Bitcoin Forum

I've been pondering this question over the past few days, trying to work out what the total level of exposure to Pirate's scheme is on these forums. Obviously we have information like the fact that he apparently paid out 26000BTC in interest this week, but we don't know either the average rate (although presumably much is in passthroughs at 7%) or the amount of accounts that are set to automatically compound rather than pay out interest weekly.

Obviously in analysing the prospect of an imminent default, it would be good to know what level of liability you're looking at, and I'm personally quite concerned over how exposed the market has got.

So, it seems that the majority of BTCST deposits are in passthroughs (although it's difficult to know, given that there's so much smoke and mirrors surrounding total levels of deposits and the like).

So, looking at some of the pass-through programs we can try to work out how much is being invested:

BitcoinMax - in the region of BTC110000 (based on interest payments) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83904.0
BurtW's PPT bonds - about BTC18000 most of the time based on compounding interest over 4 weeks https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76594.0
INAU - Unknown amounts, targeting large BTC amounts, he presumably has tier-1 trust account status so at least BTC25000 in that account https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91375.0
Hashking - Unknown total, also a tier 1 account so > BTC25000. He has 8000BTC of principal in deposits to his 50% insured pirate bonds. The amount uninsured bonds is unknown. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66802.0
Brendio - Tier 2 account, so between BTC15000 and BTC25000. Claims to be near the top end of that. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82772.0
notme - Previously had about 2000BTC in his PPT, not sure if the current spreadsheets are accurate but if so he's down at 144BTC now having lost out on trust account status. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60405.0
OgNasty - Provides data! BTC720.36 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75843.0
ShadowAlexey - BTC2155 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75738.0
TyGrr-P - Goat's bonds, BTC30000 https://glbse.com/asset/view/TYGRR.BOND-P
BitFoo - Another GLBSE bond, BTC4674 issued, https://glbse.com/asset/view/FOO.PPPPT

Also, known deposits from forum members direct:
Patrick Harnett - apparently about BTC10000, although his own program does not hold BTCST assets https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61262.0

Working on the low-end estimates for certain trust accounts (and totally ignoring undisclosed exposure from other members) that gives exposure of BTC240,693.36 or $2.56 million at the most recent MtGox price.

Obviously some of these numbers are rough estimates, and I have no idea how much over and above this is held by some lenders that don't disclose totals (PPT ops - I'd love it if you could shed some light on your level of exposure for the sake of having accurate data in the community). In addition, asides Patrick, I'm not aware of anyone disclosing even an estimate of the amount they hold in a private BTCST account (again, if you have one and want to contribute please do).

Visible interest this week was above 27k. Even if everyone were to get a full 7.7%, they'd need 350k exposure (paper coins) for this.

Bitcoinmax best estimate I know is 126k. The Monday payment was probably custom-arranged and does not tell you their exact interest, unlike the one a week earlier. To get data from GLBSE, look at dividends to see the active amount. E.g. the Goat "P" bond had 28732 active shares on the last payment.

IMO, a reasonable minimum estimate is currently 400k -- using 28k known interest (with Bitcoinmax corrected) and 7% average rate.

And, yes, that's a minimum, hell knows in what fantasyland the real number resides. A more interesting question might be: what's the exposure measured in real Bitcoins, the balance?

400k btc is a fairly nice chunk of money ,especialy in this climate of ever rising btc value ........

Keep in mind that

a) pirate won't cash out when he defaults, unless he has shills inside mtgox (oh well considering craziness of recent events that even might be a possibility)

b) the hypothetical cash out values aren't that different if done at once because of slippage.
So 240K would give 1.67 mil USD and 400K just 1.91 mil USD.

Yeah, if its a scam, he'd need something to clean his coins first; perhaps something allowing him to trade his tainted coins for freshly minted ones on a dozen or so pools. If only there was a large operation allowing just that.
Oh wait ;).


Why would he be in any rush to sell it all at once?

I don't think he would want to.

But it would depend on the public reaction, if people start selling after the default, the word goes around that bitcoin is doomed now, etc...he might have no choice. If that doesn't happen I consider it unlikely.
He might do it regardless if he wants to get out of BTC in order to take out the motivation of the angry mob upto him.
"All your BTC are already sold, there is no way you can get them back" - is a strong argument.

