You can't post if you aren't going to tell. Teasing is mean.

I actually don't think this is entirely fair. Pirate did make a point of saying that he wasn't doing anything illegal or unsavory. So his "investors" had as much reason to think that he wasn't acting illegally as they did to think that he would pay them back. In other words, if you think they genuinely believed he would pay them back (and, if not, why would they lend him money) it seems reasonable to think they genuinely believed that he wasn't do anything illegal.

Of course, this doesn't apply to those people who knew (or were willfully blind to the near certainty) that Pirate was running a Ponzi scheme and intentionally tried to induce others to invest to maintain their own cash flow. Those people are rat bastards to the core.

In what sense is he not long gone?

There are none. That's just making unverifiable excuses. You're supposed to imagine that because you don't really know what he's doing, there might be circumstances that prevent him from paying people back immediately. He's hoping you'll make up the excuses you find most plausible, that way he doesn't have to figure out an excuse everyone believes.

It means he's asking for the maximum stall time you're willing to give him. The idea is to induce people to wait as long as they would be willing to wait for a full payback by promising that he'll pay everything at once. It's a classic tactic.

Say you owe me $1,000 and $50 is due now. I'm mad at you. You say, "I'll pay you the $50 next week". I still break your legs. But you say, "I'll pay you *all* of it next week". Maybe now I'm willing to wait another week. While they both stall for another week, the greater promise makes the stall more tolerable.

Classic stalling tactic -- to get more time when you don't plan to deliver at all, increase your promise to the maximum and thus earn the maximum stalling time anyone is willing to give you.

He's still making money. Why would he run when money is still rolling in? So long as people continue to believe that he might pay, his debt is still worth something, so he can keep selling it. He can produce an unlimited amount of debt, so he's not going to stop until his debt has zero value.

I was told one of the reasons we could trust Pirate was that we knew who he was. Was I misinformed?

For the last several months, Pirate has likely been buying up Pirate debt. Why not? It's free for him. If he buys 1,000 BTC worth of Pirate debt, those 1,000 BTC just get deposited with him.

Now, Pirate debt is selling for around 50 cents on the dollar. Pirate knows that he's never going to pay his debt back. So he knows the debt is worthless. But he can sell that 1,000 BTC that he effectively paid nothing for and get an extra 500 BTC.

It makes *no* sense for him to buy Pirate debt. It costs him money. How would he get that money back? From himself?

But if he sells Pirate debt, he gets more of other people's money. And it perfectly explains why Pirate bought himself a week or two. This gives him lots of time to make more money by selling worthless debt.

As the saying goes, it's hard for a man to understand an argument when his livelihood depends on not understanding it.

If that's true, there are two reasons he could be doing that.

1) He wants to make people think he's going to pay out.

2) He's trying to cover the fact that he's actually *selling* Pirate debt.

Right, but it's important to remember that saving is a form of investment. When you save money, you have invested whatever productivity you contributed in order to get the money you saved. What that productivity produced earns interest in the economy as it makes possible further production.

For example, say I work at an auto factory. I help make cars. My productivity produces cars. Say I save some of the money that I earned. I have invested in the form of those cars that I made that otherwise wouldn't get made that are now earning interest as people use those cars to do work and produce goods. My income has been invested in the economy as I save that money and it earns interest because it produces goods that increase the demand for the money I saved. Deflation is the interest my productivity earns.

With a sensible monetary system, saving is a form of investing. Deflation is interest on invested productivity.

I agree all around. It's stupid to encourage people to consume when immediate consumption isn't needed. It's flat out idiotic to discourage saving.

How do you get the bitcoins you save without producing something? If "producing" gives you trouble, think of it is deferring consumption instead. You could have bought a car and blew it up -- you had every right to destroy a car with those bitcoins. But instead you let someone else use that car. You didn't take what you were entitled to. And that leaves more for everybody else. (Not that it's a zero sum game, of course. If you did produce to get those bitcoins, that's where you added to the sum.)

No, this is a misconception that comes from the broken window fallacy.

Consumption is not good. If you purely consume something, it's no better than if you destroyed it. It's lost. If consumption was good, then someone who went around breaking windows would stimulate the economy because people would have to buy windows to replace the broken ones.

It is *production* that builds an economy. Production should be rewarded.

When you save money, you produce but do not consume. That's great. You deposit but do not withdraw, loaning everyone else use of the benefits of your labor. Deferred consumption should be rewarded as it's a form of investment.

