Summary of the events last night - And an apology.

[BitcoinStore]

Hello,

As some of you may have noticed, there was a bit of a mess on the forums last night. In a thread last night, we released customer information in attempts to publicly shame a scammer.

The community has been outraged at this invasion of privacy.

On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize.

First, to Nikolaos (Nethead), I apologize for the fumbled, and crude, handling of this situation. Everyone involved at the Bitcoin Store is a hardcore believer in Bitcoin. What some of us saw, true or not, is that someone was attempting to harm his store, and because the store's sole purpose is to promote Bitcoin, we saw this harm as an assault on Bitcoin itself. Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry.

I was reading through the threads and noticed this:

As soon as this ends i give up the bitcoin idea entirely

All my bitcoins will be given away
I will start a thread sometime later today or max tommorow, This right here got me

Please don't leave Nethead. Scammer or not, Bitcoin needs people like you just as much as Bitcoin needs businesses like ours. We're sorry for this mess up, don't let it spoil Bitcoin for you.

Second, to the rest of the Bitcoin community. Today you got to see that everyone is indeed fallible. We apologize for these mistakes. You have trusted us with your business and today we failed to act in the utmost care required by that trust. I would say that everyone has their off days, but we're not going to make excuses. We screwed up, we'll work to make this right with everyone.

We have taken the following steps to stop this from ever occurring again:

• Blockchain.info admin privileges have been revoked for everyone except Ben who has hidden the secret phrase from the admin panel: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131608.msg1409489#msg1409489
• Customer information has been removed, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.msg1408898#msg1408898
• We are currently reviewing our privacy policy. What we did today was excessive. I do not want customers fearing the use of their private data.

Please reply with any further suggestions you have for us.

Thank you,
-Jon

[shad0wbitz]

Fuck off.... NEVER BUY on this store, or give your money to ANY project ROGER VER is involved with. These include:

BLOCKCHAIN.INFO
BITINSTANT LLC
MEMORY DEALERS
BITCOIN STORE

ROGER VER and the thugs at bitcoinstore decided it was a good idea to abuse their admin priviledge at blockchain.info (that he should have never had by the way) to exhort a customer of them for some change owed.

Here is the full thread on the extorsion. READ CAREFULLY:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.60

[mccorvic]

Fuck off.... NEVER BUY on this store, or give your money to ANY project ROGER VER is involved with. These include:

BLOCKCHAIN.INFO
BITINSTANT LLC
MEMORY DEALERS
BITCOIN STORE

ROGER VER and the thugs at bitcoinstore decided it was a good idea to abuse their admin priviledge at blockchain.info (that he should have never had by the way) to exhort a customer of them for some change owed.

Here is the full thread on the extorsion. READ CAREFULLY:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.60

I am taking this as a ringing endorsement btw.  People who work hard on creating the BTC economy, ROGER VER included, will be rewarded and their works live on.

Thieves, scammers, and nobodies will rage and cry in posts like yours.

[BitcoinStore]

Fuck off.... NEVER BUY on this store, or give your money to ANY project ROGER VER is involved with. These include:

BLOCKCHAIN.INFO
BITINSTANT LLC
MEMORY DEALERS
BITCOIN STORE

ROGER VER and the thugs at bitcoinstore decided it was a good idea to abuse their admin priviledge at blockchain.info (that he should have never had by the way) to exhort a customer of them for some change owed.

Here is the full thread on the extorsion. READ CAREFULLY:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.60

We're no thugs.

Roger used his admin privileges, which have been revoked. It was a mistake.

We're apologizing and want to work to make this sit right with the community.

[Jan]

Hello,

As some of you may have noticed, there was a bit of a mess on the forums last night. In a thread last night, we released customer information in attempts to publicly shame a scammer.

The community has been outraged at this invasion of privacy.

On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize.

