Quote from: mrb on October 05, 2012, 10:41:30 AM

Bottom line, there is no free money. 1.5% weekly == 117% yearly. There is almost no way Vescudero is legit, especially when his operations match almost all the Ponzi red flags established by the US SEC, which I keep quoting again and again: http://www.sec.gov/answers/ponzi.htm

You forgot a few things: first of all, the interests were not compounding, so this is not 1.5% weekly => 117% yearly, but 1.5% weekly => 78% early. Moreover, it ran for what, 10 weeks? So it means 20% max if it had been at 2% all along (which is not the case). This would mean a maximum investment of 748 BTC if Victor had to pay everything out of his pocket and everyone had kept their investment for the maximum time at a rate of 2%, or 655 BTC at a average rate of 1.75%. That's not really a big deal, and in reality the interests were probably lower than that (the detailed computation can be performed from the published data).

When he started doing this, it was easy to loan money at 3% a week, and get it back. Assuming Victor did this, I guess he started to build a reserve with the extra interests he got. When the other people rate went down, Victor promised interest rates also went from 2% to 1.5%. He probably had difficulties when others started to fail. He may even have had to compensate some defaults by buying more bitcoins himself. He wanted, as he announced it, to establish himself as someone that could be trusted. So far, he took upon himself to give everybody their money back with the promised interests, even if he probably endured a loss by doing so.

Moreover, you also forget that Victor gave his personal information, verified by several people, along with pictures, including at public events, we know where it works, I think Micon had it checked by a friend of his from his employer internal directory, so yes, this increases the confidence.

If Victor was to start a venture in the bitcoin world, I now think more people would trust him than before, because he stood by his word, with not a single deviation from the beginning, although a good part of the bitcoin world broke loose at the same time. I certainly would trust him more than before. Maybe I'm gullible, but what kind of guarantee would satisfy you?

Everyone is a *potential* scammer. Heck, I may even have dealt with people on #bitcoin-otc and used my real and public identity to do that to instill confidence, but nobody (not even me) can predict what the future will be made of! Even the most trusted person can become crazy. What you need if you want to ensure you will not be scammed is regulations (k out of n signatures for example), because you can never know what a person will do next, even if you think you can guess so.