If this isn't a real company, then you really need to think about the legal liability to which your actions could be exposing you.  What is the actual legal basis for taking control of BAKEWELL and its assets without a court order? 

If BAKEWELL is not a legitimate legal entity, it has no legal priority over any other creditors of Ian's and you could be creating a legal clusterfuck by trying to take control of assets for the exclusive benefit of BAKEWELL shareholders.  Yifu should be extremely careful about accepting any claims to the Avalons and should get his own legal advice about the validity of such claims.

The answer is exchanges which are purpose designed for large volume, high frequency trading and which have minimum trade limits.

MtGox fixing these problems only ensures that they remain a point of centralisation.

This is only a problem when there's a lot of speculation on BTC price - ie, when the focus is on BTC as a speculative investment.

If your aim is the adoption of Bitcoin as a currency/payment protocol, then its growth is not dependent on exchanges being able to cope with large volumes/extended periods of HFT.

There are already a couple of dedicated trading platforms due to open soon and this might see a lot of speculators move away from MtGox if those platforms are better able to accommodate trading.

I honestly think that the emergence of exchanges which meet different types of needs is a good thing, and that it's preferable for different platforms to exist than for MtGox to have continued market dominance by being all things to all people.

The thing is that massive, rapid swings in value are a bad thing for currencies regardless of the direction of the swings, so "bad press" for Bitcoin as a currency isn't dependent on the bubble bursting.

From a speculative point of view, the market needs both bulls and bears.  In absolute terms, a crash is not necessarily a negative thing - whether it's positive or negative depends on where you sit in the market and your personal investment goals.

Bubbles don't fuck people over - stupid choices do.  Risking what you can't afford to lose fucks people over.  No-one forces people to buy shit at the top of a bubble any more than anyone forces them to sell when a bubble pops.  No-one forces you to hold as the price is rising instead of realising your gains.

If you're sitting there thinking "OMG if the price crashes back to USD 20 I'm in trouble" then you probably shouldn't be playing with high risk investments in the first place.

You control your level of risk - not "the market".  At various times being bullish will be more profitable, at various times being bearish will bring the greatest returns.  Making emotional decisions - whether bullish or bearish - is what's likely to bring you undone.  If you fear the bubble popping, then you're likely already made bad choices which have left you over-exposed.

No.  That there is continued extreme volatility means the speculators haven't fled.  When the price truly stabilises for a significant period (ie, at least a few weeks) of time, the speculators will look elsewhere for quick profits.

I thought MtGox USD vouchers were a thing of the past as of 10 April.

At this point there's no certainty Avalon will offer a Batch 4 or when that might happen.  They're the most legitimate in terms of having shipped hundreds of orders, but you can't just order from them whenever your feel like it and no-one can say right now when Batch 4 orders might open.  Whether or not you can "wait too long" is kind of irrelevant, because when you can order and when you can expect delivery from any ASIC vendor is totally outside of your control.  You're likely looking at a delivery date a few months in the future no matter who you order from.

And yet other people who've ordered in the last couple of days have been told their units will be delivered in July.  And BFL_Steven says if they're shipping anything at all within the next week, it will only be developer units.

No doubt BFL will either say your friend misunderstood about the delivery date (the gen 2 units don't even exist yet, so they can't possibly be shipped) or say whoever he spoke to in customer service is new.  The "Single" is a product which can no longer be ordered.

At this point, people really need to start to insist on communicating with executive staff like Jody.  If the GM gives inaccurate information, it's harder for them to blame shift when official inquiries into their operations are made (which now seems inevitable).

Let's also not forget that their incompetence is apparently systemic and extends to their administration as well as the technical side of their operations.

"Growing pains" are a luxury Bitcoin services handling the funds of others can no longer afford.  The demand for services and the sheer value of funds being handled means that every company needs to be handle rapid growth from the get-go now. 

Services need to stop making their internal problems their customers' problems.  If they don't have the capacity to handle a certain volume, then they need to put limits in place which keep the number of users/value of transactions at levels they can handle in a timely manner - which may mean not accepting new customers until they have the capacity to handle them.

I understand Charlie's explanations for this problem, but it's one which should have been foreseen and planned for.  Neither lack of liquidity nor problems with the MtGox API should be issues allowed to affect users after the fact - transactions should not be accepted at all if they are going to be delayed due to those factors rather than user funds being hostage to those issues.

It's not 2011 any more and Charlie's been around longer than most.  Businesses which lack the capacity to scale cannot hope to survive long term.

