Actual Bitcoinica Updates ... only (daily)

[Transisto]

Starting June 25, might want to subscribe to this locked thread to get Bitcoinica payout updates.

I'm re-posting here (within one day) every Genjix and phantomcircuit post related to Bitcoinica.
I might also post relevant posts made by other users (to my discretion).

*not following IRC channel and others.

Last :

...
Personally I think the majority of people will be refunded. However there will be honest people who are mistakenly classified as fake and not repaid back. Or others who get paid back less. I really want everyone to get paid back fully, but I'm not going to lie and say that we're going to recreate a perfect database from imperfect records. The process will be fair albeit slow. There's not any other better way around this (I don't think).

EDIT : now daily updates.

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[Transisto]

if this was a company in the usa or uk all involved would have been arrested already.

since this is international , international police will have to be involved which is a long process.

lets see what the poll says but i agree, totally unacceptable.

My name is public, and my address/location too. If you want to get the police involved, I would be fine to go to them and let them have the problem to deal with. Good luck getting any money back then ever. I've got nothing to hide. Bitcoin people are always believing conspiracy theories like us making money from interest or it being an inside job.

To be honest, interest payments would not cover our time investment for processing payments out. It is a net loss considering I'm worth $50+ per hour. I charge $200 per hour for consulting work, and here I am spending 20 mins at a time researching claims and answering emails for sums less than $10. Doing this for interest payments would be absolutely stupid. It takes a long time because it's complicated. We're paying people back because it's the right thing to do.

[Transisto]

Take it to a different thread. This is for payment updates.

My identity has been public since day 1 of Bitcoin. Our pictures and identities are on the front of intersango.com. Our company info is on the about page which has a number and address. My house address is on google. We've run many honest services for 2 years now in bitcoin land. Your post = FUD and smear. Take it to a different thread as I want to keep this thread for simple payment updates and answering people's legitimate concerns.

[Transisto]

mlawrence, call the police. I will cooperate fully.

Also, it wasn't our staff that lost the backups. Zhou was admining the site, and he had no backups. One of our responsibilities would have been to create a backup system after the takeover.

... I've been researching Donald's username on that forum, Do he post here ? if so what is it ?

He doesn't interact much with the community. He sometimes uses the nickname Incitatus on IRC.

[Transisto]

I am supposed to only give out the status for emails. Accounts are in 3 states:

- Fake. This is a minority of accounts so far we are certain are impostors.
- Accurate. At my last count, this was around 1 in 20 (5%). Only a portion of these has been paid so far. Still working through paying these people back (I don't have access to funds personally. It works like Donald gets a portion and does them in chunks at a time with proper authorisation from Tihan and Patrick).
- Queued. Majority of claims are in the queue waiting to be examined. Around half (a guess) of claims I believed were accurate, and various fakes got pushed back into the "lets examine then later category". Most simply haven't been looked at yet.

The idea is to sort out claims with the highest certainty (this means quicker payouts), then as you work down, you reconcile them with other payments. I know people here are congratulating me, but I've actually been a hindrance for the claims process. Several times, I caused some mix-ups and confusion so Donald hands me batches/tasks to complete at a time.

[Transisto]

Bitcoinica LP crew is definitely not businessmen at heart. Should have set up a blog, with daily updates, put adsense ad on it. They would by now make more money out that blog that it was stolen. LOL

This has got to be the stupidest post I've read. Why would be blogging instead of processing payouts? And putting ads on there? I'd rather not be a businessman then. Thanks for the bad advice.

[Transisto]

49 days later... still looking at a big fat 0

I felt like a fool for trusting Bitcoinica with my money & I still feel like a fool for trusting Bitcoinica to refund my money.

I am not a small customer (5 digit USD currency account, 4 digit BTC currency account). I kept my own records. And most of it should be really easy to verify. For example I wired 10K USD to their CORE CREDIT bank account in NZ that cleared on May 09, 2012. No positions. Why do I have to put up with all this 'soon' nonsense when Patrick, Donald and Zhou have confirmed my claim is accurate weeks ago?

(same here)

[Transisto]

Are you asking me to make a blog?

‘Processing pay outs’, yes. Yet another prompt reply. It seems you are so active on these forums, I wonder how you get the time of day with all this awful processing.

