Possible claims process for GLBSE assets.

[stochastic]

I believe I might have a possible solution for asset issuers for claim processing since it looks doubtful every passing day that Nefario is seriously going to send out the asset information.

I was looking through my GLBSE account history as downloaded from GLBSE in csv format and I noticed that there is the bitcoin address for withdraw and deposits.  This information is invaluable as it can be checked against the blockchain for confirmation.  Also the asset history has a list of all purchases and sales of assets and we have a history of all the orders.

This might be time consuming, especially for the large issuers, but it is a potential way that assets can be claimed.

Claimants can send their claims to the asset issuers with the account history that was downloaded from GLBSE and the total number of shares they remember owning before GLBSE shut down.  The claims team can then take that information and verify the claim by looking at the bitcoin addresses for withdraws and deposits and identifying that they actually occurred in the blockchain.  Then the claim team can check to see if the history adds up.  For example, if a claimant says they owned 1000 shares of some asset yet only deposited 2 bitcoins in their GLBSE account, then it would be possible to identify that this claim is false.

Also, once the bitcoin transfers and balance have been verified, those past bitcoin address can be confirmed to be controlled by the claimant.

Bitcoin address are listed in the Deposit and Withdraw of the csv file.  If you look at the address that is listed from the deposit it will list the GLBSE bitcoin address, but the bitcoin address listed in the withdraw will the the claimant's bitcoin address.

I think this might work, but I would like input from others on potential ways fraudulent claims could be submitted and whether it could bypass a check as I proposed above.

[Deprived]

It seems like a decent starting point - but what's to stop someone either:

1.  Adding lines into the .csv file,
2.  Deleting sales from the .csv file - so the record of them buying shares is still there, but not the record of them subsequently selling them.

Haven't got a GLBSE .csv file on this computer, but last time I looked at one, I don't remember it being GPG signed or anything to allow guaranteeing its unmodified nature.  It would deter casual scammers - but actually could be used to give credibility to slightly more sophisticated ones.

One thing it DOES do (in its favour) is link shares claimed to specific transactions - so anyone inserting lines would run the risk of claiming a sale to someone else was to them and having it contradicted by the genuine buyer submitting a claim on the same transaction.

[MPOE-PR]

Haven't got a GLBSE .csv file on this computer, but last time I looked at one, I don't remember it being GPG signed or anything to allow guaranteeing its unmodified nature.  It would deter casual scammers - but actually could be used to give credibility to slightly more sophisticated ones.

Bolded for convenience.

[Kluge]

I recall someone mentioning they were still able to retrieve their account history .csv from GLBSE. Does someone remember the link to do so?

[stochastic]

It seems like a decent starting point - but what's to stop someone either:

1.  Adding lines into the .csv file,
2.  Deleting sales from the .csv file - so the record of them buying shares is still there, but not the record of them subsequently selling them.

Haven't got a GLBSE .csv file on this computer, but last time I looked at one, I don't remember it being GPG signed or anything to allow guaranteeing its unmodified nature.  It would deter casual scammers - but actually could be used to give credibility to slightly more sophisticated ones.

One thing it DOES do (in its favour) is link shares claimed to specific transactions - so anyone inserting lines would run the risk of claiming a sale to someone else was to them and having it contradicted by the genuine buyer submitting a claim on the same transaction.

My idea to prevent the addition of fraudulent buys and sell history in the file would be to compare the csv file with the GLBSE history and also against other claimants.  If there are was only one purchase at a given time yet two people are claiming that they bought the shares at that time point, then both of those claims would need to be considered suspect and evaluated further.

[Deprived]

It seems like a decent starting point - but what's to stop someone either:

1.  Adding lines into the .csv file,
2.  Deleting sales from the .csv file - so the record of them buying shares is still there, but not the record of them subsequently selling them.

Haven't got a GLBSE .csv file on this computer, but last time I looked at one, I don't remember it being GPG signed or anything to allow guaranteeing its unmodified nature.  It would deter casual scammers - but actually could be used to give credibility to slightly more sophisticated ones.

One thing it DOES do (in its favour) is link shares claimed to specific transactions - so anyone inserting lines would run the risk of claiming a sale to someone else was to them and having it contradicted by the genuine buyer submitting a claim on the same transaction.

My idea to prevent the addition of fraudulent buys and sell history in the file would be to compare the csv file with the GLBSE history and also against other claimants.  If there are was only one purchase at a given time yet two people are claiming that they bought the shares at that time point, then both of those claims would need to be considered suspect and evaluated further.

