Bitcoin Talk account hacked any way to recover?

[DougB62]

Willing to sell it to you for 0.75BTC the amount I bought it for.

So, I just want to make sure I understand. According to your logic here, if someone broke in to my house, and made off with my 60" Plasma TV, then sold it to someone, I would be expected to pay the person back who bought it from the thief? Because I'm thinking that it would be confiscated, and given back to it's rightful owner. I know it's unpleasant, and financially harmful, to be taken advantage of in this way, but seriously, it's like a hostage situation, and it's somewhat ugly. I can understand completely that you want your "money" back... but fair is fair. The noblest thing to do would be to give the "TV" back. Asking to help you out by offering you something so you don't lose your whole amount? Yeah - don't blame you for trying. Expecting to get your whole purchase price back? I think that's a bit of an unreasonable request. If your car gets stolen because you left it unlocked with the keys in it, the person that the thief sold it to doesn't get to keep it just because it was "your own fault". Nor does he get to charge you what he paid for it before he returns it. At this point, any offer made to you would be generous, because no offer should have to be made. But maybe that's just my twisted logic.

Not looking for any arguments, merely trying to understand this better.

[Quickseller]

Willing to sell it to you for 0.75BTC the amount I bought it for.

So, I just want to make sure I understand. According to your logic here, if someone broke in to my house, and made off with my 60" Plasma TV, then sold it to someone, I would be expected to pay the person back who bought it from the thief? Because I'm thinking that it would be confiscated, and given back to it's rightful owner. I know it's unpleasant, and financially harmful, to be taken advantage of in this way, but seriously, it's like a hostage situation, and it's somewhat ugly. I can understand completely that you want your "money" back... but fair is fair. The noblest thing to do would be to give the "TV" back. Asking to help you out by offering you something so you don't lose your whole amount? Yeah - don't blame you for trying. Expecting to get your whole purchase price back? I think that's a bit of an unreasonable request. If your car gets stolen because you left it unlocked with the keys in it, the person that the thief sold it to doesn't get to keep it just because it was "your own fault". Nor does he get to charge you what he paid for it before he returns it. At this point, any offer made to you would be generous, because no offer should have to be made. But maybe that's just my twisted logic.

Not looking for any arguments, merely trying to understand this better.

No. It is more like he went to the OP's house, paid for it and didn't get a receipt. Then the seller is claiming that he did not actually sell the TV

[Ask Ken About Love]

Willing to sell it to you for 0.75BTC the amount I bought it for.

So, I just want to make sure I understand. According to your logic here, if someone broke in to my house, and made off with my 60" Plasma TV, then sold it to someone, I would be expected to pay the person back who bought it from the thief? ...

No. It is more like he went to the OP's house, paid for it and didn't get a receipt. Then the seller is claiming that he did not actually sell the TV

The analogy would work a bit better if we substitute "passport" (or "ID") for "Plasma TV."

[Quickseller]

Willing to sell it to you for 0.75BTC the amount I bought it for.

So, I just want to make sure I understand. According to your logic here, if someone broke in to my house, and made off with my 60" Plasma TV, then sold it to someone, I would be expected to pay the person back who bought it from the thief? ...

No. It is more like he went to the OP's house, paid for it and didn't get a receipt. Then the seller is claiming that he did not actually sell the TV

The analogy would work a bit better if we substitute "passport" (or "ID") for "Plasma TV."

nope because there is no real reason to sell your passport however there are legit reasons to sell your bitcointalk account.

[Ask Ken About Love]

Willing to sell it to you for 0.75BTC the amount I bought it for.

So, I just want to make sure I understand. According to your logic here, if someone broke in to my house, and made off with my 60" Plasma TV, then sold it to someone, I would be expected to pay the person back who bought it from the thief? ...

No. It is more like he went to the OP's house, paid for it and didn't get a receipt. Then the seller is claiming that he did not actually sell the TV

The analogy would work a bit better if we substitute "passport" (or "ID") for "Plasma TV."

nope because there is no real reason to sell your passport however there are legit reasons to sell your bitcointalk account.

Passports are bought and sold, because valuable.  By buying a passport, one could misrepresent oneself as the passport's previous owner.
Accounts  are bought and sold, because valuable.  By buying an account, one could misrepresent oneself as the account's  previous owner.

A passport has little value outside of identifying the person who holds it & establishing a link with said person's past history.
An account has little value outside of identifying the person who holds it & establishing a link with said person's past history.

Only a person wishing to deceive--to obfuscate his real identity--would purchase a passport.
Only a person wishing to deceive--to obfuscate his real identity--would purchase an account.

There is no legit reason for buying a   passport.
There is no legit reason for buying an account.

