Just read a bit more about TradeFortress posts. I did not know his threads here in the forum before.
He is for sure a disputable person, but this experiment with Ripples trust system should make people think!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206948.0

"What TradeFortress has done is a brilliant example of what Ripple is. There will be a lot of scams going on in Ripple, lot of people will get burnt." (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206948.msg2212945#msg2212945)

I heard about the book but have not read it. I know you can see money that way. But BTC is different to that model. It is like Gold. You can discuss which model is better. I am in the BTC/Gold camp as I have seen too much misuse and bubble with fiat.  Credit does not have to be intermixed with the money system. You can lend money from businesses specialized on that like insurance companies are specialized on insurances. I prefer the seperation.
Ripple could have influence to BTC like Gold ETF to Gold. They help to accellerate bubbles and the following crashes. So all hurts more and happens faster. For speculation its helpful but thats not why I am interested in BTC.

But there is a big difference of XRP to BTC. There is a for-profit company behind it and it owns most of it. I know they say that they will give their XRP away some day and play fair, etc..... but that has to me no value (who knows who will own the company in the future?).

And I think XRP are not intended to be used as money to buy things. They are introduced to make the payment system work and prevent spam.

For me all that sounds much more as a trap to infect BTC with Fiat-like properties. To bring people to the point that they use IOUs for BTC instead of BTC directly (from their own wallets). If its faster, more convinient, maybe adds some small earnings with lending (interests) many people who dont care about the original motivation behind BTC could use it.
Look at the gold ETFs. Many people use them to speculate because they are more convinient to trade and they take the risk that the emitter is lying about the backing of physical gold. At the end the most people using that does not care about the different nature of gold against fiat. They use it to make fast profit. Like gold ETF has not much in common with real gold but very much with fiat, BTC IUOs are much more like fiat then like BTC.

As I said before the finance industry will love Ripple, and if they will not adopting it they will probably come with something similar soon.
Ripple could be a way that they keep control as well as the state. The US based ripple company and the gateways are for me too vulnerable.

I am not completely against the concept of colored coins and a layer which lets them interchange easily.
But that should come for me with the same ideas like the one behind BTC.
No need for trust to companies and states, open source and decentralized.
I think some day we will see applications for exchanging fiat or real world items to crypto with these characteristics.

You are talking about Fiat money. Fiat is IUO if it is not in form of cash, and even cash is an IUO to the FED (originally it was the promis to be convertable to gold...).
For BTC that does not apply. The money system and the credit system should be seperated. Fiat comes as a merge of them. Ripple has the same nature. BTC is pure money, you cannot lend your BTC directly via the BTC system. I am not against lending. People should be able to do that business, but that should be a seperate business, like insurances, hedgings, bettings, whatever....

Why should they be more worth?

The only reason I see that it can be more worth as its possible to use for lending. If I want to lend my BTC/money I prefer to control that by my own and not by the monetary system. Or try to tell your bank that you dont allow them to use your balance for lending. They simpyl cannot as the whole system is based on that model. You need to put cash in a bank safe to get there. But in countries like Italy or Spain cash tranfer over 1000 EUR (Italy) or 3000 (Spain) EUR is already forbidden and there a pretty high fines if you break that laws.

@PirateButtercup:
Thanks for your detailed answer.
 
I was not looking closer to the consensus ledger and did not mention that directly (ripplescam.org has some critics there as well). That seems to be a form of decentralized/distributed system (I would not distinguish them so sharply as in reality they are mixed).

The reason why I was investigating Ripple was the promis for a decentralized exchange.
That is for me the area missing badly in the BTC eco-system. And for that part the gateways are a central point and a single point of failure, the same way like the BTC exchanges we have now (can be easily shut down by a government). At the end I did not see any benefit using Ripples IOUs (or colored coins or vouchers) and to not directly trade on several exchanges BTC to fiat. At least I have more control and its seems more transparent to use them directly.

