Topic: Scammer tag: PatrickHarnett - page 22. (Read 39288 times)

Taking a more abstract point of view, I hope this thread highlights it's a bad Idea to hand you're irreversible digital currency over to even arguably the most trusted "i'll take care of ya money men" on this forum!

I'm shocked that more people on this forum desperate to make 1% a week on their money haven't heard of a site called betfair where you can lay really shit horses and get 1%. Personally I think this is a terrible idea, but it's certainly would give you much better odds of a return than any of the joke investment opportunities on this forum.

As Joel's explained borrowing money at crazy interest rates to people at insane interest rates isn't a sane business model, at least it kind of makes sense that a really a shit horse is likely to lose!

Joel. I'd be fine with this if it was always transparent who made a mistake. However, courts cannot figure this out in most cases. Thus you make simple, predictable rules that assign responsibility independent of who is at fault. That is what civil law should be about (I think).

In other cases, courts can figure out who made a mistake. Then the court can assign blame. That is what criminal law should be about (I think).

In clear-cut cases you assign blame, in vague cases you default to simple, predicatable rules.

The simple predictable rule here is that the debtor is always responsible for his debt (at least before bankruptcy law)

I still completely disagree with you Joel.  It doesn't matter what Patrick's plans with the money was - he agreed to pay back at a certain rate for a certain period of time.  He failed to do so.  He broke the contract.  That's all that matters.

PM-ed Patrick to let him know the existence of this thread. It should be made mandatory that the parties involved should receive a notice by the form of PM/email after making an accusation thread.

If they both made a mistake, and that mistake caused a loss, then they should split the loss.

They're not "assumptions that Patrick made". They're beliefs that both parties to the contract had, without which neither of them would have entered into the agreement. And I never said he could "back out of his contract scot-free".

Right, because that's not a common mistake. That's a mistake made by only one party. I'm talking about a common mistake. (Please see my example of the contract to purchase a partial interest in a car.)

That's ridiculous. Those lending to Patrick made precisely the same failure with precisely the same consequences.

The contract couldn't have had such a clause because neither side believed that situation was possible. The contract simply doesn't say what happens in that case. There is no equitable reason Patrick should take the entire hit. It is only equitable to split it. Both parties are equally culpable, both parties made the same mistake. The contract doesn't say who bears the costs because neither party thought that would happen.

If there's evidence that either Patrick or his lenders believed this outcome was reasonably possible, then my argument doesn't work -- it's not a common mistake. But it's quite clear that Patrick would not have loaned money if he believed this was possible. It's idiotic -- he'd just invest in Pirate himself. And similarly, his lenders would not have lent to him if they believed this was possible -- they'd just have invested in Pirate themselves. Both parties were victims of dishonest borrowers.

I'll have to disagree with you here JoelKatz.

The contract was made on assumptions that Patrick made, sure.  But that doesn't mean he can back out of his contract scot-free just because his assumptions were wrong.

If the bank loans me $1,000, and I wanted to use that $1,000 to invest in a business that I assumed to be risk-free, but it turns out the investment DID have risk, and I lost the $1,000, would the bank just let me off the hook?  Nope, they'd still want me to pay back the loan, regardless of what my assumptions were and how those assumptions turned out.  Would they hit my credit score when I failed to pay the loan back?  Of course they would!

We're hitting Patrick's Bitcoin community "credit score" because he failed to hold up his end of the bargain.  It doesn't matter that he didn't realize he was investing in BS&T passthroughs - that was a failure on his part to do due diligence, and it is his responsibility to own up to that mistake and still make payments according to the contract.

Now, if he had worded the contract with a clause something like "If my investments fail, then your investment with me is worth nothing," then I can definitely see a case for NOT giving him a scammer tag.  Otherwise, this is nothing more than him failing to hold up his end of the agreement, and he should get the scammer tag until he makes good on the promises made to those he contracted with.

Fine, then give the people who lend to scammers a "Lend to Scammer" tag. I agree, this would be informative.

I don't think that the 'we both made a mistake' idea is helpful here. Obviously they both made a mistake.
When, I lend to someone and 'we both made a mistake', it is the debtor's responsibility to take the hit for the creditor.
If I make an equity investment and 'we both made a mistake', then the investor takes the hit.

Is there some evidence that Patrick has declared bankruptcy / liquidated his possessions? Do you feel that he shouldn't have to because incurring the debt was a 'mistake'?

If so, I have some 'mistaken' student loan debt to clear. Is there a court of JoelKatz available somewhere?

Can a mod confirm that they're looking into this?

It wasn't a lie. It was a mistake. It was a mistake made by both participants in this deal. Each side had substantially the same information and made substantially the same mistake.

Patrick made a genuine attempt to vet those who borrowed from him to ensure they weren't just borrowing from him to invest in Pirate. Unfortunately, they lied to him. In retrospect, this is 100% predictable.

But if you think for just a second, it's quite clear that if Patrick had any suspicion that this would have happened, he wouldn't have lent money to them. Think about it, it would have made no sense. Patrick would have just lent to Pirate himself and would have made a greater interest rate. (And, in fact, I was arguing with Patrick and those who lent money to him at the time that it made no sense.)

This was a common mistake underlying the contract, made with equal fault on both sides, and it makes it inequitable to enforce it as agreed.

