I guess it'll end with an equilibrium, some miners will probably drop off leaving more blocks for the ones that stick around, some people will stop using bitcoin due to the fees that are to high for their taste.

That being said: don't underestimate the merchant's fees for paypal, credit cards, wire transfers,... I've setup a webshop for somebody i know from the forum, and i was unpleasantly supprised by the fees these companies charge the merchant. And in the end, the merchant passes on these costs to their customer. So even if it looks like paying by paypal or bankcontact is free, in reality the products you buy are more expensive because the merchant accepts paypal/cc/bcc/cheques/...

In contrast, in the bitcoin ecosphere, the buyer pays the fee... But in theory the merchant could make his products cheaper if you pay using bitcoin. The shop i setup gives 5% discount for bitcoin payments because of this.

Well... I'm not looking for new rules per se... I'm just polling if there's community consensus on how to respond to such threads.

The thing is: we're batteling scammers and spammers and account farmers, but if we only focus on the accounts themselfs, we're doing nothing about their influx. But if we stop these people from ranking up, they'll never be able to wear a signature, sell their accounts, have less time between posts, have a rank that makes them more trustworthy in the eyes of their victims.

I'm not looking for a ban on merit giveaways, i'm defenatly not looking at attacking giveaway thread starters in any way... I'm looking at some community vetted ground rules, some guidelines on how to proceed if you want to give away your merits.

@Casdinyard: well, actually i'm trying to have a broader discussion... I merely listed the thread as an example, but i'd rather see if there is a community consensus on where to draw the line next time there's a giveaway.

Sure, this specific case has been sorted. IMHO there wasn't even a need for the OP of said thread to apologise... But what are we, as a community, going to do the next time a thread similar to this one pops up? Are we going to tell the thread starter his actions are frowned upon, are we going to ignore him, are we going to encourage him???

I hadn't seen that post (yet), and it does show how Theymos looks at the "issue".
That being said, I do think there's a big difference between reviewer threads and thread that give away merits for completing menial tasks.

Personally, i think even reviewer threads are a grey area... I feel like they increase the odds of ranking up for shitposters that made only a handfull of usefull posts in a sea of "garbage".


I actually PM'd the OP of said thread... And i'm 100% sure he had the best intentions and just didn't think his giveaway trough completely (something we all do from time to time). I was listing his thread as an example tough

I'm writing this topic after responding in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5276103

The OP of this thread is giving away merit to newbies that promise to abide by the forum rules and copy/paste their favorite rule in said thread. I can only imagine it takes a newbie less than 30 seconds to rank up this way, 0 effort needed. I quickly noticed two of the recipients were on my ignorelist. These 2 ignored members have now ranked up, and can add a signature and have more lenient posting restrictions in general.

This means they now have an opportunity to partake in sigspamming, or they can now make money by selling the ranked-up account. Neither of these options is very appealing to me.

People that know me a little bit probably know i'm not a big fan of ignoring people. I always try to stay friendly and helpfull. I don't ignore people all that often. I value opinions and try to stay away from drama as much as possible (sure, we're on bitcointalk... 100% drama avoidance is very, very, very hard... If not, impossible). As a matter of fact, i basically have to notice a certain username multiple times when they're actively posting crap before i'm tempted to read their post history. And only if their posthistory shows they continuously post utter garbage they'll end up on my ignorelist. Just to say that today, 2 crapposters got ranked up...

This topic is NOT pointed towards the OP in the linked thread, but merely to discuss the general stance of other members towards merit giveaways. AFAIK, the OP in above thread is trying to do some good for newbies, and others have done merit giveaways long before he started his thread.

I think there's a fine line between merit giveaways that are beneficial, and merit giveaways that are toxic.

I've seen OgNasty give away merit to people that have mastered the technical details of signing a message. I've seen people that allow newbies to highlight merit-worthy posts... I think these forms of merit-giveaway are fine, since they at least require a minimum amount of effort of the participant.
But on the other hand, any giveaway that can be claimed with less than 15 minutes of work might do more harm than good (IMHO).

I'm sure we'll see a lot of different opinions on this subject tough

I wonder if you're putting the bar for ranking up a bit to low with this topic... . I mean, the merit system was designed to make sure spamming newbies and account farmers wouldn't be able to rank up. This way they cannot add a signature nor sell the accounts they farmed, so they'd have less incentive to shitpost and drown the forum with useless crap.

