Google has been tuning their searches to individual users for quite some time already, so each user can get a different result. But anyway the totals, though not the ordering, for the two different searches are the same, showing that Google Search is broken, which has been irritating me every day since Google did these changes.

I will stop explaining Google Search here, because we are drifting too far off-topic. I'd like to return to the more interesting question through which institutions (in addition to GPUMAX?) the money is laundered.

Google Search is useless here. Whether I search for "I hope you soon realize" or the correct "I hope you'll soon realize", I get 382,000 hits either way, apparently because Google uses some kind of fuzzy search.

But perhaps I'm mistaken anyway, and this is commonly used slang. I don't remember other flawed English in detail, so I have to withdraw the conclusion.

"Realize" is American English. British would be "realise", so that makes Great Britain less likely. But then it would always be possible to fake a certain type of English, if somebody really wanted to.

Consider any conclusions retracted. It don't matter much anyway (to use my own slang).

True, but some errors are typical and widespread, while some others are untypical for native English speakers. For example, would any native English speaker ever say:

"I hope you soon realize …"

My guess is that many of his clients, probably a majority, work with compound interest. My reasoning is that people who pay in a relatively small amount base their investment on the hope to turn their insignificant initial investment into a significant amount.

If you only pay in a three-digit amount, what you earn by having your 7% paid out weekly is and remains peanuts. But if you could compound your interest over a year or two or three, you'd be rich.

I therefore guess that those who compound their interest tend to be three-digit investors, while those who collect their interest weekly tend to be those with larger investments. This is admittedly only a wild guess. It would mean that he has considerably more than 300k BTC, but not two or three times as much. My rough guess (based on your guess) would be 500k, quite a tidy amount of untidy money, enough to live a moderate life of leisure. It remains mere guesswork, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hit near home.

This makes me more confident that the scheme will end soon, probably this month, next month at the latest. If he kept having to pay out 22k BTC every week, without a steady stream of new investors his stockpile would be empty after a relatively low number of weeks, much less than a year. But he does not want to get anywhere near empty, so he has to end it very soon.

If he wanted to launder most of his gains, his laundromat would have to be running full bore now. Is that what we actually observe?

What's the going estimate of how much Pirate has taken in, not counting any interest? BTC100,000? BTC200,000? No clue? Have some of his clients revealed their payments?

Yes, I had already noticed my mistake. I also think that it would be good to be able to use simple text strings, rather than using the QR code detour, even if a device does have a camera.

The money is gone anyway, so there may not be enough interest.

As a temporary workaround, until BitcoinSpinner gets the function, you could use a QR code generator, like http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/ or one of these: https://www.google.com/search?q=qr-code-generator , hoping that its admin doesn't notice what is running through his system.

Fortunately it is unlikely that somebody looks at every text running through the generator, and it is also unlikely that somebody who does look at your string recognizes it as a wallet key.

Nonetheless you could move the bitcoins into a new wallet and abandon the old one as a precautionary measure.

Addendum: I overlooked that the above proposal does not solve the Kindle problem. I thought in the wrong direction. Please ignore, but make a note of the QR code generators. Sometimes they can be useful.

My opinion is that it is better to avoid putting such information on any public system. There is always the administrator leak, plus some other risks. Fortunately it is unnecessary. You can keep this information locally.

Yes, that is correct (with the assumption of whole weeks). Sharp thinking.

I could imagine some other considerations. One is that the time spent to do the hedging might be better spent on something more profitable. Then there is the weird problem that some simple-minded victims might get angry when somebody takes and spends the money they have just been robbed of, without any risk to himself.

Fair enough. 10 bitcents on the way. 238 would have been a bit closer, so the next person who calculated that may also collect 0.1 BTC. SimBesh? Wallet address? Just for fun.

Addendum: Oops, the first calc also came from you. I overlooked that. And as the following message explains, 239 is actually correct under the assumption of whole week steps.

It may be easier to convince just one of the bigger "investors" to withdraw. If it's a Ponzi scheme (which it obviously is), that would already burst the bubble.

Sure you have missed something. The above point is not an assumption, but a trivial truth (except for the mathematically challenged) in a non-inflating currency like bitcoin.

This discussion needs people with some minimal mathematical ability. It would be better for the few others to shut up and stop advertising their stupidity.

Here is a little mathematical exercise for you. At 7% per week, how long does it take for one bitcoin to collect a compound interest of 10 million bitcoins? The first to answer this question correctly gets BTC0.1 from me (raising the question how long it would take for that tiny amount).

I'll simplify the question to make it easier for you, imsaguy, so you have at least a 50-50 chance of getting it right. Does it take more or less than five years?

Charles Ponzi, in 1920, was in a different situation, compared to an anonymous bitcoin environment. He ran his scheme to the very end, went bankrupt and into jail, because he could not run away and disappear. He served drinks to his "customers", who were staging a bank run and gathering at his door, just to extend his time of fame by one more minute.

But now let's look at the personality of a (still hypothetical) Ponzi scheme operator. (I'll call him "he" for simplicity.)

We know some of his personality traits pretty well. He lacks law abidingness. He is extremely greedy. He must be an excellent liar. He must be thoroughly anti-social. He must be somewhat intelligent. (If he were highly intelligent, he probably would not have to resort to crime to make a good living.) In short, he is a low-life form you don't really want to share the same planet with.

