In between Butterfly Labs buying Buttcoin and the FTC saying “buttcoin,” we made the move to our new home here at the Buttcoin Foundation. We did, however, suffer a grievous loss during the move: many of our posts highlighting the best Bitcoin mining rigs were lost. Today this changes.

Some of these may be repeats, but here is the Buttcoin Foundation’s entire collection of amazing mining rigs.

The post Mining Rig Megapost 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.

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.

As the price of Bitcoin trundles to new heights, more and more people are looking to cash in their Beenz and run like Hell before exchanges vanish or are “hacked,” and are finding it to be a rather daunting task. With the popular Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange taking almost two yearsto allow withdrawals, Bitcoiners are turning to smaller exchanges that are ill-prepared to handle the volume, small-potatoes ATMs, or shady parking lot deals made through LocalBitcoins.

We’re here today to detail the story of a man in Canada who happened to mine some Bitcoins back when CPU mining was possible, then forgot about them until the hype started to bubble the price unsustainably. This adventure is proving to be a little more difficult than expected. Here is his story so far, as outlined by SA Forums goon UberJumper:

I just learned my coworker has bitcoins from 2010. He apparently has spent most of the week trying to figure out how to convert them into USD. Mt Gox apparently wants an insane amount of personal information and even then he has to be added to a waiting list to even get any money out, and even then there is apparently some stupid low limit. But he sold some through Mt Gox, and estimates ~3 months before he can get any money out of it.

Trying to sell the coins in person, and basically saying he ether wants Cash, or a Cashiers check (since it can be handed over right then and there), has apparently been a hilarious clusterfuck.

Today he met some guy infront of his bank, and apparently as soon as he mentioned that he needs to get the cash checked to make sure it is not counterfeit, the guy freaked out and basically walked away. Stuff like this has been happening all week, and he apparently so far has only sold a single coin of several hundred.

Even more hilarious, there is apparently a place here that will buy your bitcoins from you. According to him on their site, they offer prices that are less than Mt Gox, so he tried to go in to sell them. Only to be told they will only offer 150$/coin.

Bitcoin is the currency of the future right guys?

The consensus here was “take the money and run.” Not so fast!

I would do that as well, however according to him they don’t give you the money on the spot they take the coins and then send you the funds through a wire transfer. Which means no ESCROW, given how scammy bitcoin is i think he choose the better idea.

Also apparently almost all of Gyft’s Gift Cards are not valid outside of the united states.

He’s already got funds in MTGOX, but it, of course, has problems.

Apparently he already has a 6 digit sum sitting on Mt Gox, and he is fine with giving them his personal information, which apparently can take a couple of weeks to get verified.

He is apparently scared of leaving a large amount of money on some of the other exchanges mostly because he is worried of “What if it disappears?”. He is fine with giving them his personal information, and he is willing to pay taxes/do paper work. He just wants his filthy real money.

I’ll let him know about bitstamp, he is Canadian though, the entire process so far from what i can tell has been a massive headache. I do know tonight he is apparently meeting someone who is willing to give him 500$/coin, so i have a feeling he will end up lying in a ditch somewhere.

This leads to their first experience with LocalBitcoins:

I just got back from accompanying my friend, to meet someone who wants to buy bitcoins. So we go to Starbucks, and wait for this guy who is apparently willing to pay 500$/coin, and wants 50 coins. The buyer shows up, wearing a decent suit, buys me and my friend coffee (with filthy fiat of course), and starts talking about how he buys local bitcoins and puts them on the major exchanges (I asked him if he considered himself a Captain of Industry, and got a weird look ).

Everything was going well, until the buyer tried to write my co-worker a check. Not a cashiers check, just a plain old check that will bounce if there isn’t enough money . Which according to him is apparently as “good as a cashiers check”. He didn’t want to use an ESCROW service, and his “feedback on localbitcoins.something is all we needed to see that he is legit”. Because you know an exchange valued at 25,000$ obviously you can just trust the guys feedback. We left pretty fast.

My coworker is going to try to use bitstamp and see if he can get his money out.

*EDIT* I just realized how completely and utterly stupid this is. Who the fuck does an exchange valued at 25,000$ in a Starbucks? Shouldn’t something like this be done with Lawyers, or Accountants present? Some sort of professional service to handle exchanges like this?

