This blog is now in archive-only mode! We have new outlets for expressing our excitement and contempt for all forms of cryptocurrency now!

You can follow us and laugh along with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency projects on our twitter, @Buttcoin.

You can also talk with other global banking shills on our subreddit, /r/Buttcoin.

While we are officially putting the blog out to pasture, Buttcoin is not dead. We still hate you all.

The post Buttcoin is pooped. appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Have you not been following up on Bitcoin lately? Been in a bit of a haze from the holidays? Or perhaps you’re a heavy alcoholic, unable to function in a normal society and slowly drinking yourself to death? What ever the case for the New Years Blues, it’s important to remember that 2014 2015 is the year of Bitcoin! And to let you know how amazing Bitcoin has been for the past two weeks, /r/Buttcoin reddit user Zotamedu�has broken down the happenings as of late.

Bitstamp got robbed of 19 000 butts. Their response was to close down everything and say they would be back in24 hours48 hours48-336 hours soonish^TM. They came back after a couple of days.

Paycoin is apparently still a scam according to all bitcoiners. The failure to see the irony is total.

Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver got his visa application denied when he wanted to come back to the US. He got upset that they denined him even though he had paid the his taxes. Apparently, tax is not a codeword for bribing the Embassy. Normal people laugh at him for being an idiot. Bitcoiners cry corruption and tyranny.

CoinTerra went bust and you can now buy their old used miners for only $849 each. They need to get them sold badly because they just got sued for 5 million in unpaid server bills. They are screwed.

Bitpay fired 9 people which was good for bitcoin because reasons.

Cloud miner CEX.io have halted mining because they couldn’t make any money on it any more. That was when the price was still at $270. So there’s no money to be made by cloudmining at $270. The current price of $230 will surely be great for bitcoin and miners.

It seems like Bitstamp has halted all payouts again. Totally not a scam.

The Canadian exchange Vault of Satoshi closed down citing low profitability. They will instead focus on their Netflix VPN service which apparently make much more money.

Overstock goes full Bitcoin and will offer staff to get paid in Butts. They even install a bitcoin ATM at the head office.

A silly iOS game that pays out penny shavings to players managed to use 10 % of all transactions for a couple of days. Quite a few of those seem to have been from a couple of users who quickly figured out how to trick the system to pay out repeatedly without playing. Bitcoiners were euphoric and demanded that more games “gave something back to the gamers”. How that business model was supposed to work remains a mystery. I assume it has something to do with maths and the fundamentals.

The gold dealer Amagi Metals that brings the wonderful world of goldbugs and bitcoiners together revealed plans on going full bitcoin. They plan on only accepting butts as payment by 2016 or 2017. The staff will also be paid in butts. Bitcoiners later freak out as all traces of actual bitcoin payment is removed from the site. Something something problems with evil banks.

Nigeria now has their own exchange. Bitcoiners completely fail to see what’s so funny about that.

Paybase got hacked.

Paybase/GAW claim that they have a deal with Amazon so that paycoins will be usable to buy stuff. It seems like they forgot to tell Amazon about that because Amazon are denying any involvement.

Cloudminer Hashprofit Hashie* gets “hacked” and their site is replaced with references to Disney’s Frozen complete with a link to the song “Let it Go”. It later returns and offer users to mine frostcoins or frozencoins or something. Unclear if it was an actual hack. Most people assume the owners just faked it and ran off with the money.

Then there’s the current 40 dollar drop. It’s a new bearwhalepig, hackers, evil banks, the gubment, illuminati, chinese miners or Bitpay who are to blame. Butters are going mad which is hillarious. On top of that, it seems like miners are starting to pull the plug as well. Stay tuned for a metric ton of comedy gold as this mess unravels.

*Edit: I got the names messed up. Thanks tetondon for sorting it out.

The post 2015 is the year of Bitcoin! appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Have you ever wondered how Bitcoin miners secure the Bitcoin network? It takes a bit of skill, a bit of ingenuity and a bit of amazing magic to secure man’s most important invention since agriculture.