I see some potentials in the Ripple concept (for the existing finance industry it is for sure a very interesting project), but they are far away from that why I am interested in BTC.
In BTC I like the differences to Fiat. In BTC money you dont need trust in any central point (like exchange, gateways), my BTC is not an IOU. It is a keypair where my private key is the proove that I own it, and the only trust included is the crypto behind it and the BTC network.
Also I dont like the reserve banking concept. I dont want that my money works for the bank behind the scenes. If I want to lend my money I want to do that directly and not via a system based on that model.
Of course that does not create value from itself, value come when people are using it as money.

If I use online wallets or let my BTC balance at an exchange, I am in the IUO world. If the company crashes, my money is gone.

I am not looking for a faster payment system (I think the problem of the slow confirmation with BTC is over-estimated. It depends on the use case and there will be intermediate solutions for fast payments - probably temporary IOU based solutions) and I am not looking for a forex market or ETF (like Gold ETF holding gold for you if you trust them).
I am looking in a trustless crypto - fiat exchange. And so far I understand Ripple it does not meet my expectations.

   

I just looked closer to Ripple with high expectations but got finally a pretty bad impression.
Maybe I dont understand all aspects right and maybe I am missing some. I am open for comments if I am wrong with some of the following.
But at least I am not the only one who sees Ripple as at least a pretty misleading project: http://ripplescam.org

Here is my summary of that afternoons investigation:

As far as I understand Ripple, it has much more in common with the traditional banking system then with Bitcoin.
It may be an interesting modernisation for banks and may be successful in that direction as well as it supports new crypto currencies. But it is in many aspects very different to Bitcoin:
- Money as depth
- Based on trust to gateways (banks, brokers, exchanges, FED...)
- NOT decentralized (gateways)
- Controlled and issued by a company
- Not anonymous (at least when you want to convert your IOUs)
…

I think it includes the same or even higher risks as our traditional finance system.
If a gateway goes default and if it is a huge system relevant one (like MtGox or BTC China), that event could cause a default of many other gateways and a bailout by all the users with trustlines to them (if I understood Ripple correct). The trust lines are obligatory to be able to interact but not well controlled (does the user alway update the trustlines after each tx?).
The inter-gateway (interbank) transfers could cause dangerous system wide effects.

Lets think of an example:
A Ripple user could use Ripple and another exchange with very different prices for arbitrage. So he needs a trustline with at least the tx volume to the Ripple gateway exchange. The fact that there are real reasons why there is a price penalty at some exchanges (problems to get out the fiat like at MtGox, low volume, weak trust of exchanges in some countries with low legal environment, weak security or customer care,......) will be blurred behind the scenes (the exchanges negotiate inter-gateway transfers like interbanking).
That will cause some distorted balances. Say JustCoin (which has normally much lower volume and higher prices then MtGox) will hold a lot of these BTC or USD Vouchers (BTC or USD in ripple are not real, they are IOUs for that currency including the trust that some gateway will convert it back some day, just like fiat). Some day MtGox get hacked/shutdown/defaulted and simply disappears as possible gateway for liquidity for interbanking tx. What happenes to the other small gateways? Will they get desctructed by that major event like in the bank crisis the default of some big banks destroyed small ones?
What happendes to the trust lines many users has setup with MtGox to be able to do arbitrage trades? They will loose that amount (but not only the money they had "desposited" but the whole value of the trustline if they have forgotten to adjust it after every tx). There is no protection of the state for such events unlike the "100k at bank are safe" promise....(and we all pay pretty much for that insurance). Will then a FED step in as gateway to save the system if it had already reached a global system relevant size? 

Another point is the "p2p" transfer between users directly. That sounds like cool p2p and a decentralized system. But if you look closer it turn out it is the same kind of a decentralized system like a money transfer from one users bank to the other users bank. The IOU (I owe you -> debt, fiat) is transferred but it has just some value if you trust a gateway (bank, FED,…). So you can make a tx directly but with a token controlled by a central instance. Its like you send a cheque or company voucher to a friend. Its even worse as you have to implicit trust that instance and as far I have seen (not sure with that) there is no automatic adoption to the min. amount of trust needed. That trust is the same you create when doing a deposit to a bank (when paying in 100 USD you trust the Bank for 100 USD). But here the trust/risk is implicit adopted with every tx. At the end your balance is the trust/risk. With Ripple I think you need to change that trust level after every tx (if you have deposited first 1000 USD, then widthdraw 900 you still have 1000 USD trust setup). But I have not looked that close to Ripple, so maybe I am wrong here.

