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Author Topic: Anyone know what happened to knightmb and his 371,000 BTC?  (Read 81456 times)
repentance
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November 13, 2012, 08:13:46 PM
 #281

Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things
You wrote a very nice argument, with which I mostly agree. It is just your use of the word "make". If you meant "make = force", then I'm fully with you.

Yeah, I only used "make" because it was the word used by the poster to whom I was responding.

I do think that there's a kind of "cult of Bitcoin" which enables incompetence - and not just technical incompetence - and that you're right when you say that losses to date haven't been catastrophic enough to discourage that.

All I can say is that this is Bitcoin. I don't believe it until I see six confirmations.
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November 13, 2012, 08:43:35 PM
 #282

Well, the reality is that Bitcoin is far from perfect (in the financial software engineering realm) and has an unfortunate property of attracting some of the worst programming anti-talent. The profession of software engineering is completely unregulated, neither legaly nor morally. This is unlike eg. construction engineering, where enough people died in collapsed structures or simply lost the roof over their head to understand the value of the "building code". Similarly, one doesn't have to be electrical engineer to understand the value of "electrical code" or a firefighter to understand the value of "fire safety code".

Right, we should be looking at the big corporations for an example of how to properly organize and write software that isn't so anti-talented.  Like Microsoft, who has had half a dozen tries to get their calculator right with every new release of Windows (I assume this calculator is used often in the same "financial world" you're talking about).  In spite of an update mechanism that would let them push out unlimited revisions they felt were necessary, even in fully-patched and up-to-date Windows 7 x64, when faced with something as simple as sqrt(4) - 2 (which should be zero), it gives some ridiculous negative number with lots of decimal places.

That's besides the main point: obviously you come with a lot of good ideas as to how Bitcoin needs to scale and evolve into world-class work.  But showing up and running your mouth and copping an attitude of contempt toward the other contributors to the project isn't a particularly effective way to contribute.  Assuming you genuinely care about the project, unless you plan to implement all your ideas yourself, try to be less of an asshole, so that you can spend your social capital on organizing others' efforts to steer the project the way you think it ought to go, instead of blowing it all on an ill-conceived plot to look like the baddest badass the forum has ever seen.

Companies claiming they got hacked and lost your coins sounds like fraud so perfect it could be called fashionable.  I never believe them.  If I ever experience the misfortune of a real intrusion, I declare I have been honest about the way I have managed the keys in Casascius Coins.  I maintain no ability to recover or reproduce the keys, not even under limitless duress or total intrusion.  Remember that trusting strangers with your coins without any recourse is, as a matter of principle, not a best practice.  Don't keep coins online. Use paper or hardware wallets instead.
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November 14, 2012, 06:41:24 AM
 #283

There's still not enough people who lost their savings or operating funds to make the broad Bitcoin users community understand the value of high-quality software.

This is wrong on so many levels and really stirs up my emotions. I'm holding off my response because I'm trying to keep the forum civil and also because casascius has already formulated a good part of it rationally.

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November 14, 2012, 10:30:33 AM
 #284

Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things
You wrote a very nice argument, with which I mostly agree. It is just your use of the word "make". If you meant "make = force", then I'm fully with you.

But if you meant "make = induce" or "make = enable", then in my opinion you are wrong. Especially on the purely software technical side this project became a great enabler and inducer for incompetent programmers.

Looking purely at the effects it is hard to distinguish incompetence from the opportunistic treachery, cf. bitfloor fiasco. But the end result can be widely observed: Bitcoin started as a rather low-quality proof-of-concept code. It had no (or very few) remote exploit-style faults and this somehow became equivalent to the claim that Bitcoin is almost perfect "Mona Lisa"-quality financial code, cf. Dan Kaminsky presentation.

