Topic: I believe theses quotes should now kill BS&T. (Read 7998 times)

Just started a readin' this thread, pausin' to comment. The same song came to my mind, but a better link is warranted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YZBNfYvIMs

~Bruno~

Thats another valid point ,

if pirate gets run over by a bus tomorrow  ,and hes got around 500k of everyones coins in some encrypted account or  wallet that nobody knows the password except him.........

is there any partners or any failsafe in place for investors to withdraw deposits  ? 

I had around 5k coins deposited with pirates accounts  and i have reduced it to 1k recently because thats all im comfortable losing when things go wrong

If i had more confidence ,i would put the 5000 back in ,even more but too much risk depends on the  too little information being given out 

~2% was based on 0.5% fee over 2 trades, assuming he has the 500k volume limit (which may not have even been the case for much of his "banking" days).

He claims 10% profit per week (on a post somewhere on this forum a few months back)...which means over 7 days, roughly 1.5% per day growth on average. ~1.5% + 0.5% = ~2%. I don't particularly think it makes a big difference even if he paid no fees...1% "confident" profit per day on a massively volatile and sometimes utterly stagnant market is living on the edge of insanity. Firstly you have to be right almost all the time, and secondly you have to be so perfectly right on big moves that any wrongs are minor are easily absorbed. Apple did well with the iPad, but they will certainly produce some crap products in the future, and had a hell of a lot of shit before it too...that's just normal business wins and fails.

In the early days I gave him some coins, but it wasn't because he was claiming arbitrage...at the early stage he said he was earning coins through local business transactions, the specifics of which he wanted to keep anonymous for the sake of his safety, and should anything "happen to him" during transactions the coins would be safe and returned somehow. Over time his ability to accept coin with little need for rejection (which implied either his business grew perfectly with however many coins he had, or the coins weren't really relevant to any real world productivity) made me rethink the situation and I cashed out. I don't regret doing so, even though he still seems to be doing just fine.

Unless pirate is the exchange himself.... He can easily untaint coins, in person exchange for large amounts, mixing services, etc.

https://mtgox.com/fee-schedule

0.25% for 30-day volumes of over 500K is the lowest it goes.

Actually, with any sort of volume on Gox, your fees are much less than that.  So reduce your numbers even further.

I think he's referring to TWO trades - one buy and one sell. Most exchanges are about .5% each. You have to cover a one point spread between your buy and sell.

I don't think the quotes will kill BS&T...only a missing interest payment will, like pretty much every other business/ponzi ever.

If it's a ponzi, it's been masterfully executed from the start.

I personally suspect it started as a legitimate attempt to make some money using other people's money, at a time when it was easily possible; day trading, RL trading, whatever, and I was willing to support it and make some btcs. I was an early investor, and I could feel that optimistic burn of being onto a good thing. After a couple months RL events meant I had to withdraw my funds and deal with other things, I thought long and hard about still leaving btc in a 'savings' account there. There were various things that went through my mind, but the one that stuck was:

"How can somebody so confidently earn ~2% a day in this market legitimately? No one is so godlike that they can produce this amount indefinitely just via trading highs and lows on a daily basis - especially considering the heavy 1% trade fees." I know it's possible, but not predictable nor likely. I realize a lot could have been made through bitcoinica leveraging and market manipulation, but even that has its limits (like it crashing / being broken into constantly).

The alternative reason given, that money is flowing from the outside->in also doesn't really add up. Why would a group continuously pay 10% per week just to keep buying/selling bitcoins from Pirate? Who is so stupid and wasteful as to do or need that? Who is paying pirate 10% per week to borrow off him? Laundering, if that, would mean a million bank/IRS issues. It makes no sense in a large scale...when I first joined, I simply assumed it was something akin to money laundering (hence the anonymity), but pirate has devoutly claimed otherwise, and that wouldn't make sense either in the amounts he deals with (my own estimate is that he owes around 300k btc based on needing $135k in btc to pay interest, steadily increasing "min/max limits" + nominal re-invested interest over time etc etc). The whole PPT thing spreads the responsibility nicely).

