Owlcatz participated in a criminal extortion conspiracy. The last time I checked, that makes him a criminal. Notwithstanding, his behavior is certainly not in line with what I would consider to be remotely trustworthy.

You want me to post unbiased lies[\b]

Your statement speaks volumes about you and is another reason why you should not be in any position of power.

I have not criticized you for being too fast with your actions so using that to deflect is well nothing more than a deflection. Regardless, the fact remains that you only took action until you were unable to continue to protect his reputation and continued pushing back against calling what he did to even be wrong until his reputation was lost. This is not taking a long time to take action, it is actively protecting a scammer and keeping a business relationship based on reputation with said scammer.

I don’t think there has been a single instance in which lauda has accepted responsibility for anything.

The fact remains that he was strongly pushing back against holding his business partner responsible for his involvement in his businesses scam activity and promptly disavowed him once it was shown his reputation is a lost cause, not once the underlying scam activity was made public.

He is not actually. That is Lauda's go to excuse for deflecting concerns raised about him.

I don't really spend very much time on here anymore.

It does seem like there is a double standard around here.....to the extent that those reasonably described as scammers seem to get protected.

I will just leave this here...

I don't see how any reasonable person could see this to be anything but a threat of physical harm.

My question is, who in their right mind hire someone that is even remotely connected to an extortion scheme when they are trying to raise money via an ICO (or otherwise) from investors? These types of investments are already super high risk for investors, and competition for money is fierce, and I cannot imagine a potential investor having any interest in a company doing business with someone who is a tenth as shady as lauda/aTriz/ALU.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=135920#newfeedback

Set feedback type to negative, write a comment and you can set the reference link to this thread.

Oh wow, this could be a damaging find...

Thanks.

From the looks of it, both of them are for sale for the right price. It really is disgusting.

I think your thread meets the elements of a contract. (a contract does not need to be 'signed' nor even in writing for it to be binding). Not that it matters, but if you didn't intend on making the terms of your auction binding, then why did you ask that certain users (who logically would have little credibility) pay a deposit?

I don't think you did that. It looks like you extended the auction, and expected the previous high bidder to honor his bid, which based on your thread, this is what happened - you announced the previous high bidder was the winning bidder. If you had rejected his bid, it would have gone to the next highest bidder, or if you rejected all bids, it would have started back at the opening bid amount, neither of which happened.

I want to say a couple of things about this comment.

These types of ICOs will generally only benefit the investors of said ICOs if they raise a lot of money. It doesn't necessarily need to be oversubscribed, sell out, or have any specific percentage of coins sold, however there is a reason why these companies are trying to raise the amount of money they are. If you are claiming a lot of money is being raised via an ICO when in fact (nearly) no money is being raised, you are substantially misrepresenting the risks associated with with investing because if you are the 1st investor, not only does the underlying business model need to be solid, and upon execution, profitable, but also many others need to believe in the business plan sufficiently to invest their own substantial money, otherwise the management will likely not even have the opportunity to try to execute (and be profitable), and your investment will likely be worthless.


Another cold, hard fact about most ICO investors (IMO) is that most of them lack the capability to truly understand the risks and potential benefits of investing in a particular ICO. I suspect that many ICO investors use investor interest of others of a particular offering to gauge risk/benefit of a particular ICO. I believe the thought process is that if many others are investing, then surely the ICO is a good investment. Again, misrepresenting investor interest specifically harms investors because it makes them believe said investment is less risky than it is in reality.

In both of the above examples, there is very specific consumer harm.

I would note that ibminer's above examples are not the only fraudulent statements made regarding that ICO. There are other fraudulent statement in the OP that aTriz himself posted, such as "all monetary transactions with BIBC are processed through secured servers, so users have no need to worry about any risks..."

I would point out this is not the 1st (maybe only is a better word, I'm not sure) time that aTriz has been a part of this kind of fraudlent misrepresentation. He previously vouched for alia's gambling script that was very clearly worthless, and did not work as advertised. I think this is fairly clear evidence that aTriz's word is for sale to anyone willing to pay the right price, and as such is worthless.

This problem is not unique to bitcointalk, and is a problem for ~all of social media.

Pretty much all social media is the victim of astroturfing, and very vulnerable to groupthink.

The astroturfing/fake interest/fake bumping problem will require changes at a very high level of the forum.

Things like the merit system and the captcha to login are major steps in the right direction, however users were grandfathered into their ranks with the introduction of the merit system, and users can bypass the captcha by saving login cookies, so established "astroturfers" will not be hampered by these countermeasures.

I think one solution would be to force users with under x posts/activity/merit/rank to solve a captcha every n posts they make, this could be every post, or it could be every 2nd, 3rd, 5th, etc post they make. Those with a copper membership would be exempt.

If the above is not something theymos is willing to implement, or if the above is insufficient, theymos could force login cookies to expire periodically, perhaps every week, or every 15 days. This would be a minor annoyance for some users, however would force those with hundreds of accounts to spend a lot of resources logging into their accounts, especially considering that google may slow down their ability to even attempt the captcha after attempting it many times.

Both of the above would make these services much less profitable, and more resource intensive for those offering said services. As previously mentioned, these spammers will eventually get rate limited by google, preventing the spammers/astroturfers from doing their job.

Another good idea, but something that would require a little more effort on the backend, would be to change the order in which ANN threads are listed in the ICO/altcoin section to something more random for threads that have been recently posted in. For example, all threads that have been posted in over the last 48 hours could be grouped together and ordered randomly, and threads without posts in the last 48 hours (or whatever timeframe is used) would continue to be ordered by date of last post. This would effectively make bumping an ANN thread useless if done the way these spammers are doing it.

More drastic measure would be to close registration, and/or charge a fee to register/post.

I am curious as to where this money is coming from.

I think there is also the issue of your part in a conspiracy to (attempt to) extort another user.

You were recently trying to buy fake vouches:

Because the so called “merit abuse” is not a problem based on how the merit system works over the long term.