Was Martin Shkreli Really Scammed Out of $15m in Bitcoin??

[Nirish guy]

So, after all the talk on the board about Bit coin and thew security of same I noticed the following news story doing the rounds today where Martin Shkreli ( the most hated man in America it seems and certainly the smuggest cunt one could ever come across it appears - and the guy who massively hiked the cost of AIDS medicines - so he "claims" that he's just been scammed out of $15m in Bitcoin by someone re his trying to buy the rights of the latest Kayne West album ( although why he'd want to bother is another whole story !?), but the whole story sounds like self promoting bullshit and there definitely sounds like there's more going on than meets the eye perhaps.

So Matt, ( as our seemingly sole in-house Bitcoin expert now as the other "expect" has moved on ( or got kicked out more like) any thoughts on the above, any "chatter" on this in the Bitcoin world as so far I see he's refusing to release any Bitcoin info that could prove the theft but it seems the amount of money involved is so large it may not be too hard to trace ( if the theft even happened that is).....any thoughts perhaps ??

[cdnmatt]

So Matt, ( as our seemingly sole in-house Bitcoin expert now as the other "expect" has moved on ( or got kicked out more like) any thoughts on the above, any "chatter" on this in the Bitcoin world

To be honest, I'm in Khon Kaen, and could care less what this scum bag is doing or what happened to him.

Took a quick look though. There's some "chatter" going on in the Bitcoin world about it, but the usual drivel so far. The one thing I've noticed is there's no transaction IDs being posted, which leaves me scratching my head a little. The blockchain is a public ledger, so if this was true, he shouldn't have any issue publishing the addresses / txs that funds were stolen from, so we could all take a peek, or we could at least half-ass verify it. We couldn't verify it was from him, but could verify $15 million moved last night.

Plus there's thousands of people out there running bots watching every tx flow through the blockchain, and notifies them of larger transactions. I'm not one of them, but there are lots of geeky types out there who do it. Generally, $15 mlllion being transacted doesn't go unnoticed, and tends to raise some suspicion. So if this story was true, more than likely, someone would have already noticed the said transactions, and posted details on them.

On a side note, if he did actually have $15 million stolen, good! Perfect example of karma, for him taking advantage of people's health issues like he did.

[lego]

We couldn't verify it was from him, ...

Why not? If that's what he wants to, so that people will buy his story, he could always sign a challenge message with the private key in question. That the funds are gone doesn't usually mean he has lost the key. The only thing we then still couldn't verify is that it wasn't just him who sent the funds to another address controlled by him. But first I'd be interested to know if he actually had $15 million in BTC as claimed.

[cdnmatt]

Well, if he's willing to play ball, then yeah, he could just sign a message. I'm assuming he's not willing to though, due to things like this:



Nonetheless, people would have noticed 10 x $1.5 million txs within the span of a couple hours. Plus since the story broke, I'm sure lots of people have scanned the blockchain during that time period looing for the txs. Considering nobody has posted the Tx IDs (that I can see), this story is more than likely bullshit.

[lego]

Yeah, I have to agree, claiming that he has contacted Satoshi and enlisted him to help him get his money back is a bit rich. What a clown.

[lonelywombat]

Bitcoin faces calls for tougher regulation amid Igot scandal
ABC TV tonight has a big segment

full details here

http://www.theage.com.au/business/ba...12-go44xo.html