Sorry to see that I somehow missed this thread all through the past year. I'm a big, big fan of BitcoinRush, like SyGambler and others have mentioned above.

The reasons are pretty clearcut for me. If you're a sports bettor, or any kind of gambler, for that matter, then you only want the best odds. Call me a traditionalist but I've never been impressed by flash. Talk to me odds and house edges, and there's where I put my money.

I know I'm on the verge of shilling for Bitcoinrush but I can't help it... I just don't understand why you'd want to bet anywhere else if you can enjoy even 1% more winnings with better odds. 1% doesn't sound like much, does it? But I parlay quite a bit, so that bumps me up even to 4 or 5% more winnings if I get my accas right. Even if you're a casual gambler like me, I end up doing maybe 20 to 30 bets a month? If I win just 10, that's a rough 10% more combined winnings.

That's not even counting the cashback... win or lose you get daily cash back.

My only criticism for BCR is it probably has the least familiar interface among all Bitcoin bookies. That's a reflection of 2 things really:
- all other bookies are just somehow clones of each other, BCR has its own interface, because they programmed it themselves.
- It is probably the oldest bookie in the list, 5 years old, and recently had a facelift but probably need to make the experience smoother. The odds change every few minutes, and because the betting page that loads every single line takes about a minute or so to fully load, by the time I get all my parlay choices in, odds have changed and I need to reload. That can be a bit of a pain in the ass.

So my rating: 4.5... if they fix the interface, it's 4.9 hands down (like SyGambler says, there's always room for improvement ).

Precisely. If the diseased old structure of finance and money has infiltrated even gold, and OP is suggesting that all of us buying gold will kill the banking cartel, think again. When the house of cards fall, it won't be the banks that pay the price, but the man on the streets holding his paper promise of 1 owning an ounce of gold.


Shops and stores don't sell Bitcoin immediately. The majority of Bitcoin merchants actually "accept Bitcoin payments" via a Bitcoin payment processor. It's the guys like Coinbase, Bitpay, Coinpayments etc. who take the Bitcoin from customers and THEN settle the payments with merchants with fiat. I don't have the numbers but almost all of the merchants I pay Bitcoin to are all using the payment processors I named... in effect, they never actually receive a single satoshi, nor do they even have a Bitcoin wallet. They receive fiat payments.

So expedia removing Bitcoin option probably just means they're ending their contract with Bitpay or whomever it was who processed Bitcoin payments for them.

In any case, this doesn't prove why Bitcoin has failed. Every time I take stock of how and where I can spend Bitcoin, the list and options only seem to grow.

Referring to my last point on hindsight, price just dipped $200. What bearish news shall we now attribute to this?


Yeah, even with all them players thinking to "arbitrage trade" at RoK and even Zimbabwe realised the effort just wasn't worth it, and doesn't half affect the rest of the world. Nice wordplay, I do believe it's my first time reading about auto fellatio on price association, though a more progressive trader would find that remark gender-biased.

I'm pretty happy two Dutch teams are in Champs League, I happen to be around the area for the current time and any chance of an English team drawing with either Ajax or PSV means I get to watch a game nearby. Just a darn pity Liverpool's in the same pot as them (pot 3) thanks to Benfica's win, so I won't be looking at group stages meet... just hope both and Liverpool get past group stage and end up drawing each other in last 16 maybe! More than that would be awesome of course but tickets get pricier past group..!

I actually prefer Pot 3... meet the big boys early on!

My best on Europa for tonight. Burnley will want to soother their starting pains in the PL so a simple and motivating win @2.35 is on the cards. Bordeaux are my favourites to go all the way, so a ML bet on them @1.93 too to carry on the march.

Hello OP, sorry it took a while to get back to you but I've added you on Telegram and Whatsapp so we can continue discussions over there. I'm just posting here in case you don't check those channels... they tell me you were last on over the weekend.

I'll connect you with a journalist. Very likely, coverage will be focused on blockchain/crypto activism and education on the ground, particularly with grassroots efforts along with refugee communities. They will be far less keen to talk about the specific TENUP project, particularly because they won't want to cover altcoins, but apart from that, the valuable stories from your experience and work with the communities such as of the Rohingya should make newsworthy coverage.