Something Awful forums poster�rjmccall breaks it down for us in simple terms even us non-bitcoiner dummies can understand:

look, it’s simple. you have a Happy Burger brand fast food establishment, and sometimes kids come in and want their Happy Burger brand Happy Kiddy Burger, which according to the Happy Burger brand franchise operating instructions is supposed to be 4oz of usda utility grade hamburger lightly grilled and pressed into a poppy seed bun with two slices of mild pickle and a slice of tomato and a piece of iceberg lettuce and the name of the kid written on the top in half an ounce of Happy Burger brand special sauce about which the less said the better

so naturally what you do is, you post an ad saying, cooks wanted, please bring your own grill and meat and bun and pickle and tomato and lettuce, we’ll supply the sauce

and you get an applicant, and you send him down to the Hall of Cooks, which is a featureless infinite plane that you keep in the unlit basement of your Happy Burger brand fast food establishment. and you tell him to just keep making burgers and handing them up, and if he hands up a burger that satisfies your standards, you’ll pay him a bonus, which is $100,000, plus the price of the burger, which is $.50

now the cook can’t see too good down there, and he keeps handing up burgers that are more like pickly meatballs with a swastika painted on the side in tomato sauce, but as long as the meat’s cooked the health department won’t shut you down, so you keep taking them and dutifully handing down briefcases of cash with a few quarters tossed in. and the cook’s pretty happy, even after you summarily declare one day that you’re only going to pay $50,000 per burger in the future

so the cook calls in a friend, and she sets up in the Hall of Cooks and starts handing up burgers, and now you’re getting acceptable burgers faster than you can sell them. so you raise your standards a bit, and you insist that burgers have to be on a bun, and that cuts production back down to a manageable rate. but the cooks are still pretty happy, even after you cut the burger bonus again to $25,000

this goes on for a while, and now you’ve got a hundred cooks down there, and you’ve started demanding that they spell out the kid’s name correctly, and that’s not easy. so now they’re not just making burgers to your increasingly exact specifications, they’re racing each other to be the first to get the kid’s name right. but you’re still paying $5,000 a burger, and apparently the cooks are still happy, because more and more keep showing up

you get curious one day while you’re squeezing into your franchise past the giant mountain of rotting discarded hamburgers, and you head down to the Hall of Cooks. the last time you came down here, there were only six cooks, and they were just standing around in a disorganized circle; but now they’re organized into these large groups. in one of them, you find your first cook, and he shakes your hand. “remember when we’d just started out and i was lumping up store meat by hand and cooking it on that tiny old george foreman?”, he laughs. “that was before we figured out cookie cutters and rolling pins.” he’s standing at a huge professional-grade charbroiler with twenty-four different patties arranged on it; suddenly, in a single efficient flash of movement, he flips them all over. of course, the dull glow of the grill isn’t enough in the utter blackness of the Hall, and most of the patties end up on the ground, which you suddenly realize is a lot spongier than it’s supposed to be. also, doesn’t the ceiling seem lower? you shake it off and head back upstairs to start taking orders, wondering when it’ll be the right time to cut the bonus to $1,000

it’s been another year. there are tens of thousands of cooks in your basement. you’re rejecting burgers for sloppy handwriting. you’re rejecting burgers for having too thick a slice of tomato. you’re rejecting burgers for excessively clustered poppy seeds. seven months ago, the cooks started building floor-to-ceiling ovens with internal robotics custom-designed for making Happy Kiddy Burgers; now there are whole fields of them, each making ten thousand burgers a second. of course, it’s still pitch-dark down there, and the cooks aren’t exactly susan calvin, so almost all of those burgers get added straight to the end of the Great Greasy Mountains, but it’s amazing how quick they come now. you overhear a few of the cooks talking excitedly about the orders they just placed for massive new ovens from Barbecue Labs. you don’t know how any of them can afford this when the burger bonus is only $100

three months ago, you politely asked whether they could start making the adult Happy Burgers, too

for an entire day, all the burgers had your name written on top in poison

And now you know how important it is to have tens of thousands of miners ensure a secure and robust network.

The post Explain Like I’m Five: How does mining secure the Bitcoin network? appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Shame, really

The post Seen outside the Bitstamp headquarters today appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Earlier today, while the price of Bitcoin was crashing (hence the falling Bitcoins on our site to celebrate the occasion), many users on Reddit started reporting issues cashing out with Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.

Bitstamp – Bitcoin Withdrawal not processing in time (self.Bitcoin)
submitted 12 hours ago by PokerMarket

I have a pending withdrawal since 12 hours on bitstamp.
Usually they are between instant and 1 hour.
Anyone else waiting for a bitstamp bitcoin withdrawal?