IMO, there's a right to interfere once there's an individualized showing of abuse or neglect. I think it's also reasonable to require that for some extreme cases, a showing that something is not abuse or neglect be required in advance.

However, in general, I see children as the property of their parents, to raise as they see fit. I don't believe the community is likely to be able to do a better job, no matter how well-intentioned its interference is.

I'm a bit torn about parental obligations towards children. The last time I really thought about it, my position was that parents should be free to abandon their children at any time they please and others are free to adopt those children if they please. There might be an obligation to give others a fair chance to support your children if they please. It's not so much that I like this result, it's that I can't see a justification for imposing obligations. (And I would hope that this would be rare, others would step in when it happened, and social and business ostracism and blacklisting would punish those who take advantage of it.)

Fortunately, I'm not ruler of the world. So I don't have to get this right.

The pools have a huge interest in keeping the Bitcoin system vibrant and robust. Otherwise, Bitcoin itself will fall and all their hardware super-optimized for Bitcoin hashing will be sold by the pound for scrap.

When you find a block, it includes the transaction paying 50 bitcoins to you. If someone changed the address, the block hash would change and no longer meet the difficulty requirement, creating an invalid block. The only way the block you mined can ever be used by anyone is if it makes it into the public blockchain, in which case your 50 BTC payment makes it in too.

You might think, "well, maybe someone else will mine a block that replaces mine". But why would they? If they mine a block that comes after yours, they get the same 50 BTC themselves. And because their block would include yours in the chain, it would provide a longer chain and thus one more likely to get confirmations. (Longest chain wins, more or less.)

So as soon as you find a block, every miner greedily tries to find a block *after* it because that makes it more likely their blocks will "stick". A block must stick to pay the reward. A block cannot be tampered with -- a new block would have to be found to replace it.

Of course, there's always a risk somebody mines a block at very close to the same time you do and someone else mines a block after the other person's block rather than yours. Then you lose.

I don't think I did that. I certainly didn't intend to. Perhaps it was a case where there was bogus transparency -- transparency that leads to complete opacity. For example, a bond that "transparently passes all money through to Pirate" is bogus transparency.

Suspicious would be, order of magnitude, more than double what you would expect from most completely transparent investments offering about the same level of risk.

I agree. I hope I didn't say that.

When you're responding to a one-sided view, "X, not Y", you show how the same facts allow you to argue "Y, not X". Of course, you don't actually believe "Y, not X". The whole point of showing someone how the arguments can be made just as strongly one-sided the other way is to show them that the truth is not one-sided.

Even if this was true, no civilized society should base policy on this. We've made the decision not to act on people's "tendencies" based on biological groups they belong to but instead to consider them as individuals.

Say we found a group of people we could identify by DNA who were physiologically driven to steal, but individuals were quite capable of not stealing despite this gene. We wouldn't exclude such people from positions of trust just based on their having this gene. In fact, we wouldn't treat such people differently at all. So long as it's ultimately an action with an individual's conscious control, we care what they choose to do as individuals, not what their biology "pressures" them to do.

A civilized society focuses on individual's chosen actions, not the biologic forces driving those actions. Many women choose not to have children and have no children. They shouldn't be treated differently because they had to make that choice.

It's not just they don't allow it, but they take technical measures to prevent it and don't intend it.

They take technical measures to keep you from selling your bitcoins and don't intend you to make profits in national currencies? Try again.

Nope, sorry.

That's fine. There's no requirement that you weigh things rationally. I just don't want to give people incentives to weigh things irrationally. I'm not suggesting that if people have children they can't afford to feed, we should arrange things so that the children starve. I am saying that if people have children, that requires certain sacrifices. Many people have children for bad reasons, and then they wind up making sacrifices they possibly shouldn't have made -- men and women both.

I don't really have any problem with that, at least in the case of non-government employees. If employers can pay women less for the same work, they'll prefer to hire women over men. Men will have to reduce their wages to stay competitive. My grandfather was a labor leader in a tool and die union in the South. He was instrumental in getting the union to allow blacks to join at a time when that was almost unheard of. His basic argument to other white labor leaders was this -- if the company can pay a black man less than you for the same work, who's he going to hire when he needs more workers and who's he going to fire when he has too many?

Being willing to work for less money is a huge advantage when it comes to trying to get a job. Government does people no favors when it takes their competitive advantages away. "Equal pay for equal work" is basically just a way to restrict competition over wages.

Making your day makes my day. It looks really awesome as an avatar, even more awesome than I expected. Also, you didn't have to quote my entire post to say that.