Not wanting to use escrow is big red flag for me.  I hope that they find themselves suprised at how few people are willing to sign up without funds in escrow---after up/down and others, people really should't add a paid signature that doesn't have funds set aside with a third party to ensure payment.

Glad to hear that Blazedout419 made contact with him.  For sure this is not going to help Maidak's reputation, but it's good to see that he realizes that he has a good name to uphold around here and that he's going to come back.  I did a little work for Maidak back in the day and I would have for sure been sad if he had gone rogue.

Sorry to OP for your delay and troubles, but I'll be looking forward to seeing that OP change topics when this is resolved in your favor soon.

The linux client was the principle one I used on sealswithclubs.  After that android (which is really still linux, just not GNU/Linux).  Then I used the browser when I was somewhere else or whatever.  Actually I used the browser client for quite a while before they had the android and GNU/Linux clients.  I imagine that this is one of those things where hindsight is 50-50.  They obviously should have had a browser client, but alas, unexpected things went down at the end of 2014.

I'm not in NJ or NV.  I don't know if I'm in one of the other 3 since you didn't mention them.  The message I saw was upon trying to create an account, it said what I quoted above "sorry, we do not accept players from your location".

If you need a mobile wallet, why not use Andreas Schildbach's Bitcoin Wallet for Android.  I've been using it for years and never had a problem.  You're responsible for your own private keys, no third parties.  Completely open source, you can download it from fdroid instead of the play store if you want to support FOSS on android.

I'm getting "sorry we do not accept players from your location".  I'll try again with tor-browser in a bit.  I'll have to see if it lets me sign up via a tor exit node (does anyone already have the answer to that one)?

I suspect there are several such someones and they must basically be in a race to see who can spend first when money appears in their address.


If you're just trying to set away some coins for a future date, just generate a secure keypair and print it out.  You don't need computer hardware in order to keep a number safe (just my opinion).

Right, but this assumes that you understand the nature of the request.  If you were in a mentality of trying to keep a good face for your company (say you're the best English-speaker in the group, but you're still not a good one) and you weren't sure if admitting that you didn't know how to do X would make you look better or worse, you might obfuscate to avoid the situation.
My caveat aside, I basically agree with everything you just said, dooglus.  I guess my main point above was that when you write things out like this, it seems helpful and beneficial to the discussion, when things get sarcastic and snooty, less so.  Hopefully these guys can get their act together.  I'm curious whether they owe anyone any money.  As was said on an earlier, it might be embarrasing to admit that you had left money deposited on sawdice, but that seems like a more crucial point to me than them proving their cold-storage.  Ie, did they actually take anyone's money that they need to pay back?  Maybe no one deposited anything, I dunno.

Right, but that is patentenly ridiculous (imo).  If you have a device with a radio, a gyroscope, a wifi-antenna, a java-random-number generator (that was recently hardened for use with crypto) and then you decide to make a call to a website to get a random number, that seems nuts.  What's even more nuts is that they weren't getting back a random number but an error page and somehow they weren't even looking at that.  It's pretty shocking.

Lets see if some others might join us.  I agree that it's sad to see a working, well-built site so empty.  Perhaps you're right that it'd be good to tie the freerolls to having cash hands  at tables.

But this is why stakes are so important to think about too.  Sometimes, I call what I suspect is not a bluff just because I want to see if the player is bluffing---even if I don't have cards to beat it.  I might lose that hand, but if the stakes are small, it might be more valuable to know what kind of bets the other player makes.  For example, say I've got a low pair and there's a obvious straight draw on, I can't beat the straight if he has it, but I want to know whether that bet was real.  I'm surprised how often the player is actually bluffing, has nothing, and I walk away with the pot.  However, if the stakes are high, I won't do that.

Cash tables seem to be about the same (almost nothing).  But if I'm on when you're on, we may be able to kick something off (I've seen it get up to 5 ppl at a table when a couple of people are willing to start it).  25mBTC gtd seems to always have  a few participants.  I played yesterday and there were 5 of us.

While I don't have a specific resource to add, I'd echo the folks who say that practicing with play money doesn't help, and I'd take it a bit farther: you have to know your opponents in poker and different types of games produce different types of opponents.  Online poker, for example, is very different from real life poker because the number of cues you can get from your opponents is limited to how long they took to play (a noisy signal, at best) and their history.  But you can still learn from the type of game you're playing (ring game? tourney? what stakes?, etc).  So, i guess I'd just say that in part, getting good at poker will depend on whether you are playing with frat boys at a weekend party, a local casino, swcpoker.eu, etc. 