Well, the reality is that Bitcoin is far from perfect (in the financial software engineering realm) and has an unfortunate property of attracting some of the worst programming anti-talent. The profession of software engineering is completely unregulated, neither legaly nor morally. This is unlike eg. construction engineering, where enough people died in collapsed structures or simply lost the roof over their head to understand the value of the "building code". Similarly, one doesn't have to be electrical engineer to understand the value of "electrical code" or a firefighter to understand the value of "fire safety code".

There's still not enough people who lost their savings or operating funds to make the broad Bitcoin users community understand the value of high-quality software.

At least the bitomat.pl operator did his share and is now a perfect example of what will happen if you disregard the word "ephemeral" in the documentation of Amazon Web Services.

If you are skilled in programming, why don't you just make an alternate chain?
Bitcoin has serious problems that could use fixing. There is no way you are going to convince the developers to fix them. They will just deny the existence of these problems.

If you make an obviously better product, you can convince users to adopt it. Just making the back-end better is not enough, however. You need to offer users some salient new features.

Key problems include:
1) Long-run sustainable blockchain [don't know anything about scalability etc., but the bitcoin system will not be secure without block reward. I am sure of that. This is part of the back-end.]
2) Wallet security [There is no reason why users should have to expose their entire balance to theft whenever they send coins. Fixing this would be a salient new feature.]

You suggest that there are other issues. I don't have any programming expertise and cannot comment on these. Why not fix everything you can and release a higher quality product?  
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November 14, 2012, 10:30:59 PM
Last edit: November 15, 2012, 07:53:28 AM by 2112
 #285

If you are skilled in programming, why don't you just make an alternate chain?
Bitcoin has serious problems that could use fixing. There is no way you are going to convince the developers to fix them. They will just deny the existence of these problems.

If you make an obviously better product, you can convince users to adopt it. Just making the back-end better is not enough, however. You need to offer users some salient new features.

Key problems include:
1) Long-run sustainable blockchain [don't know anything about scalability etc., but the bitcoin system will not be secure without block reward. I am sure of that. This is part of the back-end.]
2) Wallet security [There is no reason why users should have to expose their entire balance to theft whenever they send coins. Fixing this would be a salient new feature.]

You suggest that there are other issues. I don't have any programming expertise and cannot comment on these. Why not fix everything you can and release a higher quality product?  
The answer to "why not" is two pronged.

1) The mills of justice turn slow, but grind exceedingly fine. Just read the first paragraph of my BIP 2112 proposal. As a technical advisor/export to a plaintiff all my Bitcoin-related correspondence is potentialy subject to the discovery by the defendant counsel. I don't want to get involved in some sort interferrence accusactions, conflicts of interests, etc. I use my "social capital" to post here as a premier cryptocurrency forum to assure that everything technical I wrote is a matter of public domain and cannot become some sort of submarine patent. It really is secondary whether somebody implements my ideas or not. They just have to be matter of public domain.

2) IMHO another real-time, reflective, in-vivo alt-chain is not the way to go and waste of the effort. IMHO the cryptocurrency field will be stagnant until some enterprising biz-school grad or doctoral student does some sort of in-vitro discrete-time simulation experiments using GPSS or some such. When the headline will be something like "100-years of Bitcoin evolution simulated overnight" it will mean that the crypto-currencies have arrived as a field of research.

I mean I don't mind and even support you and others discussing alternatives. It is important to keep the ideas in the open, public domain. But it somewhat resembles the philosophical "what if?" discussions I've heard in the theological departments. But when the "what if?" are much-faster-than-real time animations then the actual scientific discovery will happen and the whole field will move forward. Either as a field of research or as an venture investment opportunity.

Nice, fast-moving WebGPSS or similar animations sell better than the walls of text or pages of certifiably-secure cryptographic algorithms. My contributions are really mundane, on the par of "how to make a good oil-pan washer so your engine won't seize even on the bumpiest road".

Please comment, critique, criticize or ridicule BIP 2112: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54382.0
Long-term mining prognosis: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91101.0
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November 15, 2012, 02:26:57 AM
 #286

If you are skilled in programming, why don't you just make an alternate chain?
Bitcoin has serious problems that could use fixing. There is no way you are going to convince the developers to fix them. They will just deny the existence of these problems.

