I got to thinking about this a little more.

I've been in a number of environments where I was around people from all over the country and all over the world.  I believe that I do sense an observable difference, as a statistical trend, between people from the Pacific Northwest and other areas.  We do seem a little bit more willing to form our own opinions about things and speak our minds.  Wayne Morse voting against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was a classic example of this.

One thing may have to do with education.  While it is a single observation, my mother had a high school teacher in the late 50's or early 60's who made the students read a variety of media from different sources.  Then the class would discuss the origin of the media and the messages contained within the articles and analyze things from that perspective.  This quality of analysis was probably not typical even for Oregon standards of the time, but it strikes me as reminiscent of the analytic style of a lot of my older and more intellectual friends in the area.

We are also a young part of a young country.  A fair number of my recent ancestors can be traced back to having come here from both Europe and other parts of the country within recent memory, and at a time when it was a pretty raw area.  It is said that settling populations exhibit a noticeable amount of vigor, and it make perfect sense.  It is also said that regression to the mean dampens this within a few generations.  We may have a little more of that left than average.  I dunno.

Lastly, I know a fair number of people who have moved out here within their lifetimes and they exhibit the same sorts of mentalities.  I attribute it to the fact that they are happy to be among others who are of a similar attitude and it may have something to do with their choosing to move here in the first place.

It should be abundantly clear that no reference to any investigation is forthcoming from Paytunia.  Occam's razor strongly suggests that this is because there is none.  That would make sense if Paytunia has staged this 'theft'.

Since it is unlikely that there is an investigation, and Boussac clearly stated that one does exist, it follows that he is a bald-faced liar.

We have discovered that 'Boussac' is a fake identity that this individual has created.  Also that 'Paytunia' is a tangle of relationships none of which seem to lead to anything more than some private apartment addresses.

My sense is that it would be a minor miracle if anyone gets anything back at the end of the 90 day period.  90 days would, however, be a reasonable amount of time for a fraction of the victims to forget about things, lose data, and for various trails to go cold.

Some people have suggested to me that a PI is an appropriate person to hire, and that certain monitoring regimes on individuals and businesses are possible.  I was never sure if such a thing as Private Investigator even existed outside of TV shows.  I really have no interest in taking things this far and I'm not interested in footing the bill or entangling myself with such things.  I am, after all, not out more than the modest amount that I budgeted to potentially lose in this theft.

I am, however, quite interested in making sure that a coherent set of documentation is formally presented to the French legal system such that they can choose whether to pursue this crime, and if they do, that they have material to work with.

I have yet to find an appropriate person with a good grasp of the French legal system to retain in an advisory role so I again would request that anyone who has such leads please ping me.

Thanks,

 - Tom

Some of the 'exports' from our state that I'm most proud of include

 - Wayne Morse
 - Ron Wyden
 - Jeff Merkley
 - Peter Defazio

Cannot say I agree with all of them 100% and they are policians after all, but they are a cut above much of the rest of the slime in Washington and out in front on a number of the most critical questions of the day.  Including specifically questioning the morphing of our nation into a fascist kleptocracy and police state.

Batten down the hatches...this thing is likely to get ugly...

Nah.  We know ~chodpaba isn't stupid, and certainly not that stupid.

If it is not trivial I would not waste a lot of time on that until the investigations and general fallout from the Instawallet theft are better understood.  In fact, it is very possible that these guys are crooks who staged the Instawallet theft, and if so, are likely to do likewise to the other operations they run.  In that case, give them extra visibility on a respected platform like bitcoinity.org may be a dis-service to the community.

It would be foolish in the extreme to wait 90 days to see if these guys cough up any Bitcoin at all, much less the amount stolen, before verifying (or provoking) a legal investigations of this crime.

I've not yet gotten any actionable leads via my solicitation for legal services on the marketplace of this forum so I guess the Bitcoin economy and ecosystem as some room to grow.  I'll be tied up until the middle of next week, but intend to continue activity along these lines when I am free.

I would appreciate it if anyone who may have collected information which might be of use to investigators would keep ahold of it.

