Bitcoin Forum

Has Theymos (the person who runs this forum) ever revealed any personal info about himself? Do we know his name, where he lives, etc? Is the real person behind the Theymos handle an active member of the community apart from on this forum and on reddit?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoSWnxieScw heres a interview he did seems pretty transparent to me

Yes


Yes

Everything you wanted to know. (http://bit.ly/1almtfT)

Are you claiming that Theymos is actually Gavin Andresen? That doesn't seem likely.

It looks like his name is Michael Marquardt. There's not that much info about him on the Internet, at least not much visible from some cursory searching.

Good job sherlock.



Bad job sherlock.

What info are you finding? Sure, he appears to have a website which lists some personal preferences, an inactive twitter account, a Wikipedia user page which lists more personal preferences, and some references to his email/AIM/ICQ accounts. That's not very useful information for establishing trust.

That's probably because you are trying to build trust the incorrect way.

And why do you need to trust him that much, may I ask?

I'm not a security expert, but if Theymos did want to be untrustworthy, it seems like he's in a better position to do harm than a lot of people:

-Bitcointalk uses Javascript. It is well known that a lot of members here will be on bitcointalk and on their favorite web wallet site at the same time. There may be some XSS opportunity here, though as I said I'm not an expert.

-There are some small % of newb/dumb bitcointalk forum members who probably use a similar password on bitcointalk and on their favorite web wallet. It seems possible that Theymos could somehow get access to people's bitcointalk passwords if he wanted, giving him or his friends a huge password cracking advantage over a random person.

A few small bits of info that I found mildly concerning, and caused me to be curious about Theymos:

-Theymos seems to have been a defender/supporter of TradeFortress. It's possible that they are friends, but I'm not sure. The circumstances around 1 million dollars disappearing from TradeFortress's inputs.io business suggest that TradeFortress may be very shady.

-There are a lot of people on reddit who pop up with stories about how funds were stolen from their hot wallets because they didn't have 2-factor authentication, and they describe having pretty complex passwords. It's somewhat of a mystery how their passwords are being cracked.

-The fact that Theymos allegedly raised like $600k for this forum, yet the forum is not that good technically, is sort of weird and makes me wonder how much of that was actually spent on the forum.

I'm not saying we should suspect Theymos of any nefarious activities, but the above is just why I care more about Theymos's trust level than I care about a random user's.

 

So, you want to trust theymos to protect people from their own stupidity? Did I got that right?

Not quite. I'm just wondering how sure we are that Theymos is not the kind of person to try to actively take advantage of the stupidity of people who use his forum.

Obviously not, but at least you have a realistic assessment here. It's just that XSS doesn't work that way.



That is true, dumb people will get raped, probably not by theymos though. Or at least not directly.



TF looks like he's been sloppy, probably not malicious though. But that's just my opinion.



I think there are far more plausible explanations the one you're suggesting.



You seem to assume that transforming money into working software is easy and frictionless. It just isn't, managing an IT project is a full-time job.



You shouldn't need to trust him if you use a different password for all sites you care about and if you assume no PM privacy.
Bottom line, if your security depends on trusting theymos I suggest you review your security instead of looking for reasons to trust him.

Excellent fine, bud. I just found one of Gavin Andresen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtkflEaeGjo

Being indirectly raped by theymos still sounds suboptimal.


I've been a professional software developer for almost 10 years, I have a pretty decent idea of what it takes to run a site using someone else's forum software.



I'm not asking about my own security. You guys are acting like it's not legitimate to care whether owners of this forum are contributing to newbs and dumb people being stolen from.

...right.

Anyways, theymos is asking SMF for an exception so the forum's modifications can be audited. so you can audit with to your heart's content.

Sale/purchase of forum accounts is openly permitted, hence the indirect rape.
Just don't trust the forum.



Stick to development, you're not ready for management.
If there was a magical open source silver bullet it'd be used already. Otherwise it has to be tailor-made, see previous post.



Everyone is responsible for their own safety, knowing that nobody will ever bail you out, or protect you is a much saner mindset than the "let's protect dumb people from their own stupidity and incompetence" fantasy.



What?

It's not an either/or. Would you not care if theymos was using people's bctalk passwords to try to crack the web wallet passwords of newbs, as long as it didn't affect you?

Your question seems to imply that I'd have some way of knowing. I don't. I do know that money does strange things to people, so the correct course of action is to avoid the problem altogether by ensuring your very own safety.

You'd want the benefits of being your own bank without having your own bank to protect?

Where'd you get that impression? I defended his Ripple-related actions once, and my opinion of that case hasn't changed. But I barely know him.

I'm not a sociable guy. There are few people in the Bitcoin community who I have any sort of casual relationship with. AFAIK, I've met a grand total of two forum users AFK.


It's provable via the block chain that that money hasn't been spent, and I don't even hold a lot of that money.