You're ranking up newbies by simply letting them promise they'll follow the rules and copy/paste a line from the rules...
As a matter of fact, 2 of the newbies you just ranked up were on my ignore list... A list to which i add people that blurt out pure garbage multiple times. I never add somebody because they're making unsubstantial posts once, I only add them after I see them repeating such behaviour multiple times.

Don't get me wrong, i'm just wondering if this is the right way to do this... I'm afraid you're giving spammers and account farmers a loophole, but it's fine if you think otherwise.

I don't have an issue with you, but i'll probably make a topic in meta to discuss all kind of merit-giveaway topics in general. This way we'll avoid having this discussion here (and derail your thread).

I guess it would depend on wether this is a one-time thing, or if you're going to pay 200 unique addresses every couple of days/weeks/months.

In the first case, i'd probably follow the advice that was given and use electrum... You can prepare the 200 addresses in a text editor and paste them into electrum pay to many gui window in batches.

In the second case (you have to repeat this task every couple of days/weeks/months) it might be usefull if you'd add some automation... I'm thinking about using an app that scans the qr code and posts it to a script that captures the addresses in a db or an ascii file.
Then i'd be thinking about a second script that uses electrum's commandline, or bitcoin core's bitcoin-cli to create a transaction funding more and more addresses. Each loop would add one extra address to the transaction, sign the transaction, look at it's size => if it's < 100 kb, add one more, if it's > 100 kb broadcast the previous tx and start creating a new one.
This workflow would cut down your processing time to a minimum and save as much fees as humanly possible... You'd basically have to scan the 200 qr codes with your mobile, open the terminal, unlock your wallet, run 1 script... And finished... But building this workflow would be time-consuming.

Well, that's simply not how collateral works. Collateral is meant to cover the complete loan + intrest in case you default.
You cannot get a 0.52 BTC loan with a 0.00044 BTC collateral.

Try to imagine an IRL situation.... You're walking around on the street in a city where you know litterally nobody. You grab a stranger's arm and ask him for $5600 with only a promise you'll pay him back. When the stranger refuses, you tell him you'll give him $5 as a security deposit if he gives you $5600. If you run away (which you probably will), the lender can keep the $5 and he's only scammed for $5595?

IIRC, the keepkey wallet is tightly integrated with shapeshift. If you don't have enough funds to buy a nano X, why don't you buy a nano S or a trezor one?

here's a review from a user i actually trust:
https://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167988.0

I'm assuming you use windows.

By default, Bitcoin core is going to open the file wallet.dat in the default data directory. You don't need to do anything special, you don't need to use a menu. The only thing you have to do is open windows explorer, browse to said data directory and make sure the file called wallet.dat in said data directory is the wallet you want to open. AFTERWARDS, start bitcoin's gui

so, basically

open the directory described here:
https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Data_directory#Default_Location
using windows explorer.

Find the file wallet.dat, rename it to wallet.dat.old

Copy your wallet.dat (the one containing the private keys for the funded addresses) to said directory

open bitcoin's gui

wait...

you don't actually need to wait untill the synchronisation is completed... You can export your keys straight away and import them (in bulk) to (for example) electrum

if something goes wrong, you can find the file debug.log in the default data directoy... You can upload it and show it to us, it doesn't contain data that makes you vulnerable to attack (altough it can contain data that decreases your privacy)

Well, Cloudflare is easy... It's basically a plug-and-play WAF, DDos protection, CDN, zone management, SSL certificate provider, registrar, stats provider (and much more) rolled into one.

It takes 10 minutes to setup a domain, and if you're WILLING to ignore the fact that they decrypt every piece of data that passes trough their service and cache said data, they're "ok".

If you're running a mom-and-pop shop, or a forum (like bitcointalk) or a blog discussing your love for cats, it's actually a pretty good idear to use cloudflare. It would take a ton of knowledge, time and money to setup all services yourself, services that cloudflare offers on a professional level for free. As a matter of fact, it would be allmost impossible for one person to have the level of knowledge to set everything up on a level cloudflare provides with the click of a button.

