I had replied to Salty in my other thread, however it seems that his response was regarding the placement of my thread, so I have replied to him here.
Salty -
I guess if we are trying to get rid of the philosophy of ponzis, and get straight to the question, does Dooglus owe anyone money?
That depends on the jurisdiction of a court in which litigation is potentially taken against dooglus, as well as the tort laws in such jurisdiction, however I would err on the side of "
yes".
The allegation in the OP is that dooglus (helped) create a product that was designed to ultimately steal from others. This means that anytime any ponzi operator had previously used his script to steal money from others, that he would likely be considered to be an accomplice to such theft. According to
this, there is no distinction between an accomplice and the person who actually commits the tort, although it is likely that the accomplice would not be liable for 100% of the damages.
A Gun Manufacturer can
potentially (Page 2, last paragraph), be held liable if they
knowingly sell a gun to someone they know will subsequently use said gun to commit a crime of violence (or a drug trafficking crime).
A bartender can be potentially held liable if s/he knowingly (or should have known) servers a drink to a drunk person, and said drunk person subsequently kills someone while driving while still drunk.
Both of the above examples are very similar to dooglus creating a product whose only potential use is to eventually scam people.
I moved it to Reputation anyway, because reviewing it all again, it looks like a real longshot to be calling Dooglus a scammer by possible involvement with a non specific thing. It isn't unreasonable for people to question Dooglus' person or reputation for something like this I suppose. Not that moderators are here to arbitrate scam reports, but unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't really look like this is a scam report, rather a warning that in your opinion Dooglus has been involved in a moral gray area. I get what you are trying to say by association, but a lot of this is opinion. First on the topic of ponzis, some people think they are a scam, others do not. Not that my personal opinion matters here, but I'm using my opinion as an example. Ponzi's are not a scam by default, just because the people playing the game end up losing in the end, that doesn't mean that there isn't a calculated risk that players can take with the hope to make money. In my opinion, ponzis with express written rules (like all thousand ponzis I've seen pop up) are not scams in themselves, nor when they close down, as long as they do so in a way that abides by what they have stated to the public. I don't think of ponzis any differently than dice sites.
I think you may have a
ponzi game confused with a
ponzi. A ponzi game is a game in which it is disclosed that after a certain point additional funds will not be paid out to players based on some specific trigger (the operator would also likely take some fee in exchange for running said game, out of the money that would be paid out to the players -- also disclosed). A ponzi game is very similar to a ponzi in that the "winners" are paid with money from the later participants of the game.
A ponzi (scheme) on the other hand is something that promises unrealistic returns to investors while claiming little risk to investors (
source). A ponzi (scheme) will use money from later "investors" to repay earlier "investors", and in my experience here, the ponzi schemes in bitcointalk often will simply run away with investor's money once they are in possession of a certain threshold of "investor's" money.
The ELI5 explanation between a ponzi scheme and a ponzi game is that a game is honest while a scheme is dishonest. In my experience, when most people are discussing a "ponzi" throughout bitcointalk, they are most often referring to (or describing) a ponzi scheme. However most people will participate in ponzi schemes as if they are a ponzi game, and will acknowledge that the ponzi scheme will eventually collapse.
I did point out that the ponzi that dooglus was helping was dishonest because it was claiming that any investment would be risk free regardless of if additional people sent money ("invested") to the ponzi, and that everyone would end up receiving 125% of their initial investment, which is obviously not true. That said, assuming that the ponzis that used Dooglus' source were in fact scams I'm still not really convinced that he would be liable by association. Not only was his association to fix bugs, but he's not really directly liable. If godaddy makes someone a website and they do something illicit with it, godaddy isn't at fault. To modify your gun manufacturer comparison, in this example Dooglus isn't the guy who manufactured the gun, hes the guy who fixed the crooked barrel that the manufacturer produced.
I am not claiming that dooglus is a scammer because he is associated with ponzis, I am saying that I believe him to be a scammer because he is an accomplice to (ponzi) scams (/schemes). An associate is someone who is connected to someone else. An accomplice to a crime is someone who helped another person commit a crime.
You are associated with theymos because you are a moderator of the forum. If, theymos were to hypothetically run away with all of the forum's money tomorrow (I believe the forum's money is actually theymos's property, but that is besides the point, and I hope you can still understand what I am trying to say), then you would not be at fault simply because you are a moderator of the forum -- you being a moderator would have nothing to do with theymos running away with the money. If, however on the other hand, you were to give theymos a great cover story that would allow him to get away "clean" with the money then you would be an accomplice to the theft because you helped theymos steal the money.
Speaking to your specific points, if godaddy were to have prior knowledge that the operator of a website they were in the process of creating was planning on doing something illicit then they would probably be held liable if such information were to be revealed. Regarding the gun manufacturer example, what dooglus did is similar to a gun manufacturer fixing the barrel of a gun, and then giving said gun to someone who they knew was planning on using said gun to commit a violent crime, and the gun manufacturer had such knowledge both when they agreed to fix the gun and when they actually shipped the gun back to the gun owner.
Going back to your above point, yes I would agree that it is
possible that a ponzi could "wind down" (close) in an "orderly" fashion, however I am not aware of any ponzis that have actually done this. (being that you are not very active in the ponzi/investor games section, I would find it unlikely that you have any examples of a ponzi closing down in an orderly fashion, and I am not aware of any either; all of the ponzis that I am aware of either ran away with player's money or never received any money in the first place). It is also possible that
this person is going to repay any money that he is lent, however realistically speaking that will simply not happen. The pattern of those that operate any kind of ponzi here has always ended with the operator running away with money that does not belong to them. IIRC, there was one ponzi operator that operated "honestly" for a while early last year, however he was able to quickly build up a lot of trust within the gambling community and was able to run away with several hundred thousand dollars worth of player's bitcoin.
It is my understanding that you claim to have never been scammed in the bitcoin world before, and if this is true, then I would say there is a good chance that this was accomplished in part by you not entrusting your money with a ponzi operator (among other things).
The biggest point I want to stress here, is my opinion asside, even looking from both my perspective and counter my perspective, via mine there is no scam accusation, and via counter, the scam accusation is incredibly shakey at best. From both perspectives, I'd say what is really in question here is a moral question as to how people view Dooglus' actions, which would belong in reputation rather than scam accusation. If what I've said is wrong and I've misinterpreted what you are going for, please feel free to move the thread back to scam accusations. I'm solely trying to help you put your thread in the correct board.
I think the forum should probably be fairly conservative in terms of when threads should be moved out of scam accusations, primarily because the forum makes a point not to moderate scams.
For the reasons stated above, I believe that my thread is a scam accusation, and I hope that it will serve as a warning to others prior to others potentially entrusting dooglus with money, information, access to code, or otherwise (including listening to what he says, and his arguments), and it is a best practice to check the scam accusation sub prior to trusting someone with any of the above, not the reputation sub. Also I believe that dooglus should have the opportunity to respond to my claims, which might not be an option in a reputation thread because threads in reputation can be self moderated while threads in scam accusations cannot.
