Bitcoin Forum

I think the community has been too lenient with holding service provider up to a standard of quality. We allowed mybitcoin to handles tens of thousands of BTC storage and transfer, without knowing sh*t about the operator.

I propose all BTC service providers (BTC banks, exchanges and escrows) must meet the following standard of quality, otherwise we collectively refuse to do business with them:

1. Must provide on their website, physical/real/verifiable name, address and phone number of at least 1 contact person that is involved in the operation, this is the minimum. Preferably we also want to know your place of employment, facebook/twitter/LinkedIn, but that's up to you. The more verifiable information you provide, the more we will trust you.

2. Must provide explanation of the security measures they have in place, to safeguard client security. (does not have to go into detail, just something like "we salt passwords", "we have taken xxx step to prevent CSRF attack", "we have offsite backup", etc...)

Great idea.

Or perhaps we should simply develop a standard questionnaire for all service providers in order to highlight the known important criteria. It's up to each provider what subset of information it provides, and up to each potential customer to assess the answers.

Sorry to be harsh to such an innocent happy group think kind of person... Because that would be great... But: Your proposal has no basis in reality.

If the majority of people actually gave a shit about any of the things you mention (which they should) then they would have all personally asked mybitcoin about such things before putting their money into it. They did not. And the majority of people in any "large group" will not care and will not check any of this before doing anything.

They will act upon the brightest ad, most convincing friend, or biggest marketing claim solely.

Also making a lot of real identifiable personal information available to the internet as a whole is a very bad thing for any legitimate businessman. See sites like 4chan and SomethingAwful, and this very forum where people ask for "prank calls" to someone who supposedly scammed them.

If one angry nerd doesn't like one little thing (could be anything or nothing at all) he could start a revenge campaign that hundreds may jump on to harass and threaten someone for months without any real proof or reason behind the original offending act.

Vigilantes sound great at first "Hey the cops cant take care of this so a vigilante can do it that would be tops!" but it would only work if that vigilante was truly precise and tedious about making damn sure the person he is punishing deserves exactly what is about to happen. That is not what happens when a random anonymous jerk on the internet says "hey this guy scammed me, his home address : xxxxx  Please rape his family thxbye"

You don't really need personal information about a business until you receive an invoice or receipt from them.

what happened with mybitcoin is tragic, and most likely set the bitcoin community back 1/2 a year or longer in development.

Far too cynical.

As a group, we can monitor what's going on in order to inform the herd.

dacoinmeisters thread, asking all of the exchanges about how their bitcoins were stored and managed, was valuable. Now that I know that mtgox has 98% of bitcoins stored offline, I have a lot more confidence in them. I wish someone had asked the question of mybitcoin. All of these efforts help.

Like the other posters have said, best thing you can do is keep people informed here. Unless you feel a dedicated site is necessary.