Topic: Coinlab are sneaky bastards, investors behind Bitcoinica (Read 17980 times)

Didnt happen, did it?

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

Isn't it slightly infuriating that all these companies use either "bit" or "coin" in their names?

Not only does it smear the brand, it also confuses the shit out of people.

First off I suppose I'm amused to see anyone still looking after these coins. I stopped hearing from the liquidators a while ago.

On the one hand we have "experts like genjix and phantomcircuit (oh...my fave lately is the "customer can't login to their exchange account because the expert admins let the disks get full".

On the other hand - Tihan & company appear to be the scum of the earth, and should be sued into financial oblivion if possible. (before they do it to everyone else)

Oh...and Zhou  Mr. "I'm diversifying my currency portfolio so I'd like to get $10K amounts in goxusd ASAFP - will pay .25% bonus - and nop I'm not stealing your money"

(that's 3 hands for those of you counting)

The truth be known, most of you a sneaky bastards.

Also to note that Tihan has never covered the 1st and 2nd hack as we'd been told.

Ironically, I'm somewhat more intrigued by the Rackspace hack than I am by the Bitcoinica intrusion (hell, I even have questions about the Linode hack and whether other services were targeted solely to deflect attention).  The database was ever so conveniently destroyed during the Rackspace hack and I'll always wonder what secrets it might have revealed.

I understand Tihan's position from a purely business perspective.  I still believe that his trust in Zhou was a fatal error of judgement.

tl;dr: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I'm quite sure you launched Bitcoinica with the intention for it to provide value to the community. As initially suggested by Patrick/Intersango and others, your claims about trade volume were very suspicious. It's likely you simply exaggerated them, not unusual when being proud of what you've created.

Whether the Linode theft (where other accounts as well were swiped) just provided an excuse for some profit on the side or not I don't know, but I'm quite sure the only real money to have come out of running Bitcoinica were from user deposits. I have no personal opinion of whether it operated as a pure bucket shop or not, but others have documented the lack of visible MtGox movement even when Bitcoinica should've been hedging.

When, based on how you presented the success of Bitcoinica in public, you were approached with investment offers I believe you were simply unable to admit that it wasn't as successful as you claimed. I believe you went along way too far with whatever happened, and that the Rackspace "hack" was the simplest way out when Tihan started questioning the books. Additionally, it provided yet more profit which you might've needed to be able to keep up appearances with your friends and family.

After the very visible and complete failure by the Intersango people to handle the resulting mess I believe you made yet another profitable "hack" on the service. It wasn't as well planned nor executed as the previous, maybe it was simply opportunistic after having realized the release of the source code provided the excuse needed.

I've posted links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudologia_fantastica and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance since I do believe they apply. I think you're currently unable to admit to yourself and people close to you where things went wrong, and you're still hoping to be able to exit this unscathed.

(I consider the above to be the simplest explanation possible that still fits all the known facts. I'm wary about the exact involvement by Amir, Patrick and Donald though - and since Tihan and Zhou supposedly have met in person it would be interesting to know exactly whom else have actually met either of them.*)

But then, the only reason I really care is that if people's only takeaway from having joined the Bitcoin community is that they get constantly scammed this will never fly. I thus believe Bitcoin fraud needs to be handled by the proper legal authorities. We're way past Mybitcoin's "as long as I give 49% back you guys won't hurt me, right?" - which btw looks suspiciously close to what you're currently trying to do as well.

*) Edit: Tihan's identity is verified by an upstanding member of the community, and thus Zhou's should be as well.

Goat, if you had written Matthew, Mark and Zhou, I would have asked what Bible translation you were using.

Read the thread. It has now been confirmed by 2 people, genjix and phantomcircuit, that the thief already knew the passwords and everything before the source code was leaked and the thief just thought that the leak would provide him a smokescreen and plausible deniability as it could be claimed that the group of people that knew the passwords was much larger.

Can't Tihan help push this along somehow and speak to both the liquidator and Magicaltux?

Is he not already suing Gox in for unrelated issue?

