Paypal is extremely corrupt, more than many of you can imagine, I have been doing everything I can to stop this scammer from stealing bitcoins and have failed, this thief has been reported to ebay and paypal and they do not think to care, they just tell the seller the buyers account was hacked and file a chargeback.

I think there are many sellers, we should organize and put pressure against paypal and ebay, not only to recover the lost coins, but put an stop on this crook, and hopefully put him in jail.

Today he scammed another seller for bitcoins:
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=jabgasrm&ftab=FeedbackAsBuyer
The last victim is  jewel_hilton
ebay action id: 270773724170

And for those that say selling bitcoins on paypal is illegal, they are clearly wrong
See here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PayPal it is a bad idea but that does not make it illegal, also paypal does not make laws, they can make a contract, but even then by clearly allowing bitcoin actions (also allowing fraud) they are accepting bitcoins.

Here is an example of the non written law in many countries:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_consuetudinario (sorry in spanish, could not find the english version).
What "Ley o Derecho consuetudinario" in brief refers to non written laws, that are accepted by tradition when there are precedents or what the people agree is legal.

Paypal by allowing bitcoin actions actions to take place, with or without fraud, they create a precedent that it is Ok, and it many countries in the world that would make  a bitcoin transaction perfectly legal with paypal, of course the laws vary from country to country, but in general it would be legal with a few exceptions. In the USA it is also legal, and worst case it could be a violation of contract and even that would be doubtful since there is a precedent saying otherwise.
 
If anyone has some ideas how we could organize. please post here, this post has a lot of detail of all the fraud this guy
Info on the thief.
 John Binns
141 Blackmoor Drive, West Derby
Liverpool, Merseyside
L129EE
United Kingdom
johngeljen@tiscali.co.uk

This post may help some recover their money from paypal.

My Advice, do not use paypal it is an scam, and do not use ebay it is the same company.

It is good thing that bitcoin is on a free market based on offer and demand, a market that can be manipulated is not good since history has shown it usually helps those who are in control of the money supply.

The only reason the bitcoin market can be manipulated to some degree is because it is a very young and small market, once the bitcoin acceptance grows, the market for bitcoins grows, and bitcoin will be a very stable currency by then.

What is needed is good press, and to support vendors that accept bitcoins, for example is not the same for the bitcoin economy to trade dollars  and spends the dollars on a restaurant, than go to a restaurant that takes bitcoins, the more bitcoins are used the stronger the bitcoin economy will get. I predict that if people that have bitcoins start using them as currency in 5 years, the bitcoin economy will be very strong. No need to speed all your bitcoins since savings are good for a solid economy also, just need to get more movement in bitcoins so if vendors see their sales increase more vendors will follow therefore increasing the demand for bitcoins.

Bitcoin solves many issues, it does not solve everything, but it is an step in the right direction.

In reduces fraud, it creates a solid currency system, and much more.

Other issues that have to be solved are the creation of jobs, the increase in production, elimination of debt, fair distribution of taxes, social issues, funding of education, health care, etc, but that is up to the people, bitcoin is not going to solve all the problems in the world, but it will help.

Once you have a solid economic system it is easier to solve other problems that exist in society today.
Think of Bitcoin as a tool for solving many problems, but for many others it depends on the people.

Hard to believe but paypal and ebay are not doing anything to stop this scammer, on another forum I just learned another seller got burned today July 6.
I have reported this crook to ebay and paypal and they keep screwing sellers, with the lie that the account was compromised and in was an unauthorized transaction, which is bs on paypals part, there are fully aware of the situation and the scam contijues.

Check out this thread
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26369.0

Do Not use paypal, I tried warning everyone about this scammer, and the scammer continues to scam with the help of paypal.

This guy has been doing scams for quite a while and ebay - scampal are not doing anything to prevent this.
2 days ago I tried to warn some ebay sellers of this scammer.

Lesson to learn out of this situation, Do not use Paypal it is an scam.

Check out this other thread about this same scammer.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=25586.20

You should be able to get your money recovered since this crook has been reported by me to ebay and paypal on severa times.