And there a much more problems with Ripple, best explained at http://ripplescam.org.

For me the Ripple system looks very similar to the our banking system, where we suffer from to strong interdependencies to some "too big to fail" companies and socialized losses (bailouts payed by the tax payers). Just to include crypto to that system seems for me more danger then benefit. If the bank lobby and state manage to hype Ripple as better BTC (just because it has crypto) it could become a real danger to the distribution of BTC.

Here are some building blocks of a possible solution for a trustless p2p fiat-crypto exchange:

Based on ideas from:
https://nashx.com
http://www.bitescrow.org
and in discussion with 2 other friends (not sure if they want to get listed here....)

To understand the following better its suggested to have a look first to the above 2 solutions.

The escrow solution is used for 3 escrow transactions. 2 risk funds (one for each trader) and the payment fund (btc). The fiat transaction goes over a conventional channel (bank,...).
To introduce an incitive for releaseing the fund after the fiat buyer has received the money (he could just be fine in that situation, he has payed btc and received fiat) we introduce the idea of the Nash equilibrium. If the transaction for one of both is not satisfying, both will loose the money they paid to the risk fund.

But there is a problem with the Nash equilibrium, as in different stages of the trade transaction there are different amounts both traders could loose. That leads to 2 attack situations for blackmailing the other user. If both are loosing some money but one loose more then the other, that could be used to blackmail the other...
To get rid of that problem a trading pool could serve as a possible solution.
Maybe there are other solutions, the basic idea was to break the connunication line so a blackmail does not work anymore (if you dont know the other you cannot blackmail him). With a trading pool where the mapping of the partners in the second part of the tx is randomized the communication line is broken (see later in the example if its not clear enough yet...).

Trading pool:
A group (n) of trading pairs want to buy 1 btc for the same price.
At the end it does not matter who will pay whom. All give the same fiat amount for 1 BTC.
The mapping between the fiat receiver and the btc receiver is randomly defined (only the system knows the mapping, not the traders).
The larger the pool the lower the risk for attacks.
First it looks that a trading pool will be much more difficult to use for trading as more then 1 trading partners must be found, but I think that depends only on the number of users. A user could set an offer within a price range and some security conditions like:
I want to buy 1 BTC for price 800 EUR +/- 20EUR in a pool with min. 5 trading pairs.

Here a quick overview of the rough idea:
Fiat Seller 1 sends fiat to BTC Seller 1
Fiat Seller 2 sends fiat to BTC Seller 2
Fiat Seller 3 sends fiat to BTC Seller 3
After successful fiat transactions:
BTC release with randomly choosen mappings.
BTC Seller 1 release BTC to BTC Seller 2 (for example)
BTC Seller 2 release BTC to BTC Seller 3
BTC Seller 3 release BTC to BTC Seller 1


Lets play it with an example:
User A sell 800 EUR to 1 BTC
User A has to pay trading value + x to risk fund, in our example 0.1 BTC: 1 BTC + 0.1 BTC = 1.1 BTC in risk fund
User B has to pay payment + x to risk fund, in our example: 1 BTC (payment fund) + 0.1 BTC (risk fund)

Critical attack situations:
Situation 1: User A does not send fiat money
Situation 2: User A has sent fiat, user B does not release btc payment and risk funds


Fair game:
Situation 1
User A: -1.1(Risk); balance: -1.1
User B: -0.1(Risk) - 1(Payment); balance: -1.1

Situation 2:
User A: -1(Money); balance: -2.1
User B: +1(Money); balance: -0.1

Release:
User A: +1.1(Risk) + 1(Payment); balance: 0
User B: +0.1(Risk); balance: 0
All fine....

