Topic: Pirate accomplices - page 8. (Read 30323 times)

It's the "unofficial" theory I could say. I can't say I know, since I'm only a small part of his business, I can only suppose.

But this theory is a great business model IMHO. If I had the resources and the customers, don't worry, I would not be losing my time on this forum trying to explain it.

It is unrelated.

You didn't find shit.  It was in this thread about a page up.  I've already offered my guesses as to whats going on in other threads.  If you're so lazy that you want me to do the work for you, I couldn't be half assed.  My job isn't to defend pirate.  My post history is freely available and I'm sure within the last 10 pages you can find something that'll suit your fancy that you can properly distort.

I've been a pretty decent sport about answering questions as neutrally as possible and all I get for it is a bunch of trolling and people insulting my intelligence.  It isn't much encouragement to continue the dialogue.

Also a key detail people are not talking about is gpumax...

About growth, pirate always reserved himself the right to return coins if he didn't need them, and it occurred at certain occasions. At first too, he had limited capacity, and always advertised how much was available. There was no infinite growth, far from it, he kept the growth under tight control.

The almost exponential growth happened in the summer, when PPT were freely available and competing each other. It's possible that at that time, he couldn't supply the orders he had, even if the growth was astronomical. Also, think about the customers of pirate. They also saw the price go from 4$ to 6$, 7$, 10$. I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of customers having orders of like 50k BTC in a moment of panic buy. It's only 500 000$ right now, it's a pretty cheap investment for something that went from 5$ to 15$ in less than 3 months.

But at the same time, the crazy growth is what killed the golden goose. The fact that pirate is closing is proof enough that this growth was not sustainable. If the type of growth the PPT gave him was sustainable, the operation would still be running.

Seriously, some of you guys need to go read the BTCST topic back from the start, and see the whole thing evolve. You're talking like Pirate had control of 500k BTC for the last 8 months, and paid 1 120 000 BTC in interests for the last 32 weeks. You're taking the end and making the whole story with it, instead of reading the story back from the start.

You didn't find shit.  It was in this thread about a page up.  I've already offered my guesses as to whats going on in other threads.  If you're so lazy that you want me to do the work for you, I couldn't be half assed.  My job isn't to defend pirate.  My post history is freely available and I'm sure within the last 10 pages you can find something that'll suit your fancy that you can properly distort.

I've been a pretty decent sport about answering questions as neutrally as possible and all I get for it is a bunch of trolling and people insulting my intelligence.  It isn't much encouragement to continue the dialogue.

The above + other stuff I've read here indicates money laundering

I'm a little late to the conversation here, but I've done a considerable amount of reading on this matter over the last few days.  Frankly, I've yet to see any substantial information on pirate's business model posted anywhere.  I've seen many who claimed they knew what pirate was doing, but nobody provided any specifics (for the typical dubious reasons).  The most detailed info on pirate's op I've been able to find is in this post:

D&T, the theory we've explained to you has been floating around for many months and coming from different people. Even pirate back in March or April somewhat confirmed this. It's not coming out of the blue. There is no new news here, we're only explaining what has already been explained a couple of times before.

and to further expand..

When I first joined #bitcoin-otc, I did a crapton of trading.  I did a bunch of moneypaks to btc and back.  Basically, playing market maker for whomever needed to move.  Pirate joined around the same time as me, a few days earlier if I'm not mistaken.  He was doing much the same thing.  As a result, it was inevitable for us to end up trading.  At various times, we each would come up with some big fish (or so it seemed at the time) and would help each other out with sourcing coins or finding coins good homes.  All of these trades were always online, with random people that would join #bitcoin-otc.  Eventually, pirate had some 'IRL' customers and it seemed they were larger than your typical moneypak transactions.  Eventually, I got into mining rather than trading because of a few bad moneypaks that someone screwed me with.  It seemed safer and less time intensive.  Meanwhile, pirate seemed to be branching out his trading and there were times where he needed to borrow coins.  When trading, you'd try to line up the incoming with the outgoing to minimize exchange risk and maximize profit, but then sometimes things go weird with one side or whatever and a person would end up needing to borrow.  It happened to me at times in the past so I didn't think anything of it to loan out.  Time went on, the lending became more regular and one thing leads to another and we end up here.  Pirate never really told me what he was doing but I felt I had a good grasp of what was going on.  The dip in and out of two transactions could make 10% pretty easy (5% on both sides, sometimes much more than that) so 7% actually seemed fair.

