Topic: MATTHEW FIRED FROM BITCOIN MAGAZINE (Read 7381 times)

Though his bet was fool proof. If everyone paid up on his lower bets "offering 100% ROI if you don't think I have X to pay out" then he wouldn't be a scammer.

Fuck you Andrew Bitcoiner, you scammy sack of shit!

Still not quite. Remember the terms I used earlier, which someone else complained sounded too religious: good and evil? Matthew just does NOT strike me as being evil like that. $50,000 IS tempting, but, don't forget, we're all hoping to be multi-billionaire Captains of Industry™ here  

Replace 1000 BTC with 5000 BTC and the scenario becomes much easier to imagine.  Not only that, but Pirate needed someone with at least a sliver of reputation left to keep it going while he made his own personal arrangements.  MNW fits that profile, IMO.  Just as you said, Rassah, people trusted him somewhat before this incident (just enough credibility to where some people would trust him, even though his behavior is odd) and not quite ghetto enough for no one to take him seriously. 



/Ok done with my tirade.

Not to my knowledge. All his companies have either got off the ground (Bitcoin Magazine) or flopped around and went nowhere (the Ellet), but I don't recall him ever actually taking people's money and not delivering the product (there WERE delays though).


I have nothing in this race, either (the 20BTC bet wasn't something I was planning on keeping). If this is something that Matt would consider doing, it would surprise me. Matt struck me as someone who wanted to become big in the Bitcoin community, and was focusing on growing some sort of a reputation around it, with all his attempts at and involvement in businesses (though it WAS a really weird reputation). I think he would have considered the gain of $10,000 to be WAY less than what he thought he could earn from all his other business involvements.
But then, Matt has surprised me already with this stunt...

You are probably right, Rassah.  In the back of my mind though this whole thing seems orchestrated.  I'm not really familiar with this history like some of you are - has MNW been involved with any other BTC companies that have ripped off/ran away with btc?

I mean seriously, it would have been real easy for pirate to contact MNW (young and easily manipulated) and offer him 1000 BTC for him to make an ass of himself and keep the charade going.  MNW gains 1000 coins and loses his rep - he knows (or thinks) that this will never come back to haunt him because people already think he is an idiot.  

Pirate, in the meantime, is able to liquidate his holdings and get out while MNW is trying to subdue the rest of the large redemption's.  Like I said, I have no dog in this race, but if I did, I would definitely be checking out MNW just as much as Trendon.  

*** this is all, IMO ***

From my interactions with him over the course of the year, Matthew never struck me as a rude, inconsiderate asshole (pirate definitely did). At most Matthew was always a somewhat insane weirdo with a severe lack of maturity, and excessive trolling tendencies. I may be wrong, but his character definitely did not fit the profile of someone who would team up with Pirate to purposefully rob people like that (I'm still of the opinion that he chickened out on the bet or something, which is different from basically premeditated theft.)

Do you know him?  Does anyone know him - for fucking real?  Didn't some of these PPT guys actually meet Trendon in LV?  Or was that total bullshit, too? 

That... would be too scammy of a thing to do even for Matthew

Exactly! Who cares if they have new monikers (they almost definitely do) if you protect yourself? Just don't get sucked into these schemes and it won't matter who is running them or what alias they are using.

How do you know MNW and Pirate aren't in cahoots?  Perhaps the actions MNW took gave time to pirate to take care of his own personal obligations first during the initial chaos.  Why couldn't this be the case?

Luckily, I have no dog in this race.  At the very least, MNW is not someone that can be trusted in the future.  I am just hoping that these fucking assholes don't already have new moniker's in play for the next heist. 

After personally getting Zhoutonged and then witnessing this nightmare, I will never let my coins leave my own personal wallet ever again.

Loup, you're one of maybe three or four posters on here that is thinking rationally. Thank you.

You must be right... I missed the part where Matthew proclaimed a break even service for victims of prate's fraud. You are transferring your hurt over the pirate debacle onto Matty and his ill-advised and ignorant "bet". You actually lost your 4,800 btc through pirate, you just lost out on the opportunity to break even with a doubling down bet. Did you escrow the funds to pay Matt in the event that you lost? Are those funds still available to you? You lost nothing, other than a chance to break even, which was never promised to you.

Be upset with pirate, that's the bad guy in this. Matt is foolish, and mouthy, and doesn't think before he speaks. And he was dead wrong in believing pirate to be anything other than a ponzi, but he didn't take your money. Weigh both sides of the equation Matt vs. pirate. React accordingly.

