Bitcoin Forum

I've done some very analytic research, carefully analyzing all of Pirate's projects, posts, and relationships.  I'm 99.9% sure I know exactly what he's doing.

The good news is, it's not illegal, and although it could be considered a ponzi to an extent, it's far more profitable to him for it to not be a ponzi.

I'm not revealing what I believe it is yet, for a number of reasons.

But I also believe that while he could make a good chunk of cash by taking your BTC and running with it, this would also be very stupid of him, and it would be far less profitable for him long-term.

But damn, is it a good idea.

Oh.. yeah, me too.  And I'm not telling either.  Neener neener.

Competition is always good :)

k

I have a guess that lines up with what you say, so, okay then.

Trash thread is trash.

What I want to know is, what is motivating these super-aggressive naysayers? What do they stand to gain by scaring people away from pirate?

I think it's reasonable for people to warn of a potential ponzi, but some people have been super-aggressive about it lately (and suddenly), to the point of extreme rudeness.

I just wish I could get a referral

Well, sorry for being rude to a scammer. ???

I really wish we could all be nice to each other, but some people just prefer the money.

It's a good question though, what are we gaining? Hopefully, the respect of people that we put our time and name and nerves on the line to get this place to work better. I don't expect everyone to like this before the scheme runs with the remaining funds. But hopefully, this will look otherwise afterward.

If not, yes, then I've been a total idiot for trying to help people just to get insults for it. Time will tell I guess.

The day it's over all you have to do is use one of your other sock puppet accounts.  It's coming, you better be ready.

Jealously?   Spite?   Who knows.   Perhaps they're just horrible people, who hate seeing other people making money when they're too cautious to try it themselves.

At the end of the day, who cares what they think.  They're just trashing their own reputations by being generally horrible trolls.

They may end up being right in the end, it's perfectly feasible, but the way they're going about it (and as you mention, their motives) is/are completely screwed.

As I've been saying over and over, we're all adults here (well, not all perhaps) and what we choose to do with our own money is our own business.  I for one don't need some random lecturing me about the risks.  I know the risks, thanks very much.  But as we're just hitting on now, this clearly isn't about them trying to be good people.  They have their own motives.

Forget them, not worth it.

What's the point of this thread?

I know but not telling. Well, lock your thread and let it die in flames.

Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just speculation?

I have literally been trying to figure out, "How could someone make money by trashing pirate?" But this is the first thing I've hit upon (thanks to you).

Not trying to figure it out because I would do it, but just because these attacks seem to have become strangely programmatic and motivated in the last couple of days.

You know what I find amazing.  Asking him flat out what he's doing and having him flat out say he won't say.  And people are okay with this?  I see some of the biggest names on the GLBSE backing him like he's a god.  I'm seriously thinking of pulling all my bitcoin out of the GLBSE.  I just got started here and I don't think I want to be a part of this.  Whatever "this" is.

This is just from someone that has stumbled across the GLBSE within the last couple months.  A person with capital to invest but has a serious issue with how the people he invests with invests their money.

Have you all done lost your minds?

For the millioneth time, what business is it of yours what other people do with their own money?

You think people are crazy for investing, well whoopdedoo.  Remind me why I should give a shit.

Are you serious?  I just explained why.

Oh, you explained why you're qualified to speak for everyone else and decide for them how they should invest their own cash?  

Again, I couldn't care less what you do with your money, please extend the same courtesy to everyone else.    I don't care what you or anyone else thinks.  We're all grown ups here, we can make our own choices based on the available facts, thanks very much.

If everyone would just mind their own business the trolling today would be almost non-existant.

No, I didn't do that either. 

You need to take some meds or up the dosage or something.

Later

Yeah, bye bye.

Third party; you're being an ass to Bitcoiners and you miss the point. He already explained he was getting out because a total default would have effects on the entire GLSBE market and Bitcoins overall, not just those invested in Pirate or his PPTs. You should care. This can affect EVERYONE.

Then do it yourself and earn ~10% per week! ::)

What stops anyone else to create the exact same thread you did claiming they have 99.9% certainty by evidence through analysis of whatever that pirate operates a ponzi? They just don't want to tell you...

If you really did thorough research, just tell us how much pirate currently has in his hot wallet.

