Squidnet (TimothyA) - is he to be trusted?

[hanz]

In the past year, I used Squidnet.org as a pool for mining ltc and btc. It was suddenly down and has not come up since. I had about 5 bitcoins in it. I got no email or other notice from TimothyA. When contacting him on IRC, he told some story about how his very expensive hosting provider ($3000 for a couple of months or so) corrupted (in his words "fucked up") his database. That hosting the site would be so expensive seems unlikely and would point to a scam but well... I trust people unless there are reasons not to.

You can find the conversation here:
http://pastebin.com/hb5vdK0q

According to TimotyA a new site would appear (ultimacoin.com). I registered there (the site is quite broken but you can register), but I haven't gotten my bitcoins back.
Since October 5 (when I registered on www.ultimacoin.com), I have not heard a thing from him. It doesn't seem like TimothyA is doing a lot of effort in returning the bitcoins.

Does anyone know what the current status is? Is TimothyA to be trusted (in other words, was it bad luck and is he really trying to return the bitcoins) or is his story full of bullshit and has he run off with the money? Thanks.

[Foxpup]

No.

<realhanz> but you did not have an online backup somewhere else?
<TimothyA> the backup was with the same hosting provider in a different datacenter...
<TimothyA> three different online backups
<TimothyA> all wrecked at the same time

Three online backups? All hosted by the same cloud service that's hosting the original files?!? And no offline backup? TimothyA is either a scammer trying to bullshit you or else completely fucking retarded. Nobody's that stupid. And if they are, you certainly shouldn't trust them with your money.

[BCB]

Don't you know that's the GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card of BITCOINLANDIA

mybitcoin.com used it
bitcoinica.com used it
interSCAMgo Consultancy used it
Pirate used it
GLBSE used it.

(and that guy from Poland(?) used it but I think he was legit)

loose all the data and it never existed!

bye bye 

[hanz]

It is sad and also bewildering to see that some people go through all the trouble to set up a service (bitcoin pool), run it for a while, and run off with maybe 1000 BTC or so. It's also stupid. If he's deliberately done this, his chance of doing business again is gone.

In my case it's just 5 BTC, maybe there are people with greater losses.

But... who could have said that at the time? Of course, with hindsight maybe one could have expected it. Every person that can get their hands on someone else's money can run away with it. But why run this service for several months, and then pull the plug?

There is no way one can trade without trust.
Is BTC-E a scam? Is MtGox?
If all of these businesses are building trust in order to run off with a lot of money, how can one do business?
How will BTC ever be trusted?

Yes, I know, using different sites/services, spreading risks, etc. But if you to make some money, e.g. with trading, you need more than a few BTC.

Still, I think there is a chance that TimothyA did not plan this, and that he will return what he can retrieve:

- Some of his sites are still running
- He could be contacted for a long time after the crash
- I find no hits "TimothyA scammer"

[Foxpup]

Still, I think there is a chance that TimothyA did not plan this, and that he will return what he can retrieve:

There is a chance. But if he is telling the truth, then he has admitted to an astounding level of incompetence that is simply inexcusable when handling other people's money. Whether he returns your money or not, you should never trust him with your money ever again.

[torDefrance]

I cant post in the marketplace but I'm looking for someone to trade Dwolla USD for bitcoins...let me know!

[hanz]

(...) Whether he returns your money or not, you should never trust him with your money ever again.

That would be obvious. I just want my money back.
And he knows that, of course.

[hanz]

He has contacted me and will send the BTC back. So he is definitely not a scam.

Maybe someone with a lot of bad luck. If he gets his act together, I would give him a second chance.

[TimothyA]

Still, I think there is a chance that TimothyA did not plan this, and that he will return what he can retrieve:

There is a chance. But if he is telling the truth, then he has admitted to an astounding level of incompetence that is simply inexcusable when handling other people's money. Whether he returns your money or not, you should never trust him with your money ever again.

Yes, complete and utter incompetence by paying people coins that upstream pools decided to run with, and giving bonuses, while not even being able to recuperate any of the hosting costs from the fees and donations from miners on squidnet. I didn't have much of a choice other than to stick with this provider until the very end because the costs were split between between me and my partner. With me doing the developing and maintenance and support and him handling the hosting.

