Topic: Anyone know what happened to knightmb and his 371,000 BTC? - page 5. (Read 81456 times)

I now understand where I made a mistake. I want  to apologize and make a correction.

When I wrote yesterday:
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://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.338755

2) 1000 BTC bounty for getting a major business to accept Bitcoins as payment:
 
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.555039

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://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.531318
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.558545

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.

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. 

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

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


sorry for bad english

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".

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?  

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edit: This post unfortunately lacks propert contextual qualification. I'm posting an apology below.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1337000

A new flash drive might be more appropriate given that KnightMB "lost" one.

You forgot the flowers.

May I suggest your distaste for the concept of 'community' might be colouring your impression of what was being said here?  From what I can see repentance is saying that we should not assume people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here act primarily in the best interests of the project.  As far as I can see there is no suggestion in repentence's post that people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here should form some sort of collective responsibility for one another.  I'm not saying there aren't people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here who believe in the wider implications of the word 'community' - those nuances that are more noble in some eyes whilst more abhorrent in others' (notice I'm not nailing my own colours to the mast here).

I would tend to agree with your assertion that the term 'Bitcoin community' is meaningless if the vast majority of Bitcoin users had very little of interest in common (including Bitcoin), did not regularly participate in a forum (in the wider sense) of people discussing it and related issues and instead simply used it on a day-to-day basis for their own gain (again I'm not intending to imply a value judgement here) as is the case with the examples you gave.  But what makes me smile a little at your rant (if I may call it that) is the reason you have an audience at all is that there are people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here.

What I'm saying is that sometimes people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here might want to refer to people-who-use-Bitcoin-and-hang-out-here without using so many letters and hyphens - and 'community' seems to be a word that fits the bill.

The "bitcoin community" term is making me more than a little sick ... it is meaningless ... I don't think there is any such "community". Are you saying because I have an interest in bitcoin I am somewhat responsible for what some low-lifes get up to?

Is there such a "Euro community"? A "Fed Res. dollar community"? It's utter collectivist BS to ascribe a 'community' to a group of users who choose to use a type of payment system... wtf? "Visa community", "mastercard community", "PayPal community" ... obviously, there is no bitcoin 'community', it's a made up meaningless term allowing people to assign collective responsibility/attributes to an otherwise disparate group. It also dumbs down a much richer and complicated situation so people don't have to think about it too much, and makes the propaganda that much more effective.

He's either lurking or the Secret Service now have his password.

It obviously is a flaw. And he deserves credit for pointing that out. Timekoin seems ill-conceived though.

Nope.  KnightMB did questionable things that didn't involve Bitcoin at all.  Anything which offers an opportunity to part fools and their money is going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Anything which is perceived as offering anonymity is also going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Bitcoin is just another tool they're going to use.

What I was addressing was the assumption that because people are in a position where they could do something to benefit Bitcoin as a whole or "make a contribution" to Bitcoin they have some obligation to do so.  I think any such assumption greatly over-estimates the number of people who have some kind of ideological loyalty to Bitcoin.  People aren't spending tens of thousands of dollars on mining rigs "to maintain the blockchain".  The didn't invest with pirate because it was "good for Bitcoin".  They don't speculate on Bitcoin prices for ideological reasons.  A lot of people don't give a shit about Bitcoin per se - it's purely a means to an end for them.

Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things but in the short-term it has some characteristics which are appealing to those who want to do certain types of shitty things.  There's certainly no deterrent to using this community to perpetrate scams when the community response is pretty much always "let's stop talking about it, put it behind us and move forward".  Any community - Bitcoin related or not - where there's a critical mass of people looking to get rich quick who also have a distaste for regulation and other government intervention is a scammer haven and this community is no exception.

If Bitcoin isn't robust enough to withstand negative publicity and negative events then it is ultimately doomed to remain a niche technology used only by Satoshi fanboys.

Your implicit assumption here is "the bitcoin made people do bad things" ...

... people do bad bad things, not computers, nor software nor crypto .... blaming bitcoin for the bad things people do is infantile, bordering on insane.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.  His early posts show that he thought a great deal about the development of Bitcoin and actively made suggestions to the devs and Satoshi.  He also recognised early on that an "arms race" may eventuate and perceived that as a "flaw", which is what led to him trying to develop a decentralised digital currency which wouldn't rely on high end processors.  To that extent, he's made a contribution to both Bitcoin and to peer to peer digital currencies in general whether or not TimeKoin succeeds.

While there are certainly Bitcoin fan-boys who regard Satoshi as some kind of messiah, Satoshi himself recognised the potential for the emergence of an alt currency which would be more successful than Bitcoin.  I think that a lot of people are committed to a decentralised, peer to peer currency rather than to Bitcoin per se and putting their time, energy and resources into the development is an alt currency is just as valid as devoting their energy to Bitcoin.  The idea that there should be one, true decentralised currency and that everyone should worship at its altar is ridiculous.

That KnightMb has an ego is readily apparent and his inability to keep that ego in check has certainly invited trouble, but it's unrealistic to expect that everyone who acquires wealth or influence through their involvement with Bitcoin is or should be a nice person or an altruist.  Some people involved with Bitcoin are going to be shitty human beings.  Some of them will make meaningful contributions to Bitcoin and/or make money out of it despite being shitty human beings.