Hello,

As some of you may have noticed, there was a bit of a mess on the forums last night. In a thread last night, we released customer information in attempts to publicly shame a scammer.

The community has been outraged at this invasion of privacy.

On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize.

First, to Nikolaos (Nethead), I apologize for the fumbled, and crude, handling of this situation. Everyone involved at the Bitcoin Store is a hardcore believer in Bitcoin. What some of us saw, true or not, is that someone was attempting to harm his store, and because the store's sole purpose is to promote Bitcoin, we saw this harm as an assault on Bitcoin itself. Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry.

I was reading through the threads and noticed this:


Please don't leave Nethead. Scammer or not, Bitcoin needs people like you just as much as Bitcoin needs businesses like ours. We're sorry for this mess up, don't let it spoil Bitcoin for you.

Second, to the rest of the Bitcoin community. Today you got to see that everyone is indeed fallible. We apologize for these mistakes. You have trusted us with your business and today we failed to act in the utmost care required by that trust. I would say that everyone has their off days, but we're not going to make excuses. We screwed up, we'll work to make this right with everyone.

We have taken the following steps to stop this from ever occurring again:

• Blockchain.info admin privileges have been revoked for everyone except Ben who has hidden the secret phrase from the admin panel: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131608.msg1409489#msg1409489
• Customer information has been removed, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131574.msg1408898#msg1408898
• We are currently reviewing our privacy policy. What we did today was excessive. I do not want customers fearing the use of their private data.

Please reply with any further suggestions you have for us.

Thank you,
-Jon