Yes, it was people in this thread asking for regular updates on payouts (which I'm giving). I cannot both be active, and not be active in giving updates.

[Transisto]

13 June 15:00: Initial payouts have been made to verified people for 50% of their claim.

Can we please get an update with some real factual data? The last one was made half a month ago. And so far all we know is that ~5% of the smaller accounts got 50% of their BTC balance back and 0% of their USD balance.

By now you guys should have a concrete plan containing WHO/WHAT/WHEN/WHERE/WHY/HOW. Please communicate it to your customers. Update the individual claim pages with verification status and expected payout dates and percentages. If the strategy is to solve the problem by dragging this out hoping customers will forget and go away then you are mistaken.

I'm seeing a lot of claims marked accurate (especially the larger ones). 75% of the claimed value has been marked as accurate with the remaining ones marked 'undecided' (the vast majority). This number is hugely skewed by a few people with very large balances.

The total amount actually paid out thus far is 1/6th of the total claimed value.

I was one of Bitcoinica's largest customers. I have extended you my continued patience and trust to sort this out. Now after 50+ days of inaction you have degraded me to practically having to beg for my *own* money back. Well done. Top notch customer service indeed.  

Oh, and Tihan - Can you please nullify the NDA you have with the Bitcoin Consultancy guys? We need to move forward beyond words and empty promises. We need meaningful action & full transparency. It is clear that Bitcoinica LP was (and still is) completely dysfunctional. This is not how you run a professional operation.

Well there's a competing dichotomy here. To process the claims, we have limited information and we cannot tell people what we know and don't know exactly. It's a process of rebuilding a database with imperfect information against malicious agents.

People are getting paid out, but again as I said, the process is very slow. In fact Donald right now has done the majority of work. Many of the claims I processed got reverted because I was making mistakes and doing them improperly. :/ There is lots of information, and a bunch of bottlenecks. For instance, lets say one staff member has access to information X, which the other staff member needs, then there's lag there. So it's not totally as efficient as it could be.

I favoured using a completely mathematical/statistical approach (build stats to cross match and home in on an acceptable dataset using hypothesis testing and confidence intervals). But the others decided that it's less risky and better to do them manually (despite taking longer). I still think the statistical approach is a good one and worth the risk.

Let's have a look at this in the context.
the post immediately above my post:

OK - so........... I got a mail that my account is verified as accurate - but nothing but crickets after.

I was apparently under the mistaken impression that meant I was to see some kind of funds returned?

Again - wtf? Kinda irritating because now I'm checking the damn inbox again, and I really don't want to check if the check isn't coming in the mail.

Or, are we doing the - communicate one line of email and then nothing for yet another month. This game is getting tiring

same for me, checking emails several times per day, without any news any more.. very disappointing

Bitcoinica LP crew is definitely not businessmen at heart. Should have set up a blog, with daily updates, put adsense ad on it. They would by now make more money out that blog that it was stolen. LOL

This has got to be the stupidest post I've read. Why would be blogging instead of processing payouts? And putting ads on there? I'd rather not be a businessman then. Thanks for the bad advice.

...
stupid is:
- to have no security concept at all
- stupid ist to get no backups at all
...

Thank you, bremer-btc-user.

@genjix:
This is very rich for YOU and rest of your gang to call ANYONE here stupid. Real pro!. And no, it was not an advise, it was a joke. You are too smart apparently to get it.

I quit advising Bitcoinica the moment my advise to use colocation instead of linode back in September 2011 was
ignored. I have not been advising anyone in Bitcoinica since then. So please do not even for a second imagine that I am advising you here.

Funnily enough, after you guys got owned by linode, you (Bitcoinica) have "fixed" it by moving to rackspace VPS's, GENIUS! (yea for real smart ones clarification: this means IDIOTS!). Do not you see now all the hilarity of this?

P.S. Ohh and by the way "LOL" means "laughing out loud", often used on interwebs as substitute for smiles and it is usually indication that there is a joke somewhere close by.

What do you mean by "you". We were not even involved in Bitcoinica during that time. We did not move to rackspace VPS. I don't know what game you are playing, but I know that you know this.

