Topic: Someone lowered my trust, I don't know why. What recourse? (Read 6274 times)

You say you "wonder how I managed to keep this hidden", I think it's pretty clear that the global mods in this thread saw this as an unsubstatiated he-said-she-said and left it at that.  TF was amongst the elite at the time, but history has spoken here.  My accounts "seems" legit because I am legit.  I'm a long-time bitcointalk forum member who doesn't do trades, but who does like to talk about the technical details of the protocol/software and I like to gamble and talk about gambling and I occassionally take small coding jobs.



Here's the deal man, first off, I feel very angry that I'm having to try to go through all this again, given the large time distance and the fact that while I have caused 0 problems around here, TF has well... But nevertheless, QS is determined to drag us all back through this mud so here we go.  I don't deny that I was working on a bot but I do deny any fraud or anything else.  I was in good-faith chatting on coinchat (using my fingers to type the messages and my eyes to read the replies and my own brain parse and understand them) and I was learning node.js and seeing what's what.  My best guess as to what happened is that my code didn't have a timer correctly set or I had some loop in there (I was a total noob) and that I sent a bunch of messages in a row or something and that's why "admin"/TF banned my account.  As I said upthread, it was only after getting banned that I got any kind of info about the rules for bots, how they were to be named, where they were to be chatting and whatnot.  This is despite asking TF about those rules on coinchat and him never getting back to me about it (I swear this info is somewhere upthread here and I still haven't read it all again).  Some time later (weeks, I'm not sure, but I recall it being later) I find the negative feedback on my account and I started this thread because I wasn't really sure what to do about it.

When you say that reading through this doesn't make you think that I should be seen as untrustworthy you should ask youself this.  Does it mean that I should be kicked out of a signature ad campaign?  I don't do trades so negative feedback from QS only has one real impact, it got me booted from my signature ad campaign and this was exactly his goal.  He even stated it on the main thread of my campaign.  Then he spent about a day looking for something to use against me and this is what he came up with.  After you've answered that, ask yourself this: is this the kind of behavior you'd expect from someone on default trust?  Bullying small, unimportant people because they've disagreed with you in the past?  Is that what default trust is supposed to be used for?

Here's the problem with you quoting those numbers: they are completely arbitrary.  TF had accused me in this thread of taking some wild amount of BTC that I didn't even own at the time, then he "ballparked" it somewhere else then I think he settled on "all money I had ever withdrawn".  But as I said, I spent many hours on that site chatting and having fun and I had withdrawn my rewards legitimately.  TF was throwing numbers out with no backing and demanding that I pay him those amounts in order to remove his negative rating.  I walked away from that ransom attempt.  History has shown what kind of guy he was and what kind of stock should be placed into his accusations.



Quickseller is some kind of zealous madman on a rampage against me at this point.  I honestly do not enjoy these drama festival flame-wars and I started a thread in Meta only a few days before this nonsense against me began in an attempt to make things more drama free around here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/trim-or-eliminate-default-trust-1031791   For that reason, I locked the main thread in which I call out QS for his unmotivated mudslinging smear campaign because the thread had degenerated into a flame war.  I'm not interested in continuing that flame war here.  QS, the best thing you can do at the moment is remove your negative trust on me and hope that I forget about this by the time that BadBear gets back from holiday.

Like I said in the thread that he opened on me, I don't think he is ever going to get caught scamming in the future because he has learned his lesson on how to avoid getting caught and displays a tendency to dispute any claim of him scamming even though the evidence again him is clear.

You ran a bot on coinchat, probably with TF's help. You admitted this before, so you can't really deny it now:


Coinchat paid people to chat, not bots. Bot owners on coinchat we're supposed to tag their bots with "bot" so that the system would mark them as inelligible for payments for the chatting they did.

So what exactly are you saying TF is lying about? are you saying your bots never received any payment for chatting? Or perhaps that TF said to you your bots were elligible to receive payments? This is what I don't understand at all. You claim the allegations are untrue, but don't say what is untrue, just that TF is a scammer, which is somewhat relevant of course but I have not took anything TF said into account here, only things you said and my knowledge of how coinchat worked.

You never said either of these things in the initial complaint or gave any other excuse so I suspect you did defraud coinchat, however this was a long time ago and the Bitcoin price was much lower too, approximately $128.50/BTC. So if you did defraud coinchat the amount you took was only ~$64. Not exactly the scam of the century, and as long as you don't have a history of doing this kind of thing then I don't think this on its own makes you very untrustworthy, nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes, there are no heros or villains in this world - only heroic and villainous acts.

