Thanks to everyone who participated in this bet. It was a great social experiment for me to find out who my true friends were, and also to entertain the community (which is my true purpose on these forums and always will be). Unfortunately, it looks like I lost the bet. This means I'll need to pay out exactly as described in my original thread OP.
Many of the people betting were very careful to point out that others were ignorant and foolish to invest their money into Pirate without doing due diligence beforehand, so far as to call them shills, suckers, etc. This leads me to believe that the individuals betting in my bet are very wise with their money and would only bet if they carefully read and understood the rules of the bet. For this reason, I am confident that the very wise individuals betting in this thread will be satisfied with the very literal interpretation of my thread.
I will begin paying for my losses as outlined in the following rule:
If I lose the bet, you get 20BTC sent to that address (13dSK4663Ts7j2PwHS1eUVjycKLBwx7PJM). If you lose, you'll need to send 20BTC to my address.
I'll begin processing the payouts for each of the 112 betters in this spreadsheet immediately:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajtx05YrHtIydFVHcGxLOExTbnhqajJLZmlSZUNtM3c&pli=1#gid=0Please make sure to following along for your own record keeping purposes. I will update this thread with each payment as well. Thanks again!
Technicality fail. If you wanted to pull a technicality it would not fly with your intended statement of literalness as you have just worded it. Because of the statement 'in this format', it is clear that the only thing the betters failed to do was to place their bets in 'code'bet info'/code'.
Next time you need a loophole just ask one of us lawyer types. IANAL though, so don't ask me. I just play one in that RL thing we hear about every so often..