That's what makes no sense.  Even if he gave most of the BTC away as he claimed, why the hell didn't he upgrade his hardware and shit?  The evidence that he's the same guy who claimed to have 371,000 BTC is pretty compelling, but did he ever actually have them much less give them away?  Did his gloating about the manner in which he acquired them put him in a position where he was forced to return them before he could spend them?  For that matter, why didn't he upgrade his hardware when he sold the Endless Sphere forums?

If there's one thing life has taught me it's that smart people can be totally devoid of common-sense, so I don't think any "no-one who knew anything about IT argument would be that stupid" arguments hold water.  In my experience, technical competence in any field can lead to over-confidence.

My bank's been offering a token generator for years on both my normal debit card account and my Mastercard account and I can set all transactions to require a token if I want.  By default, new payees, change of details, changing my transaction limit and a few other things I've probably forgotten all require a token.

I guess being able to get your card to show you its balance is a cute feature, but most people can easily get that information on their phone through either phone banking or net banking if they happen to be away from their computer and nowhere near their ATM.

I also wonder about the durability of the cards and how they'll stand up to being taken in and out of wallets all the time, going through washing machines, etc.

It's a cute gimmick, but I'm not sure that it really offers people anything which isn't already available to them.  Interestingly, that particular card doesn't seem to be PayPass enabled.  I wonder if merchants are going to hate it because it will slow down transaction times.

I'm still not following you Phin.  We can explain the EXIF data by the camera being new and cheap.  The images were edited in GIMP almost a week ago but I'm not sure why you think that the time of day when they were edited on 4 November is significant in some way.  Having family photos which were taken by someone else also isn't unusual.

I was kind of hoping that the EXIF data would be a smoking gun and prove that those images aren't of the 14 September raid, but unfortunately it's easy to explain the date discrepancy and maybe my brain isn't in gear today but I'm not seeing anything particularly notable about the images being modified on 4 November.

Whether you think it's rational or not, our society and many other have a thing about treating dead bodies with "respect" and necrophilia is a transgression of that taboo.  Many people are disturbed by anything they perceive as disrespectful being done to a corpse and it's going to cause them mental anguish if they find out that the corpse of a loved one has been "mistreated" in any way. 

Hell, many people refuse to allow autopsies to be conducted on corpses and won't donate organs - even when the decided clearly indicated that they wanted to be a donor - because they regard even dead human bodies as being somehow "sacred".  People generally regard murdering someone and mutilating their corpse as somehow being "worse" than simply killing them.  Society has a thing about how dead bodies should be treated.

There's clearly no harm being done to the corpse itself, but I don't think that the average person is going to react well to learning that someone fucked the corpse of their loved one - whether you believe that's rational or not is irrelevant, it's internally consistent if people hold the viewpoint that dead bodies should be treated with respect.

I hate to sound like I'm defending him, but it's possible that he was developing the TimeKoin concept for a long time prior to launching it.  I read a lot of his early posts yesterday and it's pretty clear that he's always been looking for something which would give him some kind of "edge" over others. 

While he's lying when he describes TimeKoin as "long tested", the idea of developing a digital currency which doesn't require high end computers isn't unique.  From what I can see, he had a fair bit of interaction with the devs - including Satoshi - back in the day so he was exposed to the process of developing and refining a client.  This guy seems to be an opportunist so I'm not surprised that he's looking to create a niche alt currency.  I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, but there's no doubt that people who now feel locked out of BTC mining are looking for something similar they can do with their existing hardware.

I'm having a blonde moment here Phin, so help me out.  Are you saying that when you typed Michael * Brown into Google you got that message, because I can't replicate it either with or without the *.

I can't think of any reason why he wouldn't be allowed to post while an investigation is under way.  He hasn't been charged with anything and even if he had been I doubt he'd be gagged by any court.

I'm not surprised that he decided to solicit donations after the search and seizure.  I think it's tacky as hell and that he's hoping to exploit anti-government sentiment, but begging for donations on the internet seems pretty common these days.

When I check the EXIF data it shows the images as having been taken on January 1, 2011 at around 1pm US Pacific time but there's no way of knowing whether the time and date on the camera were set accurately.

Sexual assault, bestiality and necrophilia are all examples of sexual behaviour with non-consenting parties.  "Consent" isn't always a bright line, either, and I think that's one of the things which disturbs people about some paraphilias - there can be enormous risk of harm if the parties involved aren't all mentally healthy or if the power dynamics are distorted.  In fact, DSM-V is trying to address this essential difference between people whose non-normative sexual behaviour is psychopathological (ie causes harm, impairment or distress) and those in which it's just a "quirk".