If you make an obviously better product, you can convince users to adopt it. Just making the back-end better is not enough, however. You need to offer users some salient new features.

Key problems include:
1) Long-run sustainable blockchain [don't know anything about scalability etc., but the bitcoin system will not be secure without block reward. I am sure of that. This is part of the back-end.]
2) Wallet security [There is no reason why users should have to expose their entire balance to theft whenever they send coins. Fixing this would be a salient new feature.]

You suggest that there are other issues. I don't have any programming expertise and cannot comment on these. Why not fix everything you can and release a higher quality product?  
There answer to "why not" is two pronged.

1) The mills of justice turn slow, but grind exceedingly fine. Just read the first paragraph of my BIP 2112 proposal. As a technical advisor/export to a plaintiff all my Bitcoin-related correspondence is potentialy subject to the discovery by the defendant counsel. I don't want to get involved in some sort interferrence accusactions, conflicts of interests, etc. I use my "social capital" to post here as a premier cryptocurrency forum to assure that everything technical I wrote is a matter of public domain and cannot become some sort of submarine patent. It really is secondary whether somebody implements my ideas or not. They just have to be matter of public domain.

2) IMHO another real-time, reflective, in-vivo alt-chain is not the way to go and waste of the effort. IMHO the cryptocurrency field will be stagnant until some enterprising biz-school grad or doctoral student does some sort of in-vitro discrete-time simulation experiments using GPSS or some such. When the headline will be something like "100-years of Bitcoin evolution simulated overnight" it will mean that the crypto-currencies have arrived as a field of research.

I mean I don't mind and even support you and others discussing alternatives. It is important to keep the ideas in the open, public domain. But it somewhat resembles the philosophical "what if?" discussions I've heard in the theological departments. But when the "what if?" are much-faster-than-real time animations then the actual scientific discovery will happen and the whole field will move forward. Either as a field of research or as an venture investment opportunity.

Nice, fast-moving WebGPSS or similar animations sell better than the walls of text or pages of certifiably-secure cryptographic algorithms. My contributions are really mundane, on the par of "how to make a good oil-pan washer so your engine won't seize even on the bumpiest road".

You think that a white paper based on simulation would convince anyone of anything? I highly doubt it. For economists who are introduced to the issue, degeneration of bitcoin would be trivial. It is a standard free-rider problem. Most of the community rejects mainstream academic research and holds various fringe beliefs (e.g. Austrian Economics, Libertarianism). Given that they are happy to dismiss most other economics research, what is to stop them from dismissing a critical white paper (no matter how valid). Look at the ridiculous reactions to the paper by Shamir. That paper was not critical of bitcoin to any meaningful degree. Nonetheless, it caused the community to go into witchhunt mode. Think how people would react to a full frontal attack. Complete dismissal.

The best way of convincing people is through a working system. Your argument is a cop out.


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November 15, 2012, 02:53:31 AM
 #287

If you are skilled in programming, why don't you just make an alternate chain?
Bitcoin has serious problems that could use fixing. There is no way you are going to convince the developers to fix them. They will just deny the existence of these problems.

If you make an obviously better product, you can convince users to adopt it. Just making the back-end better is not enough, however. You need to offer users some salient new features.

Key problems include:
1) Long-run sustainable blockchain [don't know anything about scalability etc., but the bitcoin system will not be secure without block reward. I am sure of that. This is part of the back-end.]
2) Wallet security [There is no reason why users should have to expose their entire balance to theft whenever they send coins. Fixing this would be a salient new feature.]

You suggest that there are other issues. I don't have any programming expertise and cannot comment on these. Why not fix everything you can and release a higher quality product?  
There answer to "why not" is two pronged.

