Yep, and I hate to say it but there's no progress in financial intelligence because each generation has to learn the hard way on its own.  That's why booms and busts keep happening every 10-20 years, over and over again.

Some of the Youtube videos I've been watching are by people in their 20s, and they're talking about things that seem really obvious to me but are apparently new to them.  I'm not blaming any of this crap on the younger generation by any means, but SBF and other big time crypto scammers are all young and obviously ignorant, no matter how wise they've been previously portrayed in the media.

Everything in trading, investment, and finance is a "confidence game".  It always has been, going back to the days of JP Morgan and well beyond that.  Anyone who uses a centralized exchange has to have some sort of confidence in it, regardless of how little.  Anyone who trades with anyone else has to have confidence in their counterparty.  No matter how trustless we'd like things to be, if we're buying or selling bitcoin we've got to have a smidgen of trust somewhere.

This whole thing is ugly to the tenth power.

All of my technical ignorance aside, this sounds reasonable to me, as does the claim that this is a marketing ploy to tap into people's fears about crypto, which have obviously been stoked as a result of the recent FTX debacle among other things.

This attack vector might sound plausible in theory--and it might actually turn out to be a successful one for hackers--but as of right now I haven't seen any reports of hardware wallets being hacked....at all.  Have any of you?  And I mean by any method, not just this one.  I'd imagine as soon as anyone proves that a Ledger, Trezor, or any of the better-known HW wallets have a vulnerability that's caused an actual loss, it'd blow up all over this forum.

I've got nothing against BitBox, BTW.

Nah, you're doing great--all of your updates are greatly appreciated, and they're what I look to when I'm trying to gauge how the merit system is working.  I hadn't looked at that graph on the first page in a long time but did so now; I can't tell if the slopes of any of those lines have increased, but it sort of looks like it (or maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part).

In any case, congrats to everyone who ranked up!  I see a lot of familiar usernames this time around, and a lot of deserving ones at that.  Yay merit system!!  Four+ years and going strong.  Who'd have thought Theymos's experiment would have worked out this well, eh?

Yeah, it was true--but I'd like to point out that you can turn anything into a poison if you use a high enough dose and also that there are innumerable methods of committing suicide.  The news story about Amazon and the suicide kits was just another piece of sensationalism on the part of journalists.

That aside, I don't think the alcohol story has anything to do with the other one.  I'm not sure why alcohol-related deaths have been increasing so much, but it appears that they were rising well before the pandemic.  Part of me wonders whether the CDC changed its definition of "related" somewhere along the way, and the definition was probably very liberal to begin with.

But the mention of taxes on alcohol and restrictions on availability are what bug me the most.  People should be free to do what they want with their own bodies as long as it doesn't harm others, and restrictive measures just don't work--we had Prohibition for a decade in the US, and all the good drugs have been illegal for many years, and yet there was the opiate crisis and everything else....so government intervention is just going to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

Do you even understand anything Yahoo62278 wrote?  You seem kind of illiterate--not an insult, just pointing out a fact as well.

OP, get over yourself and just lock this thread.  It isn't likely the feedback (which seems inconsequential) is going to be removed, and if you continue to write a bunch of nonsense it's just going to work against you in the long run, believe me.  I've seen plenty of threads like this where members call attention to themselves and wind up with more negs/neutrals or even a ban if the community starts digging up dirt.

In any case, it seems nobody is in your corner and nobody is likely to be no matter how long you keep this thread open.

Dude, good luck with the tickets, but unless your lottery is fundamentally different than all others it's odds are stacked against you and you probably won't even make your money back.

I was just talking to a convenience store worker who I see all the time, and he was telling me how much he's won on scratch tickets--and he listed some pretty big wins (not millions of dollars, but thousands on a few occasions according to him).  But the thing is that I see this guy all the time with a handful of scratch-offs, so I know he's spent a lot of money for those winners.  And it's more likely than not he's given the lottery system more money than he's won....so as I said, good luck with your tickets, but any government-sponsored lottery is basically a extra tax on gamblers.

Normally I wouldn't agree with that statement 100%, but considering the fact that every time something like the FTX debacle goes down it brings crypto closer and closer to being highly regulated, I've softened my stance on trying to protect people from making potentially bankrupting mistakes--at least to the extent that it can be done without also being paternalistic (which was mentioned in the other thread about putting a warning header on bitcointalk).

Unfortunately, all it takes to really get the message about keeping your funds on exchanges or yield farming sites is just a few days' worth of reading on the forum, and I'm kind of pessimistic as to how much any of us can help.  Still, I'm all for having a thread (anywhere on the forum) or a banner or something similar.  As I said before, it can't hurt and can only help.

Man, this thread needed a bump--I forgot it even existed or how good the advice was in it.  Interesting that I wrote this back in 2019:


This was well after the merit system kicked off, and it seems as though the changes the system made as far as post quality were pretty long-lasting, because all of that is still true to this day (and I even got a new pair of glasses since that post).

