Topic: Bryan Micon's List of BTC Ponzi Schemes that should not be listed as "Lending" - page 8. (Read 119665 times)

P.S.

The level of discussion here is appalling. I am too to some degree guilty of occasionally employing some logical fallacies, often intentionally, for that I do apologize. Now let me give you some details and examples.

The simple truth is that Pirate made an extrordianary claim that he has some kind of biz model that is producing >3400% APR AND that it is reasonable to buy capital at ~3400 APR% AND that his biz model is not a ponzi. Moreover he takes(has taken) deposits/money based on that claim directly and via intermediaries/partners/employees/etc.

The opponents have called this BS and are completely justified to assert that pirate is running a ponzi scheme. based on logical reasoning.


Pirate and his shills, supporters, lieutenants and captives went on offensive employing every logical fallacy in the book (many of them anyway).

Let's just list some of fallacies routinely used and/or likely will be used shortly by team "pirate, the miracle worker":

Ad hoc: "pirate paid 1 account, hence he will pay all accounts", "pirate paid N weeks on time, hence he will continue paying on time" etc...

Anecdotal evidence: "we had a dinner with pirate, therefore he is not anonymous"

Argumentum ad baculum: "you say something against pirate, you get paid last"

Argumentum ad crumenam: "pirate has NNNNNN BTC, therefore he is right", "I bet NNNNNNN BTC, therefore I am right (or ballsy), you did not bet therefore you shut up"

Argumentum ad hominem: attacking opponents personally and on various unrelated matters, like their own businesses, bets they have or not have placed etc...

Argumentum ad ignorantiam: "Of course the Bible is true. Nobody can prove otherwise.", "pirate is not a ponzi because nobody can prove otherwise", "there is a giant teapot orbiting the sun, because nobody can prove otherwise". This also includes "shifting the burden of proof", btw.

Argumentum ad misericordiam: (soon to be employed) "I did not murder my mother and father with an axe! Please don't find me guilty; I'm suffering enough through being an orphan.", "I lost so much money on ponzi and stupid bets, I am suffering enough, do not tell me that I am guilty of promoting and conspiring in a ponzi scheme and a scammer"

Argumentum ad nauseam: ohh yea repeat utter BS until any reasonable person tells you "fuck off, no point to talking to you", nauseating it is indeed.

Argumentum ad numerum: "so many people invested in that, they cannot be all wrong"

Argumentum ad verecundiam: (Appeal to authority, false authority in this case): "Pirates's lieutenants and shills say they know him, and he a has magical biz model and it is not a ponzi, it must be so then"

Bifurcation: "if pirate pays all accounts now, he is not running a ponzi" (That is an interesting one, think about it)

Fallacy of presupposition: (demanding an explanation of something that is not true or have not been established)

Ignoratio elenchi: (illogically concluding that some set of usually fallacious arguments support the desired conclusion)

Non causa pro causa: "pirate has defaulted because, they were posting that he is running a ponzi"

Non sequitur: "pirate pays 7%, therefore he has some miracle biz model making lots of money and it is totally possible"

Petitio principii: "pirate is not running a ponzi, because he pays dividends, and must have some underlying biz model, and therefore he is not running a ponzi"

Plurium interrogationum: demanding a simple answer to a complex question.

Red herring: "some copies of bitcoin magazine were delivered late, therefore pirate is not running a ponzi"

Shifting the burden of proof (again): "pirate has claimed that he is not running a ponzi and that he needs to buy capital at 3000% APR and that he has some underlying biz model other than paying capital back as dividend and asked and received lots of money, now you need to prove that he is not running a ponzi."

Straw man: (happens ~10 times in every thread.) miscquote your opponent than attack his, taken out of context or misrepresented, opinion. Works especially well with typos and grammar/spelling mistakes.

Tu quoque: "you attacked ad hominem, I will respond with ad hominem too."

The persistent abuse here of all the fallacies is so annoying that continuing any serious discussion here amounts to utter waste of time, not intellectual stimulating and often simply aggravating.

The above is why I do this...

For your reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_burden_of_proof
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_teapot
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/

Evidence can be misleading. Someone stabs themselves and drops the bloody knife and I pick it up. Evidence points to me stabbing them. Thankfully, real judges and courts are not so ignorant as this community to judge so quickly.

