I meant more in terms of determining things about shakaru by re-examining how the astana business went down, in light of what we know now about shakaru. I found it a lot easier to side with shakaru before it turned out he owed >8500 btc to half the community and was avoiding questions about the whole deal until recently. You can only get screwed/scammed so much before one starts wondering if there's an underlying cause.
Do you remember how I was the only person demanding evidence from shakaru in the old thread? How about how I constantly sided with astana until I had direct evidence otherwise? I went into that thread completely ignoring shakaru's past reputation. Turns out, that was well-justified. As a result, nothing I said previously changes now that we know what we do about shakaru.
I have no doubt that astana is hot-headed and is making himself no friends by posting so desperately on this thread. However, if we can look past the confrontational attitude and distorted view of how things work around here, I think there could be some interesting information to be gathered. If he really was a scammer that scammed shakaru out of loads of money, what would be the advantage in creating a new account and then linking it to his old identity? He can scam way more people by not picking up the shit reputation he'd already developed.
Why do you think I didn't have him banned instantly, even though I easily could have? Why do you think he
still doesn't have a scammer tag?
Astana is not a scammer.
The way I see it (and from what he said on IRC between fights with random people), he's hot-headed and even admits to being a bit crazy. But I don't think it's entirely unlikely that there was a massive misunderstanding (to put it diplomatically) that led to the astana/shakaru fiasco we all know so well at this point.
Ya think? What was the very first statement I made about the matter? My ruling hasn't changed to this day.
Astana has nothing to gain, as a scammer, by trying to clear his name, at this point. Even if he could somehow prove shakaru to be 100% in the wrong, he'd still have a shit reputation around here for being hot-headed. On the other hand, his obvious impulsiveness also means that he's less likely to be plotting devious and nefarious deals to scam more people, and if this was just a ploy to "get back" at shakaru, it isn't working very well, given his current approach.
So as I said, I think we should give him a chance to explain his side of what happened, and do our best not to call him a thief, scammer, or whatever else people seem to enjoy calling him to set him off here and on IRC. The benefit of doing this is that, assuming he's not lying, the whole debacle would have been extremely unpleasant for him, so it's just a nice thing to do. But even for purely utilitarian reasons, he does have potentially interesting information on shakaru, which is important now that so many people are starting to doubt his actions were in good faith. So if you want to view not pissing astana off (given his obvious uncontrollable temper) as a way to step through the threats/cockiness and get to the interesting stuff, you can also do that.
Either way, I think there's something to be learned here. I know that several people on IRC have mentioned re-examining the astana/shakaru deal over the past few months, so it could be helpful to finally get as much as possible from the other side of the story.
Absolutely. I am most definitely interested in new evidence.
Astana, to answer your question about the evidence, it's a few posts below the one you quoted. I don't feel like repeating myself.