Now let us look at how a Ponzi scheme ends. At first thought, one would think that it ends when interest exceeds new deposits, but it is not so. In fact, forget about interest. Think about the actual heap of money the Ponzi scheme operator has collected.

He will continue running the scheme as long as that heap grows. But, of course, growth will sooner or later stagnate and make way for some random sequence of growth and shrink phases, as "investors" withdraw some or all of their gain.

That is the time when an intelligent Ponzi operator will shut down and run with the money. However, greed may get in his way. He will hope to rake in a million of dollars, if he could just bridge this problem period and convince more newcomers to part with their money.

He will do anything to make that happen. He will keep promising totally unsustainable yields, he will accept any new "investment", no matter what, he will try various kinds of publicity stunts, even bets he is sure to lose.

However, at some point even the stupidest "investor" will realize that, assuming that at some time a Ponzi scheme amassed, say, BTC100,000, at 7% per week there would be BTC10million just 1.3 years later. BTC10m? Where would these  come from?

So sooner or later the "investors" will attempt to withdraw. Some will do that anyway, because they want to buy a new car or a new house. The early "investors" should have amassed a neat stash after a couple of months, many times more than their original "investment", so the tendency to withdraw grows by the day.

Needless to say, the amount of money actually available in a Ponzi scheme is tiny, compared with the amount the scheme owes, so even a trickle of payouts will quickly make its operator very nervous.

Sooner, rather than later, the Ponzi scheme operator will realize that the millions of dollars he hoped to rake in are unattainable, and he'd better be content with what he has, so he will disappear. Perhaps he will make some moves before that, designed to stall and confuse the "investors". He might state that he sold or gave away his business, he might pretend he got sick or died, he might do confusing deals with sub-contractors, he might invent maneuvers I cannot even think of. But ultimately he will cease to pay up, and that will be the end.

Now let's look at the currently ongoing Ponzi scheme. After the discussion here, new "investors", even the most gullible ones, may have become a bit weary, so we may currently experience a phase of stalling new "investments". Whether this is enough to let the bubble burst, remains to be seen. In the most Ponzi-favorable circumstances, i.e. no big withdrawals and a very optimistic (or greedy, to be more precise) Ponzi operator, willing to risk much of his accumulated stash, the scheme may weather this storm and carry on, but how long would it take for the less optimistic "investors" to run for safety and withdraw? After all, they could withdraw their money, wait for just a month or two, and if the "business", against all odds, survives, come back and "reinvest". At least some people believe that only the first very few withdrawers will actually see their money, so a withdrawal now would be the safest path to riches. My personal guess is weeks or a few months. A year should be out of the question because there aren't enough bitcoins in existence to make it believable, even for the mathematically challenged.

And don't think that he could just lower the interest rate. If he did, more people would withdraw their money. It's a one-way road, and not a long one.

Why should he hedge a bet that he'll win anyway?

Correction: That's because he let Vandroiy manipulate him into a put-up-or-shut-up. Now that he knows he overstepped and can be right or wrong about the stability of his "business" and quite possibly lose, he's starting to wriggle on the line. First, he claimed he was giving to charity, when that was one of the mechanisms Vandroiy used to goad him into the bet. Then he acted buddy-buddy with Vandroiy as if this were a gentlemen's bet, when HE IS BETTING WITH AN ADVERSARY (you know, "more like guidelines") who libeled him all over the place in an effort to end his Ponzi "business". Now he's claiming the community is broken because, you know, this stuff can happen.

While I won't say Vandroiy played this like a matador, he did pick and goad the right bull. Pirate saw red and charged right at the cape. Who knows when the bull will die, but the odds are very much not on its side. It remains to be seen if Vandroiy will get an ear or two. 

If Pirate did that, he would have to pay out first, which he probably cannot. If instead he switched accounts into a new scheme directly, then that would be considered a continuation of the old scheme, and the bet would cover that too.

If he paid out piecemeal and thus moved people over one by one, that would be considered a trick, and the new scheme would again be considered a continuation of the old one and covered by the bet.

At least that is how I would see it. We could ask the escrow holder. The bet contract contains a clause stating that, if conditions move outside the explicit bet conditions, nanotube is free to decide how to disburse the money.

Perhaps we should better wait and see what happens, rather than discuss the crazier hypothetical outcomes. Perhaps Pirate reckons he can make up for the 5,000 BTC by attracting another "investor" or two on the strength of his publicized bet, and has planned to grab and run before DEF CON anyway. That is the outcome I currently consider most likely. The second-most likely outcome I consider that he somehow manages to drag on for a longer time, but certainly not until October 2013. In that case he would need to pull a trick for his announced DEF CON appearance.

Sometimes it pays to have earned trust.

He can't drag it out that long. If he keeps the interest rate high, his money will be finished through payouts long before that. If he lowers the interest rate, enough "investors" will recall their money, so he would quickly run out of money too.

Perhaps he's a millionaire, and he can afford to lose a large amount of money, merely to bolster his ego and inflate his reputation. In that case Vandroiy would indeed lose, Pirate would start a new Ponzi scheme, using his now improved reputation, and would rip off even more unsuspecting "investors".

As to "stupid bet", I'd say, no risk—no fun.