The second option: He's controlling the markets and earning super-high profits on market movements, since he can force others' hands by having larger volume than anyone else. Firstly, there's absolutely no evidence that this is happening and extensive evidence to the contrary.
I guess you missed the day pirate was in IRC and the market was just so happening to do exactly what he would say would happen about a minute after he said it was going to do something. |
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which day of the week does he pay out the interest? just for me to know when to look for a default...
if you take 500k bitcoin at a 6% interest per week that would make 10M bitcoin in only one year - more than in existence...
you should read the op. If you're too lazy to do even that, you're not going to be much use determining if it is a ponzi or not. |
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So, your argument boils down to "because Bitcoin". I'm afraid that you'll have to back that statement up then. What is special about Bitcoin that allows Pirate to provide such large returns at this scale?
Im only going to answer this part. Thats exactly why he isnt sharing, I have had some of my very own short term legit lucrative ideas that I never revealed which later on got caught up by other people. You are effectively requesting what he is doing to make money, surely you cant be this naive to think that if its all legit and not a ponzi like Lord Micon and co. wants it to be then not revealing the actual business is +EV for pirate ? I agree with this. I gave you a lead with the futures thing, someone said it was a 0 sum gain, (which technically, any business is.. you can't just make new money, only the fed does that) and that was countered explaining how its not and then basically people forgot about it. If you really want to know, then talk to some economists and/or traders and work through the possibilities. Ignore most of the people here for that, because they're just the internet and have too much riding on being "right" vs being accurate. |
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i wonder if many of the "recipients" claiming interest received actually are recipients, or just shills.
Well I dont think there is enough tinfoil to build a hat for that conspiracy notion. Do you really think that every single person posting on this forum who invested something in BTCST is a shill, please find just one post where someone who invested claims they havnt received interest etc etc etc. Given the rate of whinging on the GPUMax thread about not getting _work_, I would imagine that there would be a hue and cry if people didn't get their payments. or complaining about being on the waiting list too long.. |
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7%... now 5% Was the 7% tier eliminated completely, or did Pirate just raise the eligibility threshold? Gone completely AFAIK |
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For one thing, there's no way for pass-through bonds to handle people who want to reinvest other than asking Pirate to send out interest payments and then redepositing any re-investments at a later date.
That's just wrong and you aren't thinking outside the box. |
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Investing in stocks or shares is one thing. A startup company is telling you "give me money so our business may succeed and we'll all earn good money". You make the decision to invest or not invest based on your judgment whether the expected returns on the investment is positive in the light of the viability of the business model, the state of the market, etc. And now for a reasonable answer: When I started loaning coins to pirate, it was much smaller, with only a handful of people. He never promised this would continue forever. Over time, its grown but pirate's not done anything contrary to what he originally said and given me any real cause to not trust him. Now, there's a bunch of people coming into this late in the game, claiming to have insight that others just can't see because they're "idiots". Even if it was gambling, that's my right and often times, venture capital is gambling, even with the best of knowledge. To call me an idiot because I partake is well within your right, but it doesn't make you correct. |
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Lending money to someone who promises to pay 3000% interest to everyone and doesn't disclose their business model is just stupid. If you've done that you're an idiot. Even if everyone was completely honest and no fraud existed in the universe, that kind of interest rate amounts to gambling. Unfortunately for you, fraud does exist. 3000% interest rate is fraud.
(Since BTC has gained in value against everything, the real interest rate is actually much higher than 3000%)
Who's the bigger idiot: the one doing as you say or the one trolling the people who you claim to be idiots? herpderp. |
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OK, so if I'm understanding this correctly, if someone chooses to have their interest paid out and manually reinvests it by sending them back to their deposit address that'd put them over the 5% limit pretty quickly and they wouldn't get the bonus, but if they automatically reinvest the same amount of interest they can increase their account balance by far more than the 5% limit each month. That's quite interesting - it effectively gives an incentive for people who want to reinvest to keep the interest money within the scheme, which means that if it is a ponzi it can keep going for longer because pirateat40 no longer needs to keep as many cold hard bitcoins around for the weekly interest payments. (Plus, presumably if they then decide to manually withdraw a substantial portion of the interest they'd be penalized fot that too.)