1) The mills of justice turn slow, but grind exceedingly fine. Just read the first paragraph of my BIP 2112 proposal. As a technical advisor/export to a plaintiff all my Bitcoin-related correspondence is potentialy subject to the discovery by the defendant counsel. I don't want to get involved in some sort interferrence accusactions, conflicts of interests, etc. I use my "social capital" to post here as a premier cryptocurrency forum to assure that everything technical I wrote is a matter of public domain and cannot become some sort of submarine patent. It really is secondary whether somebody implements my ideas or not. They just have to be matter of public domain.

2) IMHO another real-time, reflective, in-vivo alt-chain is not the way to go and waste of the effort. IMHO the cryptocurrency field will be stagnant until some enterprising biz-school grad or doctoral student does some sort of in-vitro discrete-time simulation experiments using GPSS or some such. When the headline will be something like "100-years of Bitcoin evolution simulated overnight" it will mean that the crypto-currencies have arrived as a field of research.

I mean I don't mind and even support you and others discussing alternatives. It is important to keep the ideas in the open, public domain. But it somewhat resembles the philosophical "what if?" discussions I've heard in the theological departments. But when the "what if?" are much-faster-than-real time animations then the actual scientific discovery will happen and the whole field will move forward. Either as a field of research or as an venture investment opportunity.

Nice, fast-moving WebGPSS or similar animations sell better than the walls of text or pages of certifiably-secure cryptographic algorithms. My contributions are really mundane, on the par of "how to make a good oil-pan washer so your engine won't seize even on the bumpiest road".


Your words are so full of crap it is hard to know where to begin shovelling ... I would place bets you have an MBA, law degree or perhaps both?

It will be many re-incarnations before you come close to releasing a crypto-currency, at least we can be sure of and glad for that.

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November 15, 2012, 03:54:31 AM
 #288

As often said in marketing : speak of it in good or in bad, does'nt matter, unless it's spoken about Wink

The blackmail to Mit was just a nice publicity !  I enjoyed the news.. and don't care so much about so called "bad" news / publicity.. It all fall back to the same point, more and more peoples know about bitcoin Cheesy


sorry for bad english
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November 15, 2012, 04:36:57 PM
 #289

This whole story stinks like spook sushi.  Even worse than this forum.
Now the warrant is on cryptome.  Go figure. 

It appears there are only two obvious cases for whatreallyhappened :

1) This KnightMB character went batshit insane
2) Some federales decided they wanted to grab some new flavors of money for themselves and set a trap

My instinct says both seem too obvious, there must be more to the story. 




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November 15, 2012, 05:20:37 PM
 #290

That's besides the main point: obviously you come with a lot of good ideas as to how Bitcoin needs to scale and evolve into world-class work.  But showing up and running your mouth and copping an attitude of contempt toward the other contributors to the project isn't a particularly effective way to contribute.  Assuming you genuinely care about the project, unless you plan to implement all your ideas yourself, try to be less of an asshole, so that you can spend your social capital on organizing others' efforts to steer the project the way you think it ought to go, instead of blowing it all on an ill-conceived plot to look like the baddest badass the forum has ever seen.
I now understand where I made a mistake. I want  to apologize and make a correction.

When I wrote yesterday:
Bitcoin is far from perfect (in the financial software engineering realm) and has an unfortunate property of attracting some of the worst programming anti-talent.
I had in mind the effects of the following events from middle of last year:

1) Bitcoin Consultancy touring continental Europe, establishing an office in Warsaw,Poland and having various promotional meetings there:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26919.msg338755#msg338755

2) 1000 BTC bounty for getting a major business to accept Bitcoins as payment:
 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46646.msg555039#msg555039

Because of the above efforts some people have privately offered a "bitcoind Enterprise Edition" (based on the private branch of the public 0.3.23 code):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42444.msg531318#msg531318
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46646.msg558545#msg558545

I was involved in an informal code audit of those offerings. They were spectacularly bad and I allowed my perception of that code to influence my perception of the wider Bitcoin community. The multiple discussions with lawyers even influenced my writing style, as observed by Mr. marcus_of_augustus .

