Yeah, it would seem virtually impossible to accidentally add `+35e9` to how you display something. And it's rather obvious it would be out of sync with the server. The only case I could ever imagine making sense is making adding "+1e12" for development so you can see how "Max profit: 1xx ETH" looks (and doesn't overflow or render or something).

Yeah, this confirms they are cheating.
In that video, the server has a "forced cash out" out at 45.12x. In that round there is a betting of 1.128 ETH, which establishes an upper bound of ( 49.76736 ETH (1.128 * 44.12). In reality it's lower, but I can't be bothered computing all the earlier cashouts) yet them claim it's 75 ETC.

So yeah, no surprise: they're cheating.

It's actually not too bad. My suggestion was that we use an escrow-agent to create a 2-of-3 multisig address (Where I am one holder, dean is another and the escrow the third). We would both commit enough funds into the multi sig-address (and keep it topped up) and have public payout addresses. Dean preliminarily agreed, so I talked to some extremely prominent members of the bitcoin community who agreed to escrow the deal. But that rapidly fell apart with nonsense excuses and kept offering amendments such that would break rule from the start: I am not going to enter a deal where I need to trust him with a million dollars.

Well, you can see my trust feedback for my opinion. But the misdirection is kind of killing me. You wanted a personal loan (either directly, or via BKB tokens). And promised to pay it back personally. You claimed to have systems in place to automatically sell BTC to guarantee your obligation to token-holders, even if there was a sudden and expected BTC price fall. The million dollars would've had no utility to the business. Anyway, I'm never going to prove you tried to scam me. So why don't you answer the simple and direct questions asked of you?

Here's a good one:

@PrimeNumber7 your analysis looks very accurate


The problem is the name "betking ico" is a bit misleading. It was designed (and privately marketed) more as: "Dean Nolan's USD denominated debt token" but instead of offering any interest rate he offered a % of the site bankroll profit he would provide % of the bankroll profits. All costs associated with operating the site would be purely taken care of him. (this was done so "% of bankroll profits" is strictly +EV and investors didn't need to trust his ability to run a profitable business).

e.g. Just before he scammed everyone he told me he had some poker debts (in USD) and didn't want to lose his exposure to BTC. So I should buy a large sum of BKB tokens, which he would give me at a crazy favorable rate (something like 30% under their face-value, although I'd need to consult our chat logs to be sure) and would even provide me with an accelerated buy-back schedule.  [If anyone is wondering why I keep presenting a slightly different version, it's cause he made like ~5 attempts for me to give him money just before he scammed. Each i knocked back telling him I was unwilling to accept counter party risk by him, but would be willing to in an escrowed deal, which was something he would never agree to)]

This set off a huge amount of alarm-bells, why would he be willing to acquire BTC exposure ridiculously higher than market rate (e.g. bitmex) and then confirmed my suspicions by scamming his remaining token-holders.

But it's kind of pointless to try establish his motive/intentions, but I guess I can ask:

Had I bought the betking ~million dollars of  tokens you privately offered me, would've your honored the buyback agreement? Or would've my tokens been treated the same as everyone else's?



Exactly this.

I have nothing more to add to this conversation, so I'll just leave with: Dean, Why don't you just cut the bullshit, and give us a direct answer to why you won't just buy back tokens at the promised price? What's the marginal utility of the cost of doing that? No matter what you do, you're probably going to die a wealthy man.  Was it really worth living with the fact you're a scammer? Was your reputation worth it?

Sad.

That seems almost like a philosophical question. Let's say I made a 1 BTC bet with you, and I lost and paid you 1 BTC. Then you make the same bet with someone else, and you lost this time and decided you were not going to pay (would make bad business sense, you see).

Was I scammed?

I'd personally lean towards 'yes', but it does require knowing your intentions when you made the bet. But it's kind of also unproductive to speculate on intentions, so let's focus on who you directly scammed, which was token holders (like LoyceV).

And once again, if the amounts involved are so small: why would you even scam people, and just not keep your word?

The code they use (client-side) is this:


to display the max-profit. It's certainly not conclusive proof of cheating (after all: maybe the server knows the real max-profit, but sends it offsetted by -35e9).  It seems pretty unlikely to me though.

But the only way to be totally sure would make a huge bet, and see when the auto-cash really works.

But if history is an indication, there's approximately a 100% correlation between people who pirate bustabit code and are dishonest in other ways too...

Ok. I give up. This conversation has gotten unproductive. You just finished trying to argue that you didn't "cancel buybacks" because they were still going (under completely and far worse terms) which are happening ~1% of the official buy-back price. If there was a disingenuous award, you'd clearly win it.


Anyway, I think it's pretty much telling that the only people who will come to your defence are BillyBurns who is clearly not a "normal" user and a bunch of newbie accounts that are offered BKB tokens to post on bitcointalk.


