I'm not exactly a proponent of bitcoin
Doesn't mean you have to refuse tips in it.  Also, do you have a reddit account? |
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Great strips, you should leave a bitcoin address, folks will probably tip you
I'd definitely tip you, but only if you ingrained the tipping address in the comic somewhere. |
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I'm relatively new to the BitCoin realm and within about 1.5 hours of researching, it became quite apparent to me that BFL is operating fraudulently.
Personally, I'm less surprised at the fact that they're a sham, and much, much more surprised that people still believe they are real. I must say, the founder of BFL and his/her constituents function as the absolute epitome of successful opportunists.
They saw a massive demand for a product, substantiated in a high-risk/high-reward marketplace, isolated the characteristics of their marketshare (risk-takers) and took the plunge. I would argue (assuming I am right in ascertaining their scam) that this was one of the most successful scams in history, not because of the amount of money they will receive, but because of the ramifications and their ability to conduct this scam under a veil of anonymity that is the very core value of Bitcoin.
Quite intriguing, to say the very least. I hope for the sake of Bitcoin and those who invested, it is not a scam.
So, you say that it is "quite apparent to me that BFL is operating fraudulently", and state that "they're a sham" as fact, even going so far as to say "this was one of the most successful scams in history", and yet you end with "I hope ... it is not a scam". Why state they are a scam as fact when you yourself don't even fully believe it? Instead of saying "they're a sham," say "I believe they're a sham." Stating facts that are not necessarily true is a great way to expose yourself to libel/slander lawsuits. Anyway, are you certain enough that they are a scam that you are willing to put money on it? Because I am certain enough that they are not a scam to put money on it. |
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I don't hate you. You bring perspective to things. It is always good to be forced to intensely review your own viewpoints on anything.
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Do we include this? My developer friend was paid 500 bit coin for a $200 project by some Russians a few years ago. He took then off the exchange and forgot about them. A year ago, he gave his mac to his brother. Because of the bitcoin craze of the past month, he checked his old computer. It has been completely reformatted and replaced with Windows. $45,000 gone, just like that. May as well... If I was some of these people who lost coins, I'd be looking into some serious forensic data recovery at this point. Or at least selling the drives to someone who has the capital to risk in attempting it. $45k is no laughing matter... |
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That said, I would be concerned if Roman wasn't making enough profit for himself to make this be worth his while.
That is my concern as well - that he has lost inspiration for the project. It would suck to work hours a day on something that you won't see payouts on for four years. But I know people do that all the time, so... This. Most of these creditors unrealistic goals assume repayment = 100% of gross revenue and that running bitfloor has no costs and Roman will gladly work for 3 to 5 years without any compensation. Of course if the exchange rate goes higher and higher and higher the drive to repay creditors 1000%, 5000%, 20,000% of what they lost (in USD terms) for years and year and year is likely going to run dry. Any debt scenario (any from loan shark to mortgage) involves benefit and risk for both parties. When benefit/risk becomes significantly onsided then one entity will seek to end the agreement. For full disclosure TC, LLC sold our debt to a third party so I have no direct involvement however we do move some significant volume through bitfloor so our company has a vested interest in bitfloor being a solid growing exchange. Another concern is whether he is MT/MSB registered It is just MSB. MT is just one classification of MSB. Bitfloor is registered as an MSB (has been for sometime) although since it was prior to the FinCEN guidance IIRC the classification is "currency exchange" not "money transmitter". All MSBs are subject to the same reporting, AML program, compliance officer, and third party audits. It would make no sense for Roman to register (a defacto admission one believes they must be compliant) and then not comply. My guess (no inside information) is that he is complying with MSB requirements. He can file with FinCEN to have the MSB classification changed. Well, it is a relief bitfloor is MSB registered. Thanks for clarifying that D&T. |
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You know, our heads are full of PCBs nowadays :-)
I know that this project is basically an "it will be done when it will be done..." kind of thing, but can you give us any idea about where you are in the process? I thought they were done? They were selling on bitmit, were they not? |
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Why not more information? You failed to answer some very basic questions that everyone is wondering:
- How much was stolen?
