Topic: Summary of the events last night - And an apology. - page 3. (Read 13029 times)

LOL, i agree with that man. I stole that bitcoins with a gun to buy food.
ITT guided ppl
(feel sorry for yourself my friend, and please close that tv over there)

UPDATE #2: After my last posts he contacted me that "we are done, and to not send him another message", which i replied that he HAS to remove any info and as an extra i added that i will remove all my posts regarding this. Sounds fair? He didnt reply, and prob wont. Police and lawyer have been alert, for the sake of my security. (offline police... not for whats happening here) Pictures from his tweeter(freely available), some of the pm's i got and some screenshots of what has already happened got mailed to my lawyer (in a password-ed flash drive) with a shut-closed envelope with the pass inside. This in case that anything happens to me.

UPDATE #3: An additional note I would like to leave is that after some posts here my mail got email-codes by blockchain (someone tried to connect to my wallet), and the 3rd mail i got is: "Two Factor Authentication has been disabled on your bitcoin wallet. You should now be able to login again." Well i tried to login after this, but always "incorect password" (==SO my account still exists, but someone.. changes pass?) Any explanation? I like how it became safer. Normaly i would post to let it go any further BUT what i got in my inbox from him, its like he wanted to let it "flow" more.

WTF YOU GUYS

What i posted is my blockchain info, NOT MY DOX which HE DID

He got his money back after all this happened(there was only one thread, and that locked when he recieved the payment, but im not really sure on that, anyway it was at about that time), after admiting it was his fault, and after i had no serious reason to give them back to him. NOW he sends me a pm telling me that:


My reply:


And his final reply here:



Is this real world? What the fuck did i did to deserve this fucking thing, even after paying him back, which i did because i wanted to (ok, also wanted my info to be removed)
NOW he threatens to put it back? REALLY?

If one has to apologize for anything, is a thing that he will do alone, noone has to tell him to do so (to promote others bussiness)
After all you have to recover my reputation, not me yours.

Note that, as far as I'm concerned, public shaming was never the issue here.  I understand that some people were offended by the idea of public shaming, and others didn't feel it went far enough, but that is all a matter of opinion and not a real problem.  The real issue here was the existence of a privacy policy that explicitly stated that personal information would be used in a particular way, and then actions that violated that policy.  This is not a matter of opinion.  It is a fact that the policy existed, and a fact that the policy was violated.

If a company intends to engage in public shaming as a countermeasure to fraud and theft, I'm not against that at all.  They just need to make sure that their privacy policy indicates that the information will be used in that way.  If a company wants to assist other companies in identifying those who engage in fraud and theft, I'm not against that either.  Again, they just need to make sure that their privacy policy indicates that the information will be used in that way.

If a company changes/updates their privacy statement, they really ought to make sure that it is easy for all their existing customers to be aware of that fact.  It would be cowardly and deceptive to try and silently modify a privacy policy that has already been in place for an extended period of time.

I see that MemoryDealers.com has a policy that is vague enough to possibly allow them to use their customer's personal information to enforce compliance (through shaming?) and protect themselves:

http://memorydealers.com/terms-and-privacy/


Furthermore, while you state here that you will not engage in public shaming anymore, the BitcoinStore.com privacy policy states otherwise:

http://www.bitcoinstore.com/privacy-policy-cookie-restriction-mode

We won't be sharing any more customer data. (Unless demanded by law enforcement).

After this whole debacle I don't think we'll be attempting to publicly shame anyone else.

Relevant parts bolded. In blockchain.info you can create an anonymous receiving address, which, when receiving money, automatically sends it through the mixer using "anonymous transactions," and after a while, the money ends up in your personal wallet (someone else's coins, but of the same amount). As far as I know, that anonymous receiving address is yours, and stays there, ready to receive more coins to send through the "anonymous transactions" process until you manually delete it. Am I wrong?  Does that address disappear the first time it receives any coins?

If the privacy policy was violated, it really doesn't matter whether the information was made public.  The fact that it Blockchaininfo's data was accessed and used by a third party (and BitcoinStore is a third party, regardless of Roger's involvement in both ventures) at all is the problem.  Either every other Bitcoin business should be able to access Blockchain info's user data or no other Bitcoin business should be able to access it.  People would be howling blue murder if MtGox decided to start giving out information on it's users to other Bitcoin businesses and rightly so.  People would also be very pissed off if every time they owed a company money in the real world that company could get access to the records of other businesses of which they were a customer.

