Bitcoin Forum

First off, this list doesn't include proven scammers. There's a different mechanism to handle those. That said, if you hold outstanding unpaid obligations from anyone on this list I'd certainly want to hear about it, either publicly or privately.

Second off, this list doesn't include nickel and dime outfits (which is why people like usagi aren't here). There's currently no mechanism to handle those (outside of reading the lending forum, I guess), but there's also not much incentive.

Third off, this list doesn't include well known, argued to death cases. That's why BFL isn't here: if you don't know by now that a lot of people are suspicious of them and for what reasons you're beyond help.

To sum up: large, dangerous, lurking just under the waterline. Taking the icebergs out of the high seas of Bitcoin finance one at a time.

This list is, as anything woman made (which you'll notice includes all men), subject to error. I will diligently endeavor to correct any actual errors as best I can. On the other hand, anyone and everyone included would claim the list itself and any part thereof is erroneous - simple game theory dictates it. Quite frankly I couldn't care less.

Finally, you'll have plenty of warning before showing up here. In general, I'll ask you some questions in whatever thread you're using to announce your thing and you'll fail to respond adequately. Note that simple stupidity isn't enough to make the cut, significant potential of harm to the clueless investor from interacting with your stupidity has to also be present.

The List

Bitfinex (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131573.msg1492923#msg1492923) - coupla dudes picked up Bitcoinica's source as leaked by Taaki (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/amir-taaki-has-done-and-continues-to-do-huge-disservice-to-anyone-serious-involved-in-bitcoin/) and are since herpderping around.

Btcjam (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112447.msg1413923#msg1413923) - not a scam per se, just carries the scam-enabler torch dropped by GLBSE. Repayment rate of 77% declared by op (tho that's probably significantly overstated).

Picostocks (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140366.msg1495160#msg1495160) - possibly the most laughable thing on the forum. Guy's gonna make a 100Th farm out of bitfuries and other stuff (after having bought 1000 bASIC boards bASIC never sold).

Coinlab/Coinbase/Coincrap (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145797.msg1568305#msg1568305) - Multiple cases of stealing from users through the "canceling BTC sale when price goes up" scam, amplified by "pay anyone complaining on the forum" double-down. In any event their burn rate takes them out of the picture this year, so damage should be limited, but try and sit at a safe distance.

Opencoin's Ripple (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/ripple-the-definitive-discussion/) - closed source scamcoin built on top of an ill baked, badly designed reimplementation of the Federal Reserve. Owned by Jed Caleb (the first guy who stole from MtGox). Supported by some clueless VC funds, which led to absurd claims on obscure blogs ("larger than bitcoin") and a lot of noise on this forum from well known shill accounts (MisterBigg, JoelKatz etc) dragging some naive/new people along.

Bitcoin Foundation. Pretends with no basis to be representative for Bitcoin. Is organized as a swindle, in the sense that it takes "donations" in exchange for "membership" (ie, like any "investment club" out there) but it never reports income and expenditure. The head and treasurer are the same person (Peter Vessenes), a known confidence artist from the start-up congame, who already blew up a so-called Bitcoin venture or two (above) and who is actually using the donated Bitcoin for his own purposes on his own account. Sells reputation propping services to various known scams (BFL, MtGox etc). Steer as clear as at all possible.

MtGox Notorious fractional reserve "exchange". Famous for having nearly destroyed Bitcoin in 2009 and for having tried (unsuccessfully) to brand it as a Ponzi (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/its-been-an-epic-few-days-what-happened/) in 2013. The principal (Mark Karpeles) is currently on the hook with the DoJ for having lied in filings, which means any BTC you send to MtGox is practically speaking a donation to his defense fund.

BFL Collected large sums of BTC from the general public for the past ~18 months, principally via heavy google advertising and with the help of meanwhile notorious scammers and shills (like gigavps, lukejr, quite a pirate-like list) on the pretense they are to deliver ASIC mining technology. Blew most of the Bitcoin on hookers (Josh Zerlan (http://josh-zerlan.com/?ref=1E8MkRHhBNr9X29QUN2YkMxezesrEyGhSZ)) and blow, managed to buy some functioning chips from competitors (much like their earlier FPGA deliveries consisted of sanded off chips bought on the cheap) and are for the past few months trying to parlay token prototype deliveries into more orders. Any BTC you send to BFL is practically speaking a donation to the forum lolfund.