Was your account frozen ?

Great Ad, that is one very powerful reason to use Bitcoins. I posted a link from my site to the WikiLeaks Ad to promote the Ad.
I thinks an Ad like this will help Bitcoin a lot.

The big scammers here are ebay and paypal.

The fraud by the same scammer continues.

Both Ebay and Paypal were reported by me several times 2 days ago and also yesterday,  and this guy "jabgasrm" continues to scam sellers today he just scammed someone else today july 4.

ebay Item number:   130538720794
seller: daniello76 which is a seller with a perfect rating of 100% with 32 positive feedbacks.

how can the Law or any police officer that is reading this allow the same guy to continue scamming others after scampal, and ebay have been fully made aware of the situation and not do anything about.

He has already stolen over $1000 dollars from many sellers.

Of course the bitcoin will survive. It is a currency of its own.

In about 5 years there will probably be a lot of vendors dealing in bitcoins, you will not need to exchange them, for example you go to the supermarket and pay with bitcoins, you work for someone and receive bitcoins, and probably in some countries you could even pay your taxes in bitcoins.

Also in 5 years a bitcoin is probably going to worth a $1000 at least, for 2 reasons the dollar goes down, and bitcoin goes up.

Think about the benefits of bitcoin:
The only currency designed against inflation from the very beginning.
Secure.
No chargebacks.
The value adjusted by offer and demand not manipulated by some wise guy.
Private
No risk of frozen assets.
Can not be confiscated.
Only p2p currency that solves the problem of double spending.
No central authority.

Could you describe any other currency in the world that has some of this features, probably none, bitcoin is the only currency that can do all that.

Have no dough Bitcoin no only will survive, but I will probably take over a lot of bad currencies, specially in third world countries where inflation due to fraud is sometimes over 100%.

Bitcoin is unstoppable, it is the greatest thing that has happened in recent time.

I am running a business entirely based on bitcoins, and it is picking up slowly, what is important is the growth.

For Bitcoin to have success at a faster rate, what we all should do, is try to support a bitcoin economy, for example need to buy groceries then go to the supermarket that accepts bitcoins, do not change the bitcoins to dollars and then spend the dollars, that will not motivate a supermarket to accept bitcoins, need to eat pizza go to the pizza place that accepts bitcoins, need phone service use a company that supports bitcoins, and so on, support companies doing business in bitcoins. Today all the companies doing business in bitcoins depend on us, large companies at present are ignoring the bitcoin, but onces it takes off it will no longer be ignored by traditional companies.

I know at present it is very difficult to conduct business at 100% in bitcoins only, but as time goes by it will be easier and easier.

it is not about crying, at least I am not crying, it is about alerting others and doing something against scammers, ebay, and paypal.

But it is good to expose the scammer and paypal and ebay for what they are, this post may have helped some people on this forum by alerting them of this situation, the problem with paypal is not with bitcoins, it is a problem in general, paypal or ebay has not sent me a single email the problem was because it was a transaction with bitcoins.

I lost very little, but others lost a lot, and it is very sad to see this type of fraud take place, and for paypal to encourage the fraud to take place.

Not trying to fight  the fraud would be the wrong thing to do, I know paypal is probably going to burn me, and all the other guys that got scammed, but it is worth a try to try to do something about, and then lose, than to give up immediately and act like paypal not do anything, and actually encourage the fraud.

This problems somehow affects us all, for example you buy something from a legitimate vendor, then you have to pay a little extra, since the legitimate vendor has extra expenses due to fraud, and to cover for fraud he has to increase his prices, the legitimate customer is then force to pay this extra prices, for any business if the operational cost is increased due to fraud, that cost is passed onto the customers.

The problem with ebay and paypal is that the play a huge role in the market, they have become so big, that they do not care about their customers, and posts like this is that make people aware of scams.

