For those with money stuck in Bitfunder/WeExchange:

You may find you can do a deal with someone line Olaf at Coinbase or similar for sponsorship or holding of the party fund.

When BTC > $500 consistently then you'll likely find people more prepared to go for it but we're a long way off even that. Today. Might be there in a few weeks, lol (probably be back at $100).

Well for a start it is a local bank which is offering people a way to store money which, in theory, is more secure for customers.

In Cyprus they just want people to bank again. Neo may be a somewhat specialist bank, but it's also still a bank. People depositing happily in neo would help regain overall confidence. Neo themselves will be hard pushed to get customers given what's happening, but business and rich individuals really do need a bank for their deposits and transactions.

A successful neo will boost business and perhaps innovation.

I'd suggest that the current situation, and I didn't know it was getting worse, is a boon for neo. Cyprus is desperate.

Danny, has the commission president given any indication how he sees neo versus existing banks?

Too early to take money IMHO. You want to be much closer to the price and have firmer plans really.

I still reckon Berlin is a better place. Much better scene, nicer to visit (some people will hang around a few days for sure), real bitcoin place too and I think that's important. I would have thought bitcoiners would be happy to do the extra bit of travelling / maybe something could be arranged.

In the past I know even low budget football fans have chartered planes to travel those sort of distances, else buses or trains are options?

For anyone going all that way, you really ought to experience Berlin and Berliners. Frankfurt is, erm, not the same.

Also: how about a moon theme to one of the rooms, or to the whole bash?! And perhaps a chikkun for a few ltc peeps, lol.

On irc yesterday Ukyo explained the problem with bitcoind. Essentially, for some reason he can't get it to process anything, not even manually. He's busy trying to hack around it or find a solution. He thinks bitcoind just can't handle the data size. I haven't worked with bitcoind directly so can't really offer an opinion.

It's only once this solution is found that any of our problems can be fixed as he can't even do manual withdraws over the command line. So all of us asking for unlocks, manual transfers, etc aren't going to get anywhere until he sorts this out.

So it'll be fixed when it's fixed, which one would hope would be today 'everyday'.

I could be wrong of course but I think he's being totally genuine about this and is suffering badly as a result. So let's just give him a bit of room. He knows it's fucked up, that it shouldn't have got like this.

I was talking generally, not talking about ActiveMining, not least because so much of that has been addressed already so I'm not arsed to get into an argument with someone not interested in actual discussion. My god if you wanted to pick ActiveMining apart you sure do go about it completely wrong. You only pick on the irrelevant points then crow about them as if they are the be all and end all - just happy to be right and saying everyone should have listened.

If ActM fails then it is not going to be because of all this share bullshit or Belize or the eASIC chips themselves being worthless. It'll fail because of business failures if it's going to, and that should be more than apparent by now. All the facts one needs to identify the weak points are out there and you conspicuously and continually fail to pick up on them. If I were writing a takedown of Active Mining or IceDrill, I'd not mention any of your points at all.

You're intellectually lazy and an attention seeker (hence this is my last reply).

You throw the words scammer and illegal around as if that makes you right. It doesn't, although other lazy thinkers may not see that.

Exchanges and most share issuers are not scammers except by your lazy definition. They may be flawed in what they're doing but that doesn't make them a scammer nor do it make what they do illegal. Having done a great deal of due diligence, a lot more than you I'd wager, it's a lot more complicated than that.

What's clear from your last post is that you have a some weird politics going on there. It really doesn't matter to you if people are scamming or not, if they make money or not, if it's legal or not. Forex trading, silver, gold, stock, bonds - all legal and all full of regular traders alongside people doing grey area or illegal things for a buck. No different. You probably feel the same about them. Adding nothing to anything in the world perhaps, just shifting money about.

Fair enough. Who am I to argue with the politics of that - though I wonder how your real life works - but I will never agree with anyone enjoying people's misfortune. It's just plain old nasty. But maybe that's just me being all soft and humanist and actually giving a shit.

There's a difference between greed and people trading or trying - successfully or otherwise - to start new businesses in a slightly bizarre new area. Unless you don't believe in capitalism at all.

While there are a few people who are crazy right wing libertarians, the vast majority of people are not. Whilst there are people out to defraud (Labcoin?), most are not.

Ice, your post doesn't even make sense as usual and is full of lies & made up rubbish.

Funny that both of you are anonymous.

Having had to make more than one company/individual to court, I can tell you this simply isn't true. It all depends upon the situation.