Perhaps what you could do is offer to refund the $64 to someone who was scammed by TF. Maybe you could do this to "atone". However, the way you have acted when confronted about this by Quickseller doesn't exactly scream trustworthy at all.

It seems that people seem to distrust TF so much that they just outright ignore his claims without even looking into them. The coinlenders and inputs "hacks" took place very shortly after this took place, at which point TF was likely preoccupied with dealing with that and could not even bring additional attention to this scam.

Since TF turned scammer, he pointed out a number of scams/scandals that everyone promptly ignored. There was the silvercane ponzi that for some reason scammed him first and the community ignored him and then ended up getting scammed. When dicebitco.in scammed, he advocated that people remove their signature and many people promptly ignored him, some people appeared to do the opposite for the sake of not listening to him. I want to say there are more examples but cannot think of them off the top of my head.

From what I can tell people were not leaving negative trust against people when they were discovered to scam verses the 4-5 negatives that people would generally receive today when they are discovered to scam. Plus you can add the fact that no scam accusation was ever opened and TF was on default trust at the time. Not only that but he was a newbie/junior member at the time this happened so it was likely assumed that the account would get abandoned once this came to light (and likely was abandoned until TF was removed from default trust).

I honestly dont care why the dirt was dug up, but I wonder how you manager to keep this hidden from your rating. Several highly trusted people have left their opinion on this matter, but no ratings which reflect them. Your account currently seems legit, mainly because ratings by TF no longer carry much weight. Well, rather it would seem like this if it was not for Quicksellers rating.

I am asking a legit question. I see above that you had admitted to using a bot on CoinChat, didn't use the proper string of "bot" in your handle, and withdrew some amount of funds when doing so would have violated the terms of the CoinChat TOS (which you would have agreed to when you signed up).

Your post history does resemble that of a spammer (I wonder if you have used any bots to post here )

I don't see any reason why the necro bump would not be allowed. There are several open threads about the trust system, and it appears that the trust system has failed in this case because when TF was removed from the default trust network, you lost your "warning: Trade with Extreme Caution" tag despite you still being a scammer.

I wonder if your thread asking to dilute the trust system has anything to do with this thread.

Assuming the mods are going to allow this insane necro bump, surely you realize that anyone looking at your post history would take into account that you are on some kind of anti-tspacepilot bender.   The real qustion is why?

Sorry to necro bump this thread, however it seems pretty clear to me that tspacepilot scammed TF in this case. I understand that scammer tags were in effect at this time, yet for some reason "OldScammerTag" did not leave tspacepilot a negative trust. Also several members of default trust seem to have agreed that tspacepilot scammed TF, however did not leave any negative trust of their own. Has the practice of multiple members leaving negative trust when someone scams a somewhat new practice?

I'm not saying I think you are a bad person, I'm just saying that in light of this case, I find your arguement invalid, and Tradefortress' allegations to be reasonable and believable based on the dialog between the two of you. I do believe that the amount may be incorrect, but the principal behind the thread/accusation, is that in my opinion, you exploited Coinchat and recieved Bitcoins that you should not have based on the site's rules in place. Your first comment was that you didn't know about the rules until after you were banned, to justify what happened. If someone gains unintentionally as you are claiming, as a result of ignorance of the rules, it would make sense that you apologize, and refund the amount in question. In my opinion, it is a valid claim that because TradeFortress suffered a financial loss due to the exploit, it is reasonable for him to make a mark on your trust until you two come to a resolution.

The reason TradeFortress is on the default trust list, to my understanding, is because he found a weak point in the forums security, and rather than exploiting it, he helped to fix it. That paired with his previous history of leaving accurate and reliable feedback for others, he was put onto the default trust list. All grudges aside, just the black and white picture, you took money from Tradefortress in a way that was not designed or allowed in Coinchat, and because of that he pegged you as untrustworthy. I don't really see any malicious intent in TradeFortress' amount that he pegged you as owing, I just think that in order to get a completely accurate figure, he would have had to spend additional time getting the facts completely straight for a case that didn't matter to him, because he wasn't going to see his money again. So rather than spend his time on a lost case, he make a ballpark guess.

As far as me not trading with you again, that was a little harsh, but I was trying to use myself as an example to get my point across. Your best bet is buying/selling things is to always use escrow. Trustworthiness isn't as big of a deal if someone reliable is holding the funds that could be scammed on either side. That or work something out with TradeFortress, and get this thing settled. Although, even then, escrow is still a good plan.