Yeah - mentioned that in my last paragraph.  The real weakness is that it allows people to delete just their sell line - and leave in their buy.  With the buy being genuine (so unlikely to be contested) it would give huge credibility to someone who had bought/sold shares but was now claiming to only have ever bought them.  All it can really show is that at some point they probably owned some shares - not that they still retained them when GLBSE closed down.

[stochastic]

It seems like a decent starting point - but what's to stop someone either:

1.  Adding lines into the .csv file,
2.  Deleting sales from the .csv file - so the record of them buying shares is still there, but not the record of them subsequently selling them.

Haven't got a GLBSE .csv file on this computer, but last time I looked at one, I don't remember it being GPG signed or anything to allow guaranteeing its unmodified nature.  It would deter casual scammers - but actually could be used to give credibility to slightly more sophisticated ones.

One thing it DOES do (in its favour) is link shares claimed to specific transactions - so anyone inserting lines would run the risk of claiming a sale to someone else was to them and having it contradicted by the genuine buyer submitting a claim on the same transaction.

My idea to prevent the addition of fraudulent buys and sell history in the file would be to compare the csv file with the GLBSE history and also against other claimants.  If there are was only one purchase at a given time yet two people are claiming that they bought the shares at that time point, then both of those claims would need to be considered suspect and evaluated further.

Yeah - mentioned that in my last paragraph.  The real weakness is that it allows people to delete just their sell line - and leave in their buy.  With the buy being genuine (so unlikely to be contested) it would give huge credibility to someone who had bought/sold shares but was now claiming to only have ever bought them.  All it can really show is that at some point they probably owned some shares - not that they still retained them when GLBSE closed down.

That is a good point that I did not think of.  People would have to remove any withdraws from the csv file as well (if they made any withdraws) as they can't remove bitcoins that they aren't suppose to have.

[burnside]

I recall someone mentioning they were still able to retrieve their account history .csv from GLBSE. Does someone remember the link to do so?

+1

Can someone who downloaded the CSV please go through their browser history and provide the link?

If nefario somehow left this functionality up and working, then we may have a way to pull down claims and verify them for people willing to give up their GLBSE login/password info to a trusted 3rd party.  Grab one of the people that are trusted to do escrow and have them download and validate the CSV's...

[stochastic]

I recall someone mentioning they were still able to retrieve their account history .csv from GLBSE. Does someone remember the link to do so?

+1

Can someone who downloaded the CSV please go through their browser history and provide the link?

If nefario somehow left this functionality up and working, then we may have a way to pull down claims and verify them for people willing to give up their GLBSE login/password info to a trusted 3rd party.  Grab one of the people that are trusted to do escrow and have them download and validate the CSV's...

This is a great idea, but I have not heard of it being up.  I know a lot of people wanted to get their history but could not.

[exahash]

I recall someone mentioning they were still able to retrieve their account history .csv from GLBSE. Does someone remember the link to do so?

+1

Can someone who downloaded the CSV please go through their browser history and provide the link?

If nefario somehow left this functionality up and working, then we may have a way to pull down claims and verify them for people willing to give up their GLBSE login/password info to a trusted 3rd party.  Grab one of the people that are trusted to do escrow and have them download and validate the CSV's...

This is a great idea, but I have not heard of it being up.  I know a lot of people wanted to get their history but could not.

I wrote a perl script to download my activity.  I can confirm that the history link does not work right now (I get a 404).  The url I was using was https://www.glbse.com/porfolio/csv  -- porfolio was missing the t on purpose.

I have a log of trades scraped from twitter, in case we need corroboration of your csv.  I have a copy of the markets page from 10/4 at 9:25 AM Eastern.  Not sure what time GLBSE stopped operating, but I suspect that was within a few hours.

[Kluge]

I recall someone mentioning they were still able to retrieve their account history .csv from GLBSE. Does someone remember the link to do so?

+1

Can someone who downloaded the CSV please go through their browser history and provide the link?

If nefario somehow left this functionality up and working, then we may have a way to pull down claims and verify them for people willing to give up their GLBSE login/password info to a trusted 3rd party.  Grab one of the people that are trusted to do escrow and have them download and validate the CSV's...

This is a great idea, but I have not heard of it being up.  I know a lot of people wanted to get their history but could not.

I wrote a perl script to download my activity.  I can confirm that the history link does not work right now (I get a 404).  The url I was using was https://www.glbse.com/porfolio/csv  -- porfolio was missing the t on purpose.

Damn. That would've been almost as good as getting the info released from Nef.

[burnside]

I wonder why Nef pulled that feature.

He wouldn't even have needed to code up anything new if he'd just left that in.  =/

[Deprived]

I wonder why Nef pulled that feature.

