Something Awful....
Are you under a rock the past 6 months MoonShadow?
Maybe I'm just too old.
I don't think anyone cares that Bruce is gay, I think they care that not only is a convicted fraudster heavily promoting bitcoins, he may be involved in one of the biggest thefts of bitcoins.
Obviously some people
do care if Bruce is battin' for the other team. I see no evidence that he is a convicted fraudster, a civil suit is easy enough to lose. Mismanagement is a valid cause for a class action suit, but it's not usually criminal. Never attribute malice whenever incompetance is a reasonable explaination. Again, a real con artist wouldn't have used his real identity if this were a con, nor would he try to defend himself in this forum once the game was done. Obviously, Bruce's reputation within this community matters to himself. What he should have done in 2005 was simply stop accepting new applications, or at least stop accepting a deposit for accepting new applications. I've some limited experience with land contracts, and what he was doing was basicly matchmaking of real estate investors and homeowners who were treading water, but still a better risk than the standard metrics would imply. Sort of like what Prosper.com used to do before the regulators shut them down. This does not mean that the idea wasn't sound, just that as the market started to tank, the pool of risk worthy homeowners and the pool of available investment funds both dwindled away compared to the pool of soon-to-be-former homeowners. That said, mismanagement does seem to be a plausible cause of failure, and not one that is easy for most businessmen to admit. I think that a lot of this is about a subset of forum membership that got burned by Mybitcoin.com (I lost 29 BTC myself) and are too bitter to accept that they (we) all failed to do our due dilligence. We should never have been so trusting of a faceless website ran by a largely anonymous individual, and we shouldn't be looking for prominant members to blame for our errors. Take a little responsibility for your own actions, people. I read today that some woman paid $180 for an Ipad 2 in the parking lot of a McD's; only to get it home and discover that it was a painted block of wood. The woman called the cops, as this was obviously fraud,
but what was she doing buying anything from the back of a van without checking to see if it was real!? She claims that she didn't think that it could be stolen, either. Really? I assume that half of the electronics that I find on Craigslist are stolen, if their list price is less than half of the new price and the seller isn't willing to provide contact info. Don't
you?
It's past time for the members who lost funds to write it off as tuition to the University of Life, and learn from it. Some of us may have paid more than others, but we should all be able to take a hard won lesson from this.