I only notarised the signed document for the formation of Bitcoinica the day before the hack. This is public information, yet somehow you are implying false things which is very sly and strange. The only thing we are guilty of is that Patrick's personal email got added access to critical infrastructure without his knowledge, and that his email was compromised. And now it is us that bears the brunt of processing payouts.

You know this. Yet you seem intent to just make fun of me. Are you bitter or something? Did I burn you? It's honestly pathetic considering that we hung out in London a few times, you seemed a cool person and I vouched for your trusted character to others.

Is Tihan really the one holding this up or is that an Intersango lie?

Tihan is not holding it up I don't think. It's just time consuming.

And 27% of the claimed value (not 1 in 6) has been paid out so far. Consider that's for 50% of their claimed value.

OK, sorry I took it so personally. I understand the frustration, but I'm confident that progress is being made now. It will take time. Donald has taken the initiative largely and is making solid progress. There are some holdups, and Zhou is being helpful too by sharing information needed.

There's something with Tihan going on, but I am not following that because it's unneeded drama for me - it seems he got fired, although I'm not sure for what. Personally I don't know if it's justified because I don't know the specifics. On the one hand, his boss felt the need to do so. On the other hand, when Bitcoinica was first hacked, I was terrified and suicidal at the thought that users funds could not be replaced. Tihan put those funds up, which is why we can now process payments out.

Any information you have can help your claim get processed faster:

- MtGox deposit codes
- Any emails received from Bitcoinica
- Photograph of your ID to prove account ownership
- Bitcoin transaction IDs or addresses used with Bitcoinica.

Send any information to bitcoinica.reimburse@gmail.com

[Transisto]

today in the morning i got an email fom verify@bitcoinica.com, it told me again that I should send anythin wich could help to verify cthe claim to
verify@bitcoinica.com

Now you say we should send all that can help to verify the claims to
bitcoinica.reimburse@gmail.com    (who is this??)
maybe tomorrow someone states we should send anything that can help to verify our claims to
santaclaus@northpole.com 

what are you doing there??
I sent anything i got to verify@bitcoinica.com again today, it not very much, just the mails from bitcoinica according my deposits an one withdrawal, tx-ID'S you can get out of theese mails, blockchain provides Adresses wich are tied to theese transactions. what more do you need?
You got my full name and home-adress, you got my emailadress wich was tied to my account at bitcoinica, you got my username from the account, I also tried to verify my account with my bitcoinica password (no matching hash was found...), you never had photo from my ID so whatfor do you need it now?
(maybe I' willing to give it to you if it's to proove that I had just one claim open, and will only be paid once, but you will get it when i get a message like something like this: please send photo of your ID to receive back your funds. Payment will be processed immediately after you sent it...)

Christian

[Transisto]

3) How do you tell if you claim has been marked as accurate?

If you email reimburse.bitcoinica@gmail.com then I can tell you.

So far ~50 people have been paid out. Around 4x as many people are marked accurate. Right now, I think people marked as accurate will be paid back first. If you aren't in that category then you'll have to wait until after they're paid, at which point a new batch of people will be marked with accurate status. And so on, until 50% payouts have been done.

Originally me and Tihan marked a bunch of people as accurate based on our assessment of character. This is how Zhou wanted to pay people back quickly (just by deciding who is notable and who isn't). However Donald, who's largely taken the initiative on the payments prefers to do them completely based the numbers. As he's taken charge of it, I prefer to respect his decision on that. So people who send us emails like "I'm so trusted in the community" - that really does not have much bearing (for now).

The claims are making good progress. It's expected to be slow but I'm satisfied and don't want Donald to rush the process / make mistakes. That would be the worst thing ever as we only have the exact funds from the site.

[Transisto]

Sorry about the email.

@ssaCEO, I don't have a way to search for USD payments but I see at least 2 people with their USD payments paid back. I assume there's more. However USD payments are slower since Donald doesn't have direct access to them (goes through a second person).