The ex-List

icbit.se (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50817.msg1340144#msg1340144) - old site, suspected at some point coupla months ago of running as bucket shop. They did however fully honor their obligations to MP (to the tune of ~500 BTC) and made various changes to their code. I've not looked it into it since, and have currently no reason to suspect shenanigans.

Gigamining

I thought that MP's opinion on Gigamining wasn't that it was a scam, but that it was just absolutely worthless. Mining bonds depreciate faster than a Chevy Celebrity in a demolition Derby.

More importantly, much like in the case of BFL, it's been done to death. If anyone still doesn't get what the issue is with PMBs (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-problem-with-pmbs-ie-perpetual-mining-bonds/)... well... what can you do anymore.

Does BTC Jam really enable scams any more than #Bitcoin-OTC or this forum?

Interesting on the 77% stats for BTCJam.  I wonder how many lenders realize that if the successful repayment rate is 77% and the average interest rate is less than 29.9% then it is a capital sink.  Meaning that collectively the repayments are less then the amount lent.

Wonder if the JTCJam operators are willing to publish a ROIC% for the whole site.  My guess is -30% annualized.

I think so. At the very least it makes an array of willful misrepresentations (such as "credit ratings" and claiming it prosecutes defaulters - tho in honesty dunno if that hasn't been abandoned in the meanwhile).


I bet they don't realize it at all.

The main concern here is the noob pump, ie: new person joins BTC, it's kinda cool, buys himself one or two bitcoins, reads a little on the forum, plays a little with gribble, decides to try out this investment thing. Goes to BTCJam, "invests" his Bitcoin there, one to six weeks later he's "lost" it and well...that's that.

Out of 1,000 noobs a week 20 get lucky and make a profit (1% is a profit after all), they then report it and there's 20 happy customers on the forum. 980 make a loss and disappear, never to be seen again. Rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. The widespread low level perception that "Bitcoin is a scam", how do you think that came to be? Twasn't the SEC, I'll wager.

Site can work these numbers for as long as Bitcoin exists, 20 success stories a week, 980 silent deaths a week, fiddy bitcoins in "profits" a month. Horrible story, imo.

How would you describe the ideal crowd-sourced p2p-lending BTC-based operation?

So it's basically just think of it as a really REALLY slow game of Satoshi Dice with less reward for a win.

It might be worth asking if "crowd-sourced," "p2p," and "lending" all belong in the same sentence with "ideal."

I really don't think citizen finance has a chance. It's a specialist field, and for very good reasons.

That aside, D&T has a point above. Publishing default rates per loancount and per btc, ROIC%s (ideally as a usercount histogram, actually) with some frequency (monthly?) would do a lot to help transparency. Unfortunately all that transparency would accomplish would be highlighting the poor results of investors, leading to higher interest rates, leading to higher default rates in a spiral of ponzi.

Dead right on BTCJam.  The site enablers scammers in many ways  (e.g. forbidding lenders to contact buyers), makes false promises ("we'll report deadbeats to credit agencies soon..." has been "soon" since day 1), and in general has terrible customer service.  Unfortuantely, if you dare make a negative comment in the BTCJam thread some guy who thinks everyone but him is a fools because he is 2 for 2 on not getting scammed will jump in and insult you and reap praise on the site.

Reported repay rate (if not an unright lie) is inflated by scammers who repay a 1 BTC loan, then a 2 BTC loan to get a reputation and then stiff on two 10 BTC loans.  That looks like 50% repaid, but is really 13% (3/23) in terms on BTC.  I suspect the real repay rate is well under 50%. (And yah even teh claimed rate amounts to a huge -EV situation for lenders.)

For any values of "some guy" equal to Gweedo or w/e that muppet's name is.