Why are deposit confirmations so lagged on Bitstamp? (self.Bitcoin)
submitted an hour ago * by Tsuyoku_Naritai

Why does Bitstamp lag several confirms behind for incoming bitcoin deposits?
I recently made two deposits to bitstamp, and for each one, other blockchain explorers show 7 confirms more than Bitstamp. It means waiting two hours for a deposit, and wondering if their system is broken till the first confirmation shows up. I’ve had similar happen before but it seems to be getting much worse. What’s wrong with them?
Edit: and now one of them has disappeared. I advise you don’t deposit any bitcoins to Bitstamp until they have responded or whatever is happening is fixed.

Bitstamp is apparently broken or hacked. I suggest not depositing coins there till they respond. (self.Bitcoin)
submitted 58 minutes ago * by Tsuyoku_Naritai

A few hours ago I made 2 deposits to Bitstamp. After lagging 7 confirmations behind on the blockchain, they each disappeared from the incoming transactions list WITHOUT updating my balance, which still sits at zero bitcoins. No transfers or sales have been made under the account and there is no indication that it’s been compromised. Bitstamp haven’t contacted me. Coins from one of the deposits has already been transfered to address https://blockchain.info/address/1JoktQJhCzuCQkt3GnQ8Xddcq4mUgNyXEa[1][1] which I assume belongs to Bitstamp. I’ve contacted support.
Has anyone else managed to deposit bitcoins there successfully in the last hour or so? Has anyone else had an issue? (I need to go now but if anyone else has, then it’s an emergency so all please upvote this post for visibility. If not, then maybe it’s just some crazy new KYC game of theirs).

It appears the issues is that Bitstamp may have been Goxxed. They’ve sent out emails saying their Hot Wallet is having “problems” and that you should stop doing business with them immediately.

Dear customer,

Today our transaction processing server detected problems with our hot wallet and stopped processing withdrawals.

You should STOP SENDING bitcoin deposits to your Bitstamp account IMMEDIATELY as private keys of your deposit address may be lost.

Your bitcoins already deposited with us are stored in a cold wallet and can not be affected.

We will send you more info as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Bitstamp team

Looks like this crash may be because someone just stumbled upon some�very� cheap coins.

Grab your popcorn, it’s going to get interesting.

EDIT: We’ve confirmed this is real

The post Bitstamp is fucked, hot wallet compromised appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

You may have noticed that there was a college football game on yesterday and it was called the Bitcoin Bowl (formerly known as the Beef O’ Brady’s bowl which was also formally known as the MagicJack bowl). A decentralized crypto-currencydid not sponsor the game, rather it was the Bitcoin-to-fiat payment processor Bitpay who shit outmillions of VC dollars to sponsor the 4thcheapest college bowl game, just ahead of theFamous Idaho Potato Bowl.

While Twitter was mainly bashing on the absolutely shitty looking baseball-turned-football field and trying to score free bitcoins by using the #BitcoinBowl hashtag, we had a mole on the inside whoneeded to kill 4 hours waiting for his bedspread to be dry cleaned and decided to go to the actual game and give us a rundown on just how bad it was.

SomethingAwful forums poster “N00baTheHutt” had this to say:

 

Trip report time!

As previously mentioned, I didn’t see much in the way of obvious Bitcoiner activity at the game. It was basically a Central Florida home game, since they are from Orlando, only a few hours’ drive away, and that dominated the crowd. Coming through the turnstiles, people were greeted by a bunch of attractive girls in Bitpay shirts handing out glossy literature (more on that in a bit). I wandered over to one of them to ask if there was any centralized location where I could get a bunch more Bitcoin freebies (hoping for pitchforks, really), but she sheepishly confessed that she didn’t really know and wasn’t at all involved with Bitpay – they apparently just hired a bunch of women not even remotely affiliated with them to hand out their literature. Not really a surprise. Walking through the concourses, I did see a guy in a Pirate Bay shirt and a woman in a shirt saying “Bitcoins Not Bombs,” but that was about it for any bitcoiners. I did hear some people talking about it in the stands, though most of it was “Yeah, so you pay real money for internet money, but can you get it back out into real money?” and jokes about paying all featured charity donations in bitcoins.

