I think most people would regard the lavish lifestyles which ponzi operators typically lead before their schemes collapse as "taking something for yourself".

Jesus wept.  Clean shut-down my ass.  I kind of doubt that his lawyer has approved this particular plan of action.  If he doesn't give people their trading histories, he's leaving himself wide open to being reported to the tax authorities.  Whether or not people were actually planning on declaring their income from GLBSE activity, they can claim that they were and that they now can't obtain the information to report accurately.  He's astonishingly naive if he thinks that pissed off users who now believe that they're going to be forced to take a loss aren't going to file complaints with regulatory authorities.

Have you even checked whether you'd need a licence from the FSA?  What on earth makes you think that launching a payment gateway with such a small amount of capital would be viable?  Have you obtained any legal advice regarding this idea?  What anti-fraud measures will you have in place? How are you going to avoid the problems which other Bitcoin services have encountered with UK banks?  How much of your own money are you putting towards this venture?

Sure, there's no doubt that Bitcoin Consultancy was actively looking to be taken on board as security consultants for Bitcoinica after they discovered a flaw in the code which allowed the hot wallet to be emptied.  They admitted that following the Rackspace hack.  The emails leaked by Amir also seem to point to a vision of developing a "super-exchange" to rival MtGox, and merging the interests of Intersango and Bitcoinica probably seemed like a good way to accomplish that after TradeHill failed.

If the timeline given by the parties involved is correct, then it was a pretty short one and I suspect that there was way too much haste involved on all sides - something which set the scene for later disaster.  I think that every one of the parties involved sees themselves as a victim of at least one of the other parties and that at least some of their grievances are legitimate.  The real problem is that users became the victims of a ridiculous stand-off and that's pretty much destroyed any sympathy people might have had for the legitimate grievances of the parties involved.  I think that by the time the whole truth about the collapse of Bitcoinica comes out, the community will be beyond caring and no-one will end up feeling vindicated.

Sort of.  One of the "convenient" things about joint and several liability is that it allows you to go after the person with the greatest capacity to pay  but that mightn't be the partner who lives in your particular jurisdiction.  Additionally, some low cost legal options have quite rigid criteria for small claims and pursuing a claim through the actual court system rather than small claims tribunals can be prohibitively expensive even if you live in the same jurisdiction as the partner with the deepest pockets.

And of course we now have the situation where a wind down process which was designed and implemented by Nefario alone may leave GLBSE unable to meet all of its financial obligations and the partners will be personally liable for any shortfall. As GLBSE doesn't exist as a legal entity, trying to recover any shortfall is going to require taking legal action against each of the partners for the whole amount owing.  That's very unlikely to happen given that the partners live in a few different jurisdictions, so users and asset issuers are realistically most likely to just end up eating a loss.

He's obviously not communicating with users and asset issuers, but is he communicating with the other shareholders at all?  At the very least there should be another shareholders' meeting scheduled to discuss the progress of the shut-down and address the accounting issues involved in winding up GLBSE.


He participated in a vote on a motion in which he had a conflict of interest.  It's clear that he would have refused to resign as CEO anyway, but let's not pretend that it was a legitimate vote.

So what's happening with this, Phin?

Vaporware has no operating costs.

By Zhou's own admission, he was paid a lot of money to continue running Bitcoinica after it was sold and retained the profits Bitcoinica made between the time of the sale and January.  He continued to be paid to run Bitcoinica up until the Intersango guys were brought on board, and the emails leaked by Amir show that Zhou was only asked not to take a salary after Amir, Donald and Patrick had agreed not to take salaries until Bitcoinica's financial mess was sorted out. 

Zhou's credentials should absolutely have been revoked the day that the Intersango guys took over the management of Bitcoinica.  It's absolutely standard to revoke existing credentials and issue new ones.  The emails show that at the time the Rackspace happened, the Intersango guys were not considered "up to speed" on Bitcoinica, which is probably why Zhou still had managerial level access.

A live-streamed Heaven's Gate type happening would be far more entertaining than a solo guitar performance by dank.


