But can you buy them with bitcoin?

Grass Hill Alpacas are selling SURVIVAL Alpaca Socks for bitcoin. They are gavin's neighbor, btw!



These are going in my survival/doomsday pack (along some casascius coins of course).

SR does its own laundering with its coin-tumbler.

The one evidence I've seen that 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM belonged to SR was the claim by Arkanos that his SR deposit went there "immediately".

I'll present a 2nd piece of evidence. I made a deposit to SR on June 9 2012. I just checked blockchain.info and it went to 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM after 129 hops (I'm not sure on the date it arrived because the blockchain.info taint tool doesn't show dates).

Actually I made two deposits to SR that day, to two separate addresses. The 2nd one went to 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM after 510 hops.

Does this mean that 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM was controlled by SR? No. If the address was controlled by MtGox, all it confirms is that SR or its users, also use MtGox. There would have to more experiments to support that it belongs to SR. I'm having trouble thinking of an experiment which would shine some light (such as identifying a suspected SR closure). Heck, SR could be hosting its wallet on MtGox and using the MtGox API (probably not, but just for an extreme example). In that case, SR would not have its own closure and be entirely inside the MtGox closure.

I'm very skeptical that 1DkyBEK belongs to SR. Nobody other than Satoshi (who owns the first 1 million coins if I'm not mistaken) has been known to control that many coins, and already MtGox proved they control 424k last July. 500k is a heck of a lot coins, considering that there's only 10m in existence. In all likelihood 1DkyBEK is an MtGox address, until there's stronger evidence to the contrary.


Looks like those taint numbers are about in proportion to general market penetration. MtGox taints it the most, deepbit second, and pirate's closure taints more than znort's closure.

I'm a little confused about how znort's tool is calculating this taint. The numbers are "taint from" so are these numbers "receiving taint"? i.e., 1DkyBEK received 0.5% of its coins from [addresses closed around] 1ZnortsoStC1zSTXbW6CUtkvqew8czMMG?

Thanks for this.

Now that 15k BTC is with MtGox (where is the rest? wasn't disclosed if there was still any in cold storage or if all of it was on mtgox), I'm curious about the further role of Patrick Murck. Hopefully zhoutong is still working with him on getting the rest of the funds from Chen Jianhai, BTC and USD.



Is there any possibility for Patrick Murck to meet the requirements of New Zealand law, so that Wendon Group can appoint him as receiver? Maybe Mr. Murck is willing to handle the claims process, and Bitcoinica Consultancy could hand over all the filed claims and their work on separating the valid from the fraudulent.

Tihan, you also previously stated that the fund would be proceeding with legal action against the Bitcoinica Consultancy. Is the fund still planning to do that?

AurumXchange didn't publish any contents from the e-mail address (obviously they didn't know its password), zhou was doing that. And they didn't discuss or reveal all aspects of Zhou's business, only two things: that he had an LR order with them and that he was connected to the e-mail address. They kept all other aspects of his order private: his singapore bank account, his LR account (zhou was the one who revealed his own LR account), the e-mail address zhou used there, etc.

They were in a tough position and would have much preferred for Bitcoinica LP to initiate some official court proceedings, but that didn't happen so they disclosed it publicly as they said. Maybe they could have given zhou a 12-hour heads up in the case he were a victim, but there was also sufficient reason not to. I'm glad they did, because it did lead to 15k BTC being returned. Hopefully it will be more.

At this point I just really hope he can get the rest of our money back. If not, then I hope zhou reveals Chen Jianhai's personal information (its probably a common name) as he is threatening.

And its really a shame that zhou didn't have offsite backups of the account database. A shame that Bitcoinica Consultancy had an insecure e-mail. A real shame that Patrick Strateman never changed the LastPass password. And a real god-damn shame that he, Donald, and Amir are walking away from Bitcoinica Consultancy LP. Despite their two major fuck-ups, I hope they come back so that Bitcoinica LP is not forced into liquidation "receivership". Customers have already filed their claims and they worked for months sorting the fraudulent claims from the valid ones. At the very least, I hope they turn over their work so far.

They didn't violate zhoutong's privacy, they violated the hacker's privacy (actually the hacker never had it in the first place since he didn't follow the ToS). Zhou had already stated that he had a $40k LR order with aurumxchange, and they publicly confirmed that. What they also disclosed, along with MtGox, was that the hacker's email address had a connection to zhoutong. That was a fact so its not libel, and its not a violation of privacy since the thief doesn't have privacy protections.

