Yes, that's right. This does a huge service to their borrowers, allowing them to have a certain payment rather than a payment at risk. And it helps the Greek government, because they pay out at a reduced rate. It also increases the value of their debt, which benefits their current debt holders (since their bonds are worth more) and the Greek government (because they can borrow more money at reduced interest because of the higher bond values). Everyone wins.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/13/uk-greece-debt-emerging-idUSTRE79C4BM20111013

I don't agree. The point of a bond is to raise money that you can do whatever the hell you want with. I don't agree that it's an "improper use of available funds". I don't agree that the concept of "available funds" is even coherent in that sense.

As I said, I'm only arguing the case where he has no inside information.

You realize that you're rebutting an argument nobody made. This is likely because the arguments that have been made have no rebuttal. All of the signs of a scam are present. No explanation other than a scam is plausible. Therefore, it's almost certainly scam.

I agree, that's why I limited my argument to only trades not done with inside information.

Not at all. He just pays through precisely the same way and winds up paying some of the money to himself. It is no different from anyone else buying the bonds -- it just happens to be him. (Again, assuming he doesn't leverage information he gained as the operator. By the way, if it were me, and I had any good reason to believe a payout was imminent, I would freeze bond transfers to protect bond holders from others who might get word early.)

I agree.

Since he sells unlimited bandwidth and probably doesn't actually have unlimited bandwidth ...

Of course, everyone oversells bandwidth.

I don't think so. A hyperlink can't be child pornography (under the laws of pretty much all civilized countries except Australia), so distributing a hyperlink can't be distributing child pornography.

I don't get it. He's breaching the contract because not everyone gets nothing?

Yes, if he makes a full refund.

I agree.

I don't get that. So long as he doesn't trade on inside information, I don't see why he can't buy bonds just like anyone else could buy bonds. Presumably, the people selling are happy to sell at the prices they chose to sell at. (Again, assuming he has no special inside information.) And these buys push up the prices of the bonds, which benefits all the bond holders.

I don't see why. Why can't he benefit his bondholders by allowing those who prefer to sell to do so and at the same time boosting the value of the bonds? If it's not done on inside information, it's win/win for everyone. How are his interests averse to the bondholders?

I'd have to look at the contract to see exactly what that means. The issue would be if you were the only person who knew that you were going to get a refund of, say, .33 BTC per bond and bought up a bunch of bonds for less than that prior to passing the payment from Pirate through to bond holders. That could be argued to be constructive fraud. I'm not sure that argument would work, but someone could make the argument. It's also a pretty scummy thing to do because it's an act based on inside information gained in the course of actions you take on behalf of your bond holders that's against the interests of those bond holders.

Say McDonald's hires me to scout out locations that are best for a new McDonald's. And say I find one that's absolutely perfect and selling for $100,000 and because of the inside information I gathered doing the scouting, I know it's worth $150,000 to McDonald's. Can I buy it and resell it to McDonald's for the $150,000? Or can McDonald's reasonably expect that I won't use information gained in the process of acting in their interest to perform a personal transaction for my personal benefit at their detriment? I would think McDonald's could sue you in that situation, and I think your case would be similar.

It's not uncommon, at least for me, to look back at code written just a month or two ago and be completely baffled about what it was doing.

All he would have to do is use some other money to buy back bonds slightly before passing through the payments as dividends. It's a pretty scummy thing to do, but it's not an explicit breach of the contract. It might be considered implicit breach, similar to constructive fraud.

It depends who is suing who.

If a bondholder were suing you for failing to protect their interest, I think you could make an argument that nothing is a reasonable collection effort. You have no way to recoup your collection costs from bondholders. And there's no particular reason to think any collection effort would be effective. There's no precedent for successful recovery.

If a bondholder were suing Pirate as an intended third-party beneficiary, I think they could more plausibly argue that your collection efforts were insufficient.

It may seem odd that there's a difference, since it's fundamentally the same question. But the basis for comparison is different. In the case of someone suing you, they're basically arguing that you should undertake recovery efforts that are unlikely to recover much at your own expense and then give the bondholders all the proceeds. In the case of them suing Pirate, they'd presumably be attempting to recover at their own expense with only those actively suing Pirate benefiting.

Another possibility would be your bond holders suing you for running a Ponzi scheme. I don't think that's likely to work for a variety of reasons. Similarly, I don't see Pirate's other victims suing you either.

Essentially, from a legal perspective, you can probably do pretty much whatever you want and get away with it (just like Pirate, assuming someone doesn't track him down and give him some street justice). The one thing you probably can't get away with is trying to get your bondholders for pay for you to go after Pirate. Even if that's in their interest, it's not in the agreement. (That was a mistake, by the way. The agreement should have let you deduct reasonable collection and extraordinary operating expenses from recovered funds.)