Indeed.  If these exchanges' customers had complete information about what's happening behind the scenes, none of them would have lost money in the last two disasters, i.e., FTX and the Terra Luna/USTC meltdown.  Unfortunately I doubt that's ever going to happen.  The average investor, whether it's in stocks, crypto, real estate, or whatever, never really knows what's happening with the big players that have the power to bankrupt everyone--and I don't think any amount of regulation is going to change that, either.

I've been following news about this situation, and I haven't yet gotten the impression that Binance is in danger.  In fact, the feeling I got is that CZ is at least partially responsible for FTX collapsing (and he had every reason for wanting them to).

I don't use Binance and have never owned BNB or any other exchange's coin, and I never will.  I'm not opposed to altcoins as a general rule, but I've seen enough crap go down with the biggest, most popular exchanges over the years that any coin or token associated with any of them is off the table as far as I'm concerned.  Any exchange can collapse, and as dkbit98 said, we don't know what's happening behind the scenes and most likely won't see it coming.

I don't know a hell of a lot about that coin, but given that it's not tied to an exchange like BNB or FTX's coin I doubt it's going to just implode and go to zero.  Obviously there are plenty of people who've got no problem buying coins like that, just as there are too many people willing to keep their funds on centralized exchanges, out of sheer ignorance or because they accept the risks involved in doing so.

Again?  I'm not sure if bitcoin has stopped going down (though it seems to have paused for a breather).  And those stablecoins, man....I don't really understand what function they serve except as a place-marker for cash on exchanges or why there are so many of them.  Frankly I don't give two shits what happens to them, and the more attention the government pays to them and not bitcoin, the better.

Yeah, I don't know any of that either.  As I said in another thread, I hadn't even heard of FTX until this whole thing went down (though I might have heard their name here and there).  Regardless, this debacle did have a big effect on bitcoin that can't be denied, and I'm hoping people aren't losing faith in crypto in general and bitcoin particularly.

I wouldn't jump to those conclusions based on this article or anything Ford does.  If they were making a van-home for homeless people....they just wouldn't.  I think what they're capitalizing on is the whole "van life" trend, which has become quite popular in the past few years.  Jet Cash is living out his retirement in his van or RV if I'm not mistaken, and I've seen tons of videos on Youtube by people just cruising around whatever country they're in, having a great time.

They already make camper vehicles and such, and this just looks like Ford is scaling down the size of the vehicle being lived in according to what's trendy.  I just don't see this as evidence of an impending economic apocalypse or anything of the sort.  There's plenty of evidence elsewhere that it's coming, but not from Ford.

That's an absolute truth--if no bank is too big to fail (which is true), you'd better believe there's not a single crypto exchange in existence that couldn't fail based on its size. 

All of this shit that's been going on for years, from Mt. Gox to the Terra Luna debacle right on down to FTX's ship going down is bad for crypto in general, and certainly for bitcoin.  When people start losing money because of exchanges and various companies that are involved in the crypto space, it attracts the attention of lawmakers.  And what's the job of lawmakers?  It's to make laws.  We're never going to have fewer laws as far as I can tell, only more, and because of all of these shenanigans those lawmakers are going to crack down on what's essentially been a very free market.

In fact, I'm very surprised that crypto has been allowed to exist with such little regulation for as long as it has.  Having said that, I don't know what regulators are planning on doing, but I suspect it's going to make trading a lot more cumbersome.

But all of that aside, I don't think Binance is in danger of gong bankrupt anytime soon.  They're probably one of the exchanges that very much has their act together--especially when you compare them to a lot of these smaller ones whose ownership and other details are opaque.

That's true, but just having a warning like that--which, if a newcomer doesn't understand it's meaning might Google it--isn't really being intrusive, paternalistic, or anything like that.  It's a piece of wisdom that anyone in the crypto space should have firmly lodged in their head.  Seriously, that phrase above all others I can think of is the most important thing someone who owns crypto should have guiding them.

I support this suggestion fully, though obviously it all depends on whether Theymos wants to add something like that.  Something like this certainly couldn't hurt, and it'd probably be easy to do.

One would hope so, but keep in mind that there are a lot of members active on this forum, and it'd be nearly impossible for all of them to be adhering to the wisdom in the NYKNYC statement.  Like I said, what harm can it do?

Hmm....this actually doesn't sound like a bad idea, and I'm not even sure that if it were to be implemented that people would just start up new threads with the same topic, because if there's already one going with 1000 pages, a new (essentially duplicate) thread could be reported to the mods and nuked. 

Then again, most of us who like reading things on the forum avoid mega spam threads like those in question so I'm not sure how much of a problem they really are.  And although duplicate threads could be avoided, I've no doubt members in bounties/sig campaigns desperate to meet the maximum post count would find a way to do so somehow, and that might present a different problem that's hard to predict exactly.

