You forgot the US Attorney's Office.  They've been extremely prominent in past ponzi prosecutions.

With due respect, I think that promoting yourself as a "credit union" - which is a very specific type of regulated deposit-taking institution owned by members - is absolutely nuts when you're in contact with the SEC.  They may well be after bigger fish, but that doesn't mean they won't be sharing any information they gather with other financial regulators.  Given the questions you say you were asked, it would be better to lend as a private individual at the moment and not style yourself as any kind of regulated business.

dank glass appears to have sold a dragon.  Off course one of the other pieces for sale is cracked...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110259.0

Nobody else's comments could possibly damage usagi's credibility and "reputation" as much as his own.

There've been larger single investments than that made, and of course pirate managed to borrow a shit-ton of BTC with essentially no business plan (I'm pretty sure he owes some individual lenders more than that).  

For the most part, though, people don't just throw money at ideas - those seeking funds, whether as debt or equity - need to be contributing and risking something of their own in the venture and have already done the research necessary to convince others of its viability.

Pretty much everyone on this board has access to at least two venture capitalists, but most ventures around here aren't the type of projects for which venture capital is most suitable (plus people around here hate sharing equity).  And most of the more pedestrian ventures people are looking to fund (there are very few truly novel ideas around here) aren't going to return enough to be attractive to the sub-prime lenders on this board.

There are definitely only a handful of projects/people I'd recommend to serious lenders/investors (and believe me, a lot of behind the scenes discussion goes on when those people are considering lending to people or investing in projects).  These threads are more suitable for people who only want to borrow a small amount of money/BTC for personal use or for those hoping to attract crowd funding.  They're not really the place to attract a couple of big lenders/investors for a project.

None of which means that the loans/investments made here are smart ones, only that loans and investments can be attracted here if you're pitching the right product.  That's not unique to this forum.  Got to any forum which is largely about getting maximum returns for minimal effort and you'll find similar dynamics.

I don't think anyone here would argue that your attitude towards life doesn't affect how you experience it.  People who dwell on the negative are generally unhappy even if they do achieve objective "success".  But focusing on the positive alone does not achieve results in and of itself - it's not a substitute for action.  Even though focusing on the positive can make the work required to achieve a goal more pleasant, it's not a substitute for that work.  Try opening your front door with positive thoughts alone right now.

Bad stuff happens to good people and good stuff happens to bad people.  "Karma" can be used to explain either but no metaphysical explanation of "why" is actually necessary.  Plenty of people who believe in some sort of cosmic justice system do horrific things and plenty of people who lack any such beliefs do good things.  Mature adults don't need promises of reward or threats of punishment (whether it's a possible prison sentence, "bad karma" or going to Hell) in order to have a moral compass, but the "just world" fallacy (of which the concept of karma is a variant) sure makes dismissing the suffering of others a whole lot easier.

You did this regarding your venture related to sea-steading.  Instead of seeking funding from people who were already on board with many of your ideas and therefore natural allies, you tried to "convert" people.  When you want money - or indeed any kind of material support - from others, you need to know your audience and adjust your pitch accordingly.  

You've been trying to get this community to fund your ideas without success for a year now - a year in which you could have been building networks within the communities which substantially support your own philosophies about life, the universe and everything.  That suggests to me that you're afraid to move outside your comfort zone and present your ideas to those communities even though the likelihood of you gaining meaningful support and encouragement from them is considerably higher than the likelihood of you gaining it here.  You might want to ask yourself why that's the case.


If that was true, you'd already have the funds you need to launch dank's Hookah Lounge and you'd be at work fitting the place out right now instead of arguing spirituality on a messageboard.  If you don't understand why you've been unable to raise the funds for this or your previous ventures, then you don't understand the real world.  You blame the lack of funding on people "not understanding you" or not being willing to "have faith in you" but you actively reject any suggestions to seek funds from people who are more likely to "understand" you or "put faith" in your ideas.  Given a choice between producing results and coming up with reasons why you have no results, you get to work on the reasons every single time and you always externalise those reasons.  Your reasons always put the responsibility for your failure on others, never on you, so you don't even learn anything when things don't work out.