I always suspected that BTCJam was -EV.  It would be interested in seeing analysis of personal loans in the lending forum. (Excluding large loans, "banks", and deposit programs which would surely skew the results in the -EV direction)

The problem with this is the hobbyist attitude. What I mean is: most people involved in BTC do it as a hobby, and the point of a hobby is to have fun. More importantly, the more fun it is the more work one's apt to put into it. Because of this, good results will be documented ad nauseam and bad results will not even be seriously considered, let alone written about. In fact it may be argued that even seriously considering whether something is +EV or -EV is not a good use of a hobbyist's time, because it may ruin their enjoyment of the entire thing (never count your money while you're sitting at the table sort of thing). To compound problems, most of these people don't have any education at all, and those who do sport degrees from rural agricultural colleges and whatnot.

Not that the sort of attitude and these sorts of problems aren't getting more and more prevalent in mainstream business too, or to quote Greenspun (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2011/antreprenorul-fata-cu-investitorii-arsdigita/):

I partially agree with this.  The reason I don't fully agree is because different people's fun come from different aspects of running a business - some of which aren't as bad as others.  Here's my attempt to split up the hobbyists into a few categories (talking here primarily about ones that take in investment - though much of it also applies to ones that sell services).  Do note that this is ONLY

1.  The "I want to run a business" group.  A huge portion of BTC businesses fall into this category.  They're people with no experience of running businesses who want to do something to help/be a part of the community.  They have no clear plan of what they're doing and usually very shoddy reporting - as their fun comes from the DOING of it: reporting and actually making a profit for investors don't have much importance to them (though they vaguely hope they'll somehow luck into a profit).  In my view these people are actually a blight on the community - as they their enthusiasm sucks in investment which would be much better served being used for something productive.

2.  The "I want a profit" group.  The second largest portion of businesses (many are actually a mix of this and part 1) - especially prevalent in the mining sector.  These ones want to make some profit for themselves - and aren't that worried about things like being transparent, honest or fair to investors.  Their contracts are vague on details, strong on THEIR rights and weak on investors rights.  They ensure that even if their business is an abject failure they personally make money irrespective of how badly their investors do.  Their fun comes from personally making some money even if at the expense of investors rather than from turning a profit.  Many of these are borderline scammers - as they misrepresent their investments to get sales and don't properly disclose risks.  Reporting will tend to be of a higher quality than type 1 - their (personal) profit  and ability to attarct investors come from them looking fairly professional whilst actually losing investors' funds.  These are also of very little use to the community.

3.  The "Let's see how well I can do" group.  The tiny minority of hobbyist businesses.  Ones where the operator knows what to do and gets their enjoyment from running a successful (for them AND investors) business.  Part of that requires proper reporting and disclosure of risks - there's no fun or challenge in tricking people here (it's way too easy to do - as shown by the number of totally ridiculous schemes/businesses that have successfully leeched funds).  Actually making a profit for investors (and yourself) whilst surrounded by (and routinely dealing with) incompetents/scammers/idiots is a genuine challenge which a few will try to rise to.  Of course a lot of people who THINK they're in this group are actually in group 1.

As a hobbyist myself I'd like to think I'm in group 3 - but that's not really my call. 

The main difference between group 1 and 3 is competence.  Also group 3 will tend to be better at reporting negative news - they know sometimes things go wrong and that when they do the best approach is to face up to them, learn lessons from them and carry on.  Group 1 tend to try to hide bad news as they're embarassed about it, don't want to look bad and hope somehow it'll magically go away.  Group 2 report bad news, claim it was unexpected, blame it on someone/something else and move on: they don't need to address it - as their personal profits typically come from turnover rather than from profit so making a loss doesn't really harm them (other than in terms of long-term reinvestment - but they gave up on that as soon as they decided to make personal profit whilst investors lost out).

I'd contend that group 3 ARE hobbyists but otherwise don't meet the general complaint you had against hobbyists.  As their fun comes from the challenge of doing well, things going awry don't significantly detract from the fun: they just have to try a bit harder for a while to make up for it.  Which isn't to say that there's no fun in doing well - there definitely is.  But the harder it IS to do well, the more fun there is when you manage it.

We've certainly seen a lot of this.


Isn't this how most fiat banks / corps are run? Buffett certainly seems to think so, and for a while at that.