- How much will those with more than 50 BTC be missing when they attempt to make a claim?
- Why aren't you covering the stolen amounts out of your own coffers? It was your site security that failed, not the fault of your users.
- Given that your company is insolvent (obviously, or you would be able to pay everyone back in full), are you not afraid of being sued for the remaining amounts and then being investigated for criminal activity as a result? It is against the law (at least in the US, not sure about European countries) to display favoritism to one creditor vs another when you know the company is insolvent. All account holders should be taking the same haircut and be repaid by the same percentage of their original balance.
FWIW, I have no stake in the game. I am just disappointed in how this is being handled.
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That said, I would be concerned if Roman wasn't making enough profit for himself to make this be worth his while.
That is my concern as well - that he has lost inspiration for the project. It would suck to work hours a day on something that you won't see payouts on for four years. But I know people do that all the time, so... Another concern is whether he is MT/MSB registered, and whether he is doing the proper reporting. |
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this is why the bitcoin community sort of sucks its full of scammers with no checks on their manipulations of people... nobody is held responsible. if people actually knew those BFL guys like luke they'd probably hassle em for real answers, and they may even get a solid ass whooping if they refused to pose any evidence.
that is the dark side of complete anonymity...
Huh? People know the BFL guys. Their address is public, and Josh said that anyone is welcome to visit them, just so long as they set up an appointment beforehand. BFL is far from an anonymous company. They have given real answers as to the delays. I don't know what else a person could expect from them, other than more reasonable estimates of time in the future. That is good to know. It's only 15 hours from here, I will seriously drive over there and document the trip with photos on this forum this month. Sweet! It wouldn't hurt to get some more pictures and another user account of visiting. So far, Kano & Luke Jr have been the only ones to visit (that I know of). |
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I programmed FirstBits for FreeMoney. I'm not sure what's happening with the site, but I know blockchain.info lookups of firstbits were much faster. Perhaps he felt that his site wasn't necessary? Regardless, if it stays down indefinitely and the domain comes back up for sale, I'll probably nab it and get it running again.
You may want to contact him directly. If it comes up for sale, it will likely be snapped up by domain squatters. Yep, I did. He's going to transfer it to me and I'll keep it running. |
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Also, they're still MUCH more efficient than the Avalon units, even at the highest wattage they saw! I'd like to see your maths on that. All I've seen so far is a 30Gh mini single SC prototype doing 24Gh/s, drawing 179w, and spitting out a huge number of hardware errors. Doesn't sound like much of an advantage at all. Avalon has said they've doubled their production capacity and CNY is over. I suspect that batch 2 Avalon customers that ordered on 2/2/2013 will begin receiving products before BFL customers that ordered in June of 2012 which will further erode returns for BFL investors. The whole thing is tragic. Avalon draws 620w at the wall for 68GH/s = 9.1w/GHash Bfl draws 179w at the wall for 24GH/s = 7.5w/Ghash That's a significant advantage, and that's still the worst possible case for BFL. They had miners that did much better, at 1.76, 2.5, 4, and 6 w/ghash. |
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this is why the bitcoin community sort of sucks its full of scammers with no checks on their manipulations of people... nobody is held responsible. if people actually knew those BFL guys like luke they'd probably hassle em for real answers, and they may even get a solid ass whooping if they refused to pose any evidence.
that is the dark side of complete anonymity...
Huh? People know the BFL guys. Their address is public, and Josh said that anyone is welcome to visit them, just so long as they set up an appointment beforehand. BFL is far from an anonymous company. They have given real answers as to the delays. I don't know what else a person could expect from them, other than more reasonable estimates of time in the future. |
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I've thought about going crazy on the comments on every news article that is posted, and debating anyone and everyone who has a negative viewpoint of Bitcoin. Including the author, of course, if they said something like that.
Then I realized that this would be nearly a full-time job.