The violator of zhoutong's privacy in this scenario is Chen Jianhai, by means of identity theft. I really hope zhou can get the rest of the stolen funds back, BTC and the USD, and turn them over to Patrick Murk in agreement with Bitcoinica LP. It is in his best interest.

It was only public information buried in some governmentcorporate website. I concur with some other comments, it seemed a bit unprofessional for you to tell zhou "have your lawyer contact[e-mail] us" instead of directly providing him your public address. That lack of presence only provides fuel for zhou's fire, as does this vague referral to "a member on this thread" ..

I had to go back some 10 pages to find it.. so I'll quote it again for other readers.

sgitcoin == sgbitcoin. And don't forget that stevejobs807 = steve_bobs. given the date that steve_bobs appeared, it was very coincidental indeed. Another one is bitchen == Chen Jianhai. perhaps Chen Jianhai == Kevin Lim == Patrick Strateman?

AurumXchange didn't reveal your personal information, they only revealed the hacker's e-mail address and liberty reserve account. They confirmed publicly that you had an order with them and the amount of it (not in an email/pm as you requested). Your personal information would be your email address, your singapore bank account, or your physical address, but they didn't reveal any of that.

So they did disclose the hacker's e-mail address and LR account (the bank account was revealed by zhou), first with MtGox and then publicly, when they weren't ordered to do so under either of the two exceptions of the privacy policy. But that doesn't violate their privacy policy, because the policy only applies to users following their Terms of Service. The hacker violated the ToS so he doesn't have those protections.


The (3) from the Dominican law doesn't apply here, since there was no court or Authority which requested the information.

Just a note that, last time I looked, I could only find about four lines of source code from any member of "bitcoin consultancy" in the official/core bitcoin project maintained by gavin. It was just some bash script from Amir to check the OS and run the correct client. Since then, Amir has been working on his own client and library, not submitting pull requests to the official repository, as far I know.

Above $10, one-dollar price increases become less and less noteworthy. Log-scale people, Log-scale!



Alpaca socks for me (are they still available?)

One more thing, my new best guess for when pirate defaults is when we see a correction in the bitcoin price. Not mini-corrections in the uptrend, but a deeper correction followed by a trend reversal. This would be analogous to all the Wall Street ponzis which collapsed in 2008 when the stock prices reverses. Fear gripped the market, depositors wanted to withdraw from funds, and those withdraws exposed the ponzis.

That would be the latest estimate for when he defaults (most certainly before oct 2013), but of course it could be any time.

Well, some people were withdrawing (eg MageD) and everybody was nervous about his vegas meet-up. Since it seems to have taken place, its likely there will be a wave of new investors. But that doesn't mean default is no longer imminent, indeed it could very well be. It just depends on the market (both the PPT market and the bitcoin market) and pirate's exit strategy.



There is an unhealthy amount of lending schemes going on right now, but I think you might be overestimating the proportion of new buyers they are attracting.

I see evidence for a variety of new investors: the reuters article mentioning the ip addresses of wall street firms visiting mtgox at the beginning of the year, silk road forum post count supposedly 50% of the bitcointalk post count, butterfly labs mining investments, coinLab investment by Ycombinator.

The fact that price has held up so well against the utter vaporization of bitcoinica shows that the bitcoin is market is more resilient and decentralized than I had anticipated (unfortunately for myself, 20% of my funds were in a long position on bitcoinica). So I don't think that a crash of pirate's scheme would affect the market. And actualy from that, one can infer the converse that the success of his scheme is not what's currently driving the price increase. I may be way underestimating the size of his scheme, but I think its fair to say that bitcoinica had a far greater market penetration than pirate does. Of course, MtGox remains the greatest centralized point of risk to the bitcoin price.

Mark has previously stated they keep their fees as they collect them - 50% USD and 50% BTC. I'm curious to know if they've sold any BTC to obtain operating costs. Mark also said they do (or at least were planning to) re-invest all their profits into costs which help ensure the long-term success of bitcoin (he mentioned lawyers, for instance).

And I concur with the others, more disclosure from MtGox (and of course other exchanges) is exactly what's needed for increased confidence, which is what attracts bigger investors to bitcoin.

Releasing the Financial report in January was a great move, but I think it was Adam who said they dropped the ball on that because they've been busy with other things like keeping their bank relations and withdrawals running smoothly.

You don't see anything wrong with your friend's legitimate LR funds being released to bitcoinica? Your friend would lose his $40k, not restore his liquidity.