A lot of paraphilias have "communities" and those communities attract extremely disturbed as well as well-balanced individuals.  It's the extremely disturbed ones that you tend to hear about.  Some are predators right from the outset and some seem to progressively become more and more immersed in satisfying their particular kink until whatever has previously kept them grounded breaks down.  It's those individuals who operate at the extreme that you tend to hear about.

At an intellectual level, I think many people are aware that "if you can imagine it, someone is masturbating to it".  There are certainly some people who think "if it doesn't turn me on then it shouldn't turn anyone on", but I think that many people's reactions to the paraphilia's of others are a bit more complex than that.  

KnightMB has done questionable stuff in the past, both Bitcoin-related and not Bitcoin-related.  The fact that the questionable stuff he's done in the past is known suggests that he's not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to avoiding consequences. 

That's unlikely.  logansryche has a "history" here when it comes to following through on commitments.  He'd be better off seeking funding elsewhere. It may even be better if he doesn't use his forum username over on BTCJam.  He also posts a whole lot of stuff elsewhere online which might make people think twice about lending to him.


Really?  He knows all about the ad on Fetish Fishing and is just fine with you making money that way?

KnightMB didn't do himself any favours by posting that he'd been giving away large amounts of BTC just prior to the Romney tax thing happening.  That's something I'd definitely expect investigators to look at closely.

Nothing in the article suggests that it was the catte images alone which led them to Brown.  My understanding is that it can be difficult to completely erase data from flash drives - I'm guessing there were other fragments of data on there which were more specific and that's why he can't outright deny having ever possessed the flash drive.

He says he made "large" donations to Wikileaks but that's a claim I'd take with a grain of salt.

We know what happened to him.  He's far from "missing". 

He's begging for donations because the SS is investigating him for the Romney tax return ransom attempt.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123591.0

And really, he last posted in June and his last activity on the board was on 4 October - there was no reason to be think that "something foul" was afoot.  It's always a good idea to read the last page of an old thread before commenting on its first few posts.

Joel, what has changed your opinion since you posted this in the other thread?

In that thread Patrick posted that


That seems to make it fairly obvious that any significant level of default would leave Patrick struggling to repay his depositors in a timely manner.

You literally stated in that thread that investors had no way to assess risk.  Now you seem to be arguing the opposite.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92279.msg1160524#msg1160524

I wonder if the fact that BTC were donated to both the "release" and the "suppress" address ups the ante in terms of charges.  It would be kind of funny if there's some horrible additional offence with which he can be charged because people did send him funds even if the amount was tiny.  I'm guessing that those funds are technically "proceeds of crime".

Oh god.  I'm just reading the search and seizure warrant and they're trying to get him for racketeering offences in addition to the 3 types of fraud.

I'm curious about why you find the image "creepy".  I don't find the image appealing at all, but I don't find it intrinsically creepy either.  There's a fair bit of more conventional art around which is disturbing but which doesn't ping people's "creepy" meter either (in fact there's quite a few disturbing images that I'd regard as good art and be happy to display).

It does if you assume that he was mostly telling the truth when he said he no longer has those Bitcoins but lying about why he no longer has them.  People over on Endless-sphere were talking about reporting him to the IRS, letting his former employers know about his deception and pretty much contacting everyone to whom he might owe money or may have screwed over in the past.  It's highly possible that his story about donating to Wikileaks is bullshit and that he took the Chinese relic collector route of partially returning funds rather than risk being put under intense scrutiny. 

His explanation makes no sense.  He claims that his family is barely scraping by on what he makes from his business, so why would he donate the last of his BTC to Wikileaks?  None of his posts on this board suggest that he's altruistic.  If he rid himself of whatever BTC he had left after failed investments, then I believe it was purely to cover his own ass.

reddit seems to be having trouble making the link.  This messageboard's KnightMB is the same person who used to own Endless-sphere.  They both used knightmb@dyndns.org.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=505.msg4867#msg4867


http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30632&start=30#p444475


http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/12yfnk/cats_lead_feds_to_knightmb_worth_371kbtc_in/c6z7orq

The PayPal address means that the guy the Feds questioned about the Romney tax returns is the former owner of Endless-sphere.  We know that person is "our" KnightMB because he used the knightmb.dyndns.org address both here and on Endless-sphere.  Therefore, "our" KnightMB is the guy the feds are investigating.  Which will probably make his former employers very happy.

More effort next time reddit.