Topic: [Emergency ANN] Bitcoinica site is taken offline for security investigation - page 6. (Read 224563 times)

Stealing monopoly money is still stealing. But just as you realistically won't get police and prosecutors to bust their butts to convict a monopoly money thief, you will have to sue using civil means to recoup losses. It seems Bitcoinica was mixing currency and BTC along with granting interest, so aggrieved parties could probably attract the interest of the financial regulators of the country they were registered in (NZ?).

Hacking into computers to steal BTC is theft and is criminal.  The trouble is how society values the loss.  A lot of participants in the Bitcoin economy, myself included, think of Bitcoin as a way to undermine (or at least protect oneself against) the certain corrupt aspects of our current societal structures.  But most justice systems don't share the view that the fiat monetary system as corrupt and shaky, and thus don't place that much value in Bitcoin.  Probably never heard of it in fact.  And they really do have legitimate work to prioritize.  Upshot:  Theft of Bitcoin is simply not as serious a crime in practice as it is in theory, and 'in practice' is where the rubber meets the road for a lot of us.

Now, harassement is a crime and extortion is a more serious one and physical violence more serious yet.  One can throw the other details (like "but Your Honor, he stole my BTC") out the window.  The criminal justice system will and should take an active interest in such things.  I only hope that this situation remains valid for as long as possible.

@Zhou Tong

zhoutong
VIP
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 808

Can you tell me when you changed your forum description here to the above please, I thought that until very recently it still said something like:

zhoutong
VIP
Hero Member
******
Founder & CEO
of Bitcoinica

This is what we continued to take you for until you recent announcement that you had secretly sold the business months ago & that it had been subsequently handed on to Bitcoin Consultancy =~ Bitcoinica Consultancy =~ Intersango

Anyone else remember when this info was changed, thanks

They shouldn't absolutely trust the database, sure. But, if it matches their records, it would give them the most precise information. Also, it would give Bitcoinica all of the email addresses for their customers, which is something they could really use right now since they still haven't sent out the legally required notification that they were compromised.

Funny thing is that now stealing BTC is legal but harassment like what you described above isn't.

Anyway, let's not get sidetracked here. I want my $1 bonus back ! 

Because for one thing, they can forget their careers and close their shops if they do. In other words:

We don't know what you want. But if you are looking for ransom we can tell you we don't have any Bitcoins anymore.
But what we DO have are a very particularly set of skills, skills we have acquired over a very long career in the Bitcoin forum
Skills that make us a nightmare for people like you. If you let our BtC go now we will not look for you, we will not pursue you.
But if you don't - we will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill your reputation in and outside of the Bitcoin world.

An NDA is amongst a class of thing which are worth having on one's side if one has a reasonable expectation of being able to utilize the services of a justice system.  That is to say, I'm open to the suggestion that they are useless in Bitcoin-land (and like Bitcoin that much more for it.)

I personally would not request an NDA for an interview unless I felt I needed one (which is plausible if I had a promising candidate who I wanted to try to interest...in something besides the easy-to-clean tile in the bathroom...)  But it's probably normally company policy.  One way or another, if an interview candidate was giving me grief at that phase of things, I don't even have to summarize how the rest of the interview would go:

  "Thanks for stopping by.  Have an Odwalla for the road."

I am telling Intersango and Bitcoinica to take the BTC and run !

Only give back the USD and everybody is happy.

Why should they buy up another 18K and raise the price

He's campaigning for unpunishable BTC fraud, for selfish reasons.

Sorry for duplicate posting (I posted this in the newbie forum initially) but I really wanted to share my concerns about the claims process as proposed by Zhou here.

By now it is clear that bitcoinica had their entire db and all records (apart from PII/AML and some outdated records) wiped. This is a worst case scenario. What a royal mess and one that baffles the mind considering they were dealing with a lot of customers money on a daily basis. Having a single point of failure on a virtual server hosted by a 3rd party? Wow. just wow. If I had known I'd never have put as much money into this operation as I did. However that is all in the past so let's move forward.

Zhou suggested the following approach to dealing with claims:


Couple of points below:


Wow. 50 points if you have a reputable bitcointalk.org account. Ranked higher then any verifiable things like transaction IDs, passport data, etc. I'm sorry I didn't know when I signed up with bitcoinica that it's compulsory to go to some unrelated forum and post here daily. Some people have no interest in this and have busy non-BTC related dayjobs (me). To me this is wholly unrelated. Like Bank of America returning money to customers who were good boy scouts or something? Oh you weren't in the boy scouts? tough luck. Putting this item on the top of the list introduces a kind of bias that I wholly disagree with.