Game balls were delivered by a group of Army Rangers rappelling down from the roof of the dome. This was done to the strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” though I’m not sure if anyone besides me found that a bit, uh, ironic.

The Bitpay executives were there for the coin toss to determine first possession. One of them brought his dog.

Probably a third of the seats at the Trop were blocked off, and even those that weren’t had plenty of free seats.

Didn’t quite get around to covering up all the MLB logos on the turf.

This thing didn’t show up in the plebian seats where I was – far as I can tell, it made a brief appearance in the sponsor/bigwig seats and nowhere else. Hopefully it has since been sucked back to the nether hells from whence it came.

I think these are some of the people behind the magazine we all got.

One of the other sponsors was apparently a group called ViralStyle, who look to be a bunch of classy folks.

The ads played several times during TV timeouts in the stadium. Reception did not seem overly enthusiastic.

INTERLUDE: How to molest your ray

Halftime featured the NC State marching band performing a medley of Daft Punk hits. Doesn’t work so well with marching bands. We also got to see a very special moment as the Key to the City of Madeira Beach was presented to the Bitpay team. Madeira Beach is VERY proud to be the FIRST official Bitcoin City and Bitcoin Beach in the WORLD, apparently. I’m counting the days until the city is hacked and their budget mysteriously vanishes.

It took four hours to play one hour of football. The game was pretty mediocre for much of it, too, as evidenced by this yawning cameraman.

NC State won. I’m very disappointed that the trophy wasn’t just a big coin. Missed opportunity.

Here’s the literature that was being handed out! It’s… interesting stuff, that’s for sure. Are you bit-curious?

Table of contents.

If only that wolf was colored red. Could’ve made it a Guy Fox.

Goldbugs and Bitcoiners: a match made in scam heaven.

All the profiles of “innovators” are apparently sponsored content, which amuses me greatly. But it’s okay,yBitcoin magazinewriters interviewed them before writing the puff pieces, so it’s almost like real journalism, not advertising.

You can read the rest of the magazine yourself.There’s some fun stuff in there, and I found several contradictions between articles just flipping through it before kickoff. I recommend seeing what else you can find.

I can’t wait until 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 finally becomes the year of Bitcoin!

The post The Bitcoin Bowl really did happen and we had someone at the game. appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Butterfly Labs asserted its alpha-male dominance on that bitch-ass FTC today. BFL literally whipped its dick out for the world to see and showed everyone that BFL really stands for “Better Fucking Listen” because that’s what you gotta do now you little weak-ass punks.

Today the judge just straight up said “Fuck yeah, bro” and high-fived BFL’s totally swole hand and then they both cupped balls. This rad judge�let the world know that BFL, while it’s true that they did delay a bunch of shit and straight-up lie to their customers, isn’t�doing it�any more and so the FTC has no right to be all up in their shit.

You see that idiots? BFL stopped doing preorders because our customers finally wised the fuck up so you have NO RIGHT to take their�foam pitchforks.

Also remember how the FTC was all like “Ugh, these BFL guys said you could make money off these things?” when we’ve known that’s not true? Well chew on this:

Read it and weep hombre. BLF told it’s customers on forums that it was profitable but didn’t have it on their own website. Also they bought a shit ton of fucking google ads so .. ya know .. �fucking right, idiots!

So now BFL�can continue on with business as usual and just be a fucking badass and you pansies have to just take it.

Inaba (who totally isn’t Josh from BFL) has this to say about you�nerds, crying to mommy:

Who run this town? Butterfly Labs run this town!

Until the actual trial starts next year and they’re fucked.

The post Butterfly Labs gets FTC injunction lifted, reaffirms they fucking rock, bro. appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

This a guest post from security researcherNicholas Weaver. Nicholas is a part of Berkley’s ICSIprogram and he’s here to tell you a bit about how broken bitcoin is and how you too can profit!.

OK, now I may be just be a simple country Hyper-Chicken, err Ph.D. security researcher, but I think by now I get something very important about Bitcoin: How to make money with Bitcoin. Now I’m also a lazy security researcher, so heck, lets reveal my super secret 10 step plan on how you too can make lots of money with Bitcoin.