First, to Nikolaos (Nethead), I apologize for the fumbled, and crude, handling of this situation. Everyone involved at the Bitcoin Store is a hardcore believer in Bitcoin. What some of us saw, true or not, is that someone was attempting to harm his store, and because the store's sole purpose is to promote Bitcoin, we saw this harm as an assault on Bitcoin itself. Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry.

I was reading through the threads and noticed this:

As soon as this ends i give up the bitcoin idea entirely

All my bitcoins will be given away
I will start a thread sometime later today or max tommorow, This right here got me

Please don't leave Nethead. Scammer or not, Bitcoin needs people like you just as much as Bitcoin needs businesses like ours. We're sorry for this mess up, don't let it spoil Bitcoin for you.

Second, to the rest of the Bitcoin community. Today you got to see that everyone is indeed fallible. We apologize for these mistakes. You have trusted us with your business and today we failed to act in the utmost care required by that trust. I would say that everyone has their off days, but we're not going to make excuses. We screwed up, we'll work to make this right with everyone.

We have taken the following steps to stop this from ever occurring again:

• Blockchain.info admin privileges have been revoked for everyone except Ben who has hidden the secret phrase from the admin panel: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131608.msg1409489#msg1409489
• Customer information has been removed, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.msg1408898#msg1408898
• We are currently reviewing our privacy policy. What we did today was excessive. I do not want customers fearing the use of their private data.

Please reply with any further suggestions you have for us.

Thank you,
-Jon

Thank you.

[caveden]

I was reading through the threads and noticed this:

As soon as this ends i give up the bitcoin idea entirely

All my bitcoins will be given away
I will start a thread sometime later today or max tommorow, This right here got me

Please don't leave Nethead. Scammer or not, Bitcoin needs people like you just as much as Bitcoin needs businesses like ours.

Oh, come on...

I was restraining myself from posting in this late drama since it was too much "storm in a glass of water" to my taste, but this abandon of self-respect here is not necessary.

No, Bitcoin does not need dishonest people. Actually, nothing does. Assuming the guy is really refusing to refund the mistaken transaction (what really seems to be the case), he's dishonest and we are better off if he just disappears.

It's okay and admirable to recognize your own mistakes. I just don't think they were that serious to justify all this drama... publicly posting the individual's personal details might have been unappropriated... But he shouldn't have lied and kept your money either. There were mistakes from both sides, but Roger's mistakes were certainly less serious, from a moral/ethical perspective at least.

You don't need to lower your head that much. Unless I'm wrong about something, that individual own more apologies to you that you own to him. You're falling at "troll baits" here and humiliating yourself.

[teste]

What is done, it's done. Just hope you learn with this mistake.
Long life to Bitcoin. We're all in the same boat

[BitcoinStore]

I was reading through the threads and noticed this:

As soon as this ends i give up the bitcoin idea entirely

All my bitcoins will be given away
I will start a thread sometime later today or max tommorow, This right here got me

Please don't leave Nethead. Scammer or not, Bitcoin needs people like you just as much as Bitcoin needs businesses like ours.

Oh, come on...

I was restraining myself from posting in this late drama since it was too much "storm in a glass of water" to my taste, but this abandon of self-respect here is not necessary.

No, Bitcoin does not need dishonest people. Actually, nothing does. Assuming the guy is really refusing to refund the mistaken transaction (what really seems to be the case), he's dishonest and we are better off if he just disappears.

It's okay and admirable to recognize your own mistakes. I just don't think they were that serious to justify all this drama... publicly posting the individual's personal details might have been unappropriated... But he shouldn't have lied and kept your money either. There were mistakes from both sides, but Roger's mistakes were certainly less serious, from a moral/ethical perspective at least.

You don't need to lower your head that much. Unless I'm wrong about something, that individual own more apologies to you that you own to him. You're falling at "troll baits" here and humiliating yourself.

Like I said, holding everything else aside, the point of this store is to promote Bitcoin and introduce more people both to Bitcoin itself, and the savings and benefits it can bring.

Dishonest or not, we should not be pushing anyone away from Bitcoin.

It was a mess from the start and admitting that our side was wrong is one of the few ways to move on.

