It depends on a few factors, but in general VPNs do not make you 100% anonymous. They only give you a false feeling of anonymity and using them might even get you banned, depending on the casino ToS.

In fact, some VPNs are logging a lot of crucial data about you. McAfee Safe Connect logs your IPs, timestamps, browsing history and even what other software you have installed. The list of the stuff they collect is quite scary, check it out here.

Also check out these policies:

Hoxx VPN: "We may share your data with our services providers (...). We have contracts with our service providers that prohibit them from sharing the information about you that they collect or that we provide to them with anyone else, or using it for other purposes."
Hola VPN: "We may also transfer or disclose Personal Information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies."
McAfee Safe Connect: "We may share Personal Information in the following ways: (..) To legal, governmental, or judicial authorities as instructed or required by those authorities and applicable laws, or in relation to a legal activity, such as in response to a subpoena or investigation of suspected illicit or illegal activities, or where we believe in good faith that users may be engaged in illicit or illegal activities, or where we are bound by contract or law to enable a customer or business partner to comply with applicable laws;"

As you can see, the examples above are quite scary. VPNs may unlock some content that is unavailable in your country, but they surely do not make you anonymous at all - and I think people who are using VPNs are more likely to be checked out by the gov than those who do not try to go off the grid at all.

Dogecoin reaching $1 is funny. It's been stagnant for a very long time now and spikes were to be expected. It's just another pump that'll end into nothing more but few traders cashing in and many inexperienced traders losing money like always. If there's one coin that almost always gave traders opportunities to buy, hold and play with pumps & dumps, it's Doge. Expecting it to go to $1 is quite silly imo

Knowing your real IP without also knowing any other personal information doesn't make you anonymous though, does it?

You're automatically giving up your real IP and an e-mail address you own upon registering; KYC makes it so that you also willingly give up other critical information of yours in order to be accepted on the website (or in order to extend some features of your account).

Just think about it: you use the same IP to register 2 accounts under the same e-mail, out of which one is supposedly "anonymous" and the other is an exchange you've completed KYC on. As soon as the KYC is complete, you literally fully de-anonymize yourself on the former account. Not to mention other fingerprints you leave behind, including but not limited to the way you write, your English skills, your browser fingerprint, your activity (part of which is tracked on a large part of the currently existing websites) etc. If IP wasn't an issue, Tor Browser, Tails, Qubes etc wouldn't exist.

So if we want anonymity, we should start studying this stuff from zero instead of jumping in the misleading "crypto anonymizes your accounts" train. First and foremost, the biggest flaw in this argument is that you literally automatically give up enough information to be identified by a bad actor (incuding the state) when visiting a website.


A good potential solution to all of the above might be launching a crypto gambling website on an Onion link that has no JS requirement and allows Mail2Tor registration. But that would completely kill off the fun as no JS means no more fast-paced gambling. For sports betting however, it might not be a problem - so that could even turn into a combination of JS-required gambling (blackjack, dice etc) and a no-JS part of the website that allows bet placing for sports gambling. Biggest issue here is that only very few are looking for privacy to the extremes, so not sure how successful a such website would really be.

If you want to compare BTC to Gold, then compare the fact that the easiest way you can buy Gold is in grams, forcing you to spend >$30, while you can buy Bitcoin worth as much as you like. It's affordable for everyone, but +80% believe "affordable" means the ability to buy 1 entire BTC. If it was that way, we would've needed 10 billion BTC and it would have probably been.

Hypothetically speaking, if we want to promote the idea of Bitcoin and internet freedom, in case of a domain owner willing to turn a Bitcoin-related one into an anti-BTC campaign should be free to do so without being censored. Guess it's also why a lot of BSV shills are still on here promoting it.

How does it really help if theymos copies bitcoin.org to bitcointalk.org? In case bitcoin.org turns into a crappy anti-BTC propaganda, that'll open up a big door for whoever wants to start another website and promote the real coin and the legit information; the new website with legit info will also be added to whatever big website is currently promoting the "bitcoin.org" links.

Even if bitcoin.org changes and theymos copies the current website, absolute newcomers will still initially believe the "bitcoin.org" domain is the legit one. So the only thing really changing is that you now have 2 different domains, that's it. Newcomers will not know which is the legit one anyway - the only ones knowing about this change would be us.

