Prizes Awarded = 2 Bitcoin

After leaving Overstock in August 2019 I wrote a series of blogs clarifying:

  1. Overstock decisions that previously I could not have explained;
  2. Deep State matters about which I went public in August;
  3. How the two actually might be tied together.

After what were, I believe, 29 essays, I had most of the story complete (without giving away the ending, I hope), and asked for summaries, promising to award 1 Bitcoin to the best effort. Some excellent efforts were made, and I thank the contributors for their work. My webmaster has identified one essay (a fine one, actually) as having enlisted mechanical aid in the voting, and thus had to be eliminated.

Because of the quality of the five that both made it through the voting and judging, I am going to (true to my word) award the winner 1 Bitcoin. But I am among the remaining five I will split up an additional Bitcoin.

The winners (and their numbers of votes) are below. The #1 winner received the second highest number of votes. I made the adjustment because as the guy binside the story, I found it closest to my understanding.

  1. No Stone Left Unturned: 1 Btc
  2. The Truth Cannot Be Hidden Forever: .25 Btc
  3. More Pepper: Short Freaks and Hot Takes .25 Btc
  4. Being Honorable is Viewed as Disruptive Instead of Beneficial .25 Btc
  5. Man Vs. Swamp .25 Btc

======================================

No Stone Left Unturned: 877

A concerned citizen, a patriot with a presage, and now, a nascent nomad. It all began at The Miscreants’ Ball in 2005 – a shocking call where Patrick Byrne analytically lifted a boulder to reveal a soiree of hedge funds, journalists and investigators – waltzing to the tune of “phantom” stocks. When the light cast upon the covetous creatures beneath – some of them fled, some even attacked – but most of them just dug themselves a deeper hole. Byrne had overcome cancer, founded an internet giant, and built an empire – but it was the unearthing of that rock that became the proudest day of his life. A recession, a decentralized currency, and an upset election later, Byrne has re-emerged. At the gates of a garden party full of oligarchs and hedge fund hoagies, he has shown up as an uninvited guest – intent to stay until no stone is left unturned. In his trials, Patrick has faced short sellers, billion-dollar bribes and even a honeypot foreign agent. He’s helped the FBI, reported to the DOJ, and been betrayed by the SEC. A necessary sacrifice at the Overstock table of his making – Byrne has come to tell his truths and lambast the lies. This service to his principles has forced Byrne to leave his country in pursuit of safety abroad. Hedged with crypto, gold, and more wisdom and experience to impart, he only asks of one thing – that we hear what he has to say, and perhaps meet him at the gates once again.

The Truth Cannot Be Hidden Forever: 1057

Before the great financial crisis of 2008, Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne sounded the alarm against stock market corruption in Wall Street about their embezzlement through defective stock settlement system. The SEC turning a blind eye enabled the bad actors to engage in what has become the largest financial crime of all time. In the Spring of 2019, Patrick Byrne again sounded the alarm, this time about Deep State political espionage related to the 2016 Presidential election. Byrne gained knowledge of corruption after becoming involved with a Russian national Maria Butina. In 2016, Byrne saw that Butina, through her personal charm and charisma, was opening backdoor channels between powerful figures in Russia and the major US presidential candidates of both parties. Byrne informed the federal officials about Butina and asked for advice. In retrospect, the feds were tracking Butina with the intention of using her as either blackmail against any future president or as a means to remove an unwanted winner of the election. Patrick Byrne made several TV appearances in August 2019 describing how he may have been used in a quasi coup attempt on President Trump. In August of 2019, the CFO of Overstock convinced Byrne that Byrne staying involved with the company made Overstock uninsurable. Patrick Byrne had to abandon his company and leave the country. The sun cannot be covered with mud, and the truth cannot be hidden forever. Dum spiro, spero.

More Pepper: Short Freaks and Hot Takes: 196

Financial Justice Warrior Patrick Byrne makes the first cut against the Wall Street Gang grain with a Dutch Auction rather than joining the IPO racket, earns perpetual malice for not falling in line. Despite not being a Good Ole’ Boy Byrne builds a successful company pestered by subtle efforts to pancake progress by those who stand to lose to the truth: the rules aren’t there to protect the public, they are selectively enforced by friends in high places. Government agencies spend years doing bare minimum to not disrupt the status quo, using Byrne’s talent while retarding his efforts in a bath of red-tape and circumstance. In a delicate game of Goliath and mouse Byrne spends years coordinating the creation of a brilliant new system to eliminate the sloppy settlement that enables the fraud playground to proliferate unexposed; blockchain opens the book that the SEC asked him to translate while buying Wall Street time to bail water. Rich crooks chop at the OSTK tree trunk lest the fruit grows. Impairing the company with smear and phantom shares distracts from the overarching plan which is to reinvent truth in assets. Detractors are successful in shaking the easily distracted, Patrick is persona non grata. While cooking a souffle containing a jail-break chisel, his Sous-Chefs failed to follow the recipe. Now Café Bazoomba is full despite the GSR dine-and-dash, but the executive chef has three Michelin stars for a reason and the patrons are salivating at what he can put on a silver platter.

