I sit here alone in quiet contemplation and meditation. I am writing you so that you know my side of the story.
Everything was normal in my life, as normal as my crazy life can be, until this Christmas Eve.
I felt the urge to visit a friend and try to make her Christmas Eve a bit better. When I got there she told me she had nothing for Christmas. No food, no gifts, nothing. So I took her shopping and bought all she would need to give her family a merry Christmas. In truth, we spent maybe $200, but I was satisfied the family would be ok.
Everything was fine until I took a wrong turn and ended up at a checkpoint. As we passed it, they flagged me for an inspection and it was there that I discovered that I had a warrant in a state that I haven't been to in more than half a decade.
They arrested me on it and I am waiting extradition. I am innocent of the charges. There is so little evidence against me that the state with the warrant has completely ignored me. But I still must face it and try to prove my innocence.
The charge is not financial in nature. I am not a criminal. Anyone who knows me knows this is just wrong. But this is showing me who my friends are.
During my time in my staycation, I have heard of a lot of infighting and commotion coming from a company I helped found. Most of the problems are due to people having raw data and not understanding what they are looking at. So rather than ask questions, they jump to conclusions and assume malintent. Then they publish and share what they found as though it were fact.
The fact is, unless the people who have had access to my laptop have used said access to enrich themselves, we are exactly where we were before.
There were bugs in TxBits, the software used by TradeQwik. These caused balances in the table to be many multiples of what they properly should have been. Balances would be updated with no record of charge. No cancel, no "refunded," nothing. Just the value in the balances table increased.
This leak has always been there. It was obscured by the fact that more was coming in than going out. I estimate the loss to be about 1 BTC daily for each day of operation. How did no one notice?
In order to see a thing you must first know to look. The system would sweep from hot to cold any time the hot wallet exceeded 10 BTC. When it would drop below 1 BTC then we would have to sweep from cold to hot. As long as more was coming in than going out, we would never be alerted to the problem.
When the site was attacked, we took all deposits and withdrawals offline. It was only when we processed things manually that we noticed balances would go down, but they wouldn't stay down for more than a couple of days.
People would see this increased balance and of course immediately withdraw it, thus repeating the cycle.
There is of course a bit more to it than that. Any customer wanting a refund was always refunded, but we did not have a proper procedure in place to ensure their account was debited and stayed debited.
I can rattle off the bugs we found all day long, but the fact is, this was a beta test of a failed prototype. This is why it said, "Welcome to our Beta!" right on the front page.
Contrary to anything you may have heard, I am still the sole owner of TradeQwik and I bear full responsibility for its current condition. There were plans to transfer ownership to a new entity partly owned by VHL and controlled by Joe and Rick. I cannot in good conscience do that.
My understanding is that there has been a chain of key people leave the project. Some quietly, some vociferously. I don't know who, what, or why. All I have is hearsay.
There isn't a lot I can do from here. My laptop is no longer under my control and several key people have quit recently. I have a potentially long legal battle ahead just to secure my freedom.
I am asking everyone to please realize...
Nothing has changed except that I am not currently in charge. Rightfully the person in charge should be Dawn, because she founded the company along with me and Alec and has made an epic effort to keep the vision alive and the company going.
Audits are proceeding as normal. Dennis is performing them, please cooperate with him so all accounts can be corrected properly. If you owe money, please pay so other people's accounts can be credited as well.
This project is much bigger than one person or even one group. I believe in the vision. I believe in the project. I know that we will succeed as long as we keep trying. The only way to fail is to give up and I didn't come this far just to give up.
All of you have my undying love and gratitude for your support during these trying times. Thank you!
All proceeds from this post will go towards supporting my wife and children while I am unavailable. My wife is the one uploading this post for me. So please, upvote, share, and STAY STRONG!
Image courtesy of Amazon News