I do not have any idea where you got this information from, but there is no such thing as "Bitcoin Managers" or using Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme.

We theoretically do not need to stop any of these scams in any way. We are looking towards being a censorship-free community, right? If so, then stopping scams can only be done through censorship. There's nobody managing Bitcoin. KYC can still be avoided, nobody forces you to get into IEOs and ICOs and the "they collect money from people in Claim to trade for them" actually exists under a legal form, called Mutual Funds.

I guess it could be a good thing to keep a backup and do this in case something goes wrong with the current bitcoin.org website? Like, is there any need right now to copy the stuff to the bitcointalk.org domain?

Anyways, I think there shouldn't need to be any issue even if the bitcoin.org ownership somehow goes wrong, as long as the website still continues to show and promote the correct information about Bitcoin (unlike bitcoin.com). Is there anything I'm missing?

Imagine having a money printing machine you could use at any given time to print any given amounts of USD bills.
Now imagine having a digital USD and a supply that costs literally $0 to increase or decrease to your willing.

Besides a short term "safe" spot in case of parabolic price chances, it's really a double-risk. If you want to go that way, you'd be better off holding some USD bills instead.

1. You buy BTC
2. You buy something off the Internet with some of it
3. You gamble the rest without mixing your coins, using your real IP or name

Your anonymity is already gone. Gone after the fingerprints you left in the immutable ledger. Full anonymity would probably only happen if a coin such as XMR ever gets to have gambling DApps to combine the privacy features of the coin with blockchain-based bets. Otherwise, the "full anonymity" mostly falsely remains in your head.

The article even gets crypto payments the wrong way around:


Payments with crypto in general do not provide anonymity and even when using XMR it's of no help if you're using a centralized platform. Moreover, using XMR, VPN or both possibly triggers a KYC request from the website before you are allowed to withdraw any money from it. Try registering on Binance with Mail2Tor through Tor Browser and then depositing some XMR, trading and finally withdrawing - can you? I assure you the answer is 99% negative.

So yeah, privacy is mostly gone right now and I see it worse when it comes to gambling. I'm usually very much against the way privacy gets stripped away from us however, but I am personally fine with it strictly when it comes to betting. It provokes addiction and there are some age groups I guess we all want to keep off it.

Guess that's why we are all here for. Older members may go away from the forum at one point and maybe you'll be their replacement. It's called "community" for a reason! You learn on the go. I still have so much to learn but I'm getting there - and it's interestingly linked to my rank & merits. The more I learn, the closer I get to the next rankup basically. Keep it up and someday you'll become the one to answer questions yourself.

Starts to feel great as soon as you get past Sr. Member imo. It's mostly the fact that you start realizing you're slowly getting into the rank groups where there are some members you have always looked up to. Otherwise, nothing much. It feels like an eternity for a shitposter to get rankups, but once you get how it works and stay here for the community & not for bounties/campaigns, you should be doing fine.

My best guess is that you have either received a QR code for your phone to insert a Bitcoin address on some link or you have received a private key (paper wallet) from the ATM after the money has been inserted and the scammer sweeped your money as soon as you sent the picture to them. Is there a "Private Key" on that picture or do you not have it at all anymore? Do you have the receipt? (do not post it or send it anywhere, just asking for a confirmation)

If the scammer has redeemed your BTC, it's just gone. Best thing you can do is give the phone number and a copy of the chat logs, receipt or any other information you have to the police (or the FBI, maybe it's a case they're interested in).

Next time, be 1000x more careful and think about possible consequences of your actions. If the scammer told you even the SIN and told you to withdraw all your money and go deposit it in an ATM, chances are the scammer might even be a very bad actor planning to wait for you to arrive at the ATM with tons of money and do something much worse to you than inserting an address.

Be it legally checked through customs or not, I would personally not trust that HW anymore. My advise is.. just keep it aside. IMO it's not worth it to risk. Although the hardware wallet might've been unboxed at customs, is there really any assurance the HW hasn't been tampered with along its way or even beforehand?