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes are listed as speakers for the Bitcoin Conference!  WTF is this!  These people are going to get booed out of the room.

http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

zhou matthew and mark i could see however.

Except that those things don't actually protect people from theives. They do occasionally get some small restitution for the victims (after months or years), but mostly they just make lawyers rich.

Yes we can go after Gox but it will not be easy to win.

However it will make the issue public and force them to the table while they get bad press.

I'm willing to burn $10,000 for this.

Thanks for clearing up confusion.

I've lost respect for coinlab over this, and even paul graham who invested in them.

Are/were the issues with intersango still unsurmountable?

I've lost respect for coinlab over this, and even paul graham who invested in them.

I've gotten a lot of hate from people who've blamed me for Bitcoinica, convinced I'm to blame. Maybe now you'll all understand. Here's some basic facts.

Coinlab were the investors behind Bitcoinica. Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes founded Coinlab together. Tihan bought Bitcoinica and Coinlab was involved from the beginning. Patrick Murck filed the legal papers on behalf of Bitcoinica investors.

We were given fake shares in a fake company. The deal was to contract us to work on Bitcoinica. The site had been losing money for months and had huge security problems. A new company was formed to handle that agreement.

After the first compromise, despite huge problems in the setup and design of the website, they wanted to put it back up as fast as possible. I was against this strongly which is why I released the code. After an employee used this as an excuse to steal more funds (the evidence is definitive), they were upset more over the loss of the 'Intellectual Property'.

They scapegoated me. They wanted no liability and refused to help us complete the job for them. All the emails are public on this forum (I released them) as proof. Donald kept asking to speak to their superior but they refused.

I never had access to money or any servers. I was a programmer working on the hedging algorithm.

They are sneaky, and play dirty tactics. Tihan is a manipulative sociopath.

We had run Intersango, the biggest UK exchange for 2 years without any problems doing 2 million GBP turnover annually. The site has been closed down (due to UK bank problems) paying everyone back and we experienced no security flaws during its history. I had no reason to deliberately cause Bitcoinica users any harm, and if you actually go and study the evidence on the forums, you'll see I acted in all of your best interests.

When everyone ran off, a programmer was told he was now acting CEO of a defunct company that never was formed and had to make executive decisions despite having no technical control or access to anything. Do you know how fucking absurd this is? Then to be told by many different parties conflicting things to sign for their personal interest and get blamed for that.

These are facts, and every point can be proven.

Can we directly go after Mt. Gox somehow?  

Let's focus some of our energy on getting the coins back.

(e)to any creditor who protects, preserves the value of, or recovers assets of the company for the benefit of the company's creditors by the payment of money or the giving of an indemnity,—
(i)the amount received by the liquidator by the realisation of those assets, up to the value of that creditor's unsecured debt; and
(ii)the amount of the costs incurred by that creditor in protecting, preserving the value of, or recovering those assets.

Let's go after Gox and force them to give us what is ours! Our money should not be used as leverage in their personal game.

Thanks for finally coming on here to lay the smackdown.  It makes me so irritated that your lawyers said you couldn't say anything until now.

I never had access to money or any servers. I was a programmer working on the hedging algorithm.

If all this is someone else's fault, why haven't the defendants in the lawsuit attempted to redirect blame in that forum?  What you guys say on the forums and on IRC contradict your behavior in the legal matter.  The plaintiffs and Bitcoinica customers all just want their money back, and they want the right guys to pay for it.  Why drag on the case when you could help the plaintiffs fry the bigger fish that set you up?

I've gotten a lot of hate from people who've blamed me for Bitcoinica, convinced I'm to blame. Maybe now you'll all understand. Here's some basic facts.

Coinlab were the investors behind Bitcoinica. Tihan Seale and Peter Vessenes founded Coinlab together. Tihan bought Bitcoinica and Coinlab was involved from the beginning. Patrick Murck filed the legal papers on behalf of Bitcoinica investors.

We were given fake shares in a fake company. The deal was to contract us to work on Bitcoinica. The site had been losing money for months and had huge security problems. A new company was formed to handle that agreement.