Ask anyone on the default trust list (or any of the moderators) how well they know me... I don't need to be friends with people to identify them as good moderators or trust-list-builders.

yeah, Theymos, would you mind telling us the reason Tradefortress was on the default trust list? My speculation was that he had "disclosed security flaws in a responsible manner" as your feedback for him said, but was that the reason or was there another reason?

No. The damage someone in DefaultTrust can do is very limited, so a lot of trust isn't required. I've actually long been suspicious of TradeFortress because he was holding too much BTC, CoinLenders looked like a HYIP, and I've heard some suspicious rumors about him. But I thought that he was very unlikely to go totally crazy with trust. (And he didn't.)

He was on DefaultTrust because his trust list was good. There were only a few problems that ever resulted from his list, but he brought many good people into the trust network. He also seemed to understand the trust system more than anyone else, and he paid the most attention to trust activity across the trust system.

No. That's not how the Trust system works. There's a reason why trust lists and trust ratings are separate. You can trust that someone is not a scammer but not trust them to have a good trust list, and vice-versa. Listing someone in your trust list indicates only that you like their ratings and/or trust list in some way (defined by you). With the default trust system, my goal is to maximize the number of default-trusted ratings while minimizing the number of incorrect ratings (especially negative ones). There haven't been any major failures in this area.

There actually isn't a way to vouch for someone in the trust system if you use it properly. There are only trust events which are interpreted by users, and trust list relationships which are mostly unrelated to real trust. This is why I kept my positive trust rating of TF even though my overall trust in him has diminished. My personal history with TF has not changed. My trust in him has diminished, but only because of how I am interpreting other trust events. My own history/rating is still relevant to the full picture of TF's trustworthiness in my mind, and it may still be relevant to others.

Your misunderstanding of how the trust system works is one reason why you are not in DefaultTrust.

I trusted him not to abuse his power. Mostly because he had much to lose and almost nothing to gain by doing so, not because I thought that he was particularly ethical. And I was right: he didn't abuse his power in any noticeable way.

I think some of you are misinterpreting my statement, which is understandable because it wasn't too clear. By "I have a pretty decent idea of what it takes to run a site using someone else's forum software" I meant that I had a sense of the resources it takes to do so, not that I'm familiar with the day to day technical process. I know people who run forums, I know roughly how much they spend on them, and I know how good their forums are. I know that bitcointalk doesn't look like a forum with 600k in funding.

You have correctly identified that I know almost nothing about XSS. I wasn't relying on my technical experience to give credibility to my XSS concerns. I pointed out my background to call bullshit on the idea that someone was spending $600k on this forum. Theymos basically confirmed that by saying that the 600k hasn't been spent.

Hey Goat! What's today's reason for being butthurt?

Nobody said OP's question was invalid, he's just looking for answers in the wrong places, namely this forum.
My suggestion would be to skip the forum's trust system altogether and use bitcoin-otc.com which is much simpler and straightforward and doesn't have the bizarre concept of "default trust".

That has already been said had you read the thread before proceeding to give me a good laugh.



Lurk more, it's not about performance.



It always surprises me to see what some people will masturbate to.



Ok, let me get something straight here, the words I say mean something, probably not what you think though. When I say "software project" I don't mean "things", I mean "software project" which has much more to it than "fine tuning nginx", throw 600k, some developers and half a ton of cheesy poofs into a room, what usually comes out isn't a working product someone cares about. It's usually more around the lines of a couple homemade frameworks, and fattened developers.



Things have a proper name, the proper name for md5 and sha1 is "a hash function", repeat after me: "a hash function". And I may even precise it further "a broken hash function". It is used mostly by confused PHPtards who have no idea about what they are doing. So if someone asks your opinion next time, point them at bcrypt, no fucking exceptions.



That seems to be the reason of your confusion, the correct way to make decision is by "thinking", thinking may or may not take your original gut feeling into account.



See, we have one fine example of mental confusion here, using PGP when sending PMs about sketchy shit won't protect you from getting entrapped by the FBI if they are, as you say, lurking inside.

theymos reads a lot of PMs, and not for a good reason.

See, you finally have a valid point. If you pursue your reasoning, based on the assertion you made, and with which I fully agree, the correct course of action becomes clear : don't test them, don't do shit that'll get you on their radar.

If you think you're safe using PGP in PMs you're wrong, they'll own the forum, exploit your browser, exploit your machine through some zero-day and use it a side channel to pull the keys from your machine and work from there. Not saying that PGP is broken, just saying a technical protection measure is never a security silver bullet, they could entrap you, they could use black bag cryptanalysis or whatever they do to get their shit done.

There's already tons of fun and interesting stuff to do legally, be safe and let others get in trouble.

You forgot about the $50,000 he gets each week for ad revenue.

The guy must be absolutely rolling it in right now!

