Interesting to see Fidor finally offering their website in English!
Is the partnership with Kraken for instant withdrawal still a thing?

This would be more noteworthy if the research was coming from a hedge fund or someone more averse to finance in some way.
But a company offering services online trying to ring the bell about inflation isn't gonna cut it for me...

Currency competition among FIAT money would have existed either way, with bitcoin or not. Even right now, with a global crisis situation affecting the entire world and its economy, not all central banks follow the same strategies. In the U.S., USD lost some value as the government went way over budget with the FED essentially agreeing to print money and follow along. However, USD has mostly been losing value against EUR, with the ECB following an arguably much less aggressive strategy to protect Euro members from Coronavirus' effects.

It's good that an influential person in a company got enlightened towards BTC, but I don't see this as a trend to be honest.
Being a cash reserve for companies in my honest view isn't where BTC's peak utility can be drawn from.
Fintech in Europe for instance already has much better solutions that companies can utilize. Any company can put its cash in interest accounts all across the continent with a simple app, and utilize a much more rewarding no-risk investment this way. In theory, the U.S. could follow suit in that by loosening regulation on monetary transfers and by providing tools for banks to make wire transfers to certain countries abroad more frictionless. Bitcoin on the other hand, with all of its volatility, would put whatever company holds it in much more risk than inflation for USD ever had. This problem is already being handled to an extent by utilizing non-bank payment solutions. But I still think it's more likely that in the future we'll see more companies demanding better banking in the U.S. other than adopting BTC to hold.

It should be noted that absence of regulation doesn't mean that there won't be any taxation.
Absence of specific law only leaves things up to interpretation and a decision on a court could have chilling effects on those that had past profits from cryptocurrency even.
The countries where regulators have made it clear as day that there won't be any taxation are obviously far better off, but sadly not many such cases exist globally.

This type of control over gambling sites is going to bring the barrier of entry higher and reduce the drive for cutting edge innovation. Those established as a top site and in good terms with the government, will have incentive to keep funding the government to keep their position. And the main incentive of top casinos would rather be to sabotage competitors other than innovate to attract more gamblers.

Over regulation will just create further drive for a black market. This is part of the reason gambling with crypto became so big. It's so easy to circumvent blocks that nowadays all skilled gamblers are doing it. Casinos would have to increase revenues in less creative ways like increasing house edge. Governments are probably unaware that these measures are probably going to give more gamblers a worse deal when gambling.

412,420,696

Found another new account quoting game-protect today:
The Curacao licence situation might be the only piece of information with substance that game-protect had to bring to the table.
It might be suspicious to have someone posting game-protect.com here on bitcointalk, because if it's the original game-protect doing it then its ban evasion.
But so long as there's no other evidence I'm on the edge as to whether this would be actionable or not. Maybe we should wait and see if people posting the site start being annoying again.

First thing I saw when visiting their website was a request to comply with KYC... This casino has very little online presence so it's hard to trust someone asking for your full name and address while not even proving they're registered as a company. Nowhere in their landing page did I see any company registration information or anything as such. Even their domain was registered very recently and is under the name of some obscure privacy provider: https://who.is/whois/leonmonaco.com

I wouldn't trust this casino unless they did more to work with the community at first.

If we find a way to detect spun replies then I think there's no need for a separate thread for reporting.
The original spammer wall of shame thread has (thankfully) slowed down since the days of ICO spamming and could easily fit reports over article spinnign as well.

I did find some paper that has a web-demo on detection of machine generated text, but from what I see it just won't load with user-inserted examples: https://gltr.io/dist/index.html

But it's open source so with some tinkering a self-hosted version could be optimized for bitcointalk.

Sounds like too much work though. I don't know if a spammer's half arsed efforts are worth that much effort for proving that they're actually using machine generated text. Gut feeling might also be enough. And to be honest, the replies you've quoted clearly make no sense.

That's not very surprising to be honest. Many big headsin the crypto sphere had joined projects only to have their name there.
Perhaps after the project was funded and they got their share, then they would simply disappear. Not that their involvement was anything more other than branding anyway.

It's a big reason why ICOs shouldn't be trusted, especially not over the names that seem to be 'involved'.

Before the pandemic, things were looking great for the economy. No major economic crisis after 2008, stock markets at an all time high, wages stable or rising (although not nearly enough), low long term unemployment... All these serious indicators were looking great. But as many economists had predicted, economic crises are coming under a seasonality. Be it man made, or coming from a distastes. Disasters, pandemics and all things of consequence that are out of our control, also have their seasonality. So there's no chance in the world that we're going to have a stellar economy running on its own perpetually.

As much as anarcho-capitalists like to deny it, the recovery from crises in the financial system can't be fast tracked without some level of central organization. The things an individual can do to be less affected by economic crises would look petty in front of how much assistance a state mechanism could provide towards recovery. So long as we're living in an economy with FIAT money, the state will be needed to help the economy recover.

On the individual level, you can't really do much. Yuu can reduce your exposure to systemic financial instruments, but then you're severely limiting your potential to invest. Bitcoin is one alternative, gold too. But these assets don't have the same potential for growth during times of relative stability.

And another thing is, that crises can come from different things. It could be bad handling of debt in one country (see Greece), perhaps bad monetary policy in a union (see E.U. post 2008), bad moves from the banking system (housing crisis) or even from something like a virus like now... There's no universal solution. For example, the next thing to affect the economy could be climate crisis, from which we have no idea how to adjust the economy. 

