. . . On behalf of the Bitcoin Store, I would like to apologize . . .
. . . Our actions were irrational and unprofessional. We handled the situation poorly. I'm sorry . . .
Thank you,
-Jon
Thank you. Roger never should have abused his admin access as an employee at blockchain.info, but once he did and was called out on it, an immediate response like the one you just posted would have headed off a lot of the "uproar".
Roger's failure to acknowledge his own wrongdoing (as well as blockchain.info's failure to consider the possible conflict of interest in giving Roger admin access in the first place) dragged this out far more than it ever needed to be.
Clearly NetHead was wrong in his decision not to return money that wasn't rightfully his. I think most of us recognized this from the beginning, but a business is held to a high standard. We give the business our personal information and trust them to engage in honest and trustworthy transactions. The fact that I can't trust some random guy named NetHead does not surprise or bother me. The fact that my trust has eroded in what was otherwise a great business does surprise and bother me. I'm glad to hear that actions are being taken to address the situation, and I'm glad to see that you are not trying to claim that there was no wrongdoing on Roger's part. This goes a long way toward rebuilding trust. Unfortunately it is a lot easier to damage one's reputation than to rebuild it.
Thank you for sounding your concerns in other threads as well as this post.
We all had some misjudgments this last day. I assure you, nothing of this sort will happen again under my watch. There is a LOT of inbreeding that goes on in Bitcoin companies, unfortunately due to the market size, it is inevitable. We've cut any conflict of interest that could arise from Blockchain access, so that issue is pretty much solved.
The bigger issue as you indeed pointed out is rebuilding our reputation in the eyes of the community. Hopefully we can reprove our trustworthiness this January as we publicly launch the store. I'm glad that we got this first hurdle out of the way though, every business is tried is some way, we've discovered some internal weaknesses that we're moving quickly to correct.
Thank you,
-Jon