Along the lines above, I noticed that almost everyone who replied assumed that you're playing no-limit texas holdem, but in fact,there are many more types of games and many different scenes that go with them.  I have some neighbors who play a friendly game with low bet-limits and it's basically impossible to push someone off of chasing a flush or a straight, but that's just part of the game they play.  Which kind of poker are you playing most often?

I have to lol a little bit because in my post, I said basically no one can really speak for Stunna.  Then arallmuus jumps in right below and basically speaks for Stunna.  It's all good though because Stunna spoke for himself just below that.  Anyway. 


I think the idea is that people who are attracted because of the chance to invest are probably also going to play.  They might figure, shit I'm hedged, if the house wins, I win (by virtue of my investment); if I win, I win (by virtue of obviously).  It seems reasonable to me that volume would go up with public investment.  Nevertheless, much respect to Stunna for not trying to explode beyond his means.  Same for Dooglus on Just-Dice, who has said that the reason he switched to clams was because he wanted to limit his reponsibility with other people's money.

For a somewhat connected tale of what happens when you expand quickly beyond your means to manage, see North American Soccer League in the 1970s.  The NY Cosmos had filled Giants Stadium (something like 90K people) with attractions like Pele, Beckenbaur, etc. But a few years later, the league was defunct.

I want to say that I know nothing of the internal structure of this organization, and I've never played there.  But I think you guys aren't being completely fair when you're getting all sarcastic about typing commands.  I use GNU/Linux and bitcoin core and I understand what a terminal emulator is and cetera.  However, it may very well be the case that the person who is representing sawdice here knows literally nothing about this.  This person may have a background in graphic design, or who knows what.  You can't just say "type a command" to the average guy on the street and expect that s/he knows how to parse what you're saying.  Consider, your example just says type a command, it doesn't specify "on a system running bitcoind",in CMD or windows, or at a terminal emulator on a standard computer;  it doesn't say what to do with the $ (do you type it or not?).  Yes, I know the answers to these questions, but my point is that not everyone does.  It's completely plausible that the person who's representing sawdice to the outside world knows very little about how bitcoins are stored and transferred.  What's more, if that cold-storage address is indeed in cold storage, then it might not be imported into any computer that's accessible easily.  Further, the person on here may not even speak English all that well.  Imagine if you ended up with a job where people were asking you to perform technical tasks which aren't your job to do in a language you only partly understand.

Listen, guys, I know there have been all kinds of troubles and scams and shady characters and of course that history has it's impact on how we see the world today.  I just want to encourage you guys to try to give people a bit more of the benefit-of-the-doubt until there isn't a doubt.  When every potentially problematic action becomes license for a public lynching, it's a bit of a sad state of affairs for people who have shown up with an open mind to learn, IMO.

Anyway, that's my opinion.  nb4flametrolls: I am not defending the actions of sawdice and please don't construe my words as doing so.  I'm merely trying to provide some constructive criticism for some trusted members here who could, perhaps, imo, be a little more gentle with their requests---and, if you really want to give technical instructions, it's important to fill in a bit of background.

Obviously reputable is a matter of interepretation.  But for me, the fact that they're probably the longest running web-wallet service not to be completely hacked and lose everything says something.  Also (and again, this may be just due to their longevity), I think they're the go-to block explorer for most people.  Kinda like google, they may not be the "best" search engine, that's a matter of debate, but many people equate search with google.  I believe that many people equate looking something up on the blockchain with looking it up on blockchain.info.

So, I guess I don't know a lot about their fuckups, and I don't use a web-wallet anyway (for security purposes), but yah, I had thought they were reputable.  Presumably, I don't know the whole story.

I doubt it, but that would be up to Stunna.  How could we speak for him?  If you have his personal contact info and you want to try to convince him to take your money as an investment, go for it!  Lol.

But seriously, when I said no public investment option I was clearly referring to the kinds of investment programs on sites like pocketrockets, etc.  I think you knew that though...

Maybe double-check your network connectivity, see that you're still connected to peers, etc.  Potentially reloading the blockchain would help, but it is a long wait if there's a faster solution to get you going again.  If you haven't already done so, I'd export and save your private keys in case  things go further awry.

Not just could, it does explain those threads.  @Cryddit, you're right, it's quite mind-boggling that a site as reputable as blockchain.info screwed this up so completely.

I guess I'm kinda surprised that there isn't something like this already.  I coulda swore I've heard of services that convert gift-cards to bitcoin.  Maybe it was even called "gyft" or something like that.