Quote from: JoelKatz on August 22, 2012, 09:14:41 AM

Quote from: swissmate on August 22, 2012, 09:00:28 AM

I must say Vescudero is nut running any ponzi.

I've made several deposits and withdrawals in his 2% deposit with no problems.
And I've heard from others that they have succesfully withdrawed the money.

Every ponzi does that. If you couldn't successfully withdraw, nobody would deposit. Deposits are the lifeblood of a ponzi. So long as deposits exceed withdrawals, a ponzi schemer will generally continue to process withdrawals to maintan the positive cash flow into his pockets.

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Also he has appeared in public and talked about bitcoins and his plans in the first spanish bitcoin meeting delivering some personal info.

What does that prove? Do you think it's impossible to know a criminal?

Almost every purported investment that claims unusually high returns relative to risk is either misrepresented (the risks are higher or the returns likely lower than claimed) or a ponzi scheme. The way you show that a such purported investment is not a ponzi is to demonstrate that there are actual legitimate investments taking place and that there's a source of funds for the withdrawals that results from profitable investment of the deposits rather than just the deposits themselves.

I can't agree with this. I tried to deposit with Vescudero and he only accepted around 1/4 of my offer as deposit. After he increased the total limit, he put a per-deposit limit. You can investigate this using multiple forum accounts and trying to deposit over given limits (not per-deposit, but limit for the whole operation) to various borrowers. Another borrower, chungenhung recently returned all deposits with interest and shut down operation. I'm not sure he's the first one to do that either. How would you explain these phenomena?

I think it's much more complicated than that. Some of these borrowers will turn out to be ponzi schemes, and some won't. Some will still default (BDT for one, even if it doesn't fit your ponzi criteria) just by being a bad investment. And in the end, people will either stop lending, or some auditing system will be put in place (am I too optimistic?). Hell, notme paid out all his pirate pass-through lenders with interest even without getting paid himself, which doesn't fit even my description of reality.