Bitcoin Forum

Alright this is about how scammer ruined every signature campaigns around. This forum has mean something to me and especially the bitcoin and its community like this.

What just recently happened with master-p is now affecting the trust of this forum and all the companies running their services for us.

To make it fast is anyone on here agree that all escrow should have personal requirements submitted atleast to theymos or any trusted on dt list or if doesnt either work too since id can also be faked atleast a known person by the moderator and not those simply building up trusts and reputations.

Requirements are:
Id
Facebook account
Twitter
Instagram
Billing address

These should be all authentic and not a fake or an alt.

I think this is not a problem to those who wants to build trust and be an escrow to whatever the reason he has(to earn or to help this community or both) in the future.

Theymos is with us and can be trusted enough for these personal informations that only escrows are required to obtain.

All those can be easily faked or purchased so theymos having those details could just be a false sense of security or even help facilitate a scam if everyone thinks that they are 100% legit because they've given their personal details to him. Any member here whether staff or a very trusted legendary member can scam or sell or have their account hacked at any point so there's no foolproof way to stop anyone from ever scamming.

Nothing will beat experience and tenure in this forum. Those successful trades will tell more about the reputation of person than those documents you posted there.

You can't do anything about that. Everyone has a price.

People are flawed by nature. Trust no one.

People should go after the person who was originally using that account.

It's not going to work , all of those things are accounts that anyone can make , buy etc ... so it's useless . Even ID & passport and those stuff can be faked so I don't see the point of this .
Honestly , It would be better if moderators and administrators handle the escrow things but it just will be too much for them and they don't have time for that .

Well I don't use facebook, twitter or instagram. I'm also shocked that this board allows member accounts to be sold openly. Because of this, I will never use an escrow service from this board. I think it's a shame that I have had to come to this decision, as several members have been very helpful to me, and I am sure that they are honest. However, they don't offer an escrow service, and I think that says something as well.

I'd like to buy some Bitcoins, but I think I'm going to have to do this via a face to face meeting. It's a shame that there isn't an escrow facility in Bitcoin, but that goes against the finality of Bitcoin transactions.

I already stated that these requirements can be faked easily but a real one can always be real even it took for a year but a fake person uses a faked personal information can be caught on the act even less than a month.

The information is should be for applying porpuses and not for an instant trust or reputation and the entire forum is the one to judge whether he or she is trusted enough.

And dt's only up to monitor these participants and the requirements they submitted are for monitoring porpuses only.

For example after 6 months a participant is builing trust so the dt can check if all the submitted details still be accurate after 6 months. But since i already mentioned it there should be some addition for the requirements.

Btw only a suggestion.

PEACE ALL

maybe mod or admin should've make their own escrow service ran by their trusted people , and for a reward they need a little fee for every transaction, so,if any inconvenience/problem happen

Mods aren't "gods" they're only a part of the staff because of their ability to "combat" spam. If you give them power of having a centralized escrow service, they too will scam, given a false sense of security. Has happened before , not the exact thing but many mods have scammed/acted shadily

If i ever build enough trust to escrow id be happy enough to supply those details to one of the mods, I think in generally most of the people who do escrow have been pretty good anyway. Ive never heard of someone running off with escrow funds tbh. Although from reading this thread im assuming that has happened.

Won't be useful I feel.People sell phone/bank/identity verified localbitcoin.com accounts here openly and people buy them to scam users.Anybody will give fake phone number/verify it/provide all the legal documents for a few bucks.

EDIT : Just I was speaking of verifying phone numbers ,we have a genius on our forum itself ,he can verify as many numbers as possible for $1 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1307777.0 There you go

Only pgp signs can solve this

How can you check if fake information is faked? You don't really know who is behind that username. They could have provided stolen information. The info could be legit, just isn't theirs. You wouldn't know that though.

For being escrow i would suggest to put some money on theymos wallet.
And there should be a limit on how much can an escrow hold. For example escrow #1 can handle only 5BTC and if it is "full' the next escrow deal should go to escrow #2 (if he accepts ofc) and so on.
I don't prefer this idea to send personal details as everything can be faked.

How?

PGP keys can be bought and sold as well, which is supposedly what happened when master-P sold his account.

Why we don't stop selling accounts on this forum. Make selling of your account lead to a permanent ban why people need a other account can us even do wonder if it will be done for good or ugly and dark cases.

anything can be sold, from email accounts, private keys, personal (official government issued) documents, you name it.
also, i think people havent gotten the update in that thread. theres more evidence pointing towards an exit scam rather than an account sale at this point, the claim of having the account sold is probably a cover up.

ban or not, account sales will continue offsite. just because heroin isnt legal doesnt mean people arent finding ways to buy it.

Maybe a special report sale of accounts button somewhere on the site. People can free report if they see a sale of accounts and ban the sellers also. Make it again a great community without the rotten apples.

Yeah, I was meaning to make the "supposedly" sound skeptical of the account sale.


link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1259439.0#post_sellingaccounts)

Its not about selling accounts its all about the escrow services. Most of what master-p scammed was from sig campaigns funds and driven the forum crazy because there was too many people got affected and he was being a trusted escrow of the forum so it is very alarming to trust people to escrow your money even he or she is trusted.

No one would agree to this. The only people who verify to Theymos are people that hold funds for the forum. I do not see how it is the forums job to moderate escrows.

I don't think this is true. Back when John K. was having escrow problems (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=412061.0;all) (there was a several month delay in him releasing funds he was holding in escrow), no one seemed to know with 100% certainty what John K's identity is, and BadBear posted that theymos has not asked for his identity:


Moderators are given the option to either give sufficient personal details for theymos to complete a 1099 (a US tax doc) to report moderator earnings to the IRS, or to have 1/3 of their moderator fees be withheld and sent to the IRS. I would assume this is why OgNasty has given theymos his personal information/dox considering that he receives payment for holding the forum's money, and that other treasurers were given similar options.


