If a customer losses access to their money it is accompanied by an explanation.  Unsophisticated users are pretty much always made whole and it happens in a timely manner.


It would be unlikely because there would be an investigation and punishment, so no.  This is not the case with Bitcoin.  It is trivially easy to steal money and I cannot think of a time when a theft has been officially investigated or prosecuted.  I am also unaware of anyone who has been punished in an extra-judicial manner over and above some name-calling on a forum.  Thus, the barrier to theft in the Bitcoin ecosystem is extremely weak and naturally it happens a lot.

On top of that, many people who were attracted to Bitcoin in the first place have a reason to wish to hide or obfuscate wealth, and that is likely due to prior instances of theft.  (Wagner, BFL, etc.)

Your statement seems to remind me again that you see some justification for the loss among your customers by virtue of not charging a fee.  I'm calling bullshit on this, and especially since it is not yet know how you acquired the funding from Jav.


It is hard to imagine you building a successful business with an attitude of "We didn't try to lose your money so it's cool." and "Trust what we informally write on a forum and shut up about it."

Thankfully it is possible in crypto-currency land to build a system which mostly precludes trivial thefts of the type that Instwallet users fell victim to.  I strongly suspect that the entities who develop along these lines will thrive and the 'trust us' dinosaurs will fail in offering a desirable solution.  You can join 'Tom Williams' and a host of other's who have ushered in an era where user's watch out for their own asses.

I think that the biggest problem our leadership (in the US) has with terrorism is that there is not enough for them to achieve their goals.  They practically have to strap dummy vests on borderline retard kids themselves in order to catch any 'terrorists' and get a good scare going among the plebs in these lean times.

A vastly bigger threat of harm to me is corruption and mis-management of my tax dollars, and that is where surveillance is of genuine value.  Here's the policy I would put in place if I had my way:

 - Anyone who wishes to work in the government at a management or higher level submits to surveillance.  Those who don't wish to submit are free to resign.  They will receive full pensions as promised...unless 'austerity' intervenes...

 - The records accumulated since the spying went into place are preened of all but government official's data and one degree of linkage.

 - The entire ball of wax is open-sourced for analysis by interested taxpayers.

I would also not only fully pardon Manning and Snowden and the rest of the whistleblowers but ask them to become high ranking officials in an honest and honorable government.

I hope people do.  Bitcoin is fairly unsatisfactory as an exchange currency and attempting to use it in that manner will probably result in a collapse, or at least in an evolution which quickly removes it from the category of valuable solution.  Employing it as a low velocity high powered wealth representation solution is probably it's best hope for sustainability and competitiveness against other solutions.

OTOH, it is possible to do much better than Bitcoin when targeting any number of needed niches so it could be a good thing if it 'burns out' trying to support 'skittles and goat cheese' transactions the world over.  It is largely simple greed on my part to hope for Bitcoin to eventually do another leg-up trick since I happen to hold a lot of them.

Sorry to follow up on my own post, but some people may find it interesting.  So, while we wait...


I +100 to that, BTW.


I actually consider the handling to be evidence of non-wrongdoing on the part of Bitcoin Central.  Here's why:

This things started out by 'thefounder' proposing a (fairly meaningless) weakness in Instawallet.  It was, however, sufficient to get me to finally take action to draw down some of my balance which I'd been meaning to do for a while and had not gotten around to.  I suspect that others had a similar reaction.

The theft happened very shortly thereafter.  Bitcoin-Central displayed the kind of confusion in their various responses that I would have expected from a non-perp.

The lock-down of their various services and correspondence about things around this time are also what I would have expected from a small organization who was struggling to understand the scope of the failure.

Most critically, the timing of planing and code development necessary to implement a reconciliation were also exactly what I would expect in an innocent scenario.  Were this theft a carefully planned operation, I doubt that Davout/Boussac would have had the foresight to match their operations to the observations I've made, but it is certainly possible.

In the days ahead we will find out how interested Bitcoin-Central is in providing more transparency and hopefully what actions they have taken to resolve and prosecute this crime.  If any.

Not worried about it at all.  It was a totally conscious and calculated decision to shoot for a much higher target.  If we would have gotten to around $600/BTC on the run-up I would have started the next phase.  We didn't.  On this last cycle.

I consider the 'higher target' a long-shot and will not be surprised at all if it never happens or if I miss the boat for some reason should it occur.  But I also considered 10x to be a long-shot and always anticipated the probability of a total loss.  I currently feel that the probability of hitting the second target is higher than I suspected hitting the first one was almost two years ago.

Awesome!  I was pretty much at the point of believing that my fellow Americans are to fucking stupid to deserve anything but a totalitarian police state, and a fair number of them would probably feel most comfortable in that setting anyway.  These students give me some hope.