The really huge ones:
- There has never been an investment scheme that promises to pay this well that didn't turn out to be a ponzi.
- Only one guy claims to have gotten 100 BTC 5+ days after he was supposed to start paying.

Perhaps you are confusing evidence with proof?

What evidence? I must keep missing it.

I understand that Matt's main point is "you guys cannot be totally sure that it's a Ponzi" 

I disagree.  There is more than enough evidence to look at the program and say "This is Ponzi Scheme" - maybe the exact perfect definition is "With a 99.999999999999% degree of certainty I can say this is a Ponzi scheme"  - I feel Matt would be more confident in the latter, but IMO it will take millions of lifetimes to average a not-a-scam, so we can just say "this is a fucking scam" and leave off the qualifiers.

What is even more disgusting is that it is seems no one whose opinion I value is posting on this forum anymore. With a very few exceptions, of course. There is no reason for me to remain here until this has changed. Bye for now.

The only thing disgusting is having to repeat myself. I'm not for censorship. You and anyone else are free to bark all day about what you think, but accusations, harassment, and defamation (example: THIS IS A PONZI) need to be backed up with evidence. If someone is quite sure of themselves, it's not a "gamble" to bet on what they say, it's just free money. I wonder how many times I'll have to repeat this.



What scam are you referring to and what exactly collapsed? When referencing it, please also show a link to the evidence of it both being a scam and having collapsed, thanks.

On the off-chance you're referring to the whole Pirate thing, I'd like to remind the general public that you've declined to wager on it being a fraud or not. Seems strange for someone using such strong, serious and absolute wording.

Why dont you apply this to yourself and your actions, Matthew!

Why are  you so bent on censorship here? Do you realise what are you doing?

Do I need to pay money entering some stupid bets to say anything on that forum that you do not agree with?

Do you think it is wise to effectively make yourself part of a scam, no less after it has collapsed?

Have you already forgotten as your silly arguments were utterly destroyed in another thread?

Disgusting!

Bingo. This isn't about government intervention, this was always about speech. It was actually the Pirate collaborators who stood against freedom, talking about how irresponsible--or even libelous--it was to call a spade a spade.

Everyone is still free to be scammed, but we sure as fuck better be free to call something a scam.

What if you find (soon enough, if you still haven't) that you did need protection?

The strength of the human civilization is based on people cooperating and helping each other to a degree that animals never attained (except perhaps some state-building insects). I am not going back down to animal level. When I see people in need of help, I help if I can.

Moreover, help, in the form of advice and warning, was always offered, but never was anyone prevented from making a mistake. People who ignore the warnings are completely free to throw their money away however they want.

But if the town is burning, you have no right to tell people to stop shouting "fire."

In the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, "Keep your opinions, politics and religion out of my bitcoin".

When people start talking about "protecting" me from things in Bitcoin, I can't help but equate it to the reasoning for Paypal holding my funds.

Yes. In this case the difference was the same as between having no brain and having one.

Or, in some cases it was the difference between profiting from the scam and being honest.


This is the typical garbage to be expected from you. Outside of mathematics there is rarely any "100% irrefutable proof", yet nobody (except you and a few others) would ask for it when sombody calls a duck a duck.

I think it is high time for you to shut up and stop being part of the huge fraud most of us tried hard to protect people from.

I'm pretty sure that BS&T isn't the only investment scheme on these forums with suspiciously high returns and no evidence of actual investment, and it's definitely not going to be the last one.

There's a difference between skepticism and fake skepticism. You're asking for evidence which no-one would have even if BS&T was a ponzi, and so the lack of it gives no reason to doubt that BS&T is in fact one. We know this from previous ponzi schemes that have actually been investigated by law enforcement; the 100% proof isn't available until well after the scheme's collapsed, by which time it's a bit late to do anything about it.

(That's assuming people will believe they've been scammed then. I was looking into the whole Perma-Pave swindle the other day, and despite one of their investors filing a lawsuit with evidence that the payments to them had been made using the investments of others, goods they had been promised hadn't been delivered, and none of the customers the company claimed to have had actually received any goods from them either, there were still a whole bunch of people on forums who continued to insist that the company was above board and all the investors who'd not been paid the money they were promised were just a bunch of paranoid whingers.)

