This works well for phone numbers. Much like there's yellow pages, several websites exists in every country to track scammer or annoying phone numbers.
It makes more sense in that setting because phone numbers are more scarce and not free to get.
With bitcoin addresses, there's an astronomical number of them and it costs nothing to generate millions of them. Any scammer following even the most basic guidelines to stay anonymous would know this and never use the same address twice.

Hardware wallets are fine but make sure the one you pick is (at least mostly) open source and hasn't had any vulns in the update you're running.

As of Google Auth...
The app Google has isn't the best. First of all it keeps no backups and has no password to get inside it. I would recommend you try and download an open-source equivalent from the FOSS android marketplace, "f-droid".  Go there and download andOTP. It makes it easy for you to migrate to a new device without having to go to every service to change 2fa, and also has a password to enter.

The latest feature is especially important because android OS password are especially focused on and oftentimes there are discovered ways to bypass them or crack them. So you shouldn't rely on that measure alone if your phone gets stolen.

Extradition? Probably not... India is a bit of the same under a similar premise. Online scams are tolerated by police because they bring in revenue to the country and employ many people. So long as they don't target locals nobody bothers.

But if it's codified into law that digital goods aren't property and therefore their repossession doesn't count as theft, then your country's own citizens are to suffer as well. I doubt any country would be willing to take such risk. Unless of course Russia has an agreement with all e-criminals under the table so they're free to target foreigners but not the country's nationals. Makes you wonder about Russia.

Free to listen on bandcamp. Enjoy:
https://dungeonmasterllc.bandcamp.com/releases


It's quite odd but very unique. It parodies blockchain related buzzwords and crypto-jargon. Sounds like a presentation to an altcoin or blockchain solution, but has a kickass metal track playing in the backround.
Obviously whoever made this has a good knowledge on crypto but didn't want to take themselves too seriously either. Too bad bandcamp doesn't take bitcoin.

This is one of the weirdest threads I've seen. Cockfights used to be a thing when the world didn't have standards.

Maybe they're still a thing in some countries but I doubt they're widely accepted. Owning animals as pets now is a much more widespread practice as the world's living standards have increased. many people have developed adoration for animals and even if it's now legal, the controversy around cockfights would make it near impossible to start a business around it.

It's really weird to see such thread in the bitcoin forum too. I guess some twisted mind might be thinking bitcoin is fitting to cockfights? If you really felt the need to modernize payments over gambling for a cockfighting ring, I guess you could just introduce bitcoin to it against cash. But really I don't see any benefit in that. This type of fight is only ran by underground rings and bettors do it in person. The reason is that if would be easy to fix otherwise. Roosters don't have an established record or reputation. They have no reasonable incentive in winning as a human would for say, money rewards.

The animals are thrown in the pit by humans and also agitated by the ringleaders. The match could be fixed in ways a person watching from home couldn't even notice. And for all we know the roosters probably ruined in a very inhumane way after a fight. So bitcoin would probably introduce no benefits to such transactions. In theory it could allow gambling from home over an illegal or underground ring. But nobody would want to do that I guess.

The operation would still have to remain underground and it would just overly complicate things over what would be a tiny crowd interested to bet on this obscure thing anyway. Who would go over the trouble of going in the dark web just so the can bet on cockfights from home for example? It's just peculiar to even think of.

TL;DR bad idea. Please don't do cockfights. If you do it anyway, I see no benefit in using BTC.

I used to visit this website regularly. They were among the top ICO websites at the height of the industry boom. Many sites had cashed in on the trend of listings fast...
To be fair ICObench had its fair bit of accusations. Potential fake reviews, heavy criticism on who they approved as reviewers and they likely turned a blind eye to paid reviewers too.

Now that the ICO boom is over by all means, they are likely figuring out how they could re-optimize their business. Probably there weren't many avenues to continue operation after business dropped and revenues couldn't sustain their costs. Likely they fired the few employees they had and the owners milk on the some income for the ads. Maybe after the pandemic it could make a comeback as a different business. Or maybe not. The owners maybe because rich and didn't care to upkeep the business anymore.

