Topic: Tom Williams ~ The Smoking Gun(s) or Phin's Pholly - page 2. (Read 16319 times)

I'm not at all satisfied with "Tom Williams" description of events.  Many people's passwords stopped working a good month before the supposed "hack" occurred and this has never even been addressed by "Tom".  If "Tom" and the guys behind mybitcoin are innocent they should emerge and provide evidence for their claims.  Until then, they should be regarded as thieves, IMO.

thats very true.  thankfully i wasn't involved in any way with MBC and didn't lose anything.  its an intriguing study nonetheless and i am interested to see if anything does come out of this altho from what you say most likely nothing will transpire. 

truthfully i'm more interested in learning how one conducts investigations over the Internet and how one connects the dots in attempting to discover one's identity or location.  this may or may not be the right thread to learn these techniques but at least people are trying here to find something of value whether it be a wild goose chase or not.

Hiro said;

"I've known for many, many years"
"philosophical and moral values"
"not any form of scammer"
interested in "liberty and true real money"


He also mentioned Occam's razor.

It seems to me that your assumption that the operator of MBC stole anything is based on nothing and the explaination Williams gave is far simpler than these crazy theories.

Tom Williams said an unknown party hacked the MBC server and made off with the bitcoin. He then gave up on the project and divided up what remained amongst the users.

Wagner's statement that the system stopped sending payments and was still accepting payments in the 24 hrs preceeding the outage has never been corroborated. In fact, it's just plain false. We have all seen spends that have take hours to confirm. Perhaps he misinterpreted while waiting for the network to confirm. For whatever reason he said so, we know it to be a false statement.

As I recall, the operator of MBC continually suggested that people NOT store their coins in the system. The sweep function was designed to make it easy to clear out business receipts as they came in. Also, as I recall, the addition of an email address to a user's account was made optional in response to users' complaints that requiring it was an invasion of privacy. There is no way to reset a password if the user has not left a valid email address. Those people who were unable to reset a forgotton password were those same people who refused to leave an email address. That was always their own choice.

Bruno's statment that MBC was paying Bruce for advertising is also false. In fact, the opposite was true. Bruce was asked repeatedly to stop associating himself with the MBC system because his lurid past was known to the operators since November. They were not keen to have Bruce's filth rub off on them. MBC was never a commercial enterprise, it was an operation without a cash register. To become more busy meant more computer and human resources were spent to maintain it. Frankly, the operators had no incentive to become busier. The advertising sales revenue model proved to be folly when it was discovered that none of the users wanted to advertise. I quit my own paid support of the system when it became appearent to me that it was being used as a clearing house for payments made to a child sex tourism business being run out of NYC.

These actions do not look like part of a plan to scam.

As for the current silence on the part of the operators, Bruce did tell us the the FBI had been in contact with him. I don't believe much of what Bruce says. It's more likely that it was himself that called the police in. Regardless of how the cops got involved, let's assume they are. What would lawyers advice their clients? Silence. What would police threaten to those witnesses who talked? Obstruction of justice charges.

Occam's razor; The simplest answer is probably the correct one. As I see it, MBC got hacked. Williams told the truth about that. He gave up on an unrewarding project and returned what was not stolen. Anarchists seeking authority called the cops. The cops and the lawyers told the MBC principles to shut up.

Simple. Now all we can do is wait until the police are done with this or until the gag order has been lifted. I have seen that take years in some cases.

I'm pretty sure he's not going to reveal any names on his podcast.

very good pt.  so many ppl got ripped off and Hiro withholds the identities of the thieves for a podcast show?  i may have to stop listening to him.

  It certainly sounds good on the surface. And I hate to lump someone's actions into some sort of miscontrived reasoning. Buttttt, in my short years on this earth when a group has all the answers and spends a significant amount of time avoiding giving some it is a usual indication of a very carefully crafted bullshit play in route....

On 09/06/2011 09:15 AM, Angus Boyd wrote:
> Hello Hiro,
> you gave a podcast of great interest to a lot of people when you talked
> about your long-term friends at mybitcoin.  Who are these friends of
> yours?  A lot of people were wronged in that situation and they are
> quite understandably seeking answers. The bitcoin community has proven
> very resourceful at sorting out who is innocent and who is guilty, and
> pretty fair in how they deal with each.
>
> I hope you respond to this message with useful information.