Where's the problem?

[Quickseller]

You are an idiot. An older account has certain features that new accounts do not have. Unless you are doing business with someone, there is no identity to misrepresent.

It is illegal to sell your passport. It is not against any rule to sell accounts.

You are clearly misreprenting yourself as being a newer account when you clearly are not.

[redsn0w]

You are an idiot. An older account has certain features that new accounts do not have. Unless you are doing business with someone, there is no identity to misrepresent.

It is illegal to sell your passport. It is not against any rule to sell accounts.

You are clearly misreprenting yourself as being a newer account when you clearly are not.

Maybe the unique legit purpose is "the signature campaign" I can't imagine another reason to buy an high rank account, correct me if I am wrong.

[Ask Ken About Love]

.@Quickseller  "Certain features"?  Such as?

>You are an idiot.
Lrn 2 polite, fagit.

[Quickseller]

Signature deals, don't have to wait as long between posts/PMs having an avatar, getting to own something that is scarce/rare.

[Ask Ken About Love]

Signature deals, don't have to wait as long between posts/PMs having an avatar, getting to own something that is scarce/rare.

There is no waiting time for anything but a brand new account, and that time is, as I remember, 3 minutes.  
Sig campaigns?  As I understand it, the account in question was bought for .75 BTC.  Just how much do these sig campaigns pay?

But sure, passports also have uses beyond identifying the holder--I bought a passport to prop up a table with a short leg.
I bought a Sig Sauer to use as a hammer, trying to fix that rickety table, but I guess I'm not much of a carpenter, so passport fix it is
How's that?

[Quickseller]

You have to wait 6 minutes between posts and can only send 5 PMs per hour which makes it extremely difficult to conduct business, especially when you have close to 4,000 PMs in your inbox. It drops to 74 seconds when you have 15 activity and 60 seconds with 60 activity and still have severely restrictive PMs limits.

You can earn .0015 per post with a hero account so you could make .6 per month by making 400 posts which is not unrealistic

Passports are not scarse and there is no waiting period to get one. If you are a citizen of the country then you can get one. Higher level accounts are scarse and it takes time for them to rank up.

You are only making yourself look like a fool by saying that you would use a passport to fix a table or a stool.

[Ask Ken About Love]

You have to wait 6 minutes between posts and can only send 5 PMs per hour which makes it extremely difficult to conduct business, especially when you have close to 4,000 PMs in your inbox. It drops to 74 seconds when you have 15 activity and 60 seconds with 60 activity and still have severely restrictive PMs limits.

So, let me get this straight, a brand new bitcointalk user has has 4,000 PMs?  ohyou.gif

You can earn .0015 per post with a hero account so you could make .6 per month by making 400 posts which is not unrealistic

Where?  Link?

[Quickseller]

You have to wait 6 minutes between posts and can only send 5 PMs per hour which makes it extremely difficult to conduct business, especially when you have close to 4,000 PMs in your inbox. It drops to 74 seconds when you have 15 activity and 60 seconds with 60 activity and still have severely restrictive PMs limits.

So, let me get this straight, a brand new bitcointalk user has has 4,000 PMs?  ohyou.gif

Obviously not, but when you receive 4k PM's over 10ish months then you will have a lot of periods when you need to send many more then 5 PM's per hour.

Most deals do not involve someone asking for a payment address on the 1st PM, most involve asking a number of questions and a good amount of back and forth negotiation. If you are limited to 5 PM's per hour then it would easily take two hours to get a deal done and that is assuming that the only people that ever PM you end up actually trading with you

You can earn .0015 per post with a hero account so you could make .6 per month by making 400 posts which is not unrealistic

Where?  Link?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973949.0

[Ask Ken About Love]

OK, asked OP in the sig campaign how he feels about purchased accounts.  Waiting for reply.

Re. PMs:  Oddly enough, there's throwaway email, IRC, TORChat, and, you know, normal email.
Surprised that a community priding itself in tech prowess didn't think of these

BTW, do you buy/sell forum accounts?

[hilariousandco]

There is no legit reason for buying a   passport.
There is no legit reason for buying an account.

Where's the problem?

These analogies aren't really relevant and are a bit extreme in comparison, but there would be some valid reasons (though rare) to buy a passport but maybe you would disagree. You could buy a passport to evade the law if you've been unjustly or falsely accused of something (I'm thinking Edward Snowden here). Maybe one day the gov will come after bitcoin users for whatever unjust reasons and maybe some people would have no qualms in buying one if they knew they wouldn't get a fair trial. As for legit reasons to buy an account 99% of people buy them for signature campaigns. It's not really comparable to selling your identity. It's just a forum handle. Most of the people who sell accounts are just your faceless average Joes who nobody would even notice if they disappeared or their account was sold. Disallowing the sale of them would just push the activity offsite and underground and that is one of the main reasons they're permitted to be sold in the first place as it's largely unenforceable.