Like I've said before (and before Snowden) the only silver lining on this amazing surveillance framework is that it will be sweeping up evidence of people who actually HAVE things worth hiding, and a lot of them are currently in the seats of power.  So this trove of data is the best hope to see them swinging from meat-hooks (figuratively) at some point in the future.  But only if we can get people like these students in the drivers seat.  And I expect that THAT is exactly why it is so important to Obama, Cheney, etc, that the police state framework they are building works effectively.

---

Here's a prediction.  I predict that 'because Snowden spilled the beans', 'terrorists have changed their ways' and it is necessary to eliminate from the network crypto which is not back-door'd for the safety of Americans.  (If/when this happens it will change aspects of how/if Bitcoin operates significantly BTW.)  My extra level of paranoia and reason to be extra careful about accepting as fact certain things around the Snowden affair probably stems from a several years old story involving security contractors and Greenwald by name.  e.g.:

  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/22340513034/leaked-hbgary-documents-show-plan-to-spread-wikileaks-propaganda-bofa-attack-glenn-greenwald.shtml

It is interesting to note that where initially a majority supported Snowden's whistle-blowing, that has shifted after the mainstream media has had a chance to chew on the general public a bit.  The fat middle is now accepting that the surveillance is necessary to fight terrorism and Snowden should not have given away 'our' secrets.  So they will also probably accept that steps to keep terrorists from making and end-run around the system are also necessary.  Only about 5% of people are aware of what cryptography actually is anyway, and only about 15% even have the native intellect to do so if they tried.  My estimates.

Not totally clear.  By my ball-park estimations, I'll have to wait several quarters to start.  Then the fun may last only as long as it did last time.  That is, for the duration of the meat of the bubble.

As for the top, I'm still hoping for another leg up in a few years, or any time there is a significant financial calamity in mainstream-land which could easily happen before that.  If we are so lucky then gold will again be badly beaten...at least in the minds of those who take a simplistic view of investment/speculation strategies.

I only consider myself a 'trader' because I've shifted to the frequency domain.  In the time domain I would have to claim to have lost a huge amount of money (by my standards) by virtue of not cashing out a bunch during the big run-up.  I mean, the difference between buying and not selling is minimal.

In the frequency domain (buying low, selling high) I'm sitting pretty, but when one converts back to the time domain, one finds that years have passed.  Boring.  But I'd rather be bored than broke, and I always planned on spending many years with Bitcoin...if it lasts that long that is.

Well...um...some people might assume it.  I mean that's kind of how banks work after all.

I appreciate your +100, but do need to voice my opinion about how the timing of the supposed reconciliation was handled.  My opinion is that in this respect Bitcoin-Central did a reasonably good job.  If Boussac and company are innocent of wrongdoing, the theft was an unfortunate event and it could be expected that all participants take a share of the inconvenience if not the cost.  For my part I was always keenly aware of the risks I was taking by having funds in Instawallet and have no complaints about shouldering some of the inconvenience.  One quarter seems appropriate to allow semi-interested users and (supposedly) law enforcement to analyze and take various actions.

One of the many hypothesis that remains completely open (thanks to Boussac's neglect) is that this was an inside job.  A key to games like this is to leave oneself various options to account for future unknowns.  It could have gone something like this:

 - BTC values rise and Bitcoin-Central decides to 'go'.  They arrange a theft and cash out which, owning several related properties in the exchange space, they are relatively well positioned to arrange.  It is known that Bitcoin-Central took some action to obtain the funds (including 'mine') from Jav, but unknown whether a plan of absconding with them at some point was ever part of the reason why.

 - If in three months BTC values are way up, they fold as insolvent.

 - If in three months BTC values are down, they buy in to make everyone whole, then keep the excess.

If there is a legitimate investigation with the power to subpoena and audit Bitcoin-Centrals records such a thing can easily be determined.  If there is not, and if one never emerges (and if the crime remains otherwise unexplained) then there will always be a question about whether this is what happened.

Again, because Boussac or anyone else says something on an e-mail or a forum is simply useless in understanding the reality of this event.  Analysis of what someone said can uncover a lot.  That is why smart perps say as little as possible, and why I personally am very suspicious when people avoid transparency.

That is an absurd statement.  Anyone who has observed the Bitcoin ecosystem and has some analytic abilities will need to presume as the automatic strongest hypothesis that a theft such as this was an inside job.  It is from that point that one begins to acquire evidence which corroborates or knocks out the various hypotheses.  You were remiss in providing almost any verifiable information and because many of us were directly harmed, we deserved to have it.  You just typing some words has almost zero value in analysis such as this and you known this.  Or you should.

As to the absurdity of the '4' statement, only a minority of those active in the ecosystem and almost certainly a minority of those who suffered from a loss related to Instawallet are active on this forum.  Additionally, a natural reaction in dealing with an entity which has power over one is to assume a position of subservience and even actively support the entity which victimizes them in hopes of garnering special treatment.  BFL can attest to this.  Relatedly, so can the French government vis-a-vis Morales/Snowden affair to use a recent example.  In short, most individuals and governments are weak and pathetic...and most scammers and super-powers understand this principle and exploit it fully.