[Transisto]

Less than 10% of the claims to a point of less than 50% is less than 5% of the total problem addressed. And you are concerned about "making mistakes"? You are still in the statistical deviation fussiness around the issue at 5%, you haven't even begun to fix the problem. At the speed your poor solitary trooper is struggling through this moral swamp of who is being honest and who isn't, who has a reputation or who doesn't, you should get around to beginning to look at refunding the UNDISPUTED US$ accounts sometime in August 2015. With another 3 years to resolve that cluster-fuck you might be out of this right around December 2019.

Nice work! Bravo for the effort! So glad the saviors came along to make this thing all better!

Considering that the base value of ALL underlying bitcoins that you are holding has increased by almost 55% since this theft began, you could comfortably pay out at this level for decades, stringing along the customers that you have scammed, and never touch the principal you hold. Hell, those thousands and thousands of US$ will be increasing at a steady rate too! What a clever routine you boys have worked up here.

I didn't scam anyone. Say how you expect people to be refunded without a database.

We're trying the best we can.

I am amazed that anyone in this community still listens to a single word from you gangsters. There is absolutely nothing that you have done or said that is anything less than classic textbook scamming. You have lied in reaction to every question, you have mis-directed, re-directed or just fallen off the face of the earth whenever the heat gets turned up. Nobody knows yet who actually is responsible for this disaster, and you seem to pop out another name for the penultimate responsible party every other week, and yet there is always some murky uber-mensch who tells you all what to do based on ethical/moral/legal considerations, although nothing you do reflects anything like ethical, moral or legal behavior. Amazing.

It's a wonder that you don't have the villagers clamoring for a lynching right now, but I guess the promise of a few miserable pennies on the dollar sometime in the next decade is enough to mollify your victims. Sad. Truly sad that polished scammers like this whole set-up flourish here. If there is anything that will kill off bitcoin as a concept- it is the thieving bastards like Bitcoinica. I don't believe for a second that there was any kind of hack here, this stinks like a set-up to pull a huge amount of capital out of the "market" sit on it and make gains while everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off, throw your little programmer Zhou off the Island and steal his work, while turning him into a pariah in the community, so that you can paint yourselves as White Knights.

You sicken me.

Point me to one question where I lied. I've been around all the time, posting answers to questions and answering emails. Also I give the full story as it happened in the OP. Your story is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.

As I said, if someone wants to sue then I'll provide my name and details for the police report. No one has taken that offer yet. We are happy to open our books to the relevant authorities. Tihan has also offered up his personal details. We have not acted maliciously once.

Currently I have 200 emails. A scammer would not bother answering and looking up people's claims for them. I also would not be using a crappy IBM Thinkpad T61 if I wasn't short on cash. Our conduct before Bitcoinica has been nothing but exemplary (point me to an occasion where it wasn't), and we've always operated with utmost honesty.

But I guess there is no other way to convince you otherwise, so it is a pointless discussion as you've already made up your mind.

@Transisto, I did say it was a slow process. And actual payouts only begun 2 weeks ago (see the OP). We had to sort out the legal issues with Tihan (who has legal control over the funds), create a claims system, organise all the data and start the process. This isn't something you do in 3 days, but 2 weeks. Consider that it 2 months of legal negotiation with Bitcoinica as to our role we would be taking, and when the hack happened, we we still completing the ownership transfer:

20:42 <phantomcircuit> tihan isn't like an employee
20:43 <phantomcircuit> he's a middleman
20:43 <phantomcircuit> a finder
20:43 <phantomcircuit> im guessing this huge mess is why he wont be working with him anymore
20:43 <phantomcircuit> but donald pushing the point is probably what made that really happen
20:45 <genjix> however you dealt more with tihan, so you know more about everything
20:46 <genjix> i really haven't followed the events, nor read much of the email exchange between donald and tihan
20:48 <phantomcircuit> afaict this is effectively a series of decisions that were made in good faith which were unfortunately poorly thought out
20:48 <phantomcircuit> wendon bought bitcoinica in like october and knew immediately that there were problems
20:48 <phantomcircuit> they went to the coinlabs people but they weren't able to help or reneged on the deal or something i dont know the specifics
20:49 <phantomcircuit> when we got involved in what was it like march? they had been operating for months without a major overhaul
20:50 <phantomcircuit> the paperwork was wrong and tihan was rushing because i think he realized how fucked the situation really was
20:50 <phantomcircuit> then at the worst possible moment the hack happened

[Transisto]

... It is a net loss considering I'm worth $50+ per hour. I charge $200 per hour for consulting work, and here I am spending 20 mins at a time researching claims and answering emails for sums less than $10. ...