That being said, as soon as you're offering a service for which is isn't ok if a us-based company has access to every packet, you shouldn't use cloudflare. If you're a mixer, a gun shop, a political website, a p*rn site, and you use cloudflare, i would advise everybody against visiting your site... If you run such a service, you're basically stuck with building the same features cloudflare offers by yourself.

Sorry... I wasn't planning on derailing your thread... I just tought it was pertinent information for the people reading your press release
I guess a thread about this matter might fit in the service discussion, altough, to tell you the truth, it's a bit of a grey area and i'm not 100% sure where to put such a thread...

By the way: after the discussion about the extra thread has been finished, don't hesitate to PM me if you want me to remove my posts in this thread to keep it clean... I don't mind cleaning up my posts if they are derailing the idear behind your original post

I find it kind of hard to understand what you're saying here... "A wallet.dat file, which is not marked in Open Wallet".

I don't really use bitcoin qt (the gui application). I usually stick with bitcoind, but if memory serves me correct, there is no menu to open wallets in the gui (like i said, i haven't opened the gui in a long time).
If you run a "default" installation, you just have to make sure you put the wallet.dat you want to open in the default data directory of your operating system and start the gui.... That's all...


The default directory: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Data_directory#Default_Location

BTW... If there  is already an existing wallet.dat, it's wise not to overwrite the existing wallet.dat, but rename the existing wallet.dat before you place the wallet you want to open in the directory... Never delete wallet.dat's, rename them (and make backups on a safe medium)

There are ways to open the gui using a different wallet file, or a different default data directory, but i'd rather not point you into that direction, since it'll only lead to confusion.

No,
you can export your private keys from your wallet without downloading the complete blockchain.
 
If you want to keep on using bitcoin core, you'll have to re-download complete blockchain, since you seem to be running a pruned node.
If you decide to move to an SPV wallet (like electrum), you can export the private keys without downloading the complete blockchain, import them into the SPV wallet and ONLY download the block headers (<100 Mb last time i checked).

Just to make this clear from the very beginning: this user is not my alt, I have no clue as to why he tried to join using my username.

Just read the link I posted above.

If that's tl;dr:

• yes, it matters for privacy-centric services
• no, they are not safe
• yes, cloudflare can log the deposit address and the address you want the mixed funds to end up in, rendering the complete process useless
• yes, cloudflare stores data... That's basically it's primary function

If you want an in depth explanation, just follow the link in my first post, I could explain further, but I'd just be repeating myself

Edit: I just noticed the link wasn't put properly:
https://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5247838

nah, you're probably right...I had a hectic day so far, filled with discussions about a huge database scheme and i'm left with most of my ability to concentrate gone. To this point, i'm still unable to get my head wrapped around the method used to solve this problem...  This evening, when i'm back to normal, i'll probably either completely agree with what you said, or i'll disagree (altough those odds are small).

My train of thought was pretty simple: there's a 2% difference in hashrate, so if the attacker generates 100 blocks, the honest miner creates 98. If the attacker creates 4464, the honest miner creates 4464 - (4464*0.02).

The conclusion still remains the same tough: if you want to roll back a longer time of historic blocks, the time you'll need is a lot more than just the time you need to mine said blocks, since the honest miners will keep adding new blocks on top. If you decide to do a roll back of future blocks to the state at this point in time, this isn't the case.

3 - mocacinno

Thanks 

I wouldn't touch any mixer that uses a cloudflare ssl cert with a 100 foot pole



Why? => bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5247838

I removed chipmixer from the quote since i wear their signature, and i wanted to avoid the discussion about impartiality.

The fact that you created a post doesn't annoy me... What does annoy me:

• After reading your posts (up untill now), it was very hard to tell if you have been scammed or if you tried to sell a service
• You posted in the wrong subforum. People that try to analyse scams do not frequent this subforum, they frequent the "scam accusations" subforum
• You didn't follow the scam accusation format
• You didn't link to the profile of the scammer
• You broke the forum rules by bumping your topic more than once per day

I feel sorry for you if you got scammed. But this isn't the way to warn people. If you want to warn people, move this topic to the scam accusation subforum, follow the proper scam accusation format and stop bumping your thread >1/day.
If you follow these guidelines, you'll have a far bigger impact than you have right now.