I doubt Nethead will apologize. I don't know if he has to, in any case, we screwed up, and we're apologizing for that fact.

[Bitcoinin]

Great to see this response and look forward to seeing the more explicit privacy policy.

[DannyHamilton]

. . . On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize . . .
. . . Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry . . .

Thank you,
-Jon

Thank you.  Roger never should have abused his admin access as an employee at blockchain.info, but once he did and was called out on it, an immediate response like the one you just posted would have headed off a lot of the "uproar".

Roger's failure to acknowledge his own wrongdoing (as well as blockchain.info's failure to consider the possible conflict of interest in giving Roger admin access in the first place)  dragged this out far more than it ever needed to be.

Clearly NetHead was wrong in his decision not to return money that wasn't rightfully his.  I think most of us recognized this from the beginning, but a business is held to a high standard. We give the business our personal information and trust them to engage in honest and trustworthy transactions.  The fact that I can't trust some random guy named NetHead does not surprise or bother me. The fact that my trust has eroded in what was otherwise a great business does surprise and bother me.  I'm glad to hear that actions are being taken to address the situation, and I'm glad to see that you are not trying to claim that there was no wrongdoing on Roger's part.  This goes a long way toward rebuilding trust.  Unfortunately it is a lot easier to damage one's reputation than to rebuild it.

[Cryptoman]

You should treat the disclosure of personal information like capital punishment--to be reserved for only the greatest of offences and only when you are absolutely certain of the party's guilt.  There are several lessons the community can learn from this: 1) trust your personal information with no one, 2) use Tor all the time, and 3) remember that Bitcoin payments are irreversible and be ready to accept the consequences if you send a payment in error.

[wtfvanity]

I'd like to see the logged IP addresses at blockchain.info hashed with a secret key so that they aren't just stored plaintext in the databse, but could still be validated for locking by ip or password lookup.

[mccorvic]

The greatest part of this is that we have had a (relatively) quick and precise response to the situation once people got out of the heat of the moment.

I think we can all agree that paypal, ebay, or anything similar would have done the same.  I think one of the goals of BTC was to give power to the people and take it out of the hands of giant conglomerates.  This is an example of BTC's success.

[Bitcoinin]

You don't need to lower your head that much. Unless I'm wrong about something, that individual own more apologies to you that you own to him. You're falling at "troll baits" here and humiliating yourself.

No, Bitcoin doesn't need to have dishonest people as part of the community, but if the Bitcoin businesses want to promote Bitcoin then there needs to be professionalism, honesty, and trust - even when dealing with scammers.  This scammer wasn't even really a scammer or a troll - just some coward who didn't do the right thing and return the Bitcoins.  The problem with the original response is that it turned some dishonest Bitcoiner into an active agent against Bitcoin with a personal vendetta - which the Bitcoin community needs even less.

Even if the scammer doesn't deserve it, the apology is a classy thing to do and shows that the BitcoinStore is willing to make things right if they've done wrong - the kind of thing an online retail business should do.

[BitcoinStore]

. . . On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize . . .
. . . Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry . . .

Thank you,
-Jon

Thank you.  Roger never should have abused his admin access as an employee at blockchain.info, but once he did and was called out on it, an immediate response like the one you just posted would have headed off a lot of the "uproar".

Roger's failure to acknowledge his own wrongdoing (as well as blockchain.info's failure to consider the possible conflict of interest in giving Roger admin access in the first place)  dragged this out far more than it ever needed to be.

Clearly NetHead was wrong in his decision not to return money that wasn't rightfully his.  I think most of us recognized this from the beginning, but a business is held to a high standard. We give the business our personal information and trust them to engage in honest and trustworthy transactions.  The fact that I can't trust some random guy named NetHead does not surprise or bother me. The fact that my trust has eroded in what was otherwise a great business does surprise and bother me.  I'm glad to hear that actions are being taken to address the situation, and I'm glad to see that you are not trying to claim that there was no wrongdoing on Roger's part.  This goes a long way toward rebuilding trust.  Unfortunately it is a lot easier to damage one's reputation than to rebuild it.