I had a brief chat with the telegram account that was mentioned in OP and I'm a bit sad to report that the person I talked to seemed very eager to promote a purely on commission position and didn't have much to offer when I asked for even the potential of offering a base salary...

This is a common theme in crypto. Create a "job listing" and whoever answers gets lured in to working hours over promises that they'll make solid commissions.
Projects that can't even offer minimum wage for hours people spend working for them don't seem to have very solid foundations. Because they're basically after free work to get them customers they otherwise were unable to get on their own...

In my personal view I'd recommend to everyone to avoid applying to breezecoin.io for work. At least unless they make a commitment at the very least pay a minimum base salary.
So far breezecoin.io only has the outlook of a badly constructed scam instead of a job opportunity.

Have there been any documented cases where users have reported of their funds being held? Excessive KYC is one thing but for it to be a scam the contract between them and customers needs to be broken in some way or another.

I know that bitcoin.com wrote an article on it, but also keep in mind that they have a vested interest in selling people bCash for bitcoin and are biased. Therein lies a conflict of interest so let's not take take news against other exchanges from them.

Many of these matters seem to have been extensively discussed in the Russian community. A supposed rep of the exchange already got feedback on his profile from what it seems: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=88761

Why aren't the accusers organizing themselves to see if there's any person that was harmed from the exhcnage's actions? It'd be much easier if the accusations were documented by the harmed party here.
Also, don't assume that everyone can look into Russian discussion topics and draw conclusions. Provide some context at least.

I would say to each their own. Every person can have different want and needs with money. There are many people who reside in countries with huge inflation, so holding crypto to use as money actually makes more sense in these occasions. And moreover, not everyone lives in financial stability enough to be able to put significant amounts of money in crypto without any intention to spend anything.

Bitcoin is neutral anyway so it won't judge people by usage. Every user is free to use the coin as they'd like without restrictions.

You probably can't use the wallet to transact because it's out of date and not synced. You need to have the entirety of the blockchain stored so you can transact with bitcoin core. Syncing the blockchain is a process that could take quite some time at first. Depending on your internet connection speed, CPU speed and storage drive speed also.

I would recommend you try and install an updated bitcoin core in a secure computer, import wallet.dat, and export the private keys. Then you could import the keys to a wallet that doesn't require sncing like Electrum.

Always make sure that your computer is secure and that you're visiting the official sites to download executables from. 

The wixiplaysupport account hasn't been on since Aug 11. And also the supposed admin account hasn't been on since that day too. Admin's last post on the forum was a failed auction to actually sell the site(!) so we probably won't be seeing much more of that anytime soon. They say the site won't close down, but with so many accousations against them, I don't see it having a serious future either.

I think it would be super useful if we could see which posts/replies of a user profile have been deleted by having it highlighted on the user page also...
It can be done for a post, so maybe in a similar fashion also for a profile. Perhaps on a per-request basis to reduce load by extra scraping/maching.

Thanks.

One of the last songs known I'd expect to hear on the bitocintalk forum was the internationale. A great example of how BTC doesn't discriminate against who uses it or for what. Users might, though.

To add to the topic's discussion, I think that more social programs are a one way road for America.
The government is already creating inflation to support its citizens from dying during the pandemic. And paying very expensive sums too, because for profit hospitals are, of course, looking to maximize profits instead of save as many lives as possible.

It makes the most sense to have a centrally governed system for health and medicine. You have huge bargaining power and you leverage that to everyone's advantage. A socialized healthcare program (not mixed, fully government-controlled) would give everyone the most for the least amount of money. It's an economy of scale after all.

This is proven by countless studies. Even the least economically advantaged countries in EU for example, have the same level of service for health as in the US. Same queue times, same survival rates, same quality... But pay maybe 1/10th of the government+private cost for health. And in many cases maybe far less than 1/10th for things like medicine or operations.

Removing profit out of the equation for basic things like health, medicine and water is important for America to move forward. It'll be done, but probably not after the following election. As presidential candidates from the big parties are either establishment politicians that don't want to disrupt the system, or against the very essence of the idea of social programs.

This is exactly true. Coinbase has a crazy long confirmation requirement for ETC incoming transactions. Last year when I checked it was over 3500 blocks. Which is almost 20 hours based on Ethereum target block time of 20 seconds. This is a good protection against rewrites but after the latest incident exchanges and services might consider raising it even more if they want to keep ETC included.

Funnily enough, in spite of how inconvenient it is to transact with ETC securely, the price hasn't gone through any massive drops.

It'd make very little sense to do this in ethereum. Huge fees and you can't fit many addresses to send coins to in one transaction. It's also quite hard, as it would require writing a contract specific for the token.
If anything, it might be an attempt to test dust attacks against the exchange.

I'd be interested to see OP's transaction hash if he wants to share it. If there are many outputs grouped together on Ethereum then the whoever is doing this must be dedicated. Not sure about the purpose. It'd be easy for Binance to save itself from troubles with implementing simple measures if this is an attack however.

Maybe some of these things are true or at least partly, probably they aren't. If there's an investigation let it come out before speculating.

In my view, a good journalist wouldn't leak information about their investigation. Probably not even say they're investigating such matter.
But even if it was known, an investigation doesn't imply certainty on any of the claims. With no proof, I don't think there's a point for theymos to respond. It'd just lend credibility to the accusations, which are unfounded in the first place.