I don't think this is unreasonable.  Even if pirate spun a plausible line of bullshit about his business model, I'm interested in hearing why people were willing to trust him with large amounts of money without investigating his prior business background, references, etc.  Anyone can claim anything on the internet.  What did pirate say which convinced people that he, personally - as opposed to his business model - was both trustworthy and competent?  What evidence did people ask for of his competence and worthiness of trust? 

A plausible business model is no guarantee that someone isn't just going to run off with your funds, so I don't think that can be the only reason the "institutional" investors placed their funds with pirate (or at least I hope it's not, because it would be hopelessly naive not to research the person behind the offer).

You're assuming that pirate has ripped off whoever he was lending the Bitcoins to when the reverse could very well be true or he could have been setting people up to be ripped off by his clients.  After all, if they just say "not gonna pay you any more, thanks for the BTC", what exactly is pirate going to do about it?  If pirate is involved with seriously nasty people, he has far more to fear from them than he'll ever have to fear from vigilante Bitcoiners should he rock their boat.  And if he hasn't ripped of those people, then they'll protect him.

$5,000,000 is not a great deal of money in the world of serious money laundering.  Bitcoin might be attractive to small time money launderers but it doesn't have the capacity to absorb the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars which serious organised crime launders.

While pirate's scheme may have been attractive to his clients, there's no reason why they wouldn't take a better deal if one came along.  I'm quite sure that other people in this community have considered tapping his market and possibly even succeeded.  His model was contingent on his clients needing increasing amounts of Bitcoin weekly and being willing to pay 10% for it, but I seriously doubt he was in a position to argue if they suddenly decided they wanted less BTC or were no longer willing to pay 10%.

Everything pirate has said could be pure bullshit.  There might never have been any clients, let alone nasty, shady ones.  He could come in here tomorrow and post that all your Bitcoins now belong to Los Zetas and you'd never know whether it was true or not - and even if it could be established to be true, are Bitcoiners really going to fuck with a drug cartel, a gang, or whatever other version of organised crime people believe pirate may have been servicing? I'll buy tickets to watch that event.   

He could also be just another opportunist who saw a chance to exploit people's greed.  He may or may not be working alone.  He won't be the last such opportunist the Bitcoin world encounters if that's the case.

pirate can write any narrative he wants right now and there's not a whole lot people can do to verify what he says in the short term.  

We have thread after thread around here in which people point out that they're not children and they don't need to be warned about risk and the possibility of losing their money.  And yet here we have a thread in which people want to blame others for the risks they not only chose to take but were almost beating down doors to be allowed to take.

Most start ups will fail.  Most HYIPs will collapse.  These things are a given which people wilfully ignore time and time again in their rush to be in on the ground floor of high risk financial services.

Whether pirate's scheme was a scam or just a spectacular (and likely inevitable) business failure is yet to be determined, but nobody should being doing less due diligence when using pass-throughs than they would if they were making a direct investment.  Those running pass-throughs aren't your financial advisors or portfolio managers.

There should obviously be a serious attempt to find out whether pirate has taken the money and run, spent it on hookers and blow, or simply lost it in what was emphatically known to be an extremely high risk venture.  The appropriate course of action should be determined by the findings of such investigation, not solely by the fact that people lost money (a risk they happily undertook of their own free will).

For once, the amount involved is probably large enough to warrant investigation by conventional financial/computer crimes authorities rather than simply being regarded as a civil matter.  Of course, any such investigation may well reveal that pirate was using everyone's Bitcoins for explicitly illegal purposes and that the interest payments people received were the proceeds of crime.

To those seeking vigilante justice - how likely do you consider it is that you can exact retribution against pirate without any acts of vengeance against him being investigated?  Is this really something you're willing to risk prison time (or worse) over?

One of the conditions of the settlement made between the DoJ and the online poker operators who got blitzed last year was that when online poker becomes legal in the US they will have access to that market.  Could be interesting.

Keep an eye on free trade agreements too.  That's how the US gets other nations to agree to stuff without it being debated in their legislatures (US is trying to sneak a whole heap of nasty copyright and patent stuff into the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and the negotiations are secret).



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/27/pacific-free-trade-deal

What are you going to do with the share of dank's soul you'll own when he defaults?

It would be nice to have some means of keeping the logical discussions separate from the threads where people really just want to vent or ramble, though.  As in real life, not all conversations need to have some higher purpose or be intellectual - it would just be nice if those discussions where people do want a higher level of discourse didn't get derailed by people who just want to dribble bullshit.

Maybe he knows a Chinese relic collector named Chen.   

While I don't disagree with your observations, this isn't a formal debate forum and people posting here aren't writing a thesis to be challenged or peer reviewed. I wonder whether there'd be any interest in a formal debate sub-forum.  Internet Infidels used to have one and it reduced a lot of frustration for everyone.

