Quote from: 556j on August 24, 2012, 07:08:26 AM

Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on August 24, 2012, 02:35:39 AM

Backing up your wallet doesn't harm another person's business btw.

If what was said on forums about pirate started to hurt his business, he could have done many number of things to prove otherwise. When asking for millions of dollars from lenders this is a basic duty. But yet pirate refused all options. Locked his thread. Started his own IRC channel where he could control the discussion. Every one of his actions from the beginning followed classic ponzi behavior. It was not unreasonable for people to continue to warn others. What do you think of the other people that were encouraging deposits very aggressively? Surely you didn't miss the massive spam fest trying to drown out the naysayers. That behavior is so much more damaging than what you are complaining about.

How much harm do you think pirate will have done to the community if he does abscond? The damage will be much much worse than if he was legit and "trolls" really did kill his business. And again he have many options to silence the trolls but did not.

Micon explained this to you on his show. If I tried to make the claim Bitcoin Magazine was a scam people would just think I am an idiot. Actually some people were claiming that in some other thread, but it quickly and naturally devolved from scam to just being late on issues. And most rationale people would understand any new business is going to have growing pains and unexpected delays. It's pretty common for print issues and you guys have been doing great all things considered. Any forum is going to have massive trolls, you can't do anything to fix that (even betting). You can't let that crap get to you.

This makes sense more or less, but doesn't exactly cover the reasoning I had. What you say is correct, but there are other arguments, including the "walks like a duck" fallacy, benefit of the doubt, discerning between educating about and crusading against investments, etc. let's talk about this more when the bet is over as it will probably help to understand more irregardless of outcome. I'll mull it over what you said though (and actually I -did- miss the part where Pirate and investors were being aggressive. Before I made the bet, I was only seeing the opposite. Do you have any threads as examples?)