I want to publicly apologize for my unqualified statements made yesterday. I also want to publicly thank:

a) Mr. casascius for publicly pointing to me my errors,
b) Mr. Transisto for privately pointing to me that my posts yesterday were flawed.

I'm sorry.

Please comment, critique, criticize or ridicule BIP 2112: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54382.0
Long-term mining prognosis: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91101.0
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March 15, 2013, 04:39:34 AM
 #291

active again: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.msg1616495#msg1616495 

anything new?
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June 25, 2013, 04:57:25 PM
 #292


bump
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June 25, 2013, 10:28:51 PM
 #293

> $37million in today's money Cool
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June 25, 2013, 11:52:22 PM
 #294

> $37million in today's money Cool

 Cool

Bitcoin will show the world what hard money really is.
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June 26, 2013, 02:05:42 AM
 #295

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June 26, 2013, 02:51:58 AM
 #296

This is what he claimed happened to it all a while back.  I believe this was his last post in this thread.

Well, here goes a long spiel.

Probably the last that anyone had heard from me before a few days ago was dated September, 2011 according to my profile stats. So it has been a long time of me just lurking around from time to time.

I can't remember exactly when, but some story broke on the Internet about my bitcoin collection and shortly afterwards things got crazy.

The first thing that happened was my inbox here at the forum exploded with people asking for a loan of anywhere from 10k to 100k bitcoins to start the next big market place. I had a few people message me here that they had been burned by a hacker or some website that had their wallet information and asked for anywhere from 100 to 1k bitcoins as a way to help them recover their loss. I always wanted to help people, but there is no well to tell if these were sincere request or just someone out to make a quick bitcoin scam. Some of those I did help people I did help just to be nice, but word must have gotten around quick.

I had to step back from the forums for a while as it was a good place for people to chase me down. All the questions of what I would do with it or how did I get it, was I the one that hacked XYZ website and that's why I have so many, etc. Somewhere in this topic I think, is a another long explanation of how I came into possession of it all. Long story short, I was in bitcoin early when the network was small and basically used a lot of Amazon processing power to load up a ton of bitcoin miners all at once in their clusters (Amazon) using a custom compiled version of the CentOS bitcoind source files. Amazon had a big price difference between running a lot of windows sessions and running a lot of Linux sessions. Turns out, the Linux sessions were running kind of an old version of CentOS as well as I couldn't even get the compiled binaries to run.

Well, a lot of money was spent to generate that chunk of bitcoins, but not so I could posses it all, there were plans to use it as a backing for re-loadable credit cards like service that had bitcoin powering it in the background. Needless to say, that project fell out due to (at least in hindsight) very inept investors. The project floundered and then finally as a way to get out, they (investors) wanted to see what they could sell everything for. It had cost a lot of real money to produce that pile of bitcoins, so I ended up buying it for dirt cheap (at least in terms that bitcoins really had no value to them). Maybe after the 7 year NDS I signed expires, the world will know who it was, but for now I can't name anyone or business.

Once the market value was shooting up to space, the pile of bitcoins was worth a small fortune in theory at least.

A lot of bitcoins were spread around the community to help people at first, but it kind of got out of hand.
Ultimately, a large portion ended up being donated to wikileaks.org, so I'm certainly not the person sitting up top a large pile of bitcoins anymore. The rest went to paying off small debts and the very last of it was just recently donated to wikileaks.org again. I never had any intention of trying to crash the bitcoin market with a large sell-off as many theorized I would do. So sleep safe that there is one less person like me in the bitcoin kingdom.  Grin

So, no matter what legend has built up, nothing amazing or exciting has happened to the bitcoins I once had. No buying a Country or purchasing Islands of the sort. Just trying to help out where I could instead. The only thing I have left is old screenshots and empty wallet files now.

