I don't think that is enough in and of itself.  I've collected certain information and will be publishing it in the interim and attempting to obtain more.  I also intend to make at least a feeble attempt to present it to the authorities who may be investigating this crime.

If Paymium has nothing to hide, they will not be harmed by my actions.  If they are decent human beings who care about the Bitcoin ecosystem beyond how they can leverage it's shortcomings for personal enrichment then they would actually support my and other people's efforts and even help to facilitate them.  I believe that I can honestly say that I would be doing just that were I in their situation.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who sees this as simple common sense, and also that it extends beyond my own culture.  The old 'golden rule' is, I think, almost universal because it is so obvious.  That is why this situation is so aggravating to me.

It cannot be said that Paymium would be expected to cop such an attitude if they were the perps either.  It makes no sense one way or another except that they are just ignorant pricks.

One way or another, the ONLY thing which argues that anyone will get anything in 90 days is simply the ~boussac says so.  That is hardly confidence inspiring to me, and I continue to maintain that taking no concrete action in the interim is irresponsible and negligent and will not help the ecosystem evolve to a more healthy state.

Interesting.  Thanks.  I was particularly curious about the nature of the content of the AG.  Like was it some sort of a battle scene, and if so, what sort?

It's not real important.  Just interesting to me is all.

I see nothing in his statements which is not pretty obvious.  It's relatively good analysis, but in a 'thinnest kid a fat camp' sort of a way...at least relative to the non-tech section of this forum.  I believe Assange to have been a long term and semi-active participant in the cypherpunks movement so his statements about that are particularly interesting to me.

I've long been of the opinion that there is not as much of a scarcity of carbon based fossil fuels as is often portrayed.  This 'scam' allows producers to jack prices up and gives excuses to engage in wars which also make some people very wealthy.

The chief problem we face is the capacity of our atmosphere to absorb the rapidly liberated carbon which has been sequestered over a period of millions or hundreds of millions of years.

Thanks you as always for the valuable information.  One last general question (or two):

 - Is it more obnoxious than helpful to use something like Google Translate to transform from English to French?

 - If I wrote extremely terse English statements, is an automated translator reasonably effective?

Thanks,

 - Tom

edit: fix quotes  And re-arrange format while I'm here:

By the way, in the interest of being a little bit more constructive, let me just mention how I would have handled this situation if I were running Instawallet (and were completely innocent.)

Firstly, I would be ultra-sensitive about the appearance of any sort of impropriety given the nature and history of the services operating within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I would bend over backward to provide as much information as humanly possible.  The very nature of Instawallet means that communications need to happen in public.  It did not take a lot of insight to see that this would be the case in any situations (including hacks), and if I could not handle that I would not have acquired Instwallet, their user-base, and their funds in the first place.

I would have been giving at least daily updates on all of the steps being taken to resolve this crime, and in particular any and all official legal ones.

In situations where I could not give full information because of a risk that it would damage an investigation by providing the adversary with valuable insight were to high, I would state that there was such information and that I would be releasing it under certain stated conditions.

I would also proactively be providing a channel for individuals to feed information directly to investigators without my acting as a gateway in order to further build confidence among the victims.

I would also be proactively describing the technical aspects of how the service operated and by this time would be giving up some information about how the attacker managed to subvert it.  It's not like the service is ever going to come back on-line and I would be giving up IP or anything like that after all.

A certain segment of the community is capable of fairly accurately judging effort to instill 'confidence' and whether they are legitimate and it good will, or whether they are likely part of a 'con'.  I have found that if one simply tells the plain truth, it is nearly impossible to be caught in a lie and eventually an accurate picture emerges.  That is the best outcome for everyone.  Paymium has failed badly here in my opinion.

If I log on and my funds are not accessible, I call the bank.  If they are acting weird and evasive and I suspect them of fraud, you're damn straight I follow up with the investigators.

Is this not something of a no-brainier?

You saw it on Bitcoinity.org?  Can you describe the...what-do-they-call-it...'storyboard' of the animation?

One would expect that even in France being the victim of a criminal action would make one 'involved'.


This sentence is not parsing well for me.  Sorry.  But I thank you for your other input.

I greatly appreciate your input on this ~ghdp.  A couple of follow-up questions if I may:


Can a specialist be retained to file a police report for people who cannot or do not wish to do so in person?  If so, what is the formal name of the vocation(s) who could do such a thing?

Can a person with the correct qualifications gain information on the status of a police report (or whatever the thing which Paymium claims to have filed) on my behalf?  If so, what qualifications might be necessary?

Can individuals who have other information about an incident submit it for attachment to an ongoing investigation such as the one referenced by Paymium (or more correctly, by the person calling himself ~boussac on this forum)?  Again, what qualifications might one need to perform such an operation?

Thanks,

 - Tom

Just looked on e-bay and the purchases of today all went for North of $1600.  One at $1700.  This with the 'spot' price of $1400.  These are vastly higher spreads than I usually see on e-bay.  Looks like things are going to start to get...um...interesting.

edit:  'they' = 1oz Krugs

I can assure you that Paymium took me for a tiny fraction of my BTC.  I don't need someone to ram it all the way home before they annoy me however.  A difference between Americans and Frenchmen perhaps?

I never added any BTC to my Instawallet after the user-base and funds had been purchased by Paymium.  When I put the funds in, they were worth about $100, and I specifically decided to trust ~jav for a variety of reasons which I have yet to regret.  I was delinquent in removing all of the funds, and for that I take full responsibility.