Allegations of one being a scammer doesn't necessary make it factual. It is pretty severe title you are claiming for him but present no proof to back up your claim with. You only have suspicion and hunches, I wouldn't say baseless but they may end up being true or false. Where's the proof that he scammed anyone till this point?  Is it civil and intelligent behavior to shout accusations without actual evidence? Or are you saying speculation of him running a ponzi already makes him a scammer?

And the rest of your remarks are just stupid.
You made your decision, you made your points, let others come to their own conclusions and act accordingly.

Hopefully not too soon... :D
A lot of us really enjoy making some steady nice profits.

Actually I think the others are gaining from those naysayers. Without them pirate could at least haft the rate, and still everyone would lend him. So maybe this Vandroiy is heavily invested with pirate and just fears that the interest rate would go down.

How much did Pirate offer you to type up thread extolling his business practices?

Nothing.

Let me be very clear about something.  It takes a lot for me to say that I'm 99.9% sure about something, but it takes even more for me to say I'm 100% sure about something.  That .1% comes from a lack of any concrete knowledge of who his "big buyers" really are.

This post is not about business advice.  The OP is not intended in any way to be a reason to invest/withdraw from Pirate.

That being said, I think Pirate has given us enough information to let us know what he's doing, and I think he's right in the sense that telling us what he's doing would seriously cut into his profit margins.  I've read all of Pirate's posts multiple times from the very beginning.  I've developed a working model of how he can actually pay a 7% compounded weekly to his lenders without doing anything illegal.

I'm haven't stated what I think it is for several reasons.
1.)  99.9% certainty is not 100% certainty and I am not taking any chance whatsoever of making a bad call when so much money from so many people is involved.  Pirate still has the option to run with all our money, and while I don't think it's smart for the sake of his financial and physical well-being, it could happen.  I've seen stranger things happen.
2.)  Based on my model, I think Pirate is entitled to his profits and I don't feel like screwing anyone out of business.
3.)  I'm hopefully about to land a career job myself which will allow me to gain access to enough capital in enough time to start something similar.  I don't want to ruin future potential profits for myself, either.  This is the biggest reason.

I would hope that anyone with a significant amount of money invested in a Piarte or pass-through account will have gone to the length of research that I have and far more.  The amount of money I have invested in a pass-through is but a drop in the pond.  For the love of god, be careful with your money.

if you ever start it please let us know.
i am interested in investing....

"I'm hopefully about to land a career job myself which will allow me to gain access to enough capital in enough time to start something similar.  I don't want to ruin future potential profits for myself, either.  This is the biggest reason."

This doesn't make sense. Why post this thread? You would take caution to hide any knowledge you have of recreating a 3300% ROI/year. Advocating for Pirate wouldn't provide any benefit for you or the community. Waste of a thread imho.

I know someone else on the forum with deep pockets that also plans to compete with pirate.

It's not me though; I have my own very different btc-business going on.

But I'm just saying you're not the only one who claims to have it figured out.

Those who benefit from HYIP scams are the ones who only invest once and never again, or only put the interest earned back into the system. They have a vested interest in keeping all HYIPs going as long as they possibly can. They would make a post saying, "I know what he's doing, it's legit" without providing evidence, because it benefits them to do so.

I've yet to see anyone who actually isn't invested in BS&T defend BS&T. I am not invested in them and honestly really don't care, but if people are going to insist on talking about it, my opinion is never invest in something that can't explain how they are going to make you money, because you may be the way they are going to make money.

Ah, then surely you are already making the kind of returns he does (10%/wk.)?

And BrightAnarchist prefers his business to making 10% a week? Interesting, too.

If there is any truth at all to what you are saying, then I challenge you to search for a trusted third party (theymos or Maged perhaps, or someone who has no outspoken stance on this like nanotube), share your story how it is you think one can pay out 7% a week on now 6 digit BTC debt for now 8 months (while the debt continuosly grows), and they can confirm if your theory makes any sense or not.

Otherwise, I will have to assume this:

affirmative.

I guess these people must just be rich already, multimillionaires or even billionaires, and not care about money at all to turn down an opportunity to make money on this kind of volume.

Or they are feeding us BS.

The problem with this is it's all about you knowing what is going on.  There is absolutely nothing in it for me or anyone else to tell yet another person what is going on.  I don't know if you realize the scale you're dealing with.

Funny you mention 'scale(s)'.

My opinion is that Pirateat40 is buying all the weed on S R and reselling it for rediculous markups! Possibly the rum too! Case solved!

