Bitcoin Forum

Apparently a lot of people got hosed over mybitcoin.com.  I see Todd Bethell got ripped for 1000 BTC in this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26224.msg415075#msg415075) thread, and countless others are reporting their money.  1000 BTC, that's already $14k+, isn't that theft over $5000?  These people should be locked away in bitprison.

So... I figured I would make an updating list of everyone's losses here so we can see an estimated dollar value of what these people ran off with.  Post here with your loss.

~25,000 - Bruce Wagner
1000 - Todd Bethell
618 - Chaos Computer Club donations in escrow
259 - SHlFT
85 - ball4thegame
75 - cp
70 - FTL_Ian
55 - wobber
48 - valam
40 - Gabriel Beal
29 - MoonShadow
25 - NothinG
25 - Akiron
18.8 - Bitcoin Spender
13-14 - carbonpenguin
~11.5 - cirillius
4 - fulepp
1.65 - PowerChaos
0.5-0.9 - opticbit
0.1 - qwk

Total so far, between 27365.4 and 27366.8.  @ $14 a coin that's like $380,000.

75

There are also losses due to transactions that were in progress between customers and merchants.

Some merchants used mybitcoin as part of their ordering process.

Bruce Wagner: ~25k ( http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=33020.msg416038#msg416038 )

I actually don't remember.  :)

I opened an account with mybitcoin just out of curiosity and dropped something like 0.1 btc there.
No big deal for me, but i guess there are probably thousands like me, so that could also total up to something.

I opened an account, but did not trust it enough to use it. I don't even trust the established exchanges with much at one time. This is why we need better apps and clients for conducting transactions on our own systems. We need encrypted online wallets with multiple backups with user interfaces that are simple to use. It's a lot to ask, but now nobody will trust online wallets on single servers.

How the hell can you keep ~1/3 million USD on a website if there is a much more secure way by keeping it on your own PC(s)?! :o

Anyone considered that this was likely a 1 man website and the owner could actually just have died?

Which would be one of the potentially better outcomes (not for him, maybe).
In this case, once we find out who he was, people could possibly get their bitcoins back.

Speechless about everyone losing their high amount of bitcoin. Even though I had one BTC in mybitcoin, something told me to pull out, believe this was a 1-2 days before mybitcoin went down. Had that gut feeling. Weird.

Or worse, was targeted by criminals willing to do him harm in order to get a copy of the pool's private keys.  This was always a dangerous idea.

Well considering the coverage mybitcoin received, for a newbie.. it seemed like it was paypal for bitcoin.

One has to admit, that it was fast and easy to send and receive payments via their web service.

Not to mention they did run it for a long time.

Oh well..

We lost about 40 coins, plus a little more for lost transactions due to it being down. Not Bruce Wagner numbers, but it represented the entire operating budget of SquareWear and MetaCo.in.  My partners were actually advocating us getting out of the bitcoin business, but I convinced them that the writing was on the wall about mybitcoin.com and that it was really our fault.

OMFG!  I'm going to light a bitcoin candle for that wallet!

I'm potentially out 29 BTC.

Sorry to hear all these bad stories.

I got all my (meagre) coins out on the 18th.

hope this all works out for you guys...

i havent lost anything thank god i just empty my account the other day but i notice the website isnt even working for me now it wont load up or anything. Is any one else having  this issue???

yup, the whole site is down!

if you do a whois lookup on mybitcoin.com:

REGISTRY WHOIS FOR MYBITCOIN.COM
Domain Name: mybitcoin.com
Updated: 22 hours ago - Refresh

Registrar: TUCOWS.COM CO.
Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net
Status: clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited

Expiration Date: 2012-04-25
Creation Date: 2010-04-25
Last Update Date: 2011-03-27

Name Servers:
    ns1.systemdns.com
    ns2.systemdns.com
    ns3.systemdns.com
See mybitcoin.com DNS Records

Information Updated: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:33:38 UTC

That gives people like zero information. 

Domain name    MYBITCOIN.COM

Administrative Contact:
Williams, Tom abuse@mybitcoin.com
Main Street
PO Box 556
Charlestown, Nevis
KN
+6499518329
Technical Contact:
Williams, Tom abuse@mybitcoin.com
Main Street
PO Box 556
Charlestown, Nevis
KN
+6499518329

Registrar of Record    TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 27-Mar-2011.
Record expires on 25-Apr-2012.
Record created on 25-Apr-2010.

Registrar Domain Name Help Center:
http   //tucowsdomains.com

Domain servers in listed order:
NS2.SYSTEMDNS.COM
NS3.SYSTEMDNS.COM
NS1.SYSTEMDNS.COM

Domain status    clientTransferProhibited
clientUpdateProhibited

Wait more time, maybe it's just a server fault. For me would be something like 55 BTC, the entire operational budged of my website.

