Topic: BMF has lost access to its wallet - page 2. (Read 4117 times)

Hello. This is the letter I never expected I would have to write, primarily because I never saw this coming.

On MayMarch 29th, 2014, I received the last e-mail which passed through tsukino.ca and the website was shut down by BitVPS.

The official story is that a RAID disk was pulled and was no longer in use. How this could have happened to a live server, esp. one of the more expensive plans (KVM-6) was never explained. The problem was not noticed by BitVPS but two weeks after, I sent them a letter asking about my server. I was assured someone would look into it.

How the remote backups which I had running via cron disappeared was never explained or commented on.

Over the next month, there were few emails sent to support. The responses were typically "someone is looking into it" or abouts; I didn't pay it much attention. In the back of my mind I had always assumed someone was looking into it and that the problem would be fixed soon. In the last two weeks (or so) I have stepped up efforts; On the 20th I ended up opening a ticket because email and IRC was something of a dead-end. Not because I couldn't talk to people like arij and Starsoccer and a few others, but because nothing was ever done.

On the 23rd my ticket expired unanswered so I reopened it. It remains unanswered and just expired again.

On the 27th I sent arij (the president of BitVPS) a detailed e-mail letter explaining what was going on and he assured me on IRC that he would open a new server for me "right away" while they worked on the backups so that I could at least resume development and have a webpage.

Of course, two days later, nothing has been done. Unfortunately I still don't know precisely why this hasn't been fixed and due to the exceedingly odd circumstances surrounding it, I am forced to disclose this as material information about BMF; BMF's webpage and it's wallet were hosted on that server (primarily because I was developing a web wallet service called hotwallet.ca since a couple of years ago). This wallet and all the bitcoins in it have been lost. The total estimated damage is about $10,000 in realized costs. There is a much larger amount possibly lost in losing the ability to prove we are GLBSE claimants. Not a small amount of money by any means, but not a huge and ugly number like "millions" (I pity some web businesses). However it means we can never prove a legal claim to money owed to us by HashKing, AmazingRando, Ian Bakewell, BitcoinRS, etc.

I have to admit, I have been assured by tech support that I would be taken care of and that a new server would be set up for us. However, it has not been done. Two months is a long time; if it gets done later I'll post an update.

This has set us back about 2 years. Essentially, our only asset now is our mining income stream. We have 36 mHash/share which is a significant increase over our last reported number, but please excuse me for not calculating the gain in percentage terms because this setback is deeply troubling to me.

I may have slightly panicked; they have assured me a new server can be up in about a day. Fingers crossed!