I also don't see how the reputation system is workable. For example I am using another username here then on bitcoinica (and this is on purpose). I also chose to hide my email. How can Bitcoinica match Bitoinica users to Bitcointalk.org users? And even if they can how would they establish 'reputation'? (Read all posts by members? I think not). And giving points based on friends supporting your claim... what is this even supposed to mean? Any prudent investor/speculator will keep their deposits and positions private. I don't see how getting supports from friends promotes the claims process in any way apart from allowing you-help-me-i-help-you schemes between people making claims look more legit.


The reason this won't work is because your records are outdated. In my case I sent a significant USD wire transfer to Bitcoinica that cleared only days before the hack. Yeah that is money in the bank for Bitcoinica but no 30 points for me. No sir.


Ah so customers that came in at the time when Bitcoinica started paying interest on deposits and used Bitcoinica as a USD+BTC savings account that had no interest in speculation (like me) will lose out here. Sounds like a great idea.


And you are going to verify this *how* exactly? Basically what you are saying is that if the user picked the 'Exact' option from the dropdown they get a free 20 points instantly. I would argue that because of daily interest on deposits combined with 5 decimals of precision, almost no account holder will know their *exact* balance.


Right, because we all know that putting your email address online so they can be harvested by spammers and impersonators is best practice. +10 points.


Yeah sure. Because all 5500 bitcoinica customers have nothing better to do then read 70+ post threads on bitcointalk.org all day. People have families, jobs, vactations, etc. Bitcoinica has not notified any customers by email of the claims process and the main website has been spotty at best (non www. domain did not work. Certificates were invalid suggesting the claims process could be bogus, etc.)


Let's check my user id... hmm 47**. Well I guess I might as well wave bye bye to my money. Again I started using bitcoinica for the interest on deposits back in February. I put a large chunk of my savings here (yeah, shame on me). Please tell me why I am an inferior bitcoinica customer again?

Don't get me wrong - I think Zhou did a lot of good stuff with Bitcoinica and really appreciate the information he shared during this incident given the total lack of info from Bitcoin Consultancy, but he clearly dropped the ball when it came to security and I don't think he is the right person to handle the claims process since he seems to have a personal incentive to protect his reputation that might adversely influence the process.

The claims process should be based on facts. Meaning MTGOX codes, Wire Transfer Codes, Blockchain transfers, AML/PII docs and the like. It is a big Jigsaw but the only way. Bitcoinica should start working with MtGox, BitInstant, ArumXchange and other transfer services pronto. All money (be it BTC or USD) that came into Bitcoinica should be verifiable though other institutions.

And if it sounds like I'm angry - It is because I am.

Strange. I got emails when I withdrawal, but no email when I deposit.

I'm sure that the vast majority of the emails have been delivered successfully. Our email service provider (Postmark) has very strict rules about emails, and we are not even allowed to send newsletters through their platform. Bitcoinica's transactional emails all originate from trusted IPs.  

The content isn't like spam either. The HTML email template was professionally designed and the content is has a transactional nature (i.e. not sent in bulk).

I'm not sure about the support emails though.

Just because there is no legal precedent for Bitcoins doesn't mean that a legal precedent won't be set.

Also, what's your point?  Why does that matter?  If they give back everyone's BTC, then they give it back.  If they don't, then they don't.  How does that change anything in the discussion here?

My point still stands : they can refund all the USD and not give one satoshi back and nobody can do a damn thing.

Wow. Just wow.

First they won't admit they're the general partners at bitcoinica 9phantomcircuit keeps saying it's too complicated, and that's why they wouldn't tell anyone) - then it comes out that they've completely lost all the data, as previously suspected.

Congratulations.

If you'd follow zhoutong's process, you'd have minimal fraud, and expedite the process. That'll probably save you several lawsuits.

People with BTC may or may not be out of luck with governments and courts (thought Blitz' comment that it's still "property" is quite valid) but the people who had fiat currencies are likely to start taking legal action. Some certainly already have.

So is child porn...

A fool's reliance on certification and a false belief in easy to get signatures. Means shit if your content looks like spam. Those signatures just prove the domain owner is sending the mail, *nothing* about its content -- and in light of recent hacks maybe not even that.

I know first hand that a mail server running dspam put all my bitcoinica mails into spam. Training was/is done with personal data and a few spamtrap adresses.

-coinft

It shouldn't. We use a 3rd party emailing service to ensure deliverability and we have proper DKIM signatures and SPF records set up.

Mt. Gox deposit never sends emails. Only for Bitcoin and Wire deposits, all withdrawals and orders that you request for notification by default.

Well ... I was right  My avatar illustrates the current situation ..
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.919558
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.919639

Makes sense. Has anyone using gmail found bitcoinica emails marked as spam?
Didn't notice I was "missing" emails before today. Still a little worried.