Thanks, Salty.  While I'm saddened that tf's unsupported allegations would lead you not to do business with me (were there ever an opportunity), I really really appreciate your respectful tone and consideration of the argument.  I think it stands in stark contrast to most of what's been posted in this thread.  If I could get tf to talk with me in the same way, I would suppose that he and I would have been able to work something out.

Given your analysis of the free-form nature of the trust system (despite the fact that the trust thread seems to construe it much more narrowly as relevant to currency trades on bitcointalk), do you really think it's a good thing to have people known for reactionary and incindiary usage of 'risked btc' as part of the default trust scheme?  If the system is set up to include things like personal grudges not relevant to trading, then should there really be a 'default trust' list?  Finally, if the trust system isn't really about marketplace trust, isn't it more of a confusingly labelled 'friends list', like social networks or something?  I mean, if tf's lowering of my trust isn't more than a glorified 'unfriending', then I suppose I wouldn't have been that concerned.  However, saying that he 'risked xxBTC' on me (when he demonstratably hasn't) and demanding payment of that amount feels like something more than 'i dont like tspacepilot'.

I don't think hes so much holding your reputation randsom, as he explained 1.5BTC was what it seemed you had gotten, and .5BTC is what it seems now. I'm sure he could actually check and find an exact number of coins that he lost.

The Reputation system works however people want it to work. There is no protocol or strict guideline for how it should work. If I see someone doing a very shady deal, if I wanted to, I can leave them negative feedback saying, this guy looks shady, and give them the reference link, or if someone ripped me off on Ebay, and I could link them back here, I could also leave them negative rep for that. The point of the feedback system is that you can leave notes for yourself and others, with linked proof and comments, and people can judge the validity of the claims themselves. Without proof, people will desregard the negative trust, with it, they will be far more hesistant to deal with you. My point was that the figure doesn't matter meant that unless you had planned on paying him back, whether it is for 1 Satoshi or 100 BTC, it would still show negative trust from TradeFortress, and would peg you as untrustworthy if people agreed that you are in the wrong.  If you were willing to pay Tradefortress back the amount that your bot had Actually earned, I'm sure he would be far more interested in searching through transaction histories to find an accurate figure.

but the thing is, should Tradefortress go through the logs to give you a more accurate number of BTC lost, or would it just be a waste of time. I'm sure hes thinking that a guestimate is perfectly fine, as he wont see any amount back.

And although you may not find anything wrong with your bot taking funds from coinchat, as I said earlier, it isn't really your, or Tradefortress' opinion that matters. All that matters is when someone who is going to do business with you, what will they think based on the evidence. I personally think you are at fault and wouldn't trade with you be it 1 Satoshi, or 1.5BTC (which leads into the significance of the amount owed) , and you can see that others think you are as well. But there are also other people who don't think you are at fault, so its a matter of getting people who don't find you at fault to trade with you.

Nope and yep. But if you twist stuff I say, I will have to correct it.

Uh,  was this supposed to a link?  I thought you agreed that blind tf cheerleading wasn't helping and you planned to move along. 

Like I said before, I agree with TradeFortness on this point (you really should start reading). There is a lot of stuff I disagree with, but that doesn't matter now, because he has a point and I can see past my differences with him.

Have fun making up false facts and trying to get out of the corner you are stuck in.

What this really comes down to, is:

• When was there a Terms of Service/Use/etc. published on CoinChat.org? And which revision of it specified the bot provisions, and when was that revision published?
• If that document/relevant provisions were only published after tspacepilot created his b0t and received/withdrew all BTC from using it, and CoinChat, can those terms be considered retroactive?
• Ex post facto laws are forbidden by the US Constitution for example, but should ex post facto rules be valid for private entities to claim "they broke the rules [that didn't even exist at the time they were 'broken']"?

Salty, I think I see your point about reducing this to a categorical notion.  However, I disagree wholeheartedly.  Tf is currently holding my reputation ransom for 0.5BTC.  He started off demanding 1.5BTC  (an amount I dont even have!).  If tf's ransom demand was 0.001btc I would probably just pay him to make this go away and hope that he didnt come back demanding more at a later date.  In any case I would be able to provide evidence from this forum where he and I made an agreement and if he didn't fulfill his part of the bargain that would also be public knowledge.  As things stand, there is 0 evidence regarding whatever I "owe" him (scare quotes because I don't believe I owe him anything).  Yet I am liable for any amount he chooses and my only recourse (it seems) is to decry the blackmail in this thread.  I really feel that the numbers do matter here because they are a) unsupported by evidence and b) my rep is being held liable for those amounts.