When reading articles, a common misconception about Bitcoin is that it's a business. I realized at some point that Bitcoin is something like a business, but in a web 3.0 kind of way. In a business, people apply and get hired after passing through HR. A better model is like we have here (in theory) where everyone is "applying" by participating. And naturally, individuals slowly begin to stand out, and are respected on their merits (or are loved for their lols). What they contribute is used to benefit the company - charts, links to latest headlines, first glimpse of breaking news. We "invest time in our product" and expect that that product will in turn generate value, and thus we get our "paycheck" as the adoption increases (price goes up, or we gain financial freedoms, etc.). The irony I think is that this is the more correct model of how businesses should work - people, believing in something, work towards it. Back to what you were talking about, what I see happening is that we in the Bitcoin community have a small army of PR people who get on the comment section of the news articles, and fix the misconceptions and encourage the proper discussion. When I hop on in there, part of me is self-motivated, but another part of me feels like an enthusiastic employee working for Bitcoin. Yes, I agree. I only wish I didn't have to have a day-job so I could dedicate myself to such activities! |
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Also, you have to keep in mind their perspective. From their perspective, back in June 2012, they were fully intending to have a working product shipping out in late October or early November. Then, unexpected problems turned up. With each successive push-back of the ship date, they were expecting to be able to ship on that ship date. More unexpected problems kept getting in the way of them doing so. Now, you could argue that they should have foreseen these problems, which is a reasonable argument, but it doesn't change the fact that they didn't foresee them and they were intending to ship at each of these given time periods.
I agree. Yet once they started realising that they're having problems delivering, the most sensible thing to do would be to stop taking preorders until they have it figured out. Also I wouldn't have any problems with this if the preorder was simply a place in line, pay once the product is ready to ship, but it is just incredible that all this time they just keep taking preorders when they clearly have no idea when, if ever, they can ship. Bitcointalk is not BFL. They can't stop people giving money to BFL, but when they're running BFL's ads all this time without any questions asked, that basically makes Bitcointalk a partner in crime. Bitcointalk is accepting money from a company that is looking more and more like a fraud every month. I know running the forum isn't free, but there should be at least some concern on where the money is coming from. All I'm saying is that maybe it's time to put the ads on hold until the issue is resolved. There will be plenty of other advertisers to take their place. I still say, why not take preorders? If people want to order, why not let them? |
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Online USD banking doesn't have an Energy sink like Bitcoin does (neither does as any other form of centralized online currency based on whatever)
please do not underestimate just how VAST of datacenters and server farms exist within the banking and financial industries within America and the rest of the world. HUGE sums of money are paid to have top level access to downtown manhatten space for the lowest latency stock trading available. This is true. Having your trade execute 0.5 ms before a competitor's trade makes all the difference in the world. |
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I'm pretty pissed over this bet being canceled. ( http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=701) I had betted "disagree". I started with betsofbitco.in recently, and so far I've only lost and had bets cancelled. I thought this was my first sure win, completely indisputable, and then it gets cancelled too!! In the editor's note they start out talking about the title being ambiguous, which I think doesn't matter in this case. The biggest problem for me is that they then state "On the other hand the conditions in the description are met." But they aren't. The first condition says "before April 1st" yet this thread wasn't started until 1:36 AM EST on April 1st. If every condition is true, the statement is true. If any condition is false, the statement is false. No matter if you include the title or not in this one, the statement is false because one of the conditions was false. People have also said that both sides have compelling arguments so there was no choice but to cancel it. But what is the argument for the "all conditions were met" people? How can you possibly argue that it happened before April 1st with the timestamp stating otherwise? It was still March 31 in some parts of the world, and a timezone wasn't specified as part of the bet. |
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Vladimir Law: "chances of a 3rd party running away with your bitcoins asymptotically approaches 100% over time"
"run away" includes "getting 'hacked'"
It is basically the same as amount of mined bitcoins asymptotically approaches 21 million.
People! FFS! Figure out brainwallets, paper wallets and best of all truecrypt containers, preferably with a hidden partition and decoy partition and standard bitcoin-qt with encrypted wallet.dat. Do not forget your pass phrases but still use very strong ones.
