Even if it succeeds as much as is imaginable, it's still not going to make exchanges obsolete, just change their business model a bit.

I would talk to private individuals who hold large amounts of Bitcoin and try to make private purchases to keep the price from going up too much too quickly. I'd try to buy for spot price and I'd actually slowly sell Bitcoins on exchanges the whole time to try to keep the spot price down.

By this argument, Pirate wasn't doing anything wrong. Everyone knew he was running a Ponzi. Everyone knows Ponzis must eventually default. All that's unknown is the time of the default. And it's quite possible Pirate didn't even know that much before anyone else. Sure Pirate lied, but nobody believed him, so no harm done.

And Pirate knew nothing they didn't know. So it was all just honest fun. Pirate's scammer tag should be removed. Right?

Then start arguing that Pirate doesn't deserve a scammer tag. In all likelihood, his primary business model was operating a pass through to Zeek. (And market manipulations which largely lost money but he said he was going to do that.)

I'm not "attacking" you. Read back over what I wrote and you'll see that I just summarized the other thread and then every time you said something false or misleading, I complained. Just stop saying false or misleading things and I'll stop replying. You don't have any of my money. I don't have any personal interest in this. I just detest when people who were trusted with money lie and weasel about their obligations.

Had you not claimed that you could take 10 years to pay back lost funds and still be providing full insurance, I wouldn't have said anything.

Right, so you are *not* going to honor the insurance. That was my point. I'm glad we agree.

That's childish and dishonest.

Umm, no. That's not true. Declaring your business a failure doesn't absolve you of your debts. You are your business. Your business is you.

Threatening to renege on a legitimate debt to obtain a business concession is scamming.

You might wish to look up the definition of "insurance". The crux of full insurance is that a person is made no worse off by a covered loss. Not having access to your money for ten years is worse than having immediate access to it.

Not without it looking like I was suggesting people invest in it, which I'm not willing to do. But I will say that none of those businesses, even the ones related to Bitcoin, can take bitcoins as an investment in any way other than selling them for USD. You can invest in bitcoins, but there aren't really any sensible investments denominated in bitcoins to my knowledge. The currency is just too volatile right now.

It doesn't pigeonhole well into any of those categories.

The problem is that everyone who makes such an argument has an interest in the payoff schedule that pays them the most the quickest. If the payoff is going to be proportional to amount owed, there's no reason to treat interest earned prior to default any different from principles deposited after default. Anyone who earned interest prior to default could have withdrawn it and re-deposited as principle. That should, obviously, have no effect. People who rolled over interest they could have withdrawn trusted him with those funds just as much as people who deposited principle did.

Patrick scammed himself, unfortunately.

I think that a tightly limited M1 would push the line further away. So we disagree over a hard to predict empirical fact about how the world will adjust to Bitcoin. I can't be sure your view is wrong, and I don't think you can be sure my view is wrong either. Which I think means that there could be much more than 21 million Bitcoins, but it's hard to say.

First, I reject the validity of the term "hoarding". It's a loaded term largely based on primitive and discredited economic theories. If you want to argue it, we can do that, but I'd prefer we use a neutral term like "holding" or "saving".

In any event, it's not that simple as "better" or "worse". Investment strategies have to balance risk and reward and have to fit into other investments. If you think Bitcoin will be worth significantly more in two years than it is today, you likely can't do better than holding them.

And, of course, there are lots of real businesses with real business activity that might be a sensible investment.

You can't split a semantic unit and satisfy it part by part. If I promise you "lots of money", I can't give you lots of sand to satisfy the "lots" part and then move on to the money part. "Fully insured" means that the insurance will be full. Any lesser doesn't satisfy the "insured" part because the type of insured that part refers to is "fully".

I probably should have bolded the "can". Obviously, you have to make a careful evaluation of whether the person trusted with your money deserves that trust. And mining will always be risky. Generally speaking, IMO, buying bitcoins and holding them is usually better than buying mining gear and mining with it.

Which is obviously the case here since fraudulent transfers were the only possible business model known. (Other than obviously ridiculous things such as someone who gives away money for no logical reason and happens to choose people who would invest in something that looks precisely like a Ponzi scheme as the beneficiaries of his generosity.)

Sorry, which question was that?

Probably just about anything that doesn't promise impossible returns. Holding bitcoins can certainly be rational. Investing in mining can certainly be rational.

This Jed, by the way, is the original creator of Mt. Gox. And this project and offer is very real.

It's correct. Most people recognize the concepts here, but they have a blind spot when it comes to abortion for some reason. (Religious or cultural, I suspect.)

For example, we don't compel parents to donate a kidney even if it is needed to save their child's life. We allow parents to choose to value their bodily integrity higher than their children's lives if that is their wish. We recognize that no living thing has any "right" to violate the bodily integrity of another living thing against its wishes. It doesn't matter what rights the fetus has to life or to be left alone -- no such right takes priority over another's right to physical, bodily integrity.

There's no reason you'd need to borrow an ever increasing supply of other people's money to do that though, so you can't use it to hide a Ponzi scheme. That would be the only use of such a business model and it won't work for that use.