Thanks for that. I used MyUS probably ten years ago (has it been that long now?) didn't realise they're still operational. Bad experience every time I used freight forwarders. Items arrived eventually but at great cost to me and always with some kind of damage and impossible to get any complaints resolved. Living in my part of the world was such a hassle but today most places ship to my new part of the Western world...

Still, I'll hit you up if I find something interesting. Never know what any of my three small ones suddenly wants that can only be found on Amazon.

That makes me two for that... I'm like learning two or three things new every day! Thanks @soli for pointing that out (Sojourner from CGN here).

As Quin pointed out, commissions should specify how much of the edge goes to the referrer, then they should be able to see for themselves what kind of #s this translates to. I've had virtually zero success with referring people to bitcoin gambling, even had a bout of several months trying to promote new sites, with next to no results.

Touching on affiliate numbers, I wonder if edge still plays a big role in proper gamblers wanting to do long term play. From what I've learnt (unscientific of course) from successful affiliates, very few referred players stay on once they've made their big wins/big busts and edge doesn't quite matter to them as much as how much they can win from their play and how likely they are to be able to withdraw without issues.

My thoughts: The news and reasons people talk about that occur around the time of price rises AND dips... those are all hindsight analyses.

Every price movement, to me, generally, especially the quick ones you're talking about, is just the way the market moves. No rhyme or reason. We can talk about long-term movement and explain that away pretty easily, but the daily expert analysis news pouring out are all written and said after the fact.

And for those who try to reverse that timing concept, they're called price predictors

Ah, EOS. I don't know how developers of alt projects can live with themselves, exposing all their tech shortcomings despite raising so much to create vapourware.

I'm not a fan of smart contracts just yet, even if the possibilities for me are exciting for very practical uses (like for example, how about a simple escrow smart contract for Bitcoin!), but as long as the guys out there are mass producing smart contracts without proper peer review and maturity testing, it's simply too unfeasible for mainstream use.

Would be particularly useful if Hosho actually spent some of their time helping validate/examine open source contracts out there.

That's a really good point. While of course some sites have been adding altscoins long before network congestion ever became an issue, just to try and welcome more coin communities and/or diversify and/or take advantage of psychological willingness for players to lose "lower value" alts, I've actually seen a couple of gambling places offer alts simply to get around the confirmation times issue. I'd say the profit taken from offering in-casino exchange for those alts is a big motivation too.

Again, for serious gamblers, the fee difference shouldn't make a difference but I can imagine that for regular depositors who also probably make regular withdrawals, gambling with Bitcoin and an alt makes a lot of difference as a percentage of bankroll.

It's somewhat a shame that the low network traffic on Bitcoin has made everyone forget the pains of 200 sat/byte fees and put off SegWit upgrades.

Agree with promoting it as a Bitcoin e-commerce website. True, you might lose out on fiat customers but it appears you're here and want to focus on Bitcoin users.

In addition to the payment processors above, I would suggest Mistertango as an alternative. If you're willing to get some elbow grease into it BTCPay is an open source solution that I've seen some merchants implement with success.

Benefit of the latter is more control over how you accept payments, plus you no longer have to bend over for the changes Bitpay and the like seem to impose with increasing regularity on both merchants and consumers.

For now, yes, that seems to be the stronghold for Bitcoin. At 7k now, even if it were to shed 15%, it would still be above 5,800, although I still harbour some suspicions that we're set to test the yearly low in June one more time at least - you just can't tell actually what's in store and it's a long four months to the end of 2018. Still have the kind reward from micgoosen in this "real bottomcaller" thread waiting to be claimed by someone else if that happens.

If we never go back to below 6k, we'll all be looking back to this year with mild regret!

Bad night for Ukraine and Croatian football as both reps crashed out of Champions League last night but man did I get my wish to see Young Boys come and join the big boys! The Swiss just have a way of coming into group stage and spoiling the party. Hopeful these new entrants (I believe it's their first time at group stage?) show us some more of that energetic football they've been showcasing.

No bets for me tonight on Europa. Bad run of gambling lately. Need a break!

