Over a year ago, CCN writer Rick Mac Gillis interviewed Kerim Chikhi, a representative of Bitmine AG, the Swiss ASIC miner manufacturing company. Even then, customers had been waiting months for refunds since their orders were never fulfilled.

Background

At the time, Chikhi confirmed the claims of many customers that they had been waiting “1-2 months” for refunds. When asked if his company had ever shipped a single mining rig, Chikhi said:

"I won’t point out a specific post, but on our official forum, you will find, among many negative comments, customers actively discussing our equipment."

Chikhi pointed to this fact with a note of pride. More recent events, such as the sock puppetry that takes place in the forums of a certain other mining rig company, make even this claim suspect. It is just as likely that every single word of positive feedback was bought and paid for as it is that it was not. He also claimed that 99% of pre-orders had been “cleared.”

Customers Still Not Refunded Over A Year Later

What follows is the story of just one burned customer of Bitmine. It is not actually the story of the first person to contact us about Bitmine’s most recent attempt to rope its customers in one final time, as that customer appeared unable to provide the documents and evidence specific to his case. His initial tip read:

"I purchased a Bitcoin machine from Bitmine AG on December 2, 2013. I have not gotten a machine or a refund as of today. I have sent over 50 emails as well as called the listed number have gotten no response. I have followed the bitcointalk forum on Bitmine and have seen the same thing repeatedly with other individuals with the same issue. […] Mr. Giorgio Massarotto is the owner of Bitmine and has scammed many people out of their money. They have also violated Swiss law by not paying proper taxes, he has emptied out their bitcoin wallet and is no longer anywhere to be found or heard from. The most frustrating part of the whole thing is none of the authorities in Switzerland will do anything about it. I have send countless correspondence to Federal police, local police, tax agencies, and cybercrime agencies and have not gotten any response. I would like to request an investigative news piece to be published to make as many people aware of this as much as possible. I would really appreciate your help on this matter. If there is any other information I can provide please feel free to contact me. Thank you in advance."

Here is a picture of how the BitcoinTalk community feels about Giorgio Massarotto. As you can see, an overwhelming number of these negative comments have to do with fraud.

Jacob Appelbaum: Tor developer, political advocate.

Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder, deniable cryptography inventor, journalist, co-author of Underground, author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, member of the International Subversives. Assange has stated that he joined the list in late 1993 or early 1994. An archive of his cypherpunks mailing list posts is at Cryptome

Adam Back: inventor of Hashcash and of NNTP-based Eternity networks.

Jim Bell: author of the Assassination Politics paper.

Steven Bellovin: Bell Labs researcher, later Columbia professor. Chief Technologist for the US Federal Trade Commission in 2012.

Matt Blaze: Bell Labs researcher, later professor at University of Pennsylvania; found flaws in the Clipper Chip.

Eric Blossom: designer of the Starium cryptographically secured mobile phone, founder of the GNU Radio project.

Jon Callas: technical lead on OpenPGP specification, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of PGP Corporation, co-founder with Philip Zimmermann Silent Circle.

Bram Cohen: creator of BitTorrent.

Lance Cottrell: the original author of the Mixmaster Remailer software, and founder of Anonymizer Inc.

Matt Curtin: founder of Interhack Corporation, first faculty advisor of The Ohio State University Open Source Club, and lecturer at The Ohio State University.

Hugh Daniel (deceased): former Sun Microsystems employee, manager of the FreeS/WAN project (an early and important freeware IPsec implementation).

Dave Del Torto: PGPv3 volunteer, founding PGP Inc employee, longtime Cypherpunks physical meeting organizer, co-author of RFC3156 (PGP/MIME) standard, co-founder of IETF OpenPGP Working Group and the CryptoRights Foundation human rights non-profit, HighFire project principal architect.

Roger Dingledine: Tor project leader and developer

Hal Finney (deceased): cryptographer, main author of PGP 2.0 and the core crypto libraries of later versions of PGP; designer of RPOW

Randy French (pseudonym of Sandy Sandfort): producer of the first Cypherpunk genre pornographic film, Cryptic Seduction.