If paypal continues with its scams, and people complain in forums, blogs, etc, paypal will fall, I will not be surprised that in 5 years from now  bitcoin is the big thing, and no one gives a shit about paypal, when that happens I will know that we have won, so a short term loss is no big deal, but if no one does anything,   people accept  paypal behavior as acceptable, then 10 years from now paypal will even be worse than now. that is not something that is acceptable. This post will help many in the long run, and I predict there will be many more scams like this by paypal, until its downfall.

Once paypal begins to fall they will listen to their customers and service will improve, but by then bitcoin will be big and strong, ebay will probaly start accepting bitcoins as a form of payment in about 5 years, otherwise it will be lost sales to them.

I really doubt any of the sellers will get their money back, but it is worth a try, at the very least paypal gets exposed for what it is.

I do not expect to get my money back due  to everyones experience with paypal, but posting paypal as a fraudulent enterprise, and having my prediction of paypals downfall in 5 years, and to have bitcoin strong as ever when paypal colapses, and to have contributed to paypals downfall even if it is a very tiny amount, it is worth a lot to me, that alone is probably worth infinitely much more to me than my lost btc.
This post probably helped many more people from being scammed.

In regards to seller protection, it does not seem to work, when  I received the email of paypal payment from the scammer, the email said I was eligible for seller protection, but then after the charge back no word from paypal on seller protection, I even asked them about the seller protection and have got now replay, it has been more than a day and no word from paypal, seller protection seems to be an scam.

adapting a2billing for bitcoins  would be nice, but it is a lot of work, to pay someone to implement the support of bitcoins in a2billing is something I would like to do, however at present I do not have the resources, and it would be very costly. a rough guess it will probably take somewhere between 20 to 40 hours of work, and at a rate of $100 per hour, that is lots of money, maybe my estimate is way off.

I tried to do the implementation myself, and it turned out a little more difficult than expected here is why.

A2billing gets the market rates for usd, euro, pesos, etc all from yahoo finance, yahoo finance does not have support for bitcoins, entering a bitcoin value directly on the database for bitcoin manually had this problem, as soon as the other values where updated using yahoo  finance, the value for the bitcoin btc was lost.

The other problem is that all the companies that provide reseller voip service sell in either dollar or euros, not a big problem since when loading the database the values could be converted to bitcoin.

The important part is the payment procesor, that is the part that would be nice to integrate in a2billing, one idea would be to have a bitcoin payment address for each customer, so when a customer makes a payment, a2b somehow check with the bitcoinserver if payment was receive and automatically fund the account.
That would be the elegant way of doing this which is more complicated.
The part where the account is funded, part of the code could probably be reused from the paypal module, for the payment address that is simple is could be an entry in the customer information an extra field in the database.
To verify the payment by contacting the bitcoinserver and then funding the account requires some thought.


A simpler method, not as elegant, is to create  a separate web site to sell vouchers, where the voucher is just a number that represents payment under a2billing, once the voucher is sold using bitcoins, then the voucher can be used using in a2b, that way all I would have to to is setup a site to sell the vouchers in bitcoins.
There is software that probably does this already, maybe opencart, virtuemart, zen cart, etc, the problem I am not familiar with any of these software packages, I could start by trying one at a time and see which one seem to fit better for this purpose.

But I have to agree with you, having bitcoin integrated in a2b would be ideal, and it is a much better solution to the problem, several month ago I posted about this integration in the a2billing forum but there does not seem to be much interest in bitcoin in the a2b forum, but as bitcoin gets more popular that may change.

that is already possible, I ran a site that provides voip and vpn, if you use both services you have encrypted voip.

you can also use bitcoins for payment, however the payment in bitcoins is done manually, I am working on some automatic integration.

A lot of sellers got stung, was is amazing is that paypal insists that the account got hacked, and it does nothing to secure the account.
Very hard to believe that the account gets hacked on ebay and paypal, on different days and continues to get hacked.

Paypal should immediately void all the chargebacks to all the sellers, unfreeze all the sellers acounts it has frozen, and ban this scammer from both ebay and paypal, but neither ebay or paypal seem to care.

