Topic: dissapointed by bitcoin enterpreneurs - BFL, GLBSE (Read 2908 times)

well, I didn't have any money in GLBSE, I just had shares... and you're right about BFL, it's like a bet to buy from them, you never know. I'm still hoping that they will deliver, but I'm beginning to be doubtful...

Having proof of identity hasn't been much of use for fighting against scammers. Yes, it would be a deterrent for small time thieves on the forum, but we already knew the identities of people that caused the biggest problems in advance and that didn't help a bit.

Besides, putting your name out there is a risk, and might put off a lot of resourceful people with small-scale ideas. I think we need more of those instead of the bigger projects that imitate the traditional markets.

I'm hoping we can instead come up with an alternative way of doing business.

What we have now, are either the fully free and transparent projects which are almost immune to trust problems; or the conventional companies run by a single person or a few partners with unclear liabilities, which embody the trust bottleneck we are constantly having to deal with.

The engineer's approach to this would be identifying problems and creating clean and direct solutions. I instead would like to see structures that appear more like soup. Instead of trying to come up with extreme repercussions and infallible contract documentation to "make sure" we can trust the people we have to trust, we could distribute trust itself.

The way I see things that happened in the past year, almost none of the so-called scammers, especially the biggest ones (possibly even pirate), set out to scam at all. Some had extremely poor judgement, some lacked morals, some lacked technical skills. The common theme is, they were trusted for good reasons at first, but when they got bigger, those initial reasons became irrelevant. You could assess someone as trustworthy with little intrusion to their privacy (e.g. via a WoT) for depositing your 10 BTC, if his total deposit limit is 100 BTC (assuming facts are transparent). The situation is quite different when he is entrusted 100,000 BTC in total, even if your p2p contract hasn't changed.

Anyway, by distributing trust, I envision businesses that are run with extreme transparency by a large group of people who add bits and pieces to the whole structure. No one person or a group of people should be in control of more than what their trust score indicates. Publicly announced roles and actions will make it easier to spot weaknesses in the system.

Technology could help with distributing liability without scattering vulnerabilities. n-of-m key distribution GLBSE supposedly used for database backups is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

I was pondering about such a practice, thought I could share it with you. I'm sure some endeavors are more suitable than others. I think GLBSE is a good example, because it could be operated this way, which would make it extremely resilient.

I don't think that's a problem.

Open-Transactions does all of its crypto through an abstract base class, called OTCrypto.

It's very easy to swap in different crypto libs by subclassing OTCrypto. For example, someone could make OTCrypto_GPG and easily make a version of OT that uses GPG.

However, the current version of OT uses OpenSSL (through a subclass called OTCrypto_OpenSSL.)

Therefore, all the normal x.509 cert stuff should work with OT Nyms.

Personally I don't like certificate authorities, I think it's just a big spy network. But if you like 'em, OT should work fine that way.

I don't want to pick on the author, but this was such a lovely Freudian typo. I surely can envision Internet as a sort of bush (or jungle) where Bitcoin bushnessmen roam in search of a weaker prey. But instead of killing the prey they send they prey back home for more deposits.

I find it strange that it only takes two examples for you to lose faith so quickly. One being a company that is creating brand new hardware for a niche market when huge companies making huge consumer products face delays all the time and the other being a magic money site that was obviously promising more than it could deliver.

Any time I have spent BTC I have got exactly what I've been promised and, in reverse, have always delivered what I have been paid to do.  

Sorry to say: But it was your own damn fault - at least partially.
You were giving simply too much trust in a stranger (BFL) who promised something (ASICs) and never showed proof he had or will ever have what he claims.
I know there is a deep divide between two factions of users here, the one who (want to) believe in what BFL promises and the others who know that this is all bullshit. If you belonged to the faction who wanted to believe and gave them even money for it then its your own fault. Sorry to be that harsh, but BFL has proven a few times already they are untrustworthy and if nothing else at least not very precise about schedules and specs.
The thing with GLBSE.. well... ok, Nefario was a dumbass to let things go the way they went, but why did you start putting money in ASICMINER in the first place? Same story as with BFL.

My honest opinion here is: I hope you learned from your mistakes. I wish you the best luck to get some of your money back but i doubt you will ever see the BFL-BS or the GLBSE BTC ever again.

In my country software must be certified to be used as a proof in the court. If u sign anything with uncertified soft it means nothing.

If someone issues a number of shares onto an OT server, you can only trade those shares by importing the currency contract into your wallet.

From there, every transaction you perform will result in a signed-receipt, proving your current balance.

If you have the signed currency contract, and the signed receipt proving your balance, what else do you need when you go into court?

My idea is that all of this wont happen till when we all use this board.

It's not democratic and its one of the main reasons there are so many scams on bitcoin.

(...)

yeah, well it's a crazy world we live in right now and the goverments are doing what they want... It's not my fight though. My fight is that I invested money in GLBSE and it seems like I'm going to lose it because some guy can't do what's right...

VeeMiner, obvious we are in the same emotion here. And now I started the war with Nefario, however, I still remembered the first PM we exchanged in the past. He was nice. But it is not relevant at all if you default in the business, and ruining all the contractual relationships of those securities. It is not number, it is the wealth of the users. And again, Nefario refuse to prove he is not scamming by refuse giving user access to the trading history and just let people guess whether the number should be "trust" or not.

However, after the pain, we have to fight. The efficient market is not come out of thin air. It is built by the people. Several little thoughts:

1. Credit agency of our own. At the same time, it should work with traditional personal credit recording and reporting institution. Our goal should be that a crime in bitcoin community will have the same bad influence for the man in real world. America has very good credit record system, you U.S bitcoiners should learn to leverage these resource.