With less money generally flowing around, I think that people's propensity to spend anything, let alone BTC, would be decreased.

First of all, people are becoming unemployed and the economy doesn't appear to be recovering even in countries with very small numbers of cases. Businesses tried to re-open, only to find out they couldn't cover costs. Many large enterprises are waiting for state-sponsored bail-outs or their financial doom.

BTC is largely considered a means to save money, especially robust in a financial crisis as it is disconnected from the system. Given that the situation with the virus has still not been assessed, it's important not to be overly optimistic over anything. Travel though, is one of the industries that was hit the most. This industry is responsible for a big part of the current unemployment wave. Maybe due to reduced cash flowing around, some  people would be looking to liquidate some BTC to satisfy lower needs if they don't have other cash flowing around for them.

But sure as hell I couldn't see a trend around spending BTC for travel at the time of the pandemic. Those able in financial terms and healthy enough in terms of age, would have other forms of income to spend first for sure if they wanted to travel.

The source seems to be a Telegram post?
https://t.me/SPbGS/5607

Linked in this cointelegraph post.

Seems poorly sourced anyway as no other news outlets outside of the space picked up the news from what it seems.
If true however, it's surely a weird development. It's likely to have originated from a court's inability to understand the precedent they might be setting. By that logic, digital assets, services and anything digital that could be sold for value also shouldn't be considered property. How about every Russian starts stealing iTunes gift card codes or bank card numbers and then cite case law to claim that it wasn't theft? Hopefully such convictions will be overturned.

There are quite a few solutions that allow merchants to liquidate BTC on the go.
If a merchant doesn't want to carry the risk of holding bitcoin, it's quite easy. It could even be done without specific checkout software and/or proprietary solutions/platforms.
Just use an exchange, start a trade, and fill it with the set amount that it asks for. If the fee is also sufficient, the merchant carries little risk. Because supposedly the price could change during the time the transaction takes to be completed. BitPay outweighs these risks by demanding a certain fee to accept transactions and also asking for a BTC/FIAT rate a little above current rates.

Many people are interested to know more about bitcoin but we as users will have to acknowledge that the risk associated with holding BTC is also not for everyone.
I don't quite get the point in the OP though...
If gold was accessible to more people it would lose value? Pretty much no. That's plain wrong. If demand goes up and the supply remains limited (which is guaranteed to be the case with BTC), then the value is only bound to go up.

People having more access to the internet, even in poorer countries, means that more people will need access to value transfer services. It'll be interesting to see people in developing countries leapfrog ever opening a bank account in favor of innovative alternatives like bitcoin.

OP, I would suggest you break the links in your original posts's body so it wouldn't be clickable. Otherwise it acts as kind of a backlink for the website that's probably a scam which helps the page rank among other search results. Of course the opposite is desired. Mention the name as much as you want but linking to it brings the result upwards with related keywords (for example gambling).

So just simply do not link (in other words, no clickable URL) when you are reporting a scam. The URL as plain text and the name of the website is fine.

I'm pretty sure the big money likes to play on big exchanges and don't mind regulation. DEXs still have decent volumes and those can only keep increasing as BTC markets also keep growing.
However, so long as an exchange doesn't care or doesn't bother to comply with regulatory standards, then it's unlikely that institutional investors and money from big companies will reach them. Moreover, unless DEXs find a way to connect FIAT with BTC more directly, OP's theory of large volumes just seems more unlikely.

Truly faucets aren't worth anyone's time. At least nobody's time in the western world. And for those in other countries, the ads don't pay the website owner most of the time for such territories so they are probably blocked from accessing the site. The coins are neither free nor worth it. In the vast majority of cases it would be more worth it to try and develop a skill, learn something or simply have fun... I could see more value being derived in even playing a game. Enjoying yourself can make you productive in real work...

These faucets continue to lure in new users by claiming their are giving "free coins" but the word used should be the least of anybody's concerns. Such activities are just never are a good time investment.

I think that the gist of investing in a gambling site can be that you are paid based on its success as the house. If they have a good year, you could see greater returns even in a shorter period of time too. Also good that they gmhave no commitment to keep your money locked to reap the benefits of it.

