MyBitcoin REALLY is back up, with an announcement

[bitminers]

So in other words, you only believe in Libertarian values when they benefit you?

GERKEN - You talking to me?

I didn't loose any bitcoins buddy, what I am saying is people are bagging out some one who was contacted by the FBI who had a major loss from this scam and you low lifes have the audacity to bag them out.

Tell me what the F*ck you'd do seriously if you lost $250K worth of an investment? Sit there crying like a little bitch and do nothing about it?

[1715263689]

1715263689

[1715263689]

1715263689

[BlockHash]

So in other words, you only believe in Libertarian values when they benefit you?

GERKEN - You talking to me?

I didn't loose any bitcoins buddy, what I am saying is people are bagging out some one who was contacted by the FBI who had a major loss from this scam and you low lifes have the audacity to bag them out.

Tell me what the F*ck you'd do seriously if you lost $250K worth of an investment? Sit there crying like a little bitch and do nothing about it?

If you believe in BitCoin and the truly Free Market that it is based upon, you wouldn't cry. Perhaps feel angry at yourself for not doing due diligence on the people you trusted with your BitCoins, but not sadness. The Free Market will correct itself and it requires us not to intervene with things like the government, who are only there to take their cut and dominate the market to their will.

[malbritten]

So in other words, you only believe in Libertarian values when they benefit you?

GERKEN - You talking to me?

I didn't loose any bitcoins buddy, what I am saying is people are bagging out some one who was contacted by the FBI who had a major loss from this scam and you low lifes have the audacity to bag them out.

Tell me what the F*ck you'd do seriously if you lost $250K worth of an investment? Sit there crying like a little bitch and do nothing about it?

Someone mad, eh?

1. Someone silly enough to let an anonymous stranger on the Internet "hold onto" any large amount of money deserves none.
2. Someone with that much BTC is part of the problem. Why just hold onto it instead of investing it into the actual BTC economy?
3. Said person is now trying to DESTROY BTC because said person is a tool.  He lost his investment and now wants everyone else to lose theirs.

No sympathy from me.

[Gerken]

So in other words, you only believe in Libertarian values when they benefit you?

GERKEN - You talking to me?

I didn't loose any bitcoins buddy, what I am saying is people are bagging out some one who was contacted by the FBI who had a major loss from this scam and you low lifes have the audacity to bag them out.

Tell me what the F*ck you'd do seriously if you lost $250K worth of an investment? Sit there crying like a little bitch and do nothing about it?

I didn't say you lost Bitcoins.  I was just asking for a little clarification.  I got it    Thanks. 

[Cellcote]

There is a new announcement on the page:

Friday, August 5th, 2011

From the desk of Tom Williams, operator of MyBitcoin.com

For immediate release.

SECURITY BREACH DISCLOSURE

After careful analysis of the intrusion we have concluded that the software that waited for Bitcoin confirmations was far too lenient. An unknown attacker was able to forge Bitcoin deposits via the Shopping Cart Interface (SCI) and withdraw confirmed/older Bitcoins. This led to a slow trickle of theft that went unnoticed for a few days. Luckily, we do keep a percentage of the holdings in cold storage so the attackers didn’t completely clean us out. Just to clarify, we weren’t “fully” hacked aka “rooted”. You can still trust our PGP, SSL, and Tor public keys.
It appears to be human error combined with a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin secures transactions into the next block. Our programmer was under the assumption that one block was good enough to secure a transaction. Two years ago when the software was written, this single confirm myth was a popular belief.
In hindsight we should have credited deposits after one confirmation so they would show up in the transaction history, and held the deposit until it reached at least 3 confirmations. Keeping track of two balances and displaying them in the login area would have been trivial.
CLAIM PROCESS DISCLOSURE

We are in the process of building a claim procedure for the remainder of the holdings now. We expect that we will have it online soon.

The claim process will consist of a online form where the claimant will be required to enter their MyBitcoin username and password. Their balance will be displayed along with the percentage of remaining Bitcoins that we still have in our holdings. That percentage will be paid to a Bitcoin address of their choosing. This percentage will be based on our current total liabilities vs. our existing assets. We will disclose these figures as soon as they have been totaled.

Each online claim will be written to a ledger and will be manually approved within 48 hours of being filed online. We have decided to have a manual claim approval process for better security. The last thing we all need right now is for someone to breach the claim form. We are confident clients will find this satisfactory.

RECEIVERSHIP

After some research and careful consideration regarding the appointment of a receiver we have concluded that it would be very costly and slow.

Also, finding a receiver that even understands what a Bitcoin is or how to handle the claim process online would be troublesome, and would only end up in increasing our costs. Receivers are typically paid from the remaining assets and we’d like to maximize the amount that we can disperse to our clients.

We have been trying to figure out a way to appoint a 3rd party to certify the asset/liability figures, but there are many risks involved. It would involve having us trust some unknown agent that could possibly just steal the rest of the holdings out from under us. Or, we could be accused of bribing the 3rd party to agree with our figures, and on and on. Trust is a real problem with an anonymous and irrevocable currency.

It is true that we could disclose all of the Bitcoin payment addresses we manage and let everyone look them up and track the lineage of the coins. This is also troublesome due to the way that we defragment small payments to keep the processing engine speedy. Also there are the moral implications of disclosing our client’s finances. We are sure that, unknowingly to us, that our processing system has been used for nefarious purposes.

A GIFT TO THE COMMUNITY

After the claims have all been filed and dealt with we will be releasing the entire MyBitcoin processing engine into the public domain. Our only hope is that the community can improve and adapt the software to all sorts of new and interesting Bitcoin-related things.



Tom Williams

[Sepp]

There is a new announcement on the page:

Friday, August 5th, 2011

From the desk of Tom Williams, operator of MyBitcoin.com

We are in the process of building a claim procedure for the remainder of the holdings now. We expect that we will have it online soon.

The claim process will consist of a online form where the claimant will be required to enter their MyBitcoin username and password. Their balance will be displayed along with the percentage of remaining Bitcoins that we still have in our holdings. That percentage will be paid to a Bitcoin address of their choosing. This percentage will be based on our current total liabilities vs. our existing assets. We will disclose these figures as soon as they have been totaled.

Each online claim will be written to a ledger and will be manually approved within 48 hours of being filed online. We have decided to have a manual claim approval process for better security. The last thing we all need right now is for someone to breach the claim form. We are confident clients will find this satisfactory.

Tom Williams

So this is someone who has taken bitcoins from everyone who would give them to him for a relatively moderate amount - I say relatively moderate because 250k $ is not much in business - and who is either unwilling or unable to stand up and pay back the money (value) he took in to safeguard. Evidence is his babble about a "claim process" which predictably will yield little or nothing for those who gave him bitcoins in the first place.

It's a lesson to be learned:

Don't trust ANYONE with your bitcoins. Keep them in your wallet on your computer, with a backup handy just in case.

I wonder how many of those cases it will take for people to realize that there is a price to pay for being improvident...

And yes, going to the police will only hasten the demise of bitcoin as a whole.

You either are independent of the authorities or you aren't. Police investigating and courts deciding means you aren't.

[Speculator]

Tom sounds like a reasonable guy. Hope he can sort this out soon. Some of us have a lot of coins invested with him (me in the thousands) I still trusts he will reimburse us.