[EDIT]

My contact details in the bitcointalk.org whois record went public a couple weeks ago, as I moved the domain to my Finnish ISP. Last week I got a cease-and-desist letter from a Finnish law firm hired by the forex company First National Innovation Brokers (http://www.firstnationalib.com/). They demanded removal of this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51820.0. They have no real legal case and I'm not even a forum / server admin of Bitcointalk anymore, so I'm not going to react to that.

However, FNIB has been spamming false scam accusations all around the Internet to mess up my Google results (check out "martti malmi"). They've been posting inter-linked BS articles to forums, various complaint sites and their fake news site hpub.org. For example:

I got scammed for 22.440 euros by SC5. My key contact and team lead was Martti Malmi and the job was to produce a commerce site in HTML5.  So they asked for a deposit to start the work.  Then I noticed, after the first update, the very poor quality of their work and I started expressing my deep concerns. Then they stopped answering my calls.  I got strange email answers that seemed to be in Indian style english.

After 3 weeks I found the truth; my Project was being handled in Bangalore, India, by programmers making on average US$12/hour. ( I investigated and spoke with several firms about this)  I was in shock.  I complained to Mr. Malmi but he said that the terms and conditions did not specify that SC5 could not outsource. This is a total misrepresentation of our contract and I feel absolutely betrayed.  They say they will refund part of my money but not the part already spent. I can not beleive this fraud.  Next stop is the Finnish courts.

Which is of course completely made up, I haven't even worked with foreign customers at my current job (the "customer" claimed to be from Nebraska). I'm surprised by the amount of effort they put into this. The motive is probably emotional, because profit-wise they're just wasting their time.

FNIB has been "defending" their own reputation and smearing Mitchell Bourne (worldly) among others, with similar SEO tactics on the same forums.

I'm not sure as to what extent FNIB is a scam business, but it sure seems scammy as hell. It's incorporated in New Zealand (http://www.business.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/3473593/detail) and directed by Stuart Poppleton from Wakefield, UK. Can't tell if Mr. Poppleton is the actual person running the business, as 100% of the shares are owned by a Hong Kong company (http://en.hkcomp.info/hongkong/cps.jsp?key=1634921-a797a24a). FNIB is also behind the obscure Swiftcoin "alternative cryptocurrency":

http://www.swiftcointalk.org/ - Funny Bitcointalk clone. Off-topic section description: "Other topics that might be of interest to bitcoiners". Oops.
http://www.firstnationalbnak.com/ - "MtGox of Swiftcoin"
http://www.oswift.com/ - eBay of Swiftcoin, apparently
http://www.fxboss.info/ - Tips on getting rich quick

They had photoshopped office pics on their site:

Oh God, how did this get here? I am not good with computers....

Regus.com Virtual Office Space Auckland Chancery


FNIB Promotional Picture

I guess everyone can decide for themselves if they want to trust their money to a company like First National Innovation Brokers.

EDIT: History of Changes at http://www.business.govt.nz/fsp/app/ui/fsp/version/searchSummaryCompanyFSP/FSP154824/6.do:

Initiate De-Registration
01/02/2013 11:57:10

Time to move on to the next scheme, it seems.

Auctioning eurobtc.com. Starting price 1 BTC. Make an offer in this thread or in a private message.

[1. Data model1.1 Identifier]

Here's my idea in a nutshell: A distributed network that models identity and reputation as a graph, where different kinds of user identifiers are nodes and user-created relations are links between them. The relations can be evaluated with various algorithms and criteria, such as social network based web of trust to make it sybil-proof.

The network allows users to check the reputation and other connections of a previously unknown identity. For example, you could decide to borrow 20 bucks to a stranger in a pub after finding out he's your 3rd degree connection on FB and has mostly positive ratings. Or you could write reviews of policemen, teachers, judges or other public servants with whom you can't choose not to interact.

Reputation that is instantly visible to everyone is a big incentive to not be a butthead. Maybe even bigger than threat of imprisonment, and definitely more cost-efficient and p2p.



1. Data model
1.1 Identifier
Unique or non-unique identifier of a user. Examples:

• Name
• Phone number
• Email address
• GPG key
• Facebook username
• Date of birth
• Photograph

Fields: type, value.

1.2 Relation
A link between two or more identifiers. Relations are GPG-signed by their creator. Examples:

• ID1 says: "I traded with ID2 and it went smoothly"
• ID1 says: ID2, ID3 and ID4 belong to the same owner
• ID1 says: ID2 and ID3 are Friends on Facebook
• ID1 borrowed $100 to ID2 (signed by both parties)

Fields: Type, value, timestamp, target IDs, signatures.

