Bitcoin Forum

Sorry about double posting this here but I need to have this done by Friday 8/31/12/.

If you have a pending PPT account with me please take a screenshot of your account and send me an email at hashking1@gmail.com.  I also need your forum name and withdrawal address you entered in order to verify its your account.  This must come from the email that is registered on the website

Aren't you concerned that something seems a bit... off... with pirate asking for all this info?

What happens if people do not do this? What are you going to do with the information?

hashking I suggest you have a quick chat with a lawyer before you hand this over

I would consider handing that information over breaching your agreement with your depositors. Payments on that debt from Pirate are supposed to be shared by all depositors. Handing that information over to Pirate would allow Pirate to make direct payments to your depositors, cheating the other depositors out of their share of those payments.

Please, no one give Pirateat40 userlists.  This is a common technique so he can roll them again in the future.  They are pre-qualified for an "I can help you get Pirate just pay me monies" scam

This is crossing the line and unethical. Do not hand over your users details to pirateat40.

how about the people who choose to, do, and those who don't want to, don't

That doesn't work. It breaches the pooling agreement. Say you turn over your details and I don't. That enables Pirate to make a private payment to you, defrauding me out of the share of that payment that I was entitled to under the pooling agreement. (Remember, the original agreement was that payments on all of the debt would be made according to the rules of the pool.) If a pass through operator facilitates this, he's breached the agreement.

Perhaps operators can find some way to ensure this doesn't happen. But until they do, I don't think they can pass anyone's information on to Pirate.

Don't do it, hashking! It may be a trap. As PPT operator, you might have a legal claim against pirate's assets, but your passthrough holders certainly don't. If pirate is declaring bankruptcy, you may be throwing away a chance to get a share of what's left.

It may serve the interests of your asset-holders better for you to submit one overall claim. If some of your asset-holders prefer to submit individual claims, you should submit a consolidated claim for the remaining funds.

That's far from clear. If they're intended third party beneficiaries, then they have a claim against Pirate. This makes legal sense because the arrangement between the PPT operator and his investors doesn't give the PPT operator any incentive to pursue Pirate (because he just has to pass on any money he collects, and it's not even clear if he can deduct things like legal fees). This is a case where equity would require the holders to be able to enforce their indirect debt. (See my other post with the example about the guy who buys a car for his daughter.)

The deadline for submitting the PPT information requested will be Thursday 10pm CDT.  Thanks.

Umm, what happens if you miss the deadline?

What if Pirate has one-sidedly decided to NOT pay any PPTs

Then under the pooling agreement you are entitled to nothing so no-one is defrauded if Hashking gives out some ones info

To be clear, I have no BTC in Hashkin's passthrough, but I do have BTC with BitcoinMax and we have the same problem there

Lawyer up, dude.

Pirate has no business knowing the information of your depositors.

Yes, like by 20 minutes??????????????

Information sent.  Thanks everyone.

Coward :P

If he's not going to pay out anything, why give him info? And there's no way Hashking can know this.

hashking, I find your lack of communication disturbing.

I sent the information last night at around 11pm CDT.  None of the account holders stated that they didn't want the information sent and I did receive a bunch of emails with updated information.  If I didn't submit it and Pirate does pay then there is a good chance that no funds will be sent to me.  Pirate can't really do anything without having people's personal information.  I will leave that up to each account holder to decide that if Pirate contacts them requesting it.   

Hay Hash,

It seems like i missed the deadline. I have since sent the details but i'm Curious,

1) Why didnt you just query your DB for all of the info ?
2) If there was some technical reason you couldnt do 1) why not a mass email to peoples email addresses to let them know you needed this info. We dont all frequent the forum every day.

If you did submit it, and the "don't ask, don't tell" people Pirate was working with were law enforcement, a bunch of your users who also used Silk Road are going to prison.

If you did submit it, and Pirate later gets sued, you and all your userbase can be tried as accomplices.

There's a lot of bad things that can happen here, and not a lot of good.

Hey Joel,

I've noticed your firm assertions that pirate is a ponzi on almost every forum thread.  How sure are you that he won't pay out principal + interest due through closing announcement?

I am 99.99% convinced Pirate was operating a Ponzi scheme. That is, at least most of the time, interest payments on older deposits were made from newer deposits rather than any actual investment proceeds.

I guess that depends on how generously you want to construe the terms. For example, if the price of Bitcoin drops to $1 in four months and he pays people back the number of Bitcoins owed, does that count as him paying back? If he claims that he has to have copies of driver's licenses to pay back money and the vast majority of his investors are unwilling to do that, and he pays back everyone who submits the precise documentation he demands, does that count as him paying back? If people agree to a 10% payback because that's all it seems like they are likely to get, does that count?

By fair and reasonable criteria, I would put the odds of him paying back at around 1%. The criteria are roughly that his investors don't suffer losses that are significant relative to the amount they invested. The odds that everyone who paid Pirate bitcoins will get at least those bitcoins they deposited back are very, very low.

300 BTC owed is 300 BTC owed.... No matter what the fiat exchange rate...

I thought people wanted BitCoin to succeed as an alternative to fiat not just as another exchange-rate gambling mechanism... I am sadly mistaken...

I think you missed his point.