User A tries to cheat:
Situation 1
User A: -1.1(Risk); balance: -1.1
User B: -0.1(Risk) - 1(Payment); balance: -1.1
Blackmail attack from user A does not make sense as both would lose the same:
If user A does not send, both will lose the same.

User B tries to cheat:
Situation 1
User A: -1.1(Risk); balance: -1.1
User B: -0.1(Risk) - 1(Payment); balance: -1.1
Situation 2:
User A: -1(Money); balance: -2.1
User B: +1(Money); balance: -0.1
User B could try to blackmail user A but the probability that user A get his payment and risk fund released from user B is 1/n (due to the randomized mapping).
Losses if he does not release:
User A: balance: -2.1/ n (only if the system mapped him to that trader)
User B: balance: -0.1

Users has only contact info to their trading peer not to the other users in the pool, so no way to make a poolwide blackmail.

What value should be applied to x? It depends on the size (n) of the trading pool.
To obtain an equilibrium we have that condition:
(2 + x) / n = x

for n = 1 that would result in an inequation, so that will not work.
2+ x != x

for n = 2 we get a valid result for the equalition, so min. pool size is 2.
(2 + x) / 2 = x
x = 2

Test:
x = 2 for n = 2;
User A: balance: -4/2 = -2
User B: balance: -2
both loose the same so no blackmail risk

Attack situation 1:
User A: -3(Risk); balance: -3
User B: -2(Risk) - 1(Payment); balance: -3

for n = 3
x = 1
Test:
User A: balance: -3/3 = -1
User B: balance: -1

Attack situation 1:
User A: -2(Risk); balance: -2
User B: -1(Risk) - 1(Payment); balance: -2

Conclusion:
As soon as we have a second trading pair we get perfect Nash equilibrium using the propability of the pool size. The larger the pool the lower the necessary risk fund.


Additional:
Some thoughts about user reputation systems:
If the p2p trading system would work, it should be very easy to create a new user.
That could be automated by scripts, so there could be created 1000s of virtual traders used to build up good ratings.
So I think a rating system without visible controlled identity will be misused.


Real person escrow (if we need that at all) could be introduced like that:
In case of a dispute a trading party could ask for an escrow which would be selected automatically from the system randomly between all users.
The selected escrow has to reply within a certain timespan (e.g. 1 hour), if he does not reply the next one will be selected. If the escrow accept to help he would get a fee.
The escrow could then release funds for one or the other party.

Let me know if you find any weak points in the trading pool approach.
One could be that members in a pool could work together, or a pool is a pseudo pool by 1 member with different accounts. But I think as a cheater cannot proof that he is the owner of the other pool members, a blackmail will be hard…

But of course that needs to be refined much more and there will be for sure more problems when getting deeper. Just a first step....

Dont bury that so fast.

I think there are possibilities to realize a distributed, decentralized, trustless p2p fiat-cypto exchange.
The bank transfers are from one trader to another trader but there is no central point who knows about that. Banks cannot control payments from one user to another, you dont need to mark them as bitcoin payment.... Banks and the state can only attack or block companies but not 100 000s of single traders.

I will post later some more detailed description of some building blocks of a possible solution. For the moment just a quick summary for at least a part of the problem:

- An automated escrow service (no real person escrow included)
- Use the idea of the Nash equilibrium (based on from https://nashx.com) where the tradingpartners loose both money if they dont play fair
- A trading pool to fix the danger of blackmail from different risk amounts in the trading states (explained in a following post)

In that way a BTC seller could trade with a fiat seller just knowing the fiat sellers bank account. The trading platform does not know the bank details (communication could be encrypted) and does not hold any money or BTC (so regulatory issues should be no danger as well as btc theft). The escrow inside the system cannot access the funds. The platform is at the end just software without interception of real persons.

The next challenges are how to build such a system in a decentralized, distributed way.
One possibility could be to have something like what is wordpress for blogs. If the solution is easy to install, does not require special infrastructure, is open source, there could be a wide distribution. As nobody could shut down the blogoshere, but a certain newspaper, many server instances of such a distributed exchange could be pretty safe against political attacks.

