Quote from: lolwut on February 04, 2015, 02:36:54 PM

Quote from: CoinFire on February 04, 2015, 06:58:14 AM

Quote from: Josef_Stylin on February 04, 2015, 06:44:12 AM

Quote from: CoinFire on February 04, 2015, 06:21:18 AM

Quote from: Josef_Stylin on February 04, 2015, 06:18:43 AM

Quote from: CoinFire on February 04, 2015, 05:46:24 AM

Quote from: bitpop on February 04, 2015, 05:11:28 AM

Quote from: lolwut on February 04, 2015, 05:08:38 AM

what if mike johnson isn't who we think he is? What if the owner of coinfire actually works for the SEC?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ifLCnyQEAH4J:https://twitter.com/mjohnsonbtc/status/513985493050982401+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

twitter says he's in Washington DC.

Why does mjohnsonbtc/coinfiremike not exist anywhere on the internet prior to september 2014? I can understand that maybe coinfire was created in late 2014, but surely the owner/founder had some internet presence before then?

also, wtf is this? http://mike.ml/

He's gotta be ex sec or prosecutor. He's got many many connections and reports sec news. Homero ganza is extra fucked. Coinfire basically confirmed my suspicions earlier. This is good though, even more credible. I just hope coinbrief discloses any xpy holdings if needed .

It is amazing the connections you can make in college if you are social and try to hang out with diverse crowds and you date a lot Wink

social butterflies like yourself usually have more than 24 facebook friends... unless of course "mike johnson" isn't your real name

Totally my real name but I reset my social media account to no longer be tied with my former Facebook profile. It is important to me that sources aren't compromised under any circumstances so I have taken steps to silo off my life.

I really wanted to write, it was something I was extremely passionate about for a long time before starting Coin Fire and I always figured I'd try to do everything right up front that I could. I've made some mistakes and some days I wish I hadn't full on deleted versus deactivating my old Facebook profile.... then I realize how much more productive I am without status updates and pictures of friends who have started families and feel the need to share constant kid pictures Wink

Surely you can see how it seems as if everything that you report just so happens to also coincide around GAW releases, announcements, etc. and drives free traffic to them. Whether it is hashlets, PayBase, CC purchases/Stripe, to now giving him a "see, look at what's going on" Honors Program excuse days after he dropped seeds of doubt about some issues.

So let's examine some facts:
Everything you report has some kind of plausible deniability on Josh's end.
There's nothing "concrete", ever.
You keep saying there's more.
You didn't exist on the internet before this summer.

Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like GAW's business model to me. Everything you "report" sends and stirs up more traffic than that scamming piece of shit deserves.

Sorry but it all seems a little too convenient to me.

I understand your concerns but we've reported on a plethora of other topics outside of GAW. We reported extensively on SEC involvement with 2.0 companies, we reported extensively on the BFL raid and subsequent court movements, we've reported on things such as Coinjelly, we've reported on a wide range of merchant acceptance and other topics.

It isn't fair to say that Coin Fire covers only GAW things. We've reported on a large selection of items and the GAW posts are no where near the biggest traffic drivers for us.

A lot of people have asked for more transparency and I think we've done a great job of balancing source confidence and documents. We've published a commitment to sharing our editorial and contributor bibles on GitHub, we've shared how we vet sources and really tried to bring some transparency to the space.

We don't take money for articles, we have fully disclosed a large number of things that many of our peers in tech journalism haven't (not bitcoin specific) and have been working to even a greater level of accountability and responsibility. Things take time, we are a small team, we have a limited budget and I was not a journalist by trade prior to this so it will take some learning as well.

We are working pretty hard and diligently to bring ALL of the cryptocurrency news that we can. We don't publish things that are widely reported when possible, we try to keep it to mostly original pieces and we have a large number of stories in the works that aren't GAW related. Some of these stories are in the third or fourth month of investigation and we want to make sure we get everything right.

We are going to keep reporting on the topics that we receive and vet information on, the topics that our readers have asked for and the stories we feel are the most newsworthy. I hate saying keep watching because it seems like an empty promise but we have kept our promises and published materials as we can previously and will keep doing so in the future.

I'm long on reporting the news because I've discovered this is something I am truly passionate about and a space where some disruption is always good Wink

I am not totally convinced that you're not an SEC employee. Someone with such a passion for crypto and bitcoin doesn't just show up 6 months ago and start throwing haymakers saying you've got an SEC source. Not trying to be rude here, but why would the SEC leak information to CoinFire? I can understand if you were the wallstreet journal, but some guy at the SEC is going to risk his job to satisfy the need of a tiny news website that most of the world hasn't ever heard of?

CoinFire is not ran by an individual named Mike Johnson nor does the owner of CoinFire work for the SEC. The reason mjohnsonbtc does not exist anywhere on the internet prior to September 2014 is because it's a trolling account. Mike Johnson is a pseudonym and the actual name of the individual that ownes BitCoin is Raymond Angel. See information on Raymond Angel below:

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/raymond-angel
https://angel.co/startupguy
https://www.facebook.com/raymond.g.angel?pnref=friends.search
http://ray.vc/ (no longer active)
https://startupgenome.co/raymond-angel

Cheers