Good suggestion, OP.  The only problem is that it seems like Theymos isn't listening to proposals from the community all that much.  We did get the "OP" tag, which is probably one of the least useful ones I'd seen in years, but aside from that there haven't been any new methods made available to combat shitposting in a long time.  Keep your fingers crossed, though.

I've saved nearly every cellphone I've ever owned, and I know I posted pics of at least one of them in some other thread in the HW wallet section.  I think two of them are Nokias, but I'll have to look at which models they are.  Going by the pics you posted, I think mine are way too old to be used as wallets (and I'm not sure I'd use them as such anyway, given that I have some HW wallets I already don't use).

Damn fine idea here, though, in a low-profile and stealthy-type of way.

Yeah, I'm not sure about mine either.  I know I can't get any of them to power up, but it could be that the batteries are dead.  One of them is so old that I think it needs a charging dock that I've long since discarded.

Really?  I certainly don't remember it that way at all, though I admit my memory is faulty more often than I'd like it to be.  Lauda didn't exactly rage quit the forum, but I could have sworn that, like Vod, Lauda started leaving some very questionable feedback and I began to lose trust in him somewhat.  I'm just too tired and/or lazy to go back and look at Lauda's trust page to verify that.  Perhaps I will later.

I also knew of Lauda and some others before I became a member, as I was a lurker for months before joining and found the drama here to be more than a little bit interesting.  It's been dull as of late, but man....when something pops off, bitcointalk can be the most entertaining site on the net.

To be fair, people have been calling the DT list flawed for a very long time, especially when it came from the top down, i.e., before Theymos changed it to the rotating system we have now.  I think it's worse now, and it's gotten to the point where being on DT is practically meaningless (which isn't how it used to be).

I agree with that.  At the same time, there's always been a need to define a set of members who've demonstrated their trustworthiness, especially since this forum has always scammers stacked up from the floor to the ceiling, coming out of the cracks in the woodwork, and jumping out of the cereal box when you open it.  I couldn't say if it's gotten better over the years, but the DT system always did have a purpose, even if its setup was highly flawed.

Anyway as I've said before, my trust list now consists of exactly this: ~DefaultTrust.  I've opted out of the game I no longer care to play.

Word up, homey.  I'm not sure what other CEOs are profiting off the backs of plebs, but after learning a bit about this Binance/FTX situation I'm fairly confident CZ is a prime offender.  And I'm still figuring out what went down--if you'd asked me what FTX was yesterday, I would have drawn a blank, because I'm not sure I'd even heard of them until this debacle.  Is that weird or what?

It might be unbelievable, but just look at all the shitcoins on the market and the valuations some of them have.  We were in a pretty raging bull market for a while there, and that's usually when even the shittiest of shitcoins get blown up like a ton of TNT.  I never thought BNB would ever reach $60, and yet here it is today trading for $275.  When you've got true believers buying coins they're in love with, rational investing goes flying out the window.

I'd say you're wrong under certain circumstances and depending on how you define "manipulation".  I'm also going to assume you're talking about the market for bitcoin only. 

When average investors act in concert (during periods of panic selling or severe FOMO), they certainly can move the market--but that's not manipulation, it's just market forces in action.  And bitcoin's market cap is high enough that I don't think a single whale could move it at will.  I'm not sure how much bitcoin you'd have to dump on the market (or buy) just to get the price to move, say, $100--but I would think that it'd be a massive amount.  When bitcoin's market cap was much smaller it was easier for whales to manipulate the price if they wanted to, but even with the price now at $16,250 I don't think it's feasible. 

And man I'm such a pleb.  I don't think I'll ever move past pleb status.

Eh, I couldn't even say it's risky since I don't know exactly what OP means--switching your job for "full-time investment in cryptocurrency" just doesn't compute.  I'd say if you've got a job, stick with it if you want to eat.  If you're trading crypto right now or have been in the last couple of days, yikes!  I can't imagine doing that as a job, but I bet you there are members here who do just that. 

Now is the time to be saving money IMO, particularly if you have a job that might be in jeopardy.  This economy is really spooky if you ask me, so that old advice of having at least 6 months worth of living expenses set aside for emergencies sounds very wise (if you can manage it; I never could).

Nah....even if I had that account I wouldn't do anything with it since I don't need an alt and obviously wouldn't be able to transfer all of my stats to that one.  No worries, but thanks for the support.

I may have pissed Theymos off somewhere along the line, who knows?  So I wouldn't assume you wouldn't get your request for a name change granted just because my request got ignored.  Theymos probably has way more respect for bitcoin/crypto experts who know the technical details of how the sausage is made, which is a category I don't fit into.  To him, I'm sure I'm a nobody and believe me I get it.

No harm, no foul.  I'm locking the thread, so thanks to all of y'all for your input!