I actually have someone else to thank for issuing a warning about Paymium being pricks not long before they folded.  At that time I move half of the BTC out and/or gave them away.  Not because of the supposed defect which struck me as a non-issue, but simply for reminding me to do something I'd been neglecting.

It is interesting to note that this 'hack' just happened to have happened at that time.  I have to wonder how common my experience was and how many others had started to draw down their net fiat values from Instwallet at about that time.  That is yet another observation which balances deeply on the 'Paymium are crooks' side of the scale when evaluating the hypothesis.

In complete fairness, let me mention one of the few things which argues that Paymium are NOT crooks:  If they had planned all along to stage a hack, they probably would have taken different steps in terms of how they embraced 'Instawallet' in conjunction with their other efforts in anticipation of certain legal eventualities.  That said, there is so much which is suspicious that the 'are crooks' hypothesis remains extremely strong to me.  Unfortunately the actions and behaviors that they have taken since the 'hack' have almost without exception lent strength to the 'are crooks' hypothesis.

If anyone bothers to read all of my posts on this topic, and especially the earlier ones, they will find that I was not of the mindset that Paymium were likely the perpetrators until some distance into this situation, and until significant failures on the part of our friend Monsewer Ballsack.

Any semi-competent engineer is going to have source code for a system under revision control of some sort.

Any site like Instwallet will have some for of templating such that specific information is generated while generic 'boilerplate' information that everyone sees is coded.

I wish to see the text that all visitors would see since ~davout's re-implementation.  And I wish to see how and when it changed through time and when.

Monsieur Boussac (or more accurately, whoever the real name behind this invented persona is):

You started this thread and give every indication of speaking directly on behalf of Paymium.  I expect that you will explicitly state that you are no longer interested in using this thread as a formal or informal channel of communications with your customer base if that is indeed the case.  So you may answer my question here or an official representative of Paymium may do it via a different channel in the future.

I would suggest that it would be a good communications policy and may rebuild a certain amount of trust within the Paymium (or former Paymium) user-base by simply answering the question fully and right here.  But you may be the judge of that.

So, I wish to see a full revision history of the boilerplate text displayed on the Instawallet front page since the time Paymium purchased the Instawallet service and user-base from the the original designer and maintainer.

A set of links to example pages would work just fine.  I would be very surprised if your organization lacked the technical proficiency or the several minutes it would take to comply with my request.

Thanks,

 - Tom

I'm betting on several things:  1) Absence of an outlet for demand via the paper markets, and observation of tightness in the physical markets will result in increased interest in physical PM's.  2)  The $400-ish baseline observed since the 80's bubble was a result of PM's not being a competitive asset relative to other forms of investment, and turmoil and uncertainty with instruments displaying counter-party risk will preclude such an environment for the foreseeable future.  Very possibly in a BIG way.

Time will tell.


I'm only half joking that I wish to see 1BTC/kg-Au.  The supply/demand functions favor valuations in that range by my seat-of-the-pants guestimations.  But I won't be holding out that long before starting my move.

People who are in the business of looking after someone else's funds had better get professional BEFORE entering the business, or do something else for a living.

I'm pretty careful with my funds and tend to look after them myself (using more care than most Bitcoin business seem to use, alarmingly enough) so this is the first time someone has robbed me directly for anything less more than a completely trivial sum.  I'm planning to 'deal with it' as effectively as I know how.

edit: fix

Couldn't happen to soon in my opinion.  To bad for the people who will realized in one big batch that the value is actually right around zero.

Some members of the community asked for some simple and completely reasonable information, and did so with the utmost tact, sensitivity, and professionalism.  Paymium (if Boussac is even a spokesmen which again nobody will confirm or deny) had their chance to do the right thing and they blew it.

Paymium deserved to bite the dust simply because of their res ipsa loquitur incompetence at security and customer relations even if they are not the perps of this crime.  I have never stated that they are because I simply do not know, but I have stated that it is a strong possibility that they are.  A lot of the behaviors would match perfectly.  I would totally welcome words or deeds which would argue against my thesis.  And would be very interested to find out how a charge of libel against me would play out in court...so go for it if you like, Mr. Ballsack.

As someone who has lost some BTC through Instawallet, and stands to lose vastly more as the Bitcoin network is sullied by criminal or incompetent service operators, it makes perfect sense that I would be involved here and zero sense that I wish either the Bitcoin solution or the handful of legitimate and competent operators any harm.  Weeding out the losers, however, is a very worthwhile endeavor in my opinion.

Simply producing this from the French section to the more appropriate thread on this forum is worth something to me, and I intend to make it worth ~naphto's time.

Now I am looking for anyone who is in a position to take that report to a police precinct and discover whether it is legitimate.  Extra-credit for information about how any investigation may be proceeding.  Extra-extra credit for making it known to the investigators that the behavior of 'Paymium' suggests that they very may be the perpetrators.

Secondly, it is my intent to file a report for loss of access to my modest funds.  I stated that unless everyone's funds were returned by 10 days ago (as I write this) I would be doing so, and I have every intention of doing exactly that.  I am still seeking a discussion about the best way for non-French victims to file a report.  Ideally a template and an address.

If Paymium does not do a rapid about-face and start convincing the community that they are working hard to unsure that the perpetrators of this crime are being vigorously perused, I continue to believe that a worthwhile fulcrum to apply pressure would be the mainstream bank which have been used significantly by Paymium in an effort to create confidence in their operations, and which have also already been tied to Paymium in general consumption media.

I am interested in all information gleaned being presented in a completely open manner to one of the more serious threads on this forum for discussion.  This is not always possible in real-time, but I will be working with my sources to ensure that it can be done when the time is most opportune.