Perhaps you were not around for the original circumstances leading up to the bet.

I had 4800btc on the line. If pirate pays I break even. That's the whole point. The bigger bets that hedged early on would have paid. I have absolute confidence that BrightAnarchist would have paid as well.

That Matthews intent publicly morphed over the 3 weeks is clear. This allowed an attempted backslide out of the wager.

I suggest you read the earlier posts regarding the wager. Also, track down Micon's interactions with Matthew on his little donkdown podcast.

No one is arguing about pirate being the bigger criminal here. If we were debating this we may well have a debate about Ponzi being a bigger criminal than pirate because he was the pioneer and wrote the book. This logical fallacy can be put to rest.

While I appreciate your literary embellishments, and they are enjoyable to read, I wish that you would write plainly and to the point.

Ah well, such is the lot of the galvanizing rod.

For the record- I felt the bet was a bad idea from the get go, bad for Matty, and bad for anyone who took interest in it. It was an unneeded distraction at the point where the pirate situation was going critical, and gave a lot of normally very rational people a new shiny thing to pay attention to with hopes of getting even off somebody else's dime, and not waiting for pirate to be caught, keel-hauled, broken on the rack and forced to make restitution.

I am not "defending" Matthew. I am suggesting that we could look at context and scale and unleash our vengeance accordingly. Matthew was very, very naive, and showed incredibly poor judgement to conduct this matter the way he did. It was immature, it was foolish, it has destroyed his reputation. But families can handle one child who has behavioral control issues. He embarrassed himself, but he didn't actually rob anybody. We don't know what would have happened the other way, would everybody have paid him? I suspect not, but we will never know. Pirate on the other hand, did actually rob. A lot. Where do we want to put our energy? Beating up the child who made a bad set of decisions but harmed none, or the pathological liar who recruited a cadre of the best and the brightest here to be his henchmen and did steal, lie and cheat?

Personally, I only have so many evil villain mastermind slots that I can equip, and once I get done with the current US Administration, Bernacke, the intersango gango, kittens, my ex-wife, Modaff, the Occupy Movement and a couple of other true evils, I have to pick between pirate and Matty. Which leaves plenty to be hardline about.

@Loup, this is an odd post for you, as you are normally pretty hard-line.  I've actually lost a lot of respect for your words given your defense of MNW.  It is unacceptable to apply a different criteria to someone just because you happen to know he is a flake.  No one is welcome to make financial contracts they do not intend to keep and we as a community need to enforce that unilaterally.  Personally, I don't think this was a joke at first to MNW but that is irrelevant. 

There should be zero tolerance for "jokes" that masquerade as financial contracts.

I don't think anyone thought he had 80k in bitcoins. Most people believed it was possible he had 10k though... The general consensus is that he truly believed he would win the 10k bet, hence his early caution on accepting bets from junior members.  Don't forget, Matthew did escrow a few bets in the beginning. Why would he do that if it was all a big joke? Sorry, but the bet became a joke when he realized he wasn't going to win. His mental condition may have even allowed him to convince himself that it was a joke all along, but he didn't convince me.

I also have to disagree about the majority of legitimate betters hedging their losses with pirate. I had no money invested with pirate and did not believe he was going to pay out. I made a modest bet of 10 coins, with every intention of paying up if I lost. I think the early betters were in the same court as me. When the initial 10k bet was closed, there were still loads of "investors" who thought they were still getting paid. Hedging with Matthew would negate their payment. There were even some idiots actually buying up pirate debt at that time. I'm guessing the majority of the hedgers came in at the 10k+ mark, when most realized they weren't getting paid, including Matthew.

Matthew may have done some good things for the community at some point but there is no place for a mentally unstable weasel in a company trying to sell their product to the same community he scammed.

Now, now smoothster... take your meds and relax friend. I do care if people lost money. I care a great deal, as I am one of those people who is currently at a net loss with the pirate disaster. And, no, for the record, I am not going to whine about it, I'm a big boy and decided to throw a couple coins into that cesspool, and no, I never told anybody how filthy or shady it was before we all collectively got screwed. And for full disclosure, my name does not appear on Matty's list of bettors. It never would have. I only bet three things, craps, Premier League soccer and US football. Never on shady, stupid plays having book made on how ignorant people can be. Which I assure you is what rational people saw Matty's bet to be.

But, let's take a moment and pull the curtain back for a peek at the reasoning behind my thoughts...