Everyone on the pro-pirate team says he is pretty rich in USD anyway so he can take some BTC losses or W/E

if he did steal 400-500k BTC he could take them outta circulation for a few years and slowly move them back in over the next 5-20 years when they are worth shitloads

but is this the same wealthy pirate who was in the police report for a $500 fraud case ?

The funny thing is, if you believe his supporters, he's cycling all the coins to cash every week. Surely if he's running a scam he can do it just once over time, especially if he's already started. Keep in mind that a Ponzi operator "earns" much less than the amount on the books of his clients.

I don't even think he'd need to mix them. After all, they will probably be stolen by "hackers." Could you prove otherwise?

Aside from turning this into another 'is this a ponzi' argument, this information is awesome to see.  Thanks for putting this together and posting it.

if Pirateat40 is rebuying coins on Gox to repay his lenders, does the volume traded on Gox actually support this?

Where?
No really, where would he be doing that amount of volume? The usual reasoning is "off-exchange" but we're talking about a quantity of BTC larger than the weekly MtGox volume.

Problem is, given the stratospheric interest rates it's already wrong  :D
Based on the ones I have info for, inflow into BS&T is still >10% a week.

In addition, there have been a few more new GLBSE instruments that have popped up taking money and giving it to Pirate.

I'm doing some basic back-of-the-envelop calculations here, but here's what I get:

30 day MtGox volume BTC (mtgox30btc): ~2,000,000 BTC
approximate 7 day MtGox volume (mtgox7btc = mtgox30btc*7/30):  470,000 BTC
conservative BTCS&T figure (piratebtc): 250,000 BTC

If pirate has to go back and forth to cash in order to make his profits, that requires selling once and buying once with 10% BTC profit, meaning that his weekly transaction volume would be
piratebtc*2.1, or 525,000 BTC of weekly volume, more than the entire MtGox weekly volume. If instead we view him as only selling once, then just buying back enough to pay interest, (which would be very risky in the case of rising BTC prices because he would be essentially short piratebtc number of bitcoins, and would have lost about 1.25 million in the recent rise from 5 to 10 USD), then his weekly volume would be piratebtc * 0.07 or 17,500 BTC. That would be about a third of a days volume at MtGox.

So, the short answer is it depends on what model of pirate's business you have in your mind, but I personally do believe it to be a Ponzi due to the ludicrous notion of sharing that level of profit when significantly cheaper ways to acquire legitimate capital are available.

-bgc

If he is moving that kind of volume I wouldn't expect him to be using only one exchange though.  Although, all the others don't account for much.

Do you also have this kind of information back in time? (or could this be recorded from now on?)
If so it should be possible to guesstimate whether new deposits always cover payouts, or whether his operation is actually making money as well.

Whatever happens, it's going to be spectacular.  There's no way this scheme ends without drama.

http://imgur.com/tCp90.gif

+1

one of the few things that still keeps me posting here  ;D

This analysis is really interesting. What if we look at the mega short option with the BTC liabilities backed up in part with USD and in part with BTC. Now what pirateat40 could do here is:

1) Sell his remaining stock of BTC on MtGox at market to depress the price.
2) Settle his BTC liabilities in USD right away at the now depressed MtGox price by taking advantage of legal tender laws in the United States.

This avoids moving the market sharply up by having to purchase millions of USD worth of BTC in the open market.

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/currency/pages/legal-tender.aspx (http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/currency/pages/legal-tender.aspx)

The interesting question here is whether this would attract litigation over market manipulation?

Does that mean that if I lend you my car for the weekend, you're within your rights to sell it and give me back the amount you got in dollars?

If I lend you my car, I expect to get my car back.

In the same way, if I lend you some Bitcoins, I expect to be paid back in Bitcoins.

Is the law really saying that all loans can be paid back in dollars at the borrowers discretion?

I think the main problem is more along the lines of:

US law =/= Global law

People would do well to remember that...

Actually, to a degree, yes.  If you loan someone your car and they go and have it scrapped and melted down, you will NEVER get 'your' car back.  The contract might stipulate they owe you X amount of funds + a penalty or you might end up having to sue them, but ultimately, they made a decision that they will not give you your car back.  Your only recourse at that point is USD (or find a judge or judges that will award you different property worth whatever value they deem appropriate, etc)

My understanding is that pirateat40 is a "us person" or has a strong enough nexus in the United States so that US law would apply, likely in the state of Texas. But even if US law did not apply in all of his cases. Suppose he has to settle in EUR or CAD etc., because of local laws with some creditors he can still avoid moving the BTC market.