So I guess everyone can clearly see what a scammer you are. Good luck with your next ICO scam (bitsafe was it?), you might want to create a new identity though if you want to scam people, as "Dean Nolan" is a bit tarnished now and people will see it coming.

Again, this semantics-play is annoying. You sold them for bitcoin [1] and bought them back with bitcoin. You only bought them back slightly higher in terms of USD, and that's because bitcoin skyrockted, so you were making a killing on the buybacks. (i.e. you bought them back for less than you sold them).

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per-se, because that was the terms of the ICO which said: You make a personal profit when the price of bitcoin goes up, and make a personal loss when price of bitcoin goes down. The problem is you reneged immediately after it actually happened.

And then after that, you started buying them back at hugely under the ICO price in both USD and Bitcoin. Maybe you outperformed the Venezuelan bolivar, so what next: everyone made a profit in terms of VES?


Also I find your "I had bought-back almost all tokens, so I only scammed a few people" kind of weak. Why wouldn't you just keep your word and eat the loss like your own terms dictated?


[1] Any some other cryptos, let's ignore that for simplicity though.

Bizarre. People who did sell tokens and actually lost money apparently don't count (because they voluntarily sold, or something). And people who haven't sold, still haven't lost any money (despite them would if the ever needed to)?

So basically, you're saying the only way token-holders can lose money is if the site closes down?


I don't think there's a way to have a productive discussion with someone who argues that "not a single person lost any money" on a token that nose-dived ~99%.



This really seems like misdirection. No one is attacking Dean for being a bad investment, they're attacking it for repeatedly lying and dishonest. The simple undeniable truth is Dean used his personal reputation to create and back BKB to give him personal exposure to bitcoin. He repeatedly sold it as an instrument to protect against bitcoin price going down (up until including shortly before he cancelled the promise, trying several times to pitch it to me knowing I'm stupidly heavily into btc). He milked it all the way when bitcoin price was doing well, and literally the second things turned around he renegs. To the best of my knowledge, he sold ~6.5M dollars worth of BKB, not bought a *single* one back at above the ICO price  (and claimed to have hit something like 70% buybacks or something?).

I think the only thing left to do is play with semantics ("you haven't lost unless you sell!") "It's not Dean's problem if you sell at a loss" and "he's not a scammer because he wasn't intending on scamming! He only did it cause it was profitable. But to be a scammer, that has to have been your intention".

Based on this, would you say: "no one has lost any money" to be a fair and honest statement?

I would like to apologize to BillyBurns (and Dean) for accusing them of being the same person. I believe I was incorrect, and was wrong to be so rash, and should have talked to them in private before I posted. I was also incorrect in how I analyzed the timezones: I made the mistake of believing the bet timestamp was in UTC but it was actually in local time. Therefor they are in clearly different timezones.

Have you lost money in Dean's ICO?

Fair enough. I'll agree I don't have enough evidence to say you're Dean, and there were several things I noticed in the screenshot that I wouldn't have expected of Dean. Would you be willing to disclose your working relationship with him (i.e. are you an employee of his)?

Well Dean claims he has people working for him, so it's certainly possible BillyBurns is one. I do find it rather unlikely that he's some unbiased observer though

Anyone else think BillyBurns is also Dean?  [Removed analysis, as I think it was wrong and BillyBurns is not Dean]

It wouldn't be fair for you to lose it, so I wouldn't worry. The way Daniel is doing the compensation is kind of pretty complex, as he needs to replay the invest/divest events against the bets to figure out exactly how much each investor lost. I assume he's got a lot on his plate dealing with this, so being able to code that up in 1 or 2 days seems extremely fast to me (that's how much time I'd want to do it, if i had absolutely nothing else to do in my day).    On the plus side, it means you are completely safe to divest now if you wanted and it will not impact your compensation in the slightest.

I've heard in private from who have bought tokens and lost money, but it's not my place to name them (especially if they are angling to have Dean to privately honor the original terms of their sale).

But I do find it amusing the audacity of saying "no one lost money" after selling millions of dollars worth of tokens that went on to lose ~99% of their value and the majority (supposedly) were bought back at considerably under their sale price (i.e. when it was profitable for Dean to buy them back).


Yeah, none of it really makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised that if after canceling the buy-backs, Dean was the one buying large quantities at super-discounted prices on his own exchange. Then as he accumulates large amounts of BKB he can say he bought lots back, but only had to pay a fraction of the "face value". And then he can blame investors for panic selling ("not my fault if they sold for really cheap!")

Here's some real comedy:



According to one estimate:


Or do you have a loophole  "They only lost bitcoin! Bitcoin is not money!"