That's the big "if" which never gets tested because people would rather talk about going all Los Zeta than actually report these incidents to conventional authorities and see whether existing legal frameworks can be used.  I sometimes get the impression that some people desperately want to believe that they can't so they have a "justification" for pursuing vigilante justice.  Fortunately, the legal system is perfectly capable of dealing with those who take the law into their own hands.

The coloured "ignore" label was an attempt at letting the community show its opinion on the value posters bring to the board.  While it doesn't indicate why a particular poster is being ignored by other users, it does serve as a warning that community members have made a choice to ignore that person's posts.  I'm just not sure that it's function is readily apparent to newbies.  And although it's explained in the newbies section, I'm not sure how many people realise that the VIP member status is a bought one and not an indication of the esteem in which the user is held.

The ethos of this board is strongly anti-censorship.  That needs to be remembered when looking to the board administration to enforce a given standard of conduct.

From the (really bad) song about the Moon landing.

The rivers are getting dirty
The wind is getting bad
War and hate are killing off
The only earth we have
But the world all stopped to watch it
On that July afternoon
To watch a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon

Even almost 50 years ago, we knew we were killing this planet and looked to the stars for the future of our species. The hopes and dreams of humanity went to the Moon with Armstrong.  We failed to live up to them.

I'm thankful that the footage will be all over the news for the next few days.  Although my grandson has never known a world in which living in space wasn't possible, I doubt he's ever seen that first step on another celestial body which I witnessed as a 9 year old (I only wish that us 4th graders had been able to appreciate the true enormity of what we were seeing when we were crowded around the school's one - black and white - television).

It's sad to think that in my life time it is likely that every person who ever walked on the Moon will die.  To paraphrase what someone posted elsewhere, I am getting old in a world where the Moon is a place people used to want to go, before I was born.

I lost it when I read the statement issued by his family.




His legacy is not just of a generation or an era, but of humankind itself.

While I kind of understand the idea of giving donors a stake in the future you, I think it's a really bad idea to let things like your breast size, name, etc be influenced by them.

Especially for those who fully transition, the name you choose can make a huge difference to whether you're regarded as "that trans woman" or just another woman.  So can the physical form you decide on.  It would be wise to reflect on whether you want "trans" to be a permanent part of your future identity or whether you just want to be an average woman after transition. 

Don't underestimate just how much your choices will influence how you're treated by men and women alike post-transition - especially if you choose a high-glam, porn star boobs kind of look.

On a practical level, Asia is the home of cheap gender reassignment surgery and sculpting.

Really?  That's like saying that this forum is "supposed to be the face of Bitcoin."  If either Bitcoin Magazine or this forum have gained market dominance it's not because they're intended to be "the face of Bitcoin", it's due to lack of competition. 

Neither this forum nor the magazine have any special kind of endorsement from the Bitcoin Project.  To the extent that a "face of Bitcoin" exists, it's the Bitcoin.org website and the Bitcoin StackExchange.  To the extent that an individual person is the "face of Bitcoin", it's Gavin.

You should probably read his entire post history.  Here's a good starting point.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48949.msg582414#msg582414


Here we are, almost a year later and dank wants someone to buy him a car because his grand plans of last year haven't made him enough money to buy it himself.  His "business plans" for making his untold millions also seem to have changed.

I post on messageboards which enforce this rule and it has pros and cons.  Very often people won't read more than the last page of a long thread, so threads frequently get derailed by people asking questions which have already been answered in the thread.  It gets very old, very fast.  

One feature which helps make mega-threads manageable is the ability to pull up all of a user's posts in a thread.  This would be extremely valuable if people were only interested in reading posts by service operators or others commenting "officially".  In the Bicoinica threads, it would have been useful to be able to pull up all Amir's or Tihan's posts in those threads.

I think that the most recent forums split has made it even harder to find important information.  Important information related to services is posted just about anywhere and is often found in counter-intuitive places.  The Intersango megathread is a good example of this.  From September, they won't be accepting GBP transfers until they find a new bank but that information is buried in a general Marketplace thread, not in Service Announcements, Service Discussion or Trading, which are the places you'd expect to find that kind of information.

People start new threads when they feel their particular point or question is being lost in the general noise or ignored.  Sometimes it's ignored because people consider it irrelevant or it's the 7,000th time a particular point has been made or question asked.  Merging threads or locking new threads about an existing topic (with a link to the existing thread) are options which might be useful but they require more pro-active moderation than is usual around here (if you're going to merge or split threads, you need to do it early otherwise it just creates a mess).

His guitar is the one of the "investments" which is going to make his depositors rich.  Just like the mining hardware he's planning on buying with client funds.  

dank is like Atlas and logansryche merged into one.

For some reason I was under the impression that SR requires you to leave feedback before releasing the funds from escrow.

I do agree that there's no way to gauge the amount of private sales activity, so figures based on public sales will always be on the low side.  That true of Bitcoin itself, too, though.  Not all trades go through exchanges and private trades can't really be tracked.