Step 0:

You gotta move to Sochi. Now the Bitlievers like to claim that their digital Quatloos free them from the oppressive yoke of government imperialism, but at the same time they go screaming like little girls to the government to help them out if you steal too many of their Dunning-Krugerrands. So you gotta go to some country where the local language defines MLAT as “Tell the FBI to go fuck itself”. And although most of Russia is a frozen hellscape dominated by a shirtless, humorless tyrant, Sochi is, after enough billions of corruption, a nice place to live. Hey, they even have a F1 race.

Step 1:

Break into blockchain.info and all the other “web wallet” services. Oh, but wait, aren’t these companies run securely, with lots of venture capital money? Well, if you consider the VC fundedRNG Improvments[sic]to their code, do you think the rest of their security is much better? And breachCoinbase too while you’re at it…

Step 2:

Download all the saved web wallets. Now these wallets are all encrypted by the suckers users passwords but that just means most are protected with passwords only slightly more sophisticated than “123456”. So start throwing it at your password cracker. As a bonus, get everyone’s email addresses and download all the other password information. And get crackin…

Step 3:

In the meantime, its time to provide another “improvment” [sic] to Blockchain.info’s JavaScript. Just tweak things to leak passwords out to you. Something subtle, or blunt, or whatever. Just as long as it works. For some presumably humorous reason, the Bitcoin community somehow thinks that downloading JavaScript from a server to access your wallet is more “secure” than just having all your digital Latinum stored by someone else. So be sure to laugh manically as each password rolls in.

Step 4:

Wait. Patience is a virtue, young padawan. Until your improvments [sic] are noticed, they will continue to work, snagging all the suckers who somehow, despite believing in a decentralized digital Clams, insist on trusting centralized companies because “the market will eliminate bad actors” or some such Randite fantasy. I mean, the market eliminated bad exchange actor Mt. Gox pretty quick and they in turn eliminated over $500 million of bad bitcoin actors from bad customer actors too!

Step 5:

Once you are discovered, only then do you transfer all those virtual Cubits into your own accounts. Conveniently, the wallet service will tell you when you are discovered and should move the loot because well, they’re going to have to post a big announcement and remove your improvments [sic].

Step 6:

Join the throng on /r/bitcoin who mock those who lost their binary Ankh-Moorpork Dollars to your attack, because everyone knows you should only store your Bitcoins on your own computer. This computer must run a self-burned live linux distro and never be connected to the internet. In fact, make sure to glue the ethernet ports shut. Don’t forgetto include posts noting how the thief is performing a public service in this objectivist paradise by educating the victims on how computer security works.

Now this is all fine and good, but why stop there?

Step 7:

Start writing your malcode module that looks for Bitcoin wallets. This pretty little malicious program should copy both unencrypted and encrypted wallets. It should also add an improvment [sic] to any Bitcoin client it finds to once again tell you the password. Don’t want to actually write the infection routines? Well, there are services you can use, just find your friendly PPI service.

Step 8:

For each stolen wallet, if you crack it, don’t rob it. Well, not right away. After all, probably the best host based IDS is an unsecured Bitcoin wallet, and you don’t want word to get out too soon. Wait a little while. Meditate on the fragility of all things. And then, get impatient and rob em blind.

Step 9:

Join the throng on /r/bitcoin who mock those who lost their binary Ankh-Moorpork Dollars to your malcode, because everyone knows that you should only store your Bitcoins using a paper wallet. Once again, be sure to include posts noting how the thief is performing a public service in this objectivist paradise by educating the victims on how computer security works.

Step 10:

Enjoy life!

So there you have it, a 10, well, 11 step program to make lots of money in Bitcoin. Whatever, off by one error, who cares? Its not like such errors exist in the core protocol of Bitcoin (*cough* OP_CHECKMULTISIG *cough*).

You can thank me by contributing to 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE.

You can also follow me on Twitter: @ncweaver

The post How to make money with Bitcoin in 10 easy steps appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

(Note: This is a repost of an earlier poston the Buttcoin subreddit. I’ve added new information since the original post implicatingBFL of other site purchases)

My name is Evan. I’m the founder of Buttcoin.org(now ButtcoinFoundation.org)and have been making fun of Bitcoiners since 2011. Buttcoin is one of the oldest Bitcoin sites on the internet and a few months agocelebrated it’s 1 millionth visitor.

