If you didn't save the wallet file, the coins are lost. Without the private key, there is no way they can ever be spent.

This makes no sense. If society produces more, why would society earn less?

I do think a vote should still be done, but that doesn't mean that not having a vote is necessarily fraud. Fraud has a specific meaning and requires some kind of deception to benefit one person at the expense of another.

I don't think you can answer this in the abstract. It's fraud if there's deception or intent to defraud. If, for example, the change remedies something that was objectively a defect in the contract, then it's not fraud. For example, if the contract promises that a particular person will guarantee repayment and that person dies, there's no fraud in changing the guarantor to someone comparably reliably. What's the alternative?

Let me give you an analogy. Say there a hundred people in a group. They may all agree that there are a few bad people in that group who should be kicked out. But if they don't agree *which* people are bad and should be kicked out, their agreement is very misleading. So even if there's an agreement that there are some bad posts that should be avoided, if there's no agreement on which those are, the apparent agreement is an illusion.

And it turned out they were right. A lot of people were borrowing money from Patrick to invest in Pirate and when Pirate defaulted, Patrick was unable to meet withdrawal requests. (At least, this is what it appears to be. For all we know, Patrick just took advantage of the Pirate default to stop making payments.) Patrick has still not stated what his assets and obligations are or identified how much bad debt he holds. The future is very uncertain and a lot of people are wishing they didn't invest with him. These warnings were *correct*.

We'll never know if people who agree with you *really* agree on anything if you won't identify specific posts. Any agreement is likely illusory with everyone thinking other people have different posts in mind. There is likely no agreement on which posts are the bad ones and thus no consensus on what should be done.

My top recommendations would be Economics in One Lesson (by Henry Hazlitt) and The Road to Serfdom (by Hayek).

Unfortunately, you are wrong on both counts.

I don't think any innocent investors got caught in the wake of pirate. If you invested in an obvious Ponzi scheme while dozens of people are telling you that it's an obvious Ponzi scheme, you are not innocent. The closest you might come is people who invested in a loan scheme that promised no Pirate exposure and actually had Pirate exposure.


Can you link to some of these "baseless accusations" you speak of?

This strikes me as somewhat bizarre. If someone advocates that women should be free to do what they wish with their bodies, are they then arguing that fat women should have more freedom than thin women since they have more body to what they wish with? The way freedom is being measured in this argument is incoherent, IMO.

Correct. But that wasn't the question.

I think you lost the context of this conversation. The question was whether we know that he didn't put the money into legitimate investments as he claimed he would. And the answer is that we know he didn't because there are not, and cannot be, any legitimate investments that meet the necessary criteria.

Your original question was:

And the answer is that the uproar is that he claimed the money would be used for legitimate investments and we know they were not because there do not exist any legitimate investments that can pay 7%/week interest. (There's also other evidence, it's not just that. See the rest of the thread.)

No, not at all. It's not the investors who appropriate the value, it's government and bankers who do that. Government prints more money. Bankers create money by loaning it out. (Of course, some bankers are also investors, but it's in their capacity as bankers that they appropriate the value.)

That always happens. If I grow the economy, all stakeholders benefit equally. That's not the issue. It's about whether you can penalize people who refuse to consume on the misguided theory that consumption produces value.

That's not a problem even if you agree with it. So long as you don't have a coercively-enforced monetary policy, people can always grow the currency by circulating debt instruments.

You're absolutely right, if the economy is already growing so fast that no investment is better than just leaving things the way they are, then investment will, and should be, discouraged. Not all investment is good. Bad investments steer resources from more productive uses to less productive uses.

Well, sure. Get rid of the scams and the scam warnings will go away too. I'm with you on that strategy. I thought you were suggesting getting rid of the warnings while leaving the scams.

It would help tourism in a lot of cities to hide their crime rates. But it would also make it a lot harder for people to make rational decisions about what precautions are appropriate when traveling.

Right now, Bitcoin is to currency like Nigeria is to email. It appears that the majority of the Bitcoin economy (at least, as seen in the forums) currently actually does consist of either scams or really bad deals, and cleaning that up is probably more helpful than trying to hide it. A community that doesn't tolerate scams will eventually see fewer of them. A community that hides them will see more.

Yes, like evolution and gravity. I analyze a set of facts and conclude that only one explanation for those facts is reasonably possible.

That's what I presented, real facts. They're just not the particular facts you want, and therefore you feel like you can ignore the conclusion they inescapably lead to.

The amount of money he took is a real fact. The return rate he promised is a real fact. That no business model is known that can provide those returns is a real fact. That he stopped making payouts with no explanation is a real fact. These real facts (and others) lead to one and only one conclusion.

If you have some alternate conclusion consistent with these facts, please share them with the group. But there are a large set of known facts and there is only one explanation consistent with them., No other explanation is known or reasonably imaginable. That is how you reason from facts and reach conclusions. There is no other way to do it.

That there are specific facts that we could have, don't have, and that could be helpful does not in any mean that we cannot be confident in the conclusions we've reached from the facts we do have. Can you set out any set of plausible additional facts that would change the conclusion? I'm pretty sure you can't.

Of course far more illicit goods dealers prefer dollar bills.

It is not an increase in the total value, but of course printing more money or lending out money doesn't increase the total value either. What bothers them is that this isn't any value that they can appropriate, because it's shared by all currency holders equally. In their view, printing more money and giving it to everyone is bad, but printing more money and giving it to banks to lend out is good, because lending is good. And giving it to governments to spend is good because government spending is good.

What they really want to do is punish saving, which they slander by calling it "hoarding". This is really the broken window fallacy writ large. Saving is actually producing. To "save money", you must earn it and do nothing else.

This presumes that there is one fixed ideal balance between saving (deferring consumption) and investing (consuming now). A monetary system whose value was determined by the market such that it tended to deflate when saving makes more economic sense and inflate when investing makes more economic sense would make more economic sense overall.

Not all lending and investing are good. We recently had a global economic collapse due to overly-incentivized lending and investing.

Their income streams aren't reducing. They are reducing when denominated in the deflating currency, but their real value is not reducing.

I don't agree. Resource limitations are fictional. If you don't see why, ask yourself this question -- was Uranium a resource in 1790? If not, then resources are not fixed and constant expansion includes resource expansion. If so, then the entire universe is a resource.

I do know. You keep saying I don't. I explained how I know. You don't disagree with my reasoning, yet you refuse to accept its conclusion. I'm baffled. Either I'm misunderstanding you or you seem to have stuck in your head that there's only one way you can know something and if you can think of one way you could know something that isn't the way you do know it, then you don't know it.

But that's not true. I can equally well just note in my own ledger that you have 10 bitcoins in a demand account without giving you any actual bitcoins. If the scenarios envisioned in that article ever happened (and I don't think they will, but let's assume it) then people would just do exactly that, using demand notes denominated in bitcoins to inflate the money supply.