The stevejobs807@gmail.com mtgox account was only "verified" as in "click this link to confirm your e-mail address", not an MtGox identity-verified account. Zhou has a different mtgox account for his real identity, plus the bitcoinica mtgox account, at least. the stevejobs gmail was only used at mtgox a long time ago, this time it was used at AurumXchange.

It was Chris Heaslip's mtgox account which was used to buy more bitcoin with some of the $40k USD mtgox codes, and then withdraw the bitcoin.

When the breach of LastPass and bitcoinica's mtgox account was announced, I found it equally plausible that it was a random thief rather than an insider (ie one of Patrick/steve_bobs, zhoutong/stevejobs, etc.). It's totally possible that someone would have verified that info@bitcoinica.com is a LastPass account (this can be verified since LastPass leaks account registration status through the Forgot Password option), and then tried the MtGox API key after the source code leak.

But anyone could have done that, literally anyone (seriously, I kicked myself for having not tried it myself). But the particular person who did exploit this, also happened to be one of a very few people who also knew the password to zhoutong's stevejobs807@gmail.com. Of all the numerously possible potential thiefs who had equal opportunity to log-in to LastPass, the breach was in fact highly likely, all the info was there. And of all those possibilities, what is likelihood that the one person who first took advantage also knew zhoutong's private throw-away gmail password, so that they could frame him? The probability is highly suspicious.

Why would Chen Jianhai use your throw-away stevejobs807 gmail account for miscellaneous credit card fraud, when he could just as easily have used one of his own? I understand why he would use it for laundering the bitcoinica mtgox funds. But there's no sense to him using it months prior for miscellaneous fraudulent freight-forwarding. (on this matter, equally perplexing is why would zhoutong use his own stevejobs807 gmail, connected by prior deposits to his real mtgox account? to his favor, if zhou were the thief that would be really dumb on his part, when he could easily use any new throw-away email...)

The backstory is very cloudy. For what "legitimate business" was Chen Jianhai advising, and what was Chen's webshop?

Also, what was the source of LR funds belonging to Zhou's Singapore friend? If it is legitimate and if it belongs to said friend, how can you offer it to offset the USD payment by having AurumXchange release it to Patrick Murck?



It can be used, or cannot?

How did you get his personal information?

It seems to me that a hypothetical someone involved with credit card fraud and laundering of funds through LR or suspicious bank accounts (Liu Haipeng) would communicate with you only through his internet alias. You already admitted you've never met this individual in person, only on the internet. What reason would he have to tell you his name, his wife's name, and their bank accounts and addresses? If he were to provide you business advice about anti-fraud measures, the most likely way for him to request payment for his services would be to tell you his AliPay account, not his family's addresses and bank account numbers.

That's the hardest part to believe about this hypothetical Chen Jianhai.

Its plausible that a random someone would verify that info@bitcoinica.com is a LastPass account, and also plausible that they would try the API key as the password. If it were a random thief there would be no coincidence. But for that same someone to be your previous "business associate" who also has your stevejobs gmail password, well that's a heck of a coincidence. Unless you were to claim that you also mentioned to this person that you use LastPass, but you never did.

These posts were made right around the time of the "secret sale" to Tihan/Wendon group, so it seems that would be the "advisor" he's referring to here.

Perhaps "Chen Jianhai" was a fraud-advisor for zhou's sgitcoin.com. Perhaps..

Leandro "is a really nice guy" and pirateat40 has a "WoT rating". Leandro (like the rest of them) is a clear copy-cat.

And I am sick and tired of all these endless scams claiming to generate fantastical profits with no proof and zero evidence. No extraordinary evidence of their extraordinary profits, just a bunch of fanciful what-ifs and could-be's: money-laundering profits, coin-laundering profits, arbitrage profits, trading profits. Or interest paid by borrowers, but there are no borrowers! A duck is a duck and a spade is a spade.

All these "interest" and "insurance" programs are new, inspired by pirate's success, probably people who were doing e-gold and LR HYIPs jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon because that's where the growth is. These are a bunch of counter-productive scams. They aren't useful services which contribute to bitcoin and they don't increase the fundamental value, they hurt it!

Take this thread off of "Economics", start a "bitcoinhyipscam.com" forum, and go promote there!

Bitcoin Rain?! Don't be fooled. I'm happy for your if you take your gains before everyone else, but when you lose all your principal it won't even make me chuckle.