Topic: [BitcoinMax.com] Closed - page 40. (Read 190275 times)

IMHO this is not a congruent argument.  Pirate explained his business as market arbitrage and selling to people of 'influence'.  I am not going to get into it here, but given his background in forex the detailed explanation made sense to me.  It was very clear that it was a high risk investment that could go away, but not stealing, which are two different things.

Wait...    what?

WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY WARN ME ABOUT THIS ?!?





Seriouslly, payb.tc: lock this thread until there's news.

Guys, I believe that matthew is still accepting the bets for weather pirate will eventually pay out or not.
So, instead of flooding this topic with your useless whimpering, why won't you just go talk to him and put your money where your mouth is?
Or - if you don't want to put any money where your mouth is - why won't you just start your own whimpering topic and shut the fuck up here?

Vladimir, there is something you are overlooking...  7% ROI in btc is not equivalent to 7% ROI in $... you will see what I mean in 48 hours

Yes, roughly.


I do not believe that anybody capable of running a front-end operation for the pirate, for example, processing "investments" for a significant number of clients, is at the same time so stupid that he does not see the scam in the face of a continuous stream of explanations and warnings.

I also cannot believe that you indeed hope even today that "there is some legitimacy in Pirate's venture".

Seriously? You're going to argue both that it might not be a Ponzi and that everyone knew it was a Ponzi? That both arguments are even superficially plausible demonstrates that it's a fraudulent scheme.

That was me.

I don't quite follow. I agree it's still a scam but I don't follow the 'lunch' part of the analogy.


The scheme being indistinguishable from a ponzi doesn't make it a ponzi. I'm not saying that shouldn't be the conclusion to be reached but in this case, if you've been told it's a ponzi and everyone else participating knows it's a ponzi, I don't see the harm of people joining in. Haven't there been multiple ponzi threads on Bitcointalk where people participated of their own volition?

(BTW, did your avatar previously have a photograph of you wearing glasses or am I thinking of someone else?)

+1
I also think OP should lock thread again to stop the wasted space.  This is for bitcoinmax and it's users.  Thread was unlocked to allow business to occur between site users.  That hasn't been the case in some time again.

This is all so annoying.  All of you anti-pirate people, please find a different thread.  This thread is for people involved in bitcoinmax, not for you to spew your endless rage of anti-pirate sentiment.  We're all aware of both sides at this point, so please stop trying to stroke your ego by hijacking threads.

It's the crux of why we should have seen it as a scam. There are almost no legitimate businesses that can make those kinds of returns.

It's the equivalent of someone offering you a £1000 television for £10. Sure, it's possible but very unlikely to be legal.

It has actually been exposed how such return could be possible on this very forum (only to be dismissed by mockery). I even tried to discuss that yesterday with Joel in another thread. He didn't responded to the point I made and went on how "even if it is possible why wouldn't he pay his debt back instead of continuing to borrow".

He should have done that though, that wouldn't have put him in the situation he is now, with his name, adress and face known, and a debt of 5 millions he can't repay because at some point he screwed up :/

hgmichna & JoelKatz

I'm beginning to understand what you're saying now.

Your argument is a moral one.

Whilst there is a hope that such a highly profitable venture exists, belief in one is naive and almost wilfully ignorant. Is that roughly what you're saying?

If that's the case you're making then I can see where you're coming from and I guess all that's left for me to say is that I hope there is some legitimacy in Pirate's venture.

Get back to us once you understand meaning of compound interest, annual ROI and APR (AER to be more accurate, we are not talking about US version of APR here).

I'm with you on that one.

I can't follow this reasoning at all.

Say I promise you a 10% weekly return if you lend me $500. I have no intention of paying you back. I am trying to scam you.

You say, "I won't have $500 until payday. But if you buy me lunch today, I'll lend you the $500."

If I buy you lunch, now my $500 loan scam, that I still fully intend to carry out, isn't a scam because you might not lend me the $500?