Nearlya year agoI (accidently) became a paid shill for Butterly Labs. And I wasn’t the only one.

In December of 2013, Bitcoin losing comedy steam (which thankfully came back!) and after 2 1/2 years of running the site I was getting tired. I had started up school again and work was getting steady so I wasn’t updating as much. I was in the middle of a redesign to keep myself busy but I went weeks between updates. But I liked the site so I kept it around. A few months prior our top notch reporterkillhamster had helped me find new comedy gold to mine and was posting consistantlyon the twitter. He had become the de-facto chief operator of the site.

I was approached by someone named Jeff. He emailed me from a domain at a local bar in Chicago. He had asked about buying the site. This wasn’t the first offer I had gotten. I have been asked to comment on articles in PC World and speak at John Hopkins University about Bitcoins and the site was somewhat popular, but no one ever put in any serious offers. The site got steady traffic but everyone who knows about Bitcoins, knows about computers. And everyone who knows about computers runs AdBlock. So the site made no money but was a fun little hobby of mine.

Jeff presented himself as a regular reader of the site who owned Bitcoins and had presumably cashed out. He said he liked the writing style, liked the site, and wanted to know if I was interested in a sale. I asked what he was offering. He said he wanted to offer me $XX,XXX dollars (not as high as the $30,000 someone is quoting however). I thought his was a joke. The site had no revenue and was virtually impossible to monetize. The only people willing to advertise on bitcoins sites are BFL, Mt. Gox, BitPay, and they would never advertise on Buttcoin. I asked him a few more questions to gauge his sincerity; what he planned on doing with the site, how the transition would be handled, would he allow me to continue to write for the site. He explained that he wanted to keep the site like “The Onion of Bitcoin”, wanted me to keep writing for a minimum of 6 months. He also wanted everything to be in his daughters name because she was just graduating out of journalism school and he wanted her to learn online publishing. The guy was going to buy my site and then let me still have control. I have bought and sold a few domains and sites before and could tell he was serious, so I said fuck yeah and took his money.

We did the site transfer and closed escrow. The day after the transfer occurred my admin account was locked out even though I had an agreement to stay there for 6 months. Since I was already fighting with little site issues because of the transfer I didn’t think much of it, I emailed Jeff but got no response. Killhamster still had publishing rights. The next day we noticed that our most popular article on the entire site, the “The $22,484.00 Butterfly Labs Mini Rig bitcoin miner is a huge, broken, unstable piece of shit.”had been edited and now read The Butterfly Labs Mini Rig is a sexy Bitcoin mining machine.

At this point killhamster emailed Jeff and asked what was up. He stated that there were “going to be some changes to attract new advertisers”. He explained that he liked the humor but picking on specific brands was no good. He said that BFL pays $1000/month for every ad on BitcoinTalk and that there’s no reason we can’t get the same kind of deal. Since my account was now locked out and I was the original author, killhamster could not change the article. At this point I was pretty bummed that what was told to me was no true but whatever, not much I could do about that now. Killhamster was still running the twitter and planning to do some funny stuff with future articles. I wanted to see what was up with this guy though.

I checked and see what was edited. The only thing edited was That BFL article and 2 more, one about them faking CE certification and one where Wired tested it and was unimpressed. But there was some much worse stuff on there that wasn’t touched. If he was trying to clean up the site for advertisers, why just those BFL articles.

Then I remembered that my Google Search Rankings for certain Butterfly Labs related terms were high. Very High.

Buttcoin was ranking between 3-4 for the search term “Butterfly Labs” and “Butterfly Labs Review” and was usually #1 for “Butterfly Labs Scam” and “Is Butterfly Labs ligit”. It was obvious to me that the purpose of purchasing the site was to simply remove the negative articles that were destroying their search traffic and making them look bad.

So I Google “Jeff Butterfly Labs”

http://www.butterflylabs.com/management-view/jeff-ownby-2/

Jeff Ownby is the VP of marketing for BFL.

I never got his last name and all contracts where under his “daughter’s name”.

So I looked a bit deeper and see Jeff from BFL graduated from Elmhurst College in Illinois and the Jeff that bought Buttcoin emailed me from was a Chicago-area bar domain. I still couldn’t get this guy’s last name but I finally found an old Facebook post from a press release by the bar the guy owns and it said his name was Jeff Ownby. Could be another guy with the same name but I’m sure now that BFL bought the site simply to remove three negative articles.