The exchanges needs to broadcast all offers to all others and are displaying all receiving offers, so they would act on a global level. The only centralized part would be to manage the trade transaction, so that part needs to be stored in some way. Maybe there is a way to apply that to the blockchain, but at the moment I have not thought further in that part...

Maybe Open transaction (would be great to get some input from fellow traveler) serves as a ready to use system for parts of that. Ripple is for me not an good option as its operated by a company and I would prefer a trustless system rather the a trust relationship based system.

Best of course would be to have only real p2p clients (not the above described highly distributed servers). Clients could broadcast their offers to all other p2p clients. If they find a matching partner, they could decide to use a randomly choosen remote client which serves as temporary server for that transaction (best if that client does not know anything about that). To get more stability (clients could leave during the tx...) that process could be replicated to many clients. Maybe there is a way how to use the blockchain and/or scripts for the transaction?

All that is of course very unspecific.... just some ideas....
And of course I am aware that its a super complex area. But people created skype, torrent and other complex systems, so why not a p2p exchange.

I will post a detailed description of the above basic building block in a following post.

Its not so easy....
I just sent some fund to the orig. address (https://blockchain.info/address/1EMPjmn72bHniRCcVsYD2PZ9Bw86n4uRbQ) so its funded again and then did the msc send but without success:
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=13TkryWbfWtsBWLXsFRNGEhGgHGzt8qKYP
Is there a way in the btc qt client to force to use a specific addredd for the send? it seems that the msc tx was using another address....
maybe i need to empty all in that wallet and the fund it again.... damn what a nightmare to get rid of my msc!

That address is from an active qt wallet, so yes i still have control over it, but its btc balance is 0 as i send btc to a paperwallet. does the btc balance of that address has influence of the msc?
How can i send my mastercoins out from it. I tried the 2 possibilities which seemed to me most logical:
1. send msc from the address where teh btc balance from the original msc receiver address went
2. send msc from the qt client wallet, where i recieved the msc but where the address btc balance is 0.
both are not working, so seems that i am still the owner but how can i access it? how can i send them to somebody who want to buy it?

can anyone explain how the msc are stored in the btc address/wallet?

thanks for any help!

I received 9 mastercoins into a btc qt client wallet (1EMPjmn72bHniRCcVsYD2PZ9Bw86n4uRbQ).
I send some btc to a paperwallet (17nCCJ5ge5et5oKfHEDeoWJhebR2GEjPDG) and there my msc seemed to leave the wallet as well.
I imported then that paper wallet into a blockchain wallet and did the msc sending like it is described here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=348789.0 (is that also possible with the qt client?)
Once with 1 msc, then with 8 msc.
that all seemed ok for me, but at https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=13sTmHYc2jcUPE4EwZnfULqUHwEHV1o8M6 it is marked as invalid.
I dont understand how exactly the msc are identified, but for me it seems if i moved the btc funds from my receiving address to another wallet, then use that wallet so send out msc, that should work, but seems like not.

I just tried another approach: If the msc is not directly connected to the btc address it should somehow still be in my qt client wallet. so i tried to send it from there, but seemed like also was not valid:
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=1AqJqwRrxQM84bGcdGMZZAZ7Tacs6VV2cW

I hope i have not lost them!
I am pretty disappointed how difficult it is to send/sell my mastercoins.

can anyone help me to understand why on
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=13sTmHYc2jcUPE4EwZnfULqUHwEHV1o8M6
the balance is 0 but the 2 transactions are visible and marked as valid?
is this just a bug in the https://masterchest.info or was there something wrong with the transaction?

can anyone help me to understand why on
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=13sTmHYc2jcUPE4EwZnfULqUHwEHV1o8M6
the balance is 0 but the 2 transactions are visible and marked as valid?
is this just a bug in the https://masterchest.info or was there something wrong with the transaction?

Lets look at bitcoin (the blockchain) as a global database and a Satoshi as the minimal unit to save data in there.
So the currency could become an equivalent for the capacity to store data there, to write history. Maybe that is some day more important then money?
What are our measurements for data capacity?
Bit is the smallest unit for information. So a Satoshi could be equivalent to 1 bit.