The point is that you either think

A) Pirate is an upstanding member of the community who is experiencing cash-flow problems but will do his utmost to pay everyone back

or

B) you think that he ran a ponzi scheme and that he will pay you back as little as possible

If A) then you have nothing to worry about, sit back and relax

If B) then everyone must try to maximize their return.... You have to be happy with anything you get back... if that takes giving him some info for whatever strange reason then do so, if you don't feel comfortable, then don't.... It's a ponzi so you don't have any expectations or rights to get your money back... Holding out on giving him any info he requests is not putting the pressure on him.... he will be long gone or lawyered up....

As I have posted before... he would be a pretty stupid ponzi scheme operator if he hadn't planned out his exit long ago

It's either A) or B) ; There's no grey in between where he is a bit honest and a bit ponzi

Or (C) In limbo (by taking the majority of major and senior voices of this forums advice) and in dire straits.

Great, then I suggest you take a look at my wager offer in which I am accepting Escrowed MtGox USD bets.  I used Gar (Cognitive Operator) as my first escrow with PGP signed contract.  Since you believe the odds are around 1% I would think you would be interested in making a wager with 7:2 odds.  If not you are just blowing smoke

If I had money I could afford to lose, I'd definitely take your bet. I haven't looked at the terms of your bet or the trustworthiness of your agent, but if the terms are as you describe and the agent is trustworthy, I would advise people to take your bet. (After investigating the issued I described about Matthew's bet such as precisely what the conditions of the bet are.)

I don't think so. For example, here's a middle position:

C) Pirate honestly, but stupidly, believed that if he acquired enough BTC, he could make huge profits by manipulating the market. Or, failing that, the value of Bitcoins would drop to zero before he collapsed because he believed Bitcoin was doomed to fail. He operated as a Ponzi scheme to build sufficient funds fully expecting to make enough profits before he had significant withdrawals. He was never able to make a profit manipulating the market but just figured he didn't quite have enough funds yet. Then, he got hit with a large number of withdrawals at once and realized that if he made all those withdrawals, he'd never be able to be profitable. He still has a pile of money, though not enough to cover all withdrawals, and is not sure what to do with it. Maybe he thinks he can settle with many people for pennies on the dollar and is acquiring his own debt at low cost and hopes that some day soon he can make 100% payouts to everyone who still holds his debt.

I'm not saying I think that's what happened. I'm saying though that there are any number of possible middle positions.

Lately I've been thinking that if this wasn't merely an arbitrage play that it is possible he thought that, given enough coin, he could purchase for his benefactors (this "don't ask, don't tell" group) at a very low price (~$2.00) then sell at a higher price (~$8.00), and make up for the difference by providing the people he borrowed from some of the "extra" sold coin.

The problem is that the people that purchased from him wanted a lower base price for their bulk coin purchase than he was able to provide, so he ultimately ran into problems as the price continued to increase.

Of course this theory would require we ignore any Silk Road ties, any money laundering ties, and focus exclusively on Pirate actually having some sort of hedging experience. I'm not saying that he doesn't possess such skills, but he obviously didn't have enough of them to have made money off of the endeavor.

So your reply to me has taken you longer than you have given us to provide you with this information.

Please reply to my questions at your convenience.

it absolutely would count.

'investing' in bitcoin savings and trust never at any time had anything to do any currency other than BTC.

exchange rates with alternate currencies are a totally unrelated issue.

Hey hashking, throughout all of this, I nearly forgot to ask you about the following:


You wouldn't be trying to suck up to Pirate at my expense, would you ?

Would this have something to do with the securing of a certain portion of 'Insurance' money currently invested with Pirate, that shouldn't be ?

As you can see now, he did a GREAT job roasting Vandroiy. How is your payout coming since you submitted your user info ?

Wow. So, NO response to the little stab in the back ? or call it the 'shot' you decided to take at me, to try and please pirateat40 ?

I see that you were online about 2.5 hours ago and find it ODD that you wouldn't check out this thread.

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here's the reference again, just in case: (can also be found on the previous page of this thread)


Hey hashking, throughout all of this, I nearly forgot to ask you about the following:


You wouldn't be trying to suck up to Pirate at my expense, would you ?

Would this have something to do with the securing of a certain portion of 'Insurance' money currently invested with Pirate, that shouldn't be ?

As you can see now, he did a GREAT job roasting Vandroiy. How is your payout coming since you submitted your user info ?

Hey Hasking,

Have we heard anything back from Pirate after submitting the required info?

It's probably the FBI logging into his account after he stupidly gave him all the info and he's in custody.

I do wonder how many people are going to get partyvanned over this.

Bitlane I actually do have a life outside of bitcoin and don't sit at my computer 24 hours a day.  Now to your question, I was asking Pirate that question because I heard he was moving you to the back of the line for payments and wanted to see what his response was. 

I have not received a response from Pirate yet.  I sit here patiently like everyone else.

Hmmm, interesting.
Given the amount of press coverage this story has had I suppose it's possible he's in big trouble.
That wouldn't explain him being such a dick over payouts though, and it certainly wouldn't explain the continued operation of GPUMax, since LEO's are almost certainly going to see that as a laundering operation.

Thanks for the reply and I'm sorry to hear that, m8.

where did you get that? i hope its not yours.

Honeypot  :)

hehe, isn't that a frame from the 'Smack My Bitch Up' video by The Prodigy?  kidding ofc, thought it does look like the shower. ;p  I actually had to go watch it real quick to make sure it wasn't it...