"Singular they": God said it, I believe it, that settles it
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html

Then shalt thou bring forth that man, or that woman (which haue committed that wicked thing) vnto thy gates, euen that man, or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die.

So likewise shall my heauenly Father doe also vnto you, if yee from your hearts forgiue not euery one his brother their trespasses.

How low do you think he will have to bow to get his money back? Will any shoe licking be required?

Binding mediation is an oxymoron. If you mean binding arbitration, one huge issue is that it wouldn't bind the asset holders, so it wouldn't solve the main problem. It could solve the issue of Goat getting back listing fees or any funds of his that Nefario or GLBSE is holding. But it wouldn't solve the real problem whose victims are the asset holders, not Goat, and not Nefario. Also, since Goat doesn't have anything Nefario/GLBSE is claiming they are entitled to, what benefit what Nefario/GLBSE gain from agreeing to this?

These statements seem consistent to me. The latter was a bit confusing, but the former restates the most natural way to understand it. It doesn't say you must break an NDA to reveal a scam nor does it say anything will happen if you refuse to break an NDA to reveal a scam. It just says what happens if you break an NDA to reveal a scam -- the NDA won't be honored for the purpose of the scammer tag.

If there was evidence Goat was making a significant effort to work out a redemption scheme with GLBSE, I'd agree with you. But without that, I think a lot of people will give GLBSE the benefit of the doubt. But it's certainly a warning bell, especially since GLBSE doesn't seem to be making any effort to improve the redemption scheme. No matter what happens, the decision to delist caused significant harm to GLBSE's customers, and there's no evidence NEFARIO even considered that. However, if they respond to this by announcing delisting criteria, escalation rules, and a procedure for a sensible redemption after delisting, that would go a long way to recovering.

For what it's worth, I think declaring this situation to just not be resolvable by the forums "scammer tag" mechanism is a reasonable resolution as far as the forums goes.

Hopefully GLBSE's future customers will take into account the fact that GLBSE reserves the right to totally abandon its obligation to preserve their ownership interest by making a decision to delist the asset and will exercise this right if it feels like it with no obligation to explain or defend that decision.

Two theories:

1) He was passing through to Zeek and genuinely believed he'd have his money back soon.

2) He was still selling his own debt through cut outs and wanted to keep its price up for as long as he could.

If banks hoarded, they'd have to charge a storage fee instead of paying interest.

Because they basically said from the beginning that they reserve the right to run away with your money and give you nothing in exchange.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Generation

But someone should make a scam accusation. Likely they won't reply.

No. This is seriously incorrect and I think your approach is fundamentally misguided because of this confusion. The third solution does not require Goat to assume any risk he has not already agreed to accept.

If the assets are relisted, there is no way anyone can go to Goat and accuse him of scamming and there is no way Nefario can make Goat look like a scammer. Sure, Nefario can screw over Goat's asset holders, but they agreed to accept GLBSE to protect their ownership interest and it would be absolutely clear to them that it was GLBSE that had defaulted.

You are correct that with option three the asset owners and Goat have to trust Nefario, but only to the extent they have already agreed to trust him by listing their asset with him and purchasing them on his exchange. No new trust is required.

The other two options both require Goat to assume the risk that someone will claim that he is refusing to redeem a valid claim code and he won't know whether it's because of Nefario or the asset owner. This is a risk he never agreed to assume, significantly different in type from other risks he has agreed to assume, and frankly one I don't think he should assume. This risk does not arise in option 3.

In the absence of any redemption agreement, it was Nefario's decision to delist Goat's assets that directly harmed the asset owners.

Goat has never agreed to accept any arrangement where Nefario can make it look to his asset holders like he is scamming. Unless Goat agrees to accept this risk, there is absolutely no sense in trying to get Nefario to agree to impose it on him. It was Nefario's decision that harmed the asset holders and that decision appears to have been made without adequate justification to obtain leverage in another dispute with no consideration for the harm done to GLBSE's customers. You've been asked to investigate that. If you're trying to minimize that harm by moderating, you need to obtain permission from Goat and Nefario first. You can't force yourself into a mediating position, nor is mediating by ultimatums likely to be productive. You're supposed to be investigating.

