.

[surfer43]

Update: This just leaked: theymos' first choice was Smartronix: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site/  

~Bruno Kucinskas

Wow it looks like theymos got a great deal!   He saved $17 million  

[tysat]

AC brings up a really good point... we still haven't seen any proof of the payment.

theymos or wangbus,

Please show us the transaction(s) where the $350,000 payment was sent.

No they both should show, and both have to sign their respected addresses.

This would be best and should only take minutes to do... I guess transparency is overrated

[SaltySpitoon]

The $350k was paid in cash, wouldn't that mean Bitpay or similar handled the BTC?

[tysat]

The $350k was paid in cash, wouldn't that mean Bitpay or similar handled the BTC?

...

also, did they take btc or fiat?

why did no one notice that many funds are now gone from the forums stash? is there no transparency here?

I paid in BTC, but they immediately converted most of this to USD.

I haven't adjusted the cold storage yet.
...

It should be pretty easy for both of them to show the transaction.

[repentance]

The $350k was paid in cash, wouldn't that mean Bitpay or similar handled the BTC?

this is pretty clearly a scam and maybe even a crime. i doubt theymos is going to give us any information that might force him into jail.

It's even more hilarious because "Bitcointalk" as an entity doesn't even really exist.  It's not a registered non-profit.  There appears to have been no attempt to establish it as even an LLC despite theymos holding more than enough funds to got through that step.  At the end of the day it's unlikely that the government would view "Bitcointalk" income (whether donations or ad revenue) as anything other than theymos' income and theymos alone as responsible for operating the "business" of Bitcointalk.

When the IRS comes knocking, the onus is going to be on theymos to prove that anyone other than him has any legal liability whatsoever in relation to Bitcointalk.  "I don't believe in regulations" isn't going to cut it as a defence to failing to comply with those regulations.

It's also rather amusing that when Bitcoin was worth fuck all nobody really cared all that much that their donations were in the hands of a young kid with no business or project management experience - now those donations are worth several million dollars, people suddenly care but there's no real way to wrest that control away from him and put it in more experienced hands or to ensure that he acts in good faith.

[Bobsurplus]

I think all the money should be donated to different charities around the world. This forum is more then fine and will be more then fine for the foreseeable future.

[Bobsurplus]

I think all the money should be donated to different charities around the world. This forum is more then fine and will be more then fine for the foreseeable future.

how much did you donate? how many ads did you buy?

pretty sure its a 0

"Pretty sure" means you may be mistaken. In this case you are.

[qwk]

I think all the money should be donated to different charities around the world.

I didn't donate to charities, but to the forum. I would regard such an act a misappropriation of my funds.

This forum is more then fine and will be more then fine for the foreseeable future.

There are people doing business here. The forum isn't fine for that.

[whiskers75]

A plug and play open source forum in Node.js might actually be worth $1 million dollars. Most of the widely used forums today are built in PHP so this could be just as big for Node.js as it is for the forum. Additionally, if this code is open source and integrates with BTC, it has wider applications.

*Puts on his tinfoil hat*

Since Augusto and Goat aren't directly saying it, I'll just be blunt so folks know why there is some flak about spending the money...

Federal (specifically DoD, but others as well) projects often come with an NDA for the developers to not share government work in their portfolios. Whenever I hear someone talk about NDAs, I assume government work. Given that this is going to be an open source forum that has some form of BTC and Trust integration, it would likely be highly valuable to various entities within Darknets as well. If designed intentionally with exploits in the open source version that are patched in the live version, an aspiring three-letter agency could use the success of a Node.js forum to promote adoption in some of these remoter areas of the web. Then, at a specified integration-point, they could exploit said software causing turmoil for hapless Darknet administrators.

*Takes tinfoil hat off*

Regardless of whoever is designing this software, security should be the primary focus or else you're going to get some really bad (and IMHO, quite-deserved) flak. I'd highly recommend keeping the existing security bounties and possibly even integrating or accounting for them during development of the project.

Hell yeah, this.

[go1111111]

It looks like what's happening is similar to finding a couple random new computer science graduates, giving them $1,000,000, and expecting them to write the best forum software in the world.

Prediction: If these Slickage people try to write a new forum from the ground up, it will be almost universally regarded as worse than the existing forum.

[leckey]

Prediction: If these Slickage people try to write a new forum from the ground up, it will be almost universally regarded as worse than the existing forum.

That is not a very good prediction, that is pretty much universally expected. theymos has even talked about this being a possibility.

Money well spent then...

[Justin00]

why do we need a new website ?
the current one is fine ?

sweet mother of god.... so theymos is having some guy build forum from ground up ? Seems legit they registered their domain a week or 2 ago.
why not just give the hacker the password ? ( all tho I suspect he already has it )
and fark a year I can do basic php, python etc etc.. and I could build the site in less than a year and for ALOT less than $350k.

Atleast Goat has the good sense to question this tard-ation.

For a split second I felt bad calling ppl tards in the other thread..but wow......

i repeat: clap clap clap

[repentance]

why do we need a new website ?
the current one is fine ?

The current forum is not "fine".  It's suffered intrusions on more than one occasion and it goes offline a lot.

Certainly you don't need a million dollar forum if it's primary purpose is to give people somewhere to sit around dribbling bullshit about Bitcoin, but theymos' vision for Bitcointalk seems to incorporate more than that. 

