Is it wrong of me to hope so?

Maybe he should ask Amir, Donald and Patrick to help him process claims.  ::d&r::

Priceless.  I'm sure people will flock to Nefario's new *all legal* exchange in droves due to his technical superiority.

I swear to god that most Bitcion venture "CEOs" would have trouble organising a chook raffle.

I think people were suggesting emergency legal action to wrest control of GLBSE away from Nefario rather than to seek compensation.  People feel like he's holding their funds hostage and that no mechanism has been put in place to allow them to deal with asset-issuers directly.  

They don't trust him - and to be fair, I'd be worried that he'll use information ostensibly gathered to wind down GLBSE in his new venture, just like Zhou spammed Bitcoinica users when he started NameTerrific - and they want the process in the hands of someone else.  That's only going to happen if either Nefario agrees to delegate the process to someone else or if he's legally forced to do so.  Users feel powerless and abandoned by the other partners - they feel like nobody who is in a position to take action against Nefario is willing to do so, and I can't blame them for that.

Can you post back here in 2 weeks or when you receive the funds - whichever comes first?

Time to start selling pitchforks.  Or better yet, to start selling shares in a pitchfork company.

From what theymos has posted, BG has fuck all funds which are not user/asset issuer funds.  If the shareholders (who are really just partners) were willing to front the cost of legal action themselves, they could pursue legal recourse, but there's no guarantee they'd recover their out-lay or that any action would be rapid.  This is the kind of situation where it's great if you have a lawyer on stand-by ready to file an emergency motion the moment the shareholders' meeting ends but no-one had that foresight.

dank, people are concerned about the cheque of unknown origin because there are a gazillion cheque scams out there and they all end with you either being on the hook for a loan you didn't realised you signed up for or your bank reversing the deposit weeks after you've spent the money because the cheque wasn't valid, leaving you owing the bank money.

Now maybe there's an anonymous benefactor out there who just happens to know where to send you a cheque - I hope so - but you do need to be cautious when banking cheques of unknown origin because they're often scammy in some way.  You said you've shown a couple of people your ID, so lets hope it's one of them making a kind gesture.

Maged, I do think that the knowledge that more than one shareholder was trying to sell their stake in GLBSE would likely have affected people's confidence in the exchange.  When people thought that theymos was the only one selling his stake and that he was doing so for ideological reasons, it was reasonable to assume that there was a unity of purpose among the remaining shareholders.  People may well have made different decisions about doing business with GBLSE if that theymos was not the only shareholder looking to bail out.

While I know that the "private company" line has been trotted out, more information about the shareholders would have been publicly available if GBLSE was in fact a private company.  People could have pulled the Company House documents and confirmed for themselves who the office-holders are, who the office-holders are, the paid up capital, etc - people have done exactly that in respect of Intersango (an actual privately owned company) in the past.

I do think that not informing people that other share-holders were looking to divest their equity in GLBSE may have led to users retaining a level of confidence in GLBSE which was unwarranted and that the loss of confidence which would likely have followed disclosure of full truth would have been reflected in prices of not just GLBSE's stock but also the stock of its asset-issuers.

Is there any reference on that page to how the data will be stored and for how long?  There are usually a shit load of laws regarding collecting information which contains unique government identifiers and you're usually required to inform users of the specific legislation which requires the collection information, what the information will be used for, any privacy legislation which applies to the collection of the data, etc.  Nefario needs to get his hot-shot lawyer to draft a notice regarding the authority to collect the information and the data protection measures which will be taken.  He also needs to inform people of how long the information will be retained.  In FATF nations (of which the UK is one), data collected for AML/KYC purposes is generally required to be kept for 5-7 years.

theymos, I'd seriously consider handing any remaining funds in your control over to a lawyer to be kept in trust for the time being.

dank, however, believes in transmigration of the soul.  Buddhism emphatically rejects that notion.  In Buddhist teachings, the soul as just as impermanent and transient as everything else and there is no continuity of the soul from one incarnation to the next.


We may know more about the world today, but our application of our knowledge is no more "correct" than our ancestors' application of their knowledge.  What seems "correct" to us now will not seem "correct" to future generations.

You're missing the point.  In Hinduism the focus is on work as a way of becoming worthy of enlightenment and you only become "worthy" of enlightenment if your perform your dharmas first.  Hindus regard putting seeking enlightenment before earthly concerns as escapism which will trap you in the karmic cycle.

Buddhism puts a higher value on enlightenment than on earthly concerns, but Buddhists emphatically reject the notions of transmigration of the soul and any kind of creationism (ie, the existence of a supreme being which set the Universe/existence in motion).

I don't think you understand Hinduism very well.  If you did, you'd be spending all of your waking hours performing your dharmas.

I find it kind of interesting that you've adopted a pseudo-Hindu belief system dank when that system is very much about taking care of earthly responsibilities before seeking enlightenment.

I absolutely agree, but if the will to solve the problem exists, people will come up with solutions.  In some ways, we're going to get a more realistic idea of how many people care enough about Bitcoin to put effort into solving its problems and whether it really has the critical mass it needs to survive without a high degree of centralisation of services.

In a way, the exchanges have always been the weak point in the Bitcoin economy.  They're most vulnerable to regulatory action and compliance with financial services and AML/CTF requirements is astonishingly expensive for even the largest operators.  To some degree, people have become lazy and over-reliant on the Bitcoin exchanges.

If you take the exchanges out of the picture then you get to see whether Bitcoin as a peer to peer system is really viable at this time.  Will the OTC market substantially increase and will solutions to the issues which make OTC unattractive to people quickly emerge?

I'm not sure whether the Bitcoin community is ready for an economy without the exchanges yet, but it the long term Bitcoin cannot succeed as a peer to peer system if it's always dependent on the exchanges.

For a long time it was only small-time scammers who ever got the tag quickly.  Recently theymos has been willing to give the tag to high profile people much faster, although if Nefario can be tagged for closing down a service with no notice and leaving users in limbo for a few days it becomes harder and harder to justify those associated with Bitcoinica not having scammer tags months after they ceased communicating with and trying to repay their users.

Jackie's an interesting case because she got banned when someone provided evidence that "she" was a male with a history of scamming elsewhere.  I suspect that a non-trivial amount of users here fudge their personal information when posting here to protect their privacy - at what point should that be considered scamming behaviour?

Actually, maybe handing out a "stupid" tag to everyone who gets scammed isn't a bad idea.  Might be a disincentive to being so open-minded their brains fall out.

It's fine for graphics and other stuff that you're not looking at for very long.  At least it's not lime green on black.  I know a place with that cutesy retro style sheet and boy is that rough on the eyes.