1) The problem with this solution is that accepting liability may not mean he actually makes good on that liability. Goat would actually have to pay out funds relying on Nefario to make good on his acceptance of liability. It's not clear that this acceptance would be binding on the asset holders either, so if Nefario reneges, Goat could still be left with liability. So Goat can only redeem based on this acceptance of liability if he believes Nefario will make good on it. (And how would this even work? Someone goes to Goat with a code, Goat sends them to Nefario saying the code is not on his list. Nefario says "that's a made up code that I never issued". They now go back to Goat and complain that Nefario lied and they were in fact issued that code. Does Nefario have to make good on this? If not, how does Goat know Nefario didn't steal the asset? If so, an unlimited number of people can scam Nefario and he'd have no choice but to renege on his acceptance.)

2) The problem with this solution is that that's just another unilateral imposition of a broken redemption scheme on Goat, just a slightly less broken one. It still causes substantially the same problems. Two people can still come to Goat with possession of the same private key. Goat still has to decide whether to redeem twice or once. If twice, he's still getting massive liability crammed down his throat that he never agreed to accept. If once, then he's still taking the risk of being branded a scammer if Nefario issues the same code to two people, and he'll never even know whether it was Nefario or the claimant is lying. (Consider the same scenario as in 1 above.)

So two of your proposed solutions can't work. I don't think anyone has any business trying to coerce either side into accepting specific solutions and there's no sense in pressuring one side to agree to a solution the other side won't agree to -- how does that help? If they can't *agree* on a solution, we need to evaluate whether that's because either of them is scamming. (Unless Goat agreed to 1 and 2 above, in which case, he's a fool, but congrats on brilliant mediating. But if he didn't, what good is getting Nefario to agree to things Goat will, and should, never agree to?)

I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this was just a bad decision on your part. But several people have already told me privately that they believe you are conspiring with Nefario to appear to pressure him into an agreement that we all know Goat won't accept to shift the blame to Goat. I hope that's not true and that this was just an honest lapse in judgment.

How does he do that? He has no contact information for them.

How does he *prove* he got a double code usage? If he does this, someone can just submit a code twice using an accomplice and then accuse Goat of scamming.

Right. So long as Goat has a plan to blame the resulting predictable mess on someone else, he should go ahead and screw over his asset holders, just as Nefario did because he thought he could blame the predictable failure of the obviously-broken redemption scheme on Goat. No reputable individual or business would knowingly give assets to the wrong people just because they knew it was someone else's obligation to somehow fix the mess, especially if the entity whose obligation it was has never acknowledged that obligation.

That is really not fair. You're making inferences and speculation in favor of Nefario, effectively rewarding him for his silence. It's not fair to expect Goat, or anyone else, to refute every argument Nefario might hypothetically make while Nefario gets to see which arguments Goat can and cannot disprove before he has to take any position. That just makes it too easy to lie. ("What if Nefario says X, can you disprove that?" "Oh, you can, what about Y?" "Oh, you can, what about Z?" "Oh, you can't?" And then five minutes later Nefario says Z.)

Sure, you could perhaps speculate why Nefario might have done what he did. But I can speculate that Goat can disprove each of those speculations, should those be positions Nefario takes. You have to confine yourself to the arguments people are actually making and not expect hypothetical positions they might take to be proactively refuted by opposing parties.

This seems comically self-contradictory to me. If there is amnesia, then there is no continuity of consciousness. Amnesia is, pretty much by definition, a break in the continuity of consciousness. And saying "you" remember something after your death would require first establishing what was this "you" that survived your death, which seems incoherent.

Okay, but so what? My molecules survive my death, and some of those molecules may wind up in later organisms just as some of my molecules were previously part of some earlier organisms. So maybe there is some kind of "layer" survives my death just as the molecules that compose me do. Since all the evidence suggests that it has no significant effects on anything whatsoever, who cares? I don't make a big deal about which molecules in my finger were one parts of Thomas Edison's nose. Since there's no continuity of conscious memory (or anything else significant), it's not more "me" than a rat that shared a few of my molecules.

I have never understood what it is that is being claimed. Frankly, it seems incoherent to me. What is that is supposedly being reincarnated? In what sense are these other beings supposed to be "me"?

