When the FBI comes to break down pirate's door, GLBSE is quite certain to get affected.
- all the pass-thru bonds will become worthless
- GPUMax will stop, which means many mining bond's yield wills go down and therefore their price
- many of the large miners who have a chunk of their net worth with pirate might become insolvent.
- if GLBSE owners participate in pirate's scheme as well, let us just say : ouch.
In other words, the exposure of GLBSE to pirate's scheme is certainly
large, but it's quite impossible to fathom given the secrecy around the
scheme: no one but pirate knows how large it is and who participates.
If we're going to talk about indirect consequences, though, maybe we should talk about how protected BTC is from a Pirate default. Pirate has hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of BTC, now. BTC market cap is ~$50m -- that includes coins (potentially a very large amount) which aren't at all involved in the BTC economy, yet.
Loss of GPUMax -> GPU mining less profitable (this'd come on the heels of the block reward halving, and ASICs coming in 2013 -- GPUMoney was supposed to have contingency plans to keep GPU hashing there profitable, even if BTC mining wasn't)
Loss of Pirate -> Miners (including GLBSE-listed organizations) may default -> various funds may collapse
Lendees who do Pirate arb will likely default -> lenders may default (those with significant liabilities, anyway) -> various funds and bonds may collapse
What happens from there will be interesting. Will investors have the outside capital and be resilient enough to continue on with BTC, perhaps buying back in? I'd guess it'd be a massive blow to morale (as an effect of a blow to profits) for a large portion of those using the BTC they've purchased for investment. Pirate may also sell the coins he's collected at that time, if he hasn't already. It could set crowdfunding way, way back, and for those with a large chunk in BTC investments, but not much USD, could cause them to cash out and drop Bitcoin entirely. It may cause a significant decline in the BTC exchange rate. Currently, almost nobody accounts for what they're doing -- with the rate Pirate offers, almost any business venture could be doing arb, and giving investors a minor amount of that and a pat on the head. Even for those of us who do disclose what we do, there's not much way to verify it. It's all online or on paper. It's not like I can point to a rental unit and say "yup, that's ours. Here's my key. We walk in, and everyone respects my claim on this property. Here are the checks we collected from last month." It's "nobody contests with my claim on the property I say I own, though nobody would really be able to, anyway." Even for those with services like BitCoinTorrentz (and I use them only for the sake of needing a name), they could be putting everything they earn in a Pirate account until it's time to pay dividends, when they pay only principal on what they put in Pirate. We have no idea how deep it goes, it's very difficult to verify someone's ownership of what they say, and that's what allows semi-drunken BS speculative posts like my own right here. It seems ironic, though, that Bitcoin, based on a zero-trust philosophy, currently requires full-trust for actual commerce (even if that full trust is placed in an escrow service, or perhaps later, an "independent" auditor).