Obviously this wasn’t kosher, but they were willing to give it another try.

I am supposed to go with my friend soon to meet another Captain of Industry, to try and sell 25 butts at 300$/coin. He is apparently paying cash, and has agreed to meet us at a bank, and has agreed to have the cash verified as legit.

Bitcoin is supposed to be worth 800+ according to mt gox, yet getting someone to pay even half of that value in real life is apparently too difficult.

While we waited for an update, our beleaguered heroes were informed of the ease of cashing out via Coinbase:

Guys getting money out of bitcoin is super fucking easy, according to a goon who PM’ed me said i should use coinbase, and can just drive to the US and open an account. The steps involved from what i can tell are:

1. Drive to the US
2. Open a bank account with a bank there
3. Drive home
4. Sign up for Coinbase, give them all your personal information, and wait until your verified.
5. One of the verification steps is:

Complete A Purchase – Buy some bitcoin and wait at least 30 days

6. Ignore all these coinbase horror stories of that are on reddit right now.
6. Sell your coins
7. Since coinbase has no fees* they will take 1% of your money if you try to cash out.
8. Have the US Bank wire it to your other account (who knows what kind of fee it is!)

CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE

Success!

My friend managed to sell 5 of his butts at 400$/butt! So he bought everyone in our group lunch .

Also apparently when you fail coinbase’s identity verification it locks you out for 24 hours.

Someone wasn’t paying attention and suggested LocalBitcoins.

What my friend told me is that a large number of people on localbitcoins, wanted him to use something like paypal, or moneypak codes. Then kindly asking people who want to pay cash to meet at a bank, to verify the cash is not counterfeit, also apparently causes a lot of people to nope right the fuck out of there.

He can’t use gyft and cash out through giftcards because unfortunately the vast majority of the giftcards do not work in Canada.

He sold some on mt gox, and he is apparently in some cashout queue, with no real indication of how long until he can take his money out. Coinbase doesn’t let you use non american accounts to cash out. He is currently trying to get verified on VirtEx.

“Trust me.”

My friend and I went and contacted a buyer on localbitcoins, and met with him at lunch. The buyer was offering 600$/coin in cash according to the listing, and was willing to buy up to 25 coins.

My friend showed up, the buyer instead insisted on paying the entire amount in Amazon giftcards (50 bucks a card, and had a small plastic shopping bag just filled with gift cards).

I asked him how do we know the gift cards are activated? “Trust me”.

Nope.

The score so far?

He has cashed out (as in he has money in his possession and can use it) of 11 bitcoins so far i think (this is over 2 weeks). He sold 30 odd coins on Mt Gox, and is trying to cash out (he is in some sort of retarded queue and apparently there is a limit of how much money you can take out per withdrawal).

My friend is still trying to get Virtex to do anything. He filled in information and sent them all the information required, and is basically waiting for them to consider him verified. They also have a 3.0% fee on selling apparently.

Also apparently they charge you a 50$/month if you do not do anything with coins/cash on their system.

ARTICLE 13 – DORMANT ACCOUNTS
13.1 If you have not executed a trade with your VirtEx account for more than 1 year your account will be considered inactive. VirtEx will charge an inactivity fee of $50 per month up until such a time when the account balance reaches zero. BTC balances will be converted to CAD to pay for this fee, as required.

And finally:

Well this is an improvement:

Hello,

I am interested in purchasing Bitcoins and i am willing to pay $500.00 per BTC. Payment would be provided in the form of bullion gold bars of equivalent value.

Would this be a suitable exchange rate for you?

What the Christ indeed. For anyone left paying attention, cashing out in any appreciable way is a disaster, and you won’t get anything close to the “value” quoted on the various exchanges, which isn’t terribly surprising given that they seem to be subject to manipulation and in no way represent what people are actually receiving for their pogs. If UberJumper and his Bitcoin millionaire pal manage to get anything more out of the system, we’ll let you know.

The post It’s So Easy appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Butterfly Labs has a long and horrible history with their mining rigs. They started taking pre-orders over a year ago, with a ship time sometime in late July. After numerous delays in production, shipping problems and general incompetence, the only thing they’ve managed to get out the door are some of their tiniest miners, the Jalapenos. And those mainly ended up in the hands of reviewers and blogs in order to keep pumping the Butterfly Labs hype train and securing millions of dollars of pre-orders still in limbo.

