Bitcoin Forum

http://goldengate.bbb.org/article/the-psychology-of-the-scam-34976

Great article.

Please Post portions that contradict with Zhou's personality/psychology.
Please Post portions that resonate with Zhou's personality/psychology.

Please try to exclude your bias and "give him the benefit of the doubt".

I post this because we can all benefit from understanding con psychology moving forward.

edit: fixed my poor grammar and changed to a more appropriate title.

Psychology is a barbaric and corrupt practice, that entire article is just a load of BS.  Zhou is innocent, and is acting exactly like an innocent man should by doing everything he can to resolve this unfortunate issue.

I'm sorry folks around here were ripped off, but that is the inevitable result of the free market beliefs so many people around here believe in, not the fault of an honest man like Zhou tong.  A well regulated market with the government looking over our shoulder to keep everybody in line is the only way to solve this scamming issue.  Believing in an article about a phony, fraudulent science is just falling for one more scam.

If Zhou really did this that would make him a opportunist not a con.

(If we assume that bitcoinica was a genuine operation, which it was, for a time imo, since it was profitable and sound)

Good point and I agree. I don't believe for a moment that he  started his venture to steal people's money.

If it was him, I believe it was his damaged ego that set him into con motion when the Consultancy was included
in the operation.

I believe bitcoinica ran within its liquid means initially but as soon as they changed their service to include interest rates to encourage to actually leave BTC and USD on bitcoinica which would enable them to remain more liquid while pulling out more profit than they should.

At that point any bank run would crush bitcoinica and this is why I believe it all turned into one big scam before a bankrun could occur that would 100% confirm that liquidity of funds didnt actually exist and so would have marked Zhou Tong immediately as a scammer thus its much more convenient to have a bunch of failures to happen which would direct liquidity problems away from bitcoinica and only directed to so-called hacks occurring due to outragious security issues.

Basicly, they needed interest holders to keep BTC/USD on bitcoinica in order to fullfill their obligations to actual traders withdrawals.

How do you know?

I don't that is just my opinion.

I haven't checked out the math behind the concept myself at the time, I mean it could have been fallacious. I just consider it unlikely, but who knows...
I mainly follow the whole thing for dramatainment, not for the 9 BTC they owe me. Other people on the other hand don't they are genuinely concerned about it.
They will probably give you a concrete answer.

Yeah I'm hoping for Tihan to answer: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95738.msg1056708#msg1056708

He claimed it was both profitable and sound. From the leaked memos, it seems the new operators never managed to make the levels of profits that Zhoutong claimed he was making.

Unrelatedly, the article makes a really good point here:

Exactly this.  Why trust someone who is just trying to make money off your fears and a false promise of feeling better when there are better, more real solutions out there?

That's a reasonable outline, someone posted a message from Tihan questioning whether the earnings Zhou reported when selling Bitcoinica were real.

We've all seen the evidence that Zhou Tong is guilty.  Even he admitted the evidence was correct, because he tried to deflect it to a "mysterious friend".

I'd like to believe that Zhou Tong is innocent. However, having someone who clearly believes in magic and posting in favour of Zhou is making this belief very difficult for me. Rarity, can you refract your support for Zhou, please? It does more harm than good.

Hail Xenu!

they're just words, folks.

LOL 

 ::)

I'm sorry, since when has the government been a bad thing to the majority of Bitcoin users? Bitcoin is not exempt from government regulation.

Quote from the article in the OP

So, if I'm all caught up on everything, the community is currently trying to decide which scenario is more likely?

1. The guy who has all of the tools, knowledge and access required to steal the bitcoins did it.

2. Actually, it was a non-english speaking Chinese man who makes a livelyhood of credit card fraud that had a "business" conversation with him online several years ago, in which he revealed that he was a millionaire, but also not very technically inclined. The subject of bitcoin came up in their discussions, and the Chinese millionaire not having heard of it, took this information to one of his more technical associates, who figured it all out for him, commited the crimes, and gave him all the money (he's very loyal). Afterward, he explained every step of what he did to the Chinese millionaire, in case his associate from long ago who's email account he used for the crime would call him up asking about it, he would be able to provide all of the details if pressured with the threat of "people on the internet are looking into this". As someone who makes millions in the credit card fraud industry, this is something that he is genuinely unprepared for.