Doxed? No. He put his information online. http://theymos.com

When TF was buying, each ad cycle could earn well over $50K, but now it's more like $10K per week. ~25% goes to mods (and part to himself, I think?). The rest goes into the forum treasury of ~5.6KBTC (>$2M). You're apparently doing ad revenue wrong. :P

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=301062.0

I always thought Theymos was a wizard of some sort.

do you guys talking about thermos?  ;D

You live in a bubble and want to determine how a whole community should trust each other?

Time for a reality check!

I heard Theymos lives in some kind of Bitcave.

I believe Theymos is one of my neighbors. He lives somewhere near me anyway. But if he wishes to remain private, then I'm with him.

Agreed.  :)

If he is, is he also legion?

L/\/\FAOOOO!!!!  ;)  x1O

http://www.benzinga.com/tech/13/05/3563567/meet-the-22-most-important-people-behind-bitcoin#15.-michael-marquardt-(@theymos)

Great picture of me! ;)

is Stefan Thomas and Jed McCaleb still in "Behind Bitcoin" or are they outlawed because of Ripple.com?

And how about Vladimir and his club?

 8)

His power is not limited to this forum, he has the Bitcoin-qt alert key as well.

Had he been yet another global moderator I would have considered him to be exceptionally good ;), but he has much greater power so more responsibility should be expected from him.

Back on topic: since he is in control of the alert key, it is indeed sensible that he should retain a degree of intransparency lest he is to be the target of some personal threats, unless it can be proven that he has used his power in irreconcilably wrong ways.

It doesn't really do much anymore anyway: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228

false can easily be used to drop price by 25% or more.

sell before alert
send alert
buy after alert before price rebounces
claim you were hacked.

well written copy. pick your choice

1) backdoor found in windows binary of bitcoin-qt
2) bitcoin core devs arrested for assisting money laundering
3) ECSDA attack found, all bitcoins unsafe.

this will drop the price instantly, good well written authentic copy will do tons of damage.

now theymos be accountable and explain why you read so many PMs without a legitimate reason for reading them
If you don't answer with a good response and apologize, I will post evidence and it's not going to be pretty

little bit of proof.. be more honest about justmoon/moongate's admin account password reuse on another forum ;)

^^encrypt sensitive PM's always with PGP!  :P

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send

that doesn't excuse theymos's behavior. he knows what I'm talking about ;) but maybe he has an explanation.

It'd get picked up instantly on the dev IRC and handled promptly, refer to what happened in march.

And even if it didn't, the price wouldn't drop in five minutes by some random number you just pulled out of your ass. People actually reading the notification, seeing past the bullshit would see an opportunity to buy the coins dropped by the clueless panic-sellers.

Lurk more, think harder.

Seems legit

bumping.

Why?  The OP has already been answered.

Gavin Andresen follows him on twitter.  One tweet.  Come on Michael, some more effort would be nice https://twitter.com/theymos

who is the one guy He is following ? @Simpsonsvault , I doubt it is an imposter made it in 2012.

It was a Simpsons streamer.

Trade Fortress actually doxxed Theymos. That's why he's banned. I think he paid for donator just to change his name, lol :D

Theymos is pretty much known as Satoshi's first mate, he's basically the admin of bitcoin.

Not quite, AFAIK he just compiled info which was publicly available.
IIRC Satoshi chose theymos because of his technical know-how, and maybe that he trusted him. But I don't think satoshi would've thought that the forum would grow into what it currently is
Edit:
Owh hell no

Fairly sure he just posted an existing dox which was on the internet, but was just banned from this forum.

TF has been donator since long before I even joined, probably at least 3 years at this point (if not more).

Eh, I'd say that Gavin got closer to Satoshi as he was entrusted with continuing the project as a whole and with the Alert Keys to the project.

He's the admin of a lot of the Bitcoin community (BCT & r/bitcoin), not Bitcoin its self.

I see this as somewhat an accusation to Theymos.  :o
I think it would be crazy for someone to actually put  same password for your bitcointalk account and your hot wallet. That would be a crazy thing to do the fact that anyone who is determined to really access the forum server can always do, be it by force or not.

TradeFortress is a different story.

He attempted to post to where in the blockchain Theymos' dox is. It didn't allow him to post an autobanned him instead. But doxes are allowed ::)

We already know what Theymos' name is :3

Trade Fortress doxxed him, if anyone was quick enough to read the dox, they'd know who Theymos is.

Why do you want to know who Theymos is? We should respect his choice of privacy!

Theymos is not anonymous.

A quick search will give you his name and other info about him. He is also working on other projects so is probably very busy with them. He does have several websites that he runs eh twitter so it is probably best of you contact him directly to one of these accounts.

Theymos is unlikely to be Michael Maquardt. There is no info available on the net of that name.

First of all... Holy mother of necros!

Ok, that out of the way... In the years that this forum has been operating Theymos has failed to pull of any scam that caught our attention. I am sure opportunity has stared him in the face many times. I declare him to be the most inadequate scammer I know.

Not scamming when presented with opportunity to do so generally shows a person can be trusted, though it is no guarantee.