I'm especially paranoid when it comes to blockchain stuff; I was a little in doubt even when I received my Nano S directly from their factory. I'd be extra paranoid if the package I had received was open. Chances of receiving a hardware wallet that has been physically tampered with are very very low, but I would not take any chance tbh.

There obviously is a significant matter of luck out there as sports don't always mean the better team wins - you could have a very bad day and get disqualified in no time. But congrats for the final results, 300 ETH and 0.65 BTC is a lot of money to bet in a month. I barely have the guts to play $100 nowadays as I know I'll lose control at one point.

Glad to see someone finally posting a long-term winning result thread - I usually only see attempts that end up as failures, so consider yourself among the lucky ones out here.

We don't need any authorities, institutions and other third parties to help us with risk assessment. You know what, no offense but if someone cannot digest the risk Bitcoin carries then they shouldn't invest in it in the first place. Let's not turn Bitcoin exactly against what Satoshi wanted it to be - the state has been successfully doing this for years now, accelerating the process only does more damage.

You can go right now on Craigslist and get scammed by a too-good-to-be-true offer. Who is it to blame: you or the state for not having an authority to protect you from them? If someone is scammed by sending a Bitcoin to an "Elon Musk giveaway" on YouTube desperately hoping to get 2 BTC in return, that's no one's business and fault except their own.

Scams are everywhere. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Tinder, Telegram, wherever you look. You only need a brain and some research beforehand to be able to distinguish them from legit offers. Bitcoin is an investment. There's no investment without risk. Holding money in your national currency is a risk itself.

Punishment for scamming/abusing people using Bitcoin already exists. We have laws, and they apply no matter if you do criminal activity using USD, BTC or rubber ducks.

There was one app for Android phones that let us do exactly what OP has suggested; you could bet for free using free credits and the top 5 players with most virtual credits at the end of the month would get cash prizes. It's a quite interesting idea, but knowing Bitcoin's volatility .. it's very, very risky.

If you gamble on Bitcoin this way and you think in 5hrs the price will be lower than now, when exactly 5 hours hit there might be a huge 2-min price spike although the market goes very bearish again afterwards. That means you were theoretically right - in 5 hours the price was still lower than when you bet if you exclude the spike, but that one spike would turn it into a huge, annoying loss.

A straight "no" from me. We cannot make sure our data is misused by them. If the authorities can't trust us for having full privacy, why should I trust them for handling my information?

They'll always misuse our data. They always have and always will, but we find out when it's too late (or generations after us do). Just think of how many undisclosed documents there have been hidden from us for so many decades - we basically pay the state to do stuff we don't even know about, and it's disturbing (like Berlin secretly doing this program for 30 years) many more times than it should've been.

It wasn't really supposed to be completely anonymous, there is enough data the governments could've collected to identify a Bitcoin user without any kind of KYC. Place an order online and pay with BTC - they'll register your full name, address, mobile phone, Bitcoin address etc. Make a transaction and you're probably going to expose your real IP. Even without KYC, there are enough ways people would expose themselves.

The difference is, KYC forces you to hand out 100% real information about you and goes way beyond basic personal information.

Most ATMs actually have cameras and are strategically placed so that they can both capture your face and QR codes at the same time. If you want privacy using an ATM, that means following a non-tracked way (streets without cameras) to the ATM with enough stuff on your face to cover your facial features. And I am quite sure that would trigger a KYC especially as some ATM chains verify txs live with the help of a human being.

Except information from flash drives cannot be fully restored using a string of words.

You can literally hand it out to a thief and nothing should happen to it. The thief has 3 attempts to unlock your wallet before the Ledger resets. The only thing you have to take care of is the seed.

Haha, I guess we would've said the same thing about the first computer, only few decades ago.

If there's a little bit of bad intent dust thrown on this machine, the government could literally turn 180 degrees against Bitcoin and do some stuff we don't think we wish for. I see some govs out there capable of doing so, but that is basically war not only against other crypto-supporting countries but against every single Bitcoin user.

As I always say, we will have quantum resistance before they become the norm. As soon as most stuff is quantum-resistant, it would not be a problem anymore to create those machines also for personal use.

Why exactly do you think the BTC sending time would be reduced by using quantum computers?