Coinlab are sneaky bastards, investors behind Bitcoinica

[sd]

... the legal, and practical, protections in the conventional finance world turn out to be necessary to protect people from thieves.

Except that those things don't actually protect people from theives. They do occasionally get some small restitution for the victims (after months or years), but mostly they just make lawyers rich.

You are only thinking of the extreme cases. If I buy something with a credit card and it isn't delivered or it isn't fit for purpose I can get the cash refunded without lawyers. If I get ripped off for a small amount I can go to a small claims court without a lawyer and stand a good chance of getting my cash back. In bigger cases normally the threat of a law suit keeps everyone involved honest.

There are cases like Enron and Madoff but these are exceptions in the real world and the rule in the BitCoin world.

I'm not saying the BitCoin world is doomed, just that people are going to have to learn to be very careful who they trust as there is a far lower penalty for dishonestly where wrongdoing can't be punished.

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[Seth Otterstad]

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

Are they speaking before or after Boussac, or  is there a special panel discussion for all three?

zhou matthew and mark i could see however.

Goat, if you had written Matthew, Mark and Zhou, I would have asked what Bible translation you were using.

[kakobrekla]

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

Wet dream only.

[dancingnancy]

Can't Tihan help push this along somehow and speak to both the liquidator and Magicaltux?

[dancingnancy]

Can't Tihan help push this along somehow and speak to both the liquidator and Magicaltux?

Is he not already suing Gox in for unrelated issue?

Is he?  I can't keep up with this shit anymore.

[repentance]

Can't Tihan help push this along somehow and speak to both the liquidator and Magicaltux?

Tihan represented Wendon, the limited partner of Bitcoinica LP.  Limited partners can only participate in "safe harbour" management activities without exposing themselves to legal liability.  Tihan seems to have been extremely careful to avoid doing anything which would potentially expose Wendon to liability.

The liquidator's last report suggests that he's had contact with the limited partner.  It's not in Wendon's interests to involve itself in the liquidation beyond co-operating with the liquidator.  This has been one of the problems throughout this whole clusterfuck - Wendon has always wanted others to take the actions which bring with them legal liability.

Given that Tihan is an investor in CoinLab and CoinLab has initiated litigation against MtGox, I'd expect Tihan to let the lawyers handle any communication with MtGox at this point in time.

The partners in Bitcoinica LP and Bitcoinica Consultancy (also in liquidation now) don't really have a role to play in the liquidation beyond assisting the liquidator.  They no longer have any authority in respect of Bitcoinica.

This is all just the nature of getting into bed with venture capital.  "Angel" investors play hardball when things go sour.

Ironically, I'm somewhat more intrigued by the Rackspace hack than I am by the Bitcoinica intrusion (hell, I even have questions about the Linode hack and whether other services were targeted solely to deflect attention).  The database was ever so conveniently destroyed during the Rackspace hack and I'll always wonder what secrets it might have revealed.

I understand Tihan's position from a purely business perspective.  I still believe that his trust in Zhou was a fatal error of judgement.

[MPOE-PR]

If the leak did not cause the MtGox theft, then what did?

Read the thread. It has now been confirmed by 2 people, genjix and phantomcircuit, that the thief already knew the passwords and everything before the source code was leaked and the thief just thought that the leak would provide him a smokescreen and plausible deniability as it could be claimed that the group of people that knew the passwords was much larger.

If we momentarily disregard the fact that both these people are proven idiots (phantomcircuit aka Patrick Strateman is the guy who sent all his customers an email containing the emails of all his customers, this is how far the "never had a security breach" claim goes) and proven liars, yeah that thing may even count for something.

[muyuu]

Goat, if you had written Matthew, Mark and Zhou, I would have asked what Bible translation you were using.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and Zhou 

[defxor]

Ironically, I'm somewhat more intrigued by the Rackspace hack than I am by the Bitcoinica intrusion (hell, I even have questions about the Linode hack and whether other services were targeted solely to deflect attention).  The database was ever so conveniently destroyed during the Rackspace hack and I'll always wonder what secrets it might have revealed.

I understand Tihan's position from a purely business perspective.  I still believe that his trust in Zhou was a fatal error of judgement.

I made the following post way back then. I'm confident in my analysis - all hacks make sense viewed from the perspective of the person Zhou. While I unfortunately didn't link all the statements I refer to I believe the info exists in that thread, or at least linked from it. Bitcoinica simply never made any money - and that exaggerated boasting from a proud teenager spiralled out of control and was the direct cause of the later "hacks".

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95795.msg1065233#msg1065233

This tells a lot about your attitude. I hope it is a hindsight and you didn't assume Bitcoinica to be a scammer's product when it was launched.

tl;dr: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I'm quite sure you launched Bitcoinica with the intention for it to provide value to the community. As initially suggested by Patrick/Intersango and others, your claims about trade volume were very suspicious. It's likely you simply exaggerated them, not unusual when being proud of what you've created.

Whether the Linode theft (where other accounts as well were swiped) just provided an excuse for some profit on the side or not I don't know, but I'm quite sure the only real money to have come out of running Bitcoinica were from user deposits. I have no personal opinion of whether it operated as a pure bucket shop or not, but others have documented the lack of visible MtGox movement even when Bitcoinica should've been hedging.

When, based on how you presented the success of Bitcoinica in public, you were approached with investment offers I believe you were simply unable to admit that it wasn't as successful as you claimed. I believe you went along way too far with whatever happened, and that the Rackspace "hack" was the simplest way out when Tihan started questioning the books. Additionally, it provided yet more profit which you might've needed to be able to keep up appearances with your friends and family.

