A question to all the pirate pass-through operators:

If you're so confident in pirate's investment scheme, why don't you sell insured bonds?
There seems to be a great market for insured pirate bonds paying around 2-3%, and if you let the 4-5% you collected each week compound you'd be in profit by Halloween.

I mean, if you can make an extra 4-5% on the entire sum of all your deposits every week, at absolutely no effort, why aren't you doing it?
The rewards are massive, so if the risk/reward ratio isn't there for you then you clearly perceive an absolutely astronomical default risk 

Alternatively, you could sell pirate bonds paying 2-3% interest compounding over say 4 weeks where just the principal is insured - that cuts your exposure by about 20% and you still make a profit of about 15-25% on your entire fund every single month.

If we're extremely likely to get all invested funds back then why not? 

At least by then his rates will have gone down or he'd have liabilities in excess of all the bitcoins that will ever be in circulation, and from where I'm sitting from that wouldn't be very sustainable 

Bet people would still "invest" in pass-throughs though 

Me personally? I just regret not starting something like this myself - right now he's totally free to cut and run with over a million dollars 

http://whois.domaintools.com/dailycheckout.com

http://www.dailycheckout.com/faq.asp?#100003
^you were looking for Roy Ditmas, you could do worse than call this number 

15 acres may be a little small for wheat, but grow pot and you'll be in business 

Now if only there was a way to short these 

So Bitcoinmax has exposure equal to >100k BTC?
Hmmm...

Hey Micon, surely this interests you:

What could possibly go wrong?  

Suggesting that they probably don't have cold storage in place - sounds an awful lot like the maximum amount that can be withdrawn is everything on the exchange.

Are people still getting BTC out?
Does anyone there even still have any?  

In the spirit of bidding based on your actual chances of seeing that money again, I bid 10 satoshis.
That's right, I've made this into a reverse auction.

There's been some movement on some of the big addresses I pointed out here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94675.msg1065019#msg1065019

One of them I suspect is just a passthrough as it makes a lot of small payments, but there's large amounts still moving in and out of the bigger ones too.

I really do wish you the best of luck but surely the fact that I'm more interested in the assets you're buying as insurance than the assets that make up the yield-paying bond tells you something 
That is, with Pirate's current level of deposits and assuming trust account interest stays where it is Pirate's liabilities will increase by about 1 million BTC in the time taken for you to break even.

Best of luck 

Then why aren't YOU doing it?
Someone drops a business opportunity in your lap that pays >3000% APR and you're NOT already a competitor?

Any chance you can give us a breakdown (even in % terms) of where the insurance funds will be kept?

Let's look at a scenario in which pirate defaults in just 4 weeks for simple maths:

You put 200 BTC in here - you end up with 220.762 BTC, you're +20.762

You put 100 BTC with pirate, and 100 BTC locked away, paying half your interest into the cold storage coins each week to keep your insured amount level - each amount goes up to 114.752 BTC, so you had 229, but you just lost half, so you're -85.25.

With a bit of maths, we can see that it'd take 71 weeks for your pirate funds to "catch up" so that you'd be better off after a default with your method.

Straightforward enough?

Is there some way to guarantee payment in the event of a default? Will coins be kept in escrow, do you have other assets that would fund it or what?

I'm interested, but I need to be confident that the insurer can cough up >5000BTC at short notice in the event of a BTCST default.

From my perspective here, what you're offering is essentially a weekly CDS at a rate of 4.5% per week (not unreasonable given the risks involved). Would you consider selling CDS outright? (that is, say, I pay you 4.5BTC/week and in return you guarantee payment of 100BTC if pirate defaults). I'm not sure GLBSE has a way to offer that but I'm sure there would be interest.


But yeah, I'll buy some if you can make me confident that the insurance can and will be honoured in a timely manner in the event of default 

The problem as I see it is this:

People on here complain about fractional-reserve banking - well how many in the "Lending" thread are doing just that?

*Full Disclosure: I have a very small account with Patrick Harnett, whom I know has 10K exposure or so to BTCST, but to my knowledge (and as Patrick has stated) investors funds are not directly exposed to BTCST*

It seems that many of the companies on the forum hold undisclosed exposure to various lenders, some of whom may be "robbing peter to pay paul" but at the very least they're loaning this out to others who spend it in the bitcoin economy, these funds then often finding their way back to other investment funds and increasing their liability.

The problem with all fractional reserve systems with fixed interest-rate savings, whether the major banking system or in a small economy like this one, is that a major default (Lehman triggered it in '08) could bring the whole system crashing down and leave depositors with either nothing or massive haircuts on the wealth they thought they had.

We end up with a situation here whereby debt is effectively being made into a form of currency in BTC terms, so if things continue as they are we could easily end up with a situation in which over 21M BTC is owed between various people in the BTC economy.

Whilst I think this is the way it's going to end up going regardless, I do find it alarming that people are slowly starting to invest in debt with ever-increasing leverage, particularly to completely unknown borrowers (and often on a massive scale - BTCST has been able to take in millions of dollars and nobody has enough info to track the guy down if he left).

What's startling is the sheer size of the operation.
We're talking >200K BTC just in various pass-throughs and "trust accounts" before we even start talking about people's own BTCST accounts (published or otherwise).

Sweet.
Thankyou for going some way towards answering my question rather than attacking me for practising due diligence 
Well that's something I guess.

Truth is, I'd love to get rates of >5% weekly on my coins, but I have a long-standing policy that if I'm going to give someone serious cash (Let's say, more than a week's pay) then I need enough information that I can either sue them if it all goes wrong or head over to their house with a cricket bat 

It's a very simple question:

"Has anyone who isn't affiliated with a pirate pass-through of some sort come forward and said that they met him in Vegas?"

Right now I'm forced to assume that the answer is no.

Also this.
At the end of the day, this guy is handling millions of dollars of other people's money.
I don't see why there should be an issue with a little transparency if everything's on the level.

I was looking at it more along the lines of "Did he show his face to anyone who isn't directly involved and profiting from the spread of his scheme?"