He's not allowed to buy illegal drugs. 

While that statement is, in itself, mostly true, there are things you can do with your benefit money (like waterskiing) that show you aren't really disabled at all.  Just being able to engage in a combination of sitting, standing and/or walking for a full eight hours a day falls outside the category of disabled.  That fat fuck sits on his leathery ass eight hours or more at a stretch.  His "back problem" is fucking bullshit and he's stealing taxpayer money.

Five card draw with a jacks-or-better starting requirement might be a useful model.  Unlike some poker variants, anyone who actually plays a hand can be compelled to "show their starters" (i.e. prove they had a hand that they were allowed to play).

It still has the issue of people who didn't play not showing.

Any solution to the provably fair poker problem has to deal with the fact that you can't see everyone's cards, even after the fact, but much more importantly, has to be implemented in a client that uses open source software and can be compiled by the end user.  Verifying the results (at least the ones that you can see) doesn't seem to be something that can be done in a single step, and would be very impractical for the end user to do manually.

Also, while provable fairness is a nice gold standard for online gambling, most cheating is going to be done (and has in the past been done) by insiders with access to other people's hole cards and by collusion.  Even if every player provides a seed for the PRNG, so that the deal is provably fair, once the server actually does the deal, an insider may have access while the hand plays out.  Collusion is similarly impervious to provable fairness.

Insiders and collusion constitute the two most serious threats of being cheated in online poker, and as for defective PRNGs, I can only think of one that had any real effect (Planet Poker back in 1999 iirc).  That particular PRNG crack would have been absolutely fatal, but luckily the discoverers documented it rather than using it.  So far as I know, most poker sites now use robust PRNGs seeded with truly random data from some physical entropy source.

So as much as provable fairness is a gold standard, it really seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem.  I am unaware of any case in which an online poker site has been caught rigging the PRNG.  There are just better ways of cheating.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see someone do it.  I'm just not sure that except as an academic exercise (and one that is worth doing lest you think I am just being a jerk), it actually will make much difference for poker players.

Trufax.  I'm not sure if the BBB was ever anything other than a scam, but that's what it is now.  Basically, they operate by bribery (you have to pay them to get a good rating) and extortion (you get a bad rating if you don't).  It can still potentially be useful to file complaints with them just to hassle the target, but the BBB should never be used as a source of reliable information.  Many outright scams (way worse than BFL) have an A- or A rating.

I think BTC is actually a hybrid.  It is certainly money for the purposes of prosecuting a Ponzi scheme where the "accounts" are denominated in BTC.  It might not be for other purposes.  For instance, some regulatory agencies that for whatever reason don't want to mess with it might decide it isn't "money" for the purposes of being within their jurisdiction.

While regulators often like to claim that their statutory authority entitles them to regulate everything under the sun, there are occasions when something is such a headache they'd just as soon ignore it.  While two big states (New York and California) have already weighed in to some extent on BTC, it's entirely possible some smaller states with less BTC activity would rather not.

Sometimes, irony can be really. . .ironic.

For the non-lawyers among us, this means there isn't a single "bright line" you cross to become a business, so it is possible to fall into this category inadvertently.

An example of another fact-based, factor-weighing inquiry is the fairly common case of adjudicating whether a person is a contractor or an employee, which often arises when a construction project goes awry and a plaintiff is suing both the person or company who actually screwed up as well as whoever hired them.  If the person whose hammer slipped is an employee, employer liability is almost automatic, whereas it becomes rather more difficult if the person is merely a contractor whose activities are not directly controlled by the person who hired him.  The issue also becomes very important in tax or unemployment compensation cases.

I chose this example because it's fairly common and you can find multi-factor analyses actually used by professionals.  For example, this is a 20 factor checklist which is or resembles the 20 factors often used by the IRS in making such determinations.

Just because factors like this are listed does not mean they are exhaustive.  Courts can (unless prohibited by statute or binding precedent) use their own tests, ignore or give little weight to some factors, or even consider factors not listed in the "standard" test, especially in unusual cases.