After the very visible and complete failure by the Intersango people to handle the resulting mess I believe you made yet another profitable "hack" on the service. It wasn't as well planned nor executed as the previous, maybe it was simply opportunistic after having realized the release of the source code provided the excuse needed.

I've posted links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudologia_fantastica and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance since I do believe they apply. I think you're currently unable to admit to yourself and people close to you where things went wrong, and you're still hoping to be able to exit this unscathed.

(I consider the above to be the simplest explanation possible that still fits all the known facts. I'm wary about the exact involvement by Amir, Patrick and Donald though - and since Tihan and Zhou supposedly have met in person it would be interesting to know exactly whom else have actually met either of them.*)

But then, the only reason I really care is that if people's only takeaway from having joined the Bitcoin community is that they get constantly scammed this will never fly. I thus believe Bitcoin fraud needs to be handled by the proper legal authorities. We're way past Mybitcoin's "as long as I give 49% back you guys won't hurt me, right?" - which btw looks suspiciously close to what you're currently trying to do as well.

*) Edit: Tihan's identity is verified by an upstanding member of the community, and thus Zhou's should be as well.

However, this doesn't change the fact that the Intersango crowd are utterly and completely incompetent.

[Transisto]

Also to note that Tihan has never covered the 1st and 2nd hack as we'd been told.

[muyuu]

Isn't it slightly infuriating that all these companies use either "bit" or "coin" in their names?

Not only does it smear the brand, it also confuses the shit out of people.

[repentance]

Also to note that Tihan has never covered the 1st and 2nd hack as we'd been told.

One thing I'm curious about is a company called Ator, of which Tihan is a director, being named as a creditor in the liquidator's report.  I wondered at the time it was mentioned that "Tihan was providing funds to cover the losses" whether those funds were going to be provided as a secured loan (which is what I would have done under the circumstances) and I'm very curious about whether Ator was the vehicle for providing those funds.

[guruvan]

First off I suppose I'm amused to see anyone still looking after these coins. I stopped hearing from the liquidators a while ago.

On the one hand we have "experts like genjix and phantomcircuit (oh...my fave lately is the "customer can't login to their exchange account because the expert admins let the disks get full".

On the other hand - Tihan & company appear to be the scum of the earth, and should be sued into financial oblivion if possible. (before they do it to everyone else)

Oh...and Zhou  Mr. "I'm diversifying my currency portfolio so I'd like to get $10K amounts in goxusd ASAFP - will pay .25% bonus - and nop I'm not stealing your money"

(that's 3 hands for those of you counting)

The truth be known, most of you a sneaky bastards.

[MPOE-PR]

Isn't it slightly infuriating that all these companies use either "bit" or "coin" in their names?

Not only does it smear the brand, it also confuses the shit out of people.

And therein lies your answer: because it confuses the fuck out of people.

First off I suppose I'm amused to see anyone still looking after these coins. I stopped hearing from the liquidators a while ago.

On the one hand we have "experts like genjix and phantomcircuit (oh...my fave lately is the "customer can't login to their exchange account because the expert admins let the disks get full".

On the other hand - Tihan & company appear to be the scum of the earth, and should be sued into financial oblivion if possible. (before they do it to everyone else)

Oh...and Zhou  Mr. "I'm diversifying my currency portfolio so I'd like to get $10K amounts in goxusd ASAFP - will pay .25% bonus - and nop I'm not stealing your money"

(that's 3 hands for those of you counting)

The truth be known, most of you a sneaky bastards.

Congrats, you've covered about a hundredth to a tenth of all the ways all those involved on all sides lied, stole, defrauded etc. "Business" and "businessmen". Says so right on their business card.

[melvster]

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

Didnt happen, did it?

[Seth Otterstad]

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

Didnt happen, did it?

I did not listen to any of the panels because I knew they would be recorded, but it would not surprise me if no one booed.  Most of the people there had only known about bitcoin for less than a year, so they would not have even known what bitcoinica was.  At least Peter Vessenes is leaving his position at Bitcoin Foundation soon.  That was such a joke.

I don't know who this MPOE guy is, but he appears to have a MASSIVE bias against the intersango trio for some reason that is not obvious.  Every time I've seen anyone mention intersango over the last year or so, MPOE makes sure to pop in and mention that they leaked 5000 email addresses and that genjix acts like an "idiot".

Nevermind that intersango was the longest running exchange to never get hacked.  Nevermind that genjix was out there doing interviews, starting exchanges, and promoting bitcoin before anyone else was doing much for the community.  Nevermind that those guys appeared to never have any big profit motive and bankrupted themselves to help bitcoin in its infancy.

Patrick does come off like a dickhead on the forums, but if people were coming after me for no good reason (that I am aware of), I would be demanding a little "******* respect" and acting like a dickhead too.

In fact, I think I will leave a little note of appreciation here:

Dear Donald, Patrick, and Amir,

I would like to thank you guys for running intersango for so long and doing a huge service to the community at great expense to yourselves.   My ability to use bitcoin was massively improved by this when I was living in London.  You guys would always reply to support tickets extremely fast while mtgox (at least back then) had complete crap for customer service.  That sucks you got screwed over so hard by Tihan and Zhou, and I'm really glad to see genjix still making contributions to the development of bitcoin.  Please keep up the good work.

[btcsql]

Whatever happened to this? Did this all get swept under the rug? What's the status of any current legal proceedings?