Quote from: alani123 on December 04, 2023, 05:18:04 AM

Quote from: The Sceptical Chymist on December 04, 2023, 05:03:12 AM

Quote from: alani123 on December 04, 2023, 04:11:55 AM

Golden Feather: Mircea Popescu - Dude died swimming. R.I.P. Allegedly he was a bitcoin billionaire. I hope this was just a boating accident. Godspeed to his republic, if it still exists.

Oh, man....is that MPOE-PR? If so, although he hasn't been active in years I always found his posts to be some of the most biting and humorous I've read on this forum yet. Who exactly was he? I only know the username from my lurking days, not who he was in the bitcoin world.

Mircea Popescu was one of the earliest bitcoin adopters.
He had built a securities exchange almost purely based on bitcoin and cryptographic verification. It was so barebones that very few were able to actually use it. He would famously call those that didn't manage to use it idiots.
It's very hard to document his antics because he was ridiculously active online and apparently only a very small but nevertheless dedicated crowd seemed to have been following him around.

MPOE-PR was the account representing Mircea 's security exchange, MPEX. Now defunct.
Mircea sold these securities when BTC was worth peanuts. I can only assume that most people never cared enough to retrieve their bitcoins and that's how he ended up becoming a billionaire. But by the time these bitcoins had any actual value, there was no one left to generate demand for buying back said securities.
One of the securities was of a now also defunct new website, qntra.net. Another was of a bitcoin based economy MMORPG, Euloria I think.

In the end, we have no idea what happened to these coins to be honest.
MPOE-PR was a woman btw. Not sure what her relation with Mircea was. He would post pictures with naked women regularly though. He apparently was very much into BDSM and featured it prominently into his life, posting about it for the whole world to see. Maybe in one of these pictures it was her. Who knows...
Some of his blog posts remain up on trilema.com

Mircea was considered by many to have tainted bitcoin's early image because of some of these antics. No doubt he was a very eccentric dude.
Ms MPOE's still alive but I don't know if she still cares about bitcoin or this forum in general.

All that absolutely useless information is still stashed deep into my head, thanks for asking and thank me later for the TMI that you didn't exactly ask for. Grin

Was MPOE-PR really a woman though? I thought it was Mircae himself pretending to have hired a porn star to represent him on this forum, but the writing style seemed similar to his.
Anyhow, he was not very popular and would probably fit the role of a villain if he was still around, but he surely made things more interesting.
I liked how he trolled the FBI Grin

if anyone remembers that.

Apparently his blog, Trillema is still up, with some edgy and controversial takes:
http://trilema.com/