Paypal and ebay have been lying to us, making it look like the account was recently hacked, and hiding the fact that the same guy has filled many chargebacks using exactly the same scam.

This is how the scam works:
 
1. buy bitcoins on ebay.
2. pay with paypal
3. receive the bitcoins.
4. file a chargeback claiming account was hacked.
5. keep the bitcoins and the money.
6. repeat this process.
7, after process has been repeated a few times, change ebay id, and repeat the process again.

and repeat this same process on different days with different sellers.

Paypal know about this, and if failing to warn the sellers, in fact when the seller gets the email from paypal, paypal makes it appeared that the problem is only with you, and that the account was hacked only for your transaction, which is clearly false.

It seems Paypal wants to kill bitcoin by encouraging fraud against bitcoin.

Well this serves us as a lesson to learn on ways paypal has to atack the bitcoins, and how low  paypal has fallen.

The problem the way I see it, the scammer is stealing bitcoins, he could very easily steal other items as well, since shipping does not seem to be an issue, blockexplorer is proof of shipping.

Up to this point neither ebay or Paypal  has said anything against bitcoin to me, they have acted against bitcoin which is a different thing.
On the email from paypal or the chat with ebay there is not a word against bitcoin.

As far as the seller protection, I have no idea what this protects but seems to be an scam since there is very strong evidence that the-mullet09 and jabgasrm are the same guy and has charge many chargebacks during a week against other sellers and continue to do so.

It it very hard to believe that both ebay and paypal account were hacked, it is even harder to believe that he gets hacked on a daily basis, since after his first charge back, paypal or ebay should have alerted other ebay sellers and investigate why a single user goes by different ebay ids and it filing charge backs on different days against different sellers claiming his account was hacked each time. After the first charge back it should have been ebay and paypals responsible to secure the account, no such action has been done on either part of ebay or paypal, this crook continues to charge back all bitcoin purchased, and paypal is honoring those chargebacks.

I agree with everyone that says paypal should be avoided, but it is difficult since ebay has a monopoly over paypal and only allows paypal as the only method of payment, therefore saying paypal should be avoided is like saying ebay should be avoided they are basically the same thing, and very true the should be avoided by all means.

As far as shipping, it is very easy to prove that a shippment took place using blockexplorer, I have submitted the evidende of blockexplorer to paypal, but it seems paypal prefers to ignore this evidence, since they do not reply and there is absolutely  no feedback on their part in regards this matter.

Not everyone that sells on ebay does it for more profit, some do it to get the money quicker, since it takes me a whole week to convert bitcoins to dollars by avoiding paypal, mtgox is very quick, dwolla is very quick,  however the money has to go from dwolla to banks, and that part is very slow sometimes a whole week, and I have tried with 2 different banks and it takes an entire week in either direction.

I would like to see if anyone can recover the money from paypal, I think we have very strong evidence of Paypals wrongdoing, ebay, and of course the scammer, in my case paypal froze the money on my account, not only the money for the chargeback, but all the money on the account, I have access to my paypal account but can not withdraw any money at all, I get an email saying the money is being delivered to my bank, but during the process there is a warning message that there is an investigation open and funds can not be withdrawn.

The more I know about paypal, the more I like to use bitcoins.
We should stop using ebay as well it is the same scam company that paypal is.

We are sure of that here is that proof:

under the ebay  id jabgasrm on june 28 he files a chargeback against another seller btcmania, so paypal is aware of the situation since it only makes sense that only a legitimate user will file a chargeback, but then on July 1 he buys bitcoins from me, and then on july 2 he files for a chargeback.

Could a hacker file for a chargeback on june 28? I do not think so, it would not make any sence.

Paypal tells me on july 2 that his account was hacked. that makes no sense, since paypal told another seller that his account was hacked on june 28, and he is also fighting the chargebacks. could the account get hacked on a daily basis, I do not think so.
Why is paypal covering up this scammer and screwing the selers? does not make sense to me, under than paypal being a very bad service that fails to investigate the claims.

