But, but, but... if he had the resources to pull off a 51% attack... wouldn't he already be rich and powerful and not need to pull a ponzi scheme?
IM not saying its a 51% attack, but if it were, when would be the best time to cash in? WHen BTC value and market depth peaks, and you can sell soon to be worthless coins for as much as possible hard dollars. So he could sell his 500K coins now, then publish his alternate chain, and pay back as much BTC interest as he wants. |
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But Pirate is still within his announced 1-2 weeks window, still hasnt lost his 5000 BTC bet...
True, but he loses BTC5000 EVERY DAY due to interest. I know. But if you believed he had a mystery money making machine that allowed him to generate such profits, there is no reason to assume that machine no longer works today. He still has the coins. Its no different than 2 weeks ago. Secondly, the only way I can conceive pirate can pay back his BTC debt is if he has some way to debase BTC value tremendously. And I dont mean by selling his coins, because that wont help him, but something akin to a 51% attack that he has been working on for months. I dont think thats whats going on, but if its something that has a similar effect, those 5K btc per month dont mean a thing to him. |
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Its not looking worse than 2 weeks ago, in fact, if anything prospects of pirate actually somehow paying out imo look slightly better than they did two weeks ago. But then I have to say, I always assumed it was a ponzi, so better doesnt mean very good  . What has changed recently? Primarily the perception that this is indeed a ponzi by a lot of people who thought otherwise until now, debasing the value of pirate debt and allowing pirate believers to snap it up at a huge discount. That is all that has really changed. The mathematical near impossibility of producing 7% per week ROI is not different from last month. But Pirate is still within his announced 1-2 weeks window, still hasnt lost his 5000 BTC bet, is still running and paying out gpumax.. He and his believers have every interest in making you believe he wont pay. I already assumed that 6 months ago, so he isnt changing my mind, but if you thought Pirate was the real deal 2 weeks ago, I suggest you keep thinking that for another week, because odds have not changed. When his 2 week deadline has passed and he lost his 5000 BTC bet and Matthew (his backer) lost his 10000 BTC bet, then Id say the odds are changing. |
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I think I got this one figured out. You are investing the funds in fixed MH mining bonds! |
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The issue isnt Pirate bailing with the money. The issue is that the money never existed and everyone is sitting around waiting to be paid out funds thats are not there!
Precisely! There never was 500k BTC in an actual wallet somewhere. There were promises, ledgers, calculations and all other forms of ideas, but not half a million bitcoins. This close enough for you? https://blockchain.info/address/1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM |
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Might work if pirate only owed 50% interest on the sums he received. Thats the thing with exponential functions though, at 7% week, Pirate's debt doubles every ~2 months. This ponzi has been running far longer than that, on his first deposits, he would owe like 10x the principal by now.
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My only claim is I've thought of a viable use than can pay good returns
And its a use that hasnt been proposed, debated and debunked a few 100 times already? That list is pretty long, you know. Now Im quite willing to believe there could be things I havent thought of (even though I have thought about it for more than 15 minutes ), but it strikes me as unlikely that apparently no else would have in these 9 months of BST and 6 or whatever months gpumax has been operating, even though both are among the most highly contentious and most debated topics. |
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Dont be fooled. The pirate clan is just trying to further debase the value of pirate debt by pretending to be panicking; Whether or not they should be panicking , we shall probably see next week when Vandroiys bet reaches its deadline, but Goat isnt selling.
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Its called variation: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/If you see how much variation there is in the total network's block finding "luck", perhaps you will realize how futile it is to try different pools for a few days that generally have less than 10% of the total networks hashrate. Organofconti has done extensive statistical analysis of some major pools over many months and his conclusions are not always conclusive because there isnt always enough data. |
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All it takes is 376,918 Btc to push price down to $1.25.
Below $1 is just panic.
What if Pirateat40 does just that.
What if that is in his interest to do so?
Maybe he is working on a competitor to Bitcoin ie another micropayment system or payment company.
That would mean he would get plenty of dollars. Now he can buy all those cheap < $1 Bitcoins.
No he cant. Just like selling 400K bitcoins would crash the price, buying back >400K coins will cause a price jump like we've never seen. |
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And as I said in speculation. All it takes to bring value down to $1.25 is 370,000 Btc. In fact probably even way less as people panic on the way down.
Then buy lots of cheap coins at <$1 pay back the Bitcoins, profit and laugh.
It doesnt work like that. You can crash the price by selling that many coins, but you cant buy back even more coins later without the price shooting up again, way above the point you sold yours. |
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Ive always assumed it to be a ponzi, but if anything, right now Im more inclined to believe pirate will somehow pay out than I was 2 weeks ago.
Why? Matthew might have ahmmm.. issues, but despite what he says, I dont believe he would really risk $100,000 on betting something that appears so unlikely, unless he knows something that we dont.
