MNW's promise was that he will give 100% ROI if pirate defaults. When pirate officially defaulted, he has broken his promise.
Compare to a bunch of tokens / IOUs which has zero terms. No contract unlike MNW, end of story. If I said that I would redeem those for actual BTC, and did not specify a time, then it would have to be a reasonable amount of time.
Exactly why I asked Theymos "If I had made the bet with Ripple IOUs instead, would I still have gotten the scammer tag?". It's a legitimate question that he needs to answer. Apparently scamming expected value, cheating, tricking, promising without delivering, whatever you want to call it-- is fine so long as it utilizes the Ripple system.
I assume if you'd promised to settle in ripple IOUs (without specifying any settlement date for those IOUs) then you could have just issued ripple IOUs and then forgotten about them.
An IOU without settlement terms is worthless.
What you did was make a bet - where established practice is immediate settlemenet in cash as soon as the outcome is determined. There's no equivalent default settlement terms for IOUs.
Bets need to be settled in cash on demand (unless agreed otherwise). IOUs don't.
That's the difference - and why you got tagged but TF didn't/shouldn't. If anyone should get tagged for this it's the ripple developers for promoting a system which automatically treats even explicitly worthless debt as having the same value as payable-on-demand debt. Sounds like they intend to fix this - but it's hardly a new issue or one which they were unaware of.
And people handing out ripple trust for no reason is hardly new either - as soon as ripple was launched there were threads where bunches of idiots handed out trust at random to one another.
This is exactly what's wrong with their system. And new users that don't know any better are liable to trust people without having any idea of possible consequences. I would never use ripple to trade.