For those who don't know, I was the first investor in Bitinstant, and that is widely regarded as the first investment into a startup in the Bitcoin ecosystem ever. Charlie didn't manage the business well, and made numerous bad business decisions, only one of which was to openly sell Bitcoins to a dealer on the Silk Road. He was eventually arrested for it.
The short version of this story is that Charlie Shrem claimed he had no money when he was on his way to prison.
He asked me to loan him money so he could afford to hire someone with the prison selection process.
In the past I had loaned Bitinstant hundreds of thousands of dollars for liquidity float, but when it came time for him to pay me back he was full of excuses, and it was always impossible to get him to pay me back on time. Because of those past bad experiences with Charlie I had promised myself I would never loan him money again. This time I felt bad for him so I agreed because it was only $5,000 and I actually didn't expect that he would ever pay it back. I would have been just fine with that if he hadn't gone on a social media rampage undermining my own efforts with Bitcoin.com to promote the version of Bitcoin outlined in the Satoshi White paper.
I then asked him privately numerous times via email to pay me back.
He can say whatever he wants about the scaling debate, but he should pay me back the money he owes me.
One night I saw his support for the censorship supporting, Bitcoin choking Core roadmap, so I was extra fed up with the fact that he still hadn't repaid his debt to me, so I decided to comment on that fact with this tweet:
https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/891050550862561280
In the following tweet storm, we had this great comment from Charlie:
https://twitter.com/CharlieShrem/status ... 2168039424
This really pushed my buttons a bit more because I had been emailing him privately for months asking to be repaid, but he always had an excuse or delay tactic.
I pointed that out too:
Notice that the date of the email was several months before I publicly called him out for it on twitter.
After I made a big deal out of it on Twitter, he eventually paid me, but then blocked me on twitter for my efforts:
I just thought people should be aware of his juvenile behavior, so there it is.
P.S. This post was inspired by the fact thatI noticed on Reddit that BitcoinCore has blocked Jeff Garzic on Twitter for no reason at all.
It is also worth noting that Core supporter Tuur Demeester also blocked me for pointing out that Charlie doesn't pay his bills on time. I suspect the real reason is that he disagrees with Satoshi's roadmap for scaling bitcoin, while I support it very publicly.
Birds of a feather.....