Bitcoin may tend to create situations where additional factors may need to be considered, or where the traditional weighting of factors is not applicable.  It may shake out that Bitcoin situations are actually pretty similar to other already adjudicated cases, but I wouldn't bet on it.

This story discusses the pirateat40/Trendon Shavers scam and the SEC's lawsuit against him, which is surprisingly little discussed here considering its importance.


More at the link.

And if you had read the thread, you'd have known I was one of the people who previously pointed it out, idiot.

Sorry for repeating myself, but when people ignore what has already been posted and post the same impractical solutions the flaws of which have already been pointed out, and utterly fail to address it, I am forced to repeat myself.

And how many people would be willing to do all this every time you got dealt a hand?

Remember, it's not just the hand you get dealt.  Then there's the flop, the burn card (generally not visible to the player), the turn, another burn card, and the river.

On each street, players are going to be dropping out.

You also have the fact that you don't get to see other people's hands unless they show down.  And nobody is going to want to play on a site where everyone knows every previous hand they have played and can basically completely profile them as a player.

If he is collecting Social Security disability and is not disabled, that is fraud.  "I have a bad back" is the #1 kind of disability fraud.  I bet if they bothered investigating, they'd find this fat fuck is going around doing all kinds of things (prostitution, gambling, running around committing crimes) that no disabled person could do.

If he is actually collecting disability based on his condition, he has to have made all kinds of claims about what he can and can't do, and this involves practically being in a wheelchair.  Watch this scumbag crook for so much as a couple hours and I'd imagine he routinely does shit he has claimed he can't do in order to defraud disability.

ETA:  For instance, to be disabled under Social Security regs, you either have to have a listed impairment (and baww baww my back hurts isn't one without very specific medical findings) or you have to be incapable of a combination of sitting, standing and walking for eight hours or more, i.e. you couldn't hold any kind of eight hour a day job, even one where you did nothing but sit for eight hours watching a video monitor. 

I defy anyone to say this fat fuck doesn't routinely sit on his ass scamming people on the Internet for eight hours straight.  He certainly has on Seals.

You can try manually retransmitting using the blockchain interface here:  https://blockchain.info/pushtx

To get the raw transaction information, get the transaction ID.  In Bitcoin-Qt, go to the transaction list, right click the transaction, and pick transaction details.  Copy the transaction ID. 

Then go to Help --> Debug Window and click the Console tab.

Type in getrawtransaction transactionID, where the transactionID is what you have in the clipboard.  Take that raw transmission data and paste it into the blockchain site.  The blockchain will check the raw transaction for validity, and if it is valid, will then transmit it, whereupon it should show up in the blockchain shortly.

If it still gets an error, your client for whatever reason is generating a malformed transaction.  If it doesn't, your client is for whatever reason generating a valid transaction but then failing to transmit it.

That bank is the Bank of Thailand, the nation's central bank.  That puts it in roughly the same position as the Federal Reserve in the United States.  If they really have taken a position that Bitcoin is illegal, that could be highly problematic.  It would strike me as highly unusual, though, for a bank to make a definitive, final policy statement about the legality of something without promulgating regulations of some kind actually saying so officially.

Fair enough.  I zapped my OP to this thread and just replaced it with a statement there should be a thread about this but the previous one is locked, so I created one.  To say the least, my OP did not start a productive discussion.

Some kinds of game are going to be a lot easier to make provably fair than others.  One necessity for being able to prove fairness (without some kind of independent audit) is that you actually know all the results.  In a dice game, you can basically know everyone's results over the history of the game.  In a lottery game, you can have some independently verifiable source of the seed, like for instance an actual real world lottery.  Basically, you need very little entropy for a probable result.

In games like poker, you need a tremendous amount of pseudorandom numbers generated in real time.  You also don't get to see the final results, just whatever hands make it to the river.  People are also generally going to be unwilling to have the cards they had known to the other players without seeing a showdown.  