Most of the explanations speak of a "soul" or "spirit" that is reincarnated. To the extent I can understand what this means (which, frankly, is hardly at all), it seems clearly impossible since we know that the brain is the physical implementation of identity and the brain is destroyed during death. It's like arguing that you can burn a rug and somehow the pattern can continue in another rug. (The idea of a pattern without a rug seems incomprehensible. A thought without any brain to think it contradicts everything we know about how the brain works.)

Yes, there were certainly people and animals that lived before me and people and animals that will live after me. But if there is some sense in which some of them can "also be me", I don't even understand what sense that is.

There might be some technical means to "copy" consciousness into a storage device and implement it in another physical container. So it's possible that before my death I could be "recorded" in some way and continue to exist through some other physical implementation. But if those people don't have my memories and don't extend my same consciousness, then they are not me.

These are obligations that Nefario, it appears, has currently directed GLBSE to default on and continues to default on. Assuming there isn't some dramatic "other side to the story" that we haven't heard, that alone seems to merit a scammer tag until that obligation is honored. Combine that with the apparent failure to return even undisputed amounts of Goat's money that Nefario directed to be frozen and the case is a slam dunk. I think that if it were anyone else, it would resolved already.

I'm not on a witch hunt. By far my preferred resolution to this problem would be GLBSE accepting responsibility for the mess Nefario made, finding a way to make things right with their customers, and pledging to work out a freezing and delisting policy that will avoid a repeat of this fiasco.

Thank you. I now have all the evidence I need.

How would that work? If Nefario says "I gave that code to Goat". Then what?

And if the person making the second claim says they don't believe that Goat got any other claim, then what? If Nefario gave the same claim code to two people, how can Goat prove that?

Exactly. So as soon as Nefario accepts that liability and agrees to a resolution system, *then* Goat could accept claim codes. But until then, it can't work. (But he won't do that because the liability is massive. See below.)

That would be the only thing he needed to check if he had an agreement in place with Nefario to resolve disputes. But right now, he'd have to be an idiot to start accepting those claim codes. Consider:

1) Person comes to Goat with a code.

2) Goat redeems the code, it's on the list.

3) Another person comes to Goat with the same code.

4) Goat says, "Sorry. That code was redeemed."

5) Person says, "I didn't redeem it. It was issued to me. Maybe you're lying. Maybe Nefario gave two people the same code. I don't know."

Now what? Nefario has not accepted any liability for this situation and Goat would be a fool to do so since he doesn't trust Nefario. Of course Nefario will say the code was only given to one person and that's likely true. But how can Goat prove he's not scamming? And if you say "in this case, we'll trust Goat", then Goat can cheat anyone he wants to.

In other words, for Goat to accept these codes opens himself up to massive liability if his asset holders try to scam him. And nothing Nefario can do can fix this after the fact. The second Goat starts accepting these codes, this window opens up. Goat would have to be an idiot to start redeeming these codes.

And how can Nefario accept liability for this? He doesn't know if the guy is scamming (redeeming the same code twice) or Goat is scamming (redeeming other people's codes himself through an accomplice). And if Nefario says to the guy, "sorry, I only gave your code to one person", (which is probably true) then the guy can argue that Goat is a scammer. So Goat can only accept codes if Nefario makes good for anyone in this situation, even if they are scamming him.

This code system is so fundamentally broken and so at odds with everything we know about security that it looks like it was thought up in two minutes by a below-average third grader. And, in any event, for Nefario to impose it on Goat and his asset holders without even trying to reach an agreement on a scheme that's at least not so obviously broken is an inexcusable breach of GLBSE's obligation to protect its customers' ownership interests in their assets.

All that I require from my senses it that they report what the actual state of the universe causes them to report. This is precisely the input I need to try to figure out what that state of the universe is. It's inconceivable that they could somehow report something other than what the universe causes them to report. That the senses are reliable is axiomatic. There is no sense in which they can be unreliable.

If, for example, my eyes first reported one thing and then another, then it would be a fact of reality that my eyes reported things in this way. My eyes would accurately be reporting this fact. If, despite the fact that my eyes had this defect, they still reported the same thing, then I would be fooled by my senses and unable to  detect and understand this defect. The idea that senses could be unreliable or defective is self-contradictory.

If they really are unreliable, then by acting unreliably,  they accurately report their unreliability to me. If they really were unreliable, but nevertheless acted reliably, *that* would be a problem, since I'd be unable to sense the true fact that my senses were unreliable.