🚀 In 2011, a stranger on a Bitcoin forum offered something no honest operation can offer: 7% a week, every week. Thousands of people said yes.
This episode of Mining Tales follows Bitcoin Savings & Trust and the pseudonymous operator known as pirateat40. Between February 2011 and August 2012 the scheme took in at least 700,000 BTC on the promise of fixed weekly returns from trading. There was no trading strategy. New deposits were paying old ones — the oldest fraud in finance, running on the newest asset in the world. The SEC charged him in 2013; a federal court entered judgment in 2014, and he was sentenced to prison for securities fraud. It is the clearest lesson in early Bitcoin history about the difference between a promised yield and a real, physical operation.
In this video, you'll see:
📈 How a forum persona built trust before he ever took a deposit
⚠️ Why a fixed weekly percentage is the warning sign, not the selling point
💱 How the scheme collapsed once withdrawals outpaced deposits
⚖️ What the SEC and the courts eventually established
⛏️ Why mining hardware behaves nothing like a promised return
Mining Tales — the OneMiners series on the stories that shaped Bitcoin.
💡 This is exactly why OneMiners does not sell a rate of return. You buy real hardware, it carries your name, it sits in a facility you can visit, and what it produces depends on the network, the Bitcoin price and your power cost — not on our promises. No fixed weekly percentage. Ever.
A promised weekly percentage is a claim. A miner is a machine you can point at.
👉 Start mining smarter with OneMiners:
• Explore our global hosting locations
• Browse the latest ASIC miners
• Learn more about OneMiners
⛏️ Real Hardware, Not a Promised Yield
• You own the Bitcoin miner outright, in your own name
• 20 real facilities you can see, verify and visit
• 7-year hardware warranty and 0% management fees
• Transparent, all-inclusive electricity pricing
• No fixed returns, no guaranteed yields, no exceptions
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Disclaimer: Performance, profitability, and mining results vary depending on cryptocurrency prices, network difficulty, electricity costs, and market conditions. Nothing here is financial advice.
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