Topic: Scammer tag: PatrickHarnett - page 14. (Read 39288 times)

From what I have seen here I highly doubt it, seems like they have never met a scam they would not like to throw their money away on around here..

Your argument is that Patrick's business method was sound, he just couldn't quite figure out how to get it right. Perhaps he used the wrong magic words. Perhaps there was one little thing he forgot to do. If he had just asked one more question, checked one more reference, it all would have worked. You have learned absolutely nothing from this fiasco. I hope you are in the minority.

I just don't see how you can confidently say "There was nothing PH knew that would have changed MP's view. ".  Do you actually KNOW who all PH's customers were at the time that deal was made?  Do you actually KNOW what steps he took to ensure they weren't going to use the funds to invest in pirate?  Unless YOU know EVERYTHING PH knew you can't possibly give any credible comment on how much of that someone else would have known.

Now IF PH's methodology was simply to ask people "Are you going to invest this money in pirate?" AND IF it was well known (KNOWN, not suspected) that was his entire methodology then you might have a point.  Is this what you're claiming?

On the general issue that people gamble whilst (at least partially intentionally) ignoring the risks I have no argument.  Most idiots (as opposed to rational people) look at pretty obvious ponzi schemes and try to look for reasons to believe they're legitimate - when they should, rationally, be looking for reasons to confirm they're NOT legitimate.  So they get into a mind-set of effectively trying to persuade/tallk themselves into investing when they should be doing the opposite - and insisting that the operator give full disclosure, answer in detail all queries etc.

But that's neither here nor there in this specific case.  MP wasn't investing in an obvious ponzi - in fact appeared to want to totally avoid pirate exposure.  MP's biggest mistake was likely assuming PH was competent to run his business - which WAS an erroneous belief both parties had in common: however someone fooling others that they have more competence than they do has never been an issue which, on its own, will invalidate a contract.

When this deal occurred, I also shared the mistaken belief that PH was likely competent to run his business.  When offering loans the most basic of skills needed is the ability to properly vet loan applications to determine ability to repay.  This obviously includes assessing the general reliability of the individual but also includes determining the means for which the loan would be used.  If your contention is that he wasn't doing that (or was just asking, not verifying) then obviously his business was just a disaster waiting to happen - but that doesn't mean that AT THAT TIME all and sundry knew that.  Even if there's threads pointing this out (or suggesting it) that doesn't mean that everyone read those threads - or that those who did read them gave more weight to the views of the posters than to a pillar of the community like PH.  Where's even ONE thread where there's general consensus that PH's investments MUST have heavy pirate exposure?

Just because YOU may have believed something at that time - which subsequently turned out to be correct - does not mean (or give you the right to assert) that everyone else should have realised the same thing.  And it's still a big leap from "should have known" to "did know" - where the latter would be the relevant condition.

As for your claim that not knowing who PH's customers were was irrelevant, thta makes no sense.  Are you asserting that EVERY customer of PH's invested the money in pirate and defaulted?  If not, then you already accept that SOME people borrow money at PH's rates and DON'T invest in pirate/similar.  So we then have two groups of people:

1.  Those who borrow and invest in pirate/similar,
2.  Those who borrow and don't invest in pirate/similar.

How do we find out how many of each?  Either:

1.  Investigate the customers,
2.  Ask PH.

MP didn't have the list of customers, so had to use #2.  PH was confident that pirate exposure was minimal/zero.  PH should know - from whatever due diligence he performed before (and after) loaning.  Doubting his word on that would make no sense - if you didn't believe him competent to undertake even the most basic requirements of successful loaning (doing enough due diligence to have decent confidence in repayment - which includes determining a use that isn't random gambling/spunking away on ponzis) then you shouldn't even be considering investing in him anyway.

I repeat in case you missed it.  Unless you claim ALL borrowers from PH were pirate investors then you NEED the list to work out whether, at any point, his exposure to pirate is 0%,10%, 30%, 50% or 100%.

PH fooled people (including himself) that he was competent to run a lending business/bank.  Your argument, at root, is that because people were stupid enough to be fooled by PH they deserve to lose out and that he shouldn't be punished for it.  That's a scammer's charter - aside from anything else.  You're basically saying that if you can talk people into an investment that, with full 20/20 hindsight vision, is clearly bad then they're as much as fault as the individual offering the investment (as both of them should have known it was too good to be true).  You also massively over-rate the weight people give to whatever threads (at that time) supported your proposition that PH was incompetent, out of his depth and very clearly exposed to pirate.

I did not say impartial. The point is that it makes no sense to ask me what you tried to ask me, as I have no way of knowing.


Are you aware the deposit was part of a CDO series? "Delayed payment" does not work in this context. On time or bust.