If the target is in Europe, is identified 100%, and has assets - then it's worth pushing. Going all the way to court will get expensive though so ideally you want an agreement long before that happens.

Getting lawyers involved changes things very quickly, particularly if fraud is involved. The problem with fraud is proving it.

If I had been part of this, I'd make it my mission to get this guy in front of a judge/returning some funds and losing money wouldn't be an issue (subject to a limit of course). I'd not let go for moral reasons because fraudsters rely on people not bothering with them, then they do it again.

I love being quoted by crumbs. I didn't say anything I've not already said but thanks for quoting me and missing the bit about about him being an ideas guy who did a good thing with eASIC.

I'm intrigued at the way you gloat at real people with real problems. Not one ounce of empathy, not one ounce of credit given, and never a positive word to say. One wonders what your own life must be like. Very sad I assume, from the amount of time you spend on this forum shitting on everything and everyone. I can only presume you spent a lot of time being bullied as a kid and decided to take it out on everyone else. That or you're an egotistical twat. It only frustrates me because you're clearly also intelligent.

Tat, that's just basic mismanagement. You can't use that as an example.

I obviously dealt with Ken directly and whilst I wish him all the best, my view on his business skills could not be written here because children may be reading. He is more of an ideas guy IMHO (setting up the eASIC deal was good, the handling and follow through... less so).

Unstuck is not the same as successfully withdrawn. I have unstuck coins but it still isn't possible to withdraw them.

At least for non US citizens (if not everyone) given that this was done voluntarily by ukyo. Still, WeExchange needs fixing before anything else who would have any confidence in getting BTC out.

I don't think it would at all. It may make some financial news in a few places and it may be mentioned when Bitcoin is discussed heavily, but that's it. I think you (and others) see this as bigger than it is. At this point anyway.

It's a far bigger deal for regulators than it is for anyone else. It will only really make the news radar in Cyprus unless it's very successful vs other banks.


If it got so big as to have tens of thousands of customers and then it failed, it's either fraud, gross mismanagement or Bitcoin itself failed.


I'm afraid I think that will happen anyway. Tax is tax and it's going to get you one way or another. Quite rightly too.

If you're talking about the gov taking your money when big banks take a haircut, well that's where Neobee gets interesting but I've already said that I'm unsure if they could really stop that unless only one sig was needed to withdraw money. Even then, that transaction is traceable and you'll get the bill.

I said earlier that there is a real temptation to make everything BTC amazing or awful or the most important thing or the currency that kills fiat or it's the thing that banks are shit scared of. It isn't all that at all. It's a new type of financial instrument looking to find its place.

It is not the danger to the entire world of finance some of you guys think it is, only to certain companies. It can be made into a real positive for stable banks in the West. Bitcoin has some big limitations which are also its strengths. In fact it could be real boon to a lot of the financial industry and international business. It's much more of an issue for regulators, I accept that.

IRC earlier today:

There are almost certainly rather serious legal reasons why he cannot do that and why this has happened in the first place.

Edit: From IRC is sounds more like he's had enough/can't afford to continue because of legal costs.

God yes! I meant a few weeks for any major changes

For now I hope we can all move money like.. well today would be nice.

Nope, didn't miss that. And wasn't surprised to see it. Ukyo said there would be an announcement later today after which he would have more time to deal with weexchange issues. From the sound of it, weexchange will be sorted out properly in a few weeks but for now we just need the wallet to work again.

Ukyo has said that this is not the case and that it really is technical issues. Given today's developments and that I caught him for a private chat on IRC earlier, I think this is probably true enough.

To be fair I don't think that's true either. Neobee is another interesting experiment with Bitcoin but it's failure is unlikely to change anything. Success would but failure would really be down to why it failed. Lack of customers is not going to affect Bitcoin at all while losing customer money would be different but still of limited damage to the ecosystem in my view. Nothing like this is going to set it back years.

Bitcoin actually has 2-5 years of technical and regulatory changes/improvements before it's a world player in anything other than the commodity market in my view. An exception may be banking in selected countries, however - and this is where Neobee comes in. That is unless a Facebook or PayPal jump on board.

It's common for people to over emphasise aspects of Bitcoin or Bitcoin businesses. It's really very incomplete as a system, brilliant though it is. No one company is going to break Bitcoin at this point (Mt Gox have tried, twice!), although a successful one could make it.

Tat: crumbs is here now. All we need is Ice and the downhill slope will be complete. Why these guys haven't been banned for making the securities section near useless I can't fathom. It's a forum admin fail when a tiny number of trolls are allowed to repeatedly trash threads.