But interesting classification I would say, certainly seems to jive well with the dataset. I guess you have a solid point re #3. After all, hobbyist astronomers discover new planets all the time and every day plenty of serious and competent people turn hobbies into serious business. I guess in my terms these would be hobbyists without the hobby attitude, which is what it boils down to: people can take their hobby seriously, people can treat their profession as if it were a hobby. Or in other words, driving on Sundays is no stigma. Being a Sunday driver is, and every day of the week at that.

Well yes - but I was talking about people doing it for a hobby, not doing it as profession/for a living.  If you do something for a living then you pretty much HAVE to make sure you cover your living expenses whether your investors make profit or a loss.

That's why I'd argue a competent hobbyist is a better investment than someone doing it for a living - as the hobbyist doesn't need to personally make a profit that covers the time/effort they put in (if they regularly DO then debatably it ceases to be a hobby). 

The problem around here is that there's plenty doing it for a hobby - but few with competence.  I'd argue that lack of competence is actually the root problem - with the hobbyist attitude exascerbating it by causing loads of incompetents to do the wrong thing (run a business they aren't competent to manage) for the right reason (to help/be a part of the community).

Meanwhile, clowns are clowns.

Yes and no.  One factor which many Bitcoin enterprises have had to deal with is explosive growth - growth which they have neither the financial resources nor the experience to handle. 

Outside of Bitcoin, you can often "learn on the fly" because you're not going to have people throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at you a few weeks after you've launched.  In Bitcoinland, your business can literally be taking a couple of hours a week of your time one month and the next month pretty much require a team of employees with different skill-sets who you can't yet afford to employ.

Hobbyists need to recognise their own limitations and plan for controlled growth before they even launch.  Past a certain point, it's neither possible nor desirable for a business founder to try to micro-manage all aspects of the operation.  You need to set your ego aside and find the best people available for the tasks which need doing as an enterprise grows.  You need to be willing to *shock*, *horror* refuse additional customers if you don't have the capacity to service them properly. 

The community are their own worst enemies in some ways.  They keep throwing money at businesses which have extremely limited capacity to absorb losses.  We know most of these businesses are so under-capitalised that a loss of even tens of thousand dollars is something they couldn't compensate and yet people insist on placing hundreds of thousands of dollars with them and just leaving it there.

The community also tends to hail new services as heroes and feed the egos of new service providers - perhaps in the process convincing those operators that they're more competent than they actually are.

To my mind the issues you're describing ARE precisely a lack of competence.

Properly realising your capital requirements (both the minimum AND the maximum) IS an area of competence.  Recognising which skill-sets your business needs but you don't possess yourself IS a competence - if someone can't even recognise the need for something then I'd say that indisputably they lack the basic competence to be running their business.

Capital is one area where a lot of BTC businesses go badly wrong - and I'd argue that raising TOO MUCH capital has been one of the primary reasons for the failure/bad performance of many BTC investment funds (with mining ones the problem is slightly different).

I trade rather than invest, but for both traders AND investors there are two key elements for every potential security purchased:

1.  How the current price relates to the actual value.
2.  The liquidity.

A lot of investment companies have given some attention to #1 whilst completely overlooking #2.  The hard truth is that with the low level of competence in BTC businesses in general #2 is very important - as the value (as well as the price) of securities can change very rapidly.  SO even if investing rather than trading you need to be able to get out of a position quickly if you spot a downwards change in value (usually some act of incompetence by the manager) before it gets reflected in the trading price.  Even a fairly incompetent fund manager can spot these changes in value before the price really crashes - as they pay more attention to what's happening than the casual investor does.

But to be able to respond by divesting yourself of your holding, you have to only be holding an amount that the market can absorb - and many funds have raised so much cash (which isn't necessarily a lot in any absolute sense) that when spread over their small list of investments meeting criterion #1 it leaves them unable to exit at any sort of reasonable price when they need to.

When, inevitably, one of their investments gos bad (and it would be an absolute miracle if none of them ever did) they then end up complaining to their investors that they couldn't sell out because of a lack of liquidity.  But that lack of liquidity existed before they bought in - and their current plight is thus a direct result of their decision to commit to positions such that they could never easily reverse them.  Their lack of ability to recognise the NEED to take liquidity into account BEFORE investing IS, in my view, pretty much a text-book example of a lack of competence.  There was something that needed to be done - and they were unable to even recognise the need for it let alone do it.

