There is. Plenty of people start threads with links to their own sites or services, and these are only deleted if they break another rule, which is kind of what I was trying to determine here: Is a link to a site which exists only to list referral links against the rules in and of itself. The consensus seems to be that no, linking to such a site does not break rule 4 which I quoted in the opening post.

However, linking to such a site in someone else's thread quite clearly breaks rule 22:

I'm going to report the relevant posts in others' threads and see what happens.

Let's be clear here: She didn't toy with bitcoin - she toyed with the Lightning Network, which is still in beta and still very much experimental, and not just using it, but setting up her own Lightning Node. Her first point was all about the difficulty she had setting up a Lightning Node. Could this be easier? Yes. Will it become easier in time? Also yes. Is it necessary for the average bitcoin user? Absolutely not.

Her second point is essentially it is not widespread enough yet to use all the time, and there are too many people who just hold it and never use it. I'll concede the second point,* but the first point is nonsense. It essentially boils down to "It'll never get big enough because it's currently not big enough".

Her last point is that customers had to give her shipping details when they paid in bitcoin, and so that requires trust. That's hardly a flaw with bitcoin, and customers can use single use addresses and mixers to maximize their privacy, or have it delivered to a Postal Box or other drop location if they don't want to give out their address.

I totally agree that there is work to be done to make things as easy as possible, but she's taken the hardest possible route (setting up her own Lightning Node), and then complained that it isn't straightforward, when she could simply have installed Electrum (for example) and displayed a QR code to her customers.

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*This is something I've talked about before. Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, and if we want it to become one then we need to use it like one. Just holding it and waiting for the price to increase does nothing for adoption. If you want to long term hold, that's fine, but next time you are buying consider buying a some extra to use as an actual currency in the meantime.

Most good VPN providers will have their own native app which you can install on Android. If not, then there are apps such as OpenVPN or WireGuard which will let you connect to any VPN service, and again, most good VPN providers will provide pre-made configuration files to use with these.

Firefox for mobile is just as powerful as their desktop version. You can still access the necessary privacy and security add-ons such as HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger, and you can also still access the about:config to apply necessary security/privacy tweaks.

Tor browser is obviously a good choice, but you can also use an app called Orbot, which will route all your internet traffic (from any browser or app) through the Tor network.

Yes, and I've noticed more than usual over the last week or so. I assume it's because staff have lives outside the forum and it's almost Christmas, as opposed to them discriminating against any particular user.

I have a report for barn door plagiarism that is sitting unhandled (and these always get dealt with in my experience), so I assume the mods are just busy and there's a bit of a backlog to work through.

I'm pretty sure that's BSV's core demographic.

The subject of the trolling is pretty much irrelevant. Being anti-BTC and pro-altcoin (even if that altcoin is a steaming pile of trash), isn't a reason to be banned. Indeed, if we banned everyone with a dissenting opinion, then what's the point of even having a forum in the first place. The trolling alone should be enough to warrant a ban, but given we have had to put up with cryptohunter/TOAA trolling the entire forum and derailing threads left, right, and center with walls of gibberish for over a year now, it seems that the "No trolling" rule is being firmly ignored.

Fair enough. Thanks for an answer.

I think that's my issue here, in that he is being disingenuous and dressing up his referral links as some sort of useful newbie guide. In contrast to LTU_btc above, who is completely up front that he is sharing a page full of faucet links, this user is stating he is sharing a "Guide for newbies" or a "Guide for the best altcoins to buy", when in actual fact, he is just sharing a list of referral links with some plagiarized text thrown in. He's also posting these links in other people's threads, which probably falls foul of the "Advertising in others' threads" rule.

So it would seem that starting his own threads with these links seems to be allowed, but we should be reporting his links in other people's threads?

Definitely not the case. The first two words which appear are series and again, but the clue they gave said the first two words should start with "u" and then "o".

I've narrowed it down to 26 words which I'm fairly confident are correct. None of the words are words which appear in the normal text they write over the video - they are all either hidden in the video or displayed in the graphics. I have two words for "p" - pact and pretty - and 2 words for "w" - word and welcome.