You think that dollars being legal tender gives everyone the right to liquidate any contract they please by paying what they claim to be fair market value?  That's an interesting belief.  Others believe in bigfoot.

More importantly, has he ever even promised to give everything back?  The lead post seems to have a disclaimer about risk and past performance not being a guarantee.  If Pirate's really looking for a tricky legal argument, that'd be the one I would use. 

As if anyone could sue him for being "hacked" or having a major deal go wrong in these "bitcoins" (assuming you can even prove who the responsible party is...)

The tricky legal problem here is determining what fair market value is. That is where the lawyers will start to bill.

Black Market Drug Site 'Silk Road' Booming: $22 Million In Annual Sales
His findings: the site’s number of sellers, who offer everything from cocaine to ecstasy, has jumped from around 300 in February to more than 550. Its total sales now add up to around $1.9 million a month. And its operators generate more than $6,000 a day in commissions for themselves, compared with around $2,500 in February.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-market-drug-site-silk-road-booming-22-million-in-annual-mostly-illegal-sales/

I think this puts the argument that Pirate's business is somehow related to laundering coins for silk road to rest. Pirate's interest payments completely dwarf Silk Roads operator profit and almost rivals the combined revenue of all silk road sellers combined.

Well now that makes me feel somewhat more confident about pirate's operation continuing.

How so? There's still no known revenue stream...

Its crazy the public can be duped into believing in the fiat money banking cartel ponzi scheme, and yet we have the same thing here in a microcosm. Amazing. There are even people insuring the bonds, just like derivatives!

It took me roughly 9 seconds to realize that you weren't talking about Michael Jackson GIFs

nothing wrong with derivatives, as long as they're not being violently enforced as a primary currency to be used by everyone with their value loss due to their collapse being socialized.

Most of the pirate insurance are obvious scams though. Goat's is the only one that makes financial sense. The others take on full pirate risk for less profit. With no logical explanation (one said "creative accounting") and dodge any inquiries about why they'd offer it. Or pull the "you're too stupid to understand" nonsense. Unless you think the operators are just nice guys and want to run a charity.

Most/all judges are not young computer geeks so good luck

I doubt pirate would even be charged with anything if he claimed he was hacked tomorrow and someone
stole everyones coins

if the coins are transferred to some anonymous wallet using untraceable  IP address from TOR  ,what case 
would there be for pirate to answer?

does everyone  have a paper contract signed and witnessed that says pirate owes them 10,000 BTC or $110,000 in cash for deposits invested ?

didnt think so :D

I still maintain someone with confidence in BS&T (anybody???) should offer Pirate CDS.
The only issue is how to enforce payment - there'd have to be a free-floating CDS market so that it can find an appropriate rate. It'd inevitably also settle at >7% to be worthwhile for the sellers.

+1

Even if you did have an enforceable contract, you'd never know if he stashed the coins in an offline wallet somewhere, and you'd never be able to prove it.

Individuals are judgmentproof anyways. Good luck getting you bitcoins from a bankruptcy estate.

This is actually incredibly common.  For example, pretty much every commodity exchange asserts the right to pay you out in cash if they need to.  This is one of the reasons they say it is safe to trade more futures contracts for gold than actually exists.  That is just an example, everything else is done the same way too.

That's because cash settlement is usually baked into the contract. Sure, if dooglus lends you his car with the option of cash repayment, you could get cash back, but it's because of the nature of the contract rather than the dollar being legal tender.

Before the 1980s most futures contracts required actual delivery, and many still do (even though most of these are unwound by covering the contract close to expiration).

It's pretty clear everybody arguing about the legality of paying the outstanding debts in USD instead of BTC has no idea how shorts work.

I borrow 10 BTC from you, and pay you $100 at market price.
I then immediately sell them for $10x10 = $100.
The price then plummets to $1.
I buy 10 BTC off the market for $10, give you the near-worthless 10 BTC, and keep the $90 profit.