Am I missing something?

What about the relic collection?

Can it be woven into the story somehow? Like, the relics are being used to launder the stolen coins or something. Or maybe just as a setting for the final fight or so.

"A well regulated market with the government looking over our shoulder to keep everybody in line is the only way to solve this scamming issue"

Is this a joke? are you trolling?

Yes. Yes, she is as usual.

The tooth fairy just told me that #2 is the correct answer.

Your paranoia is disturbing, your accusations against me are even more baseless than your witch hunt against Zhou Tong.  This is why we need government involved in this, every witch hunt will always find new victims and I guess I'm up!

Forgot about the relics!


Here is a transcript from their business conversations:

Zhou: Hello? Is this the professional credit card fraud artist I requested?
Chen: Yes, of course! How can I help you?
Zhou: How do I know you are any good?
Chen: Well, I am a millionaire who collects relics and speculates precious collections.
Zhou: Perfect, I'm interested in getting some help building some security into my website and payment processing.
Chen: Oh yes! I do quite a bit of business with that sort of thing. Well, not really. My associate does!
Zhou: Okay, what kind of advice can you offer me?
Chen: First, go ahead and sign up for MY website to check out how it works. Don't worry about using a unique password either.
Zhou: Sounds good!
<MINUTES LATER>
Zhou: Okay, so we should use our Mt. Gox API key as the password on our Lastpass account?
Chen: Yes, that is very good, because it has a lot of random characters.
Zhou: And two factor authenification is totally unecessary?
Chen: Yes, certainly if you have such a long password like that.
Zhou: Awesome, thanks! You've been a great help!
Chen: Any time, buddy!

Awesome!

Can we still have a final battle in the private museum?

That's right, because governments never engage in witch hunts and always act in the best interest of the people they serve.   :D

Why is someone with your views even interested in Bitcoin?  It is largely about moving away from such oppressive and corrupt centralized systems.

As a socialist/communist and a member of a spiritual group that has had to battle tons of spurious attacks from government I am very familiar with the concept of government witch hunts.  No government is perfect and we should always work to improve them, however the safeguards they provide are a huge step up from the unrestrained mob justice you get in a situation like this.  

I think you would be surprised how many other leftists are flocking to bitcoin.  The concept of being able to track every transaction, as opposed to the total anonymity of cash, is a huge benefit if you are trying to exercise control over the market.  Now, you don't actually manipulate the Bitcoin itself, you just regulate it's use within your market by setting up whitelists for approved wallets.  Any blacklisted or unlisted coins are sent to the government for redistribution before they can enter the market.  That all seems a bit off topic for this thread though, but as I've said before it's very like Satoshi is actually a leftist and not any sort of libertarian at all.

You have no clue who Satoshi is or what "he" believes in. I have never said this to anyone but, please, Shut The Fuck Up! Log off and relogin as Zhoutong and tell us more stories about your classes and your relic collector friend. In the meantime, trackdown is on FULL FORCE! Get ready!

Maria.

Nobody knows who he is, as far as I'm aware.  Given the product he created though I'm comfortable with my assumption.  A true libertarian would stick with gold not an electronic currency maintained by socialized mining cooperatives.  

^ But in practice most people are part of the pools where the gains are socialized and distributed equally because they recognize the benefits of such cooperation and equitable distribution!  Don't you see, our WHOLE economy could be like that!


No, you aren't actually controlling the blockchain.  The idea is you whitelist some bitcoins you control and divide and distribute them equally among the population.  Any coin which enters a non-whitelisted wallet is out of the system and no longer valid currency.  This way if your bitcoins were stolen, for example, the hacker would have no use for them in your economy since any valid wallet would have a name attached to it.   For another example, any time a drug dealer was caught you could trace back to all his customers and have law enforcement contact them and send them to treatment.


Businesses who engaged in such activity would be severely punished.


Because he knew government would be handling the identifications in their natural capacity as regulators, there was no need to build it into the system.

They administrate the system and deserve compensation for it.


