In Late March of 2013, I published an open letter to Instawallet and the whole team at Paymium.
The problem that was exposed was the fact that Google was listing all their private URLs. A few weeks later Instawallet was shut down.
What I discovered was actually only the tip of the iceburg.
http://www.adaptiveglass.com/?p=762I was all ears and eyeballs when the URL concern was at it's peak, of which you were kind enough to point out the exploits.
My inital estimates were WAY off. Google only showed about 100 or so bitcoins in the index. Whereas when reading forums and reddit, I found that Bing, Yahoo and others had thousands of urls containing tens of thousands of bitcoins.
I asked tough questions, so I thought, but my concerns were laid to rest, opting to not pursue it further due to the respect I had for the principals.
I quoted the above to state that I did find a many funded addresses via Bing and Yahoo, unaware that such were being discussed on other forums, reddit, etc. The idea just came naturally to me. Upon seeing for myself that it was true (not touching a single coin belonging to others), is when I started expressing my concern.
I had way too many bitcoins on InstaWallet, even though I was well aware of consequences, but I trusted the crew who manned it, just like I would trust theymos, Roger, or Rassah, to have control of my bitcoins if they happened to be running some similar site.
With my concerns alleviated, I didn't think much more about IW, until the 2-3 days after the dam broke, and only brought to my attention by greyhawk via some other thread.
My questions and concerns were then not addressed by Boussac, with davout nowhere to be found during that timeframe. I then went into vial mode, of which probably didn't help matters. Now, I'm in wait-and-see mode, hoping for the best.
At one time, I had over a quarter of a million dollars worth of bitcoins on IW in three wallets: 1000 BTC; 123.xxx or 132.xxx BTC (honestly don't remember, but submitted the 123.xxx BTC amount to be fair, not knowing what the xxx...'s are); and .84 BTC.
I honestly don't know if losing such a large sum justified my rant, for I've never been in a similar situation before, thus not knowing how to properly act. I finally settled down, realizing that that would probably be the best course of action, coupled with I wouldn't be out that much, if any, real money if the worse case scenario comes to past. But if it does, I will be screaming at the top of my lungs as if I did lose a fortune.