Now that we're all on the same page, I can't just give you back $10. The contract states that I owe you BTC, or oil, or scrap metal, not dollars. If the current bid price for BTC was $1, but the ask price was $30, would you accept $1 each as fair value? Neither would anyone else.

If he owes BTC he must pay BTC. Non-currency or not. If I owe you a Tinkerbell doll I have to give you a Tinkerbell doll, not $5.

What is surprising to me is just how large a target this guy is for a real hacker/social engineer/thief, in real life.

His name is public, his facial details are known, his place of residence is likely known by somebody with access to county records. He happens to live in a "hacker hotbed" (The Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex).

I would not be surprised at all if he's targeted personally.

I'm sure he uses encryption and what-not but everyone makes mistakes.


I just can't see how this can be good in the long run. My gut tells me if something happens we can kiss goodbye to double digit Bitcoin pricing. :-D

-p

which day of the week does he pay out the interest? just for me to know when to look for a default...

if you take 500k bitcoin at a 6% interest per week that would make 10M bitcoin in only one year - more than in existence...

you should read the op.  If you're too lazy to do even that, you're not going to be much use determining if it is a ponzi or not.

Which would be a huge bummer if he ever needed, for some ungodly reason, to accumulate all of the payout before making it.

It's in fact true, ignoring your silly "what they claim" nonsense. Efficient breach is not only permitted but *encouraged*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_breach

hi - sorry for asking, but what is the "op"? if it is the first post, how does it answer my question?
and at 7% per WEEK there is absolutely no need to "determine" if it is a ponzi or not.

why not? Because it is?  ;)

7% ?! Per week? Excuse me.

it...is... ;)

Original Poster. Thread author essentially.

I always thought it was opening poster.

Well, there is original poster on urban dictionary, but no opening poster, so...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=original%20poster

easy to claim a hacker raided the BST coins regardless of the identity of pirate or bitcoin max or the other

Yeah, Zhoutong 2.0 coming up...

-p

In the next period of time Pirate's scheme will collapse, or the interest payout will be slashed, or Pirate will get hacked and the bitcoins will disappear.  How long the period of time is is the only question here.

Many have stood up for Pirate and said a 7% weekly return is quite reasonable for a skilled trader like he.  I just hope those people aren't invested in the scheme, for they may well learn a very valuable lesson in mathematics.  Over the years countless people have claimed 'this time it's different' when claiming returns of several thousand percent per annum (compounded) are quite achievable.

Interest rates have already been cut.. Reduced to 5% next week :(

yep, that's the signal pirate is vulnerable to BTC price increase. If he needs more that 20k bitcoins for interest payouts each week and he's buying them at exchanges, he may go bust pretty soon. His bitcoin debt is huge.

Not if its a ponzi.  Because everyone will demand to see the txn that stole the coins on the blockchain. And that txn wont have enough coins.

Why would he go bust if he's free to change interest rates at will?
He could change them to zero for example.
Wish I could do that with my loans.

You can if you loaned under Pirate;s conditions. People are free to withdraw and stop loaning to him. It' not like he is changing the interest rate on an agreed upon fixed period.

That being said, I expected him to give notice earlier (mainly due to the wording in his bet)

Because he will eventually need to return the debt? Or are you saying that he will not pay interest and will not return the coins he borrowed and still not default?  ;D If he sold bitcoins earlier at lower price for let's say providing loans denominated in USD, this price increase will hit him badly, so badly that he may be unable to repay his bitcoin debt.

Pirate will issue IOUs and invent bitcoin fractional reserve banking :).

who's going to bail him out tho?

in the bitcoin world banks are not to big to fail.

This is an excellent point. I've never thought of that before.

You're assuming he sold the bitcoins at a lower price. And that he's lending in USD. As it is, we have no evidence (well, I've seen none) of what he's doing with his deposits.
All I'm saying is, if you have debt with zero interest, you have all the time in the world to pay it back.

He already has. What do you think demand deposits bearing interest are? If he didn't do a fractional reserve, how could he pay you interest?

He is buying a lot of coins.
Wow, that was very difficult question </sarcasm>

If he's buying coins, that must mean he's holding USD. But all his deposits are in Bitcoins. So either he got the USD from magic or his Bitcoin deposits are fractionally reserved.

There is no reason this should be controversial. It is basically common sense that if you have deposits in a particular unit and you pay interest in that same unit, you cannot also have 100% reserves. The exception might be things that reproduce, like animals.

