I saw you
talk about this in a previous post, and you said that you have a "hard-requirement of not exposing (yourself) to counterparty risk" and I wanted to point out that having Dean deposit the bitcoin collateral with a reputable escrow would expose you to counterparty risk with the escrow. I agree it is not a good idea to expose yourself to counterparty risk to someone offering an "instant" 42% return. It also is maybe a good policy to not expose yourself to counterparty risk to anyone who approaches you with a business proposal over a threshold.
It's actually not too bad. My suggestion was that we use an escrow-agent to create a 2-of-3 multisig address (Where I am one holder, dean is another and the escrow the third). We would both commit enough funds into the multi sig-address (and keep it topped up) and have public payout addresses. Dean preliminarily agreed, so I talked to some extremely prominent members of the bitcoin community who agreed to escrow the deal. But that rapidly fell apart with nonsense excuses and kept offering amendments such that would break rule from the start: I am not going to enter a deal where I need to trust him with a million dollars.