Nah, he's a pretty low effort troll.  No manic manifestos, no website spewing out all the New Age bullshit he says he believes in, no blog, no attempt to create any credible belief that any of his "projects" will happen.  Everything's confined to an obscure thread on a message-board most New Agers and wannabe musicians don't even know exists.  Who on earth would look for news about the world's biggest music festival or try to find the world's next rock god in the Lending forum of a message-board about internet currency.  People with genuine delusions of grandeur try to attract the attention of those they believe can make their delusions reality.  People who think they have genuinely great ideas which they believe will attract wide-spread support promote those ideas anywhere and everywhere. 

dank's a strictly low-effort troll who rejects any notion that he should post his ideas or seek support anywhere outside this forum, which is why I think that we should call his bluff and promote them elsewhere on his behalf and get him more attention than he ever bargained for.

Except for how to open a hookah lounge or organise a music festival, apparently.

Look dank, we all know that there are thousands of events organised world-wide for 21 December.  And we also know that when 21 December comes and goes without you staging a music festival you're probably going to claim that your world's biggest musical happened anyway because those events were "all connected by consciousness" or some bullshit even though you had nothing to do with organising any of them.

I'd be more interested in knowing how many accounts dank has.

Of course he's trolling.  He should probably be careful what he wishes for when it comes to attention-whoring online, though - he might get attention he didn't bargain for.

Roger, I've been extremely critical of the Intersango guys and the way they've handled this clusterfuck for a very long time but even I don't buy the idea that the Bitcoinica MtGox account was breached because Amir leaked the code.  Are you telling me that you seriously believe Zhou's explanation of the MtGox breach and how someone who just happened to have his credentials (but who doesn't read this forum) also just happened to come across the leaked code and then also happened to think that the MtGox API keys might be a password to something else?  Seriously?  Because given Zhou's ridiculous story about the MtGox breach, I wouldn't even trust his explanation of the Rackspace breach.

There are plenty of legitimate grounds on which to criticise the way that Donald, Patrick and Amir have handled the whole Bitcoinica disaster.  Let's not damage our own credibility by pretending to believe in the absurd.

There is literally no reasonable explanation for dank failing to publicise this event outside of this pathetic thread other than him trolling.  I say if he wants attention that badly, we make sure he gets it and publicise this shitty little thread and his shitty little troll far and wide across the web.  We can make sure that you're "famous" by the end of the year dank - it won't even take two months to make you more well known than Chris-Chan.

Are you fucking high?  Your comments are total non-sequiturs.  Your beliefs about death have absolutely zero to do with whether or not you need to provide adequate medical facilities at a million person event.  Whether or not death is a bad thing has no bearing whatsoever on whether it is negligent - both morally and legally - to organise such an event without providing adequate medical facilities to deal with utterly foreseeable needs for medical care.

Anyway, lets get back to co-ordinating publicity for this event so that you can get the resources you need to make it happen.  People are going to need a way to contact you other than through this message-board so you might want to think about how they're going to do that.  Nobody's going to lease land or entrust tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment or services to someone who's anonymous.

How many people have you ever watched die dank?  Regardless of whether you believe in an afterlife or not, death is frequently a messy, ugly event. I doubt you'll ever put yourself in a position to observe it because you seem to have a fear of reality.

But hey, if people don't get adequate medical treatment at Wankapalooza then it's all good because it's their karma if they get injured or die and they should have just healed their souls before attending.  That's going to make a wonderful defence when somebody sues your ass off.

The best promoters in the world would have trouble organising a million people event for just before Christmas in two months and they have both the contacts and the money to make things happen.  How are potential volunteers or attendees even going to know about this event when all you do is post a wishlist in this thread?  You can't even publicise it because you don't have a fucking venue.

Are you going to just throw up a Facebook page at the last moment and invite everyone on FB?  I know.  Why doesn't one of us create a FB page for your event and link it back here so that your potential volunteers. donators and attendees can communicate with you directly about Wankfest?  The more people who know about it the better, right?  I'm sure people will donate/volunteer everything you need once they learn about this event.  We should all get onto publicising it right away in as many places as possible.  reddit and FB seem like good starting points.

You're the one who thinks people believe your bullshit - who's the silly one?  I can't wait until 4chan discovers that you exist.

Visa offers chipped cards in the US as well as cards which are PayWave capable.  The problems seems to be a lack of merchants with the technology to read them.

http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/card_technology/chip_card.html

Whether it's banking, health insurance or communications, you're always going to get additional "user-pays" fees when stream-lined, efficient systems have to interact with ridiculously complex and inefficient systems - it's exactly what you'd expect in a free market.