There wasn't unbounded growth.  There were people that weren't ever going to invest with Pirate.  There were people that were only going to invest X with Pirate.  Still others couldn't afford to buy more coins because they ran out of funds and/or the price was goin gup past their preferred purchase point.  That only leaves the new coins from mining and obviously, that's limited as well too. 

2) So much growth he doesn't seem to have a need to control how much inflow of investors there are? Opening up to the public with seemingly no limits or buy in rounds? I know this is an "internet" business but I thought the dotcom bubble and now facebook would have killed the idea of such growth.

I see being 'dense' goes both ways, because I already answered 1) a few posts up.

2) I expect business growth.

3) I can just imagine the additional stink people would make if he didn't pay total the interest due on things. I know its a drop in the bucket compared to the principal. It may have also just been an oversight.  I really don't know, he hasn't told me.

4) If he sells coins to investor Y at say $10, coins that weren't really his, but coins that he borrowed off you and I, he must return the coins to us.  In the past, the coins were slowly appreciating, so once they hit $11, investor Y would sell.  Well, he announced the closure and the price tanked.  So now investor Y doesn't want to sell.  Sure, pirate's got cash he could buy coins.  We all know trying to buying a bunch of coins on gox is going ot make the price jump like a SOB so that's a terrible option.  Meanwhile, investor Y's pissed that he's taking a loss.  Perhaps the contract from pirate guaranteed a certain minimum price for X amount of days.  A whole slew of scenarios could be there.  Regardless, the sudden closure has thrown a wrench in things.  Probably an overreaction on pirate's part, but Monday morning quarterbacks always pick the right play.

Poor execution.  Does the owner even leave mommy's basement?

And since as of late the questions seem to be directly posed at me, I'd like to say I don't speak for Pirate, nor have I talked to Pirate in the last day.  The last time I talked with Pirate was in his IRC channel for the Q&A with everyone.

Do you really think there is a never ending line of rich fools out there lining up to buy bitcoins at over inflated prices week after week?

Further,by compounding the interest they would need to increase their appetite for btc or he would need to find increasingly more and more rich fools.

Yes, saying D&T is "missing it" is pretty flippant. If that was his model:

1. Why was Pirate's appetite for more BTC seemingly insatiable, until he closed?

2. How was he able to promise consistent returns for such a long period of time?

3. Why has he not publicly stated interest compounding has ceased?

4. What is it about this claimed trading model that has left him seemingly short of quite a bit of BTC a week after closing?

Out of curiosity imsaguy...
1) How do you pronounce your name? I keep pronouncing it like I'ms (or Iams, like the dog food) A Guy
2) At this point, given the long delay and minimal communication do you think Pirate will be able to pay out the rapidly increasing debt he owes as per the terms of his post (principle + interest to the hour)?

I do think it's a viable business idea on some level. I believed it at one point, mostly because I wanted to believe.

But it's the volume of BTCST plus the extraordinary interest rates (over such a long time) that make me unable to believe it.

Possible, maybe. I just don't think that is what is actually taking place. If it weren't for my new bet, I would like to be wrong.

It's also very easy for a legitimate investment scheme to slip over into the realm of ponzi. I do tend to think it was a scam from the start, and that this business idea is the only one Pirate could propagate to justify borrowing so many coins. It was only a matter of time before someone realized how simple a bitcoin ponzi scheme would be to pull off. Inevitable.