I'm not hugely in favour of the forum being a place to conduct business - I think it tends to make people careless - but that seems to be part of the vision.  Certainly if this million dollar forum was designed from the ground up with security baked in, then the software might be attractive to other enterprises with similar requirements (and I'm sure that's crossed theymos' mind). 

You don't spend $1 million on developing forum software in order to offer a prettier look or bells and whistles.  It would make sense both financially and ideologically (if you're theymos - remember that theymos is very ideologically driven) to do it if you thought the end product might assist grey or black market forums to be less penetrable though.

[Bit_Happy]

....
As for the software itself, it is not a custom piece of software. When open sourced, it'll be available for use by anyone just like vBulletin.

You are making big bucks to design a forum, yet you think vBull is Open Source?
That is odd that you don't know the most basic thing about the industry.

[Justin00]

hold on.. slow down!!!
according to the thread I made... with the multiple intrusions... the hackers didnt get access to the db.. they just held hands and danced around.

but ya.. i was being sarcartic after i locked other thread.

why do we need a new website ?
the current one is fine ?

The current forum is not "fine".  It's suffered intrusions on more than one occasion and it goes offline a lot.

Certainly you don't need a million dollar forum if it's primary purpose is to give people somewhere to sit around dribbling bullshit about Bitcoin, but theymos' vision for Bitcointalk seems to incorporate more than that. 

I'm not hugely in favour of the forum being a place to conduct business - I think it tends to make people careless - but that seems to be part of the vision.  Certainly if this million dollar forum was designed from the ground up with security baked in, then the software might be attractive to other enterprises with similar requirements (and I'm sure that's crossed theymos' mind). 

You don't spend $1 million on developing forum software in order to offer a prettier look or bells and whistles.  It would make sense both financially and ideologically (if you're theymos - remember that theymos is very ideologically driven) to do it if you thought the end product might assist grey or black market forums to be less penetrable though.

[repentance]

remember that theymos is very ideologically driven

i thought that once.

His ideology is certainly "different", kind of like Amir's is "different".

[Justin00]

well your dealing with a person who tried to sell GLBSE shares 2-3 days before it collapsed..... after he got inside information.

our fearless leader !!
fearless until its his btc that might be lost.........

[murashu]

Well, the lack of transparency is problematic. The lack of community involvement in the decision making that lead to this is problematic. And, the lack of a clear definition of the relationship between theymos and the community and the resulting anarchy/theymos as benevolent dictator is too problematic.

THAT SAID, I will attempt to go against all of my instincts and natural predispositions and attempt some optimism in this matter.

Presume for a moment that theymos was visionary in retaining Mr. Schlongtrain/Wangbus/whatever and Co. and that they indeed are capable and follow through in delivering $1mil in added value to the forum.

If you suspend disbelief momentarily, there could be some interesting possibilities. If the new forum fully integrates things like cryptographic authentication and signing of 'posts' and transactions between users, as well as the ability to create complex conditional transactions between multiple users including things like an escrow function capable of different terms such as if X/Y of escrow keyholders affirm or deny a transaction it is released - things like that, perhaps a reformed trust system as well, heck the capability of complex transactions backed up by cryptography could even create the possibility of a rudimentary legal system with judges and juries, etc - built right into the p2p transaction functionality of the forum software itself rather than as a separate service running on top of the forum and validated by the community to be legit as it will all be open sourced - then it could be very interesting indeed.

If you can envision a forum software capable of seamlessly, natively supporting these types of complex interactions between users in a way that is cryptographically sound and secure, perhaps a visionary and anarchic way to look at this is that with this forum software, forum membership becomes the new citizenship. The infrastructure of the forum replaces the infrastructure of the sovereign nation in governing and administering the transactions between users/citizens. And, of course the weakness of bitcointalk.org in this regard is that it's "owners"/admins/whatever are known and so should it become a serious threat to physical nations, it could be physically threatened or taken down - but since this software is intended to be open source, it could and should then be installed elsewhere, hopefully a lot of elsewheres.

Viva la revolucion. Now, maybe that will cost more than $1mil - if it does, and if it does turn out to be so revolutionary, then theymos will have redeemed himself and Mr. Schlongtrain will be a hero.

Hoping for a happy ending,

me

[btcsql]

Presume for a moment that theymos was visionary in retaining Mr. Schlongtrain/Wangbus/whatever and Co. and that they indeed are capable and follow through in delivering $1mil in added value to the forum.

If you suspend disbelief momentarily, there could be some interesting possibilities. If the new forum fully integrates things like cryptographic authentication and signing of 'posts' and transactions between users, as well as the ability to create complex conditional transactions ... then it could be very interesting indeed.

Did you read the bio on these guys? They have combined a few years of post-Bachelors computer science experience under their belts. $1m for this project is absurd, especially given that the firm doesn't even have its own website. What kind of software development firm can get away with charging $1 million for a project when they themselves don't even have a website? This just looks awful, all around. Gweedo et al. raise very valid points across the board.

[Justin00]

anyone who believes theymos paid 1mil or 350k is well...very gullible.
pretty sure we'll get updates then it all mysteriously vanishes.


I havnt read all 13 pages.. but does anyone know how theymos met the dev ? considering they don't have a site and all.. i'm kind of curious ?
perhaps he met him at a bar.. and they got talking..  or perhaps he sent PM

'Hey d00d I can make you a site for 1 million'
well you dont have any previous websites, that actually work and was not registered 2 minutes ago.. so i suppose based on those reg flags it seems reasonable what is your btc address ?
'wow i didnt think it would work errr umm here it is'