Topic: 4 BTC debt of TradeFortress (Ripple IOUs) - page 2. (Read 3601 times)

Some might believe there is a chance that TradeFortress will pay to improve his reputation, others might do it for fun or as (stated above) to own a little piece of history


Yes, that's right. Thanks for bidding! So current winners are:

user	quantity @ BTC	remainder
dancupid	4 @ 0.015	0 remaining

This is indeed economically unreasonable. The people doing it probably want to have a "collector's item".
Like old post stamps, which are unusable for their original purpose since the postal organization that emitted them does not exist anymore, but will be sold and bought anyway.

Onkel Paul

I'm either missing something or you're all brute stupid.

Why are you bidding on something that even TradeFortress (The one who is supposed to honor the IOU) implied that he wasn't going to be doing so?

I don't know much about Ripple, so feel free to tear this post to bits.

That's what you get when you extend trust to someone you shouldn't trust. (There are maybe other areas where TradeFortress can be trusted, I just don't know him well enough. He can't be trusted regarding anything related to ripple, though).

Let me tell you something that really happened to me a long time ago:
When I walked to my car, a guy walked up to me and told me he had lost his wallet, needed a few bucks for a train ticket so he could get home - he would pay me back immediately via bank transfer. He looked like he was sincere and really in need of help, gave me his name and address and he signed a piece of paper that he owed me that money. I was young and naive, so I gave him some money. Of course I never got it back - I was stupid, and he was just a scammer.

Now this is what happened to you:
TradeFortress walked up to you, promising you he would give you 1 Bitcoin (via a ripple IOU) if you trusted him for 100 Bitcoins. You are young and naive, you don't understand how ripple works, and you believed that a promise from TradeFortress is worth real money, so you trusted him.
Now you find that the "piece of paper" where he promised you 1 BTC isn't even usable to wipe your arse since it's just virtual.
You believed that he would keep his promise to give you 1 BTC (in return for the IOU) and now you find out that he never intended to do that.

He calls it a social experiment. I see a very clear parallel to my case where I've been scammed. Who is the scammer here - the paper on which he promised to pay you 1 BTC (which is an analogy of the ripple system and theh IOU expressed in it), or the guy who promised it to you knowing perfectly well that he will not pay?

And just in case you still don't know what the real scam is here: it's not his empty promise of 1 BTC (everybody could promise me 1 BTC - if they don't pay I haven't lost anything) but his tricking you into trusting him for 100 BTC. In the ripple system, this means that up to an amount of 100 BTC you accept "his" worthless BTC IOUs as substitutes for BTC IOUs from actual trustworthy gateways.
If you don't trust a gateway to pay out the BTC they owe you, you definitely should not do business with them, whether in ripple not in the "real world". So now you should immediately reduce the trust level for TradeFortress in ripple to zero and hope that there hasn't been too much BTC rippled through your account - that amount would definitely be gone.

Note that there are valid criticisms regarding to ripple, such as it being based on IOU instead of irrevocable value transfer such as Bitcoin, or the discrepancy between the bold words of openness on their web page and the closed-source server code. These points have been discussed to death, but TradeFortress seems to have chosen to not accept the answers and claims that his questions have not been answered.

Onkel Paul

correct (that's about $6 right? - I'm worried I'm losing track of the decimal places)

ill sell 6 Tradefortress IOU 4btc for 6btc

Yes, thank you

So you bet 4 @ 0.015 , right?

Are these the famous TradeFortress bitcoins from the great '2013 Ripple scandal'?

I bid 0.06btc just to own a little piece of history.

So why did it work yesterday?

You cannot withdraw these TradeFortressBTC to Bitstamp, you can only withdraw BitStampBTC to BitStamp. I feel like I have already told you this in a couple other threads, why do you keep asking the same question?

1) Create tons of worthless IOUs but use a common name for these (e.g. "BTC", "USD"...).
2) Get people to extend trust to you (="giveaway thread").
3) As soon as one of these people also has a trust line established with a "good" source of these IOUs (e.g. Bitstamp) and has some balance there, they can and ina  few cases already did end up with the worthless IOUs instead.

2) is the problem where people are messing up, 3) is something that many are not aware of and that I too consider a flaw in the Ripple system (trusting 2 BTC gateways implicitly means that I value each to the same extent).

I have a question for ya guys has anyone tried withdrawing these btc to bitstamp yet? I have and it only worked once but not after that? it just says no path found

How then can ripple possibly not be a scam if it is a debt system that rests on service trust? Hey everyone, I'm selling a napkin that says "5 btc" IF you can find someone to pay 5 btc for it, I guess the system works! Wtf

Ships me some r3v4r7Darb2J5o7whULpMXuDQ9CpctBd7L
I honestly can't even figure out how this scam is supposed to work.. Seems convoluted and strange..

Good luck in enforcing anything from this debt...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/tradefortress-is-a-scammer-207841

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As his goal clearly is to spread FUD and damage ripple's reputation, I would not trust him on this, even if he's a hero member, and I don't think any sane person should trust him either.
He is most likely not willing to pay his IOUs, probably claiming that it's obvious that they are worthless since they are in ripple so nobody should expect him to pay anything.
Whoever accepted his offer just shows his own inability or unwillingness to understand the concept of IOUs and deal with them responsibly.
There are quite a number of gullible folks in the Bitcoin community...

Onkel Paul

If you really want it, I'll send you some Ripple IOUs for free.

Yes, thanks! In fact I wanted to set it, but confused the wording (you can see min bid and start price in original post, which is the same... I meant min increment, not min bid... my mistake)

Yeah, I guess my last post was a bit ambiguous, since it could technically be read either as you put it (which is what I meant), or as that price for each.

Just to be clear, my last bid was 4 @ 0.01255

Maybe next time you do an auction it would be a good idea to set a minimum step size.