2. Distributed data storage and index
This is more of an open question and I'm asking for your ideas on it. The network must be resistant to censorship and political pressure. In addition to storing the static identifiers and relations, for searching we need a dynamic inverted index that links identifiers to the relations they're involved in.

Freenet would be a solution for the static part but it doesn't solve the indexing problem. Distributed indexing could be done with a distributed hash table structure, for which there are existing libraries like Kademlia. Bootstrapping would be easier if we could use an existing indexing network like YaCy, but it doesn't support Freenet atm.

3. Use case
Web site where users can rate their experience with public servants.

1. Alice logs on to the site with her FB account
2. The site creates an ID with type "user@facebook.com" and Alice's username as value.
3. Alice writes a review of Bob the policeman.
4. Alice adds Bob's full name, phone number, email and FB username to the review.
5. The site creates a relation that connects Alice's ID with all the Bob's IDs she entered. The relation content is Alice's review and it's signed with the site's GPG key (because the site verifed Alice's FB identity).
6. The newly created relation is published to the network.

Now the review can be found by any of the Bob's IDs entered by Alice. Changes or additions to Bob's details can be added later with new relations. Bob could write a reply to the review and sign it with his WoT-verified GPG key, for instance.



Ideas and suggestions welcome!

[EDIT 23.4.2012:]

Sirius is back in the business. I'm opening EuroBTC.com, a site for buying and selling bitcoins for euros in the mail. Before officially opening the service, I'd like to invite all Bitcointalk users to try it out so I can see how it goes. So feel free to buy or sell.

https://eurobtc.com
username: test
password: user

Any questions or suggestions are welcome.

EDIT 23.4.2012: I'm temporarily closing the site. All orders made so far will be processed.

I'm offering a 1000 BTC bounty for getting a major business to accept Bitcoins as payment. Conditions:

• The business should have at least tens of thousands of customers and a revenue of at least 50 -100 million USD.
• The business must accept Bitcoins as payment for the most of their services.
• The business must provide a reasonably convenient way to pay with Bitcoins. If it's an internet business, they should process the Bitcoin payments automatically.
• The bounty recipient(s) must prove that they convinced the business to start accepting Bitcoins. Contact Sirius by a PM or IRC when the business has shown interest in accepting Bitcoins.
• The bounty will be paid when the business has accepted Bitcoins as payment for 3 months. If they accept Bitcoins for less than 3 months but at least 3 weeks, the bounty will be 200 BTC.
• The bounty expires on 31.12.2011. The business must make the decision to try out Bitcoins before that.
• These terms are subject to change.

Ask me if you're unsure if your business qualifies. Feel free to contribute to the bounty amount.

Suggestion: Try to get a poker site to accept BTC

[250 BTC]

Exchange owners, here's your chance to be the first Google result for "bitcoin exchange"

Auction starting price 100 BTC. Auction closes when it seems that nobody is offering more. I'll announce all bids here, you can send a PM if you don't want to post. Minimum raise 5 BTC.

Highest bid so far: 250 BTC

Sold for 250 BTC.

The policy to not remove anything worked when the forum was small. Now that we have thousands of posts a day, we can't afford 50% of them being junk. The moderators are now instructed to be less tolerant of low-value posts.

Some guidelines:

1. Free speech - you can say anything as long as it is relevant and presented in a calm and polite manner. Swearing, SHOUTING etc. make your post more likely to be removed.
2. No zero value posts or threads, like "SELL SELL SELL"
3. No pointless or uninteresting threads.
4. No referral code spam
5. No NSFW content

What do you think about adding wallet server functionality to the Bitcoin software? It would help establish a wallet protocol standard and make it easy for anyone to start a wallet server. People could then use their mobile and other lightweight clients to manage their account on any server. I believe the average user would rather use a 3rd party wallet service than download and store the block chain and worry about backups. Just like most people don't want to run their own email server, but the paranoid guy still has the option to do so.

We already have support for separate accounts, they just lack authentication. Another useful and user-friendly feature would be the user@domain.com address scheme proposed by Genjix.

TL;DR Bitcoin should have clients and servers like the email protocol.