Michael Froomkin*: Distinguished Professor of Law University of Miami School of Law.

Eva Galperin: Malware researcher and security advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation activist.

John Gilmore*: Sun Microsystems' fifth employee, co-founder of the Cypherpunks as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, project leader for FreeS/WAN.

Mike Godwin: Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, electronic rights advocate.

Ian Goldberg*: professor at University of Waterloo, designer of the Off-the-record messaging protocol.

Nadia Heninger: assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania, security researcher.

Rop Gonggrijp: founder of XS4ALL, co-creator of the Cryptophone.

Peter Gutmann: researcher at University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Sean Hastings: founding CEO of Havenco and co-author of the book God Wants You Dead.

Marc Horowitz: author of the first PGP key server.

Suelette Dreyfus: co-author of Rubberhose, a deniable encryption archive.

Tim Hudson: co-author of SSLeay, the precursor to OpenSSL.

Eric Hughes: founding member of Cypherpunks, author of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto.

Peter Junger (deceased): Law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Phil Karn: Bell Labs researcher, later at Qualcomm.

Paul Kocher: president of Cryptography Research, Inc., co-author of the SSL 3.0 protocol.

Ryan Lackey: co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven.

Brian LaMacchia: designer of XKMS, research head at Microsoft Research.

Werner Koch: author of GNU Privacy Guard.

Isak Johnsson: Creator of the stealth technology used in Stuxnet, virus author, programmer.

Ben Laurie: founder of The Bunker, core OpenSSL team member, Google engineer.

Moxie Marlinspike: co-founder of Whisper Systems, author of the Convergence SSL authenticity system.

Morgan Marquis-Boire: researcher, security engineer, privacy activist.

Nick Mathewson: Tor developer

Timothy C. May: former Assistant Chief Scientist at Intel, author of A Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and the Cyphernomicon, and a Founding member of the Cypherpunks Mailing List.

 Jim McCoy: creator of MojoNation.

    Declan McCullagh: journalist specializing in security and privacy issues.

    Jude Milhon (deceased; a.k.a. "St. Jude"): a Founding Member of the Cypherpunks mailing list, credited with naming the group; co-creator of Mondo 2000 magazine.

    Sameer Parekh: former CEO of C2Net and co-founder of the CryptoRights Foundation human rights non-profit.

    Vipul Ved Prakash: co-founder of Sense/Net, author of Vipul's Razor, founder of Cloudmark.

    Runa Sandvik: Tor developer, political advocate.

    Len Sassaman (deceased): maintainer of the Mixmaster Remailer software, researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a biopunk.

    Steve Schear: innovator of the warrant canary and eCache, founding member of the International Financial Cryptographer's Association and GNURadio, former Director Wireless Products and Smartcards at data security company Cylink, team member Counterpane and Director at MojoNation.

    Bruce Schneier*: well-known security author, founder of Counterpane.

    Andrea Shepard: Tor developer

    John Young: started the Cryptome web site.

    Peter Wayner: author of the book Translucent Databases.

    Barry Wels: discoverer of lock bumping, co-creator of the Cryptophone.

    Deborah Natsios: Cofounder of Cryptome, Creator of Cartome.

    Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn: DigiCash and MojoNation developer, co-designer of Tahoe-LAFS.

    Asher Wolf: Founder of Cryptoparty.

    Jillian C. York: Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

    Eric Andrew Young: co-author of SSLeay, the precursor to OpenSSL. Invented 256 bit SSL proof of concept.

    Philip Zimmermann: original creator of PGP v1.0 (1991), co-founder of PGP Inc (1996), co-founder with Jon Callas of Silent Circle.

Isn't that how all theories are developed before researched or proven/unproven? "I have a gut feeling we don't actually have all the planets and stars revolve around us, but we revolve around the sun..."

And why did he get to sign the bitcoin car in my hometown and i didnt?



