Author

Topic: What was Pirate really up to? (Read 995 times)

legendary
Activity: 826
Merit: 1002
amarha
October 25, 2012, 12:31:18 PM
#4
He was probably just bullshitting the whole thing. All these phantom "big players" trying to bitcoin through him, yeah right.
hero member
Activity: 826
Merit: 500
October 24, 2012, 10:51:22 AM
#3
he was up to get rich, and did.
hero member
Activity: 868
Merit: 1000
October 24, 2012, 03:47:37 AM
#2
There's zero reason to believe that anything pirate told anyone - including the pass-through operators - was the truth.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1294044

His former employers, The Lending Partners (where one of his partners in GPUMax also worked), have a few things to say about pirate, too.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1289098

pirate told people what they wanted to hear - as all good conmen do.  He played to people's vanity and greed and found the mother-lode of both in this community.
legendary
Activity: 1330
Merit: 1000
October 24, 2012, 02:55:18 AM
#1
http://codinginmysleep.com/confessions-of-a-pirate-pass-through-operator/

Interesting article.  Kind of long.  These are the interesting parts:

Quote from: PPT operator
He [Pirate] claimed to be running a very large scale dark exchange.
...
What he was doing by borrowing and paying out all that interest was controlling the market for his large USD customers.

Okay, this isn't particularly surprising.  It seemed to be the common wisdom that this is what BS&T was doing.  Still, no real explanation of how this could justify 7% weekly interest.

But what about these details:

Quote
All of his profits were in USD on the USD side of the business.

Really?  Pirate had such little faith in Bitcoin that he didn't take any Bitcoin earnings?  That seems odd...

Quote
Everything fit together in a nice package (the business) also after talking to him for a long time I did not think he could have designed the whole thing himself.  I did not tell him that I thought this but at one point in the conversation he did intimate that someone else had designed the system (how the economics all worked out).

Wow, that's kind of surprising.  So Pirate was handed the design for a Bitcoin market manipulator, which he then used to short Bitcoin?  But by whom?

Quote
He claimed to have lawyers, contracts, etc on the USD side.

Even more interesting...

Quote
And one thing that was more of a "slip" or just the final nail in my coffin was when he let it "slip" that he had BOSSES.

Wow.  So Pirate was not only manipulating the Bitcoin market on behalf of clients, but BOSSES as well?

Now this really doesn't add up.  What really went on here?  Was Pirate just a front-man, or a patsy?  Still more questions than answers...
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