Personally, I'm glad that Roger did chose to make this public and that Nethead responded publicly because if this matter had been kept private no-one would have been aware of the inappropriate sharing of information.  While Blockchaininfo and Bitcoinstore have addressed this, we have no idea  whether other Bitcoin businesses are also sharing user data without the knowledge of their users.

Apart from making the circumstances under which they'll share information with other businesses very clear in their user agreements, perhaps Bitcoin businesses also need to make clear to their employees and investors what constitutes appropriate use of any personal user information to which they have access.

Errrm, yes they are. "Each anonymous transaction creates an entry in a forwarding or routing table which is used to track the final destination address and the value of the transaction. After 6 confirmations (~1 hour) the entry is permanently removed from database leaving no connection between the input and output address. Unused forwarding entries are removed after 8 hours."

So if it was a blockchain.info anonymizing address, any transactions more than about an hour after the first one wouldn't have been forwarded to the receipient. And yes, you can add addresses given out by the anonymizing service to your blockchain.info wallet as watching-only addresses if you want to be notified when someone sends money to them or do taint analysis on them.

Given this understanding of how contracts and ethics works, I'm curious how you resolve following...

The blockchain.info company has a single owner named Piuk.
I enter into a business relationship with blockchain.info (Piuk) and the terms of the contract assure me that the personal information I provide to blockchain.info (Piuk) "will not be shared with any other third party or advertisers."
Later, without informing me, Piuk sells a 25% stake in his company to another individual named Roger.

Who is my contract with?  I never intended to enter into a contract directly with Roger.  I never agreed to do so. I am not willing to allow Roger to use my personal information for any purpose unless it is specifically for meeting the obligations that Piuk and I agreed to for the service he and I call blockchain.info.

So, am I unknowingly and without my permission forced into a contract with the individual of Roger, and forced to allow him to use my personal information for his own purposes as long as he doesn't share that information with anyone else?

That's that I thought, but it appears I was mistaken.

Companies are just "shared property", nothing more.
You may have a contract with a company, the same way you may rent a house that belongs to a married couple. Saying you have a contract with such shared properties is the equivalent of saying you have a contract with each of the owners of the said share property, proportionally.

I don't see how it could be any different, ethically speaking.

And btw, there's only one reality.

Let me try to make it clearer:

- Nethead took Roger property.
- Roger had a previous contract with Nethead via blockchain.info, in which Nethead had provided data which Roger was supposed to keep private.
- Roger used the data he had on Nethead due to this other contract in private to demonstrate to Nethead how he know he had Roger's money and his excuse was a lie. I highly doubt that this would be a violation of the contract mentioned above since the data was not made public by Roger.
- Roger's actions might have represented a breach of the contract he had with the other owners of Blockchain.info. But that's a problem between them, irrelevant to Nethead.

Sorry, I misunderstood the part where you were calling "companies" "abstractions" without rights, responsibilities, or obligations.

I see now what you are saying.  I disagree with you completely, but since our realities don't overlap we will not be able to come to an agreement on this matter.  Others who agree with you that contracts, rights, and obligations only apply to actual individual people and not to companies, and in that case you can all probably find a way to accept Roger's actions as justified and ethical.

In my reality, among the people like me who believe that contracts, rights, and obligations apply to companies, it is clear that Roger acted in a manner that damaged his reputation and the reputation of the businesses he is involved in.

It's almost as if you didn't read the first phrase of mine you quoted.

Blockchain.info and BitcoinStore are just abstractions. They don't actually have any rights, they don't exist ethically. Only individuals have rights, and when under contract, obligations. Contracts may allow the creation of these abstractions, but in the end, there are always individuals behind them.

There were two individuals in this dispute: Nethead and Roger. It's their actions that count.


Roger owns part of Bitcoinchain.info AFAIK, he's not some random dude that asked for data and got it.
As an owner of Blockchain.info, he's probably bound by this privacy policy. I'm not sure if he did really broke it, as he didn't release blockchain.info data publicly, but that's irrelevant as I explained before - if he did broke the contract he had with Neathead as owner of Blockchain.info, such breach of contract is eclipsed by the fact that Nethead took part of Roger's property.

Now, if Roger also broke a contract he had with the other owners of Blockchain.info by gathering this data the way he did, that's another matter between them, irrelevant in what concerns Nethead.


They're much less wrong than Nethead's actions and therefore are forgivable.
His relations with the other owners of blockchain.info and his privileges in their application is a totally separate matter.


When I say "crime" I mean any violation of an individuals right, be it a slap in the face or murder - contract breaching is within.
These distinctions you mention are just administrative distinctions, separating different courts to rule over different issues.