Is there something/anything you could outsource by hiring someone ?
...

I think there is a sense of scale missing.  This is like paying 1000$ to fix a problem with 5 000 000$ in collateral damage.
Deepwater Horizon come to mind.

Could you explain this further ?
Im under the impression this is a HUGE problem..
How will hiring help, not help ?

Let's collectively pay Donald / Genjix something better than an old laptop to work on this.
Hire someone to feed and towel wash him while he's working on this 19h/24.
Hire mercenaries to hunt that hacker and recover that DB !!!

Sorry I lack imagination, but it's not like money's missing we're all loosing money every days that passes.  What's missing IMO is someone in charge giving a fuck.

Yes, I work for way below my pay bracket on Bitcoin stuff. Point is that I wouldn't be living like a pauper if I had scammed lots of money. You can check my entire history since 2003 on the internet, and you'll see that I've been working on Free/OpenSource software as a dayjob for 10 years. Those jobs pay far less than proprietary/normal commercial jobs and it's always a struggle. I've never been money oriented or concerned with earning money.

Don't believe what I'm saying? Then google my name 'Amir Taaki' or my nickname 'genjix'. Several times I was living as a squatter, homeless or living out of a backpack. All my programming history is on OpenSource projects.

Also there's many people who can say what my true character is like:

My CouchSurfing page: http://www.couchsurfing.org/people/genjix
Hackathon I organised: http://crystalspace3d.org/main/La_Fibra_hackfest_report (most of those people are on IRC)

Here's a picture from 2008, when I was still a leftist. I was always against greed, but at the time did not understand economics. That control of money is another form of fascism.



My other pics for anyone who wants to play detective: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genjix/

Here's some writing of mine before getting into Bitcoin: https://n-1.cc/pg/blog/read/44422/jb
https://n-1.cc/pg/blog/read/44421/fss

You can decide yourself whether I am a scammer. A scammer would not be posting here. Also if you read some of the forum posts, some people say they were answered by email that they are accurate, and some were told they were at the end of the queue. A scammer would tell everyone they are marked accurate.

Now it is slow, but the data is incredibly bad. But at the very worst, payouts will be completed within 2 months (or at least the large significant portion of them done). We only have the funds for the site. Mistakes that get made will cost people real money. Mistaken payments will not be refunded (hence the 50% first solution).

I'm inviting people to dug up dirt on me because there is none.

Tihan has also offered up his personal details.

I'm interested in having this.

Show me the police report. I'd rather not give people's personal details in public.

[Transisto]

Amir-

Please, I am not challenging you as a person, or your commitment to the cause of smashing the State or eliminating debt. A person is paid what he values himself at- if you want to be paid more for your development time, stop coding in industrial squats, promote your skills and work with people who value your ability. Sounds to me like the murky cabal of unknowns behind Bitcoinica has made you their code-jockey and are giving you the crap duties. Yes, you have been more communicative than the other alleged owners, but your communication has not addressed the issues. Stories have changed, directives have been announced that contradict earlier plans, new players have been introduced throughout this disaster... I am not going to humor you by dredging up all the inconsistencies in 65 pages of dialogue, anyone who has been following along at all knows exactly what I'm talking about.

When Zhou was the spokesperson, you were not heard from, now you are the spokesperson but you still can't give an OFFICIAL or CONSISTENT or ACCURATE answer to any of the questions.

Why are you not paying out in full for the funds that you have good clearance on?

What about the US$ funds you are holding- they have never been disputed?

Who is truly in charge, and more importantly, what business entity has taken on the legal responsibility for the fiduciary responsibility of all of the many tens of thousands of dollars in value you hold in trust?

Instead you keep offering up these little teases of a couple of pennies to this person, a minor payout to another of your select friends on the inside, and you maintain a smoke screen of silliness that you hide behind.