If someone that got burnt by paypal wants to use me as a reference feel free to do so, my ebay id is member67232 and my dispute with paypal case number is PP-001-362-340-429.

Maybe it could be a good idea to collect all the case numbers together when filling a dispute, since it is the same scammer screwing all of us.

update:
I got an email from a seller that was scammed also by this guy, it appears that he is going by different names, according to an email I got he also goes by the name of  "the-mullet09" under ebay.

It is clear that his account was not hacked, and sellers are being screwed by ebay and paypal.

Paypal is claiming his account was hacked which is clearly false.

The bitcoin delivery can be proven using blockexplorer, and that the account was not hacked it is simply only the legitimate user can file a chargeback, so unless he is getting hacked every day, it is a clear sign of fraud, not only by the scammer, but by paypal by protecting the scammer against all evidence, and ebay for allowing this to happen.

Several ebay listing is which the scammer comited fraud have been removed by ebay:
This listing (110709762773) has been removed, or this item is not available
This listing (220807321393) has been removed, or this item is not available
This listing (260808173674) has been removed, or this item is not available.

    *
          o Please check that you've entered the correct item number
          o Listings that have ended 90 or more days ago will not be available for viewing.

But all this bitcoin related listing that have been removed by ebay are recent do not have more than 90 days, I feel paypal   is trying on purpose trying to screw sellers using bitcoins, and covering up the fraud.

How could paypal claim that the account was hacked on july 1, when  john binns had a charge back for the same reason on june 28 against another seller., that is fraud being done by paypal by allowing this fraud to take place with their knowledge.

What makes this case special is that it can be proven that the account was not hacked, and paypal is saying it was hacked which makes no sence since only a few days earlier there was a chargeback by this scammer.

Yes I agree with all the posts here that we should stop using paypal, the problem is that ebay has a monopoly with paypal and does not allow other payment methods.

One more good reason to use bitcoins.

This is the scammer info:
 Buyer
John Binns
jabgasrm
johngeljen@tiscali.co.uk   Note to seller
bitcoin address: 1KmouQEKQ5b3bDYARu3RtMAFo4o3CPad5K
Shipping address - confirmed
John Binns
141 Blackmoor Drive, West Derby
Liverpool, Merseyside
L129EE
United Kingdom
   Shipping details
You haven’t added any shipping details.

This scammer has been scamming bitcoin ebay sellers, based on the transaction logs he has scammed a total of 45 BTC
http://blockexplorer.com/address/1KmouQEKQ5b3bDYARu3RtMAFo4o3CPad5K

On june 28 he filled a charge against an ebay seller btcmania, then on july 1 get paypal payment from him, the next day he files a charge back.

Paypal claims in their email that his account got hacked, but I say paypal is lying, since on june 28 there was already a chargeback, it is clear that only the legitimate user can file a chargeback, so it is very unlikely  that 3 days later he gets hacked again.

Why is paypal lying that his account got hacked on july1, and hiding the fact that the scammer filled a chargeback on june 28 to another seller.
There is another seller tinchen-hro  that was also scammed by this very same person.

I am filling a dispute on the charge back with paypal, I would like to know who are the other ebay seller that got scammed by this guy.

Problems with ebay, it is not possible to leave negative feedback to buyers, so the feedback system is corrupt and therefore useless, it use to work a few years ago, but ebay broke it, so if a buyer can have only positive feedback, there is no point in feedbacks, every buyer gets 100% positive regardless of how corrupt they are.

Another problem with ebay, the only allow paypal as the only payment system, there are very few exceptions such as the porn area, and you get screwed because then the listing do not show with their search engine, under 99% of the categories paypal is by force the only option of payment with ebay.

So for all ebay sellers that have been scammed by paypal and this guy let organize, lets dispute all this chargebacks.
I only lost 1 BTC, but other lost 44 BTC, and we should try to put an stop to paypal fraud.