After the first compromise, despite huge problems in the setup and design of the website, they wanted to put it back up as fast as possible. I was against this strongly which is why I released the code. After an employee used this as an excuse to steal more funds (the evidence is definitive), they were upset more over the loss of the 'Intellectual Property'.

They scapegoated me. They wanted no liability and refused to help us complete the job for them. All the emails are public on this forum (I released them) as proof. Donald kept asking to speak to their superior but they refused.

I never had access to money or any servers. I was a programmer working on the hedging algorithm.

They are sneaky, and play dirty tactics. Tihan is a manipulative sociopath.

We had run Intersango, the biggest UK exchange for 2 years without any problems doing 2 million GBP turnover annually. The site has been closed down (due to UK bank problems) paying everyone back and we experienced no security flaws during its history. I had no reason to deliberately cause Bitcoinica users any harm, and if you actually go and study the evidence on the forums, you'll see I acted in all of your best interests.

When everyone ran off, a programmer was told he was now acting CEO of a defunct company that never was formed and had to make executive decisions despite having no technical control or access to anything. Do you know how fucking absurd this is? Then to be told by many different parties conflicting things to sign for their personal interest and get blamed for that.

These are facts, and every point can be proven.

If the leak did not cause the MtGox theft, then what did?

The theft of frunds from the MtGox account was not the result of the source code being leaked.

would the second 'hack' of occurred if the source code had not of been released ?

would the second 'hack' of occurred if the source code had not of been released ?

an employee used this as an excuse to steal more funds (the evidence is definitive)

I was against this strongly which is why I released the code. After an employee used this as an excuse to steal more funds (the evidence is definitive)

These are facts, and every point can be proven.

So why didn't you defend your reputation back then?

This is quite odd. You come back almost at the same time as Zhou and with lame excuses on top.

My explanation is to read my full post instead of taking snippets out of context.

That fat girl is a person you know. Why would you insult her when she's an innocent bystander?

I'm not saying I'm happy Roger Ver lost money, but simply that his life is not really impacted in a huge way compared to someone who barely has enough money to survive or eat because they lost it in Bitcoinica. I seem to recall in Vienna that you were talking about renting out an aeroplane. That's a level of extravagance that goes way way over my head. You probably live far more comfortably than the majority of people do including myself. Don't tell me that 25k out of 50k is more of a loss than $200 of $600. That's the difference between homeless and starving, vs surviving.

Amir,

I've refrained from getting involved at this point, but how dare you say something like this.


Do you know how much damn work Roger has done to get where he is today? Do you know how many sacrifices he has made for Bitcoin?

Wait...you don't. Know why?

BECAUSE YOU RELEASED THE GODDAMN SOURCE CODE OF BITCOINICA WHICH HAD THE MTGOX API IN IT WHICH LED TO THE THEFT OF ANOTHER 40K BTC AND WHO KNOWS HOW MANY USD.

Your fault! No one elses! How dare you say "Oh, I need time off." Please, I've heard that bullshit before.

Oh, and next time you trash and break a Segway in Vienna that Alex paid for because some fat girl offers you a hug...DONT RUN AWAY AND LEAVE THE SEGWAY IN THE STREET!!!!!! (true story for whoever wants to know. Roger, Erik and myself were there)

-Charlie

Tihan Seales the deal, as always.

Well that's certainly interesting.

Did an employee of a New York based online reputation management firm just happen to scam a bunch of people out of their Bitcoins?

I've watched Fun with Dick and Jane so I can envision the scenario you present. However I have to ask why you failed to communicate with the community for the past how many months (years?). I haven't followed things that closely since I fortunately didn't have anything in Bitcoinica when it crashed and burned. I'm not even sure who all the parties involved are (Bitcoinica consultancy - is this you/Intersango?), Zhou Tong, the purported hacker in China, Tihan, MTGOX, a liquidator, etc. However it seemed like the Intersango side of the equation was the only ones who were not communicating whatsoever throughout and the fact is that it doesn't seem like anyone has their money back yet.