He wouldn't even have needed to code up anything new if he'd just left that in.  =/

If he was trying to do things in a sensible fashion he'd just have cleared order book and prevented adding new orders/making cash transfers/paying dividends.  Then everyone could have withdrawn their funds at leisure and sorted things with asset-issuers with no risk of idiocy like returning funds twice.  That would have taken all of 5-10 minutes of his time and not had any problems (I didn't do any transfers of shares on GLBSE but assume it showed who sent them - so asset issuers could just have requested shares to be returned then reissued them on a different platform).

But where would the fun, drama and chance to excel in demonstrating incompetence have been had he done that?  This way he gets to drag his 15 minutes of fame on for a few months and gets to make sure he has absolutely zero chance of ever having any credibility in the BTC community again.  Can only assume he wanted to make sure he burned his bridges - as, had he so chosen, he could most definitely have left them intact with far less effort.

[2GOOD]

Something has to be done.. Personally I have several csv exports for my orders and a screenshot of my portfolio page just after the site was shut down. The problem is that we must convince the share issuers to accept such claims, since now gigavps does not. Another point will be maybe a warning for future scams that if/when Nefario release that information any account with scam attempt will be closed or something like this. Only the open buy/sell orders will be a issue.

[MPOE-PR]

If he was trying to do things in a sensible fashion he'd just have cleared order book and prevented adding new orders/making cash transfers/paying dividends.  Then everyone could have withdrawn their funds at leisure and sorted things with asset-issuers with no risk of idiocy like returning funds twice.  That would have taken all of 5-10 minutes of his time and not had any problems (I didn't do any transfers of shares on GLBSE but assume it showed who sent them - so asset issuers could just have requested shares to be returned then reissued them on a different platform).

But where would the fun, drama and chance to excel in demonstrating incompetence have been had he done that?  This way he gets to drag his 15 minutes of fame on for a few months and gets to make sure he has absolutely zero chance of ever having any credibility in the BTC community again.  Can only assume he wanted to make sure he burned his bridges - as, had he so chosen, he could most definitely have left them intact with far less effort.

Alternatively people could smarten up and not use any securities exchange that doth not sign receipts.

[stochastic]

Something has to be done.. Personally I have several csv exports for my orders and a screenshot of my portfolio page just after the site was shut down. The problem is that we must convince the share issuers to accept such claims, since now gigavps does not. Another point will be maybe a warning for future scams that if/when Nefario release that information any account with scam attempt will be closed or something like this. Only the open buy/sell orders will be a issue.

I am sure the large asset issuers are only concerned with the process as this process for claims may take a very long time to process in their case.

I image the initial check could be automated.

1. import the account history csv
2. check that the funds are in balance (i.e. there is no negative btc balance in the account history).
3. confirm the bitcoin address in the account history files

I don't think it is unnecessary to wait 3 months from the time GLBSE shut down to expect to have the asset information, but there is not a reason that asset issuers might start collecting the claim information.  Then after that 3 months give up on Nefario and do this process.

[HorseRider]

I wonder why Nef pulled that feature.

He wouldn't even have needed to code up anything new if he'd just left that in.  =/

It is very likely that Nefario is trying to modify the share number balance and steal some shares and funds from the users. Or he had already decided not to return the asset info and money at the very beginning.

[stochastic]

For the time being lets assume James McCarthy will never send the asset information.

Does anyone else have any ideas for a claims process?

[memvola]

For the time being lets assume James McCarthy will never send the asset information.

Does anyone else have any ideas for a claims process?

If we had enough of these CSV files, we could devise some heuristic to vet claims by partially reconstructing the actual trade history, which would be a deterrent for false claims. With enough addresses, the money flow within GLBSE could also be clarified and potential deposit/withdrawals verified that way. There is also this possibility that the database will be leaked, at least an early snapshot. All these combined with a threat to publicize false claimants would help a lot with a claim process.

friedcat did the best by collecting the information while there was still a chance that Nefario would release the db, and the claims process went really well. However, since the deterrents do lose effect, shareholders need to pressure issuers to start collecting claims as soon as possible, and in the meantime we need to figure out new ways to invalidate false claims.

[MPOE-PR]

For the time being lets assume James McCarthy will never send the asset information.

Does anyone else have any ideas for a claims process?

None that could work.

Yet another one of those instances where people will have to mark a loss as a loss and move on.

heuristic to vet claims by partially reconstructing the actual trade history

None of this is actual verification however. In practice it will simply function as follows: the asset issuers find themselves with an immoral windfall (the value of their shares which were annulled by GLBSE, thus stealing from all the shareholders) and somehow try to ease their conscience by splitting this windfall with their friends. While this is quite human behavior, any claim that it increases the overall fairness is pure bollocks. It may reduce the overall complaining, but I think that's unlikely.