Bitlane is owed a fair chunk of money by pirate, but yesterday I saw he wanted to buy more debt (presumably, pirate debt). Is he nuts, or does he too now know something we dont?
GPUmax is still running and paying out every day.
Lots of pirate backers have a large financial interest in everyone else assuming pirate will default, because it allows them to buy up pirate debt at a discount. Pirate might even be buying up his own debt at a discount through these proxies. So the fact he hasnt yet paid out, IMO says nothing.
What i do fear is that if pirate does pay up, it will be in very cheap coins, because I dont believe he could have made the profits that he promised, but perhaps he found a way to manipulate the value of btc that would allow him to pay out such sums in devalued coins. How? I have no idea, but to take an extreme example; assume he has been using his coins to fund some asic farm that has been mining a forked blockchain for a few months now, a chain now longer than the current blockchain. All he has to do is publish it and presto, he can pay out any amount of coins he wants. Im not saying I think thats whats happening, but something along those lines.
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Yes it's possible just holding btc could be more profitable(and it has been over the last few months), but it's also more risky because if the price falls by 50% your wealth falls by 50% where as holding mining bonds you would be better protected in such a situation. Basically the reason you think mining bonds are turds is because you could put your wealth into something riskier and potentially profit even more - well duh but you're forgetting you could also lose a lot more if things go south too.
The issue with those bonds is that they will lose value even if BTC price goes up. |
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I think they look pretty good for drafts too. Maybe they were not in the style you were looking for, but clearly a considerable amount of time was spent on making these. Seems only fair he gets compensated for that.
Meanwhile Ill remember tecshare if I ever need some artwork done.
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Pirate40 has defaulted to Bitlane.
Was promised payment yesterday
That default is a late payment, not a lack of payment, as bitlane will eventually get his money back (not at the promised time, but eventually). This thread seems to be for lack of payment. Correct. Only confirmed defaults (lender disappearing) is added here. If the criterion is "scammer", then whether or not Pirate belongs on this list remains to be seen, but he did default: In finance, default occurs when a debtor has not met his or her legal obligations according to the debt contract, e.g. has not made a scheduled payment, or has violated a loan covenant (condition) of the debt contracthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_%28finance%29Even if he repays Bitlane at some point, he still defaulted. Just sayin. |
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you did much more better for many weeks in the past but now it seems your luck is over. so my question was easy what did you change on your setup? I ask you what "DC" is and no answer from you. something changed no matter if it is at your side or in the bitcoin network. don't call me new to bitcoin mining, I can count one and one together. you had obviously problems this week and I ask for the reason of that.
Tycho probably has to remain more diplomatic than me, so allow me to say this in his place: either you are indeed very new to mining, or frankly, you are an idiot. A pool that is having issues will have trouble producing getworks and accepting shares. So you can see miners that wont connect, dropping hashrate, high % stale shares etc. Deepbit is not immune from such problems, but its rare, and its not happening now. But whether or not those submitted valid shares produce blocks or not is only dependant on one single thing: LUCK. There isnt a bloody thing a poolop can do to improve luck (yes, im ignoring orphans and stale blocks). |
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Rat.2, you may want to look in to mining litecoins. It will also earn you next to nothing, but at least a bit more than mining bitcoins. CPU's are utterly useless now for mining bitcoins, and in a few months if specialized hardware enters the market, so will GPUs. You missed the boat by ~2 years Im afraid.
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Pool is up and running again.
I want to apologize that it was down for so long. I was on a guided tour of Batterie Dietl, german bunkers and coastal guns from WWII. I had only a cellphone and was far from my laptop. Perhaps stupid, but the pool was running smoothly and I thought it would be ok for a couple hours. Took a while before I was back to the laptop and could fix things.
Backup pools is still not implemented in BitMinter client, which of course makes downtime much worse. It is one of the top development priorities now, below supporting ASIC mining speeds better.
Not sure what caused the problem yet. But it may be the bug in cgminer 2.5 and below that we had problems with earlier. If you use cgminer please use the latest (2.6+) version. I am changing the server software to better handle a client bombarding it, but I haven't finished this work yet.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Edit: Yes, rollntime is implemented, but turned off for all miners except bitminter client and diablominer. I'll turn it on for all miners as soon as I have implemented some defenses against old cgminer versions that can suddenly bombard the server with thousands of getwork requests.
Doc, how hard is it to restart the backend? If its just a matter of ssh-ing in to the server and restarting the db or something, maybe you should consider making a "killswitch" and giving one or two trusted users access to it. They may not even need full ssh access, just a trigger. It will not resolve all possible problems of course, but someone else being able to restart the backend could be enough to help you sleep a bit more easily and not get stressed out just because you leave your laptop for a few hours. |
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I bought a few bluetooth sticks from UnderGod (as well as 2 SSDs which I traded for a videocard). I just received all the goods, in working order, fast, well packaged, good communication.
+1 from me
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