 
Correct! You will get your deposits regardless and you don't seem to care enough about people continuously slandering you to do such a thing. Which is why I was speaking to people like "the joint" and "BrightAnarchist".

I am specifically also very interested in why these 2 people who seem to know but choose turn this once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity. Too lazy to make buckets of money with seemingly no risk and limit to volume and timeframe?

Why don't you tell pirate?  See if he'll tell you if your theory is correct?

In the words of one of my favorite quotes.

"It ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors, it's just that I'm too damn big to pay attention to 'em. That's the difference." - Dr. Dre

Wow, did you seriously just quote Dr. Dre?

I did... words are words regardless of who says them.  I just gave him the credit.

Distraction method #34 from your handbook?

I have some too:

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." - Isaac Newton

"When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." - James Whitcomb Riley

But let's get back to the topic's issue at hand, shall we.

This is nonsense if you refer to Bitcoin trading at any of the exchanges; pick any of the optimal entry and exit points at MtGox within a week and see if you can do a 100k trade on which you make 10%.

Do you know that even with 7k weekly, this would be a multiple of what MtGox alone earns on commission during a typical trading week? Must be magic.

Let me just illustrate how stupid this idea is: Typical MtGox trading volume has been ~400k in the past weeks months, and pirate would have had to be 200k for entry+exit. It is absolutely impossible to make 10% profits on this alone continuously. How the hell would this work, trading with himself? Look for yourself: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg150zigWeeklyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

We are also working with only 100k which is a conservative estimate.

But I'm guessing you haven't done much Bitcoin trading.

OK, sorry for assuming MtGox trading, it's just a popular theory around also which I thought you referred to.

Alright, so it is OTC and some people out there have been paying outrageous amounts of money for some reason on huge volumes for 9 months and for some reason noone else really (except the joint and BrightAnarchist et al.) can provide competition or even knows about this clientele. Although I believed this, it is now unlikely due to the volumes, timeframes, consistency and seemingly non-diminishing profit margins.

+1000

I like pirate. He makes me money.

Hey interesting responses, but I never said I knew what Pirate was doing. I just said there's someone else here in the forum who told me that they know what he's doing and are planning to compete ( other than the OP ).

Bingo.

Bitcoin is not an isolated market.  It's inherently tied to the transfer of fiat currencies, but it's like fiat with a mask.  This is one reason I use things like Bitcoinmonitor in addition to Bitcoincharts and Blockexplorer to see what's going on in real time.

Pirate has made it clear that his clients are interested in one of two things:  Cash and BTC.  Hm...why do you suppose that is?  Can you think of a few groups of people who could benefit from this, and would pay a premium for BTC?  

Pirate is also big on trust.  Look at his OTC.  Look at his posts from his date of registry up to November.  Pirate can't pull off this operation by himself.  One of the best ways to make money is to place yourself in the middle between two markets.  Pirate is currently that guy in the middle.  Both sides need to trust him.

Bruinic is also correct that the 6 figure debt is not real.  The interest debt is real, but Pirate is making more than the interest debt.  As the interest debt increases, the BTC inventory increases.  And round and round you go.

I don't think Pirate himself is concerned so much with BTC as he is with USD.  By the way, he has a lot of that and his sum is increasing.  BTC can't pay his bills or buy him awesome shit, but USD can.  Pay some attention to the bid/ask walls in relation to what Pirate said about the danger of the BTC price increasing too quickly.   Think about the impact that a rapid price increase would have on the USD he's holding, and think of where he got that USD from, etc.   Also consider that Pirate needs USD to purchase BTC for interest payments, and check out the interesting "support" walls after a rally.  Like Pirate said, when there's a rally, people panic buy but new buy orders don't immediately rush in, but rather people eat away at the outstanding supply.  When there's a crash, people panic sell and buy orders are removed.

The relative stability we've seen is no coincidence.  We're riding a cycle.  

It's so simple now:

Person A wants to launder money to person B.

Person A gives pirate 100K.

Pirate takes a big fee, say 10K.

Pirate buys 90K worth of coins via person A's mtgox account.

Pirate launders these coins to another address in a manner ( using GPUMax etc. ) that makes it impossible to trace.

Pirate sells 90K worth of coins via person B's mtgox account.