Really? Where did someone claim 100% irrefutable proof?  I saw a lot of people claiming that it exhibited all the characteristics of a Ponzi. That was true. If a passive investor felt differently, they were free to keep their high rates of return to themselves. That's not what many conspirators did.

I agree it's disappointing, and it's especially disappointing to see bitcoin rhetoric co-opted by Ponzi-boosters. Yes, Bitcoin is great, and has the potential to reduce transaction costs, but it's not the ticket to absurd rates of return.

There's a difference between being skeptical and calling someone a scammer.  Most of the FUDsters were claiming 100% irrefutable proof, when none existed.

This is fair, but there's also a big difference between investing and attacking skeptics as FUDsters and worse.  I don't care what people want to do with their money, but a lot of the folks on this thread are culpable co-conspirators morally, if not legally.

I don't think I did that. I certainly didn't intend to. Perhaps it was a case where there was bogus transparency -- transparency that leads to complete opacity. For example, a bond that "transparently passes all money through to Pirate" is bogus transparency.

Suspicious would be, order of magnitude, more than double what you would expect from most completely transparent investments offering about the same level of risk.

I agree. I hope I didn't say that.

My bad, I read it as if you were speaking about all offers. Then again whether or not there are some terribly unappealing investment offers doesn't seem too relevant to the case of vescudero and the like, which I was talking about regarding the notion of being too dismissive.

Since you haven't touched the subject of how vescudero's guarantee is worse than, say, CPA's guarantee, I'll go ahead and assume it's the fixed interest, which to me isn't very convincing. A better metric would be risk/reward ratio of running with the money, and I would more likely look at the deposited amounts. It fits perfectly to BTCS&T, MyBitcoin, Bitcoinica, bitscalper, REBATE and the like and excludes vescudero and CPA (for now of course).

Since no one is actually signing anything and almost all identities have almost perfect deniability, I would go a step further and suggest we usually include personality assessment when calculating the risk. This explains borrowers paying up after shutting down operation much better than "luck".

I think we both agree that these measures aren't good enough and we have to find a way to weed out scams. What we don't agree on is the hope that people will stop depositing money to fixed interest offers.


Transparency is no absolute, and it can be very misleading for gullible investors. For those who can assess the risk, this is already not a black and white thing.


Even if there aren't any exceptions, you've successfully excluded everyone who claims (truthfully or untruthfully) to be even a little transparent, which almost all do. Also how do you measure suspicious returns? I remember my bank offering more than 100% "overnight" interest for extended periods, even when the inflation rate wasn't as high as Bitcoin's.

If we add some tolerance to the claim, then the ones that have paid up all debt before shutting down operation so far become exceptions, which are AFAIK all of the offers so far (hopefully pirate will be the first one to successfully complete a Bitcoin based HYIP scam). Should we do a generalization based on this sample? The same goes for other sorts of extreme generalizations.

So in summary, when you say that a well known person who gives a guarantee for deposits, who is limiting the total deposits to an amount that's not worth stealing, and who is mostly transparent with his investments is a Ponzi scheme because he's paying out interest more than banks do (but well within range of what can be done in the market), the argument seems to me to lose credibility. He might still steal my money, but the reasoning behind why the risk is supposed to be higher than any other investment option (available currently in the greater Bitcoin market) isn't clear at all.

my show is run by 1 man. 

That echo is classic computer-listener echo - but there is one problem - Crazier Mike does not own a computer

no clue why it echo'd so bad only when I was speaking.  One for him, many calls from skype to other phones that show worked fine.  I'm pretty sure he has a land line too. 

Nah, Clipse was hopping, I run a similar (but much, much smaller) little proxy, splitting my hashrate between hopping and a couple of other bonus pools to reduce variance.
I'm able to offer 105-110% PPS without ever investing the coins anywhere. To be honest I think clipse should have offered two rates for mining with and without BS&T exposure. That'd have been the ethical thing to do.

I just hope his miners get paid even if BS&T defaults