Thank you for sounding your concerns in other threads as well as this post.

We all had some misjudgments this last day. I assure you, nothing of this sort will happen again under my watch. There is a LOT of inbreeding that goes on in Bitcoin companies, unfortunately due to the market size, it is inevitable. We've cut any conflict of interest that could arise from Blockchain access, so that issue is pretty much solved.

The bigger issue as you indeed pointed out is rebuilding our reputation in the eyes of the community. Hopefully we can reprove our trustworthiness this January as we publicly launch the store. I'm glad that we got this first hurdle out of the way though, every business is tried is some way, we've discovered some internal weaknesses that we're moving quickly to correct.

Thank you,
-Jon

[Freja]

With a name like Nikolaos I guess he's Greek. It's unbelievable how tight things are for regular people there right now. I feel so sorry for them, their entire country has been taken for a ride ever since WW2.

And somebody just puts a large sum on his account just like that. (didn't get how much it was) When he probably needs it the most. It's understandable that he got tempted. Sure he might have to explain that in heaven one day but for goodness sake this vendor should have been more careful and the naming and shaming was disgraceful regardless.

Well I'm a newbie and I cerainly will not be using blockchain.info
I see that Danny Hamilton who recommended it to me had second thoughts too.

[DannyHamilton]

. . .And somebody just puts a large sum on his account just like that. (didn't get how much it was) . . .

As best I recall, it was a bit more than 4 BTC (somewhere around £36.90)

. . . for goodness sake this vendor should have been more careful and the naming and shaming was disgraceful regardless . . .

If we are to believe Roger from MemoryDealers.com, an employee accidentally gave out the wrong address to another customer to receive payment.  That other customer
then sent payment to the address provided (which happened to be an address that was actually under the control of Nikolaos).

. . . I see that Danny Hamilton who recommended it to me had second thoughts too.

Blockchain.info has addressed the situation quickly and appropriately.  They were not the ones who did the naming and shaming (That was Roger from MemoryDealer.com who happened at that time to also be employed at blockchain.info).  blockchain.info removed his employee access to personal information as soon as the issue was pointed out to them.  Furthermore, no blockchain.info bitcoins were ever at risk in this event. At this point I do not see a reason to avoid using blockchain.info.

[BitcoinStore]

. . .And somebody just puts a large sum on his account just like that. (didn't get how much it was) . . .

As best I recall, it was a bit more than 4 BTC.

. . . for goodness sake this vendor should have been more careful and the naming and shaming was disgraceful regardless . . .

If we are to believe Roger from MemoryDealers.com, an employee accidentally gave out the wrong address to another customer to receive payment.  That other customer
then sent payment to the address provided (which happened to be an address that was actually under the control of Nikolaos).

. . . I see that Danny Hamilton who recommended it to me had second thoughts too.

Blockchain.info has addressed the situation quickly and appropriately.  They were not the ones who did the naming and shaming (That was Roger from MemoryDealer.com who happened to also be employed at blockchain.info.  blockchain.info removed his employee access to personal information as soon as the issue was pointed out to them.  Furthermore, no blockchain.info bitcoins were ever at risk in this event. At this point I do not see a reason to avoid using blockchain.info.

It was a small amount, with mistakes on both sides.

At this point Blockchain.info is entirely removed from this situation.

We're doing our best to regain trust at Bitcoin Store, please do not discount us solely on this mishandling.

Thank you,
-Jon

[stochastic]

Talk is cheap, I think the real victim is the person who's privacy was invaded.  That person should be given compensation for this cheap attack and it should be more than 4 BTC.

[mccorvic]

Talk is cheap, I think the real victim is the person who's privacy was invaded.  That person should be given compensation for this cheap attack and it should be more than 4 BTC.

It's clear that you haven't run or owned a business. Otherwise, you wouldn't be so cavalier about rewarding criminals and thieves.