Quote from: ZenInTexas on January 24, 2013, 05:01:03 PM

Just thought I would follow up on this one; after giving things time to settle down.

It makes more sense to close down once all incentives to stay are removed. Hence, I expect any reasonable individual who gets a Bitcoin talk scammer tag, and can't remedy the situation after considering all the facts, they will eventually stop interacting with the Bitcoin talk community.

I have to say anyone who gets banned, has even less reason to stick around.

Starfish BCB was probably run by an individual who had the very honest intentions, but his understanding of western banking lacked. It's sort of sad because of the social nature of bitcoin talk. So far, the scammer tag is the only way moderators have come up with to administer punishment for promises that are broken. For a person that truly believes they are honest, receiving a scammer tag must be very painfully. Expecting someone to stick around to face the pain is not something normal people would do.

In some ways, it's really a moral weakness in the Bitcoin world. What I mean by this, is there is no way to punish only the business side, ie spare the individual. It's a step backwards in time, since the scammer tag is the same as social isolation via a bitcoin debtors prison. I also happen to think this system appeals to some bitcoin supporters.

Banks are really, a systemic problem within Bitcoin. Banks as we know them cannot function in the world of bitcoin in the same way. Banks function in the western world because they can obtain funding based on their deposits, ie loans from a central bank, which multiples their ability to lend and make money; they use this multiplier to boost profits, which in turn allow them to write down bad loans and not reduce their capital base. Plus, there is no way efficient way to recover funds from a bad debt, not to mention the lack of statistics to even calculate loan loss provisions for a given business type/size.

Great post.

It's really a tragic story, because Patrick and his wife really do/did volunteer at and donate to a homeless shelter. If you do enough digging online you can find an article about Wendy. I think Patrick was a nice man who ended up between a rock and a hard place. Unfortunately he appears to have disappeared for good, which makes him more of crook than just a bankrupt man.

Though a petty analogy, it's far better that the "bitcoin bank" fail than to receive a bailout from the government. Amen?