Bam. Person A just laundered a ton of money to person B. The more BTC pirate can borrow, the more he can launder each week. Person A and person B pay him big bucks because he's "the computer guy" and they don't know how to do this themselves.

Wow. Just, wow.

Actually, the model I was thinking of doesn't need to include money laundering of any kind.  But, as I said, I have no concrete knowledge of who his big buyers are.  That .1% of uncertainty goes a long way.

Edit:  And keep in mind that there are other sources of BTC than exchanges.

Laundering without point. The tax man would want to know how the 'buyers' suddenly accumulated 90k.

you know.. Tbh I don't care what pirate is doing as long as them sweet sweet payments keep coming my way.

If pirate is making a good chunk for himself good on him and thanks for giving me my cut each week. I think the reason some people want to know is so they can try and cut out pirate and make more for themself hence all the FUD.

True, it could simply just be international transfer between legitimate business's. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest laundering then. I was just trying to fit GPUMax into the picture and I didn't see any other way to fit it in. Either way I'm looking forward to finding out (if we do find out eventually) because I'm so darned curious!

This reminds me of the Penn and Teller episode where they talk about Area 51: whenever people don't know what's going on, all kinds of crazy theories come out. Maybe pirate is enabling money transfer between aliens from mars?

I'm dropping out.  Not locking this yet, but I've said all I'm willing to say.

Same here. I'm making myself look foolish here, but I'm just having fun trying to figure this out. Not trying to spread FUD.

All I can figure is that people will avoid logic as long as the money is coming in. My guess is when pirate's ponzi collapses will have another thread like the Bitcoinica one - a bunch of people whining that really should have known better.

IF it goes that way, it may be true for all the average joe's invested in through pass throughs.

You'll need to add the following up for yourself to validate it. But I am fairly certain a large percentage, like 70% or more of the money in BS&T is on deposit from larger investors who are all well aware of the risks. These people are more likely to spend their energy on looking for the next venture versus coming here to cry if a collapse were to happen.

On a personal level, I do find it slightly concerning that such a large volume would be vested into one place. No matter who or what that place would be. edit; that is likely as much a product from a lack of high risk investments (see start-ups, other Bitcoin based ventures) as it is people not analyzing risk.

Too big to fail?

You shouldn't be bothered by comments criticizing the investment or folks saying "well, I got out with my profits", especially after how long of a track record you've had. You clearly *are* bothered, though. That's what's throwing a red flag for me.


If this is the remittance argument, even in jest, you don't need to borrow coin to do it, you can buy it. I know, I have done so. The profit margins can easily reach 7%, but they don't scale, some days you'll have 5 customers at 10%, some days you have 0. Using loans actually cuts into your profit margins. You'd only use loans if you wanted to conceal the source of remittance, which I would agree has some merits, but not to the scale of what BS&T is doing, at that scale, the only entities doing that aren't exactly legal.


I realize you say this in jest as well, but even this is better done by buying coin at market rates to avoid unnecessary financial risk of a loan. You would only want to borrow coin in the case of resale, and even then you're likely not making a whopping 7% per week doing this, and you're probably going to start losing money the more you do it, so the whole "scale" thing really wouldn't apply.


There's ways of easily getting around this for money laundering. It's called "smurfing" in the industry. You can use actual people as your smurfs or just use accounts of random people who's SSN and other info you happen to know and you've created a special bank account for that they likely don't even know of.

Like others have somewhat alluded to, he could very easily be laundering money for Sinola or Los Zetas, I mean, given his stated location on his forum account it would even make sense. There was a NY Times article on this just the other day. A few of the Sinola underbosses have bricks of cash just sitting around in their living rooms and they don't give a crap if they lose 7-10% having to clean it. Hell, most of the time they don't even clean it, they just trade it dirty and leave that up to the capos getting their weekly payment to fix.

But Pirate has went out of his way to insist he is not doing anything illegal because he's a "family man", so I suppose we'll have to take him at his word. It's great what all you can theorize as having the same kind of profitability when someone's unwilling to talk about the details of their investment plan, though. Occam's razor.

Have a great 4th of July weekend, pirate!

Well you see the aliens noticed this genius Bitcoin idea. They can use it to cryptographically conjure starships and then sell these cryptoships for a huge profit. The only problem is, the quantum cryptography requires a signmessage being run from an address with a verifiable balance of over 100K BTC... :o

Ok, now the FUD's coming in.  I'm locking this.