Useful resource.

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Needs some additions though. Their explanation for the bitcoin island at the moment is that it references the principality of sealand  .

Not to mention the fact that they have no clue who pirate or goat is. 

Check who's right next door to bitcoin island and sailing away.



And a few tiles further on ...



Coincidence?

Or (in the case of tradeable instruments) just retain 33% of the debt instead of selling it all. Removes some trust issues.

But if pirate really was trying to buy back his own debt, then his recent announcement that gave many renewed hope was a bad move. I don't think there are any clever maneuvers to regain respectability in the pipeline. The gameplan was apparently simple
1) Take money
2) Run

Except that it now appears that step 2 is optional, since apparently none of his "investors" have the balls to do anything about it. The same people who claim to have lost 10k+ coins, and in the very recent past traveled vast distances to have dinner with him in Vegas, can now not be bothered to go knock on his door and ask him what's up, even if only to confirm that he lives where they think he lives.

Pics or it didn't happen.

OTOH (arguing with myself here  ) if everyone knew that it was a ponzi then PPT customers were willingly playing russian roulette and the operators can not be blamed.

Problem is that either EVERYONE knew it was a ponzi, in which case no-one was scammed, and therefore no-one is a scammer (including pirate), or not EVERYONE knew it was a ponzi in which case it is impossible to prove that the PPT operators were not among the few dumbasses who were not in on the game.

Still believe they should choose their own tags
SCAMMER or DUMBASS.
It has to be the one or the other.

Fair enough. But at some point you have to assume that people know the obvious, even if you can't prove it. If I take a gun hold it against your head and blow your brains out and then claim that I had never encountered a gun before and didn't know that guns do that when you pull the trigger, do you think I would get away with it? Even if the prosecution was unable to find any proof of me having encountered a gun before, I would still be found guilty.

Joel argues that it is not plausible for PPT operators to claim they did not know BTCST was a ponzi, just as it would not be plausible for me to claim I did not know what a gun does when you pull the trigger. To take the analogy furter, individual investors were playing russian roulette (which is stupid but not criminal), but PPT operators were playing russian roulette with the gun held to someone else's head (which is criminal). And for them to turn around now and say they didn't know doesn't pass the sniff test.

Sorry, but unless you disclose the nature of these and offer some proof, there is nothing in your post to distinguish you  from pirate in the early days. Merely offering lower returns does not automatically make you more trustworthy. I can offer 1% APR or 0.1% APR and still walk away with your money.

Please don't see this as an attack. From what I have seen of you on these forums, I believe you are trustworthy. I'm just pointing out that you will need to provide some proof of your RL business.

Interesting question. Remember that the opposite question "What is the best way to dispose of 1 million dollars worth of bitcoins?" may be just as relevant for some. i.e. there are some early adopters around with access to huge amounts of coins. But they can't sell over too short a period on gox without crashing the market. Now if only there were a way for these parties to find one another without either party having to show his/her hand publicly first and sparking a panic. I suspect iceberg orders on gox will do a lot to enable large players to enter/exit the market non-disruptively. Still hoping for something like this.

I was also wondering what I would do in this situation under the assumption that the threat is real (highly unlikely) and that I really have something to hide (highly likely). My first thought was that I would send an encrypted message to the blackmailer requesting a new deposit address so that I could pay without it being widely known that I paid. I thought I could use the public key corresponding to the blackmailer's address to encrypt the message so that only the blackmailer could read the message.  I then realised that since bitcoin addresses are hashes of public keys rather than the public keys themselves, this key would be unknown until someone does a withdrawal from the address.

Does anyone know why this is? What benefits do we get from using the hash rather than the key itself? Obviously we save a few bits on address length, but since we are past the point where addresses can realistically be memorised or manually typed anyway, this seems somewhat irrelevant. Satoshi had good reasons for most every choice he made in this system. What was the reason for this one?

Joel, you give people too much credit. Some of us here are dumber than a box of hammers.

Personally I also feel that it is not the PPT operators we should be going after, but rather those who formed part of the Pirate propaganda machine irrespective of whether they operated PPTs or not. So if you operated a PPT, but did not campaign for Pirate you get away with it. Simply providing a service that the market demands.

But if you went around claiming to know the business model, saying stuff like "No-one with half a brain thinks this is a ponzi" and tirelessly shouting down anyone who dares disagree, then you were either on the payroll or so incredibly stupid that others should be warned against paying heed to anything you say. Unfortunately we can't prove who is unethical and who is developmentally delayed. So I suggest that they should be made to choose between scammer tags or dumbass tags. It has to be one of those.

What id will you be using for your new account?

Yeah, I could and that does give me some results. But a lot of  them are not quotes of you, they're others saying shit like "reeses is a dumbass." That's  why I never said that it was impossible to to read your posts, simply that you were making it as hard as you possibly could. That point stands.



Sense of humour detected. Respect.

Well given that you appear to be doing everything in your admittedly limited power to make going back and reading your posts as hard as possible, you'd excuse us for assuming that that is actually the last thing you want. So we'll just have to go by what we remember you saying.


Witnessed

+1

Except I wouldn't include all PPTs and I wouldn't restrict it to only PPT operators. All those who vocally defended Pirate and shouted down anyone claiming ponzi, are either stupid or scummy. Unfortunately we can't prove who is a scammer and who is merely developmentally delayed. So I think they  should be made to choose between a dumbass tag and a scammer tag. Either way, next time round (and there will be a next time) their word should carry less weight.

Maybe. Personally I wouldn't gamble with the safety of my family like that for all the money in the world.

Deranged people are not in short supply in this community.

This is an very interesting hypothesis. I've been wondering why pirate didn't attempt to hide his RL identity if he was intentionally running a massive ponzi. Surely he didn't expect that he would be able to just walk away with the cash and there would be no RL repercussions. But if he was operating a Zeek passthrough, then he may well not have realized that it (Zeek) was a ponzi, assuming he's bad at math. But if there's one thing we've learnt from this fiasco it's that a lot of seemingly intelligent  people are really bad at math.

It also explains why he tried to keep the BTC price down, which does not fit with the default straight-up ponzi theory.

The only gotcha I see is that under this theory it makes less sense for him to restrict or decline deposits, as he apparently did at times. Does anyone know whether Zeek restricted deposits early on?

I agree with Brunic that we need to look closely at Zeek's history for further confirmation or contradiction.

P.S. Perhaps a mod can split this conversation off into a new topic?

You guys sound like you're hammered.

I can't speak as to Micon's mental development status, but when it comes to credibility, right now he sure has a lot more of it than you bunch of ponzi-promoting ass-clowns.

Now where have I heard that before?

Second verse same as the first.

Curious to hear whether Matt paid you.