You can say they lack experience - but experience itself doesn't help.  Learning from experience helps - and that's pretty much what competence is.

I run a small fund myself (that trades rather than invests).  I could sell plenty more units in now - there's no Ask on it under about 3 times its NAV/U and I frequently get PMs asking to be notified if more units are sold.  But I KNOW that selling a load more units wouldn't be smart.  If I had ten times the capital then one of two things would happen:

1.  I'd only use 1/10th of it to trade with and leave the other 9/10ths idle and the growth per unit would be 1/10th would it is now.
2.  I'd use ALL of it to trade - and I'd make LESS profit than I do now.  Not just a smaller percentage but a lower amount.

The reason for 2. is that at present I only commit to any security I trade the amount I can liquidiate quickly at the first hint of trouble (I prefer not to wait and see - and to take tiny losses when there was actually no problem so as to avoid big losses when there IS a big problem).  If I tried to trade 10 times the volume on the same assets then I'd never be able to get out just before a price crashed - and would make little more profit when things went well.  That would result in lower profits than at present - which would then have to be shared between a lot more investors.

Investment companies need in BTC land to follow a similar policy - far more so than applies in fiat world - because of the volatility of pretty much everything BTC related (e.g. an otherwise perfectly fine business could be screwed if BTC rises more than X% vs USD in a short period).  Yet few investment funds have ever properly considered this -and end up wedded to failing businesses as they plunge to their demise.

Raising more capital than they can safely use is a direct cause of failure - as they then feel obliged to use the capital even when doing so introduces risk outweighing the benefit.

I say it's a lack of competence - if you disagree, then I suspect the difference in our views is more one of semantics than anything else (you're maybe concerned over WHY they lack competence - e.g. lack of experience - I'm just pointing out that they don't have it).

This actually is very true. Few people can turn overnight or over a weekend from McDonald's managers responsible for two cooks and four people working counters to transnational corp managers responsible for (the work of) dozens of people each making much more in base salary than the whole take of a McD manager.

So the management doesn't scale at all, on top of the problem of finding/evaluating/hiring the respective employees. To compound problems, volatility is nuts. The market can literally expect you to scale from one to the other between 9 and 9:15 pm on a Sunday, then scale back down again the next Tuesday. Wait six weeks, back up, etc. These sorts of pressures aren't at all something that humans can handle, even if markets can ask for them - heck, markets can ask for anything, and most times they will.

That's why limits introduced by design (even on growth!) are much more sensible in BTC than anywhere else.


Absolutely.


I suppose this is just the way of BTCs filtering themselves out of the hands of the well-meaners into the hands of the savvy. This is how it should be, after all.


Egos are a very large problem quickly becoming larger. On one hand, early Bitcoin was pretty much built on the ego of socially failed individuals - take Taaki for a fine example because of his hysterical wiki page but really, half the Bitcoin "famous" are in the same boat. Because of their ultimately doomed effort to "prove themselves" as equal to their self image rather than equal to their social image these people were capable of spending quite a bit of time, and in the case of failed miners quite a bit of their own coin.

On the other hand, the perennially inept, dregs of society, Dunning-Kruger people of the world always have serious ego issues, in the sense that they cannot, for the life of them, swallow being told they fucked up. This is understandable - it happens so often in their life as it is...and after all they came to Bitcoin to escape exactly that, and build a new and true society of the future where by god nobody shall ever tell them they're stupid ever again rawr!

These two interplay - and it's often the same people - and so many mistakes that aren't really necessary or unavoidable get made nevertheless.

The problem of too much money. (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-problem-of-too-much-money/)


This is a very good point. Market isn't really mature enough to handle funds and like vehicles too well yet. The problem is that the need for managed funds exists, as in, many more people would like to invest than are capable/competent to do it, and so someone investing for them makes perfect sense. Take the simple point of the S.DICE PT on Havelock going as high as 89 this week, when it both charges a fee and the underlying never went over 75 on MPEx. That's a whopping 20% worth of market inefficiency. If you think about fiat fund managers, happy to chase a two pip difference in price and gorge plentifully upon that....

