I spoke to Tim Fillmore, president of Titan Bitcoin this morning. I told him I would be taking this conversation public. He's aware of the situation and my intent to take this conversation public. Besides, if someone is out there tampering with titan coins, or has hacked their website, or it is an investment scam, then the public should know. I'm under no contractual obligation to keep this conversation private, nor have I ever been.
I'm unwilling to provide further information on any previous owners of the coin, not only because I don't have it, but also because they have insinuated that they suspect me of theft and fraud and now I feel that anyone who may have been in possession of this coin could also be implicated. I'm unwilling to throw innocent people under the bus to help them with what I see as a wild goose chase, or to participate in their personal criminal investigation in which I am also now apparently a suspect. There may have been n previous owners of this coin, and even if they were all identified, it would still be impossible to prove which one had fraudulently redeemed the coin via tampering with the sticker. I still maintain that I don't think the sticker was tampered with, at all.
So when I opened this sealed coin, I not only lost 1btc investment that I put into it because of this, I have been implicated in fraud/theft, and been asked by Tim Fillmore to help him in a criminal investigation that he has apparently not involved the police in, yet, and in which he implies that I am a suspect.
Great way to start the holidays! Thanks Titanbtc!
I have offered to settle this "disputed coin" situation with Tim, for 0.5 bitcoin, but this is unacceptable to him, and I generally sympathise with his situation to some extent. To him this is an already-redeemed coin, and he's being asked to payout again.
Let's say someone has tampered with the coin sticker, resold a sealed yet redeemed coin to someone else along the chain of n possible owners here. They had access to the original email, we know that much, so it should be theoretically possible to trace the chain of owners who would have had access to that email address. The original owner claims to have sold it on Ebay, but I know that I didn't buy it on Ebay because I have only bought coins for btc directly, in person or via this site. So, then we can narrow down the possible "redeemers" but not prove which one it was. I have been defrauded, and n possible people in the chain of ownership have bought/sold an already-redeemed, tampered-sticker coin. In that case, I am the victim of fraud, and it is not legally Titan bitcoin's responsibility to make me "whole", only to provide me information I would need to provide to the police to start a criminal investigation, which I would probably never do anyway, I would just write this off as a loss.
However, I don't think the sticker was tampered. It looked perfect, and I also peeled/redeemed another titan btc the next day, and it felt exactly the same "stickiness" as the disputed one. So this, in my mind, leaves open the possibility that their "redemption" website was hacked, or that this could have been an inside job. In those cases, Titan bitcoin *would* be responsible to make me whole, and I have offered Tim a month to look into these possibilities, even though this dispute has now already been going on for 4 weeks.
In my mind, this displays clearly a huge, big problem with physical bitcoins. Any time any "dispute" like this happens, it can throw entire groups of people "under suspicion" and then compel them to investigate each other and point fingers. I gave away some V1 cascasiuse coins in 2010 to friends and now I feel that I must tell them that they are only toys, which may or may not even contain a bitcoin, and are unsafe to sell as if they did, because they could eventually become under suspicion of theft if there was ever a later tampering by anyone in the chain of ownership at any point in the future, out of their control. I have a whole collection of physical bitcoins and now I feel they are too extremely unsafe to even use.