I had at least 70 BTC there.

That's what I get for being lazy and not transferring the money out to a secured wallet.   >:(

I'm potentially out 259 BTC  :-[

I wish you'd mentioned something; I would have advised you not to use MyBitcoin.

25 BTC

i had around 4 BTC on mybitcoin.com

I just started few weeks back. I went to this site as it was recommended somewhere on the wiki or on the bitcoins for dummies forum. Good lesson.... And I am disappointed as I had the impression bitcoin is for a small group of people. I hoped it wont happen in a family...

Such in life. Bank takes everything... :(

48 btc

youre not the only one, but I didn't loose anything. I had just transfered btc from there to mt gox when everything went down.

~13-14

0.5 - .9 BTC lost.

the annoying part is I had a mybitcoin address used for some referral links, so more could go to that address

Chaos Computer Club donations in escrow, ask kiba for the exact sum, he mentions 600
here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33014

25 BTC... also since this may prove useful, my address was 13kDg6YLvK8eT2fkbdAARhFCZAPDRjJ9mR

I have 2 accounts with 9.4 BTC in each account.

18.8 BTC

I've found a copy of ToS of MyBitcoin

http://pastebin.com/9Fb0uauU

edit: removed unnecessary comments, read for yourself

I also had 2 accounts, to spread the risk ...

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BiBPCqEJTmC6SZbCGmyAp4EMVSK8MBgDB

there you go
or to make it easy

1.65 BTC (it was sended before i could change my bitcoin adress and before i noticed that mybitcoin was down , client asked a refund but cant do anything at this moment :'( )

Greets From PowerChaos

Question.... WHY did you guys even put money in there to begin with?

What was their "promise" ?

Is this part of the reason why BTC has been crashing a bit lately? Terrible news.

no promise, just easy to deal with! call me stupid... or maybe still trust human been :-\

~11,5BTC

Wait, so what's the verdict?  Was Mybitcoin's wallet.dat file simply lost by Amazon, or did the guy actually skip town with the loot?

Still unknown.

what does receivership mean in this context?

And I wonder how large was "a large amount"

It means, most likely, that they will submit themselves to an independent third party auditor who will act in the position of arbitor/judge in the effort of distributing the assests that remain as equitable as is possible.


There were four wallet pools that operated mostly automaticly, so it's roughly one quarter of the total deposits, I would guess.  If there were more pools, independently secured, then the loss ratio would be lower; and if there were only one pool the loss would be total.  This is a good lesson for future online wallet websites to learn from.  Many wallet pools with independent security is better than less.  Best would be something like a single wallet file per user, with a method of single user encryption.  Perhaps something that requires the user to log into his account, and then provide a different passcode to decrypt the user wallet onto a ramdisk for a limited period of time.  Alternatively, an android client could use public/private keys like SSH does to double authenticate the user account, thus requiring that an attacker have access to the individual user's phone, home computer or other device with that secret key, and the phone client can reprovide the server a decryption key every 15 minutes or so.  In this way, the user can conviently use the wallet service on his phone when Internet is available to him, but whenever he closes the client, turns off his phone or leaves the range of his cell service his wallet.dat file is only exposed for (at most) the next 15 minutes until the file is purged from the ramdisk.  A cracker breaking in could (potentially copy the wallet.dat files from the ramdisk, as well as copy as many of the encrypted wallet.dat files as he can find before being noticed, but the encrypted wallet.dat files are useless because his intrusion is unlikely to go unnoticed for long (as this event illustrates) and users can be notified that they need to flush their accounts and then destroy their wallet.dat and not reuse those keypairs again.  These steps would limit the exposure to risk of the membership of an online wallet service, regardless of the degree of security.

I lost 5 starter bitcoins for my beta site and lost it all. I had small amounts at first and thought site was ok then the next day after buying bitcoins they shut down. Alot of other lost alot alot more than I so I can complain much. :)

i had 23 BTC on mybitcoin.
I know its not much compared to what some people have lost.

having a letter from the owner does make me feel much better, but still wary.
what took him 1 week to respond? also a large chunk? i have a feeling most if not all users
will only get a fraction of what they actually had.

Something is better than nothing.

not reviving this thread, just posting the obvious fact, seemingly 75k btc will not be returned to the users
from cca 150.000 btc held at MBC 49% will be paid back via the claim page

I lost 40 BTC when I sent it to myself (my computer). Not sure if it was mybitcoin or just me...

To be fair to him he's been perfectly transparent about all of this and I really don't think that he's "walking away" with much of anything at all other than some valuable life experience.

I should imagine simply dealing with the emails and phone calls is a 24/7 occupation right now, you have to respect the guy for at least trying to make things right for his customers.