I would however agree that the majority of escrows would not be willing to give up this information, and a good number of them probably do not even have any of the types of accounts listed in the OP. A major feature of Bitcoin is privacy and many people who use Bitcoin value their privacy. Plus even if an escrow's personal information is publicly known, money could still be stolen by such escrow if they were in need of money -- just look at MtGox, Mark's personal identity was public but that did not stop him from embezzling money from Gox customers.

What is this for? So I can send a bill when the escrow steals money from me. :D
How is someone suppose to verify this? All of the above are commonly traded on here and elsewhere. It is really not all that difficult to get a mailing (billing) address anon

Thank you, I was going to say that I don't use those services either and OP might want to think twice before throwing all that personal info out there for all to see.  

And yep there are no foolproof methods to stop scammers.  I too think account sales should be banned.  Everywhere.  

Now in the other thread they're saying that Master-P might be a minor, which would be disturbing.  Yes, I agree that these companies who offer sig campaigns should know who they're dealing with.

Edit:  Holy Christ Quickseller, you should talk about escrows not wanting their identity to be known after your whole fucking "self-escrow" debacle.  I don't listen to a word you say about escrowing.

who is theymos and why would people verify themselves to him ? He is no authority and he can't help people in any legal case.
Even after knowing the people behind the scams the authorities don't seem to be caring about bitcoins these days.It's of no use.

Yeah, Quickseller was about to pull a Master-p scam but he got stopped, unfortunately there is no way to know if a trusted escrow is going to do it or get hacked. There has to be some other verification that can't be hacked or at least not at the same time.

Mmmhhh no, personal identity to theymos ... this is insane !

You can use External Escrow Services...
People provide Escrow to help others more than to earn from it!! No one is going to reveal their Personal information for this...

That is why I stopped escrowing. I think people way under value the escrows here and what they provide. I would spend way too much time and hardly ever get tipped. I noticed Mitchell also stopped offering for the same reason. The more honest guys that stop will lead to problems I am sure. I would never use some off forum website to escrow...

that goes for any service offered here on the forums.

For the record, I don't think QS was going to go the way of Master-P and run away with escrowed funds.  He had a slower scam going, collecting a little bit at at time from people who thought there were actually 3 independent parties involved in each transaction.  I don't know which is worse.

Exactly. How does this give people more reassurance that they won't get scammed?

I don't have any interest in that. And it probably wouldn't help much anyway. Identity information is fairly easy to fake, and it doesn't even act as much of a deterrence. pirateat40's identity has always been known, and it neither prevented his scam nor has it helped his victims get their money back. It's looking like master-p will probably be located. And there are several others. It's actually a bit rare for scammers to be totally anonymous, since being totally anonymous is difficult. It's impossible to identify all long-term con men before they scam.

Sending all of the money to an escrow is ridiculous when you can do a Bitcoin smart contract. For example, it would make far more sense to do a 2-of-3 multisig among the payer, the payee, and the escrow agent. When the transaction goes well, the payer and payee will just both cooperate to release the money, and the escrow doesn't need to be involved at any point in the process. If the transaction goes poorly, the escrow can cooperate with either the payer or payee to send the money to that person. At no point can the escrow single-handedly steal the money. And since you might not even need to talk to the escrow agent at any point in a transaction, it should be quicker and less expensive. More complicated smart contracts than this are possible, but this m-of-n multisig is very basic and is supported by several wallets including Bitcoin Core. (Though Core still lacks a GUI for it.) Someone should make a detailed tutorial for all steps of this process in a number of wallets, and then we can sticky it somewhere.

From the looks of it, master-P had used a number of his alts to have several people send BTC to master-P, as escrow, primarily regarding currency exchange deals, and then his alts would stop responding to the bitcoin sellers. In these cases, master-P would still be able to steal the funds if a 2-of-3 multi-sig was being used because he would have had 2 of the keys necessary to spend funds from the multi-sig address(es).

I would also question as to how effectively someone with little/no technical knowledge would be able to create multi-sig addresses, and spend funds from multi-sig addresses (remember there is a reason why wallet services like blockchain.info are so successful, and it is not because of their security record). 

I am not sure an escrow agent would want to even attempt, or be available to mediate a transaction if they have not previously acknowledged and understand the terms of a particular trade, as without these details, it would be difficult to mediate a dispute unless one party outright fails to deliver anything at all.

Yeah, that is a risk, but it should be pretty rare. A more secure escrow contract would be something like (payer AND payee) OR ((payer OR payee) AND 2-of(escrow1, escrow2, escrow3)).


A detailed tutorial would help. If people can just mechanically follow the tutorial without really understanding the steps, that'd be better than nothing, and it'd be the first step toward real understanding. Maybe someone needs to make a really nice escrow GUI in some wallet or other.


It might not be such a great idea, but I'd expect some to do it, since it's so easy. The escrow agent would just have to publish a public key and give their terms ("In case of a dispute, contact me here: ... If I have to decide your case, I will only sign transactions which assign me exactly 5% of the final amount as a fee. ....")

Is this currently possible? This setup would allow people to significantly reduce the risk of the escrow running away/colluding to steal funds because various escrow agents could be selected whose locations are known to be in geographically diverse places in the world.

Yes, but it's not a normal script, so actually creating and spending that output would require some work.

Untested script:


This can be packed into a P2SH script, so sending money to the escrow contract would just be sending to an address starting with 3. Creating the P2SH address and spending money sent to it would be the difficult parts. (There's code floating around for doing this stuff, but I don't think there's even any CLI utility for it.)