So if I read what you just said correctly, you're talking about an instance where someone receives their paid out interest, deposit it back in, and then withdraw it again. Of course he's gonna penalize that! You're wasting everyone's time with all of this in and out. He's borrowing coins for the sake of using them, not just to pay you interest. If he's got to keep a huge slush fund that can't be used for business purposes, but still has to pay interest on that slush, its effectively cutting into his margins. BTCST doesn't appear to be setup to be your bitcoin checking account. It was designed to be a savings account of sorts. Its called Bitcoin Savings and Trust, not mybitcoin wallet. Its the same premise with savings accounts at a US Bank. They limit the number of withdrawals you can do per month in your savings account, because if you need a lot of transaction volume, it should be a checking account. |
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People seem to be against HU (according to the polls)
But nobody's willing to say why; makes me wonder if it's just the trolls who want Eligius dead. Shame on you for saying "trolls" and "wanting eligius dead" in the same breath as you quoted me. 1) I voted a "support" option for the eligius-RA system (effectively, a new system which sounds very much like wizkid's proposal which was sought-after by myself, and several other voters) 2) double shame on you, because I already asked plenty of questions on IRC, and more than one person in this thread has expressed specific concerns. 3) here, have some reasons that I myself don't like Eligius-HU one bit. For starters, Eligius-HU is largely undocumented, and not explained well in the OP. What is the size of a share anyway? How many hashes is that? I ask because the entire bitcoin network is usually between 7k and 8k blocks per month, of which, eligius only finds 100 or so... how does this arbitrary value of "8x difficulty" fit in for our rate if we suddenly mine more or less percentage of the bitcoin network's blocks? The current "second proposal" doesn't really explain the math which will determine the size of the window over which each miner's recent shares are counted for the purpose of payouts. Also, my original paranoid questions which I suspect others may have had similar concerns about not getting paid for the previously submitted shares under the Eligius-RA PPS system. This last concern ties in with my first new question -- Eligius-HU system is going to arbitrarily change the size of a share to be dynamic based on hash-rate, so that nobody's math will be able to know what is going on with the new algorithm. tl;dr Basically, Luke-Jr, you did a terrible job explaining things and then wonder why there's a negative response. |
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Hey, you Pirate supporters, could you point me to ONE case in history where someone has paid consistently several thousand percent REAL interest rate for an unlimited number of debtors over extended time where the nature of the business was not disclosed to investors that didn't turn out to be a scam.
The extended time you speak of is right at a year and its in a brand new/emerging technology. Look at any brand new, rapidly growing company and their rates will be off the charts and of course if you extrapolate those rates to infinite they look ridiculous. That's part of the point that the 'pirate supporters' are trying to make.. a high interest rate isn't a clear indicator all by itself. |
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Also, increases in BTC value probably hurt pirate, as when he trades between BTC and USD, he will at some times hold some USD, but he has to pay interest in 100% BTC. Pirate himself has claimed that sharp increases in the BTC/USD price could hurt his business.
Are you sick? you're actually acknowledging something pirate said makes sense? You better go see the doctor or else Micon might label you a participant in the ponzi. |
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For those of us who aren't experts in the futures trading market, could you please explain how your theory might work? I am willing to be open-minded about this, so I'm all ears.
Also, we can easily check the BTC side of MtGox without them even assisting us, so the comparison isn't even close to valid. Because the BTC used by Pirate can move back and forth between USD and BTC, we cannot check those numbers without his assistance.
With Gox, I simply was trying to illustrate that coins can change hands without every actually being published in a public record. To assert that the blockchain is the end all, be all, to prove a transaction.. well, its just wrong. Now on to futures: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_contract, "In finance, a futures contract is a standardized contract between two parties to buy or sell a specified asset of standardized quantity and quality for a price agreed today (the futures price or strike price) with delivery and payment occurring at a specified future date, the delivery date." Are you familiar with shorting a stock or buying a stock on margin? |
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A lack of evidence is evidence of nothing, so, you have nothing but baseless claims, again please come up with something that isn't 1) "You don't know therefore ponzi" or 2) "7% therefore ponzi", there were some people a while ago trying to prove that pirate never moved any of the coins, I'm guessing they failed at that... Surely with all of your investigations and 36 pages of discussion you have SOMETHING right?
"ponzi ponzi ponzi" |
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What about the claim of "there is no evidence that your business has the required income to pay its incredible interest bill without eroding principle balances"?
Surely it's fairly easy in a currency in which all transactions are on public record in the blockchain to show that you're doing a substantial amount of business?
I mean, given the weekly interest bill, you'd expect BTCST to be doing at least 150k BTC per week in trades even if they were dealing in something with a very high profit margin. It shouldn't be difficult to show.
Unless of course they are futures contracts and don't actually require the coins to move. How about you ask mtgox to show all of their btc transfers in the block chain... oh wait, you can't because some of it is internal/on paper. |
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People seem to be against HU (according to the polls)
But nobody's willing to say why; makes me wonder if it's just the trolls who want Eligius dead. Or people just don't want to gamble on an untested payment strategy? PPLNS is untested? Really? Now SMPPS, when we originally switched to it, THAT was untested. How many pools use PPLNS as you have proposed, using the values you've proposed? |
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People seem to be against HU (according to the polls)
But nobody's willing to say why; makes me wonder if it's just the trolls who want Eligius dead. Or people just don't want to gamble on an untested payment strategy? |
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Wouldn't it just be easier for people to show they're not scammers?
Not when the people that need to be convinced don't really want to be convinced. In addition, sometimes the best way to prove you aren't a scam is to keep doing business and paying everyone as agreed. |
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I didn't realise this topic was about poker...
Its a topic about a guy claiming a bunch of other people are scammers. Its only fair to discuss the person doing the finger pointing. |
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