Perhaps he did bitcoin a favour by making this blow up faster. Either way, Theymos clearly stated he assumed it to be a ponzi, and most importantly, he gambled with his own money.

I can even quote, go figure:


And stop hiding behind Theymos.

Am i reading this right? SO now you say you knew it was a ponzi all along? Woha, some people are going to have a field day digging up quotes from you Im sure.


No Goat, In fact I did exactly what Theymos did. But there is a difference between saying something is almost certainly a ponzi yet gambling some of  your own money on being able to extract your coins in time, as compared to what  you did. IF nothing else, one is a criminal offence in most places, the other isnt.

For the record, by "on the take" I mean goat profited from this scheme (at zero risk), as did all other PPT passthrough providers. There might have been incentives beyond that, but we dont know that.

As for there being 2 possibilities, there is a third, unlikely as it may seem; the OP is written with the explicit assumption it was a ponzi/scam. THis seems rather likely, but is not certain yet.

Simple logic isnt slander goat. You were the one claiming not to have been fooled, so you havent changed your mind. There are no other options than either you still believe in Pirates ability to pay back, or you never did.
As for this respect thing; please, you are the only one crying about it. Grow up.

At least I can read, which is apparently more than you can. Lets try again, shall we?
You deny being fooled by Pirate, correct?
Hence either you are still convinced he will pay out, or you never believed it. Which is it? Its a simple question goat, you cant have it three ways.

Goat you do your nickname dishonour.
reread what I wrote and then respond.

Doesnt matter. Can you perhaps make 10% commission on some deals? Sure. Could it make sense to borrow bitcoins to allow you to conduct such business and get started? Sure. But it you are making such windfall profits trading btc, you will not keep lending more and more while compounding your costs,  instead as your own capital grows you will pay back your loans and keep your profits. So this is not a reasonable explanation of what pirate did. If he could make 100s of 1000s btc profits for his investors, he could make them for himself and he wouldnt need anyone to lend him a bloody thing.

If you can make 10% per week, why are you posting here instead of sipping cocktails on your yacht?

Even if you had a brain, I cant look in to yours. The issue here is not if I am sure, a more interesting question is if you are since you have been on the take and convinced countless people to deposit. So are you saying you scammed them knowingly or that you still stand behind pirate?

If you werent fooled, then either you are still convinced pirate will pay out in full, or you are saying that you knew all along. Which is it?

Pirate's scheme from the getgo had all the hallmarks of a typical ponzi.  Without more information than what was and is known publicly, anyone who can think should and would have assumed it to be a ponzi.

The only reason I gave this scheme any credibility whatsoever was the fact that a lot of generally intelligent and (apparently at least ) even honest long timers on this forum gave it not only the benefit of the doubt, but full credibility. Many of them did know more than I did, because they met Pirate, because some at least claimed to know and understand his business model.  People who I assume to be smart enough to recognize a ponzi when staring at one this obvious. If they were totally convinced it wasn't one, what was it they knew that I did not?

This is still true today, perhaps even more so than 6 months ago. IF 6 months ago, I was 95% sure  it was a ponzi, right now, ironically,  I am *less * sure . Why ? Because these same, generally intelligent people  dont seem to be thrown off one bit, despite the fact that it looks like a ponzi now more than anything ever could.  Because I dont believe Matthew, crazy as he may be, is actually stupid enough or can even afford to bet $1M on something he wouldnt be sure off or doesnt  understand himself.  Because none of those big Pirate backers are getting out their pitchforks. In fact most of them are still tacitly supporting him.

There are not so many explications for this. Either it is not a ponzi and somehow Pirate will pay up, crazy as that may sound to anyone who has no more information than I have.

Or if it is a ponzi, then the vast majority of pirate backers were given an incentive to pretend to believe him. I might believe Goat is stupid enough to be fooled  by pirate, but I will not believe that from most of the others. IOW, if this unfolds like it appears it will,  they would be knowing accomplices.  And very effective ones at that.

It was already pointed out here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101958.msg1135291#msg1135291

You could possibly run it over a 14.4k baud modem. Mining uses almost no bandwidth.

Of course its theoretical, but he could spend the same coin 500K times and technically have "paid everyone back".
Anyway, this whole 51% thing is side tracking from the real topic. I just wanted to point out today is no different from 2 weeks ago, and if you believe pirate is for real, denoting his debt in dollars is possibly misleading.

No, he would only need to generate 51% of all blocks to be able to repay all his debt with 1BTC. 51% with asics is fairly trivial right now.

Well, I disagree. Id rather bank 100K BTC perfectly legally than be on the run from the law for the rest of my life with 5x as much.

Caught? What would be illegal about it?


Fair enough, but if he sold or is about to sell the actual coins he received, its still a tangible (pun intended) sum of money.


He could own 10 million BTC tomorrow if he has a longer blockchain. They may not be worth a lot of dollars but it would let hem repay his debt as promised.


disclaimer: Im not seriously arguing pirate is doing a 51% attack, but I just want to show how it could theoretically fit what we know.

You can do an asic design for considerably less than 500K btc and all it takes is 10 year old cmos technology. No aliens needed.

Id does make a very important implicit assumption; that BTC value will remain more or less stable. If Prirate's big secret is that he hacked sha256 or has been mining a forked chain on asics for half a year, that assumption might be very wrong.