There should be no change in the protocol it is working, and people investing in the bitcoin economy what something stable.
Bitcoins should never expire, that way they can be used for retirement, savings, and emergencies.
The 21 million dollar limit is more than enough, with a total of 8 digits for decimals, and 8 digits to the right of the decimal point, it creates a total of 16 digits, in other words you can represent 2.1 thousand trillion  bitcoins, the world population is 7 billion, if we divide we get 300000 bitcoins per person, most of us are not even close of having that type of money, and average the current amount of money per person is the world is a lot smaller than that.
Do not ever compare Bitcoins to Banks policy, Banks are corrupt inflate money, charge huge fees, buy politicians, etc, Bitcoins represent a very honest system created by very clear rules, we want to keep rules simple so everyone understands them and that way they are clear and precise, Banks are like courts, the reason you need a lawyer when in trouble, is because laws are very complex, unclear, they contradict each other, and even though the law says not knowing the law is not an excuse, I am sure no one in this planet knows all the laws that exist, not even a tiny percentage of the ones that exist.

Someday far away we will have a p2p legal system, and that will be great, clear and precise like math.

Bitcoin is a very clean design, it is lean and mean and it should stay that way, if a lot of bogus stuff is added on the protocol, you risk having security issues, in the computer world it is well known that secure programs are usually small  with few features, complex programs with millions of lines of code and many features, very often have security holes, the reason for that is human nature is a program is small it is easy for someone to go though the code and detect a flaw, if it is a huge program it will require many persons going though the code, but the persons going though the code will most likely go over the code that they consider important.

Simplicity for security is critical in a program that represents a currency.

I have a lot more trust in Bitcoins than I do with any bank, banks change their policy all the time, it is nice that Bitcoins is very stable in this regards.

We should always compare the Bitcoin with good things, paypal is terrible we should never compare bitcoin with paypal, banks are bad.

I have a web site www.vpn3000.com, that provides VPN and VOIP services.

For VOIP I am using a2billing, however it does not have support for a bitcoin payment system, and it is better to have things automated, I have decided  to completely dump paypal and improve and automate everything using bitcoins.

Here is my idea, under a2billing there is the concept of vouchers, a voucher is basically a large number like a pin that represents a certain amount of money, the voucher concept is already integrated in a2billing.

I am thinking of setting up a site with a billing cart separate from a2billing to sell this vouchers, using bitcoins as the payment system.
The voucher which is a numer is like a pin, it does not require physical shipping, but it is important that this number does not get seen until after the payment has been made, it is like a pin number representing credit in dollars, so you pay for it in bitcoins, the voucher gets delivered either by email or directly at the site, and then using the voucher you can add credit in a2billing to your voip account.

Any recommendations on the software that would be good for something like this:
There is a list of shopping cart modules at:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Shopping_Cart_Interfaces

But most shopping carts are designed to sell physical goods, in my case I intend to sell vouchers which are just numbers representing dollars, but making the sale in bitcoins.

If you know of a good open source package for doing this please let me know,  I think in the page under shopping cart interfaces there is probably software that is good for this purpose, if you are familiar and know if a package that will work for this purpose please let me know, also if you know what does not work also let me know, that way I concentrate on the packages that could work for this purpose.

Bruce, that might be a good idea.
But check if the timing is right, for the last 2 months the bitcoin has been under heavy attack by the bad press, press that lies and does not say the truth.
But a TV add  maybe very costly, I have no idea how much a tv commercial could cost, but if it raises money that money could be spent on open source projects for the bitcoin that could be great.
Something that is important at present is securing the wallet using encryption since the average user uses windows and it is not technical.
I think before making massive publicity we should make the bitcoit idiot proof, something that would be needed is to secure the wallet somehow.
The technical person already uses bitcoin or will very soon, it is the non tech person where the tv add will be great, but for the non tech person bitcoin has to be extremely easy to use and secure by default, the average person has a pc full of viruses and under that environment the wallet has to be secure not an easy task. The tech person is safe he/she runs linux and probably already using bitcoin.

So I think a TV commercial would be great for the bitcoin, but the proper timing for it has to be studied with great detail, I think it might be a little too early now,  if it is too early it could cause the bitcoin to skyrocket again to later come down in price, if the timing is done right once a significant portion of the population knows about bitcoin, it will cause the price to skyrocket but stay up, which is better.