To be fair to dank, he's pretty much said this all along, not just in respect of Dank Bank but also in respect of his previous loan/investment pitches. It's always been clear that he effectively uses the loans he gets from people as personal pay-day loans to fund whatever he wants and he's never suggested that the money loaned to him will be used purely, or even primarily, on things which directly produce income for his lenders/investors.  

He's 18, unemployed and no longer living at home.  He's obviously not doing enough graphic design work to pay the bills and he's not a trust fund baby.  What more do people really need to know?

I originally thought that the "commodity" he was investing in might be weed (this would be consistent with a lot of his early posts), but as he says that he no longer buys weed, my best guess at the moment is that he's set up a small scale grow op.

dank, if you can't keep your spiritual beliefs out of your business dealings (and you're the one who brings them up with statements about karma being your business model), then you really need to look for investors who share those beliefs.  There are plenty of people out there willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend neo-hippy, New Age seminars and retreats which are all about "you are what you believe" and some of those people may be willing to invest in your ventures.  This forum is not the place to find those people.  

You need to find out the online communities in which they hang out.  Better yet, you need to connect with their real life activities in your local area.

Actually, he wouldn't be much of an investigator if he was constantly in the office.

I don't think posts implying that GLBSE has not been legitimate in the past are going to be helpful to any investigation of its activity.  The DoJ has a long reach and where your business is based is often less material to their powers than whether you are conducting business with people in the US (see online poker debacle).  A number of countries have laws which make it illegal to offer unregulated securities to people who don't qualify as "sophisticated investors".  You may or may not be in the clear, but don't assume that you are purely on the basis of location.

Get legal advice now.  Even if you're cleared of any wrong-doing, the cost of complying with investigations by financial regulators can be devastating.

And with an irrecoverable derail, yet another venture goes the way of Dank Glass.

Well he has stated that he no longer buys weed...

Let's be honest.  If he's looking to borrow up to $70,000 it would be worth incorporating, but I suspect that dank regards his business ventures as his personal ATM.

Does anyone have any evidence that 20 Mission isn't just as dead in the water as JRO's other grand plans?

Given that he said in another thread that his wife is the one who wants him to buy land for rice farming, I have to wonder whether this venture isn't about expanding the operations of relatives of hers who are already rice farmers.  Although Goat initially says in his thread that there's a heap of stuff he needs to check into, he's also talking about not being ready to buy before 10 October.  That's certainly not enough time to research the industry, find suitable land and a trustworthy farmer if this is a brand new idea - common sense suggests that he already has a specific farmer and piece of land in mind.

And yeah, if this forum continues being a haven for scammers and the incompetent, then people looking for serious, legitimate Bitcoin enterprises will stop looking for them here.  Sooner or later someone will develop a standalone "Marketplace" which imposes standards for those who advertise/solicit there.

Her older posts say that she spends most of the BTC she mines on SR products.  She maintains that she's currently staying with an old friend, and it's sure as hell easier to borrow real money from friends than it is to have people send you BTC and then have to convert them, especially for low amounts.  Same with using small amounts of BTC to buy food.

Having had to replace the keyboard on my own laptop recently, I'm wondering where she's going to source a new keyboard for a 9 year old laptop and whether she's planning on installing it herself.

There's nothing about either her posts here or her blog which inspires trust.


People are going to lend or not lend based on their personal evaluation of you.  Your "site" is not going to earn you enough money to pay back a loan in a couple of weeks and you haven't shown much dedication to maintaining it so far.  You're still going to need to be able to recharge your laptop even when you get it fixed.

If someone offered to ship you a new keyboard would you accept that offer - after all, you said you're staying with a friend right now so there's a place to send it.

Yeah, I wonder how many of the people who own the computers on which she's mining know that she installed a mining programme on their equipment.

That's a rendering of the jalapeno, before anyone gets too carried away.

To be fair, it's not really "all these funds".  If dank's telling the truth, there's a whopping 212 BTC invested with him at the moment.  He claims to have some BTC invested in unspecified "commodities", and even average quality guitars don't come cheap.  Nor does babby's first rental home.  Someone has to pay the bills for our budding entrepreneur so he can sit around and be creative.