A large portion of my past time has actually been invested in the creation of an alternate digital currency for the last few years because I always thought there was a better way to do it. So that's where I spend all my time now, at timekoin.org

I was great to catch up with everyone though, hopefully the story wasn't too boring. Maybe not as exciting as some had hoped.
He says a large portion of it was donated to wikileaks, but if you look at this article on wikileaks (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/08/20/wikileaks-bypasses-financial-blockade-with-bitcoin/), it shows that wikileaks had only taken in $32,000 in TOTAL donations up to that point.  In August 2012, $32,000 of Bitcoin would have been less than 10,000 Bitcoins.  That's a far cry from 371,000.

Anyway, I'm not going to bug him about it.  He's probably still got a lot of coins, and that's fine - he deserves it for being an early adopter of this technology.  He also deserves to not be pestered by people trying to beg money off him.
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June 26, 2013, 11:15:43 AM
 #297

Oh. Since there's some interest in this, again... I wrote an article intended for Bitcoin Magazine last year, but they apparently lost interest in it when ownership changed over (I wasn't paid, I'm assuming I retain ownership), so here it is:

(Someone pick me up to write -- I'm bored out of my mind and could use some side-income)

Two Secret Service Raids Later, Previous Holder of Over $4m in BTC in Good Spirits

One man's world has been inarguably changed, for the better, and the worse, by Bitcoin. Through a shrewd and, what some have claimed dubious, business deal, Nashville, TN resident Michael Brown (known online as “Knightmb”) acquired 371,000 Bitcoins (then worth roughly $20,000 in a market which couldn't bear downward pressure) for $5,000. As of this writing, the 371,000 Bitcoins he purchased in 2011 are currently worth approximately $4m. Now, however, he may not only be Satoshi-less, but may also (again) be at risk of a stay in federal prison.

Who Is Michael Brown?
Brown lives in TN with his wife and child, working in just about everything technical. He provides wireless Internet service, designs hardware for other his company and other Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) to use, as well as software. Brown also works as network, email, and website administer for multiple SMBs. Brown is quite familiar with Bitcoin and within the earlier online community. Around 2010, Brown even wrote and published an abstract on “Timekoin,” a proposed Bitcoin alternative he still uses.

Brown's Bitcoins
Around the time of Bitcoin's birth, Brown collected money (the project had roughly $12,000 in total funding) and bought hashing power to accumulate Bitcoins. By the time the money had run out, the project owned approximately 371,000 Bitcoins. However, even while the price of Bitcoins were roughly $.06 each, there was only very weak market demand. According to Brown, “It is easy in hindsight to think of how foolish anyone would be to sell that large amount of bitcoins for such a small amount, but back then there were articles written all over the Internet about bitcoin being a pyramid scam or a fools investment. The people (investors) that originally got into it, thought they had made a huge investment mistake and just wanted to get out.” And get out they did, allowing Brown to buy the project and its 371,000 Bitcoins for “only” $5,000.

However, while this collection of Bitcoin would be worth roughly $4,000,000 USD as of this writing, Brown states he did give away most of his holdings, including a large chunk to Wikileaks when they began accepting BTC donations, with Brown adding the quip “At the time though, I might as well have been sending power points from pokemon cards as far as what actual value they would get from it.“ Brown also gave much of his holdings away to those finding his contact information, with the remainder being sold once the Bitcoin market skyrocketed, allowing him to “make back my initial investment plus a lot of interest.“

There have been claims of foul play by Brown's previous partners, who were primarily members of electric bicycle forum Endless-Sphere. Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Justin, the current owner of the forum (Brown previously owned the forum while the Bitcoin accumulation project was ongoing). However, as of this writing, no evidence was brought up indicating Brown had done anything morally questionable. While there was “a three day mutiny” against Brown while he owned the forum, it appears this was solely related to the sale of the forum to another person (not Justin) who wanted the forum to be monetized.