Way to convince the community that you're a professional business person.  You could easily put these accusations to rest by providing proof that a report was made to law enforcement and by telling your users which firm of auditors you've retained to investigate this incident.

No-one's going to take you seriously when you won't give the most basic information about your company - who you are, who the directors are, etc.  Credible businesses are more than happy to provide that information and you make yourself look sketchy by not doing so, especially when you've tried to cloak Bitcoin-Central in legitimacy.

It would take less than an hour and a few hundred dollars to have your auditors write a public letter to your users confirming that they're investigating this incident and that they'll be overseeing the integrity of the claims process - and if the claims process isn't overseen by accounting professionals, then it has no integrity.

Instawallet may have been a free service, but how you handle this will shape people's opinion of Paymium as a whole. 

Charlie does have time to give interviews.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/inside-the-bitcoin-bubble-bitinstants-ceo.html

You may be right, I haven't really kept up with what's been happening with Bitcoin-Central.

I just don't like Paymium playing the "it was a free service" card.  When you hold large amounts of other people's funds, you're accountable whether you charge for that service or not.  If you're not willing to be accountable, then don't operate the service.  

Also, it should be possible to ring these people and confirm whether or not the incident was, in fact, reported to them.


As the OP maintains that independent auditors are involved in investigating this incident, it might be beneficial to advise users which firm has been retained to conduct the forensic analysis.

The onus is entirely on Paymium to prove their claims regarding this incident having been reported to law enforcement and the involvement of auditors.  Providing such proof in the OP would have gone a long way towards restoring credibility, but it's not to late to do so now.  Calling people trolls (other thread) and evading reasonable questions does not engender confidence in Paymium's professionalism or their ability to run their other services competently.

One card people might want to keep in reserve is contacting Bitcoin-Central's partnering financial institution (Aqoba).  Bitcoin-Central made a huge deal about being "legitimate" and I'm sure that the financial institution they're using to cloak themselves in legitimacy would be interested to learn that another service operated by the same principals has lost user funds and is being very evasive about answering questions in relation to that loss.

It might also be worth contacting the organisations mentioned in this post by davout.

Just searched ASIC insolvency notices - no liquidator has been appointed yet.

PayPal's financial services licences require them to comply with AML and other financial reporting requirements.  They will report accounts suspected of being opened with fake credentials, and regulators may well view the offering for sale of the means to obscure true ownership of PayPal accounts as facilitating money-laundering activity, tax evasion, etc. 

Purchase "stealth" accounts at your own peril.

I would guess that they're still hoping to resolve the issues and offer the product.  Having the most powerful Bitcoin mining rig in your product line but out of stock makes you look superior to your competitors who only offer products similar to your low end units.  It's a marketing thing.

I'm kind of surprised that they haven't dropped the jalapeno and that they're still offering the little single.  The jalapeno's going to be pretty much a stillborn product very soon and the BFL wait list shows very few people as having ordered the little single (although that may become their new entry level product with the price rise).

One of the greatest ironies here is that BFL increased their specs to compete with bASIC and bASIC never delivered.  If they'd stuck with their original specs, they could probably have delivered months ago and had plenty of happy customers mining away at 40 GH and waiting to order a gen 2 product which did 50 GH (and happy to pay the new price because they could trade in their gen 1 units).

They don't want to accept any more mini-rig orders at this stage because shipping multiple other units to make up the 1500 GH is too expensive.

When these issues first arose, they said that they'd ship multiple units to meet promised hash rates on existing orders no matter what it cost them.  They were clearly hoping they'd only have to do that for Batch 1 orders and that they'd have resolved the issues by the time the next 6 wafers rolled out of the fab.  Now it's pretty obvious that these issues aren't going to be quickly resolved, they don't want to have to commit to shipping multiple singles (almost certainly more expensive to BFL than working mini-rig would have been) to achieve the 1500 GH on future mini-rig orders so they need to pull the product until they can resolve the issues.

A lot of people over on the BFL forums don't especially care whether they get their promised mini-rig as long as they get their promised 1500 GH.  Potential eBay buyers may well be the same - especially if BFL isn't going to be offering a unit with that much hash power any time soon.  The desperation to acquire ASICs right now is truly mind-boggling and people are willing to overlook an awful lot in that pursuit.

Not to mention that when this hit the media the other day the Opposition said that they wouldn't roll back the changes if they come into power.  This happens often here - oppose something when you're not in power but don't reverse it when you're in government.