If you were a collector, you should know about "Roll your own coins". I do not need to own 10,000 individual 1Ƀ coins or even 2,000 individual 5Ƀ coins. I can own a 0.3155111Ƀ and 9 separate 1,111.11111111Ƀ coins if I wanted to (TL;DR? I load my own coins.) Now, part of the reason I'm being purposely vague is for my privacy and protection. The other is because the conspiracy theories are fascinatingly entertaining for me.
I think, Pirate decided to give back the $ to everyone else, but as a way to supplement his income, he and MNW are working together to make these huge bets, so when Pirate does give everyone their $ back, instead of being down 500K BTC, he can be down 495K BTC (He and MNW will split the BTC) and Pirate can walk away with a cool $50K.
With that $50K, he will then move to Somalia, purchase a ship, and become a real pirate. Or if he screws MNW on this deal and walks out with the 500K BTC, he will buy an even BIGGER ship, and maybe even some gold from Coinabul to get his collection of booty started.
But that is, if Pirate isn't actually the Feds trying to monitor the flow of BTC, and have now decided that 500K BTC is the proper "Tax" to levy on the BTC community as a whole.
This, in it's entirety is the most likely conspiracy theory out of all of the ridiculous conspiracy theories, because it shows me doing something adventurous. Come on guys. You can do better than that.... Nothing so far even shows any imagination for christ's sake. What if I just took a loan from Pirate for 10,000BTC? Wouldn't that explain my confidence? That's not the case but -seriously- lacking imagination trolls. Keep trying.