The mistake was failing to realize two things:
1) There's no way to enforce these loans in any court of law ...
2) Borrowing from Patrick to invest in Pirate just seemed like too good a deal ...
This is why Patrick's business failed. And there is no argument you can make why Patrick should have known this that doesn't equally apply to those who loaned him money.
I am not exactly sure are you here claiming the Patrick understood this in his heart or did not. In other parts you are clearly claiming that at least some people understood these problems and publicly discussed them on this forum and you link their understanding very strongly to Patricks understanding of the situation. Either Patrick did infact understand these fundamental problems or at least should have understood them as they were presented to him. In neither of these cases it is acceptable to publicly post claims to the contrary in the attempt to get money flowing in, probably from the more stupid part of the audience and if somebody does that he deserves a scammer tag.
Some other kind of argument about the case was that Patrick was operating an honest to good solid business with all the best intentions and did not have any clue there might be big problems and everything just came as a total surprise from blue sky to him later. I might understand how somebody could argue about this not deserving a scammer tag, but in this case also the lenders were totally without fault to themselves and the reason the loss should be shared is that everybody was without fault of any kind. However this does not seem like the argument any more in the last reply.
I find the lenders stupid and think they are also at fault to the losses but I don't buy the theory that it is okay to separate money from the fools. This lenders stupidity and fault is totally separate issue from scammer tag to Patrick. In similar way I find the people falling to Nigerian scammers stupid and at fault of losing their money, but the Nigerians are still scammers.
About the people that borrowed money from Patrick, I know nothing of their actual status, so I am not making any claims about them. I am not even sure whether they exist in how big numbers or what is the actual route how money disappeared to pirate or where. Everything is possible in here. I think the probability is great that there are also good candidates for scammer tag in there. The pirate case was a gift from sky to many scammers and I would be very suprised if all losses that are said to be be because of pirate, are actually losses to pirate.