Tell you what, some of the earliest faucets even gave out 1 BTC. As DannyHamilton points out, there wasn't really a marketplace for them and people even gave them out free (to me even the pizza day affair was basically a giveaway for a treat although, there were other giveaways recorded for no effort). If I'm not mistaken, Gavin made a faucet in 2010 that gave out 5 BTC. http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

At the rate that some faucet farmers hit these days (I know of people who do at least 12 each on moonbitcoin and freebitcoin) I'm not surprised if faucet hitters from those days could have easily amassed hundreds in a month. Of course, they might have just used them up the way we use up satoshi for fun now, so I doubt anyone retained his faucet collections until today.

Here's another perspective. When I first used Bitcoin, I gained my very first from a giveaway (100,000 satoshi!) and then found faucets giving out close to a thousand. Like the newbie I was, I farmed perhaps 50 faucets so heavily I'd collected 0.01 in perhaps little over a week. It was worth maybe $6 at the time, but today it's more than $40 after just over a year. If Bitcoin were to reach 10k...

So it had to drop and you guys were right to call that... but yeah, a second drastic drop also feels like we're being played. It begs the question if anyone has anything to gain my slightly manipulating the figures. I mean, a small adjustment may not have changed enough minds as this drop surely has. Suddenly the scenario you predicted two adjustments back looks to become more and more plausible, with hashpower zig zagging across BTC and BCC.

Like I said, it closed down sometimes in 2014? I can't remember the exact date. I started using it in 2011 when I needed access to most sites that were blocked from Pakistan (I was living and working there for two years). It was American, and their main service was to provide rotating IPs to users from something like a million residential IPs based out of North America (including Canada). It was popular because it was free to residents of some countries - Iran and North Korea at first, and then they gave open access to more countries during the Arab Spring. I recall TOR being extremely slow in those days, barely quicker than most VPNs and proxies, IPrental didn't seem to cut down on bandwidth. Since they seemed to refresh the IP pool quickly, it got by most blacklists easily too. They used a form of tunneling, but I won't remember the exact tech.

Actually, they have been flirting with Bitcoin for quite a while now, it was just in July that they started making overt advances when they caved in to client pressure to start adding Bitcoin to their trading signals/predictions. After some remarkably good calls (the level of accuracy surprised even me) I guess it was only a matter of time before they gathered enough courage to ask it out on a first date with direct Bitcoin trading.

Bitcoin can be a tricky relationship, I'm sure they'll find out. She wants full commitment, not just fleeting encounters.

I think discussing Bitcoin's irreversibility is sidetracking from the original issue: lack of protection (either from buyer or seller). Besides, people can argue that with such things as Replace By Fee payments, you are in effect, reversing payments (or replacing them with another). I've also experienced enough double spend tx that never confirmed!

@OP it's just a question of the technology's maturity. I imagine when credit cards first came out, people didn't have insurance or fraud protections that almost any card today has by default. I'm sure when the first bank in the world was robbed or absconded, their account holders weren't protected. There are some examples mentioned here that do provide some degree of protection. For sellers, setting a min number of network confirmations can be one way to protect themselves against double spends. For buyers, the use of smart contract escrow (which one day might be a standard in some crypto wallets) is another.

If you're looking for more conventional forms of protection: see Japan. From now on, when you use exchanges, you are partially insured from losses and hacks thanks to a framework of regulation.

This is something that I can find common ground with. Without taking into account the majority of newcomers who nowadays are lured by the prospects of instant riches, Bitcoin really did attract a lot of early people because of some of the concepts that they identified with or wanted to believe in. I sometimes avoid or don't like to tell people about its beginnings partially because of that deliberate shroud of mystery that surrounds Bitcoin. But every now and then, I meet someone whom I feel would absolutely love to hear that, and I'm not usually wrong

I still find a lot of value in what I guess are "genesis stories" that gave birth to and helped propel Bitcoin into mainstream. And if you look farther, you'll see that those who eventually became proponents and advocates are likely to also have been attracted to this aspect of storytelling.

The same concept has helped propel people like Einstein, Tesla (and now Musk)... their otherwise quite ordinary lives transformed into amazing stories of hardship, struggle, discrimination etc.

I suppose I'm in two (or even three minds) about this. I strongly disagree that customers of any service should be suddenly and forcibly required to provide documentation which was previously not needed. At the very least, it could have been the one selling point that made one sign up for it in the first place, and the very most, it constitutes unfair practices.

Then again, this could be a backlash from all the customers who have been hacked or who've claimed unauthorised withdrawals. But to me, this should be tackled with something similar to Bitfinex's "green lane" system, where security measures like 2FA, whitelisting addresses and IP, and email encryption are implemented to protect against fraudulent withdrawals - all without the need for ID verification.

I think, to be on the safe side, we should now expect to be asked to verify at some point. I really detest the idea of sending my ID and selfies too, but I'm afraid this is the way it's going to be from now on.

Yeah, realistically, you are never going to be able to "beat those whales" if you're talking about those huge buy orders. Those are bots, by the way, I'm sure of it. I've seen massive sell orders keep adjusting to 1 satoshi cheaper than my order immediately after I place mine (and that happens throughout the day at any time, always immediately). When I see that happen, then I just mess around with it, putting the minimum price to force that bot to trade at the nearest buy order, just to see that even a little of that wall disappear.

I probably didn't do much to dent the whale, nor did I beat it, this is just my way of shaking a stick at the system

I miscalculated and have only 60 points this week, heh. Got to thank Arsenal for a second successive 2-0 to shore up my terrible predictions. Liverpool's been my biggest headache all season, predicting with my emotions. But who knows, maybe they'll get in gear at Man Utd...

