Just to weigh in on my experience, I was able to deposit and withdraw crypto (Bitcoin mainly but also a few other alts) without any verification request. I know that as recently as last year, you were even allowed to withdraw fiat (bank transfer or other payment processor) as long as it was below the limit of a a basic account. That's different now and any fiat withdrawal requires AML/KYC verification with personal documents. This was the exact same experience across exchanges I've used, including Bittrex, Poloniex.

The newest exchange I used was ViaBTC when it opened around the time of the fork, and I was also allowed to deposit and withdraw without document verification. But you can't even enter a bank account now without document verification.

Note: at all sites I did opt to verify Phone Number, which elevates you to Basic Verified account, higher limits basically.

AFAIK, there isn't any exchange that will send you fiat without doc verification anymore. Even if you manage to find one, wouldn't recommend you try if you're not prepared to disclose your identity.

Despite what you might think of the guy, he actually is a lot more sensible than most of the company he keeps... and good journalists/editors have a way of leading interviews into good reports, which is the treatment I believe the South Koreans gave here

While I can't wholeheartedly support the way Ethereum is managed, I suppose ongoing development is, after all, focused on mitigating the issues that Buterin can foresee with the network. All these apps jumping on, especially from states and corporations, it seems to unsettle him and the other developers  he brought on board, in a good way that's forced them to rethink their direction over the years.

But he must be also thinking inwardly about how these centralized ICOs are a projection of projects like Ethereum. And no, I'm not the radical libertarian here to think everything must be decentralised.

Cloud mining, at best, returns your capital after many months. The best ones I've seen are from Genesis and ViaBTC's ones, but only when you get the pre-ordered contracts. Those get you at break even after 7 to 8 months.

Prior to end of 2016, you will see that a lot of users complained that they lost money: mainly due to the halving as a poster experienced, but also because Bitcoin price fluctuated. A lot of those "profiting" from cloud mining since are really only benefitting from the price increase. Coin for coin, the ROI is still projected after 7 to 8 months. In other words, you'd have made the same or more if you'd just bought coins and held.

The recent sharp drop in mining difficulty also probably earned a lot of coins for contracts. In other words, you'd have made the same or more if you mined it on your own.

The risks are too high for a relatively small return. I made up my mind about cloud mining a long time ago and I'm still as convinced that it's not worth it. Nevertheless, good luck.

I hope you manage to keep this til the very end - when your contract is terminated or expires. At the very least, this experiment will add documented evidence (lacking on the Internet).

So it looks like the 4-match parlay above would have proven to be a very nice win, but all narrow ones. I am either not confident enough in my own assessments or I just keep getting luckier when I don't bet


It looks like we chose completely different match ups on last night's games! Always trying to learn from other players' picks. I felt PSG were worth the money too but thought wrongly that Bayern would end their PSG hoodoo finally. I also thought Basel would lose but then the result swings completely to the other direction

Yeah, I couldn't find that option on my sportsbook either, so looks like I'm going to sit this one out. Was quite lucky last night on a parlay but something tells me I should just relax and enjoy the games tonight.

Edit: Qarabag just scored their first ever CL goal too, and I was so sure Roma would thrash them. Maybe I was right to sit on my hunches

Didn't expect to get Champions League deja vu so quickly, but last night threw up a few surprising results, just like Tuesday night last week. My poor Liverpool served up quite the expected unexpected draw so maybe that's not going to be a surprise after a while if they keep suiciding like that. Monaco though? Didn't watch that game so can only imagine a lot of luck in that score.

I still got a nice parlay on Spurs, Real and City winning quite comfortably as it turns out but I'm going not going to risk another one tonight. However, I still think it's a good bet on tonight's trio of Chelsea, Barca and Old Lady... and top off any parlay with Roma too. Can't see Qarabag winning or even drawing any of their games.