Perhaps the word "crime" in English is not appropriate to describe every violation of somebody's rights. In my language it is fine enough. In French I know that it's not - the word crime is restricted to some serious offenses. Anyway, if that's the case, it's just semantics. Find an English word good enough to describe any violation of somebody's right and replace it whenever I said crime or criminal before.

Agreed, Roger damaged his own reputation, the reputation of MemoryDealers.com, the reputation of BitcoinStore, and the reputation of blockchain.info all over 4 BTC.  Seems ridiculous when you look at it that way.

Clearly NetHead was wrong in his actions, and by returning the 4 BTC could have prevented all of this, but that doesn't justify the damage that Roger did over that same 4 BTC.

Please cut the drama because the guy is Greek. The tv news are getting in your brains and this shit with the Greek situation (problem way exaggerated) has to end sometime, so no reason you feel sorry.

All this waste-of-time thread has nothing to do with the guy's nationality, btw this mess was about 4 btc (four!)

No.  Breaching a contract is usually a civil matter with civil remedies available.  Theft is a criminal matter with criminal law remedies available - thus Roger would have every right to disclose all of the information his business held on the customer to law enforcement or to seek recovery of the overpayment through civil action if he chose that path.  The issues here are both the obtaining of information from a third party as well as the disclosure of information held by the business involved.  NetHead violating the ToS of BitcoinStore (if you hold that's what he did) did not justify the violation of Blockchain.info's privacy policy.  They are separate entities and the fact that Roger is involved in both of them is irrelevant.

We need to remember that there's a significant amount of cross-ownership of Bitcoin entities and this is a situation which could easily arise again unless all Bitcoin services take appropriate measures to protect user data from being shared with other Bitcoin businesses which may have common employees/investors or they explicitly advise their users that they will share that data with other businesses.

Ok, so lets look at the actions of the actual entities involved in this dispute.


There were 3 entities involved in this transaction (keep in mind that the BitcoinStore customer did not take anything from Roger.  If he was guilty, then he was guilty of keeping something that belonged to BitcoinStore.com, not Roger).

Entity 1: NetHead
Entity 2: BitcoinStore
Entity 3: Blockchain.info

In no way did NetHead violate the rights of blockchain.info.  blockchain.info has a privacy policy that states that they will not reveal personal information to third parties.  NetHead might have violated the rights of BitcoinStore.  Under what circumstances was it ok for an employee at blockchain.info to provide personal information to an employee at BitcoinStore?



And yet that is exactly what they did.  They gave Roger from BitcoinStore the ability to demand people's data exactly like that, and he used that ability against the privacy policy of blockchain.info.

They have since addressed this issue, and they didn't know when they gave Roger this ability that he'd actually use it, but that doesn't make Roger's actions acting as an employee of blockchain.info any less wrong.

You're talking about abstractions, while what matters are the actions of actual individuals.


I'm not arguing you should have such power no matter what.
I'm arguing that, if you happen to have - for example, because you happen to be an admin there - and you break your contract against me because you believe I'm violating your rights, then a few outcomes are possible after a "proper trial':

• I'm proved guilty of violating your rights. I took more from you than you took from me. Conclusion: I still owe you.
• I'm proved guilty of violating your rights, but it's decided that you ended up taking more from me than I took from you. Conclusion: You owe me in proportion.
• I'm proved innocent of violating your rights. Conclusion: you aggressed me and has a full criminal debt towards me, proportional to the actions you took against me.

That's what I'm arguing.
Rothbard explains it well in one of his texts, it was a text about police raids and searching for criminals. I searched it to link here but couldn't find it.


I don't know how this abstract entity is supposed to know this. But that's not the point. I'm not arguing they should give everybody the ability to demand people's data like that.

Agreed.  The error in judgement that Roger made was to access the records of blockchain.info to gain leverage in a dispute between BitcoinStore and a BitcoinStore customer.  Had he not done this (or had the customer returned the funds that were accidentally sent to him), then none of this discussion would ever have occurred, Roger's reputation would still be intact, and Roger would still have access to the Admin Panel of blockchain.info to assist Piuk with customer support.

This is mostly true. I would like to add that what Roger published in this forum initially was information from its own site, and not blockchain.info's information. The blockchain.info's information was merely used as proof for nethead/bitbitman when he replied rudely and denied that the address was the anonymizer's address. It was published by nethead himself.

In fact, apart from Roger accessing the blockchain.info to verify that nethead's address wasn't an anonymizer address and he indeed holds the privatekeys to it, I don't really see what was wrong in his situation.
Even bitcoinstore's privacy policy does have a clause pertaining to this situation.
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