Enter your account into blockexplorer and it will tell you if the coins were sent. If so, you can click on the transaction and see what block they're in. As soon as your client gets that block, the coins will show up. But if blockexplorer shows them, you have them, whether your client knows it or not.

Not that I don't believe you, but is there any evidence or proof you can provide of this claim? I suspect, and I think a lot of other people suspect this too, that it's actually an anti-fraud requirement and not an AML requirement. And the difference is very significant.

If anyone invests with you after seeing you write this, they are dumber than a box of rocks. If you take a loss of 40% of value, you can't continue to pay out dividends. You would have to distribute the losses to your investors. In order to pay out dividends, you have to have assets that exceed the value of your investment. Otherwise, you are a Ponzi scheme, your principal will dwindle as you continue to make dividend payments, and you will collapse.

He's wrong because I can owe you 100 bitcoins without having 100 bitcoins. Heck, I can owe you 25 million bitcoins even though 25 million bitcoins will never be in existence at the same time.

IMO, the best solution is to walk a request to the box. You can also have the box connect out to a web server that provides it with transfer requests that then just have to be manually approved at the box. The most common transaction will be to move coins to the cold wallet, so all you need is an amount.

I wouldn't invest with anyone who claims some secret magic money making formula. History has revealed that all such magic formulas are scams. A way to provide a low-risk 3,650% APR would be among the biggest financial breakthroughs of all time. It's hard to imagine you've actually got it.

But on the off chance you are an honest person, please provide sufficient information so that your potential investors can rationally evaluate the risks they are exposed to. Explain to them how they will be able to assure themselves that any claimed profits are in fact profits from legitimate investments. Also, explain how they will be able to tell if any claimed losses were in fact legitimately incurred.

If you can't provide this, please invest only your own money. You can take out a loan if necessary. Making 365% APR, you should be able to payback any loan pretty quickly and should have no further need of anyone else's money.

Someone has to do it.

It's a way to reduce the chances that we have to do this again, and again, and again. The goal is to learn the maximum from this incident that it is possible to learn. And the key thing to learn is that if something looks exactly like a Ponzi, it's almost certainly a Ponzi.

There is risk in the volatility of bitcoin's value and the possibility that bitcoins will become all but worthless overnight and never recover. We can disagree over just how much risk there is, but there's no question it's there. This puts a bit of a drag on everything we do with bitcoins. Fortunately, there's so much friction in the traditional financial system that this doesn't actually hurt bitcoins very much. But we do need better ways to hedge these risks. There are definitely ways today that don't require paying huge fees to get no leverage. But they could be a lot better and that would help a lot.

Denominating debts in bitcoin makes the debtor short bitcoins and the borrower long bitcoins. Debts could be a sensible way to speculate on bitcoins if the market wasn't so messed up by fraud. Ironically, it would probably actually help bitcoins if the borrowing market were heavily regulated. (Of course, it's unimaginable that you could get beneficial regulation in the borrowing market without also having horribly harmful regulation in every other aspect. So I'm not suggesting that's a workable solution.)

Yeah. 1%/week is around 67% APR. 1.5%/week is around 117% APR.

The main problem is that investors have no way to assess risk. Funds compete based on the reward, which creates a huge incentive to increase risk.

Fundamentally, it's this simple: If the fund operator is not making decent money, there's no good explanation for why they'd go to all this trouble and risk other than that it's a scam. If the fund operator is making decent money and not exposing their investors to extreme risk, the first thing they'd do with the money they're making, if they're not an idiot, is pay down all their ultra-high-interest debt.

Do you know a system that prevents this? I mean, other than "if you have what we want, even if you justly acquired it, we'll take it from you".

It is extremely difficult to build a monopoly without using force. If you used force to get it, nobody disputes that others can take it away from you by force. If you somehow do manage to build it without force, it's going to be very temporary. And the more you leverage it, the more incentive others have to find some resource that replaces it.

In any event, who cares? I'd gladly trade the remote possibility of some temporary blackmail for living under those conditions permanently where the government has an eternal monopoly on a long list of things.

You live in an interesting fantasy world. I'd love to hear your explanation for why Pirate was making 100% payouts, including exorbitant interest rates, to everyone lucky enough to request a payout and then suddenly stopped paying out any funds at all without making any disclosure of the total assets and obligations the funds had. You also might want to read 15 USC 45(a)(1) and 11 USC 548(a)(1)(A).

Yes, it was quite clear in that case that they didn't actually need investment money. They were basically just taking it to see if it worked. And the high interest rate loans were cut off very quickly.

The amount of money involved was very small. There's nothing wrong with shorting or hedging against volatile exchange rates. What's idiotic is paying 100% APR to do it with zero leverage.

I have no objection to you doing it with your own money. And every explanation I've heard for why other people's money is needed fails the giggle test.

There's no need to answer him. I think pretty much everyone is ignoring him and he appears intent on deliberately sabotaging threads. He is the very first user I have ever ignored on this forum, or any forum as far as I can recall.

Survival is not assured. There is no known system that can ensure survival. If a person cannot produce enough to ensure their own survival, then the only choice is for them to rely on the charity of others. The only question is whether such charity will be voluntary or coerced.

Okay, then there's no limit to that kind of power. But that kind of power is not harmful because pretty much the only way you can acquire it is by giving others what they most want. That's what will be compensated with wealth.

If a private key is greater than N, it's equivalent to that same key minus N and will generate the same corresponding public key and bitcoin address. Most tools allow them for input and never generate them on output.

So you're saying that someone with the investment genius to consistently land low-risk, ultra-high-interest Bitcoin loans would also pay an APR over 100% just to short Bitcoins?! Seriously?!

If someone else has something that you want, there are only two ways you can get it from him. You can offer him something in exchange for it or you can take it by force. You seem to think these things need to balance each other out. However, I would say it's preferable to eliminate the latter leaving only the former.

If an AnCap society is working correctly, there really isn't any "power". Of course you can trade material wealth for other material wealth you may desire and you can trade your labor for wealth. But everything else we would hope would be cancelled out -- unjust force met with just retaliation with as little net effect as possible.