Tax Document Theft
In mid-2012, Mitt and Ann Romney's tax documents were stolen from their accounting firm, PWC. Later, PWC received a flash drive and ransom letter demanding $1m worth of Bitcoins to keep the documents private. These documents, as of today, were never released, though it would appear the Romneys never paid the ransom. BitInstant, for their part in grabbing the media's attention in this ordeal, offered the Romney campaign a free USD-to-BTC conversion should they be interested.

The flash drive in the envelope sent to PWC did not just contain copies of the documents the ransomer was threatening to release, but also included two pictures of cats around furniture. The cat pictures were heavily scrutinized by the US Secret Service and considered to be the smoking gun of the case, which Brown says “has kind of turned into a running joke now among friends and family.” The Secret Service then decided, likely with evidence not yet presented to the public, to conduct a raid against Michael Brown and his family's home (again).

Likely taken into consideration by the United States SS was Brown's previous acquaintance with SS agents during their last raid of his house, which occurred in 2009. At the time, Brown worked for an insurance company to help them neatly organize customers' personal information into a spreadsheet. Brown alleges that part of the information he was to organize were social security numbers, which he wasn't sure if was legal. Brown contacted the insurance company but wasn't given proper attention until he threatened to tell national media. Brown says, “They explained that no one should have access to any customer's social security number, but I was trying to show them it was wrong assumption. Soon afterward, instead of fixing the issue, they called the federal government and told them I had stolen their customer data which contained tens or hundreds of thousands of social security numbers.“ It was at this point Brown first experiences the joy of a federal raid, where only his workstation was seized (he would not be so lucky in the future).  According to Brown, “After many months and many visits to the Secret Service office in Nashville, the case was finally closed for being a waste of time and resources for the Secret Service and my workstation was returned (damaged). No charges were ever filed and the case dropped.“

The 2012 Raid
It was September 14th, 2012 when Brown and his wife would again awake to bright flashlights being shone in their faces by Secret Service agents. This time, agents demanded answers about the pictures of cats written to the USB drive included with the ransom letter sent to the Romneys' tax firm.

Unfortunately for the Secret Service, they soon found neither the cats nor the furniture pictured. This didn't prevent them from further interrogating Brown and his family, however. His daughter would later be able to identify the cats as being owned by one of Brown's former clients, Janine Bolin, whose computer he backed up for her while helping repair her system. The Secret Service left Brown's house after crawling around his attic and confiscating any electronics they could find. They then paid a visit to Bolin's house, where they'd again confiscate all electronic equipment in case it might have evidence.

Brown states legal fees may be as high as $6,000, with other damages including what was done to his house (including the stereotypical broken doors), and says the situation the US Secret Service has created is similar to if “your local plumber has his entire truck taken, along with all the tools he uses for the trade.” Brown appears in good spirits, however, saying “if I ever do get any/all of my equipment back, I'm going to have a lot of extra of the same thing at least.” Brown ends responding to my questions with “Overall, the Federal government is made up of regular people like myself. The Federal government makes mistakes and bad things happen because of it. The most our family can do is pick up our life and move on. That is why we were reaching out for help. There have been many times when I've donated money or resources to help those in need, I guess it is time I ask the same in return of my fellow man.”

Brown has created a site for donations at www.mbdonationfund.com.
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June 26, 2013, 06:21:53 PM
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OK, thx for sharing that resumé with us Kluge. The question remains, what ever became of it?
Did he go to jail? Was the case dropped? Did the cats come clean?
...
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June 26, 2013, 09:22:38 PM
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Did the cats come clean?
...

LOL

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever
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June 27, 2013, 12:24:29 AM
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OK, thx for sharing that resumé with us Kluge. The question remains, what ever became of it?
Did he go to jail? Was the case dropped? Did the cats come clean?
...
They dropped the case AFAIK, and he's back to operating his WISP. He's actually developed and sells some pretty useful hardware and software for WISPs. https://amaranthinetech.com/

The cats refused to give up their dark secrets and are being held at Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants, likely to die before a release hearing.
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