Now, by collecting large numbers of hand histories, you can analyze whether the action is funky, like flush draws are coming in more often than they should, but you can't really prove it's honest.  You can just show the results are consistent (or inconsistent) with the PRNG being fair.  I'm sure there are other games where it would be difficult to be provably fair, but poker is definitely a big one where it would be tricky to do.

Or I could just ask a fucking question before trying to look up something that is registered under another name, on the off chance someone who isn't a complete dick answers, rather than reinventing the wheel.  Thanks.

I didn't agree with those attacks until he locked the thread.  That was seriously sketchy and makes me doubt his other comments.  I was polite and respectful up until that point and willing to accept that he was acting in good faith.

The issue he started a discussion about is one that needs a thread.  Locking it was a highly questionable action and difficult to square with good faith.

You probably also remember casino bonuses, if you exploited them, or as the term was, "bonus whoring."  When Internet gambling was a novelty (and to some extent to this day), there were often lucrative deposit bonuses which you'd get and then be able to turn into real money by giving a certain amount of action or "playthrough."  Like for 20x playthrough with a $1,000 bonus, you'd have to give the house $20,000 in betting action.  So any game with a house edge lower than 5% is an expected profit.  However, many casinos have stopped being so generous with these offers, or specifically exclude the low house edge games like blackjack, video poker, etc. from deposit bonuses.  Also, they tend to kick you off for "abusing" the bonus (by making money on it).  I never had any of them refuse to pay on a bonus or confiscate funds, though, even when I got kicked off all the Cryptologic casinos for basically raping the shit out of their bonuses.  This casino network with a lot of sites in it gave a monthly small bonus for a certain amount of play, and one month, I collected it on every site betting the entire playthrough value, something like $500 or so, on a single hand of a 21 variant called Pontoon.  Basically won 10 out of 12 hands and that was enough to wear out their patience.

There's also arbitrage betting, where you find two sportsbooks offering odds such that whatever outcome the sports event has, you still are going to make money even taking out the house vig on both bets.  For some reason, sportsbooks seem a lot faster to kick you off for advantage play, though, and then arbitrage opportunities dry up.  I have also found that in many of these arbitrage situations, one of the sportsbooks majorly screwed up and one of the bets is actually massively +EV.  But since I generally don't know jack about sports, I stuck with the sure things here, usually.

Casino tournaments are also a very lucrative casino opportunity.  In these, which are often partly skill-based games like blackjack but sometimes pure luck games like slots, you buy a certain amount of tournament chips (with no independent value), sort of like in a poker tournament, and it pays off in real money based on how many chips you win in the game play.  This can be winner-take-all or have a pyramid type payout structure with a big first prize and smaller prizes for second place and on.  Since most of the people playing these, other than maybe the blackjack players, are usually just recreational gamblers, it is possible to have an enormous advantage over the field.  

Progressive jackpots are also often a source of +EV bets.  Basically, on every bet on an otherwise losing game like a slot machine, the house takes a drop that then goes into a jackpot that increases in size over time.  So at literally no risk to the house, they get to offer a jackpot that when it gets huge creates a great deal of excitement.  Since these are usually on extremely unlikely events like poker bad beats or some goofy 5 of a kind on a slot machine, these are rarely exploitable by a single player with a normal size bankroll and require some kind of team play to make a regular practice of exploiting.  

Anyway, I've never found enough of these kind of opportunities to be a reliable source of income by itself, since other than bonuses, they're generally occasional events, but they can make a nice change of pace from poker from time to time.  

There are also, of course, rare occasions when a casino accidentally offers action that is favorable to the player.  Obviously, nobody is going to tell you about those if they know them.

I'm deleting my OP in this thread.  I'll just change what I said to being the previous thread is locked, but the subject is going to come up again and so there should be a thread about it.

Anyone actually found corporate records on this shit?  As far as I can tell, it doesn't even exist.  I haven't gone to much effort, though.

He was caught making a statement that turns out not to have much factual foundation.  (It may ultimately turn out to have been true, or at least partly true.)

I haven't seen any reason to believe he was deliberately lying.  Why would he?