Topic: [BitcoinMax.com] Closed - page 41. (Read 190287 times)

they lended it to him for 7%/week.
and (my guess) they did hedge their own risk so they could still get the 7% without investing so much from their own money.


i'm fine but thanks


higher risk means higher reward.
i dont see how this is "unearned".

i work for my money, i guess this is what you consider "earned" money.
but why not gamble a little?

You are still thinking that this is about the relationship between the PPT operators and the people who paid them money. It is not. It is about what they paid Pirate to do.

If I ask for donations to hire a hitman to kill my boss, I'm not ripping off my investors if I actually use the money to hire a hitman to kill my boss. The issue is what I paid the hitman to do. What did the PPT operators pay Pirate to do?

It makes no difference. Even if you think that Pirate wasn't a Ponzi, his business is still indistinguishable from a Ponzi. So this is some kind of "essence" or "omniscience" argument. ("You can't prove there's no possible way I'm right, even though all the evidence suggests that I'm wrong.") If I shoot at you with a gun I loaded yesterday, having no reason to believe anyone unloaded it, can I somehow escape responsibility because there was some chance someone unloaded the gun before I aimed it at you? Of course not. It's still wrong because I have no reason to believe the gun is unloaded and every reason to believe it's loaded. The standard for moral judgment is not a hypothetical being with perfect knowledge.

If there is no way to distinguish between the two then there is no difference with respect to the culpability of the investors for the two.

Say there are a bunch of boxes. Some are empty and some contain children. There is no way to distinguish which is which. Should you shoot at the boxes?

I hope you don't take this as rude, but you really demonstrating how Ponzi schemes and the desire for a quick, unearned buck make people throw reason to the wind.

yes; and i think the same.
but: to prevent a ponzi (i dont call pirate a ponzi for now; we just dont know for sure) we should invent good standards where people can easily compare investments. rants do not help. they do the opposite.


YES with a big big please
i want to think for myself and i really hate it when other people try to tell me what to do (even if it means that i get burned) - my parents hated me for this


again: we still dont know for sure if it was a ponzi or not.
i still think that pirate tried to be honest but failed because of his clients - but i dont know.

what exactly to you want to prevent?

anonymous funds / projects?
ponzis?

i dont see any way to distinguish between them. and one of the reasons i love bitcoins is that i have the chance to keep my businness anon (btw this does not mean it is illegal by any way).

I don't want this to happen again. I want the community to learn the maximum amount possible from this mess. And I see significant efforts to prevent the community from learning a lesson.

I can very clearly say that all contributions to the bitcoin address in my signature will be used to hire a hitman to kill my boss. That doesn't absolve me of responsibility for hiring a hitman to kill my boss. The issue is not what Pirate did with the money or how he induced people to give him the money -- the issue is what he paid Pirate to do.

For those who argue the PPT operators did nothing wrong, should they do it again next time?

Again, the issue is what he paid Pirate to do. It has nothing to do with the service he provided or whether he was honest or lied about what he was doing. He knowingly paid Pirate to fraudulently transfer to him money that he knew was obtained from others on the false promise that it would be legitimately invested -- a transfer he knew was not in fact a legitimate investment.

My problem with that is that he knowingly participated in a scam, drew others into that scam, and attempted to profit from it. And if he agrees with you, he still sees nothing wrong with that.

hi joelkatz

i dont unterstand you reasoning. i've read most of your posts and liked it.

but now you just do rant over rant about pirate. why? its over; please just stop this mess. i did understand your warning about "pirate selling pirate debt" - that was good (maybe a little to often).

payb.tc was VERY clear that he just passes money to pirate. as long as this passthrough existed there where many threads in this forum warning people about pirate - everybody should think for himself.

he was just offering a service for people (like me) which dont want to invest that much money at once but still would like to gain 7% interest. he did a very good job and was very open about it.

he made it clear when and how much he will pay. what's your problem with that?

In other words, everyone associated knew, or should have known, that it was a scam. That means the operators knew, or should have known, that they were participating in a scam.

You're missing the point. The point is not what happened to the money they paid Pirate, the point is what they paid Pirate to do. The fact is, they knowingly paid Pirate to transfer funds to them that they knew, or should have known, were obtained from others on the fraudulent promise (credible or not, believed or not) that they would be legitimately invested, knowing that such a transfer is in no way a legitimate investment.

(Again, I am not pointing blame at any specific people. I'm just refuting the argument that people who funnel money into Ponzi schemes are blameless for doing so because the blame instead rests with others. Also, you should pick just one of "I didn't know what I was getting into" or "Everyone knew what they were getting into". You can't argue both at the same time.)

He hasn't been concealing his identity, just not gone public with it.
http://whois.domaintools.com/payb.tc

I don't know enough about the specifics to point blame at any particular people, but I find it really hard to imagine anyone could have been running a PPT and not be either aware of, or willfully blind to, the near certainty that they were paying Pirate to transfer to them money that other people were induced to transfer to him in the belief that it would be invested, and that transferring that money to them was not in fact an investment. In my opinion, that makes them scammers.

And no disclaimers would eliminate this, because the issue is not how they collected their funds but what they paid Pirate to do.

Again, I don't know enough about the facts of any specific situation to point blame at any particular people. I am not saying that any particular person is a scammer.