While removing spammers, I accidentally clicked delete on a wrong row of users. Deleted accounts:

7594    ­­Atlas
6090    ­Satoshi
2993    !0suspectedof
707    .-_-.    .-_-.
4149    [Tycho]
447    0x0
7222    0x1
2817    0x6763
23    1 currency now
2970    1337.Gh0sT
3077    13fpigil
5785    1564649846846
867    168virak
518    17ujzChRb6VPQGyANVyktc1du
881    1kewlchicu2   
4424    1Pogo1
7245    200901001007
5309    200901001023
6296    200901001036
6259    200901001042
6491    200901001048
6258    200901001064
2585    30dirtybirds
6203    3opr
287    43554
5069    4isl0gru3
4246    4u2
3668    4u2guess


Damn sorry for that, better be more careful next time (and find other ways to counter spam).

I can restore the accounts from a database backup tomorrow.

Anyone interested in helping out with bitcoin.org? We need someone who has the time and skill to optimize and manage a high-traffic server. The server should be made to easily withstand slashdotting and other major news coverage. We're currently running a LAMP on a Rackspace VPS, but the hosting can be changed if necessary.

It's fine if you want to do only the optimization part, but maintenance help is also very welcome. If you're interested, please post here or send me a PM to tell me about your experience, optimization ideas and how much time you have to spare.

1. Trading of goods that are illegal in the seller's or buyer's country is forbidden.

2. Insert a [CLOSED] tag to the subject line when your offer is no more open.

I'm leaning toward having no explicit rules, unless it starts giving us too much trouble at some point. The forum won't go down because of somebody selling drugs, it's just a matter of reputation. Sex and drugs are very good for publicity and grassroots marketing, but possibly a turn-off for brands that want to avoid association. I don't think the association thing is a problem, but we can change the rules later if it becomes that way. We can of course have the unwritten rule to keep controversial stuff low-profile like it is now.

edit 19.2.:
Illegal goods are now banned on the marketplace (rules). The decision is based on the notion that there's no need to keep that kind of content on this particular forum. The cost of having to go somewhere else is smaller than the cost of possible bad reputation on this forum.

I was asked if we could get someone to represent Bitcoin in a high-profile financial business conference in Europe. Any volunteers or recommendations? I asked Bruce Wagner, but other ideas are welcome in case he can't go. Anybody with good presentation skills and Bitcoin knowledge will do. I need to find a suitable person asap.

Hype: somebody might throw a $10M investment out of their back pocket there

I'm in Tokyo 19.-21.3. and we're planning to have a meetup with MagicalTux. All bitcoiners welcome!

Doodle: http://doodle.com/bg8zngecdaewdg4m

You could start reselling VPSes, web hotels, file storage and other digital services and accept BTC as one option. Or actually any digital or even non-digital services from providers that have reselling programs, like Rackspace does. You could resell them anonymously, unless the provider really wants customer contact details. There's even profit to be made if this is done professionally. European and Asian people could sell American stuff localized to their native language and target advertisement better.

What think? Too bad I just started in a full-time work lately so I'm only able to add this to the end of my todo queue.

Do you think we could find some prettier screenshots to the bitcoin.org front page? Maybe Mac screenshot or Windows Aero.

In addition to the anonymous VPN, web hosting and filesharing providers mentioned before, it would be cool if some IT freelancer sites, many of which offer an escrow service, accepted BTC. Any other cool ideas?

Something that was posted on the IRC: Technology Driven Universal Currency

A question to everyone: from which sites would you buy ad space for the project? Freetalklive.com would be a good pick if we want to find people with ideological support to the project. Where do we find people who are interested in the idea and are also technically able to utilize it?

In addition to Facebook and Google adwords, AdBrite.com is also an option. There you can choose the page you want to advertise on.

Distributed social networks combined with a reputation system would be huge. Like eBay, LinkedIn and Facebook combined on a distributed basis. You could take something like Diaspora and build on it a reputation system where you can rate your experiences with every person or brand on earth. The value of the reviews you give would depend on your own rating and your connectedness to the social network, so you couldn't cheat by creating new accounts and writing fake reviews. You could place more value on reviews by your friends or their friends, and see how you're connected to the merchant.

A system like this would be a very good incentive to be honest and not anti-social, both in business and personal life. You could instantly check the reputation of any person (maybe their credit rating hovering over their heads on your augmented vision glasses? ), and few people would like to trade or otherwise interact with people who have unsettled anti-social things on their record. Maybe some would require higher prices from those people because of the risk involved.

It would be way better in maintaining peace and justice than the state-monopolized courts we have: practically free, non-violent, instantaneous and effective.

What do you think about this?