Hello Angus. Stay tuned to future CoinBase episodes where I will talk
more of the subject.

Thanks for the video, sadpandatech. That explains the morning glory seeds I've been finding in my coffee.

I just had a thought. I could sell bitcoinMGseeds by the bitbag. On the homepage of the website will be this morning glory. I'll state that once a day it opens up and reveals a Bitcoin. When you see it open, it means you've eaten to many seeds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARIG-BQRATs

Good ol' Terence Mckenna. Peep the whole thing for some insight, neat part is at 0:32+ ;p

There's an old saying: If you howler sheep to many times, the wolves when start to ignore you. That said, I just listened to this: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=137795648&m=137803856 which is the extended interview. The previous one sited was hashed to pieces for a completely different broadcast. JG is not involved what-so-ever. I'm so glad I didn't site emails and full names. I sure the hell hope I don't get the same room that Bitrebel's in.

has anyone told you you talk cryptically?  why don't you just come out and say what you mean in plain English?  and what does NPR have to do with this?

Thank you, NF6X. BTW, I've almost completed the Freddy Mercury connection. Just a tad more poking.

Phinnaeus Gage: He's much less crazy than Bitrebel. 

I just listened to the PodCast for the umpteen. Would you say that DK and JG had a busy morning? First they spoke with GA, then went to BW's office, signed up to MBC, then wanted to know if using Bitcoin is legal (I would have done this step first), then conducted an interview with RM and felt relieved that it is after paying $40 to BW, then had lunch at MG. But, while eating the chicken platter, MBC gets robbed. Now that's the story NPR should cover.

I forgot to mention that somebody else posted about BW wanted to move Bitcoin away from MBC the day before.

Trust me! I'm not a nut job, but the way I've presented this sure makes it look that way. Now, somebody tell me how JG didn't know about BW and MBC prior to GA telling him about them? The home page of bitcoin.org clearly linked to this forum back then when the investigative reporting on Bitcoin started. Look at the FB page. Out of all the suggestions, Bitcoin was picked for the story, yet didn't have a clue a main guy was only 10 blocks away. Yet, JG did a story on Yap back in December. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

you know, i keep wanting to unsubscribe to this thread cuz a large part of me thinks you're a nut job.

but i just went back and reviewed that NPR podcast and the 25000 BTC on BW's computer has also bugged me ever since i heard about it.  anyone know what MyBitcoins total balance was at the top?

also the fact that there is a Tom Williams one relationship away from Bruce thru Serge G who signed up right after him seems a bit too coincidental as well. 

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. ~Wikipedia

cHIROpractor


Perhaps, if I wasn't forking my investigation, and forking up, then maybe I would have this done by now.

I keep going back to http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/24/138673630/what-is-bitcoin (listen closely to the podcast) because I feel there's a nugget of gold to be found here.

As far as TW is concerned, last night I was trying to connect http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2005-10/msg00008.html + Dr. Prepper + polarbeargarden + Freddie Mercury.

This morning, I've connected http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2005-10/msg00008.html with Nvidia.

On a recent podcast, Hiro White says he is long-term friends with the Mybitcoin guys.  That seems like a big, fat trail to follow.

PM, [email protected] or [email protected]

I believe half the fun of this thread is taking the mass amounts of random information and concocting your own tale of the MyBitcoin Fiasco.

I am currently working on a site taking excerpts from this thread and putting in blanks for certain nouns, verbs, and adjectives so we can all have some MyBitcoin Mad Libs fun.

Honestly though, based on information from this thread, it would lead one to believe there is a decent connection with either Bruce or someone affiliated with Bruce, and a Tom Williams.

I would also say I think there is way more to this story than we will ever know, unknown parties that use guns and don't use the Internet.  But that theory will be in the second Mad Libs book, stay tuned.

This thread is really jumbled and very confusing.  Was anything actually discovered/confirmed?  Is Tom Williams = Bruce Wagnar?