Lucky BFL forums user Luke-JR however scored a sweet Mini Rig from Butterfly Labs (it’s just a coincidence he’s a driver developer for them I’m sure). This rig was originally promised to produce 1500 GH/shashing power at 1500 watts for $30,000, but has since seen it’s hashing power slashed to a third of what was promised and it’s power consumption increased 75%, now just offer 500 GH/s at 2400 watts. They’ve promised to make good on pre-order buy sending out 3 rigs to match the initial hashing rate, so now it’s only 1500 GH/s at 6900 watts, a reduction in GH/Watt by a factor of 5.

So what does $22,484 buy you? Take a look!

Minirig is here!

Today, my Minirig arrived.

FedEx apparently dropped it somewhere along the way, and the weakest part of the case, the thin metal part around the back of the PSU, broke.

I’m not sure how sturdy the back side was supposed to be, but its two pieces aren’t quite together either.

The power supplies (EVGA 1500W) also created havoc interfering with the neutral on the power line. This disrupted X10 communication significantly enough that the pool overflowed because the system controlling it was unable to turn off the pump. Workaround: This PSU supports 240V, so we rewired the outlet. 240V does not use neutral, so now all should be okay.

Edit: 240V workaround is only partial. Still having problems

But the good news is, it all seems to be working for the most part.

Next up, installing it in the window so the heat goes outside

 

A twenty two thousand dollar box of electronics that is broken out of the box, that required the guy to do a sketchy electrical workaround to getpartiallyworking, that he is going to install in a window… and he’s happy about it?

In case you didn’t notice it, the delivered unit is different than the picture on the website. They had to install 2 power supplies instead of 1 and had to modify the case to fit. Also, if you didn’t notice, the LCD/Phone thingy in the front has been replaced by … a piece of cardboard spray painted black. Wonderful.

You could maybe chalk this up to a careless Fedex postman, but when you’re shipping something that costs as much as a mid-sized sedan, how bought putting a little more effort into packing? Dell and HP can ship bigger and heavier servers across the world without this kind of problem.

The unit had to hit its huge power draw increase by putting dual EVGA consumer grade power supplies in the unit.We’re talking almost a 75 amp load (6*1500/120), disregarding power factor. He could very well overload the circuit panel and trip the main breaker for the house.

Let’s take a look inside this guy. This is from an earlier version of the Minirig (note the single power supply)This is apparently from an earlier FPGA but it will give you a good glimpse at what kind of craftsmanship you can expect from a computer that is half the average household income in the United States.

Consumer grade PSU and cheap USB hubs glued to the inside case.

Electrical tape and random velcro glued to the insides

A closer look at the USB hubs. Plugs are hot glued to stay secured.

Electrical tape everywhere, splices and voided hardware are the theme.

You can view the entire album here.

Despite all that, this thing can still mine bitcoins and it should be profitable. Keep in ind that many people jumped in on the preorders a year ago when bitcoins were still hovering around $6.50 per. Meaning customers paid 1562 bitcoins for that particular piece of shit, which at today’s value is $156,200. Aston martin money. How long will it take them to make their money back? If the difficulty didn’t change, they would make 37 bitcoins a day and recoup the initial investment in 124 days. Difficulty is jumping pretty much 20% every 12 days or so, so in the next week before adjustment, they’ll make 259, the next 12 days 369, the next 12 days 312, then 256, then 213, etc.

So by day 127, they’ll be halfway to breaking even, but by day 151 they’ll be making less than 5 bitcoins a day, and even if difficulty stopped rising at that point(which it won’t), it would take another 435 days for a total of 586 days to break even. If difficulty kept rising at the same pace, by day 200 they’d be making 2.4 bitcoins per day, and it would take 1024 days to break even with no difficulty increase. Assuming 25 cents per kw/h, and $100 a bitcoin, it would cost 0.43 of a bitcoin per day in electricity which means the unit would no longer be profitable on a power usage basis by day 307, at which point it will have produced 2620 bitcoins.

Bear in mind this is only for the first few units, and that’s running 24/7 pumping out around 24,000 BTU, so yes, medical bills from heat stroke will be on top of that.