FULL documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1VaSSoeI4gKw6f4Qq_PrMQ

1.3 million is comparative peanuts in the VC world. You can burn through that in a few days spending on offices, branding, schmoozing.

Businesses fail constantly everywhere because they're not attractive to customers. At least it didn't steal anything from anyone. If they wanted to survive they should've been as appealing as existing options. For whatever reasons, they're not.

Bitcoiners feel a little bit like arsehole yuppy parents sometimes, screeching when their special snowflake acquires a chipped fingernail. I don't scrap my car when the nearest fuel station closes down.

quick update

I have officially resigned from my duties @ gaw. DOJ is true they have come in and even confiscated my personal macbook air and galaxy note 4 mobile so yes i am going to take charges against gawminers, they even owe me for the last 4 for my work , the news has gone out to investors also and they are also taking action against gaw , sec have found hundreds of forged documents/emails. Matlack is also part of the scam and he is the sole owner of at east 5 prime controllers without paying a single cent. april 8 is when everything shuts down. Once I get my macbook back if i do i will post some documents that i saved which will show everyone the amount of corruption. i am being served to provide evidence against gawminers at court however received countless threats from gawminers in relation to this i am heading to police to ask for protection until the court time is up. when the price of paycoin goes down garza makes an announcement to bring the price back up everytime. in reality there is and will not be any new features uptades if you are reading this right now convert all your paycoin to btc whilst you can and move on because in the next few day price will hit 0.000001, we were forced to get paid in paycoins at the start so in the end all the work i have done costed them $86 where it should be $10000 range

very sad
Jake

you have to pump a bit harder not working otherwise

There is a significant volume decrease at most of the altcoins. Except some coins , nearly all altcoins have very low volume (@cryptsy especially). What is your opinion about this? Why altcoins' volume dropped?

I have some conspiracy theories , but I like most the possibility of all whales went to holiday

I wonder how many people out there have gotten as far as wondering where money comes from and who's running it. I would've thought it's just 'there' for many of them.

If you start with good amount you can easily make $100-300/day from daytrading and there is no need to work for someone else.

How the fuck can you not run a company beyond four months with $1.3 million.

Seriously, what is it with these people.

Excitement among tech startup people is a lot higher than the regular people out there who might use their products. I think they're overestimating how many crypto users there are right now. Netagio was another that closed due to lack of interest from actual customers.

Exchanges must be a bitch to run and make money from. Only a small hard core would use it multiple times a week. The rest might make one trade on occasion and that's only a fraction of a per cent for the owners. You gotta spend vast amounts on security and pleasing The Man let alone gain the trust of your customers.

It would be a worry if an established exchange shut down for lack of interest. This is another example of VC money going up in smoke without having gained traction.

 

Decentralized exchanges can be even more risky. Look at what happened to Silk Road 2.0, which was a decentralized market place. Hackers stole the credentials of sellers with good reputation, and then used these accounts to scam ordinary users.

No way! If you've got to read a book to be able to use BTC, BTC will fail. Did you read a book to use fiat money? You didn't and that's why fiat money has been so successful for centuries. BTC needs to reach that stage.

US bitcoin marketplace Buttercoin is shutting its doors, despite launching just four months ago with at least $1.3m in investor backing.

In a farewell post to customers today, the Buttercoin team announced the service will go offline this Friday (April 10th) at 11pm PST.

Stressing that it was "100% secure and solvent", the Palo Alto-based platform blamed a lack of VC interest for its closure, stating:

"With the dip in bitcoin interest among Silicon Valley investors, we weren't able to generate enough venture capital interest to continue funding Buttercoin."

Buttercoin's nine-person team had raised at least $1.3m from investors including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Y Combinator, Centralway Ventures, Google Ventures and Wedbush Securities – though its exact funding total is unclear.

The interest in Bitcoin is stagnant from exactly one year!
Just do a google trend research...
What would you think it is needend to comeback interest on Bitcoin???

Obviously an increase in the value but what else?