Read the first post and then decided to look a bit down the path, the idea was probably very original at the time of posting. Must admit I'm surprised to see how far it has come. From website, I see a lot of awards but not a single organisation mentioned? Perhaps these partnerships are yet to begin?

What is most interesting was the blog post regarding your work in the wake of the recent Italian earthquake. My commendations, by the way! But what I would like to know more here.

Are you able to provide more information on the Legambiente case study? I come from a non-profit career, working especially in natural disaster and conflict. Especially directly on the ground in the early days of the emergency, most organisations suffer from poor accountability. This is most painfully apparent months and years after the operation, when donors are demanding for accurate and transparent accounting and reporting - which most local standards fail to meet.

Are you someone I could contact for more info? We can follow this up in PM, if you prefer.

Been a year this week since MGT's launch and rather surprisingly, no McAfee style update on their news section or even a Happy Birthday from Bitmain. Can't say if the edge that MGT purportedly has is really any better than what others have. Unfortunately, the burden of proof is on them. If I were curious enough, I'd wonder what kind of hashing power they have now, especially with the reported expansion last month. Doesn't seem like they've opened up McAfee pool yet?

I've seen some early work on tech that (on paper, at least) looks like it might rival or even surpass MGT's claimed advanced and secure UI. easyMINE is one (and no, I don't buy theirs either).

Yes, it is an article about bitpetite, and that's the whole point. It's masquerading as a news article purporting that people are getting rich by investing their money into bitpetite, allegedly a bitcoin tumbler. People think "wow I better take this chance to earn easy money. It's illegal but untraceable, what a find!".

What really happened: bitpetite runs a ponzi HYIP script, it pays to have that article published. People get clickbaited. So they get "legitimate" marketing instead of advertising themselves as a HYIP.

No decent tumbler will open public investments like that, and give fixed interest. And as someone pointed out, there are referral links with commissions so that's something like 15% on day 1 including commissions.

P.S. Malwarebytes blocks bitpetite.

Hello again Loyce, thanks for the PM! I'd almost forgot about this to be honest. Anyway, I've just made the spend to the deposit address assigned. Shouldn't take longer than an hour to confirm. Checking on Peercoin (my pick) now, I guess there isn't a better time to buy them. In fact, most of the picks look ripe for buying, even your GBYTE!

The "pot" we are about to start with is worth some $390 right now. Good luck, everyone, and thanks again for hosting Loyce

Nice calls on Tennis and Champions League, Carles! I made a risky 3-match parlay myself on Sevilla, Man City and Hotspurs. Spurs were the risk actually, as they've got a terrible history of ruining themselves in Europe. But they did OK and now Liverpool look like the ones to make it tough on themselves this season.

Anyway, hope you've got a nice parlay for Wednesday Champs L... if possible, try not to post them too late!

You have to trace back the history of Japan's Financial Services Authority (FSA - the agency responsible for monitoring bitcoin exchanges) attention on Bitcoin to understand the rationale of this move. It all started in 2014 with the Mt Gox debacle. Japan was caught offguard. Culturally even, this was a slap to their face, a deep embarassment for it to have happened right under their noses. That's when regulators started putting together this idea of regulating exchanges.

The main items on the early draft is evidence of this. Aims to ensure separation of client and company assets (Mt Gox stored bitcoins haphazardly, the CEO even later "found" a USB with a stash), protection against cyberattacks (Mt Gox claimed it was a hack), auditing (MtGox had terrible accounting).

Of course, it's not just all about preventing another Mt Gox, but that was what started Japan's move down this path.

In that context, it cannot be bad. If anything, this restores confidence for those burnt by the scandal. Japan also has insurers now offering cover for bitcoin exchanges, thanks to this regulatory action. Nothing is ruined.

Now isn't it nice how you sorted out your own problem - and now have a solution that benefits an important part of this forum? I've seen a couple of sites and/or services now offering automated campaign management but this is the first time I've seen evidence of it actually existing. I am certain a lot of managers wouldn't mind paying a small fee if it cut down their time on manual checking.

