Topic: a week (Read 2585 times)

There are plenty of established businesses that are a low risk. You can screw it up if you don't know what your doing. I was thinking something simple like dominoes or subway. You can't just buy some fancy restaurant, hire a manager and hand him the keys. If you do it right sales should be the same as before you bought it. If you have to hire someone because you don't know how to run a restaurant or a mining farm, you should not be doing it.

Restaurants are extremely risky money-pits. I'd loan to a wise fellow with 100 gfx cards hashing away in a warehouse and a year's experience mining instead of a fellow with 100 pounds of foie gras and a year in culinary school any day of any week. If you think owning a mining farm is more risky than owning a restaurant, you're out of your mind. I'd rather have a god-damned boat.

FLAME ON!

Restaurants sell for about what they profit in a 2 year period. Which comes out to about 1%. Bitcoin mining takes less investment, but far more risk. I think it averages out about right. 

Waiting to see what blackmail he will use against me for "his" 22.5 BTC.

I never use SR

His business is indeed strange. Give BTC to everybody that is scammed and somehow get the scammer to payback but not remove the tag ( A1BITCOINPOOL ).

I would much rather pay smart1985 not Raize. But they could be the same person for all I care ( not likely though ).

Hmm, that would be an interesting position to be in - he could be the debt collector because he knows everyone's SR shopping habits, and could use that for blackmail....

So, you just admitted on shopping at Silk Road... You better watch the feds, you moron!
In fact I'll even go as far as saying you are the operator of Silk Road.
How do I know? Because you distribute money to people who are stupid enough to fall for scams.

Oh, wait: Nobody needs to worry, when Pirate runs aways with everyones money, Raize will still be here to cover our losses and pursue Pirate on the courts to recover his money, like he so much likes to boast about doing every time he bails out someone.

So you knew Bitcoinica's active wallet was going to be stolen? Quite a claim.

Of course he does. The part that tipped me off to exactly what was going on was when I followed a few particular trades that were made to certain individuals that ended right back in my wallet again. Then I started watching other trades through the same particular addresses. Then I started doing more, the details of which I can't go into on a public forum.

I guess I can't say for certain he knows he's working for SR. Maybe he's been working without asking questions like a good little mute. Then he can deny working for them, because he doesn't know who he's working for. I was under the impression he knew exactly who he was working for, though. If I were a betting man, I would still bet he's part of the crew, despite his denial. I'll explain why.

This might come as a surprise to you, but at any given point in time, three-or-more different largely trusted vendors of various products on SR are the exact same group of individuals. They rotate usernames in order to prevent detection, but sometimes they make mistakes and actually ship the same product in each other's merchandise. They typically tend to do this when they are moving on to their next username. They don't just have a "close relationship" with SR, either. They run it, or well, the geeks that run it know exactly who their biggest vendors are because they are close friends. I guess I thought, given who pirate is, that he was also part of this group of real life friends, but maybe for some dumb reason he just randomly appears on the forums in Fall 2011 with a trusted group of people needing significant amounts of money for "loans".

usagi is right, this won't continue forever, because he put a limit on how much you can invest. This limit exists because at some point they intend to either close up shop, or they understand that the authorities will be confiscating pirateat's wallet, and every coin in it will be property of the US federal government.

You want FUD? Ignore my warning now. Ignore usagi's warning. I complained that Bitcoinica could only make money at their customer's expense several months ago, and now people can't get their money back and the price of BTC is increasing. It's a little hard to call someone out on spreading FUD when you're still being secretive about exactly how you're able to find someone willing to lose about 7% in interest on a legal enterprise, and that's even before his cut. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind taking on those rates, even the foreign nationals I spoke to about remittance payments said 5% was pushing it.

Anybody who openly admits to committing a crime deserves the jail time they get. If you were smart enough to set up a huge money laundering operation involving SR, bitcoin, and most of the users on the network then I really don't think you are going to go on a public forum and admit to it. Really.

That being said there are probably a dozen users of the bitcoin community that would balk at finding out such allegations are true. Everybody else around here would probably demand a bigger cut.

Ah... Ok.

Yes, there is a limit, once, the market is saturated. Even cornered markets follow certain rules unless you want to destroy your control over a market and the value of the market itself.

I understand and agree with your claim.  My comment was about this claim:

Pirate hasn't said he would pay 7% forever, and if he had limitless capacity to accept deposits then the price of Bitcoin would increase, in which case he might still be able to offer 7% real interest, just not 7% nominal interest.

But in any case, this isn't a big deal because banks change their interest rate all the time. All the pass-through bonds either run for a short period of time or have language allowing them to change their dividend structure, so unless pirate defaults the only people who should lose money are people who leveraged to invest in him (and I'm perfectly OK with that).

I suppose it's valuable for people to have some idea when the interest rates will go down though. I truly hope people aren't investing in pirate assuming he can grow arbitrarily large and continue to pay his rates.

What you call interest doesn't necessarily mean interest. There is a limit to accounts within a certain range. But if others choose to call the payments 'interest' that is on them.

Relating it to stocks, bonds, etc... isn't correct. Something might tell me if he was paying 'interest' on a company bond from the company, it would be very low indeed. But he has no need to issue bonds. Stocks, well the value of them isn't controlled by him but the people buying and selling them. (Usually based off of news and earnings but who knows these days with stocks regularly trading at 400 times earnings.)

Start thinking along the lines of Profit Sharing. Or it could be something completely different like sha256(ponzi(ponzi(sha256(ponzi)))).

Or Sha256(honey(sha256(pot))) lol...

You know someone said somewhere in one of the many posts, follow the money. Not bad advise. Along with know who you give your money to, at least in large quantities.


meh... tired. Night night.

You're making assumptions.  That's only going to get you hurt.  Very few people have reinvested the whole time without taking profit.

Pirate himself contradicts your claim:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82849.0;topicseen

I think I stated before either on here or Reddit that Pirate and GPUMax are washing coins for Silk Road (which is actually owned/operated by one of its biggest vendors that creates new profiles on a semi-regular basis). I thought about going into detail about how I figured this all out, but it only really would help the feds catch them. Pirate is using your money and charging the Silk Road operators and large vendors a significant amount to wash their coin, which he passes on down in the form of "interest".

Now that you know, you guys can chill out on the "Zomg its a scam" posts, ok?

spendcoins.com with Jeremy seems to charge 10%
"You will receive bitcoins based on the Mt Gox USD 24h high->xe.com's AUD exchange rate + 10%."

And people seem to be happily paying him. Rather than use his money, he could borrow at 7% and massively expand the business quickly.
The key is finding people willing to buy large amounts of Bitcoins.

This may not be pirates game, but it shows that 10% per transaction is definetly possible and being done, and it seems successful too

Also try to take a look at the money inflation BTC is currently at, with 50 new coins created every 10 minutes. (Slightly overpriced imho) mining bonds alone return ~2% per month.

7% per week however is a different beast, this is just to counter "everything above 1%/month is suspicious".

Makes sense, but I remember that Pirate has an upper limit on the deposited coins if I'm not wrong.

a week