Store not only encrypted images but truecrypt distribution/installation too.
This is all you need to know and do.
Remember risk management formula: Risk = Asset * Vulnerability * Threat. This means you can trust 3rd parties for small amount of BTC for short time. The smaller the amount and the shorter the time, the better. In this case Risk is acceptable. For large amounts and long time you simply cannot trust 3rd parties without taking on disproportional risks.
Too bad nobody is gong to listen to the above. No matter how often I (and others) repeat it. So fuck you, you deserve all your coins to be stolen eventually then.
I hate blaming the victims, but people you should have more sense. Phinnaeus Gage, I am really sorry, hopefully it was a trivial amount.
Spot on, and did not take offense, bud. All others feel free to stick it up me, but at least ask me if I want to taste it when you do. Although this hurts me financial, it's not drastic, but this is a major blow to Bitcoin on several levels. Not in my wildest dreams I thought InstaWallet would go down, but looking back I should have thought otherwise. In fact, for a brief second I did about a week or so ago, but was assured that all is well, opting to not look deeper and explore my options further. Without disclosing what this idiot had at InstaWallet, I could've easily purchased a house due to the recent exchange rate increase. Today, I don't have a single satoshi to my name, all because I never took the time to set up a secure wallet whether it be a paper wallet (no fuckin' idea what that's all about) or on a USB stick or downloading the client on some off-the-grid computer. I'll just say that the Bitcoin-QT wallet is incredibly easy to set up (pretty much just click install, and it's done), and it is reasonably secure once you password protect it. The downside is just that it takes a number of hours to synchronize, and it does take up some ram and a decent amount of HDD space. But that's a small sacrifice to make to have full control over your coins. Davout seems to be a standup guy. I'd be surprised if you didn't get the vast majority of your funds back, given how much of instawallet's funds were sitting in a cold wallet. But certainly, put more effort into making sure your coins are secure down the road, especially when you have enough to buy a house with! |
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Yeah I wasn't clear, I meant 230ish each. Sorry to dwell on this but I don't see how you're so calm about it. The only real advantage left was their huge power efficiency advantage estimate and that's turning out to be inaccurate as well. I'm certain I'd have cancelled when that first Avalon showed up and began dropping my expected returns if not sooner. Doing so whould've given you resources to invest in Avalon's batch 2, which is looking like the ASIC bargain of the year at this point. You seem like a pleasant enough fellow, hope this works out in your favor.
If I had a later order, I might have cancelled and gone for an Avalon. But I have a first-day order - I'll most certainly be in the first units to be shipped out. And I'm not terribly confident in Avalon's ability to actually get units to US customers either. They're taking 1.5-2 months to get there! There's much better things in life to get upset about. I choose to live a stress-free life by not worrying about much of anything at all. It works well for me. As it is, I still stand to make a metric ton of money whenever they finally do arrive (double the $$ per day than when I first ordered them, even), so I'm not complaining. Sure, in hindsight, it would have worked out better to order an Avalon. But I couldn't have known that. It was my choice to risk my order with BFL and not with Avalon, so I will take whatever consequences or reductions of benefits that come along with that choice. Also, they're still MUCH more efficient than the Avalon units, even at the highest wattage they saw! |
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Ok guys, we may as well give it up. We have all been trying to cover up this flaw in the system so that the government does not enact this strategy.
I will be the bigger man and step forward to tell the truth. This is a huge vulnerability.
The US government and the Federal Reserve could wipe us all out by pouring tons and tons of money into Bitcoin.
I hope they do not do that, it would be so disasterous that I cannot imagine.
But we must admit this and hope that no Federal agent or someone close to the Federal Reserve reveals this to them, otherwise they may just go ahead and destroy Bitcoin by buying over and over and over.
I am just glad that no government officials are reading this now. If they were, I hope they would not go to their bosses with multi-billion dollar proposals to buy everyone's bitcoins. They would likely become heros among their peers and get laid...a LOT...once it all works.
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