One more thing:  If any of the principles of 'Paymium' had any integrity, they would be in full support of the actions of those of us who wish to see this crime investigated.  That they have shown no such sign of any interest along these lines, and have been evasive is, to me, a pretty strong indication that they have no intent on doing anything more for their 'customers' than is required to minimize the impact upon themselves.  And very possibly to maximize profits resulting from this crime.

Thanks,

 - Tom

Need to watch this thread, and it is more convenient to me to do so via 'reply' vs. via 'watchlist'.

I've only casually picked up some (possibly mis-)understanding over the years, but:

1)  I believe that much of the infrastructure that Mt. Gox uses runs under Tiabans which Krapeles had going before he bought Mt. Gox, and much of it is co-located in the US.   Including the forum upon which I am tapping out this note just now.

2)  For all intents and purposes, Japan is a vassal of the US.  If we say jump (or 're-start those fucking nuclear reactors'), the Japanese's only acceptable response is 'how high?'

3)  Mt. Gox operates completely at the pleasure of Proxais...at least when the going gets tough.  And they, like many other critical infrastructure companies, will dance to the tune that the US government calls.

4)  Sufficiently motivated (usually be graft) the US has no trouble bringing huge swaths of the Internet to a full stop.  As Kim Dotcom about how that works.

Sorry for the multiple SIC in names.  I am to lazy to look things up right now.

I probably sent some or all of the BTC I had in Instawallet from an ancient bitcoind built from head in late 2011.  I shut the client down at that time and have been using Instawallet since.  I've still got it, but I have to figure out if it will sign messages and if so, how to do it.

I'm going to use the full 90 days to make a claim so that I have a personal reason to push things in the direction I believe is healthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem.  I've stated before and I'll state again that I'm not sufficiently satisfied until the large wallet holders receive ALL of their funds.  If this was not made technically possible by next Monday, or if 'glitches' pop up which I find not adequately explained, my intention is to take this thing to the next phase.

The next phase is to make certain that the legal authorities in France are appraised of a theft of value and loss by users.  Again, if the authorities choose not to pursue things, that is their business and is for the voters in France to work out.

I 'lost' a few 100 large over the past few days, or more accurately, failed to capitalize.  I worked all day moving some logs (of the dead tree variety) and I don't believe I thought about it even once for the whole 6 hours.

The reason for my relaxed attitude about it is exactly because at this point I am pretty much in it for the money and nothing much else.  Had I really cared about Bitcoin specifically I might be more upset.  Actually, I might have been somewhat happy since I can see ways in which the behavior may ultimately be helpful.  I myself missed the first blip but made good use of the trough between and I could see more people doing such a thing today simply because more people know of the solution.

It was not always the case that I lacked hope for Bitcoin.  I was pretty excited about it as a 'revolutionary' thing although I always had some nagging reservations.  At this point I believe that Bitcoin has fulfilled it's most useful purpose.  That is, to demonstrate the viability, in concept and practice, of user-controlled crypto accounting systems.  If Bitcoin fails it is almost certain that others will crop up to take it's place.

Even more than that, one of the most fascinating 'features' to me about Bitcoin is that it actually can fail.  Gold cannot.  Gold will rip apart nations and societies but never fail.  Bitcoin, on the other hand, can be democratically replaced if there is sufficient reason to do so.  If the 'owners and managers' of the solution fail sufficiently it is possible, in my theory, that a much less bloody re-boot can transpire than has been the case in the past.

So, even if my 'losses' go through their terminal doubling from what we I've seen over the past double-digit hours, there is still the opportunity to find out if my theories about the families of solutions are sound in practice.  I'd rather not pay $0.5M for the experiment, but would be no worse off than I was several years ago...and I had no complaints back then.  I've always considered my 'investment' in Bitcoin to be highly speculative and likely to yeild a 100% loss.  Unfortunately this means that you (the OP) are unlikely to get rid of me completely.

edit: minor syntax.  edit2: the day before I move logs of the digital variety.

Was this what maria2 was talking about?  Was it a lucky guess?  Was it an obvious guess?  Will the truth every be known?