Given that there are 5 "s" words, 4 "t" words, 3 "a" words, plus the 2 above which I have duplicates for, I'm coming up with (5*4*3*2)*(4*3*2)*(3*2)*2*2 = 69,120 combinations. I still don't have a full node to run btcrecover on, but I'm going to write a little script to just check which combinations are valid seeds and then check the addresses manually.

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Edit: Before I started trying combinations, I thought I would check for more clues. Literally 1 minute after I made this post Ledger confirmed it has been claimed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/ebggok/dont_get_hacked_for_christmas_3_hacks_and_one/fbnvd90/. Lol.

They haven't released the winning seed yet. Here are ones I came up with, be curious to see if I was on the right track:

again
aware
accident
coffee
design
eyebrow
guide
hockey
jacket
leader
maid
offer
pact/pretty
salad
series
short
slab
stumble
theory
trumpet
toddler
tackle
unveil
welcome/word

A signature is not within the post area. This rule is saying you can't manually append a signature to the bottom of your posts within the post area, as one might to bypass signature bans or display signatures above their rank allowance.

He also isn't advertising a service, just linking to referral links.

Anyway, back on topic please. I would be keen to hear from a mod regarding my initial post.

I never mentioned a ban, but the posts are purely designed to lead people to his referral links, so should be trashed in my opinion.

Trust feedback, even if neutral, is not appropriate. This has nothing to do with the trust system, unless their evidence he is linking to malware or phishing sites. All I've seen are referral links.

Yes there are worse signature spammers, and I report them too. Doesn't mean this guy should get a free pass just because he's not the worst.

Quick question for any mods or users who have reported this kind of thing before.

We all know that referral link spam is against the rules:

My question relates to users who post links to third party pages or sites which are solely designed to lead people to clicking on referral links. The most recent user I've seen doing this is gocryptowise, but he certainly isn't unique in this behavior. He's started multiple topics in the last few days, and made many more posts, containing links to various pages on his site which shares his name (I will not link to it here, but you can review his post history if you are interested).

The pages he links to are disguised as a variety of "helpful" guides for newbies - "How to make money from cryptocurrency", "Best cryptocurrencies to invest in", "Beginner's guide to crypto", that kind of thing. Every single page contains link after link to sign up to various exchanges using his referral code, or buy hardware wallets using his referral code, or buy some tax software using his referral code, and so on. It's also worth noting that large parts of many of the articles seem to be plagiarized.

Even ignoring the plagiarism since it is off-site, to me linking to a page entirely designed to get people to click on your referral links is no better than just posting the referral links themselves, and these posts should be trashed. Am I accurate in my thinking here?

Ach, succès de scandale, or there's no such thing as bad publicity, as the old saying goes. It's the same as we see with every single ICO/token that's launched on here; a thread full of sockpuppets isn't appealing to any serious user, but it will drum up interest among the idiots. Same thing with the Cryptotalk campaign; their endless spam just annoys serious users, but might pique the interest of newbies.

I'm sure CSW is fully aware that trying to change the opinion of established bitcoin users is pointless - no one wants to touch his shitcoin. Brand new users though who don't understand the difference? They are prime material for being duped in to buying some bags. Ver has been preying on uninformed newbies for years, maybe CSW wants some of that action too.

Haha, I'm in the exact same situation with multiple words for the exact same letters. I would be using https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover on them right now, except I'm away from home on my laptop and therefore don't have access to a full node (and obviously we don't know the master public key or address.)

I wondered if maybe there was a clue in the video to the order of the words? I though maybe the time stamps on the camera feeds, or the random coding that shows up in the background, but I've not found anything useful yet.

Might just have to wait for them to release another clue.

We can already send bitcoin using email and email alone.

If I know your email, but nothing else, then I can simply use SIGHASH_NONE to sign an input and send it to you, allowing you to choose the output and then broadcast the transaction. I could also create a brand new wallet, fund it with however much bitcoin I want to send you, and then email you the seed phrase or private key with the instructions "Please sweep this to your own address".

This however is none of that. It sounds very much like you are only able to send bitcoin to an email address which is linked to a Coinbase account. It's essentially exact the same as Binance's "internal transfer" system that they launched a few weeks ago.