[tspacepilot]

A few replies here.

What Quickseller seems to not be acknowledging is that in principle, the limits/lack of features on newer accounts aren't there just because accounts are like fine wines and need to age a little in order to taste nice, it's because the people who own these accounts are supposed to be limited in this way until they've been around long enough to have proven themselves worthy of greater privileges.  There is a very real sense in which buying and selling of accounts undermines these restrictions.  To emphasize, it's not that in principle newbie accounts are supposed to be limited, in principle its that newbie people are supposed to be limited.  This is carried out by limiting newbie accounts.

Now, I'm not passionate about this issue.  And I understand that the forum rules don't disallow account buying and selling, but I think that in arguing about this it's important to recognize that there's no logical point of limiting newbie accounts unless you understand that as a proxy for limiting newbie people who control these accounts.

In many ways, I see the lack of a ban on buying and selling accounts as a strange kind of loophole in the prohibition on ban evasion.  That is, there's a rule that if you're banned then you're not supposed to buy a new account in order to be unbanned.  But apparently, if you're a newbie, there's no prohibition on buying another account in order to get around restrictions on post time waiting and cetera.

Just my 2 Satoshis.

[Quickseller]

A few replies here.

What Quickseller seems to not be acknowledging is that in principle, the limits/lack of features on newer accounts aren't there just because accounts are like fine wines and need to age a little in order to taste nice, it's because the people who own these accounts are supposed to be limited in this way until they've been around long enough to have proven themselves worthy of greater privileges.  There is a very real sense in which buying and selling of accounts undermines these restrictions.  To emphasize, it's not that in principle newbie accounts are supposed to be limited, in principle its that newbie people are supposed to be limited.  This is carried out by limiting newbie accounts.

The limits are to prevent people from scamming. They were instituted as a result of this thread which was complaining about phishing attempts and scam attempts via PM. The reason why people will not try this with a purchased account is that if they are caught trying to scam then their investment will disappear so people have an incentive not to scam with a purchased account (this incentive is not there when you go and create a brand new account and then make a few posts until it becomes a junior member).

Now, I'm not passionate about this issue.  And I understand that the forum rules don't disallow account buying and selling, but I think that in arguing about this it's important to recognize that there's no logical point of limiting newbie accounts unless you understand that as a proxy for limiting newbie people who control these accounts.

There are a good number of people who run their business out of separate accounts from their "main" one.

In many ways, I see the lack of a ban on buying and selling accounts as a strange kind of loophole in the prohibition on ban evasion.  That is, there's a rule that if you're banned then you're not supposed to buy a new account in order to be unbanned.  But apparently, if you're a newbie, there's no prohibition on buying another account in order to get around restrictions on post time waiting and cetera.

Just my 2 Satoshis.

It is much easier to tell that two accounts belong to the same person then it is to tell that one account no longer belongs to the previous owner. Not only that but there are a number of legit reasons to both buy and sell accounts so there is no good reason to prohibit their sale even if they reasonably could be detected and stopped

[tspacepilot]

A few replies here.

What Quickseller seems to not be acknowledging is that in principle, the limits/lack of features on newer accounts aren't there just because accounts are like fine wines and need to age a little in order to taste nice, it's because the people who own these accounts are supposed to be limited in this way until they've been around long enough to have proven themselves worthy of greater privileges.  There is a very real sense in which buying and selling of accounts undermines these restrictions.  To emphasize, it's not that in principle newbie accounts are supposed to be limited, in principle its that newbie people are supposed to be limited.  This is carried out by limiting newbie accounts.

The limits are to prevent people from scamming. They were instituted as a result of this thread which was complaining about phishing attempts and scam attempts via PM. The reason why people will not try this with a purchased account is that if they are caught trying to scam then their investment will disappear so people have an incentive not to scam with a purchased account (this incentive is not there when you go and create a brand new account and then make a few posts until it becomes a junior member).

That's only true if the scam amount is less than what was paid for the account.  Otherwise the point doesn't hold.  It's certainly not generally true.  I don't think that you can make the argument that "spam" or "trolling" aren't relevant here.  They may not be "scams" per se but certainly part of the restrictions on new accounts is to slow spammer and trolls.

Now, I'm not passionate about this issue.  And I understand that the forum rules don't disallow account buying and selling, but I think that in arguing about this it's important to recognize that there's no logical point of limiting newbie accounts unless you understand that as a proxy for limiting newbie people who control these accounts.

There are a good number of people who run their business out of separate accounts from their "main" one.