After the FTC seized Butterfly Lab’s assets and Buttcoin.org went offline permanently, we decided to re-launch the site under our control again and re-post the original unedited articles in their entirety.

Since the original post blew up on Reddit, a couplepeople have come forward who used to work for BFL and Jeff. They said that this was the tip of the iceberg and that Butterfly Labs has gone in a major campaign to buy up Bitcoin websitesand turn brand-neutral sites into website who promote their products.

One of the most trusted Bitcoin sites on the internet is the site called WeUseCoins.com.WeUseCoins is one of the oldest Bitcoin websites (about a month before Buttcoin started, early 2011) and is known as the official “beginners guide” for new bitcoin users. It’s a brand-neutral site created by an early Bitcoin fan to clearly and plainly explain Bitcoin’s benefits. It’s on the Bitcoin wiki, the subreddit, and posted any time someone wants to know about Bitcoin. They also made the very popular “What is bitcoin?” videothat has over 600k views.

Ssometime in the past year Butterfly Labs purchased WeUseCoins.com as well.

The site now says “BF Labs” on the bottom and it’s obvious purchasing the site was mainly to inject product links to BFL products.

Take the link on this page to “mining contracts”.

Here’s the page as it was cached in October 2013:https://web.archive.org/web/20131010210100/http://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide

Link goes to the official Bitcoin wiki

Now look where it goes to: https://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide

Butterfly Labs. Their links are peppered everywhere else on the site to. Any link that went to the Bitcoin wiki that mentions Mining Hardware or Mining Contracts now goes to the BFL website.

WeUseCoins is a PR6 website in Google which is very authoratative. Has over 450k backlinks as well.

A link from WeUseCoins is very valuable and just another one of many sites that BFL purchased to control their image online.

This is most likely against the FTC guidelinesto turn websites into paid advertising platforms since the intorduction of so called “Mommy Blogger Disclosure” laws which state that any links that can be considered paid advertising must be clearly marked separate from other content and any sponsors must be disclosed. Articles such as Buttcoin’s criticism of the BFL Mini-Rig being turned into a promotional article with zero article definitely run afoul of the FTC guidelines and should contribute to the legal clusterfuck that BFL is already in.

So that’s the whole story of how BFL bought Buttcoin.org, locked me out of the website, turned itand other websitesinto a a promotional machine until it was ultimately killed. It’s also the story of how we’ve risen from the ashes into our new, shill-free home at the Buttcoin Foundation. Until the next juicy offer comes around, I suppose.

The post The Story Of When Buttcoin.org Sold Out And How Butterfly Labs Turned It (And Other Sites) Into A Product Marketing Machine appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Poor Blake Benthall.

What’s a former SpaceX engineer to do when your favorite drug buying marketplace, Silk Road, goes under? Do you possibly risk going outside, into the real world,and interact with other people?No, of course not. You start a new drug empire and invite an FBI informant to be your number two on the very first day of operation.

And that wasn’t even the dumbest thing he did during the rise and fall of Silk Road 2.0.

Blake Benthall is software engineer living in San Francisco. He worked for SpaceX for a few weeks before quitting. He went to the University of Florida, bounced around a few startups, ran a tech incubator from his house, helped create a project to bring Linux to the iPod, was an eagle scout and took some awkward pictures with his very unfortunate forehead. By all accounts of what we can see, it was your average Silicon Valley engineer, fuckingaround and disrupting whatever industry he happened to bump into.

Let me play you song of my people (privileged 20-something white males living in the Bay Area).

According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Blake seemed rather upset that the original Silk Road has closed down and wanted to be part of the team that rebooted the old code into a new incarnation, dubbed Silk Road 2.0

Here are the timeline of events of how Blake came into power at Silk Road 2.0:

• October 2nd, 2013 – The Silk Road online drug marketplace is shutdown andRoss William Ulbricht, A.K.A., Dread Pirate Roberts, is charged in federal courts of being an enormous shithead.
• October 7th – A discussion forum is set up for discussing how to re-open Silk Road. A man calling himself Dread Pirate Roberts publicly claims he’s not THAT DPR and he’sextending an offer to all the other drug dealers and vendors of the old Silk Road website to set up shop and the new Silk Road 2.0
• October 8th –THE NEXT FUCKING DAYDPR2 gives the FBI informant moderator access to the forum and control over hidden parts of the site. The entire operation is compromised before the site is even launched.
• November 6th – Silk Road 2 goes live and there is much rejoicing. DPR2 is still the admin at this point.
• November 13th – Blake Benthall, who goes by the super lame handle “Defcon” (and commonly called “Defcunt” by the other admins) gets added as a site admin. His mom prints out his forum profile and puts it on the fridge because she is so proud.
• December 20th – 3 admins from Silk Road 2get their asses hauled to jail and have federal charges files against them. DPR2 realizes what a stupid idea this was and bails on the entire operation. Blake sees this as his moment to shine! In fact, one of the admins even posts a warning that law enforcement must have infiltrated the site and to remove all coins immediately. Blake decides to reassure everyone that everything is OK.

• December 22nd – Blake decides to massively inflate his e-peen by publicly posting the SR2 forums that as the second in command he’ll be steering this ghost ship.
• December 28th – Blake says that he’s the new sherrif in charge. He promises to literally put his life’s work into this compromised illegal drug empire and formally removes any doubt whatsoever of what his role in the site would be.

From this day on it’s Blake Benthall’s site to run. And he runs it terribly. The FBI document is light on details on how exactly the FBI gained control of the servers, but since the FBI informant was forum admin since the first day we can imagine it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to find where the servers are. In fact, there’s a lot to parse in this document but for this article we’re just going highlight just how bad a job Blake did of trying to cover his tracks.

When the server was ultimately located in another country the FBI had the local law enforcement make an image of the server. While the server was down for imaging, Blake posted a message in the forums noting that he was aware of the downtime.

After inspection of the server, they located chat logs between Blake and DPR2 that carefully explained the handoff of admin duties.

The interaction between Blake and his ISP that hosted the server seems to hold the majority of the evidence against him. Because he was a colossal idiot, he used Tor and hid his tracks quite well when interacting with the Silk Road 2 website, but when it came to any other interaction with the host or management activities he did zero to cover his tracks.

He didn’t use Tor to submit support tickets complaining about the server outages and alsoused an unusual combination of abeta browser and an out of date OS.This was easy to match up the site visitor information tohis laptop..

He accessed the customer support from ahotel wifi over clearnet. He also registered the room withhis real name.

And tweeted about being at the hotel the day before.

But the most idiotic, moronic, stupidest thing he could have done was register the server usinghis own vanity email address.

Not only that, he sent private messages from the Silk Road 2 administrator panel to his personal account, removing any doubt that the owner of email account also knowingly controlled Silk Road 2 servers

All this while he was urging the vendors and users to use stronger encryptionand the site adminswere helping to lower the risk of FBI honeypots

When they did eventually catch up to Blake the trailed him at his house and matched up “Defcon’s” available/away timeouts with his time spent at home.

BONUS: Remmeber that guy that bought a Tesla with Bitcoinslast year? It was probably him too.

At this pointyou would think that Blake Benthallis the dumbest drug kingpin you’ve ever seenbut in one last ditch effort to surprise everyonehe opens his mouth and throws away his only bargaining chip.

In court, federal prosecutor Kathryn Haun said that Benthall was likely to flee and should not be released. “He was found with over $100,000 in cash at home,” Haun told the court. “He has a passport. We’re not aware of whether that was secured. In addition to all of the detail, Mr. Benthall did admit to everything after receiving his Miranda rightsthat he was the administrator of Silk Road 2.0. Our principle basis is flight risk at this point.”

…

His attorney, Daniel Blank, a federal public defender, said that he only met his client for the first time in court on Thursday.”You could fill a large volume with what I don’t know,” Blank told reporters after the hearing.

Prosecutors also reportedly found a laptop filled with customer and vendor information, stored unencrypted

After raiding his home, the FBI says Benthall’s PC (which was not encrypted in any way) had full “address lists for customers all over the world that will be of significant interest to many global law enforcement agencies.” Prior to the raid, the U.S. DEA made purchases from the Silk Road 2.0, including heroin, cocaine, LSD and Oxycodone. Each was then tested and all tested positive for illegal drugs.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Blake Benthall, chief dumbass.

The post Blake Benthall and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.