If you lend me $100 and I'm to pay you interest on that $100, I have to do something with that $100 other than store it.

Investment and a 100% reserve are mutually exclusive.

See, you just confirmed my posting from some other thread, zero imagination.

i think you need to read his post again.
one cannot take in 1000 btc and pay interest on it without risking the 1000 btc in some way to make btc/money. once you do that
you only have a fraction of the original deposit in btc on hand.

Of course you can.

how? by using your own money and doing it for the lulz?
really?

maybe you should explain so I can see how wrong i am. i missed your other post in another thread.

I should probably go ahead and edit the OP at this point, given that there has been two sets of interest payouts at 7% the values are now definitely on the low end (and they were already) - we're probably now talking at least 300,000 BTC exposure, ~$3.6 million  :D
Crazy.

He won't be able to claim that myriad exchange accounts were also hacked?

Maybe he will say he converted it all to USD and was mugged in a back alley and they stole his suitcase full of cash?

Or that. He has implied that he works with cash...

Good luck proving him a liar, future "hacker"/"thief" victims.

An example would be providing a "line of credit" to gambling houses so they don't have to hold a huge amount of BTC in reserve in case someone hits the jackpot.  So essentially, they pay you for the right to tap your BTC if needed (and fill it back later) but mostly your BTC just sits in an account.  Imagine lottery like odds and payout.  If the lender insists that the gambling houses check the size of your BTC account just before every bet you could even sell multiple lines of credit to different gambling houses (on the SAME BTC) since the likelihood of two jackpots hitting at the exact same time is nearly 0.  Or set up a simple protocol to guarantee it (allows someone to "reserve" the BTC for a few seconds during the actual bet then "release" it).

I don't think this is really happening in any legal business because 7% or even 1% a week is just too high.  None of these ideas explain why the lender wouldn't be getting fiat loans (or getting investors to get them) to maximize personal profits instead of borrowing people's BTC at these insane rates.  And the "risk" mitigation argument is just silly.  Any VC would jump all over this at a much lower profit then 1% a week.  So it is likely that the scheme cannot accept fiat or VC loans.  Conclusion: at best its not legal.  But if the lender put just a couple of BTC into his own scheme (I have to assume he's taking some personal profit above the payout %) it would have grown so fast he'd be retiring other investors at this point.  Possibly the lender IS doing this but demand for the loans are also growing exponentially.  This is very unlikely for a legitimate business with no media attention.  But these HYIPs are not retiring loans.  Conclusion: very likely ponzi, best case its illegal

Last thing I heard gambling houses are illegal pretty much everywhere in the US

Harmful ? NO 

Illegal?  YES

so giving a 'line of credit' to them is also illegal... Harmful NO

giving a line of credit is not a very good example. once they take the credit the risk is there if they never return it.
then you only have a certain fraction of original btc left.

money cannot just sit there and make more money without some risk. if very little risk.. little reward.

Regardless, even lending money to such establishments wouldn't pay the sort of rates required.

The 1st post in the BS&T thread says the investment is risky.  That is not in question.  The question was how to make $ without going fractional.  And I answered it.  You could go for months or even years without having anyone draw on the credit, without going fractional.

Dutchbrat:  yes. And it being something illegal or quasi illegal would explain why he can't get a fiat loan.  So as i said best case illegal worst case ponzi.

Disclosure: I have no positions in any of these...

Pirate claims it is not illegal.

Like that means anything to the people who think he is a ponzi.

thezerg is trying to come up with a non-ponzi explanation so I thought he might appreciate that info.

I just thought of something, I haven't seen this brought up before, but Silk Roads owner goes by the name Dread Pirate Roberts... Now, thats something to think about...

It's been discussed.
$6000 a day wouldn't have been enought to keep BS&T going.

Agreed, but when you consider that SR charges 150.00 bucks to be a vendor, charges 6 percent to have access at your escrow money and another 5 percent to hedge the vendors bitcoin. Along with other data that they couldn't get or see, I would argue that SR is bringing in much more than 6k a day..

But, it does seem very unlikely that the two are connected, for one, SR looks to be a smooth operating machine and I don't think pirate40 would be able to run something like that...

