Anybody who can understand English knows what he meant. Let's look at it again:
Is there anyone who thought Patrick Harnett & Pirate were doing honest dealings? I certainly hope not.
He uses the word "thought", as in "thought at the time." Don't know how you could possibly confuse this, but I'm sure you'll find a way.
What part of any of this changes the fact that there are no victims seeking redress and this is purely driven by clear long term motives to target OGNasty rather than to seek any kind of restorative justice?
Nobody is talking about the "victims," aka willing Ponzi participants, because nobody cares about that aspect. Its just interesting information that was recently brought to light. Don't know why you're getting all bent out of shape over it.
I am not really opposed to bringing some of these matters to light based on possible new evidence, even though I hardly know shit about a lot of the underlying case. Nonetheless, if there is new evidence, we cannot keep considering the looking into the matter would merely be a personal vendetta or fishing expedition.
Sure, having victims would seem to be some kind of necessity in terms of considering impact or even if there would be a damage related remedy, but, they might not even know enough details of the underlying situation to realize that they were damaged, and I keep coming back to the idea that the extent of damage would have some reflection of the dollar value of the asset at the time of the damage, even if the asset had subsequently appreciated in price (which we know to be the case with bitcoin).
I see most of the time in 2012, BTC prices were around $4 but towards the end of the time period in question, BTC price went up to $16 before coming back down again to $10-$12 for the rest of the year.
There seems to be some evidence that OGNasty may have paid off the bigger of the investors, so the ONLY remaining ones would have had smaller investments.
Of course, in retrospect, we can see that it was a ponzi shceme and too good to be true, but when people are caught up in ponzi schemes they sometimes will still participate based on their considerations that they are not going to be the last person out, so they kind of already know the risk, or could be presumed to be sufficiently taking on their own risks.
So some of the victims might have been reluctant to make any claims, even if they did not get paid back any of their investment, because there could be some feelings of guilt about making any kinds of claims in such an obvious too good to be true situation, but even if everyone kind of knew it was a ponzi scheme that would not remove fiduciary responsibility from anyone serving as a middleman, including if there was fraud, misrepresentation or conversion that is just discovered.
There might be plenty of investors who don't give too many shits about chances that they took on a few hundred dollars, so they don't really want to rock the boat if they got paid back some of their amount, given that they knew the whole thing was bullshit, but if they later found out that there were breaches of fiduciary responsibility, fraud, misrepresentation or conversion, then that could raise their concerns (or change their perspectives).
I still don't believe that any reasonable remedy would purely measure damages in BTC... but we cannot really know circumstances, if we cannot pindown any actual cases of actual victims, can we? On the other hand, there still could be conclusions of wrongdoing, based on the new evidence, even if the exact victim circumstances are not clarified?