All meaningless. Even if you come up with a system which will 100% prevent bots from playing (which is not possible), I could simply open a second window or even set up a second machine out of shot of the video, copy all my opponent's moves against a computer program, and then simply mirror the move the computer makes against my real opponent.

According to their twitter, it still hasn't been claimed as of 2 hours ago.

There's a further clue here: https://www.ledger.com/christmas-campaign-easter-egg



I've watched the video a couple of times, and between all the text which is clearly displayed plus the "hidden" words, I've ended up with over 60 valid BPIP words. Even using their guide, I'm currently coming in at over 18 billion possible permutations. Anyone else working on it?

This looks terrible.

More centralization, more loss of privacy, more risk, and more letting Coinbase hold your coins for you - this is everything that bitcoin is against. Emails are poorly secure and people use terrible passwords.

This is also no different to how an exchange works or how "free transfers" between different users of the same web wallet platform work. All they are doing is updating an internal ledger as they move bitcoin around between email accounts. You still need to pay a withdrawal fee and wait for the usual confirmations if you want to actual take your bitcoin out of their system and use it for anything. No doubt it will be subject to the same ridiculous KYC, and also exposed to all the risks of letting someone else own your coins.

Checkers is a solved game. A computer playing perfectly knows every possible outcome of every possible board permutation and every possible move, and so therefore will never lose. Two computers playing perfectly against each other will draw every time, but a perfect computer will almost always win against a human.

There is nothing you can do prevent cheaters online. Online chess sites are riddled with them. Introduce a monetary component, and your site will quickly become overrun with them.

It looks like you've put a good amount of work in to this project, and I'm always happy to see original ideas for incorporating bitcoin in to various sites and services, but unfortunately I don't think this is sustainable. As mentioned above, there is a reason that fiat gambling sites don't offer games like this.

That bonus also caught my eye, so I looked in to it a bit more. Not quite as good as it seems on first glance.



Their rake is between 1-5% depending on the stakes: https://www.americascardroom.eu/play-poker-for-real-money/rake/

So to earn $1 bonus you need to generate 27.5 Award Points, which is achieved by generating $5 in rake. At a rate of 5%, this means spending $100 in pots, or at 1% means spending $500. That's a lot to gamble with to earn a single dollar. So if you deposited $500 to get the full $1000 bonus, you would need to wager somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000 to "release" the full bonus. And you only have 60 days to do it.

An eye-catching headline for sure, but you will only see a tiny fraction of it once you read the small print.

That graph is incorrect.

The most recent stale block* was at height 599587, on 16th October this year. It had the hash 00000000000000000012e55a5c5b0464ceab40b29af6cacb4b02ef6cc009a4b4, and was replaced by another block with hash 00000000000000000008fc27ad8c46149aa12bb12866fde846c93365591314f7 mined 15 seconds later. A stale block occurs every couple of months on average (but like the bitcoin block time, the actual timing varies significantly from the "average".)

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*Orphaned block is a misnomer. An orphaned block, as the name suggests, would have no parent. These were blocks which a node received but was unable to verify because it had not yet received the previous (parent) blocks. These haven't existed for years since Bitcoin Core was changed to download block headers first. A stale block is what we are actually talking about here - a block whose parent was known, and was once part of the main chain, but has since been replaced by another block at the same height, and is therefore now inactive or "stale".

There are plenty of options for trading peer to peer. As OmegaStarScream has mentioned, there is the Currency Exchange board on this forum you can use to trade directly with other members (pay attention to their trust ratings and use an escrow if in doubt). Decentralized exchanges are another option, such as BISQ or Hodl Hodl. Ideally you can use one of these platforms to find a regular buyer in your country who will buy your bitcoin repeatedly from you in cash, bank transfer, or similar. Local bitcoin meetups are also a good place to find regular buyers. See if there is a low fees bitcoin ATM near your location which doesn't require KYC.

Alternatively, rather than trade it for cash, you can use a site like Bitrefill or Coinsbee to trade it for gift cards for your regular stores or prepaid Visa/MasterCards which you can use in lieu of cash.