This surely is a useful site. But odds comparisons are mostly paying off in the long term.

It takes effort to create accounts and keep them funded. The benefits of course show when you are making larger bets rather than doing it casually and more often with smaller bets.

Personally I have been the kind of person sticking to a single platform for my bets. I wonder what range the people using these services bet at.

You're more than free to share your charts and predictions but criticism in the forum is usually a bit more harsh than usual unless you're showing bullish signals.
If you're after BTCUSD analysis though, I'm sure you'll love the wall observer thread. It's the largest and overall most active thread in bitcointalk through time. Most of the happenings related to BTC price are discussed there.

Overall I think this forum is quite welcoming to speculation. So long as you're not making outlandish claims, and aside from some bias towards negative predictions, bitcointalk is perhaps among the most friendly online forums to speculation about BTCUSD.

It's interesting but I'm not sure if it'd be a first.
A few years back someone had tried going on a forum where freelance women working the nights would often post and offered BTC to anyone of them willing to accept his offer.
This was a few years ago and no girl had taken the offer of 1 BTC being given to them for free essentially because they considered it sketchy. I'll have to try and find it because it was kinda funny tbh.

Things might be a little different these days in terms of how widespread knowledge on BTC is and how Bitcoin's reputation holds up.
But The thing is, prostitution could have been a place for acceptange of BTC but the current regulatory environment in the US essentially kills this possibility. At least for conducting it legally. Girls working the night even illegally will still prefer to  receive cash other than anything else because for a user without much experience it's still very hard to convert BTC bach to a form of currency they could easily spend on the super market. Especially without it being traced back to their activities.

For me, it would have still been more impressive to see women discovering BTC and utilizing it for their activities as freelancers. Girls working in clubs are employees essentially. But to their credit it's perhaps one of the few ways they can earn with their body legally in the states. Of course there's also the rest of the world but US is the biggest market hence why its always interesting to look at what's going on there for BTC adoption across various sectors.

BitPay used to have a visa card. Not sure if it stopped running at some point but it used to be considered one of the reliable services for US. Now loading up their page from my country tells me to sign up for their mailing list as their new card might be coming soon to my country. That's interesting to hear, some competition is always good. But it's rather sad the route BitPay took for their retail payment business. They adopted a controversial protocol for bitcoin payments and no longer support depositing to a plain address. Ironically Roger Ver's proprietary wallet is one of the few ones that supports BitPay's obsolete BIP.

But if their card has good rates it should be judget on its own merits. If they can offer a good product for conventional payments, hopefully they'll change their retail payment strategy for bitcoin too.


I had a thread monitoring bitcoin debit cards. Now with more cards coming in perhaps I should start updating it again maybe.

Definitely looks like a scam. It's one of the issues of Telegram in my opinion. Anyone can create an account and group without any verification, just an SMS to their number once.
It's literally zero risk to create new accounts and spam messages, be it scams or whatnot. Telegram barely regulates those anyway.

There's open source bots to program and repurposed any scam to your needs... From there, accounts in rooms can be botted, followers can be faked etc. For a means of social media networking, its very easy to manipulate. And moreover the service is also fully anonymous and the provider is known for protecting user identities, even of those commiting crimes in other countries. The only types of content they get off their platform actively AFAIK is ISIS and war front videos from terrorist groups and militia. You really shouldn't take offers via Telegram unless you know the person outside of the platform too.

Bookies would need some more professional teams to form and at least a tournament going on to add this game IMO. Currently they would have no idea how to calculate odds. Players in Valorant don't even have that long of a match history. Thankfully for them RIOT is already making match history and leaderboards public much like in lol, so it'll be easy to study that at least. However, it might take at least half a year until a pro league can form. And don't forget that the pandemic is still ongoing in the US so in-person events might be off for at least until after the summer. Which means that tourneys are also off to smaller revenues due to no ticket sales etc. It's a good time for starting a new game in terms of online viewers and/or a player base but not the best time to create a pro scene.