mlawrence, call the police. I will cooperate fully.

Also, it wasn't our staff that lost the backups. Zhou was admining the site, and he had no backups. One of our responsibilities would have been to create a backup system after the takeover.


He doesn't interact much with the community. He sometimes uses the nickname Incitatus on IRC.

Take it to a different thread. This is for payment updates.

My identity has been public since day 1 of Bitcoin. Our pictures and identities are on the front of intersango.com. Our company info is on the about page which has a number and address. My house address is on google. We've run many honest services for 2 years now in bitcoin land. Your post = FUD and smear. Take it to a different thread as I want to keep this thread for simple payment updates and answering people's legitimate concerns.

My name is public, and my address/location too. If you want to get the police involved, I would be fine to go to them and let them have the problem to deal with. Good luck getting any money back then ever. I've got nothing to hide. Bitcoin people are always believing conspiracy theories like us making money from interest or it being an inside job.

To be honest, interest payments would not cover our time investment for processing payments out. It is a net loss considering I'm worth $50+ per hour. I charge $200 per hour for consulting work, and here I am spending 20 mins at a time researching claims and answering emails for sums less than $10. Doing this for interest payments would be absolutely stupid. It takes a long time because it's complicated. We're paying people back because it's the right thing to do.

Yes, the SSL provider is having uptime difficulties. bitcoin.it (the wiki) also has problems.

Nice. I was expecting another braindead "selfish" explanation of earning more money, bitches or fame. Simple fact is that I think people like to create, and feel inspired. I don't like pouring the precious hours of my life into a blackhole that will disappear in a few years time. It's nice to write things people will use to bring more wealthy, happiness and benefit to their lives rather than software which causes misery and vendor-lockin. Our job as coders is not to imprison people but to set their minds free.

I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes it deletes code separators.

Check my code here (I think it is easier to understand):

https://gitorious.org/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/blobs/master/src/script.cpp

Search for bool script::op_checksigverify(...)

You see the look where I create the script_code object? It loops from the last codehash position until the end of all the operations, skipping the signature or any codeseparators. Everything else is pushed to the new script object which is then used for the check_signature function.

I would suggest not copying Bitcoin's representation of scripts and instead store the parse tree for scripts. It makes it much easier for the user from an API perspective. Just remember that coinbases are unparsable so you'll need either a special script type or opcode for a raw_script (which is uninterpretable).

Hmmm OK. I'll setup a new VPS to get compatibility with the LTS again. I'm making some simplifications, optimisations and cleanup of the interface for the next release.

The problem is that all the Linux distributions are moving towards g++ 4.7 which implements the C++11 standard fully and were complaining about compilation problems.

It turns out that g++ 4.6 implements the C++11 incorrectly which causes an incompatibility for me (that I had to workaround using macros). I eventually said whatever and decided to fully transition to 4.7 as it will become the norm in the new Ubuntu which is being released in ~2 months time.

More info:
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7214623/rule-for-lambda-capture-variable
https://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/libcxx/trunk/include/system_error?view=markup&pathrev=153194 (incorrect noexcept specifier in 4.6)

I plan to make Ubuntu builds again when the new version (Quantal) is released.

Yes, you're correct.


Personally I think the majority of people will be refunded. However there will be honest people who are mistakenly classified as fake and not repaid back. Or others who get paid back less. I really want everyone to get paid back fully, but I'm not going to lie and say that we're going to recreate a perfect database from imperfect records. The process will be fair albeit slow. There's not any other better way around this (I don't think).

ninjarobot, thanks.

I think some of the biggest payments are being made soon (possibly today). It's just we wanted to be extra careful that there was no trivial oversights. For instance we could afford to mistakenly pay out $20 but not $30,000.

Evidence that people send does help, but it is not definitive. We use the evidence you send to try to find matches for you in our records. But if we don't have a record of it, then digital evidence is easily faked and does not mean much.

I work everyday.

About the payouts: working on it. Not much to add except going slowly through accounts to verify the low hanging fruit. There are some accounts marked accurate but they aren't immediately paid because the balance is so large.It could be a devastating blow if a large amount is paid erroneously, so those accounts require more checking.

When something is needed, we contact the people to ask them. It's hard to know ahead of time.

Stratising is where you connect to multiple chain-services and only accept the common shared history that they give your client (Electrum .etc).

Assume that you connect to n chain-services controlled by different organisations/individuals. There is an average expected risk r per service that they are compromised by a single attacker. Not that each service gives false info, malfunctions, but that they are compromised by the /same/ attacker. We assume this to be an independent probability.

The chance of being cheated, p

p = r^n

The more services you connect to, p drops exponentially very fast because r < 1

I suspect users would choose the services or they are bundled with the client.

After we've paid everyone we intend to pay, their initial 50%. Then afterwards we double back and refund the remaining 50%.

BTW, I'm getting lots of forum PMs. I cannot respond to them in an efficient way. Please use: bitcoinica.reimburse@gmail.com

People wanting to know about their claims status should email:

bitcoinica.reimburse@gmail.com

I set it up so me and Donald can answer queries and have a record we can check, as opposed to my not so good riseup email.

The emails are piling up. I need to make some tools though to better analyse the data first rather than doing it manually.

I have a big backlog of email which I will go through tonight or tomorrow. I need to export this data and write some tools to easier display info for people's accounts.

People are divided into different classes depending on how certain we are of their claim. As we move through verifying accounts, we become more certain. Once everyone is refunded for 50% we then double back through all refunds and refund the last 50% at the very end.

I was mistakenly missing 1 file when processing the claims which I've now got. I'll now be able to confirm more people now that I might not have before.

Allow people to upload photos of themselves, and pay you to verify their account (take their ID and stuff).

Also the search function could be better (have a giant box which accepts post codes, city names or similar) with the ability to filter by currency. It would be good to show the city for sellers and buyers because I have no idea about distances on the scale of 100s of Km, but I do know all the local nearby cities/towns. In the UK at least, distance isn't always proportional to ease of access / cost of travel- Ramsgate -> Manchester is cheaper than Ramsgate -> Milton Keynes despite being massively closer.