He thought he did know, as did the people who lent money to him. This wasn't a mistake that he alone made. This was a mistake made equally by both him and those who lent money to him.

The difference is that the others paying back slowly and labeled scammers, like Hashking, are in default. Patrick is not. He would only be in default if it was equitable to enforce his contracts as agreed. It is equitable to enforce Hashking's contract as agreed because his deliberately misrepresented his Pirate exposure. There is no evidence Patrick did so.

In any event, if we were to try to do that, we'd have to figure out how much of the loss equitably belongs to Patrick and how much belongs to the lenders, so we can decide when he has paid back everything he is responsible for. That's a remarkably subtle judgment for the community to make and would take effort collecting evidence and making subjective judgment calls. A scammer tag is way too coarse a mechanism for such a subtle process. It's for fraud, theft, lies, and stealing -- not for complex deals gone bad due to outside facts with all sides acting in good faith to make good.

Those who loaned money to Patrick at usurious interest rates are just as responsible for this collapse as Patrick is. There is nothing more foreseeable than the inability for a business to consistently produce outrageously unrealistic profits. Yes, Patrick was an idiot. But so were the people who loaned money to him. I have yet to see a single such person take even one shred of responsibility.

I'd say there's a bit a difference between PH who's paid back half the money and is making reasonable progress towards getting it all paid off and someone like Hashking who's paid a couple percent of his debt, has said the rest will take at least 3 years, and demands people be nice to him or he'll just cut and run.

If he didnt know, he shouldnt have said it categorically like that and mislead potential investors.
As for him paying back slowly; so are a few other labeled scammers. Im all for removing the tags once they paid everything back.

I believe after reading what he has said after the Pirate default, is that he under-estimated the exposure people who were his borrowers,  to Pirate, but that he did not have prior knowledge. 

A bank counts debt is holds as assets & liabilities.   Unless you have more evidence, I am not sure this alone should meet the bar.   I have been visiting his thread in another section and so far, he has been slowly paying people back in regular intervals.


 

That turns out to have been a lie, and hardly an innocent one.

Am I the only one who after reading the transcript, does not understand what is wrong other than the allegation that a deposit has not been paid back in a timely manner.     Could the OP please summarize what is actually the issue so we can weigh the evidence.  Just posting some logs out of context and having someone passionately arguing with the OP using Pirate references is not enough. 

I want your argument so I can weigh it.



Appreciated,
Dalkore

Meaning that person is a scammer and you shouldn't borrow money from them. (See the post above me for one way they could abuse this, but there are many others.)

I don't agree. If Patrick's portfolio had consisted of deposits from people with scammer tags, people might not have so easily underestimated the risk.

It's not clear why that would be stupidity. He might want to borrow funds to finance his debts better. There's no evidence he would mislead people about the circumstances. He has no history of doing so. If he wants to borrow money so he can settle his debts with those he had to force terms on and instead owe money to people he freely negotiated terms with, why should that be discouraged? (But that's the best argument I've heard so far. If that's the reasoning, I wouldn't consider it particularly unfair or unreasonable -- just a bad idea.)

Well I could claim for example that I borrowed you money and provide forged evidence to support my claim, which would make me a scammer.

Scammer tags are issued in the public interest. Blame is irrelevant.

Borrower in default gets scammer tag -> signal "this person is in default don't lend to this person"
Creditor gets scammer tag -> signal "meaning "

Obviously the latter signal is useless. Therefore, scammer tags are only assigned to borrowers in default.

Regardless of whether Patrick is a good guy or whatever, there may still be idiots who would agree to lend him more funds.
The scammer tag is intended to protect these idiots from their own stupidity.

Nobody has yet admitted publicly that they relied on those ratings. If anyone does, we can try to figure out whether we should laugh or cry.

Now that Standards & Poor has to pay back investors for their false ratings, it should be pretty obvious to require Harnett to pay back pirate investors for his false ratings.

It's not clear he's a debtor in default. He's a debtor in default if it's equitable to enforce the contract as agreed. But because the contract was based on a common mistake -- that Patrick's loan portfolio did not have significant Pirate exposure -- it's inequitable to enforce the contract as agreed.

Say you and I both believe that you have part ownership a particular car. I agree to pay you $5,000 and you agree to transfer to me your ownership interest in the car. If it turns out that you don't own the car at all, it's inequitable to insist that I still pay you the $5,000 in exchange for your zero ownership interest in the car. I wouldn't be a "scammer" because I broke the agreement, even if it technically appeared to say that all you had to do was transfer to me whatever interest you had, even if that was none at all.

Here there was a common mistake underlying the contract. It's inequitable to enforce the contract as agreed.

By the way, I doubt there are any courts that would enforce a contract of this sort. The usurious interest rates pretty much assure that the contract can only be kept by fraud or coercion and virtually assures this kind of outcome. Blame for that goes equally to both sides, IMO. Anyone who is legitimate and likely to pay back won't borrow at such high interest rates. The only people willing to pay such ridiculous rates are people who don't expect to have to pay back out of their own money.

Both sides deserve equal blame for this outcome, and I see no logic to applying a scammer tag to a transaction where both sides are at equally at fault.

I'd be open to an argument that Patrick is imposing an unfair portion of the default costs on his lenders. They should be shared.