Well done to StephenCurry for extending his lead at top spot. But I think congratulations are in order for unyil. This was his first week and he's hit us for 160 points, the highest of anyone this week!

Yeah, I doubt you'd have seen a confirmation if you entered an invalid address, as above. If you want to double check, just look at the confirmed transaction and load the transaction ID on explorer. If that's not available, check the address you've withdrawn to on a blockchain explorer. It should show the transaction you just requested, whether or not it's confirmed. If you don't see anything there... then you open a support ticket. Been 7 hours now.

Yikes, it's really unfair to say Japan's a scam country just because it was where Mt Gox was based. Mind you, the CEO was French - but once more, nationality has nothing to do with what happened there. The law is still playing catch up to Bitcoin exchanges. On the bright side, one could say that if something like Mt Gox didn't happen, we may never have seen the early steps that were needed to reach this point. Japan's government may still have a lot to do (and 11 out of 50 exchanges who applied were approved means it isn't just some lip service) but this would be the type of legal protection you would need to prevent another MG.

Good job on the guy who got scammed for going to the police. You'd be surprised to hear just how many people get away with exactly the same kind of deals from Meet-in-person / face-to-face trades, when the victims simply do nothing about it. It's somewhat a natural reaction as victims tend to feel embarrassed or even shameful, particularly when dealing with Bitcoin!

Lessons to be learnt: always request escrow on Localbitcoins. Don't let the 5% or 10% higher cash offers on F2F trades tempt you. Second lesson, always have evidence to back you up in case things go wrong.

On one hand, I feel that businesses who want to use Bitcoin need to understand better how fees work, how to make inputs more efficient, how to keep transactions to a minimum, how to use batch transactions, how to take advantage of network congestion, etc. I made all the newbie mistakes. Withdrawing multiple times from faucets (creating a lot of dust inputs), not planning deposits in advance (requiring immediate transfers with high fees when network is congested), for example.

On the other, if Bitcoin is touted as an alternative payment method and if it hopes for smaller SMEs and merchants to adopt it, if it needs propagation across economies, then yeah, it has to scale. And it already is addressing this.

Hey there, didn't realise you had your own thread here. I know it's already a lot of predictions, but won't you find it easier for people to see your results (and probably an instant form of advertisement for your betting prowess) if you edit the thread title to show total wins/losses as well as cumulative % profit/loss?

Tempted to add you to my already fat list of tipsters, but would have an easier time tracking if everyone had a historical record.

Well Spurs already killed me at 3-0 since I predicted 2 goals to nil. I also better stop predicting 1-1 draws for Manchester Utd as they seem to hit me with massive wins.

So far only 40 points this week from 3 wins and 1 draw outcome. Hopefully Chelski give me the 2-1 win I put in amd Liverpool make good on 3-0. Last week also gave me 40 points on last games. League tables not updated so can't see how far down I slid haha.

Haven't you heard? Bitcoin has thousands of decentralised representatives ranging from individuals to corporations - none in a formal relationship of course, since there can be no way for an official representation for Bitcoin (that's a difference with ETH when I start comparisons). A lot of them think the other is a misrepresentation, some believe they are the angels, others who denounce it publicly are even in some way representatives against Bitcoin.

On a more serious note, here are some organisations whose missions are Bitcoin advocacy: Bitcoin Foundation, Bitcoin Suisse, Bitcoin Center NYC and Bitcoinfest.

Now if only we could get someone from one of the news agency to send a proper investigative team down there for a full story! Bitcoinization or not, we probably need a few more countries to descend the depths of Venezuela's economy (while having the infrastructure to support Bitcoin) before we can have a few case studies. There's a host of countries in East Africa experiencing some of the same issues (hyperinflation and alternative currency market) but these just don't have entry points for crypto (thinking of South Sudan and their spiralling pound, and Somaliland where people already don't use fiat).

Sensationalism aside, this really is going to be something for economists to look at.

If mining 200,000 satoshi makes one a huge proponent of Bitcoin, I guess we can call those users script mining while surfing faucet and torrent sites hardcore advocates of Bitcoin.

This is not much different from the millions of businesses who bought a domain name, put up a "under construction" placeholder to index.html and then proudly claimed that they were huge advocates of the Internet.

Actually, this isn't a coincidence at all. It was precisely the Mt Gox scandal that started the ball rolling on regulating Bitcoin (exchanges) in Japan. In the aftermath of MtGox, the finance ministry first looked to the international community - probably in a daze of confusion over what cryptocurrency was but very soon after realised that it had to start with a national move. In 2014, the FSA got together their lawmakers and began the drafting the legislation that would bring lawful recognition of Bitcoin and regulation of exchanges. That final draft was shared only last year and the bill was passed as law this year, beginning April 1.

And they haven't forgotten Mt Gox at all. In July, trials for the ex CEO of Mt Gox started in Tokyo and is still ongoing.

Not quite full circle, but they're getting there.

It actually sounds like a good idea. If something as complicated and sensitive as banking transactions can be performed using blockchain, I don't see why the same couldn't be done for voting. Certainly some of the features are perfect to what a fair voting process should be. Some of the problems brought up by posters here and some possible solutions, trying to stick to very basic levels:


There are so many state and non-profit electoral watchdogs who already spend huge budgets trying to ensure fair elections. If you had a working blockchain solution, I guarantee it will cost less. That's incentive enough (besides the incentive of transparent, immutable and verifiable votes!). Besides, plenty of other protocols besides PoW.



Knowing an address doesn't equate to knowing the identities. It's basically the same thing as getting your voter# on an electoral roll assigned to you. Just because your voter# is known, doesn't mean they know your identity. People don't just go into voting booths with masks to cast their votes, in your country, do they? Besides, if that's really a problem, implement some anonymous protocol similar to Monero and you hide the address of the voter.