I assume that guarantee only applies when you use their referral link. But even then, it's not worth much:

Electrum can be quite slow when syncing many transactions. You can try this for yourself by importing an old watch-only address.

The large number of transactions may be the reason Blockchain's (buggy) wallet doesn't show the deposit anymore. OP should probably consider switching to a new wallet, and create a new seed phrase for that.

Many users have their Bitcoin address in their profile. Click his username to find it.

Bitcointalk is not a casino helpdesk, resolve problems with them.

A "friend" of an account buyer who tried to become a loan defaulter? I'll skip this one.

I came here for this one. When will they learn to keep their spam away from the tech boards?

So invest in the company that created the Bitcoin ETF instead of investing in the Bitcoin ETF itself Or do what they all try: create your own Bitcoin ETF.

Since Bitcointalk didn't ban altcoins, ICOs and all other money-grabbing-schemes after that, I don't think it should ban other promotional activities either. Banning doesn't fit the forum's mission "to be as free as possible".
Banning forums would make it a thin line to banning other websites.
Bitcointalk has tens of millions of spam links to Facebook and Twitter. None of those are banned.

I don't get it: Bitcointalk offers more freedom than any other forum I know. Why would you want to reduce this freedom? People (both online and IRL) seem hell bent on getting more and more regulation, without realizing you'll never get back the freedom you once had.

I'm glad Bitcointalk is far above that level. Let's keep it that way.

If they get away with that (after numerous lawsuits), they don't need to start a hash war. They can just sell the "not Bitcoin" they own, and if that happens to be the most valuable chain, it's pure profit for them.

This is exactly what makes your story so hard to believe. Earlier you wrote this:
It doesn't sounds like the regular payment for this is €8k. If "it's nothing", you wouldn't talk about killing yourself over losing payment for a week.

Don't quote long posts.

So you got partially paid up front but didn't check it before you did all the work? I find this hard to believe (and incredibly dumb). Trusting an anonymous website with a large amount of money at once was dumb too. You could have made several smaller exchanges, to reduce the risk of selective scamming freezing your money.

I'm curious: on January 7 you posted about a project that started in December, and paid €8k. That's a very high payment for working on a website for maybe a week (first payment: Dec 21, second payment: Jan 2). And 365 days maintenance was also paid upfront?
I get that this story raises suspicion.

What do you mean with 30% Bitcoin transaction fees? Fees were high, but sending 0.067 or 0.138 Bitcoin with one input would have taken 0.0002 Bitcoin at most. That's 0.30%.

So this basically means criminal funds in this case have successfully been laundered, even though the victim contacted fixedfloat? This is exactly what fungibility means, and it's exactly why the whole idea of "taint" is BS.

This makes your story about earning €8k in a week even more difficult to believe.

So far for your "reputation". If your customer paid to the Bitcoin address you gave him, he's done his part. You're now showing to be an unreliable business partner by changing the deal you made after you were paid. Your customer can't help that you used someone else's address.

That's another thing: this whole "signals" business is very shady. I've seen spam for it countless times, and I bet it's abused for pump and dump schemes too.
This story smells.

The more I read about this case, the more I think there's more to it.

Which "partners"? Be specific.

In this case: if you know the funds are stolen, and you know who told you about it, have you contacted the "partner" or the victim to tell them the joyful news that you found back their stolen money?

It's in his screenshots:
842005fb2433d12308d94b0c492bd950ad0aa53ce33aa9a6ff3aa53934ec80f1 and cfcfcdfd29ccd5bb0aaf852076ab9fdd22895d9474c88f84add7f61c53866b73

Following the above transactions, it looks like you've "mixed" OPs funds with other funds and consolidated them into bc1qns9f7yfx3ry9lj6yz7c9er0vwa0ye2eklpzqfw. Aren't you concerned that those funds you deemed criminal are now in your own address, meaning anyone that receives Bitcoin from your exchange now receives some of those criminal funds? It shows once again that "taint" is only made-up BS.

That's not true. You say the funds "remain frozen", but that can't be since you've mixed them already.
The first transaction was mixed in this transaction and that same output was used to sent to another address. The second transaction was mixed in this transaction and also sent to another address. None of the funds were frozen in your wallet, you're normally using them to pay other people.
To summarize: if those funds came from criminal activity as you claim, you've now sent it to other innocent users who now own those "tainted" Bitcoins.
It sounds very much like you only care about "taint" when it's convenient for you.

You're omitting the fact that OP initiated the exchange on your website. Of course he has something to do with it.