Do you really want anybody in the community to believe that the speed of your laptop is the reason that you haven't made good on 95% of the payouts in bitcoin yet? That's nonsense. I use a ThinkPad 43 as my main laptop for work every single day, and I would be embarrassed to suggest that the reason I couldn't initiate a simple transfer of funds is because that machine is slowing me down. Get Tihan, if he is the leader of this gang, to come forward and speak for his plans and the approach they are taking. Your group makes all sorts of forward looking statements about your knowledge, abilities and financial strength, but all anyone sees is strawmen coming forward to sling the next line of bullshit.

Its been said very well- this is just business. Act that way. Do the proper ethical, legal and moral thing to do and be honest. Don't play the little bluffing game of go ahead and sue me, I'm available... start making some payments, speak only the truth, and if your partners are not willing to empower you to act then out them for it, and demand they come and take the heat. This is the marketplace that you have chosen to work in- you have an obligation to this marketplace to act with integrity and transparency.

I'm not involved in verifying the claims or refunding customers (if Bitcoinica wants me to I would be glad to dedicate some of my time), but I'm following this thread continuously.

I may not be able to give you some official information, but based on all the sources I have (including some big customers who have close contact with people at Bitcoinica), I can answer some of your questions:

> Why are you not paying out in full for the funds that you have good clearance on?

The team is quite skeptical in making payments. Because the amount of funds is limited (Tihan has exceeded his legal responsibility as a Limited Partner by chipping in *personal* funds, and no more such kind of contributions is available or expected), every cent extra paid to claimants means one cent less for other honest customers. AFAIK Donald doesn't want the team to consider the reputation of the customers so it's assumed that all the money paid out cannot be recovered if it's found to be wrong later.

> What about the US$ funds you are holding- they have never been disputed?

The funding account has sufficient funds to cover the vast majority of the claims. Whether Bitcoinica LP is still solvent depends on the claim verification. After removing the scammers from the list, they may have the funds to cover all the claims. But it's also possible for the company to become insolvent. In that case, Bitcoinica should make fractional payments to customers with less evidence or verifiable data. Again, this is just a suggestion based on my personal value judgement. It's not official.

> Who is truly in charge, and more importantly, what business entity has taken on the legal responsibility for the fiduciary responsibility of all of the many tens of thousands of dollars in value you hold in trust?

Based on government records, Bitcoinica Consultancy Ltd is the General Partner of Bitcoinica LP. AFAIK the owners of Bitcoinica Consultancy Ltd are Donald, Patrick and Amir (or possibly Bitcoin Consultancy Ltd). Tihan is a representative of an investment group, which is the Limited Partner. He is never in charge of the company after the corporate reorganization.

I have not received any official information from Bitcoinica for more than a month. So there are nothing more I can comment on. The whole thing is very complicated and I do believe that the team has good reasons for the delay.

[/b]

~35% of claimants are marked accurate
~86% of total funds are marked accurate
~25% of total funds have been repaid

[12:45:25] Amir Taaki: if we spend a whole day doing claims over skype
[12:45:33] Amir Taaki: we can maybe finish 50 of them in a day
[12:46:14] Incitatus: dude I have so many lined up for patrick to do
[12:46:21] Incitatus: where all the work is done
[12:46:49] Incitatus: he spent from friday to monday working on trying to automate withdraws
[12:47:04] Amir Taaki: i can do withdrawals
[12:47:14] Amir Taaki: we need those bitcoinica payments out
[12:47:16] Incitatus: you can build code to automate it?
[12:47:19] Amir Taaki: no
[12:47:19] Incitatus: you can't do withdraws
[12:47:47] Incitatus: everythign you touch that has to do with money blows up in our face
[12:48:08] Incitatus: we cannot fuck up
[12:48:12] Amir Taaki: ok
[12:49:47] Incitatus: looks like a good article
[12:49:53] Incitatus: can't read it now
[12:58:56] Amir Taaki: so what's happening with bitcoinica payments?
[12:59:05] Amir Taaki: why doesn't patrick give you some mtgox USD?
[12:59:58] Amir Taaki: i see lots of claims marked as accurate though. very nice.
[13:02:06] Incitatus: yea idk, too busy i guess. As long as mtgox wouldn't lock my account down then that would be cool but that's very possible. Techinically we'd have to get permission i think that's why
[13:02:23] Incitatus: but yea there are many that patrick himself has to do and we're just waiting on that
[13:02:26] Incitatus: obv he's uber busy

(about blow ups, I am careless/irresponsible and not security conscious - hence I don't have admin root access on Intersango.)

