Instead of worrying about how to go after people like pirate, how about worrying about how stupid people are to fall for such a thing in the first place?
If you give your money to someone you never met, who won't even tell you how he is investing it, but claims unrealistic returns, than frankly, you deserve to lose your money.
+1 This post pretty much sums up the solution to the whole pirate drama.If you give your money to someone you never met, who won't even tell you how he is investing it, but claims unrealistic returns, than frankly, you deserve to lose your money.
Not sure how you get around the "give your money to someone you never met" part though in the 99% of internet transactions where BTC is actually useful? If you can trust a web vendor to sell you a TV in BTC, you should be able to trust a banker (pirate) who has a network of other bankers (goat, giga, patrick, hashking, etc) using their services, not to mention the tons of representative "assets" on the main BTC exchange GLBSE. The pro-pirate posts on the forums outnumbered the con posts 10 to 1, and the cons were always ripped apart. This was not simply "give your money to someone you never met" in the general sense. Everyone trusted pirate because the long-time high post count "bankers" here that should have been "in the know" did.
I don't think you can call the general population stupid on this one. I think that designation should be reserved for the pros that should have known better. Many of which will come out ahead, despite the default.
You really can't see the difference? Someone is running a scam selling TV which don't exist, how much can he get away with $100, maybe $500 before someone reports him? So the level of trust should be $100 to $500. If you can trust Mr. TV with $500 you can trust him to deliver the TV. If you can't you should use escrow.
However this is an entire whole different level of scam.
Usually I have a lot of respect for your posts. Not so sure here. First of all, for most people it WAS a $10 to $500 level of trust they gave. Most likely in the form of a few bonds held on GLBSE. Those people believed in the system because the people that should have done due diligence believed. For everyone else that directly handed pirate $1k+, yeah, stupid. (pretty sure that's the point I was trying to make.)
You (and a hundreds? thousand? of other suckers) sent someone $5M in return for nothing but the promise of that he would return >$5M in the future.
Don't you think the level of due diligence and verification should be a "little bit" higher when dealing with that kind of money? Do it again and I guarantee you it will end equally bad. Smart people don't hand other anonymous people millions of dollars with no verification and expect good things to happen
Don't you think the level of due diligence and verification should be a "little bit" higher when dealing with that kind of money? Do it again and I guarantee you it will end equally bad. Smart people don't hand other anonymous people millions of dollars with no verification and expect good things to happen
No single person sent him $5M... Each individual person trusted "just a little bit" because other people here trusted "a lot".
Also calling Pirate a "banker" is just about the stupidest thing I have heard today. What bank charter is he operating under? Oh yeah none. He isn't a banker. He is a 35 year old scumbag who had his house foreclosed, doesn't pay his bills, and had a half dozen lawsuits file against him in his short adult life. I mean lets be at least slightly objective here.
IMHO calling him a banker fits perfectly. To the general public a banker is a person who takes your money in deposit so they can fuck you out of it in a million different ways.
You (and others collectively) gave a semi-annoymous person $5M in irreversible and very difficult to trace currency based on absolutely nothing other than his "word" he would repay it. Period. To say the investors suckers shouldn't be called stupid is just pure denial. The bolded sentence above is STUPID. STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID. There is no possible scenario where the above bolded sentence is anything but ASININELY STUPID.
Not many people will ruined their rep for $100 scam, a far larger number are willing to do so $5M esecially when the marks hand it to them on a silver plater with a note that says "rob me, I'm stupid".
Sorry for the harsh reality lesson but your line of thinking is just going to enable "Pirate 2.0" and we will have to hear another round of whining about how it wasn't stupid.
Not many people will ruined their rep for $100 scam, a far larger number are willing to do so $5M esecially when the marks hand it to them on a silver plater with a note that says "rob me, I'm stupid".
Sorry for the harsh reality lesson but your line of thinking is just going to enable "Pirate 2.0" and we will have to hear another round of whining about how it wasn't stupid.
My argument is that the fault lies higher up the chain with the people ACTUALLY DEALING DIRECTLY WITH PIRATE. You can't expect a small-time investor to treat every $50 investment like it's a $5M investment. However, if you are about to give a guy 40k BTC (aka $400,000, a number I read elsewhere here that was Goat's deposit) ... Then yeah. STUPID for not doing the research.
Do you use escrow for -every- BTC transaction? Do you know -every- little detail about everyone holding your BTC investments? Calling everyone who lost money stupid... just seems ignorant to me.
