Hard to believe some people dont understand this. Its really easy.

Step 1: planes fly designated ATS routes in corridors, often at evenly spaced distances from each other; think of it as a highway in the sky. Different planes fly in opposite directions in the same corridors (at different height), again, just like a highway.

Step2: Under the right atmospheric circumstances, planes leave long vapor trails, its actually tiny ice crystals.

Step 3: At 10Km altitude you typically find 100+ KmH winds. Now apply a 100+KmH wind at whatever angle on those vapor trails forming in opposite directions, and guess what pattern emerges ?

Yep.

BTW, the composition of those trails is indeed made up of various chemicals, but composed mostly of a single quite lethal substance that has killed millions of people already. Its called H20.

To clarify, do you need someone to actually hold those coins for you, or only make a judgment in case the two parties dont agree? Big difference; if its the latter you mostly need someone objective and rational. Since Im not aware of any lawyers frequenting this forum, Id pick a mathematician. Meni Rosenfeld? If the former, pick someone who is not likely to be tempted by 1K coins (*). GigaVPS comes to mind.

(*) Im assuming you meant 1K.. If you really meant 1M, I wouldnt trust anyone, I wouldnt even trust myself!

What happens if no block is found?

insert a bit of foam or something between the cards to force them apart.

Id say its primarily because of the huge risk for the borrower to get scammed and never see his coins back.

So he can buy them beforehand. After all this time, if his business works only half as well as he claims, surely he has the capital required and then some. Yet for some reason he seems to need constantly more, not less.


Sounds like a very expensive way to hedge against a BTC price collapse. Going short on bitcoinica would make far more sense. Not too mention he could just cash out his profits in $.

Thats the point.. why would he borrow at an insane interest rates if he has to buy coins at exchanges anyway. All that changes is that he has to buy even more.

Id like to point out that most backers of Pirate were claiming he was involved in money laundering and/or other (drug related) illegal activities. Pirate has recently categorically denied this. I wonder if those people are calling Pirate a liar or if they are now as clueless as the rest of us about his actual business model.

Ive been thinking the same. Organize a Pirate withdrawal day. Anyone convinced Pirate is running a legitimate business would have nothing to fear; give pirate a headsup so he can plan a few days of holiday.  Time it to match a betsofbitcoin bet .

Of course this would only work if you could get a majority to participate, which seems unlikely, and therefore it might end up legitimizing his business regardless of merit.

Perhaps more doable is Pirate posting his wallet addresses; it wouldnt tell us all that much without knowing how much he owns his investors, but at least it might give some reassurance.

Are you guys starting bitcoin automatically on startup?

Perhaps, but if you invest in to something that you understand, at least you can gage risk/reward. Kinda hard to do here.

There is no surefire way to make money buying "low" and selling "high" on an open market, anyone who claims otherwise is either a scammer or misguided.

Thats not to say he may not be trying, I have also wondered if there isnt a relationship and Pirate may have enough funds to manipulate the price, to a degree. Im not quite sure how one can profit from price stability, but even if one can, that doesnt make it guaranteed profitable, there are always limits. And if indeed Pirate is speculating on btc price somehow, then he is gambling with a lot of money that isnt his.

Which brings up the single most important issue Pirate hasnt addressed yet: what kind of risk is involved?

... blocks found?

50 euro received, 12 btc sent. Thanks for the trust.

FWIW, no such problem here with ubuntu 12.04 and bitcoin-qt 0.6.2 from the stable channel. Menu's work, tray icon works.

... why is any of that necessary?
If you just install the bitcoin-qt client from the stable channel, it works fine, with launcher and everything. No problems with unity either on my laptop.

(or use ubuntu software center to do the same through a GUI)

Im quite sure they arent, unless they invented time travel.
It just looks like their block faking algorithm is "catching up" and reporting all the blocks they didnt pay previously.
Doesnt matter for current miners that get paid PPS, but it just further proves what we knew all along.

Interesting:
https://bitclockers.com/statistics/blockhistory

Notice that block 650 introduced PPS. Also notice that those recent short blocks have fake dates and all link to blocks that were actually found several days ago,  when payout was still proportional.

Its hard to cheat on PPS. 8% is also considerably less than deepbit. I see no problem here.

Of course how much they pocketed from their miners before the switch to PPS is an open question. A round average of 2.1M shares per block and not a single short block in 6+ months suggests it might be tangible.


More interestingly, some fools are still trying to hop them it seems .

Calling it robbing doesnt make it so. Do you feel robbed because bitcoins (or for that matter, gold) is constantly being mined?