I think it's quite possible he has made massive amounts of money via bitcoinica, and is using those funds as his buffer to trading for now, while hoping / acting to push the price back down so he can rebuy more cheaply. This would make this more of an investment bank than a ponzi, I imagine, and the price rise might be concerning, but it may also just be a case of w/e if the cash buffer is there. Again this proves nothing.

Granted it may just be that I, like hundreds of others on these forums, just can't think of how it's done so consistently and legitimately without any real service being offered that anyone here has even used. Instead of making me jealous, however, it would be most sensible to assume the simplest answer to be true. I haven't visited these forums for a few months (due to said RL events), but I'm quite surprised to see the mounting pressure on pirate. He is responding to critics very differently now than he was when I was active previously - definitely more hostile, but also more erratic/irrational. Even Apple is quite open about how it went from being a $5/share company to $650. What's the big deal? If everyone could do it, like Pirate has claimed, how could it be that hundreds of people wracking their brains could not also conceive of it? The more I think of it, the more clearly my intuition speaks.

At the end of the day, it's not a ponzi until it fails to pay what it says it will. Anyone investing today simply has faith that pirate is a better trader than them.

I share the same view, so far I have only one person on ignore although there are several that I'm almost certain I wont care about their post.

It seems that in the last two days I hit quite a few nerves since my ignore count went from below first shade of yellow to the current 12+ which is fine, I do admit I paid little attention to being effective in communicating my positions and may have been a bit too blunt and persistent.

While the ignore counter is kind of annoying -- it's being abused the same way the old simple reputation system was -- its announced usage can be an indicator of people being emotionally compromised. "I will now ignore you, take that!" or something.

I never felt that skimming over pointless posts is harder than using the ignore button, you lose part of the discussion's context with it. My ignore list remains empty, and I fail to see any disadvantage of that.

Yeah I'm devastated..   

 

I'm sure you're crushed, hazek.   

It seems that there is just no reasoning with you. If your mind is that closed, there's nothing I can do here. Welcome to my ignore list. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Great, thank you for answering.

For the record: No, absolutely not.

Just for the record: Are you in any way shape or form involved with pirate or his business?

I've noticed that there are large bets (total of 635 btc) placed on this issue on our site:

Bitcoin Savings and Trust will default before the end of 2012

If the bettors are here, thank you for your trust. We'll do our best to be a fair judge. For further clarification here is what we put on the page as the definition of "default":


Don't hesitate to contact us for questions, or think that the statement is resolved. For people who wonder, all the bets are moved to an off-site cold wallet.

Btw pirate finally realized he can't handle the forums anymore and decided to move to a more controllable environment where can be in absolute control of what PR potential "investors" are exposed to - his very own irc channel: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1010582

My two cents..


I started off with a very small amount of bitcoin and have been steadily growing it through trading. I use almost every exchange relative to their volume with the exception of Gox, and I also mix in some triangle trading. On a good day, when I have lots of computer time, I can pull 1% - IT IS POSSIBLE. Could I do it every day if I had the time? maybe.

That said, I have a hard time believing pirate. If he was trading himself he would just keep those returns for himself. If he has these "large investors" that want to buy large amounts at a premium that are worried about moving the market...well, that just doesn't make any sense on so many levels. Rich people can buy their own BTC - they certainly don't need pirate. C'mon people, use your heads.

Ok, let me make it clearer just for you:


Supposedly, it's his business model:


Now I don't know about you but I don't know of a business that can run by not doing what their business model says that they do. Either pirate was operating as usual when the exchange rate increased and made the profits he paid his "investors" or he didn't run his business and didn't pay his "investors". It can't be that he didn't run his business but was able to pay his "investors". There should either be loses or there should be no profits. We appear to have neither.

Unless you are willing to claim that pirate can predict the future and knew exactly when to jump back into BTC just before the price increase to avoid loses, my argument makes perfect sense.


Because that's not what he says is his business model. He specifically said, explicitly, that he is using other people's money as a hedge against fiat to BTC conversion risk. Why would he then after incurring these type of loses not transfer them to his clients if that is what is his business model?