Well, if I ever considered investing with MPEX reading this case has disabused me of the notion. If someone sends you 130BTC and forgets the bitdust it is morally flawed to just keep it. Return it or at a very minimum donate it to a charity. You are taking the route modern banks take whereby they gain the majority of their profits from the charges they levy on the mistakes of their customers. But you are even worse. If I send a bank wire to a bad address, it comes back to me eventually. A situation where the institution's gain is the customer's loss soon sets the institution against its own customers and is a recipe for failure since it violates the basic idea of mutual benefit that underlies contract law and capitalist economic theory.
MP, your precedent and abuse argument is specious. If the number of mistaken deposits becomes an issue, solve it via a fee that discourages abuse but still loses MPEX money. Because its your d*mn system and if customers can't follow it then losing a bit of YOUR money encourages you to fix it!
And I frankly can't believe you wasted everybody's time on this stupid case. If I was a judge I would have charged you a penalty. A penalty for being forced to do the right thing instead of just doing it yourself.
Practically speaking it's this sort of dumbassery that has cost people like you ("the community", if you wish to hold on to that mistaken notion) any chance of being involved in the process for the future. Which... you know, anyone's guess if it's a loss or not in the end.
My first thought was that sending cookies coded in the amount field was silly, and that mpex should stop that yesterday. But it does allow full transparency. Anyone that wants to can look at that address and see exactly how much money has come in. The value of such transparency is quite considerable, and I understand why mpex would want to keep it
Yeah.
I think the judges made a mistake here. And I can understand why that mistake would signal the failure of the idea. Having a good reputation for completing trades in OTC is not the same thing as having a good reputation as a fair judge. Only by judging cases fairly can you develop that reputation, and who would want to put themselves at risk to provide that experience?
Yeah.
I don't know about stealing* exactly, but I agree that everyone has a duty to return things they know don't belong to them. The extent of that duty varies a bit, but generally an involuntary bailee is held to a very low standard of duty, sometimes not much more than merely not injuring bystanders while they dispose of it. In the case of an entity taking deposits, I think that most people would consider the bailment to be at least a tiny bit voluntary, and the duty somewhat higher. How much higher is open to question.
Except there's no duties in BTC. Nor customs. Nor etc.
But, I don't see any mention of the plaintiff taking any steps at all to rectify his mistake. Would mpex have returned the money if asked? We have no idea. Perhaps the judges saw more evidence than I did, but based purely on the public part of the record, the punishment was not justified.
No, actually, the case was quite agreeably brought before the court, it was more of a "here's a chance for you boys to prove you have some basic understanding of the matters involved" rather than a sort of "omg I KILL HIM".
Perhaps we need a rota of appeals, and a supreme rota. But I can't see how to get there from here, mostly because it compounds the reputation problem. In the real world, this problem is mooted by simply having someone with the authority to impose obedience by force, an option that we clearly do not have.
MP has stated the only way forward is for actual law students to take this up as a summer project.
Now why the MP-Jury consisted of a bunch of bleeding hearts instead of people versed in law is another matter entirely and was not only foreseeable but totally MPs own fault for accepting these people in the first place for jury duty.
'Twas either because MP is a blooming idiot who didn't foresee the possibility or else because MP is an evil mastermind who did foresee it but aims to derive whatever unforeseeable profits and benefits from it. I'd guess the former but nobody'd believe me anyway.
But for the record, the sum in question was returned etc. For the future however, the FAQ is quite clear:
DEPOSIT|{sum}, where the sum is an integer, written in BTC (note that you can not deposit less than 10 BTC). You will be quoted an exact sum, which you must send to the exchange address (1Fx3N5iFPDQxUKhhmDJqCMmi3U8Y7gSncx). Don't round anything, the decimals are there to identify you as the beneficiary. You will be credited the full amount. Incoming Bitcoin that doesn't exactly match a quoted sum will be simply kept, reported as profits and distributed to MPEx shareholders.