But regardless of the provider utterly destroying the neccesary data, I did give several weeks/months notice to withdraw whatever you had with squidnet as I already suspected that dediserve would screw up with their announced maintenance and I was already planning on packing up everything and end it due to the operation costs... I just did not expect for them to screw up *this* big.

As for keeping several online and offline backups at the datacenters; they were on different hardware in different datacenters. Who would EVER expect for *all* of them fail as catastrophically as it did? All I had was an older offline backup on my local harddisk; A harddisk which also decided to go "FU!" in my face so even that backup is semi-corrupt, and inaccurate, after attempting to recover it.

As for what was lost: Not anywhere near 1000 BTC. Try something more around 60BTC... and that number includes the donations/fees of the entire running time of the pool which were not taken out. So you would probably looking at about 30-40BTC sitting in limbo as I do not have any of the addresses of any of the users anymore, if they have not already moved on and are using a different wallet by now.

And as for entrusting me with your money ever again; That will probably never have to happen again as I am sick and tired of putting up with false accusations and concentrated efforts of discouraging me of developing anything bitcoin-related again for the foreseeable future.

TL;DR; I am a scammer that ran off with a massive negative amount of money.


And for Foxpup's earlier messages: you are aware there are a couple of popular BTC pools and services right now that do not keep recent backups and are only operating on a single server instead of having several redundant online servers in different locations of the world like I did while being able to afford them, right? If you call me incompetent, than what would you call these people? These same people also tend to store your passwords in md5 without a salt... *shiver*

[hanz]

TimothyA returned 5BTC and 100 LTC, although the records in his db do not corroborate my claim of 5 BTC.
I cannot prove what amount I had, but I recall it was (in total) around 5 BTC. Anyway, he has returned them all, and a bit more too.

So I can only say "thumbs up" for TimotyA!

His only fault was - as it seems - to trust a hosting provider (and their backups) which did not live up to the expectations.

I think it is always best not to rely on a single backup provider or system for important data. (I advise people not to use exclusively an online backup provider for instance, always a combo of a local and online back-up.)

Anyway, it seems fair to say that there are still people who can be trusted!

[BCB]

If all this newbie talk is true, I'm glad you guys and TimothyA are working this out.

[hanz]

Well, I just posted this here because I did not have access to the main forum. (I did not find any recent info on the forum or on the internet about this issue btw.)

It's all true.

[Foxpup]

My apologies for not applying Hanlon's razor to the situation. We get a lot of scammers here, as you know.

But regardless of the provider utterly destroying the neccesary data, I did give several weeks/months notice to withdraw whatever you had with squidnet as I already suspected that dediserve would screw up with their announced maintenance and I was already planning on packing up everything and end it due to the operation costs... I just did not expect for them to screw up *this* big.

As for keeping several online and offline backups at the datacenters; they were on different hardware in different datacenters. Who would EVER expect for *all* of them fail as catastrophically as it did? All I had was an older offline backup on my local harddisk; A harddisk which also decided to go "FU!" in my face so even that backup is semi-corrupt, and inaccurate, after attempting to recover it.

So, you suspected they would screw up, and you still trusted them with your only recent backups? (And no, it is not unexpected that *all* of them would fail at the same time for the same reason - I  really can't believe you didn't see this coming.) And by the sounds of it, you didn't even check that your single older backup was still working until it too late? That's just hopeless. Hard drives are cheap. Not having a working backup is expensive. It's a no-brainer. But some people have to learn things the hard way.

And for Foxpup's earlier messages: you are aware there are a couple of popular BTC pools and services right now that do not keep recent backups and are only operating on a single server instead of having several redundant online servers in different locations of the world like I did while being able to afford them, right? If you call me incompetent, than what would you call these people? These same people also tend to store your passwords in md5 without a salt... *shiver*

I call these people "utterly moronic". Stupidity and gross negligence is par for the course in Bitcoinland. That's no excuse. Well, I hope you've learnt something from this incident.