Well I'll be darned...an antiwar.com person.  I've probably used that site more than almost any other since the 2002 timeframe although I don't do it much these days.  Once a week or two when I've exhausted other higher priorities.

antiwar.com is, to me, a jewel in the otherwise highly disappointing world of Libertarianism.  I just looked to see if they took donations in Bitcoin.  Sadly...and oddly...it does not seem so.

BTW, I made a post in 'meta' to discover what access ~davout has or had.  Particularly whether he could read my PM's.  ~badbear says no.

Whether it happened or not, it would be inconceivable that such a conjecture would not pop up and make it's way around.  Along with all manner of others.

Certainly such a thing strikes me as worthy of 'hypotheisis' status.  Going forward we just see how future facts stack up against this and other hypotheses which remain viable.

  edit: fix statement slightly.

Ya.  If you don't turn 5-figures US over in a day, you are probably nothing more than a nuisance.  6-figures might get you some support and it may be enough to get some access to the dark pool action.  For now.

It would be delightful to me if PMs dropped a bunch (and there was physical availability) because I would rather take whatever profits I'm going to take out of Bitcoin straight into PMs rather than go through fiat.  And I don't like sitting on fiat.  Even better would be if a lot of private individuals got all worked up about Bitcoin so I could find willing trading partners for PMs and other things.

I find it hard to believe that after this much time, after all of the money that Mt. Gox has made, after the availability of high performance hardware and software, etc, they cannot have come up with a decent matching engine implementation.  An alternate explanation is that they wish to have poor performance at times, but that's pretty outrageous and doesn't make much sense.  So, I guess there must be things I'm not thinking of.

---

On a different topic, another thought I had was that when I was trading, I usually either put in bids a long way away from the market or just made my purchase.  It was not worth it to me to try to chase the price for a fraction of a percent.  Might as well just go ahead and make the purchase.  If I'd finished my buy-bot before I had my fill of Bitcoin it might have been a little different but not much.

So, I wonder how the near-walls get filled to such a high level and move so quickly to stay near the price.

Then I thought, gee, if I were going to manipulate things and risk a large stock of coins by selling, I could reduce the risk by simply selling them to myself.  Of course I also want the BTC of whatever geeks I got involved in the stampede.  So putting quite a few bids in over some period of time would be the way to go.

I don't trade much or participate in any market manipulation, so maybe this is a big 'no shit' to the veterans?

My google-fu is weak, but it was pretty easy to see that he calls himself Andre, and some of his work is here

  http://www.e-ducat.fr/author/admin/

Also, about a month ago he took enough of an interest in travel to have set up this:

  http://bitcoin.travel/author/boussac/

Everyone needs a vacation now and then I suppose...

I liked Instwallet very much for it's URL only usability.  My philosophy in using it was for spending money only.  I always knew that a whole range of possible issues existed, and am not complaining bitterly about my loss.  I am pursuing the failure vigorously, but for different reasons.

My feeling about URL access is that a whole range of issues from a different but overlapping set exist with other solutions also.  Losing one's password is high among these.  I see no reason why it could not be reasonably secure and well managed on the back end.  The 'killer app' for me was not needing to provide an e-mail addy, SMS, etc, and the lack of a password made that smooth.

---

Here are the things I would look for:

 - A team which is well known and respected (this failed in the case of ~davout though.)

 - A good description of the back-end to architecture.  Opens-source if possible.  I think the pro's outweigh the con's, but it is debatable.

 - A good understanding of the funding.  Limited hot-wallet with occasional funds exhaustion is preferable to insolvency on failure.  Fees going into an auditable pool to be re-distributed absent failure would lend some credibility.  Or even let the user select thier preference on limits.

 - A documented recovery plan in case of failure.

 - A 'lock out' URL which, if visited, would lock the account.

 - A 'recovery token' which could be used to unlock a locked account or prove ownership of a URL

 - A 'maximum exceeded warning' mechanism whereby a user could be reminded that the service is for limited funds.

 - I've already forgotten some of the stuff I thought of.

I'll use your service without any of this stuff for minor spending, temporary funds shuffling, and new user demonstration purposes.  As always, with the anticipation that you guys could rip me off at any time.  Also with the full knowledge that you could be logging my IP's, transactions, etc.  Just as was the case with Instawallet.