Zhou is totally correct in what he says. We (Bitcoin Consultancy) have taken on responsibility for the payments. In order to do that, we had to complete the paperwork for the formation of Bitcoinica Consultancy. He's also not directly involved, but has been helpful with the odd query when needed (despite not being involved).

About converting the balances: if you prefer USD, then you can specify it on your payments option for the claims.

[Transisto]

about forum PMs - please email the address. Getting too many messages and need them all in one place.

bitcoinBull, OK, take it up with Patrick. I'm just retelling a story.

bitcoinBull, OK, take it up with Patrick. I'm just retelling a story.

No, you take it up with Patrick. You're the one who works with him. Get your story straight before retelling it. Two people of a three-person company should be be communicating better.

I did. I told you what I know happened. You said no. I said OK, fine ask Patrick.

Patrick requested him to be added because he wanted to reset server root passwords. And he did receive several email reset confirmations. Whether the email is his personal email or work email, it shouldn't matter. It's the same email that he use to receive the confirmations and all Bitcoinica sensitive emails.

According to zhou, Patrick's email was added at Patrick's request to reset passwords. I can't believe Bitcoin Consultancy doesn't have their story straight this late in the game, and we are still seeing communication failures among their team.

Why would I need that? I already had the password for rackspace.

Indeed I had recently reset the root password for one of the virtual machines by using that password.

I can understand how this might be slightly confusing so I'll clarify.

There are two password reset mechanisms at rackspace.

One is for the rackspace control panel, this sends you an email with a password reset link, I had no use for this.

The second is for the root password of the virtual machines, this is accessible from the control panel, this is what I had used.

[Transisto]

I am supposed to only give out the status for emails. Accounts are in 3 states:

- Fake. This is a minority of accounts so far we are certain are impostors.
- Accurate. At my last count, this was around 1 in 20 (5%). Only a portion of these has been paid so far. Still working through paying these people back (I don't have access to funds personally. It works like Donald gets a portion and does them in chunks at a time with proper authorisation from Tihan and Patrick).
- Queued. Majority of claims are in the queue waiting to be examined. Around half (a guess) of claims I believed were accurate, and various fakes got pushed back into the "lets examine then later category". Most simply haven't been looked at yet.

The idea is to sort out claims with the highest certainty (this means quicker payouts), then as you work down, you reconcile them with other payments. I know people here are congratulating me, but I've actually been a hindrance for the claims process. Several times, I caused some mix-ups and confusion so Donald hands me batches/tasks to complete at a time.

Genjix, can you please clarify to me under which status does my accounts hold at the moment?

Maria. <3

You have no claim.

The online claims process is now closed to new claims.

If you wish to pursue a claim you will need to send a notarized copy of any and all information you have by mail to the registered address as listed by business.govt.nz

[Transisto]

I want to explain the logic behind 50% initial payments:

For each claim you have a certainty of its validity. You have the sum of funds from before the site had the database stolen which is equal to the site's previous balance. This sum must be distributed among claims somehow.

Ideally you would mark claims that you thought were accurate and those that weren't (based on what the data indicates to us). Then you would end up with some total value which you compare to the total funds available.

If less than the total funds, then be more permissive and allow certain more claims in. Repeat the above step.

If more than the total funds, then knock out low certainty claims and maybe redistribute funds among lower certainty claims (better that someone who is maybe legitimate, gets something rather than nothing).

You then end up with claims that are refunded with a best-fit according to the available data.

However people demand funds quickly. So as a compromise, we make 50% payouts initially (for claims we are highly certain are accurate). This allows an error margin so that in the final step we can still juggle balances around to resolve payments for everybody. The only downside is that you cannot decide to pay someone 0% after you've paid them 50%.

Then once people have been refunded for 50% and the final balances are decided, the process goes back over payees and refunds them for the remaining amount. I assume the final step should not take long given that it's just making payments out for known beneficiaries.

[Transisto]

You have no claim.

The online claims process is now closed to new claims.