It doesn't matter if they aren't out of your system as long as you don't try and spend them back into the white system, which you can't do.  Any citizen who ended up paying into a non-whitelisted address could be questioned about their reasons as well.  That is the beauty, it's a lot harder to have informal black markets when you don't have cash.  Transaction logs can keep any bad money from being laundered back into the system, which is not the case now and allows the black market to survive as a parasite on the true market.  


It's not laziness any more than it's laziness that paper companies don't print cash, it's not their job.  They are just supplying the raw material for the government to work with.


It reads to me as a lament that the government was forced again to rescue the market from its own irrational actions.  We would not need bailouts if we nationalized the banks.

Who said I'm not?  I just believe that market needs to be very strictly regulated and people should not take unfair levels of compensation, as many top executives and business owners do today.  They should be more like the mining cooperatives were most of the profit is going back to the labor force.


The laundering of cash makes you unable to track it, which is the point of the process. With my system,  no matter what you do with the money, the government can see where it goes, it has no way to make it back to a legitimate business free and clear.  

If somebody robs cash Bill A from a bank, when I find it again I can confirm it was Bill A with the serial numbers, but I have no idea where it has been and what seemingly legitimate business laundered it.  

The thrill of being a black market millionaire isn't quite as great when you can't use your money to buy a house or a car or a plane ticket.


We're on our way, the current rise of Bitcoin and the growing pains are just the first stage of the natural evolution towards centralization and regulation.

 
The banks and insurance companies that collapsed were corporate entities in the financial industries, not government run central banks.

Hmm.  Seems I had a post deleted from here calling Rarity out as a sockpuppet.  That's interesting.

Rarity just strikes me as an immature soccer mom with the inability to use actual logic and reason. "The gubmint must protect us!!!1!"

Grow up.

I'm a dude, and no kids yet, do like football.   ;D

I wonder what the government will do when a chain gets created with the sole intention of rewarding hitmen who kill beuraucrats who step out of line ?

I call it Anarcoin.

As someone with multiple degrees in psychology and mental health and with experience in a multitude of mental health settings, I would love to hear you explain this one, particularly the words 'phony,' 'fraudulent,' and 'scam.'

Scientology  :)

Well for instance the average CEO in America makes 380 times what the average workers do. (http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/19/news/economy/ceo-pay/index.htm)  I think it would be fair to legislatively limit that to 2 or 3 times what the average worker makes, or if we really have to stretch up to ten times more for the sake of compromise okay.  You have a livable minimum wage and a generous maximum wage so that high achievers still have something to drive for but they can do it without leaving behind people in poverty or bankruptcy from medical bills.

Just shut up.

There would be no reward for taking enormous risks in the marketplace.

1 - This is a thread about the psychology of a con man, so you are off the line.

2 - Your source is a biased news channel with no concern to accurate statistical data...

 8)

Could you stop to throw the pony's manure in the fan and keep for yourself, please?

Sure there would be, people work to the mutual benefit of themselves and their company and the rest of the country.  Our current system encourages excessive risk which is why it collapsed and required the government to save it.


I pointed out this was off topic before but folks seemed to want to peruse it.  *shrug*.


Okay, what is the correct number?

The "magic" 69 minutes is all I can think of. Anybody else?

Lol.  Oh.

Im excited
http://schmoesknow.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/get-attachment-6.aspx_1.jpeg

+1

Who the hell is going to do that - work for the mutual benefit of everyone?  This isn't the starship enterprise.

-2

Slaves.

I think you meant Orion Slave Girls (http://www.startrekmemorabilia.com/orion-slave-girls).

Scotty, beam us up.


http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/faqs/html/howmany.html

Keep in mind however, we aren't talking about a world where everyone is non-profit.  People who still want ten times as much income as everyone else, or wherever you set the max pay, will still have that to drive for and it will encourage them to build new companies and work hard.

While I think you had a couple of important points earlier about trying to avoid "mob justice", you have to bear in mind that a lot of people on this forum live under a system whose government is utterly evil, corrupt, "gone beyond the point of no return", routinely dishes out its own brutality against dissidents (and to scare others), and it also annoys the shit out of the entire world by being a massive warmongering asshole-bully on the world stage. And yet, they lull their people to sleep by pretending to be kind and caring, "there for the people", "protecting you from the bad guys" and all that crap.

