Quote from: Jonathan Ryan Owens on December 20, 2011, 09:46:05 AM

Open letter to Todd,

I was introduced to you through Jared Turner of PlayNTrade. I remember him talking about you, and the numerous warnings that you weren't "normal" in any sense of the word. He insisted that I'd just "understand" when I met you. As you'll recall, Jared brought Eric and I in to meet you and check out the Bitcoin ATM, and you were against a rock and a hard place. Remember? Jim the Bitcoin Blogger had been working with you to develop the Bitcoin ATM v1. Though I don't know the whole story, the pieces that I heard were as follows:

1. You promised Jim something that you didn't deliver on

2. Jim disabled your software for either non payment, or because you didn't adhere to the agreement you'd reached with him. This was a warning sign.

3. When we met, you quickly offered up the world, dangling the carrot of "ownership" in the BitcoinATM idea to both Eric and myself.

4. I told you straight away that equity was off the table, that neither I or Eric had any interest in ownership.

5. We agreed on a fee to completion. We had 6 days to rebuild the software to run BitcoinATM.

6. On day 2, you had a conversation with Jared at PlayNTrade, and had a falling out.

7. The day after, a friday, I drove up to San Clemente to meet with Jared and ask him whether he wanted your device in his store.

8. It was readily apparent that Jared was uncomfortable with the reality of a Bitcoin ATM in his place of business. There are probably a number of reasons.
a. No defined ownership on his part, even though he paid for half of the Kiosk.
b. No registered corporation, no money services business license either State or Federal
c. Grey area legal status of Bitcoin itself
d. Lack of legal structure, opinion or adequate legal representation
e. No funding
f. Lack of popular interest in the Bitcoin concept i.e. too early

9. I previewed the BitcoinATM video / interview from digivid media, (you know - the one which had interview questions that I prepared for the interviewer to ask you) to Jared et al on a trip to san clemente, trying to get him excited toward BitcoinATM being in his place of business (playNtrade). However you were still "negotiating". Jared felt 50% was fair for his name, experience and his internal and personal resources to be put on your project.

You were LUCKY to have someone who knew your nature be so nice. He was offering up 50% for his and his resources time to get BitcoinATM in as many locations as possible.

10. Half way through (4 days) I was concerned that you weren't going to pay us on completion. You insisted that you were in negotiations with Jared, but he made it perfectly clear that you'd alienated him, and that you were acting in a very imbalanced way. I concurred. As it stood at that point, Jared told me to press on, and let me know that he'd pay me if you didn't.

11. I found "Cool As Ever Tech Show" and got you to sign up. It was a good place to showcase our work, and your BitcoinATM. As you'll recall, the video crew showed up there, too.

12. The stress of working with you caused me to start having panic attacks, which triggered my latent heart condition, supra ventricular tachycardia. I had to go to the hospital and everything. I came over the next day to pick up our check, and that's when we had our confrontation. You lead with your power move - i.e. you presented both Eric and I with a non compete agreement which, according to you, would have to be signed in order for you to pay Eric and I what amounted to a small token of our agreed upon price.

13. We left and blacklisted your IP, and changed all passwords.

Todd, you tried to rip us off. As you already stated above, you tried to infiltrate our web host to take software which was not legally yours. It was wholly your intention from the beginning to do exactly what you did, as evidenced by your previous forays working with Jim the Bitcoin Blogger. He's too nice, and doesn't want to make waves, but I tell you, sir, you have not made anyone who's met you personally believe that you are sane, or worthy of trust.

You never paid for the work, Todd, and you alienated both myself, Eric and Jared at playNtrade. You blame everyone else for your problems, and when people try to step up (like I tried to) to help you, you always find a way to manipulate and lie your way into negative relationships. I knew something was wrong when your daughter, Maria, came into the garage and told both Eric and myself "you're my daddies slaves. you work for him. he's better than you."

Eric and I both looked at each other with concerned looks.

Further, from day 2 both Eric and I were aware that you were obviously recording and possibly keylogging. Completely aware, Todd. Still, I was on the Todd boat, and figured that you had a good reason (?) to be so paranoid. As we went on, your complete ignorance of how Bitcoin actually works, and your half baked Libertarian oddness started to paint a clearer picture of who you are, Todd. You hold an MBA and went through the whole program at UCI alone, because nobody would let you be in their group. You got forcibly removed and put in jail for coming back to campus after the dean told you that your lifetime auditing privileges were revoked because of suspicious and offensive behavior toward students and faculty.

Todd, I got involved because I fucking LOVE Bitcoin, and we were SO EXCITED to get involved in what we thought would be a really cool project. We followed through and did so despite your constant badgering, interference and steady supply of soul crushing jabs, arrogance and unpredictable behavior. We followed through and made it happen in 6 days, sir. You have been without software for months now, with no end in sight. You never needed 35k for Bitcoin ATM, sir, you only needed a good heart, some humility and a community spirit which you have demonstrated a marked lack of.

I felt such empathy for your Bitcoin love and need of assistance, and wanted to see you succeed. You broke my heart, Todd.

Best to you and yours, sir.

-Jonathan

[Edit]

One thing to note: Residing on the BitcoinATM Kiosk is every bit of source code that he'd need to run the BitcoinATM right now. We simply turned off the remote host, webserver, which we had to use because Todd provided no internal development resources, servers or networking management. He's had the software the whole time, but doesn't know how to run a LAMP stack.

You didn't need to try to hack into atmco.in, Todd. You only had to set up a webserver on the machine, which we'd have happily shown you, but you didn't want to pay us, and you tried to strong arm and manipulate us, so we walked.

Too bad you stole thousands of bitcoins off "investors' in the ringcoin ponzi scheme.