IANAL. This is my speculation. Since there's pretty much no precedent for any of this, we're all just guessing.

He can, and he did. No other conceivable substantial source is known and this has been true of every similar claim in the past. You don't have to rule out every inconceivable alternative to have proven something. Proof doesn't require omniscience, just reasonable certainty.

In context, it's clear that "only" doesn't rule out the possibility that some miniscule amount occasionally comes from some other source. "Only" can mean the only substantial factor or effect. For example, "Don't argue, you'll only make him mad" doesn't mean that you won't also cause air to vibrate.

There is no difference. When a person makes a claim, they are stating that they believe that claim is true. We understand that people are neither perfect nor omniscient.

If I say "Your wife is cheating on you", every rational person who understands the English language knows that I mean that I have reason to believe their wife is cheating on them. You would not conclude that it must be the case that she is in fact cheating on you. Nor would you believe that I was stating that logical proposition just to bring it up for discussion. The most natural interpretation of "Your wife is cheating on you" is that the speaker has reasons that he believes justify believing that your wife is cheating on you. "I think your wife is cheating on you" says precisely the same thing, just more weakly.

There is absolutely no reason he should weaken his warning. In fact, if he could think of any way to make it stronger, he should do that.

If the government ran all the supermarkets, you'd say the exact same thing about food. You would worry that all the grocery stores would close and you would starve. But, the thing is, in an AnCap world, there's money to be made by solving real problems. If the problem you've identified is a real one, then someone will find a way to solve it and charge you for that solution. And then someone else will find a better way to solve it and charge you less. And before you know it, the problem's gone. Problems are opportunities.

You might think it sucks to have to pay for everything. But the fact is, you're paying for everything now. It's just being done by an inherently inefficient government with little to no incentive to innovate and facing no competition.

As for the land ownership issue, there's a more specific response. Land ownership includes some bundle of rights. And society, if it's going to have property, has to work out what that bundle of rights is. It may be that preventing people from reasonably crossing your land to access other people's land isn't in that bundle of rights. It may be that shooting anyone who accidentally stumbles onto your land isn't in that bundle of rights. Just as, for example, taxing satellites that pass over your land likely wouldn't be.

Also, covenants can run with land and can specifically exclude some rights for the benefit of nearby land owners. A society has to come up with rules for how those covenants can be enforced, whether they can be valid in perpetuity, and so on.

It's much more dangerous to steal USD than Bitcoins. Also, if it was Roman, how would he explain the missing USD? (Not that I'm saying Roman stole the coins, I'm just saying this reasoning is very flimsy.)

Not to mention the rights of other bondholders who are entitled to a portion of any payout on the shared debt. If two people jointly own a home, one person can't pick a half of the house, sell it keeping all the money, and tell the other person "well, I sold my half. You can sell yours". The agreement with Goat determines how payments on the shared debt is distributed.

By the way, I've done some more research, and I'm much less confident that the intended third-party beneficiary argument would work unless you could show that Goat was not making reasonable collection efforts.

Madoff would be an example.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/09/news/companies/madoff_feeder_funds/index.htm?iid=EL

Under any jurisdiction that doesn't have a law that makes what blockchain.info illegal. If there's a US Federal law that you think makes it illegal, I'd love a citation. Honestly, I don't know if it's legal or not. My bet is that you could probably find some law you could cram it into, but that's true of almost anything.

+1, unfortunately. My life experience suggests that people actually don't learn lessons and instead repeat prior behavior if they can get away with it. (This is not a personal judgment about any particular person.)

Honestly, you just fundamentally don't "get it". If I have a mortgage on my house, and my house burns down, do you think the bank will still let me take out a second mortgage? I mean, I can still make the payments, right?

Yeah, here it is:

[links to illegal sites removed]

That's correct. There are serious risks if you don't have incoming bitcoins go directly to the cold wallet.

For example, recently an exchange was hacked with a bogus LR transfer. The hackers bought up Bitcoins and pushed the price up to some absurd amount. This encouraged people to deposit more Bitcoins in their accounts to sell them at the bogus rate. If deposits had gone to the hot wallet, these deposits could have been stolen as well.

Right, that's why you don't keep that much money in the hot wallet. A starting point is your average one-day volume.

You can't. That's the point of the hot wallet. It holds the coins you can afford to lose if you're hacked.

You can't, that's why you don't keep a lot of money in the hot wallet.

To be clear, you do make the hot wallet as secure as you can. But the risks you mention above are fundamental and they are the reason having a cold wallet is essential. If an account is holding more than about $100,000, the keys to that account should never appear on any one machine that provides remote access from the Internet.