(Just in case anyone had doubts, I was talking about the US of A!)

So, when you suggest things like strict government regulation, or getting government to enforce laws the old-fashioned way, understandably that idea does not go down too well.

And I'm sure Marxism looked utterly fantastic on paper, which I guess would explain why a huge group of countries enthusiastically implemented Communism across Eastern Europe all the way out to China and killed millions of people in the process (and set their civilisations back by decades)... What's a few million when it's sure to create everlasting world peace, love and harmony?

In practice it just doesn't work. People are naturally lazy and the free market/Capitalism deals with that perfectly: there's always pressure to do enough work to survive, and extra productivity gets rewarded with extra desires being met. Centrally planned societies break that system so that you're either working like a dog because some bureaucrat decided to send workers elsewhere, or you're "working" 2 hours a day instead of being productive where you're really needed. So you get massive under-employment, low production levels, and of course the government has to be corrupt and dictatorial to keep the system running.


No, people join mining pools because of greed and trying to reduce risk. When faced with a choice:
1)Wait X months or years for a 50btc reward, and have low confidence about exactly when a reward will arrive, despite steady effort.
2)Get a steady trickle of bitcoins coming in right now.
Most people would pay a little bit extra and choose 2. People work together when it works for them. This is different from saying that people 'must' work together for some centrally planned purpose.

The gains per hash might be distributed equally amongst pool members, but the hashes are not. Depending on the technology available to the different members of the pool they will be generating hashes at different rates and at different joules per hash. The large FPGA miner might be the equivalent or your real-life CEO and the CPU miner the equivalent of your real-life slave laborer working for minimum wage (with an even larger disparity). Our economy IS already working like a pool.

Charity you are talking about centralized control. You are talking about the total and complete opposite of what bitcoin is all about. You are trolling whether you know it or not. This is not a forum that will take kindly to your collectivist ideals. You are advocating for the initiation violent of force. Setting a max limit on someones income just like setting a minimum wage, requires a third party to enforce their opinion with the threat of violence. I appreciate what you are trying to achieve (a more fair and equitable world). Free market thinkers like myself and probably many others on this forum have found that the best way to achieve more fair and equitable interactions between people is to allow them enter into voluntary agreements with one another for mutual benifit. Without a third party imposing, by threat of force their views, regulations, rules, etc. Party A does business with party B and everyone else minds their own business. If party A earns 10,000,000 BTC per year then she is obviously creating amazing value for others.
TL;DR interfering with the free market = initiating violent force

Rarity doesn't seem to have a problem with that...


Not just punished but severely punished.   

And no doubt it wouldn't be just those who failed to obey all the proper laws and regulations who would
suffer, as hir views on psychology seem to suggest.  Anyone deemed to be abnormal ( the government
being the sole arbiter no doubt ) would perhaps be considered to be possessed by demons and simply
exterminated...  no need for things like psychology and psychologists.

Innocent people will fight and fight and fight to defend their name.   That's why the police ask you the same questions over and over - they know that if you are guilty, you will eventually give up and admit it.   There is psychology behind this, but I was unable to Google the correct term to find it - maybe someone else will have more luck?

Now let's look at Zhou - he made up his big story and when no one (save for an ignorant few) believed it, he quickly stopped posting.  Didn't try to defend himself at all.

Does anyone know his real name yet?

He's definitely still fighting, so this point isn't helping your case. Check his post history.

My case is tight as it is, thank you.  He started posting again 10 minutes after I wrote this.  :)

The starving children around the world sympathies with your utopian free market ideals, I'm sure, but I'm more concerned with the practical matter of making sure they have food.  If it means a rich man has to have a little less luxury, that's fine by me.


Absolutely.  We would already have punishments so severe if we had the tracking ability BitCoin provides for us with cash.  That ability protects the innocent so you can be sure they aren't accused of a financial crime they did not commit.


Bitcoin is the magic that changes all this and makes real leftist government possible.  It's the best thing that has ever happened to socialists, even if they don't realize it yet.  There are non anonymous political donations or obfuscated lobbying ties or blackmail when all this is public and recorded.  Those are the tools the 1% uses to dominate politics.