WTF?  You never claimed to be able to pay everyone off for the money you lost, or if you did I didn't see it.  It's pretty weasely to claim that you remain solvent under a scenerio where you pass the losses off to a fraction of the largest accounts.  Just because the modern banking system does so does not make it right.

That reminds me of yet another aspect of your incompetence.  If large accounts were going to cause you grief in the face of a successful system level attack (and the likelihood of such an attack seems one of our rare points of agreement) then you were remiss in capping account sizes.  How remiss I am not certain because you have so far failed to produce the state of the text that you presented to Instwallet users.

My only 'suffering' will be if I take the lazy/easy way out and drop this thing.  I will know I should have done better.  Whether I fail here probably will be only due in a minor way to whether you pay me the 20-ish BTC you lost on my behalf and more to do with external priorities and interests.

I did.  Many times from mid 2011 to the bottom.  I was slashed up pretty good.  It theorized that all that grabbing would eventually have me buying at the bottom so I kept some power dry throughout and even had one last batch queued up but never deployed.  I always gave some odds that it would be one of the better financial moves of my lifetime and so far that looks on track to be the case.  At this point I'm just waiting for the next 'bubble' to start to genuinely capitalize though I did make myself whole fiat-wise at about 10x.  I've engineered things pretty well to never need to 'panic', but being netted to zero give extra psychological comfort to wait however many years it takes to find a good selling point, or even stand by in a complete failure of Bitcoin if that should occur.

I've not seen much from him for some time, though he and I were both members of the same group buy to obtain an ASIC not long ago.  I think he only bought one, but I don't remember for sure.  The prices were absurd.  I've not even bothered to fire mine up yet.

I used to harass you regularly by going back 365 days because I knew BTC would look bad for a while by this metric.  It will be interesting to find out if I'll be able to pull that stunt again.

Rightly so.  Anyone who would do such a thing to themselves had, at one time, some significant mental issues which manifested themselves in an identity crisis of one sort or another, and God knows what else.  These kinds of issues might recede but one has to suspect that they will crop up again from time to time.

Lots of people, and especially people who have it together enough to have the resource to support an employee, are going to find it weird that someone in a modern culture would maim themselves.  I don't assume that someone who does weird shit to their bodies is necessarily a bad or unreliable person, but if there are options, why take the chance?

I agree that it is unrealistic to expect with high probability to thwart a system attack undertaken by capable adversaries.  But you guys should have been aware of this from the get-go.  If/when the mechanics of the attack are made known to me I'll refine my judgement about this aspect of things.

My chief complaints of incompetence are several:

 - Your handling of this situation what sufficiently weak to turn at least a number of your customers from tentative supports into vicious adversaries.  And I believe that certain of us were unusually rational and patient for a surprising amount of time.

 - If you lost enough money to call into question your solvency or ability to re-pay the losses, your funds management and surveillance strategies were not up to the task.

There are a lot of details about this event, and about Bitcoin-Central's aquisition of the Instawallet funds, and about Bitcoin-Central's operations which are not currently known either in public or to me personally.  For my part I decided that it was not worth my time or money to pursue answers to some of these questions until seeing if/how the reconciliation progressed.  Your implementation of the recovery strategy as published seems coherent and reasonably well thought out to me.

Can't hurt.

May I suggest something like:

  "♠ Minecraft BitVegas Casino ♠ ♠ Drinking Games | Parkour | Casino Games | Free BTC every 15 minutes ♠"

I've a bit more respect for Zang-Bing after this post.  The only substantive difference I have with this is that I consider BTC to be the speculative play of the century, gold to be the long-term one, and silver to the the SHTF insurance policy.  For diversity and diversion I employ putter around with property of various types.

I think ~blitz is making a point that anyone can post any bullshit they want on this forum and probably 75% of the readers will just accept it since it is easier than actually looking for themselves.  Of course it's also completely pointless to do so here.

Continuing the India thing, I not with amusement that when Snowden's information indicated that the Indian embassy had been bugged, one of their ministers issued a statement that it was OK, we (the US) were only gathering 'metadata', and that we (the US) had stopped a lot of terrorism.  The Indian's certainly know their place in the modern world.  And their place is certainly not to be accumulating gold and causing problems for their Western overlords.

So says Sprott.  The salient point is that the Indian govt is fucking their own people under the direction of the Western financial interests.  Or at least so goes the conspiracy theory.

The massive silver accumulation is evidence of this hypothesis insofar as it speaks of a substitution effect.  Especially notable also as to the best of my knowledge, Indians have never had much interest in silver.

And was in the US, was one which boussac traveled, and was subsequent to the loss.

The 2013 one in San Jose, CA.  Sorry to have left my comments in a state which required so my detective work to unwind.  Boussac presented at the conference ('Future of Payments' or some BS was the formal name IIRC), but I am less interested in the business stuff and didn't see any of his presentations.