@tomahawk: Draw's tomorrow and still hoping Liverpool get drawn with Real Madrid. Need for revenge is still strong. And yes, loser goes home early is much better than reaching the final and getting even more jokes and memes. The pain of losing in the final. Second place syndrome, need to purge that!

The ban, as noted, was ineffective. Rather than a lose-lose situation for everyone, they've at least relented to the inevitable coming of Bitcoin and crypto. The only thing one would hope for, as a citizen there anyway, is that they don't go down the path of Venezuela in creating a centralised and closed token. It would just be an incredible headache to convince allies and partners to accept a new token, not to mention how insecure the blockchain itself might be if it were to be attacked by enemies.

One would hope they would go for the obvious, the most secure, the most readily accepted, the most widely available: Bitcoin.

Thank you for this OP. Severely limited in terms of technical knowledge here, but always keen to follow Bitcoin upgrades and have been happily using SW for a while now, enjoying the very obvious benefits. Just curious from the paper, which assumes (as I do) that SegWit has already reached the stage of significant adoption (at least through P2SH) and can be considered mature, yet the percentage of legacy users and services still stubbornly holding on. Will implementing this and possible further expansions cause even further risk of alienating legacy?

I know it doesn't affect them (no network partitioning as your paper says) but the fact that they can't transact/spend to native SW unless using the same client already must mean some users are shorn off... Or does it actually make no difference, or would it actually further push to encourage SW upgrade?

Sadly, I haven't been able to convince any of my favourites sites either, not that I tried with everyone. Some already had P2SH for a while, and those aren't ready to move to native Segwit for fear of alienating depositors who are largely using wallets that won't be compatible.

Seeing withdrawal fees of 10 to 25k, I'm wondering why people are still willing to pay those fees and not ask owners to upgrade... I can do 100 txs for less than the price of most site withdrawal fees.

Those who did respond say that it just wasn't worth the hassle and downtime, and that may be true for many more months, if not years, since I don't expect congestion will ever again hit the heights of 100+k txs... those who wished the network ill with deliberate spamming no longer have the will nor motivation to do so. But you never know, price increase, next bull run, demand shooting back up, all those ingredients that led to "expensive" fees.

So I got almost everything I wanted, except the yellow cards bet. Just goes to show that maybe Pogba was right: they weren't fired up enough to win this contest. I mean, 3 goals down with no reply and no one lost their cool except the manager?

4 teams sit atop the table now, City took a slight tumble but seeing United and Arsenal on 3 points is a sign of the times, even this early on in the season. Fortunes are shifting, power is shifting from clubs. It took a lot of stop-gapping, big signings and money for United to hold on to their glory post Ferguson but the decay set in a while ago, as it did already on Wenger's swansong.

Too soon to speak of a new era of City dominance?

Check out my PM. I didn't provide any stats, since I'm sure you'd like to verify them yourself with a basic look up on the high-level domain name I provided. For us, the main audience seek out specifically Bitcoin, but there is exposure to general blockchain, and categorised interest in cryptocurrency (that isn't always Bitcoin), but you can guess from the name.

Traffic and viewership metrics are one thing, actual content, reputation and association are quite other factors. Feel free to hit me back on PM if you'd like to discuss.

Pointless to "buy gold". All these banks and giants you speak off can do 10 times what any single person here can, in the blink of an eye. They don't even need access to physical gold. One phone call or email can get them any amount of paper gold via Comex probably at a deep discount too. No one cares that they're not even 1% backed by physical gold. That's how bad it's gotten for gold, and that's what futures could do to Bitcoin one day, who knows?


We're only halfway to that 20-yr mark, my friend. Care to tell me why Bitcoin has failed if you're here on this forum talking to thousands of users, and I'm here still earning and spending in Bitcoin?

$600 wouldn't mean it's failed, simply that it's returned to 2016 levels. Small timeframe in the big picture.

Hackers and criminals? That is soooo 2015.

Now why didn't I see this before? Purse failed user here from a while back, gave up on ever getting wishlist orders fulfilled and every now and then wish I had an option to ship items from US.

My question: Some items only ship to US. Are you saying you're willing to arrange shipping costs internationally, or are you only willing to make orders for shippers that send overseas? If the former, I might have an order coming up in November and shall bookmark to try you, of course I understand all costs borne by me.