First off, I have nothing to lose here. Net, net, net since day one with bitcoins, I am comfortably ahead. I got to ride the roller coaster in the $30 era, and I have kick-out points in anything I do financially. I kicked, and own all my mining rigs free and clear, have put a few shekels aside as profit, and could give a rat's ass about reputation. What a group of anonymous folks on an online forum think of me means nothing to me. I an universally reviled in other online communities, including one where I am considered to be the most massive douche-bag of all time because I rode a flashy investment vehicle to a rapid killing, and bailed before the market inevitably tanked, with a shiny 5 series BMW to show for 30 days work, because I didn't share the secret of my success with the rest of the nasty insiders who were manipulating the game. I out-gamed the gamers, and that pisses people off.

Second off- Matthew is a well meaning goofball character. He is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in terms of self-promotion, and is an incurable attention whore. Unfortunately like most whores that I know, he is rather indiscriminate about who he bumps nasties with. Here he thought to make a point via the vehicle of pranksterism, and to shame the folks that called ponzi/scam/douche-bag early on what he (Matthew) felt was a valid investment. Well, that turned out to be a pretty bad decision. Sort of what championing Zhou Tong was like earlier this summer for him. So, let's stipulate that he is rash, impulsive and doesn't use up a lot of pre-planning on what checks his furious typing skills are writing.

But, I suggest we look at him in a different light than a fraud. Who here didn't know Matt was the class clown? Who here didn't expect him to find some silly-ass way to welsh the bet? Who here, and be honest now, actually thought that some happy go lucky entrepreneurial techno-impresario in Korea with a fetish for horse costumes actually had a million dollars in bitcoin stashed to play at silly buggers with? Who suffered actual damages? Nobody bought that critical surgery to keep Mom alive with their anticipated winnings from this absurd wager. Nobody is losing their homes, lives, honor or one single penny of their wealth. And quite frankly, I don't think a single person on the list would have actually paid a penny to Matt if pirate had decided to spank his little ass and make good. Especially not the piling on at the last moment clowns who got ouchy when he wouldn't take their bets.

But, he didn't win. He found his silly little technicality (and Matty- if you are reading this, there are a whole lot better ways to play this particular prank! Write me, you could have done this a lot less suicidally.) and thought everyone would have a big belly laugh at themselves for such a silly joke, and move on. Oops. Apparently a whole lot of very angry, very easily impressed folks thought they could recoup their losses through the simple expedient of a sure thing bet. Forgetting only the most basic rule that every gambler should know... the House is the only winner in any wager.

So, all snide comments and alleged side sitting aside, nobody lost a thing. Except Matt. He lost a job, he lost his honor, his lost his reputation, he lost the respect that he had worked very hard to build, and he lost his nickname which is now besmirched with a Scammer Tag. A richly deserved, and agreed in advance Scammer Tag.

Do we execute him a nineteenth time for this dumb move? Your call, Caesar. My point in this, and indeed in defending Matthew from some of the vitriol, is that we have really big, slimy ass-holish fish to fry in these affairs. Matt is a very, very minor sideshow that means nothing when compared to the great fraud that has happened. Let's not spend all our time beating the poor kid to death for making a dumb choice- let's all gang up instead on the assholes who are actually stealing really big amounts of money. Let's grab the pitchforks and torches, the tar and the feathers and go Biblical on their asses. We have real villains to worry about here, who are still mouth-breathing their schemes all over this community every day, and we are all too busy with the minutia to see the meteor crashing into our world.

So, if that still makes me a despised jackass in your eyes, eh, whatever. Sorry you feel that way. Chances are you will never have the exquisite pleasure of knowing firsthand anything about my balls, pro or con, as I play strictly het, and whatever you are alluding to with having the "most to lose" is so vague and churlish that I won't dignify it with a specific response.

And finally (yeah, I know TL;DR...) why limit yourself with necro ad hominem attacks... get Mr. Bitcoin in your post for some besmirching, what about Pattaya Brucie? Bitscalper? C'mon, you can do a whole lot better than BCX.

With enormous respect, I remain, cordially, your friend,

Loup Garoux. (and I fucking hate emoticons, and consider them to be a tool of the devil and otaku girls so I will not give you any, but insert some in your mind as appropriate.)

Please post often.

[bitcoin mag in rack at B&N picture]

lol at the Psychology Today mag with "LIFE LESSONS" on the cover in the pic. how appropriate.