The whole thing just makes me sick..

i love every part of it. My guess, he pays most if not all back.

Any calculations on how much have actually been deposited? Using paid interest is meaningless for a ponzi, because there is no backing for the sum that the interest is based on.

It is possible the researchers had some error in the their analysis but lets assume the profit is on the ORDER of $6K.  i.e. it might be $12K or it might only be $2K.  But it is very unlikely that it is $60K or $600K a day.

Pirate's interest obligation is $50,000 per day (and more like $75,000 per day at the Bitcoin peak).    Even IF SR generated $50,000 per day in profit the owners certainly wouldn't give it all away as interest to third parties.   Even IF SR generated say $100,000 per day and for some reason had to use Pirate @ 1% per day (and give up half their profit) they could pay down the debt in a mere 10 weeks and thus no longer need Pirate.

Of course you also need to consider that the 1% per day is what Pirate was paying lenders gamblers.  If it was a business obviously he isn't doing all the work and paying out 100% of net profit to the lenders.  Say he decided to split it 1/3 to himself and 2/3 to lenders.  That puts the profit required at more like $75,000 per day and ~$125,000 at the Bitcoin peak.

Starting to see that while the researchers may not be able to say down to the penny exactly how much profit SR operators made the cashflow of Pirate's operation is so much larger that even using the most unrealistic assumptions you can fit that square peg into that round hole.

The passthrough which were issued as bonds on GBLSE are a good start.  Since the shares were sold on a third party platform you know that those are outside funds entered the scheme (not just paper profits).

Even that is misleading because the PPTs didn't pop up until more than halfway through btcst's run, which means that you don't know how much of the glbse bought PPTs are interest from outflows from btcst vs fresh funds.

True but it does provide a lower bound.  IF 100K* BTC of shares were issued we know the minimum amount deposited would have to be 100K BTC.  Even if every share was bought based on interest payments at least 100K would have had to be initially deposited to produce that much interest.

* Note: I have no idea the value of all PPT shares on GBLSE.  The 100K is simply an example.

Unless he bought a lot of them himself to give the illusion of interest. Then he would also be paying interest to himself.

How is Pirate going at returning the funds of his investors plus interest?  Anyone know if he's paying out as promised?  Two full days have elapsed since he promised to progressively make his clients whole.

Well that is the question of the week.  If it is/was a Ponzi scheme the answer is he won't and investors will lose.  If the PPT bonds are any indication the market is anticipating a less than 50% chance of repayment in full.

people close to pirate  have bought bitcoinmaxaccounts for  close to 80% face value

matthew is betting out 25,000 btc that pirate is going to pay in full

giga has offered to go 50% in that deal

does that not all sound like people close to pirate know something everyone else doesnt ?

maybe the plan is for everyone to ditch their btcst shares and ppts  cheaply by scaremongering
and pirate can come in and win all the bets on the last day by reduvcing his payouts through
skullduggery,stramger things have happend  :)

Goat said that pirate has defaulted. Piotr_n alleges that Goat is shorting his own passthrough bonds, though I don't know if this is true. It's all on the TYGRR-P thread.

There's apparently been one payout of ~100BTC, so we're almost 0.02% of the way there!...apparently.

bitcoin max accounts are now being sold for 50% face value

if i was pirate ,id stay quiet for a couple of weeks until everyone thinks its 99% default
and people are happy to get anything back for the accounts

in the meantime he can proxy buy all reduced priced accounts in the panic ,only repay 50% of BTCST liabilities  and probably still win the bets since people "agreed " on a lessor amount

the more panic and fear the better to reduce the colossal payouts down to a more managable amount ..........

+1. I just had this exact same thought a moment ago...

how does one know who is close to pirate and who is not?

its safe enough to assume  that people who  personally had  dinner in vegas with him
 like BurtW and gigavps  and the others on the top tier  are closer to the top than most of the "normal" everyday joes that invested a few coins

i would include payb.tc as  well  as anyone else  running  one of  the  ppt funds, some worth  1+ mullion usd as being on the top level

if these guys are still buying up accounts as if theyre worth something ,then they probably know something most dont  ;)


matthews bet  thread also ,highly entertaining as it might be  ,doesnt act like a man about to lose 100,000usd worth of BTC..............

This needs to be watched closely.  I wonder how many accounts have traded hands privately?