No, not every scam is a sure thing. Otherwise, nothing is a scam because someone might steal the money you scammed.

The operative question is this one: Did anyone invest knowing that this scheme was indistinguishable from one in which interest payments to earlier investors come from later investors and no (or insignificant) legitimate investment actually takes place?

And, by the way, several people have admitted that they thought it was a Ponzi but invested anyway. Necessarily, they expected their payments to come from others who joined later.

Sorry - re-replying because I didn't answer one of your questions directly.


I don't believe payb.tc paid Pirate to fraudulently transfer other people's money to them. Personally, I hope that the money is generated in some high, risk, high reward scheme. 3400% is just too good to believe and that's where we differ. I believe it's more likely to blow up than to work out. I've made some high risk investments (run by me) that if they'd worked out would have made me very wealthy but they didn't work out.

I think this lies at the heart of our disagreement. You rightly believe that if someone were going into an investment knowing the money was being used in a Ponzi that they're implicit in the wrongdoing. I agree with you but we differ in our belief that Pirate is a scammer (currently anyway).

Because they knowingly participated in a scam and tried to profit from it. Duh.

You are a scammer because you knowingly participated in a scam, paying Pirate to make you the beneficiary of fraudulent transfers of other people's money. Sorry, but that's the truth.
[/quote]

I agree with your conclusion but I disagree that Pirate is a scammer (with the existing evidence).


False. I disagree completely but if I did believe Pirate to be a scammer, yes I'm with you 100%.

The extraordinary claim is not that pirate and his crew run a ponzi. The extraordinary and preceding claim is that pirate and his crew are operating some biz model producing ~14204% annual ROI and that it reasonably requires capital to be borrowed at ~3372% APR.

As such the burden of proof never even initially was on JoelKatz. It was and is on pirate and his shills and his captives and simply idiots who think that a biz model with 14204% ROI biz model is in a realm of possibility.

Even if the above is not the case, and someone first claimed that pirate is operating a ponzi, and only after that pirate claimed his magical money making machine existence. Still Occam's Razor argument effectively shifts burden of proof back to pirate and his shills.

Nobody needs to prove anything to claim that an operation claiming ~14204% annual ROI (10%/week) and requiring capital to be borrowed at ~3372% APR (7% a week) is indeed a ponzi scheme (or some other kind of fraud and combination of various fraudulent activities) for all practical purposes until proven otherwise.

The only slight innacuracy here is saying that it is definitely a ponzi. It is just being said so for convenience and simplicity. There of course could be other types of fraud involved and even one type of fraud could be converted into other type of fraud over time etc.

Ah - I think I see the problem.

There are two subtle issues here which appear to be being called the same thing by both sides and thus causing some confusion.

1) I've been scammed - I don't feel this to be the case as I went into this knowing I could lose my investment.

2) I'm scamming - This would only be true of people who went into this believing they would never lose anything (this can't be true either as they will have gone into it knowing what I knew) and me expecting my returns to come from those that invested after me (which I didn't).

Did anyone invest believing they wouldn't lose anything?
Did anyone invest expecting their payments would come from others who joined later?

Neither of those are true of me but I can't speak for everyone else.

Joel,  you don't have the start of a proof, so stop accusing.

Assumptions and facts are different things.

This is not about risk. Risk is the chance that you'll lose the spin of the roulette wheel. This is about the casino planting a magnet under the roulette wheel.

When you hire someone to clean your house and he steals your jewelery, people don't say that this was a risk you accepted when you hired someone to clean your house and that you knew a house cleaner might steal.

When you are willfully blind to how you are being paid an extraordinary amount of money, it is unearned.

This is not about gambling. Gambling is when you play roulette. This is about the casino planting a magnet under the roulette wheel. There is a massive difference between gambling and fraud.

When you pay a deposit to buy a car from a dealer, there's a chance the dealer will run off with your deposit. But we don't refer to taking this risk as "gambling".