I'm not sure I would advocate for campaign participants to use this service as well... applicants who fill in incomplete forms or don't follow rules should just be excluded by "natural selection". On the other hand, it can be helpful to avoid not meeting requirements (unintentionally).

Could even extend the service with more sophistication to normal forum users to screen post history and inform of possible violation (wrong section posting, wrong format used, etc.).

Here's how you find out: follow the news/media trail.

1. Choose the biggest ICOs you want to track.
2. Use a search engine to look for news articles talking about their ICOs. Follow the links to these news articles. If they're on a news portal or media site, then look on the main page for Press Release or Marketing or Promotional or PR services. You'll find some charge per article, others have an entire package to promote projects/ICOs.

Alternatively, search google for "marketing campaigns X project/ICO". Might throw up some interesting partnerships

I want to say some names but I don't like giving PR people free PR

Sadly, this is a great example of subtler marketing for ponzis masquerading as businesses. Definitely a paid article. You can either frown on Bittox for helping promote scams but then you'd have to go after all these news/media portals and force them to have stricter screening, since any number of ICOs have done similar "news" stories to bait users. This is an extreme level of shadiness, though. Should just dox the people who paid for this article, I bet you'd open a whole can of ponzi sites.

Thanks for that guys, as usual a lot more helpful than the article itself. my initial SW and LN interest was because of the possibility for rapid and scheduled p2p exchanges, especially between parties that do it a lot.

I thought of it in the context of a personal example, say, as a freelancer with multiple fixed clients, some of whom pay a quasi-fixed rate on time count and on product count. Both sides still manually keep track for bookkeeping purposes, including scheduling and rates. But because of accounting, we have to fix the rate retrospectively (after txs are confirmed) and that is a huge pain during network bloat. Blockchain.info now stamps the value at time of confirmation so that's very helpful but an indefinitely open p2p channel would be "my dream".

Why this news was interesting was I didn't know this could be done cross chain. This addresses another part of my problem as different clients use different alts (hence current need for clumsy DEX)! Exciting times!

Yep! These old-school commentators really need to catch up with the times. China is not that slow, overbearing Communist regime the West would still like to think it is. This was not a knee-jerk reaction, but a swift series of events that just caught the market by surprise. The broad and over-arching capital outflow reasoning is far more rational, even if that alone is unlikely to be the sole mover.

Also, if 2017's Bitcoin (should we say crypto, though?) economy isn't a threat, this doesn't explain similar reactions from the Chinese administration as far back as 2014.

Things won't return to the way they were for sure, but whatever new environment China wants its economies to operate in will be the new normal.

Just keep safe, buddy, I'm sure you can do it next week. And yeah! 2 correct scores and it hauled me back up to 100. I think more than half of us took the right score on Arsenal, though I was sure it was all over when Jay Rodriguez was chopped down in the box. No penalty and shot saved by Cech, and we all got our 2-0 win. These are the margins of football, eh?

Anyway guys, a reminder that BBC Week 7 is up, so enter all your picks now to save heartache. I still got Liverpool on a 3-0 win away at good old Rafa's Newcastle!

At first, my reaction was "poor guys, they have to cough up almost double the money just to get something that everyone should be able to get at the same rates. Then I came to my senses and realised that these guys buying Bitcoin at that price were probably loaded with cash anyway (hence the willingness to buy so costly). And not to play to stereotypes but in countries like Zimbabwe, if you were super rich, then you probably got there through status or some less than honest way.

Isn't there an international exchange accepting Zim at the moment? I thought Western Union was there.

@ajax are you sure you just didn't have a bad week like I did?
@toke come on, there are 32 games left and plenty of upsets and surprises, don't throw in the towel yet.
@unyil man you got some balls to come in and play after missing 6 weeks, but welcome to the BCT league!

And hey, there's still tonight's final game of the week to throw up 40 points. Maybe tonight's the night overtake you, hilarious.