There's some pressure there. Hopefully it will be slowly but not too slowly resolved the natural way: people holding worthy companies realizing that this forum doesn't, mostly, matter; that the horde of muppets screaming bloody murder at one wall will soon enough move on to some other randomly chosen wall and it all makes no difference; that the fate of BTC is in large part related to their own financial decisions (as in, the biggest thing they can do for BTC is list in BTC, larger than opening a BTC shop of anything; as in, the worst they can do for BTC is not list in it, the longer it takes for BTC to establish itself firmly as the financial measuring stick of everything the worse its prospects at success - again indifferent of absolutely anything, coffee shops taking Bitcoin, wikipedia taking Bitcoin, crud like that). Even so I am confident that the market will overtake blather slowly but surely for the universal reason this happens: the profit motive.


So "Absolutely!" it bleeds.


This is probably the case. Taking an implicit view of competence ("anything the rational agent could do") rather than an explicit one ("that which is so-and-so certified", for instance) resolved the problem.

To top everything else off... there was an unreported hack. Which nobody knows anything about and nobody's asking anything about because the sorts of people involved are not quite together enough for anything like that. BTCJam. (Yes, they're claiming nothing was stolen, but the truth is probably more to the tune of 1k BTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112447.msg1454215#msg1454215)).

Its called "stealing your own wallet" or "doing the Nefario"

Updated.

Coinlab and coinbase are two totally different operations with two totally different sets of people involved funded from two totally different sources, right?  One of your links you posted earlier today seemed to posit that coinbase is behind yesterday's news about MtGox when actually it's coinlab.

Not really that totally different, no. Basically the same group of people.

Who is common between the two groups?

Do MPEX and GLSBE have any common people, too?  I'm sure to someone who didn't take the time to research they would seem to be "basically the same group of people."

They all use bitcoin ?

They are all in the US ?

Since we're talking about "people who didn't bother do the research", did you read the comments on the first link in the linked post? They pretty much cover your question, apparently it's been asked before.

This leaving aside the rest of the nonsense.


Above question to you, too. Didja read or too busy posting?

What exchange should I go with instead? I'd like to use a reputable exchange instead of one that gets hacked or shut down..

If you're in the SEPA zone probably the people at Bitcoin-Central (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=129461.0). If you're outside of the SEPA zone you're a little underserved/underbanked at the moment, unfortunately. Probably p2p is your best bet, for a number of reasons. Something like Local Bitcoins or the specialized irc channels.

To: MPOE-PR

Could you please recommend sources where I might learn more about your concerns regarding Coinlab?

I agree that Coinbase is not trustworthy because of their unpredictable last-minute cancellations. I no longer do business with them, and it is irrelevant to me whether their unreliability is nefarious or mere incompetence.

Coinlab, on the other hand, worries me. I have been a MtGox customer for some time. On 3/22/13, my account will be transferred from MtGox to Coinlab. If I don't like it, my only alternative will be to leave and take my trades elsewhere.

I would be grateful if you would suggest where I might learn more about Coinlab.

I don't think there's any place where you can read anything useful. The reason is that the pretend-press (like for instance the Bitcoin Rag, or that dorky kid doing something in his sleep) fail to do their job, which would be reporting, preferring instead to do pumping.

One person discussing CoinLab's misadventures in mining in the piece linked (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/ycombinator-continues-to-suck-jointly-and-severally/) is jcpham. You can get ahold of him on irc, or alternatively since he's in the WoT you can probably shoot him an email. There's a little more discussion for instance here (http://silvervigilante.com/coinlab-repatriates-funds-to-us-no-thanks/). His statements are generally correct, they've tried to (bribe people to) get a mining pool going. They've failed.

Prior to that they've tried to get various online gamers (such as wurm players (http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/61990-coinlab-faq-how-to-earn-silver-coins-with-your-graphics-card/page__st__20)) to run their mine. That plan also never went anywhere, principally because it wasn't very well thought through (gamers tend to want to use their video cards, their pricing structure was ridiculous, their sales approach beyond amateurish).

The founders are Peter Vessenes, Mike Koss, and Tihan Seale. That last guy is deeply involved in the Bitcoinica fiasco (you can start reading here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=97272.0), but literally a search for his name on this forum and the Internet in general should be most informative). Mike Koss is a sort of slumlord for the Seattle bum entrepreneur world. His name is probably only mixed in all this because he gave the other two enough space for two desks in a hallway somewhere. Peter Vessenes is the connection to CoinBase, via Ycombinator (which is, quite literally, investment's sideshow, a sort of contemporary PT Barnum Grand Circus).