Something good about the TV add if it gets a lot of people to use bitcoin, it will be harder for legislators in USA and other countries to pass laws against bitcoins, and if bitcoins get very popular maybe we could have laws protecting the bitcoin.

Bruce you are doing a great job on the bitcoinshow, congratulations.

This is a clear example of low quality press, pcworld which is supposed to be a technical magazine proves that it is not, it tries to create news that sell at the expense of lying, most low tech readers will believe the article.

There is no such thing as a fake bitcoin, a counterfit bitcoin does not exist, the only way a counterfeit could exist is if someone discovered a flaw in the bitcoin algorithm and up to present time it has not happened, and it is not likely that it will happen since bitcoin has a few years in existance and it is open source.


So to make things clear there are no phony or fake bitcoins, if you have a bitcoin it is the real thing.

What happens is that the database of a bitcoin exchange got compromised, and a thief stole bitcoins, the bitcoins that the thief stole were the real thing, however it appears that he altered the entry on the database for more bitcoins, that does mean a bitcoin  can be fake, since in the wallet is where the bitcoins are actually stored and those are real.

It is just bad press, since the average person will think bitcoins can be fake, when in reality they can not.
The average person will think that the security of the bitcoin protocol has been compromised when in reality it is strong as ever, the only thing that was compromised was the security of the exchange and that has been fixed and improved.

For example if someone writes a check without funds no one in their right mind will say that the dollar has been hacked and it is faked, only the entry in the checkbook is fake not the dollar, same with bitcoin, if a microsoft virus steals your bitcoins it is not the bitcoin protocol that is insecure it is your windows pc.

The article mentions  "the price of the online currency crashed, creating a buying frenzy", not true it was a hacker selling massive amounts of bitcoins and therefore bought the price down at the exchange, the price of bitcoin as a whole remained stabled at other exchanges at around 15 to 17 dollars, the buying frenzy was created when the hacker sold massive amounts of bitcoins, but it was only at the exchange, and it was because of a hacked account. The bitcoin currency never crashed, saying otherwise is misleading.

It is well known that a thief will sell what he/she steals below market price after all it costed him/her 0.

People do not say the dollar crashed because a bank got robbed, why create this nonsence with bitcoin, I got a feeling that the bitcoin got past the step where it was being ignored, now it is being attacked and using low quality press for that, after the bitcoin has a large percent of the market it will no longer be atacked, the same persons that talk bad about bitcoin, they will be saying that they new all along the bitcoin was going to be a great thing.

I used to be a cryptographer, and any good cryptographer will tell you the same thing there are no fake bitcoins. Someone can write an entry in a database saying they have 30 million bitcoins or on a pice of paper, so what those are not bitcoins, in the case of the dollar in can be countefeit, but countefeit for most people means something that looks like the real thing but it is not, not an entry on a database or something very different like the liberty dollar.

When I say the bitcoin can not be fake or phony I am talking in terms of computer science, math, and cryptography, under the law anything is possible some day some legislator could by definition define the bitcoin as counterfeit money, but at the same time on some other country it could be defined as legal tender money, so under the law anything is possible, but not under math, computer science, and cryptography which are sciences clearly and well defined.

By law the liberty dollar is counterfeit money, but using math it is not, the weights are different, the metals are different, a simple computer program or even a 3 years old could clearly see the difference between a quarter and a liberty dollar, but the real reason it was that it was not convenient to the government to have a competing currency.

The enemy of the bitcoins are the bankers, the bad press, and ironically the government.

The good news, once bitcoins survives the period of attacks by bankers, the bad press, and some governments, it will then be highly recognized by everyone, then the banks, the bad press, and the governments will be saying good things about the bitcoin, and its value will skyrocket by then, we will then speak of the milibitcoin.

For those of us that believe in the strength of the bitcoin we will be rewarded later, just like the early adopters have been rewarded already.