If you wish to pursue a claim you will need to send a notarized copy of any and all information you have by mail to the registered address as listed by business.govt.nz

I do have a claim, and its a public one. Part of the funds you are holding are for a pending donation list I have including 1000 BTC for the forum. My claim now is aprox. 16500 BTC interest included.

If you have no intention of honoring my claim, please let me know. I have a PLAN B for your type of people.

Maria.

The claims process (both policies and procedures) are very reasonable.

Your refusal to go through the standard claims process constitutes clear and obvious bad faith.

As I said

The online claims process is now closed to new claims.

If you wish to pursue a claim you will need to send a notarized copy of any and all information you have by mail to the registered address as listed by business.govt.nz

Hello genjix,

would you mind explaining some details of how you handle your payout? It seems this could settle the worries of a lot of people here.

(1) assumed someone is considered 100% correct, and this claim is for a position of M bitcoins and N USD.
Is it correct then that this claimant recieves an payout of M bitcoins and N USD? Obviously, as you stated, the first round of payouts will be 50% on each part, but in any case, no conversion whatsoever happens?

It's up to the claimant. They can specify their payment preferences with the main ones at the moment being BTC and MtGox codes. But we're also able to provide other payment options within reason (like bank deposits).

(2) you stated in the past that you will close out open positions at a fixed buy/sell rate, which is close to the BTC/USD price at the time the site was taken offline.
Is this statement still valid?
(3) how do you intend to handle the case that a (accurate) claim includes a position, but the opening base price of that position can't be established preciesly?

Thanks for any clarifications
-- Ichthyo

2- not sure. I'll have to check and repost here. I think they are being closed at 5 (not sure though).

3- it's subjective depending on the claim. My preference would be to assume no position, but it depends on the case itself.

genjix, how are the 50% disbursements going?  It's been a while since anyone's posted about getting a payment.  Just wondering if there's a hold up or if you're still making regular payments.  Do you email people to notify them that you've sent a payment?  Do people get emails notifying them that they're accurate and just in a queue for payments?

~35% of claimants are marked accurate
~86% of total funds are marked accurate
~25% of total funds have been repaid

No people aren't getting emails when their account status changes. I want to get whether a claim is marked accurate or not added to the claim ticket.

When I finally got an email about my claims status I was told that my "account is in the queue and waiting to be reviewed".  I'm assuming that means that my account just hasn't been gotten to at all yet.  Is that right?  Or does it mean that there's something wrong with my information and it needs to be reviewed in more depth?

Yep, you're right. If your account needs to be reviewed more in depth then you would get a message along the lines of either "your account will take a longer to review" or that "your account is placed at the end of the queue because...".

...
(2) you stated in the past that you will close out open positions at a fixed buy/sell rate, which is close to the BTC/USD price at the time the site was taken offline.
Is this statement still valid?
(3) how do you intend to handle the case that a (accurate) claim includes a position, but the opening base price of that position can't be established preciesly?

Thanks for any clarifications
-- Ichthyo

2- not sure. I'll have to check and repost here. I think they are being closed at 5 (not sure though).
...

...Do you email people to notify them that you've sent a payment? Do people get emails notifying them that they're accurate and just in a queue for payments?

...

People have been asking for this from day 1 and this is the answer you have ?  "5$, not sure"

You've not answered, I suggest you send notice before and after sending payment... to avoid sending to wrong addresses.

I'd swear I had answered this.

Anyways shorts close @ 4.9 longs @ 5.1

[Transisto]

The claims process (both policies and procedures) are very reasonable.

Dude, if you think that communicating through an obscure thread on a forum about peoples lost monies is reasonable then you should have your brain checked for severe damage.
Seriously. Worst communication practices ever. There is nothing reasonable about this process whatsoever.
There is no confirmation of deposition of claim, for one.
You say claim period is closed, but i don't even know you received or accepted my claim because you didnt care to confirm it.
Careless practices.
Now stop making it look nicer than it realy is and don't patronize people.
And please take a course in communication asap, you clearly need it.

If you didn't get a confirmation email then you either did not open a claim successfully or your email provider classified it as spam.

Almost everybody has received additional emails requesting payment instructions as well.