When Being Honorable is Viewed as Disruptive Instead of Beneficial: 63

Gaining notoriety for battling settlement process corruption on Wall Street, Byrne subsequently emerged at the forefront of Blockchain technology integration, garnering him attention from individuals in Russia seeing it as means to prevent a post-Putin power vacuum. Maria Butina, approached him on the behalf of Russian Oligarchs interested in him speaking in Russia and meeting with Putin. Byrne reported the contact to the FBI and received guidance contradictory to law enforcement objectives from top officials he referred to as “X,Y, and Z” (one of which was Peter Strzok). He realized that something unusual was going on. His company was launching TZero, and attempted to sell the retail portion to enable this. The SEC executed actions that made it difficult. This paired with a capricious buyer tanked the deal. Byrne was offered $1Billion incentivized in the form of making the SEC interference go away. He instead made a report to the DOJ, then gave a series of interviews. The CFO of Overstock convinced Byrne staying with the company made them uninsurable, and prevented the stock from reaching $50. Byrne agreed to leave the company despite learning of deception. He arranged to sell his stock at a pre-determined time with full disclosure to the board, and broke contact with them entirely to avoid insider trading. Byrne’s shares of Overstock sells, the digital dividend is cancelled/delayed by the SEC, stock prices take a hard dive, and further SEC investigations/lawsuits ensue. Consequently, the head of the SEC investigations is Peter Strzok’s wife.

Man Vs. Swamp: 32

The rule of law has returned to the USA under Attorney General Bill Barr prompting our protagonist to come forward with information regarding his role in the Russian collusion scandal. High-level figures in government, including former FBI Peter Strzok, gave him direct orders to pursue a romantic relationship with Russian journalist, Maria Butina. Uncovering the ploy that she was being allowed to contact several political parties in 2016 including Hillary and Trump, she could subsequently be used to taint their images as an insurance policy. CEO of a multimillion-dollar company targeted by malfeasance, he’s called attention to financial market corruption by major players operating outside normal investment channels. SEC, the very group created to combat such activities, secretly enable those participants willing to turn a blind eye. Silent vindication would come in the aftermath of 2008 witnessing wall street and banking arrests with FED chairman Alan Greenspan admitting to systematic settlement flaws warned of years prior. Libertarian at heart, and understanding blockchain potential, he devised a fully accredited crypto-stock dividend to expose “slop” created through naked short selling. Approved and scheduled for deployment, he’s blindsided by fake ultimatums coercing his resignation. Liquidating his stock to achieve distance and transparency, proceeds are converted into gold and cryptocurrency, assets beyond market manipulators reach. Meanwhile, the dividend gets postponed and an investigation ensues by the SEC lead by none other than Melissa Hodgman, the wife of Peter Strzok… welcome to the swamp. Meet Patrick Byrne, and follow his continuing saga at DEEPCAPTURE.COM

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32 comments
  1. That was pretty cool of you man, although I did not win the top prize I am glad you chose it based on what you felt was the best content. Thank you Patrick, this turned out to be a lot of fun (and the prize is pretty cool too).

  2. I am glad. I am leaving it to my Webmaster to contact the winners and send the BTC.

    For the person (whoever it be) who wrote that lovely doggerel… It was well done. IMpressive. Not right for this contest. But get in touch.

  3. I wonder which essay would get the most response from the general public if Patrick tweeted a screenshot of each one of the 29 essays….

  4. Well done Patrick. Good choices.
    Glad to see you were able to eliminate the cheaters like that “Magi” guy.
    When is the next episode coming??

  5. Hello Patrick. This is Ousmane, the Swiss-African.
    I would love to have been part of the contest. I would enrich both my English and my culture.
    As always I love reading you. My son loved very much Bazoomba (which I have told many other African leaders in the hope they will get the joke not to change the rules of the game) and Lashed to the Mast.
    How are you feeling? Come and visit Guinea. Conakry.
    Ousmane

    1. It is sounding good. Would love to someday, my Swiss-African friend. I hear that park in the North is impressive.

  6. I think the story on how you settled with Goldman for $30M just when we had them dead You let the off the hook how many investors and public companies were destroyed after that?