But Alas, the chips don’t run nearly as well as they’re supposed to, frequently running too hot and giving multiple hardware failures. Coindesk noted in one of the first ever runs of the Minirig by hosting provide gigavps that it was running much too hot and erroring out.

At the time of posting, gigavps warned that the unit would be repeatedly shut down while ckolivas, who was assisting, modified the machines software to optimise performance. After some tweaking, the device was said to have been left to run continuously for two hours, and was shown to have an average hash rate of 478.1 GH/s. As you can see in the table below, ASIC number four (of a total of eight hashing chips) ran significantly hotter (86 degrees) and consequently gave the highest hardware (HW) error rate.

So, what happens if you just decide you don’t want this, you don’t want to wait over a year to get a $22,000 broken piece of shit? Nothing, because BFL won’t let you cancel your preorder because they’re now “shipping”, i.e. they sent out one unit to their own company shill.

Which is of course illegal regardless of what Butterfly Labs may say.

So in summary: Don’t buy anything from Butterfly Labs … ever.

UPDATE:Butterfly Labs get a miner seized in Germany for faking CE certifications.

The post The $22,484.00 Butterfly Labs Mini Rig bitcoin miner is a huge, broken, unstable piece of shit. appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

This is by far the mosthilariousthing to happen in the official BitcoinTalk forums, ever.

Someone hacked the forums and injected some code that, among other things, causes a bunch of Bill Cosby popups, simulates uploading of a wallet.dat file, changes all avatars to images of Bill Cosby, and even changes the word Buttcoin to Cosbycoin.

You can see the hilarity yourself by going to the forums and waiting about 5 seconds for the comedy gold to flow.

Here’s a sample of what’s going on.

Better fix this right away!

Forums have been shut down for several hours now.

EDIT: I just got an email from one of the admins “Sirius” that this was mostly likely another Adobe Flash exploit.

We’re looking to the incident right now. We had to take the site offline to protect any further malicious activity.Luckilyit seems like a simple Adobe Flash exploit, and we’ve cleaned up most of the offending code and .swf files.

The exploit he was referring to had this information from Adobe’s site.

This vulnerability (CVE-2018-COZPOP) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected server. There are reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks via a Flash (.swf) file embedded in certain website forum software, delivered as an emoticon or “smilie” in the forum software. At this time, Adobe is not aware of attacks targeting Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Adobe Reader X Protected Mode mitigations would prevent an exploit of this kind from executing.

Make sure to browse safely guys.

The post Bitcointalk forums hacked, Bill Cosby pimping new CosbyCoins to all the members. (Forums DOWN) appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.

Bruce Wagner is the host of OnlyOneTV and the organizer of the Buttcoin Conference, and he’s a bit of a character. He seems to hate women and blames them for being victims of rape. He hadvehemently advocatedmoving the buttcoin conference toPattaya, Thailand, which just so happens to be the underage prostitution capitol of the world. Hell, he’s even posted about tips on how to pickup boys for sex.

But Bruce is also a convicted scammer and con man. He’s even fled the state and still owes thousands of dollars in outstanding debts and restitution. He’s had a mortgage fraud scheme backfire on him and been estimated to have stolen over a million dollars from people losing their homes in foreclosure.

And he may have pulled off one of the mostsuccessfulscamson the buttcoin community.

Mah Bit Con!

This all started unraveling when notorious Something Awful forums poster Three Olivesdid a little scratching under the surface of who Bruce was before bitcoins. It all started innocently enough with a post on the SpamCop forums. The post was nothing of importance, but it did have a rather unique signature:

Bruce Wagner
President
Bold Funding, Inc.
Chicago, Illinois
312-951-7960
bred[at]mailblocks.com

Who or what was Bold Funding? Glad you asked! Bold fundingperpetratedone of the largest mortgage frauds in Chicago history. Here’s how it all went down:

In 2004,Bold Fundingmaintained its “headquarters” at a commercial post office box at40 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago, Illinois.Bold Fundingalso operated a website at www.boldfunding.com and sponsored hundreds of commercials on local and out-of-state radio stations. On its website and radio commercials,Bold Fundingclaimed that it could save homes from foreclosure even after a Sheriff s sale. Homeowners in foreclosure sent thousands of dollars toBold Fundingunder the belief thatBold Fundingwould secure funding to refinance their mortgages and save their homes. The Defendants did not arrange or provide any funding. NeitherBold FundingnorBruce Wagnerever possessed an Illinois residential mortgage broker’s or lender’s license.

