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by poi412 1960 days ago
Is this coordinated image rehabilitation or something?

You authoritatively confirmed that the account is who it says it is as your first involvement in this thread. Was that based on firsthand knowledge? I’m really suspicious about your involvement here and I’m starting to suspect someone figured out just how easily HN can be leveraged if the commentary remains civil and lionizes the right people late on a Friday night when everyone is looking the other way.

People who rescue children from fires are heroes. People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity. There’s a difference and while he certainly deserves credit, he’s quite obviously manipulating this discussion in real time (I’m not saying it, but I’m saying it, wink wink).

Call me cynical, call me uncivil, whatever, but what you just said is a giant pile of the absolute worst excrement to ever cross this site. I’m not even involved in this drama, I’ve never speculated on Bitcoin, I have no ill feelings for this person, he cost me nothing, but holy Moses is what you’re doing here one of the most transparent efforts I’ve ever seen.

The more this back room stuff goes on in crypto, where we are all subjected to very public he said she said spats and expected to choose who’s our hero in this adventure and navigate who’s more full of shit, the less claim cryptocurrency has to legitimacy. I’m amazed that’s not obvious to you.

2 comments

Please assume good faith. I do not believe there is a image rehabilitation campaign, nor are nefarious forces trying to sway public opinion late Friday night. Don't waste too many brain cycles chasing ghosts. We all are just people trying to get by in life.

There is no conspiracy here :-)

That eased all my concerns. Thank you. I feel better.
Rasengan is Andrew Lee, cofounder of London Trust Media, parent company of Private Internet Access. He has been personal friends with Mark Karpeles since well before Mark's fraud was discovered. Here's a PR piece he put out when he hired Mark as CTO after he was let out of prison. Yes you read that right, an infamous fraudster who couldn't even be bothered to use version control on MtGox who lied day after day for years and who ran his business into the ground and was imprisoned for it was hired as a CTO for a major VPN company.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/why-i-hired-mt-go...

Rasengan has an obvious bias here, you can call that whatever you want but whatever you call it, he's not a neutral third party. I'm not either, Mark Karpeles stole a great deal of money from me and many others on this site. Rasengan has in the past given this same spiel on HN trying to make Mark out to be some kind of victim of circumstance.

>People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity.

At no point has Mark Karpeles done anything at all that could objectively be described as making amends for anything. Jed McCaleb previously indicated that Mark Karpeles was aware from when he originally made the deal for buying most of MtGox that the exchange was already insolvent. He lied to users for years and claimed that MtGox had a cold storage system comprised of 3 geographically disparate locations, of which access to 2 were required to move funds out of cold storage and 95% of customer funds were kept out of the hot wallets. In reality that never existed, and Mark just continually kept emptying the cold wallets that were just stored in their office into the hot wallet. The hot wallet was compromised in a hack, Mark knew the hot wallet was wiped out in the hack, he didn't rotate keys, he just kept dumping our money into a known compromised address and never once bothered to check just how much money was missing until it was gone. The only saving grace was that Mark was so incompetent and blaise with managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other peoples money that he quite literally forgot about 200,000 BTC. If he had remembered it, there's no reason to believe that he wouldn't have just kept dumping it in and push the collapse back by another 6 months.

Since the collapse everything's been in the hands of the trustee for MtGox and Tibanne. If Mark Karpeles told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check.

Gox or Mark didn't steal any money from you, you lost the money you had left in the casino. While it might be true the casino lost it, it was no longer yours the moment you transferred it out of your own wallet. I'm sorry for your loss.

"I can’t give you your money, it isn’t here, it’s in Frank’s house and Joe’s house".