We give them food when we need to, and wealth to invest in their own communities so we don't need to anymore.  It's hard to do that when the top 10% accounts for 85% of the wealth.  There is plenty to go around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

This thread appears to have been heavily derailed, but in response to the last few posts, think about this:



Offering free food to nascent developing nations means that the local farmers have no business. No one is buying their food (what little they have) because they can just eat UN rice or whatever for free.

Because there is no money in making or selling food, no one does it.

The infrastructure and supply chains required for food production are never developed.

There is no way to make or get food locally.

The cycle of starvation and dependence continues.

Which is why you both invest in the community and stave off starvation at the same time.  Even so, there is enough food in the world to feed everybody already produced, distribute it and you might have some problems down the line if you don't invest in the community right but otherwise people starve.  It's not worth protecting some yacht for a rich guy to let people die.

The only problem with this theory is that everyone would have to have been in on it. If Bitcoinica had obligations that exceeded its assets, there would have been nothing for Zhou to sell to the consultancy. So every person involved in Bitcoinica before and after ownership transferred would have to have been in on the scam.

Rarity, I think you are ignoring the side effects of charity. The only way to "stave off starvation" in the mean time also entails destroying the success of any up-and-coming agricultural or comestible industry.

While there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, this may not always be the case, and it is not desirable for poor nations to be reliant on the charity of others. It is much better if they can produce their own food, or at least be self-sufficient.

And yes, people will starve. Humans have been starving since humans existed. This is (or at least was) a fact of life, and it is necessary to push food production technology to a point where starvation is no longer a problem.

This is a fairly straightforward issue of incentive. If there is an incentive to create the facilities required to avoid starvation (the incentive being starvation), those facilities will be created. If there is no incentive (because the food is being shipped in from charitable wealthy nations), the facilities will not be created, and those people will be at starvation risk forever.

You are also reducing the idea down to the strawman situation of "Rich people being rich vs poor people eating food". Those two things are not in opposition in any way, and temporarily feeding people with the money of the rich will not make the poor any better off in the long run. (By the way, the amount of money that all of the world's rich people have saved up is not very large compared to the world's GDP. That is to say that using up all that money will not actually do very much.)

You place too much importance on people not dying of starvation right now, and not enough importance on the future.

I am not ignoring the side effects of charity.  They are the side effects of giving someone a fish.  This is about rescuing them from starvation and teaching them to fish. 

Wow. Talk about a hijacked thread. Wish I could moderate my own thread.
If posting here, please reread the original OP and stay on topic and ignore all the sock puppets.

Here's another nugget:

Actively hacking other sites and steeling money if possible but then boasts of giving it back.

From the article in the OP:


So, it can be more that just money that drives a pathological liar.

Sorry >:(

Is Zhuo Tong a Crooked little bastard?: Discuss

Really? How can i do that?

Good luck with that.


You know, I'm having a real hard time telling if you're trolling. All of your posts seem to demonstrate that you are precisely the kind of person who would not like Bitcoin at all... Either that or you don't understand it in the slightest. http://www.planetsmilies.com/smilies/confused/confused0071.gif

I think you would fit in better at http://www.freicoin.org (http://www.freicoin.org).

I'm just ahead of the game.  In a few years there won't be any libertarians around here once they realize what Bitcoin is really meant to accomplish.  Of course, a few years later they will come back when they realize the great things socialism and communism have to offer once paired with a superior currency.

I'm leaning strongly towards "trolling".

Yes, otherwise you end up with this sort of thing : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91661.0

It consists of half a page that's on topic. the following 25 and a half pages have nothing to do with the OP, and consist of bets, insults, thinly veiled threats, and some slander. All fun stuff, but nothing to do with the OP. I think you should do what CBH suggests if you don't want this to degenerate similarly, what with all the degenerates posting here.

http://www.echinacities.com/expat-corner/illogical-or-tactical-lies-in-chinese-culture.html (http://www.echinacities.com/expat-corner/illogical-or-tactical-lies-in-chinese-culture.html)

Says it all  >:(