…

In Civil Court on April 18, 2006, Judge Julia Nowicki orderedBold FundingandBruce Wagnerto refund $115,858 in application fees to 74 former customers who never received any funding from the Defendants.Bold FundingandBruce Wagnerwere also fined $250,000, and the Defendants were permanently banned from providing any services in Illinois related to residential mortgage loans.

“The taking of monies from vulnerable homeowners in foreclosure under false pretenses is reprehensibleX,” Devine said. “Any company which purports to help homeowners who are in foreclosure must follow the law and fulfill its promises to assist its customers.”

Bruce Wagner and his Bold Funding company went to desperate homeowners who had recently beenforeclosedon in the housing crisis. Bruce and Co. told these desperate homeowners that “We can save your homes! Just pay a $2,000 deposit and we’ll get the paperwork through and keep you in your homes!”. Then they decided to sit on their hands and do nothing, while continuing to pocket the deposits these desperate homeowners had paid them.Trulypreying on the weak. All told, Bruce and Co. ended up having to pay back$115,858 to 74 homeowners plus a $250000 fine for beingworthlesssacks of shit.

One interesting comment on that page had this tidbit:

remember hearing about the collapse of Bold Funding on the news when it all went down in 2004. It was probably the largest, most sophisticated foreclosure scam I’ve ever heard about, before or since then. $116,000 or so in refunds doesn’t begin to compensate all of the victims. And now the owner, it seems, fled to another state and is trying to start his own talk show!

Actually, Bruce never fled Illinois, he was kicked out by the state according to his judgement.

A) Defendant Bold Funding and Defendant Bruce Wagner are permanently enjoined from owning, operating, managing, or supervising any form of business in Illinois which offers or provides any residential mortgage brokering, originating, or loan servicing activities.

B) Defendant Bold Funding and Defendant Bruce Wagner are permanently enjoined from offering or providing any residential mortgage brokering, originating, or loan servicing activities to any member of the public located in Illinois or for any property located in Illinois.

Could this just be a mistake? Maybe another Bruce Wagner? Nope, Bruce himself admitted it’s him, although it’s VERY MISLEADING and just a “misunderstanding”.

What happened though… in short is…. We were a victum of our own success. At the same time that we had just begun a radio advertising campaign… mortgage foreclosures hit an all time high.

We were suddenly swamped with applications to process. We hired more people as fast as we could, but there was no time to train them. It was a disaster. A management and planning disaster. As a result, we dropped the ball. We did not get applications processed fast enough.

Just a paperwork issue is all! Hundreds of thousands of dollars in paperwork issues. And a court judgement against him for paperwork issues. And being kicked out ofIllinoisand never being able to do business in that state again. Over paper-fucking-work issues.

I mean seriously, look at these poor people Bruce Wagner stole thousands and thousands of dollars from:

Two years ago Bobby Whitehead was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He tried to keep working but eventually lost his business and fell behind in mortgage payments. Whitehead turned to a company called Bold Funding, giving them a $1,200 check.

“It was devastating because it was the last money I had because I’m on disability now. So I sent them the last money I had,” said Bobby Whitehead

Sorry Mr. Whitehead, it was all a big paperwork misunderstanding! Pobody’s Nerfect!

With some more formal digging, we also see some interesting things start to emerge. We see a pattern forming. Here’s Bruce’s business history:

1995-2002 Dublin OH/ Columbus OH

2002-03/2004 Chicago IL

03/2004-03/2005 Minden NV Business Perminately Revoked due to Registered Agent Resignation. Basically, he fled. Again.

2005-2006 FL? not sure

2006-yesterday New York

Today, Japan?

Guys gets around.

But all of this is in the past. The guy paid his fine, and he’s aproductivemember of society. Sure, he wasconvictedof financial fraud, and now he’s an unapologetic supporter of an anonymous currency, but what’ the harm there? What could he possibly be scamming for? What’s your angle Mr. Buttcoin? HMMMM???

Well, hang ontoyourbutts because it’s about to get real conspiracy theory-like up in here.