But no, PatrickHarnett has not been in contact (as is typical for scum of the sort).


This is not the first time someone's raised this point and I do think it'd be pretty sad if it were in fact true.

So far, in all honestly, I have no reason to suspect it is. Obviously there may be plenty I don't know that'd support that claim, but as far as I know, it's not the case.

True but how would that have made any difference?

MP could not verify them even if she knew who they were. What would she have done other than ask them? You think they would lie to PH but tell the truth to MP? PH knew Patrick's methodology. If it was unsound or insufficient, that was a common mistake.

And Patrick did assess the credibility of his customers. It's not like his method was a secret.

There was nothing PH knew that would have changed MP's view. They agreed on the common set of facts and they both drew the same incorrect conclusion from those facts.

If everyone was rational, this would be quite correct. But when it comes to greed, people have a rather bizarre ability to compartmentalize and isolate their knowledge. With subtly different senes of knowing, all of these were true. It's just like how every gambler knows that the odds are against them and many gamblers believe they will be the exception.

It just shows what we all know, that a lot of people gamble stupidly. Everyone who invested in Pirate knew that what he was saying was too good to be true, yet in a sense those investors believed it.

Your key false assumption is that all people are fully rational and only hold logically consistent beliefs.

Spokesperson?  Really, you don't sound like an impartial spokesperson.   You talk with too much authority for that.

Scammer, so you invest with someone, the investment goes bad and they are a scammer so you don't work with them to get your money back.  Sounds like a different motive.  Has you not gotten any principle back or gotten communications from Patrick about ETA for repayment.  This sounds personally motivated to swear his name, and not actually accept a delayed payment.

Sure, maybe it is a small deposit, but still BTC500 isn't something to think is small, it is in effect 1/42000th of all the Bitcoins in existence.  No matter, this doesn't add to the dialogue.

Miner fees, sorry I thought we were having a wider discussion about ideology outside of Bitcoin.  My bad.

You really just don't get it, do you?

1.  MP didn't know who PH's customers were.
2.  Those customers swore they weren't invested in pirate to PH, not to MP - more accurately, MP took PH's word that they'd said such - as MP COULD NOT verify that due to 1.
3.  PH had responsibility to assess the credibility of his customers' claims not to be invested in pirate because a) They were his customers,  b) MP couldn't due to 1.

If you accept the above then the following is each party's degree of knowledge:

PH had either been told (or not told) by his customers that they weren't invested in pirate.
PH either did or did not do due diligence on those customers.

MP knew that PH claimed he was satisfied that his customers weren't invested in pirate.

MP's knowledge about the specific investments was limited to ONLY what PH divulged.  There's no equality of information there.

Your argument then gos back to its default state which is:

"Everyone knew PH was invested indirectly in pirate"
"PH didn't know he was invested in pirate"
"MP didn't know PH was invested in pirate"

It's blatantly obvious that the first of those three statements directly contradicts the last two.  That lots of others also invested in PH also disproves your key assertion (that it was common knowledge PH was at risk to pirate exposure) - as noone who wanted pirate exposure would have invested at 1% per week.

Not only is your argument logically inconsistent ("everyone knew X",  "Except the people who had the most interest in knowing X", "And specifically except the only person who COULD know X"), it's also totally irrelevant anyway.  At no stage has PH claimed he should be released from his obligations because "everyone who invested must have known I was exposed to pirate so should take a massive haircut if they ever get paid back as their ignorance trumps my incompetence.".

Seems to me like PH made some errors of judgment, was unable to fulfil his commitments, still accepts he has those commitments but is unable/unwilling to resolve them in any sort of timely manner.  As such there's no point him posting here - as he isn't disputing any of MP's facts or what he owes.  If policy was consistent then I'd actually expect him to get a tag about same time after default as nefario did (both broke an off-forum agreement - more clearly tbh in PH's case).  Both have reasons outside their own control why they believed they had no choice but to break existing agreements.  Both, arguably, should have known that risk existed (in PH's case by properly doing due diligence on how his customers were using their loans).  Luckily for PH I don't think any of his victims are mods - so he's probably safe.

Yes. Miner fees.


You are aware I'm just the spokesperson, right?


Matter of policy. As explained afore, negotiating with scammers makes no sense.


According to PatrickHarnett himself, it was by no means a large deposit at all, let alone such a large one.

Well yeah.  That's why they charge a high interest rate.  No one is disputing that high interest rates generally correlate with risky investments.  What people are disputing is your insistence that a relatively high interest rate made it obvious that the funds Patrick invested in were investing in Pirate.  That is simply not true.  If I would have looked at a 1% weekly payout investment prior to the whole pirate debacle, I might have suspected that it was invested in Pirate, but it would have not been at all "obvious" as you claim.