One of the most horrible things about Ponzi schemes is that they promise free money in way that turns honest people into scammers. Pirate cleverly tricked you into being a scammer.

You are strangely overlooking a decisive difference. If you gamble, you are fairly well informed of the rules. The pirate Ponzi scheme was different. There is a person who set up the scheme as fraud, inventing an incredibly elaborate network of lies designed to deceive people and steal their money.

If you gamble in Las Vegas, there is nothing of the sort. If there is deception, like in playing Poker, then that is part of the rules, and everybody expects it to be that way.

Don't tell me you cannot see the difference.

Why do some people worry about other peoples' money? Perhaps there are some who want to uphold honest rules, including the rule of the law. Some people just cannot look on and be silent while watching other people being defrauded, just as some people will not look the other way when grandma cannot get across the street safely. They help as well as they can. These are the people I want to be with.

thanks hg, that's very kind of you to say.

i agree completely.

I already said that I would stay quiet in a case like yours, but if you reply explicitly, I will give my opinion and my guess at what a judge would say.

If you are a victim of the fraud and did not know it was a fraud, then you are without guilt. Sorry for your loss (unless you were among the lucky early investors who had made a gain through interest payouts or a timely withdrawal).

If you knew it was fraud, but gambled nonetheless, perhaps because you thought you came in early enough to make a profit before the scheme would fall apart, you are probably legally clean, but you have to clear the moral side with your own conscience.

If you knew it was a scam and set up a front-line business to profit from it, designing contracts that pushed all the risk on your clients, but left you with a riskless profit, then I would not be so sure whether a judge would absolve you of all guilt. My guess is that you would count as a conspirator and would have to bear some of the responsibility.

A word about the moral side, just generally, not as a reply to your message. An unpleasant sign of our times is that increasingly many people believe that anything that makes them money is good. They no longer even know what morale or honor means. At best they show ethical behavior only for fear of punishment. They have not understood or they wilfully ignore that our human civilization could not work if most people acted that way.

Then you are a scammer. You knowingly paid Pirate to fraudulently transfer other people's money to you without their consent.

That's not the issue. It's not what Pirate did with your money, it's what you paid him to do.

Okay, so you knowingly participated in a scam. You are a scammer.

Right, so you knew it was a scam.

Umm, how do you figure? You don't agree that they paid Pirate to fraudulently transfer other people's money to them?

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.

True or false: Pirate induced people to invest in him by claiming to have an actual business that turned a legitimate profit. You knew, however, that he was probably using new investments to pay off interest on previous investments. You knew or should have known that by investing with Pirate, you were in fact paying him to transfer some of those funds that others were lead to believe would be invested to you, which is in no way an investment of those funds.

How can you say that doesn't make you a scammer? How long until reality sinks in and the cognitive dissonance stops?

+1

+1

+1
I am sick of the insults implying that I am some sheep being led around and taken advantage of by the conniving payb.tc.

I have yet to hear from someone who has gambled their bitcoins on Bitcoinmax who is shocked at the current state of affairs. There might have been something to be said about trying to warn new folks about the risk. No more new folks are "investing" any longer. Perhaps after one of us clams we need an advocate you can try to assign blame for us, but I think everyone knows the blame lies with himself.

+1 - my sentiments exactly. I wonder if message boards discussing Facebook shares or 0.5% big bank savings accounts are met with such ferocious trolling. I guess those are "legitimate" investments ;-)

Some people gamble by hopping on a plane to Vegas. Others speculate on real estate or stocks. Speculating on a high-yield Bitcoin investment is no different - one should only play with money that they can afford to lose. I have had a lot of fun speculating with Bitcoin, in addition to profit (despite this unresolved Pirate scheme). I'm not complaining one bit, though I find it mind boggling that so many people spend so much time and energy worrying about other people's money.

Thanks inedible. That was long due.

+1
wow there are still reasonable people in this forum

I'll bite.

I 'invested' in this scheme.

Was I aware of what I was getting myself into? Yes.

Am I going to blame someone for the current outcome? No.

It's not like I didn't read payb.tc's warnings. It's not like he didn't say you stand to lose your entire gam...er...invstment.

Everyone's saying "a 3400% annual return rate - it's got to be a scam" - well I agree with you. Did I still take a chance, sure.

I don't think anyone who can think rationally could believe that there wasn't something fishy here, especially with no information as to how these returns were being generated.

I'm also as suspicious of people who are calling people like payb.tc scammers, for exactly the same reasons.

If you're a rational person who can think for themselves, how can people who operated passthroughs be considered scammers?

Some have said that they're scammers because they helped legitimise Pirate... how? Am I a scammer because I gambled? Did I legitimise him?

I'm closing this offer and won't post bids in this thread anymore, but people can still PM me for a current bid.

I can't say anyone has lost coins, yet. Running such an operation had to be a nightmare, closing it the way it was closed seems to be unwieldy at best, impossible at worst. Sitting out here in the dark twisting in the wind like everyone else,  it seems that what may be needed is a coordinated crash of the price and a subsequent buyback which may be the only way for pirateat40 to acquire enough coins to make the payoff. Just a thought, ideas and solutions are always better than vitriolic language and threats.