13 June 15:00: Initial payouts have been made to verified people for 50% of their claim.
Can we
please get an update with some
real factual data? The last one was made half a month ago. And so far all we know is that ~5% of the smaller accounts got 50% of their BTC balance back and 0% of their USD balance.
By now you guys should have a concrete plan containing WHO/WHAT/WHEN/WHERE/WHY/HOW. Please communicate it to your customers. Update the individual claim pages with verification status and expected payout dates and percentages. If the strategy is to solve the problem by dragging this out hoping customers will forget and go away then you are mistaken.
I'm seeing a lot of claims marked accurate (especially the larger ones). 75% of the claimed value has been marked as accurate with the remaining ones marked 'undecided' (the vast majority). This number is hugely skewed by a few people with very large balances.
The total amount actually paid out thus far is 1/6th of the total claimed value.
I was one of Bitcoinica's largest customers. I have extended you my continued patience and trust to sort this out. Now after 50+ days of inaction you have degraded me to practically having to beg for my *own* money back. Well done. Top notch customer service indeed.
Oh, and Tihan - Can you please nullify the NDA you have with the Bitcoin Consultancy guys? We need to move forward beyond words and empty promises. We need meaningful action & full transparency. It is clear that Bitcoinica LP was (and still is) completely dysfunctional. This is not how you run a professional operation.
Well there's a competing dichotomy here. To process the claims, we have limited information and we cannot tell people what we know and don't know exactly. It's a process of rebuilding a database with imperfect information against malicious agents.
People are getting paid out, but again as I said, the process is very slow. In fact Donald right now has done the majority of work. Many of the claims I processed got reverted because I was making mistakes and doing them improperly. :/ There is lots of information, and a bunch of bottlenecks. For instance, lets say one staff member has access to information X, which the other staff member needs, then there's lag there. So it's not totally as efficient as it could be.
I favoured using a completely mathematical/statistical approach (build stats to cross match and home in on an acceptable dataset using hypothesis testing and confidence intervals). But the others decided that it's less risky and better to do them manually (despite taking longer). I still think the statistical approach is a good one and worth the risk.