In lieu of a conclusion: the thing with handling money is that you have to do due diligence. A large part of this due diligence business is doing independent research, by yourself. The reason is that other people pretending to be doing research for you aren't really doing any research, but simply pushing their crap.

Thank you very much! A very useful reply!

MPOE: You realize that CoinBase is legally allowed to do what they do, right?  It's blatantly listed in their TOS, so it's not a scam.  Their customers agreed to follow those rules.

First sentence, eh?

That is not the point. You would be horrified to read the terms printed on the back of airline tickets. Or on most commercial software. Or most construction contracts. The point, in my eyes, is not whether the corrupt mechanisms of the U.S. justice system would side with Coinbase or with me in court. The point is that, having been screwed by Coinbase ("legally" or not--I suspect incompetence, not malice), I simply walk away and resolve to no longer deal with them. If Vessenes links Coinbase to Coinlab via ycombinator, then Coinlab is suspect as well.

This is very much on point. That some [expletive deleted] would very much like to import the brokenness of the fiat system into Bitcoin is no surprise: it's the easy thing to do and the [expletive deleted] are first and foremost intellectually lazy.

That it's easier, that it's what the [expletive deleted] do or want, that it's "how things work" in the failed fiat world are not arguments. Bitcoin is that which fiat has tried and failed to be for two thousand years by now, NOT the other way around. Time for the [expletive deleted] to get with the program.

I suspect they will "go to wall street" by running a fractional reserve system of paper notes backed by nothing but air. In a few years people will find their bitcoins are filled with tungsten.

Do not want.

That's true for everything. One suspicious thing is Coinbase are heavily trying to get people paying with BTC on site using their balance, but that can be as much vendor locking as FRB.

Doesn't seem like they're doing anything at all really.

BTCjam I believe will be the hot Apple pie to the world of BTCscam drama. I have this cutting feeling in my stomach that ID's will eventuality be sold "stolen" or used in other scams not related to crypto.

The fact of the matter is supplying that info to BTCjam is pointless. they can't and wouldn't do anything legit with it. I've given up pretty much anything I can destory to them. but no ID, proof of resident or credit check.

Anyway more could be said but I'm sure you get the picture

It just came out that Coinbase was leaking user details via allowing private sessions to be indexed in google: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site:https://coinbase.com/checkouts/

That they sat on their hands for days after a very similar attack was documented against a different service puts them solidly in the same class with the dummies of Bitfinex, who had to find out from me RoR was broken wide open, half a day after it happened.

Children running a nonbusiness.

Updated, added OC Ripple.

Group of scammers involved with Bitfinex (Giancarlo Devasini, J.L. van der Velde, Raphael Nicolle) oust a fourth scammer involved with Bitfinex, hilarity ensues.

Updated.

+1 on the Bitcoin Foundation being a scam, all they do is spew lies and bullshit (like when they said they were stomping out scams and such, what utter crap). As long as that exists this isn't decentralized, there has to be a better way to develop the Bitcoin-QT software.

Exactly, if anything they help prop the bigger scams.

It's called using alternate clients. Most IRC networks no longer use ircd, they use forks of it.

Actually I have a list handy.


As you can see...mostly hyperion.

Really not a good comparison, cause the reasons it got forked, or rewritten was cause, IRCD was stopped being developed.

Most normal people who aren't too tech-savvy will go to bitcoin.org and download Bitcoin-QT, though. (unless they get pissed at the blockchain download and go search for alt clients)

^THIS! !!!!

I've converted a few handfulls of people to the world of bitcoin and crypto.  I usually weigh in how tech savvy they are and further if they are of the mindframe to wait out the blockchain download.

Either MPOE-PR is well ahead of her time; either we are all living in the past.

Care to update the list?

You said it.

Black Arrow.

"I want a profit" isn't a bad thing. "I want to guarantee a profit by scamming the customers/investors" is. BA falls into this second category.

Stating that they're "of very little use to the community" is a serious understatement.