Perhaps you are simply more insightful than the rest of us.  But just because something is obvious to you and a handful of other outspoken forum members does not make it obvious to everyone, nor does it make it "common knowledge" of any sort.

@ MPOE-PR - Ok, I agree with you on a few points.


1.  Yes this is about money

2.  No, we should not steal from others to give opportunity to others, but on the other hand, we do not live in a bubble so you do owe something back to the system that created your opportunity to prosper

3.  Able people should be making able decisions.



Question:  What I don't understand then is this, did you think this was truly a "risk-free" asset?  You were not depositing your BTC for safe keeping with him.  You knew that he was doing "something" with your BTC to generate profits to pay the advertised interest rate.   You didn't know what he was doing with it, but you knew it had risk.      What do you feel was the risk you were taking on to capture these profits?  What I don't understand is why your taking such a hardline stance and not working with him to get paid back?  Getting him a scammer tag will affect his reputation and may impact his ability to collect on the debts he is owed.   It seem counter-productive for someone who wants to get paid back unless you have another motive in mind when you made such a large deposit?  

Was Patrick's business model sound or not, in your view? Why do you think his business collapsed?

They take huge risks, and they know it. And they have the force of law to go after people who don't pay them.

Agreed.

I mean, heck, payday lenders charge upwards of 900% APR on a one week loan.  Which, broken down to a week, equates to what, 2.5% weekly interest rate or so?

1% interest per week doesn't make it obvious that it was part of a pirate passthrough scheme.  It wasn't obvious then, and it's not obvious now (as proven by MPBOR).

I find it particularly telling that he repeats ceaselessly that 1% a week is "the impossible" but completely ignored the obvious point that the MPBOR is twice that atm.

This is much like saying that paying half the LIBOR is "the impossible" in fiat. BS.

It doesn't matter whether it was impossible to fully determine the risk - what matters is that Patrick is responsible for shouldering the risk because nothing in writing stated otherwise.  And because Patrick did not fully disclose all of the information that would have made the extent of the risk "common" knowledge, it cannot fall under the "common mistake" rules that you keep coming back to.

OK i'll do it $2000 dollars!! (bitcoin only)

Should those "others" happen to include you, please learn the pecking order. You don't come to tell me what's what.

It's clear that you are absolutely determined not to learn anything from this fiasco. I hope others are not so stubborn. Your complaint is that Patrick did not do the impossible and you fail to take any responsibility for failing to realize that this is what you were expecting him to do.

To the extent that they would not be enforceable in whole or in part in the real world, Bitcoin contracts pretty much exist only by mutual consent.  I know that everyone likes to take the "Wild West, different rules, blah, blah, blah" line but I think that doing so not only leads to absurd over-valuations, it also encourages total paralysis when shit goes wrong and to some extent it discourages realistic recovery arrangements.

I think that Patrick's real world occupation and his experience in the energy derivatives market created a perception that he was or should have been aware of the strong possibility of correlated risk to a far greater extent than the other PPT operators.  I think that people made the assumption that "Patrick knows what he's doing" in large part because of his extensive experience in high risk markets where correlated risk has caused spectacular collapse in the past (Enron anyone?).

There seems to be a whole lot of meaningless blabla going on in this thread when action (or not) is needed I think somebody should set fire to Patrick's house or just leave it and let him payback like he's agreed as you handed over a non reversible digital currency to a foreigner in the first place.

Outsiders to Bitcoin in general - such as yourself - make all sorts of basically stupid but otherwise wild claims. The fact that they make them rends them no particular validity.

The "that works" in that quote works as follows:

PH: Hi, I would like to paint your house for a fee.
MP: Are you able to paint houses without doing them damage? Specifically, set them on fire?
PH: That doesn't matter because if I damage your house to any degree I will pay for it, up to the extent of the house's full value.
MP: That works, go ahead.

"That works" means that the respondent offered something substantially different from what was sought that is considered nevertheless to satisfy the original point. In this case, MP's concerns about PH's loans were put at ease by PH's universal and unconditional undertaking to repay (personally) in any event.

This is what "the business model wasn't part of the agreement" quote of mine before means: it was not, because what had originally started as a discussion of that was averted by Patrick's reply.


Our position is that this contract exists in BTC world. We're obviously (all of us) still working out how BTC world contracts work. The demand is obviously nonsense, nobody has the authority to award damages in BTC world, so the point is factually moot.

However, since JoelKatz's delusions reached the point of setting numeric percentages (randomly 40%, later randomly 50%, all this of course fully backed by the imaginary legions of "everyone" surrounding him in his mind) I figured it can't hurt anything to set a counterclaim, as an example. It's not to be taken out of the context of talking to that lunatic, and it's not intended as anything else than illustrative for that context.