2. Rethink about the anonymity culture. buying weed unanimously is absolutely fine, but doing business anonymously should be treated as  "impolite", especially if you're the one who get the money first in a transaction. We should see anonymous as a red flag in a normal business relationship, except the Silk Road market. Anonymousness is good for speaking freely, but also good for scamming freely. If you are a polite business man, you should let your business parter know exactly who you are, which means, how to let the courts find you, so deliver the signal that you're not scamming.

3. Business contract is very important. For large amount of money, either for purchasing, depositing or investment, we should sign a serious paper contract with the help of lawyer. It does not cost very much.  The please "Send bitcoin to adress 1xxx" or "wire money to bank account XXX" are only good for small money, if you spent, invest or deposit a big money, the paper contract should be put in place before you pay. Blind trust is not a way to promote the efficiency. The bitcoin is only a kind of value storage and payment system. In a business, we need signing contract and define the legal jurisdiction.

For example, if you all had asked Pirate40 to sign a contract before investing in, it would have be much much easier to put that guy into jail nwo. As these kind of "serious paper contract culture" evolved, the scams will be much more difficult to grow, or they even reluctant to try.

4. For mtgox and other exchange, please open a separate bank account for large deposits, so called "third-party custody" bank account. I have not met with any money wiring problem myself. But mtgox should make an example for the community as a leading exchange, and any exchange that make such solution will be a leading exchange. (it is standard operation in the security exchange nowadays world wide).

For the clients fund, they must be deposit in separate bank accounts for each users, or at least large users. The stock brokers in Hong Kong and China will open a separate bank account for each investors, and the broker cannot move the money, only the users have rights to withdraw the money. I am not sure about what this arrangement cost, but I think for the large deposit of mtgox, they should demand such arrangement. And Mtgox should research and find such arrangements seriously as so much disputation have sounds in this community.

For the exchange, especially the ones with the KYC demand, sending a paper contract after the digital registration process, I think it is a must. Or at least, a digitally signed contract should be sent to every user. The exchange is where users depositing money and wealth, it should be a politeness for the exchange to make users easy to show the courts evidence, such as contract and trading history, to claim rights.

Mtgox and other leading exchange should prepare similar system. You should assume yourself can be cheating them, and then people how can prevent that, but not ask users to "trust" you.

I don't appreciate the "trust" idea anymore. 2012 may not be the end of the world, but it will definitely the end of my over "trusting" .

5. For the security exchanges:  in a real security trading service system, the history are not only held by the brokers, but both a central recording system and the bank (as mentioned before, investors' money are deposited in separate bank account : the bank should be notified what stock are bought or sold. So even if China Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation Limited were burnt down and lost all the transaction record, investors can still have the trading history and balance and then get back the shares.

Sending shareholder list to only the issuers is a bad idea. The exchange must provide the evidence in such situation: if the issuers default, the security holder have some solid evidence to sue the issuer to claim his rights. In the old times, the stock issuers will print the paper stock beautifully and try to sell them, and the paper stock is kind of evidence of rights. We are in a community of cryptocurrency, it should be very easy for us to find some digital solution for the security evidence.

This community, please don't get used to scam. The Open Transaction is good idea for small financing project, but not a good idea for large money. We should not say that "we have to always trust the issuer" for large amount of investment. We should say, we should be able to easily show the evidence to court and claim our rights.

6. Punish. Bitcoin Foundation now starts with a positive thinking, such as PR, develop the codes and so on. The Bitcoin Foundation or any other non-profit organization should help the bitcoin community to use the real world law, to punish the liar and scammers, such as Pirate40. From Pirate, we may not get back a single coin in the future, but we still can get back the justice. I know Gavin and other core members of Bitcoin Foundation have warned more than enough that people should not fall into the scam, however, working against pirate is still good for the community.

The ppdai.com in China show us a good example. For everyone who like to borrow money, the identity must be verified, and friends' contact information must be provided. If a man default longer than 120 days, all the information will be public. :

http://www.ppdai.com/blacklist/

And ppdai.com will try their best to make this records in the credit reporting system.

There is a great opportunity for someone start a similar platform in the bitcoin economy.

Do you have any other ideas?



 

If you're only dissapointed in some of the entrepreneurs, then I'd say you're still on the positive side of bitcoin. Many of us have lost faith in much more than that already.

It should be unbelievable that a perfectly valid business model of providing an exchange service for bitcoin bushiness can be shut down by people threatening to put you in jail... But hey, what do I know of what is fair.

I guess so, but I mean how hard it would be to just release a list of emails and shares to the companies? I mean it's unbelieveable that he would piss on our heads like this from a ladder

I agree, but I'd like to notice he taught us a very valuable lesson.

This is one of the realities of a market that isn't run by governments that we have to put up with I'm afraid, eventually we will get some trustworthy people, but until then, be paranoid as is necessary.

Hello everyone,

I have been a bitcoin enthusiast for almost a year now. I became interested in putting some of my money into the system and I preordered a single SC from BFL. I also put some of bitcoins which I bought for cash into GLBSE and bought some ASICMINER shares.

Now it seems to me like the companies are just screwing with us. I have always stood by BFL in threads in the past, but now they just keep on putting the ship dates back and it's not something that can be easily overlooked since so many of us put so much money into the preorders. Some of us paid half a year ago and I really hope it's not wasted money.

GLBSE is an issue by itself. People that met Nefario in RL are saying how nice guy he is. I say fuck him. How hard it would be for him to release information about shareholders so at least we could continue our relationship with company in which we invested in normally? He's screwing with us like we're some kind of idiots and I hate that.

So where I'm getting - we need more people that would run a trustworthy business in bitcoin world so that bitcoins can flourish and not be trampled down by these scammers and half assed promises of deliveries.