This once again comes down to "taint" being completely arbitrary: the transactions were published in this topic. If certain addresses are "criminal", and you happen to know about it, why don't you publish a list? Who decides this? How is this verified? Do different exchanges use different lists of what they consider "tainted"?

That's a lie, as pointed out above.

Cool story. Except for the fact that you didn't freeze the coins, and sent them to other addresses (most likely owned by your other customers). How are you going to explain to them how you got those coins, if they come back to you because they are "tainted"? It seems like you're demanding much higher standards from your users than from yourself.

OP gave his customer a Bitcoin address to pay to. They paid.

And there's the problem with "taint" again: what's legal in one place, may be illegal in another. You're not even sharing which jurisdiction applies. Depending on where you are gambling or prostitution can be perfectly legal or a crime. Now who's going to judge who's "honest"?

Say what? It sounds a lot like data mining from an anonymous guy who's hiding in a tax paradise.

@fixedfloat: can you confirm the above 2 statements (mother's birth certificate and law enforcement request) are true? I'm especially curious which law enforcement agency allows you to refund stolen funds in exchange for his mother's birth certificate.

You mean the companies that sell this "service" and turned the notion of "taint" into a business model? The companies who's sole existence depends on people buying into the "Bitcoin isn't fungible" attack?

What do you mean when you say you're "partners" with "analysis services"? I can imagine you buy their "service", but if you're "partners", does that mean you provide them with data too (maybe an overview of all exchanges ever carried out on your platform)?

Great! So let me ask again: have you contacted the "partner" or the victim to tell them the joyful news that you found back their stolen money?

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@fixedfloat: please use the quote button instead of bold font inside a quote, and read the forum rules (edit your post instead of posting 4 times in a row).

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I spend quite a lot of time digging through all posts and data for this case. TL;DR: OP's story sounds shady, and fixedfloat lied about freezing OP's funds.

Bitcointalk.org didn't exist when satoshi was active:

This is often brought up by a certain troll. In my opinion, it doesn't matter: "the forum" is more than just the URL, it's the entire post database and it's users, and that database was transferred to a new domain name after satoshi's last post. The users moved too, and some of the old users are still active today.

I don't worry too much about it, because of the "in good faith" clause. Not that I trust them, but I trust the American claim culture enough to know it would end up in a lawsuit if they screw their customers.

From my bank's perspective, receiving money from different unknown IBAN accounts is much more questionable than receiving money from an established centralized exchange. The same with sending money.
Cash has different privacy problems.

The next step would be going back to barter: I give you Bitcoin if you buy me a new TV. It's not very convenient though.

Who is "the Sponsor" in this?

Even if they act in good faith picking the correct chain, I'm missing details on what happens to the value in a possible Fork chain. When the BCH Fork happened, the value of the Forkcoin varied, but could have been sold for 10-20% of the Bitcoin value. If they keep that instead of sharing it with the ETF investors, it just adds to the list of reasons to keep your own keys.

I'd say that would be the day to abandon pools

In this scenario, it would be trivially easy for the 99% to ignore that one block in a hundred that included the transaction they don't want. It doesn't even cost them anything missing the block, since the difficulty will be based on their 99% of the hash rate instead of the full 100%. They'll make up for the missing block the next 2 weeks.

Of course it's possible. But if enough people do this, I bet some of them lose their money, while others are unable to recover their seed on their own. And that's why it's generally not a good idea to create your own "system".

Even a safe deposit box in a bank far from your home would be a better idea. Or 3 safe deposit boxes, each storing 16 out of 24 words.

That's similar to my setup. If you save the full blocks directory on HDD, your download gets much faster if you symlink your chainstate directory to your SSD.

Quoting everything:
I've verified all Bitcoin signatures, and old staked addresses (1, 2). I haven't checked the PGP signature.

Who isn't?

Both. With some cool art work.

Print it more than once, in case part of the paper gets damaged.

There used to be a nice paper wallet website, which unfortunately turned into a scam after it was sold so I won't link it. But the design was nice, and something like it, running from the command line would a very cool thing to have. And with Segwit, of course.

I like bash, but never looked into how to create a WIF private key. I like it
If you're bored enough for a challenge: how about using qrencode and ImageMagick to create a really cool looking printable (PDF or high resolution image), ideally with Segwit address and redundancy in printing the keys?

Sorry, if I ignored his email already that was for a reason, and you've barely posted and didn't earn any Merit in the past 4 months, so I can't accept your vouch.

Thanks for confirming my decision not to let you vouch for someone.