If you recall a number of weeks ago, there was an incident with MyBitcoin.com where they simply disappeared off the internet. No notice or anything, just vanished into thin air. MyBitcoin was the largest online wallet service, storing hundreds of thousands of buttcoin wallets, Bruce himself admitting to having 25,000 coins personally. Some investigating into the people behind MyBitcoin turned up nothing but a private whois and a server overseas. MyBitcoin was officially called dead.

But a week after MyBitcoin’s disappearance, suddenly the site comes up again. There’s a press release from someone named Tom Williams(take note) and here’s what he had to say about the situation:

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

From the desk of Tom Williams, operator of MyBitcoin.com

For immediate release.

As you have probably noticed, MyBitcoin.com had been down for almost a week due to an unfortunate event.

On Friday of last week we noticed that one of our pooled holding servers was missing a large amount of Bitcoins. After a prompt investigation we realized that the security of ourSCI(Shopping Cart Interface) system had been breached by an unknown attacker.

MyBitcoin was another victim of a hacking attempt on a buttcoin site. Hackers supposedly made off with half the coins on the site with MyBitcoin pledging to pay back the remaining coins. Bruce was another poor victim of the constant buttcoin scamsplaguingthe community, his friends and family, loyal supporters and himself personally losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoins.

Or, he perpetrated the whole thing and has pulled off the mostsophisticatedscam in buttcoin history.

Remember that name Tom Williams? Well, if we go back to Bruce’s scamming days with Bold Funding, we see something interesting. It allegedly looks like there was a bit of astroturfing going on for his company. Someone was posting very flattering things to say about Bold Funding, including gems like this:

That forum is littered in posts like this, all from the same guy, Tod Williams.

If you examine the writing style, you realize it’s very similar to Bruce’s writing style on the buttcoin forums. Moreover, it’s the type of thing bruce would do, pump up his own company to boost reputation. Bruce is a natural hype man. I am convinced this is Bruce astroturfing his old company.

UPDATE: As was pointed out in the comments, according to the court documents not a single client of Bold Funding got the funding they were promised. This “Tod Williams” seems to be the only one who has claimed to have success with Bruce’s company. Tod is most definitely a shill.

So, to reiterate.

Tod Williamsis Bruce hyping up Bold Funding

Tom Williamsis the owner who kept 50% of the coins in MyBitcoin

Bruce Wagneris/was heavily involved in both companies.

It’s my opinion that Bruce was, if not responsible, somehow profited from my MyBitcoin fiasco. I wouldn’t besurprisedif Bruce’s supposed 25,000 coin wallet is inactualitythe entireMyBitcoin wallet.

What a better person to steal an anonymous currency than someone who’s been convicted of doing that exact thing before.

Holy Shit.

UPDATE2: Some more interesting information from the comments section.

Earlier today, MyBitcoin.com had a hiccup and went down, throwing up error pages.

Here’s what it looked like:

Saved version here.

Here’s something interesting.

This is OnlyOneTV.com’s whois info:

So, MyBitcoin.com and OnlyOneTV.com are hosted at the same obscure, crappy webhost?

This is pretty damning information if I’m reading this right.

And for fun, here’s a bunch of other crimes Bruce has been convicted of:

Didn’t think of using lexisnexus

fyi bruce’s stuff in new york:

http://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/isc…xNo=101308-2008
http://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/isc…xNo=101308-2008

EDIT: Notice: The nature of this action is assault; landlord tenuant occuppancy, and use, fraud in the induicement.
The relief sought is $514,400. As of 11 December 2010, this is still ongoing.

Yup, it sounds like Bruce is wanted in NY as well.

…

More digging:

Franklin County Ohio

YOB: 1961,DEFINITELYnot 29. Speeding tickets show relationship with Edward Gel, and was there till 2002.

EDIT: Evicted in Jan 2002 due to non-payment.

…

Shoot, there is a lot of dirt in Ohio’s Court records.

Lived there from 1995-2002 citations include:
Prostitution
Speeding
Eviction
Property Damage
InsuranceFraud
Trading Fraud

Such a good person to play with Bitcoins.
(fyi –http://www.fcmcclerk.com/is the website for public records. this is all small claims, but shows a pattern)

Admin Note: I have spoken to Bruce and he has declined to comment on anything in this article for me.

The post Has Bruce Wagner pulled off the biggest financial scam on the bitcoin community? UPDATE2 (A long fucking post.) appeared first on Buttcoin Foundation.