1000 Satoshis = 1 kilobit ~ 1 cent (USD) at the current price
0.01 BTC = 1 000 000 Satoshi = 1 megabit ~ 10 USD

Of cours it could be confusing to use kilobit/megabit for a currency. Also it does not sound well. So a better name is needed, but maybe the analogy leads somebody to a nice name.
Satoshi is by far the best name for a currency, better then bitcoin IMHO.

Decimal/Cubic/Satoshi (DeCuSa) for 10^3 Satoshis (1000 Satoshis ~ 1 cent)?
And that as symbol: Đ as sign for the leaving dollar ;-)
Or maybe better a mathematical symbol like: Ξ or θ

today dec. 2. 2013 02:10:29 PM

I just read about Mike Hearns black-list (red-list) idea:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qmbtu/mike_hearn_chair_of_the_bitcoin_foundations_law/

I want to make clear that I am not a fan of black-lists (or red-list like they are called now for better PR). I also did not tag these addresses yet and probably will not do it, as it will not help and will lead to such kind of black-lists.

In fact it is a difficult topic: If you are a victim easily your personal interest are getting more important to you then the principles of a free and decentralized currency.

It seems to me that some of the inner circle of the core devs of bitcoin are likely to act in a fashion which limits the liberty of bitcoin.
Then probably it is the time to look out for alt coins which comes with more anonymity/privacy. But unfortunately these alt coins does not have that enormous hash power BTC has today and could easily be attacked by a 51% attack. Even if the entity controlling > 50% does not do any harm and stay invisible, they have the control over the alt coin when it would gain higher adoption.

Imagine that people using more and more of one of these altcoins (don't know yet which offers best anonymity and privacy, zero coin is still alpha) and the market cap. grows to something like bitcoin. The government invests early into that altcoin and is mining more then 50% but let it rise until the market cap. is really high. Then some day they do the attack, corrupt all the network and make the altcoin worthless in a day. Huge shock for many people.
BTC was brought down by an alt coin promising higher anonymity, but the government was that time faster and did not miss to take over the control.
So the 2 main security holes in BTC had been exploited (the 3. is the power of the mining pools IMHO):
1. The power of the core devs: If they start to do something in a more government friendly but less BTC liberty friendly way, people will change over to a better money. An altcoin promising to give these features, could become the new BTC (also could be used for laundry).
2. The 51% attack is easy when the market cap is low but pretty difficult if it is already at a level like with BTC today. With such a new rising alt coin the government could invest early and take over invisible the control.

Of course there are other possible solutions:
- Laundry services
- On top of BTC features (?)
- Built in in BTC anonymity (zero coin?)

Just my 2 cents about that topic.
I know it is a difficult topic, and stories like the following I suppose we will see more often in future (some probably pure PR inventions):
"a little old lady was trying to buy bitcoins via the Canada ATM because she got a CryptoLocker infection. She has no clue what Bitcoin is beyond the fact that she needed some and didn't know what to do."

At the end it touches probably a much deeper problem. Crime in general.
Why is these crime coming more often from poor countries?
If you are in a country like Ukraine you have to take care much more rather then if you are living in Switzerland.
With a global accessible currency like Bitcoin we getting closer with anyone in the world. So the crime rate of these countries touches us directly. There are no borders and walls and long distances to keep us safe from them.
But if we want to live in peace and without fear the only solution will be to eliminate the reasons for the crime. And the main reason for crime is poorness and lack of education (which leads to poorness).
So why not think further and think of ways how the Bitcoin community could help to make the world a more fair place with more equal chances.
If Bitcoin really becomes the global world currency 1 BTC will be probably worth a fortune (some say 100 000 - 1 000 000 USD  -  http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin-is-not-some-50-or-100-it-is-100000-to-1000000/).
So many of us will become super rich. Will that shift of wealth lead us to a better world? There will be winners (early adopters) and loosers (people with less access to IT). What are we doing to help those who are far away from understanding something like BTC?
BTC will cahnge the banks, but I dont think it will kill them. the banks are clever enough and tech-affine enough to get early enough into the boat, and will not be the big looser from BTC.
The big loosers will be in places without IT infrastructure, people how still are using only the absolute minimum of modern communication tools.