    I passed your message that included Warren name to him Thought it was the right thing to do

    Now that is the story Good luck

    1. I agree with Patrick here: easy for you to say.

      How many of those other investors and public companies put up the time, effort and shear force of will to battle their demise? How many of them listened and joined in when it was somebody else getting bashed against the rocks? Patrick is the only one I know of. If it hadn’t been for him, nobody would have been wiser.

      Settling with Goldman may make you angry, but we’re you the one that spent years with a target on your back? Or building your company without access to the capital that it rightly should have been able to generate? All while battling your own board and stockholders to continue the fight? I think we are lucky that Patrick pushed it as far as he did without letting up.

      1. Exactly, well said, Lily –

        This HangThemAll person clearly is a ____ !

        Not worth my time anymore, I used to think he might be on of the ones who could have an intelligent conversation on PB’s site. I think I might have even have responded to a few of his comments.

        Cheers,
        Anil

        1. Thank you, Lily and Anonymous. I see why you wrote what you did and thank you. But actually, I was not even making that point. I was being sarcastic because Hangthemall’s post was ungrammatical and unintelligible. And not by a little, either. It is a kid’s barb: when someone says something that is supposed to be nasty but comes out twisted or garbled (which nasty comments often do), just say, “Easy for you to say,” and walk away.

          1. I think I grew up with a different “Easy for you to say” meaning. I’ve always equated it with saying it to somebody who has no real depth of knowledge of what they are talking about and are not willing to back up words with actions.

            As in, talk is cheap, especially when the best words that you can come up with come out of an orifice not suitable for polite society.

            Or don’t insult what you obviously don’t have the brain capacity to understand.

          2. Welcome, Patrick –
            Interesting that you were being sarcastic, which I didn’t catch at all !
            🙂

            I did use the “Easy for you to say” line recently, when some guy in my
            Company, a pretty senior guy actually, started arguing without any merit
            on some business decisions we were talking about.

            “Easy for you to say” shut him down pretty fast, (followed by another phrase that exposed the fallacy in his statements), a la what Lily says below.

            If someone hasn’t walked in another’s shoes, their comments must of necessity carry less weight.

            Cheers,
            Anil

  7. If anyone who hadn’t already read Patrick’s posts tried to make sense of these they would have no idea what was going on. You need so much context for any of these to make sense.

    1. Thank you for noticing.

      The other day I watched those appearances from August 2019 that everyone thoguht was so scattered. Yes, I see how I could have improved them, and the CNN one caught me off-guard, as I had driven home when Chris Cuomo called me (he had one a story on m ein 2001, but I think we had not spoken since then). That said, I also see that I am trying to give a gloss on a “War & Peace” kind of a story, and that is hard to do without sounding a bit… manic.

      So I am glad to see that others trying to do this have the same problem.

      1. Patrick – world is on fire. USS Barr looks like it just hit an iceberg. Need your salient insight amigo…. time for a post

    2. (Below is my entry.Other than the provocative title,I tried to focus on things Patrick said that would grab peoples attention and motivate them to read further into the story.This is why I mentioned the soft coup attempt on President Trump in the first sentence.)

      Patrick Byrne vs SECretaries of Deep State

      Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne made several TV appearances in August 2019 describing how he may have been used in a soft coup attempt on President Trump.

      Byrne suggested the complicity of Peter Strzok, who is married to SEC official Melissa Hodgman.

      Byrne said that he was encouraged to go public with his information by his mentor,Warren Buffett.

      Byrne said that he may have been offered a billion dollar bribe to keep quiet on this issue.

      Byrne said he thought he was cooperating with U.S. intelligence officials for the purpose of law enforcement but later realized he was being used for political espionage conducted against Donald Trump,Hillary Clinton,Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

      Byrne had a relationship with Russian citizen Maria Butina,who had sought contacts with the campaigns of Trump,Clinton,Rubio and Cruz.Butina was imprisoned and is now released.

      Byrne explained that he had contacted FBI officials to get clearance to continue his relationship with Butina after he met her and was given the “green light” to do so.Byrne said that he believes Butina is a sincere advocate for freedom and peace.

      Patrick Byrne had been an FBI informant in two prior cases.
      The first case was to help identify the killer of his friend who was murdered.
      The second case was to provide information regarding stock market corruption.

      Byrne and Overstock have been the subject of multiple SEC investigations which Byrne suspects might be a result of his public complaints against stock market corruption.

  8. In Man vs Swamp, the rule of law was mentioned to have returned under AG Bill Bar, prompting you to come forward with your story.
    My question is one year later, and seeing Barr’s legacy in retrospect, do you feel the same about Bill bar, or do you feel he did not do enough to live up to that description?
    I ask as the author of that particular essay, and while I deeply appreciate the consolation prize, I struggle with the opening line of my story, and my own thoughts on The former AGs non-actions on a multitude of meaningful fronts.

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