But the 0.5% of wallets you can't refund in full will contain the majority of the money. How many btc were stolen?

Lol. C'est pas problem. Je parle francais.

No. But the phone number above got through to Davout and as mentioned before the board members seem credible. Got to be worth a few hundred quid to find out.

I wonder if going to Paris and trying to visit their office would be any use.

I live in the south of the UK and a trip on the Eurostar would be about 1.5 btc at the moment. If there are any other bitcointalk members who have lost maybe we could make a trip of it and see what we can find out.

Any donations from other members further afield to cover costs/wages lost from work would be great. And in my case if I get my money back would be repaid in full

I can assure you my time would be spent standing outside their offices until I get seen and not drinking espresso by the seine.

Seriously though, I think for he cost involved it can only be a good idea to get a bit of info.

Looks like me and you are in the same boat Phinnaeus, nice to meet you. Shame it couldn't have been under better circumstances.

Ok, I have been doing some analysis/thinking about the situation and am feeling (relatively) positive. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would care to indulge me.

INSTAWALLET DEBACLE 2013

Firstly i have made some assumptions

1. The people behind Instawallet are honest and want to return the money to their rightful owners.

I have assumed this based on the fact that they have their public profiles on record, some of them have been directors of big multinational companies (Orange), they have other businesses which i believe they want to keep earning them money and finally they probably realise that a higher percentage of the bitcoin userbase compared to the general public might go after them personally if the money was not returned. (Based on the fact that the currency is underground and only recently surfacing to most people).

Besides this, if we assume they are dishonest then our money might as well be gone anyway. :/

2. Everybody who had money in instawallet now realises the error of their ways and will be using a paper wallet rolled up into a tube and inserted anally at all times.

Some of the people here have lost a fair bit of money and the I told you so's are a little annoying. I for one will invest a few bitcoins in awareness of this problem for newbies if i get my money back.

3. The hacker has some info

This is as far as i could go with this. I am not technically minded and can only guess from reading this thread the kind of data he could have. I have listed the possibilites from worst cast scenario to best.

• All 3.5 million URLS and public addresses in a list with balance attached to them in the list. - this would mean they have probably emptied all the big ones straight away
• All 3.5 million URLS and public addresses in a list with no balance attached. - this would mean having to search each address on the blockchain to find out what is on each one. Quite time consuming. 2 people doing that for 90 days, 14 hours a day, looking up 1 every ten seconds would be 907,200
• A portion of the URLS and public addresses, maybe gained from Google or Chrome as mentioned earlier in the thread - same as above but obviously some of us will not be affected
• All 3.5 million URLS but not the public address - this would mean that as soon as the website was closed they no longer had access to the site to search for bitcoins in the URLS they were holding
• A portion of the URLS but no public address - the same as above but again doesn't affect everyone

There may be more but that's all i could think of for now.

4. The hacker has already stolen something?

Now this i am not sure of. I feel that the wording of their agreement leads us to believe that some has gone but not all. If this is the case, when was it stolen? If it was only stolen in the last few days then maybe a date-stamped document in Time Machine (Mac recovery service) would be enough to prove that you have held the URLS for a while?

CONCLUSION

After all this we can conclude that if we claim back on an address and find that all large amounts are being double claimed we can be sure that the first option in section 3 is probably true.

If this is not the case then i think the chances of double claiming go down and we can hope to see our money again.

You never know, a 90 day force holding period might be a blessing in disguise.

What do you guys think?

Positivity is the key now I think.

Vlad, you are right. It's our fault. (I was in the process of sorting out the armory on Friday). Give me a break though mate, still smarting here.

Lets assume the hacker has all the urls. I assume he will argue any large balances with the rightful owner. What if their was documented proof of owning the URL for a while. I assume the hacker has only has access in the last few weeks.  

What do you think?

Well an update at last

Here is my issue

Lets assume the worst that its an inside job. Maybe the team do not have access to the individual urls.

By making us give them to them we are effectively handing over our bitcoins.

By making it a first come first serves it makes you want to give it to them straight away. Just saying.

What do you think?

Which I am still hoping is not the case.

I imagine in a situation like this some element of media silence is needed. Especially if you don't want to say something that might turn out to be wrong later.

Lets just hope he is as decent as he has seemed before.

Is his real identity known?

I also had funds on the way out. It had happened before that it would take 24 hours so I wasn't worried.

We shall see. Fingers crossed and good luck mate.

How do you think they can profit from it?

A lot more than that.

Didnt realise how unsafe they were and i just started to realise before Easter that i needed to do something about it.

Started a thread to get some advice about the armory and setting it up, even bought an offline asus on friday ready to get it sorted this week.

Oh well....let's see. 

Cheers mate. Hope you're not in as much as me.

The stalling thing is an option I suppose I just feel that as the owners are known there will be a lot of people ready to kick off if it has gone.

No idea. I switch from positive to negative feelings nonstop. Driving me crazy. :/

One thing for sure though. If it turns out all right I am taking some profits and flying to a beach for a holiday. (Not before I finally get armory working though )

So you think if I have used only Firefox in safe mode then it should be all good?

I feel it is definitely intentional to not mention instawallet, the webpage is still the same too whereas the bit coin-central/paytunia page has been updated.

However, if 42,000ish BTC was moved from their cold storage and is now "under their exclusive control" then surely they must not have lost everything. Maybe it is like some people have said, a problem with google that left some wallets searchable?

One thing that is really pecking my head though is the fact that there has been no update and Davout has disappeared too. This seems a bit suss.

Finally, can anyone with some technical knowhow please set me straight on the problem below. Surely if the money was sent from pone address to another 48 hours before this debacle then it has to be safe? If so, why hasnt it shown up in my wallet?

I just want whatever was in the wallets.

bitcoin-central.net has updated its message

Still no mention of instawallet 

Can anyone help with this?

The waiting is killing me