So I think BTC needs to stay clean from politics and law enforcement tasks. Politics had not created a really fair world in the past so why they should in the future?
Maybe we need something like BTC (how it will change the finance industry) for politics?
The pirate party (with liquid democracy) is the only light what is see in that direction, but maybe it needs a much more profound change in that area.
To fight crime we need other politics not other money.

i got a PM from shylock as reply to my post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=354554
maybe he can help? ;-)
he offers services to track down thieves (at least he should be capable to track down himself) ;-)

here his PM:
"hey mate , i saw you tread about the stolen btc ,
i work with some law enforcement agencies israelly and i have access to some tracking abilities that will make it very easy to track and catch your thief , even if he did it from a public wifi or something i can still track the physical address of his computer and match it with other networks , i will guarantee you that you will have your thief and i accept your offer of payment of 10 btc but i must insist on payment of half the ammount upfront to insure my work dont go for vain.
let me know if it suits you"

Moderator: could you please mark shylock as scammer?

Yes it was via email and a fake webpage. It was after the Mt. Gox database hack, where all email addresses were stolen and published. Of course I was stupid to not look better to the url when logging in, was my first phishing experience, and I hope the last one as well :-).
I did not care so much in that time because it was "only" 190 USD, 44 BTC at that time, but today 44 BTC is much! As I said I dont have much hope to see that again.
One reason for posting that was that I had the idea of tagging his addresses and as I have seen now at blockchain  others used that feature as well to mark scammers.

I think that will be some stuff we will see in future more, at least as long bitcoin is not really anonymous and laundry services are not used so much (this thief seemed at least not too clever the way how he left traces in the block chain).

I know it is nearly impossible to track a BTC thief but I just wanted to share what I have found so far in searching for traces of a theft a while ago.
Also I tagged all these addressed which seems to belong to the thief as "BTC Thief" at blockchain.info and linked it to that page.

Here is the Story:
Someone has stolen 44,32 BTC from my Mt.Gox Account due a Phishing attack on 2011-12-25 16:30:22 GMT.
The Address to where it was transferred was: 1MND3zAnRkPCiBLafWb3btog13NyqtNWV5
The IP address from the hacker was reported from Mt. Gox as: 46.250.9.208

As seen here: https://blockchain.info/address/1MND3zAnRkPCiBLafWb3btog13NyqtNWV5
it seems very obvious that all the outputs leading to one input of 277 BTC was probably a wallet where the thief transferred the BTC to another address:

the receiving address:
https://blockchain.info/de/address/132KKNz8pXcREf1M8ZpWrqDme6jJPDecnJ

next step:
https://blockchain.info/de/address/15SaatjLKjHDNWBgMfpDmYF1QCtMptRAAG still funded with about 7 BTC (will not tag that address as it might belong to someone else)
and here: https://blockchain.info/de/address/17vxXzTkmmVf96nstmDqbPF8hYkEiW9Yuw with 270BTC (I assume the thieves address)

another move of all the funds to: https://blockchain.info/de/address/1CB9Z7LBFcWAV7Rk9vhec7B1zezD3T2XiB
and another to: https://blockchain.info/de/address/1GJW1KjgxHGimDhSNSH7b1zk5H2cTG7mVz
which is still funded with 270 BTC.

It seems very obvious that all these addresses belongs to the same person and I assume that there is more stolen BTC other then mine in there.
I found that the IP belongs to a place in the Ukraine:
http://whois.net/ip-address-lookup/46.250.9.208
As it is in the Ukraine and its just an IP from a provider I think there will be no way to find the identity of the thief (maybe the provider want to earn some BTC :-) and help to track him down)

Any help which leads to catch the thief and helps to return me my stolen 44 BTC i will reward with 10 BTC.

PS: still could not tag it as blockcain.info seems to have server problems....