I don't see how this addresses my point above.  There's nothing inherent about a newbie account which would suggest that it should be limited.  The reason to limit a newbie account is motivated as a proxy for limiting the newbie person via their account.

In many ways, I see the lack of a ban on buying and selling accounts as a strange kind of loophole in the prohibition on ban evasion.  That is, there's a rule that if you're banned then you're not supposed to buy a new account in order to be unbanned.  But apparently, if you're a newbie, there's no prohibition on buying another account in order to get around restrictions on post time waiting and cetera.

Just my 2 Satoshis.

It is much easier to tell that two accounts belong to the same person then it is to tell that one account no longer belongs to the previous owner. Not only that but there are a number of legit reasons to both buy and sell accounts so there is no good reason to prohibit their sale even if they reasonably could be detected and stopped

Certainly this is your opinion.  I just bold it to try to highlight the difference between factual claims and opinions.  If you want to convince others that your opinion is correct then you ought to offer a rationale, IMHO.

[hilariousandco]

A few replies here.

What Quickseller seems to not be acknowledging is that in principle, the limits/lack of features on newer accounts aren't there just because accounts are like fine wines and need to age a little in order to taste nice, it's because the people who own these accounts are supposed to be limited in this way until they've been around long enough to have proven themselves worthy of greater privileges.  There is a very real sense in which buying and selling of accounts undermines these restrictions.  To emphasize, it's not that in principle newbie accounts are supposed to be limited, in principle its that newbie people are supposed to be limited.  This is carried out by limiting newbie accounts.

Now, I'm not passionate about this issue.  And I understand that the forum rules don't disallow account buying and selling, but I think that in arguing about this it's important to recognize that there's no logical point of limiting newbie accounts unless you understand that as a proxy for limiting newbie people who control these accounts.

In many ways, I see the lack of a ban on buying and selling accounts as a strange kind of loophole in the prohibition on ban evasion.  That is, there's a rule that if you're banned then you're not supposed to buy a new account in order to be unbanned.  But apparently, if you're a newbie, there's no prohibition on buying another account in order to get around restrictions on post time waiting and cetera.

Just my 2 Satoshis.

Sometimes rules can be bent and broken though (sometimes for good and sometimes bad) and not everything is black and white and there are always grey areas. I'm sure everyone of us breaks various rules and regulations all the time, especially if it suits us to or we don't agree with them. I get what you're saying about that some privileges should be earned, but at the opposite end sometimes money can buy you those privileges or help you 'skip the wait', but other rules would still also apply. Break or abuse the rules with that account and you'll likely face the consequences.

[Ask Ken About Love]

There is no legit reason for buying a   passport.
There is no legit reason for buying an account.

Where's the problem?

These analogies aren't really relevant and are a bit extreme in comparison, but there would be some valid reasons (though rare) to buy a passport but maybe you would disagree. You could buy a passport to evade the law if you've been unjustly or falsely accused of something (I'm thinking Edward Snowden here). Maybe one day the gov will come after bitcoin users for whatever unjust reasons and maybe some people would have no qualms in buying one if they knew they wouldn't get a fair trial.

By "legit," i mean "without intent to deceive."  Sometimes deception is warranted, but that's not the point here--the point is deception is the goal.  

As for legit reasons to buy an account 99% of people buy them for signature campaigns. It's not really comparable to selling your identity. It's just a forum handle.

As far as this forum is concerned, an account is your identity, just like a passport identifies you IRL.  I used the passport as an analogy, never suggesting that a forum account is a passport.  Analogies are just ...analogous.  Don't you agree that a passport is more analogous to a forum account than a 60" plasma TV?  If yes, that's all I set out to say (see my first post), and we agree with each other

As far as buying accounts for sig campaigns?  I was going under a naive assumption that people posted because they had something to say, and not to earn some change.  If those paying for sig campaigns knowingly support this sort of thing, some of the credit for bitcointalk's shittening, undoubtedly, goes to them.

Most of the people who sell accounts are just your faceless average Joes who nobody would even notice if they disappeared or their account was sold. Disallowing the sale of them would just push the activity offsite and underground and that is one of the main reasons they're permitted to be sold in the first place as it's largely unenforceable.

If sold accounts wore avatars clearly stating "I bought this account to spam the forum with ads in my sig," I wouldn't mind half as much.  I'm also sure those accounts would not net their sellers quite as much coin.  

I also wouldn't mind it if buying/selling of accounts was not sanctioned by this forum.  Just like I''d be sad if rape became sanctioned in US, "because only a small percentage of rapists are brought to to justice anyhow, so we'll just let them rape right in the middle of the town square--otherwise they'd just do their raping in dark alleys."