Here's the new ticket for Saturday's draw:




I make the numbers public so that after each draw, it's easy to verify if I have a winning ticket or not.


Well I am using my real name. There are also archived versions of this thread on archive.is so in the event of a failure to pay, going to the media is always an option.

Plus it would be a guaranteed way to gain God's disapproval. If God is willing to let me win the Powerball jackpot in order to fulfill my dreams of becoming a biochemist then I'm sure an angry God wouldn't hesitate to thwart my plans (e.g. by spontaneously breaking equipment, contaminating cell cultures, etc.). 10% of the Powerball jackpot seems like a small price to pay to make sure that this won't happen.

The draw will be taking place 10 minutes from now!

Here is the current thread snapshot:

http://archive.is/icCSp


No real requirements, other than account age. Just change the signature of the accounts and send me a PM or post a reply in this thread.

Update: The results are in... and no luck unfortunately:

Sadly, it seems my ticket was not a winner:



Results: https://mylotto.co.nz/results

Nobody won the Powerball jackpot, so it has rolled over to $3.2 million ($5 million NZD). The next draw will take place on June 24, 2020. In the event of a first division win, signature campaign participants will be entitled to an equal share of $320,000 (10 percent of $3.2 million). Here is the ticket for that draw:




Back in 2014, I was surprised to see this username was still available. So I registered it. But I am not Mark Karpeles.




The draws take place at ~8:00 PM NZT on Wednesdays and Saturdays so I'll try to take a snapshot of this thread and my PMs immediately before each draw (the last snapshot happened at 7:47 PM). I suppose it's possible for someone to change their signature to the prayer message when the snapshot takes place and then change it to something else after the snapshot is over but that seems more trouble than it's worth. Only wearing the signature after the draw is over and the ticket is confirmed to be a winner wouldn't work since it wouldn't show up in the snapshot.


We have 10+ participants now!

A few of those have posted in this thread and a few have applied via PM only. While not mandatory, those who applied via PM only should also consider posting in this thread to make their participation part of the public record (and also as reassurance in case my account gets hacked).

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I backed up a copy of this thread here:

http://archive.is/2y4BP

The draw for Satuday will be happening in less than 5 minutes from now. Fingers crossed...

Here is the ticket for Saturday's draw:



There are currently 0 members enrolled in this campaign.

Note: I updated the title to the USD value equivalent of $5 million NZD which is $3.2 million.


Well that depends on whether or not you believe in the existence of God and/or the power of prayer.


Odds are 1 in 38,383,800. There is a minimum of four lines per ticket so that works out to 1 in 9,595,950 odds per four-line ticket. The current top prize up for grabs is $4 million NZD so that makes each ticket worth about $0.40 NZD (ignoring lower division prizes and the possibility of a sharing the top prize). 10 percent of that is 4 cents NZD or about 2.6 US cents. If you assume a 50:50 chance of me paying out in the event of a win, then that brings the expected value down to 1.3 cents.

So by changing your signature to the prayer, your overall gain is 1.3 cents on the day of the draw. However, since it's a recurring event, the actual value is limitless and approaches infinity.


I had dreams of becoming a biochemist but had a falling out with my university so this is my plan B.

The New Zealand lottery does have lower tier prizes if you get e.g. 4 or 5 numbers correct but they are so low compared to the top prize that I decided to only make it applicable if I won the top prize (6 numbers + Powerball). I remember slightly over a year ago I got 5 numbers + Powerball but ended up only winning about $1,200 despite the fact that the odds were something like 1 in 200,000.


Payments will be made in BTC (I've since updated the OP). Converting such a huge amount of fiat to BTC would probably take some time but I'll try to get it done within 30 days. There is no maximum limit for participants.


Unless things have changed since I've been away and theymos has instituted a board-wide rule against alt accounts participating in signature campaigns, then they're fine.

Mainly what I don't want is one person registering something like 20 brand new accounts just to put my signature on them (which could be done in a few minutes since creating an account is usually free). Then if there are 25 accounts in the signature campaign and 20 of these are owned by this one person, then they would get nearly all of the 10% and everyone else would only get a few crumbs each and that wouldn't be very ideal.

(Also, active accounts are fine too, but there are much better signature campaigns for those out there. I've updated the OP.)


As stompix said above, I am using my real name. If I don't pay out, you could take it to the editors at Stuff.co.nz or Nzherald.co.nz (basically our two biggest news sites) and they will probably write a scathing article about me calling me a fraudster.

If you have an account that is 1+ year old* and no longer using**, then change your signature to the following and shoot me a PM with your BTC address or post a reply in this thread:


Every Wednesday and Saturday, I will purchase a ticket in the Powerball draw. If I win the top prize in the Powerball draw, 10% of the winnings will be allocated to accounts displaying the signature. The Powerball prize begins at $2.6 million and can jackpot all the way up to $32 million, so if you are the only person with the signature then you could make up to $3.2 million for doing absolutely nothing! If there are two accounts with the signature and one of them is yours, then you could make up to $1.6 million, and so on.

The latest winning numbers can be found here:

https://mylotto.co.nz/results

*Since I don't want to incentivize people making dozens of new accounts, I decided to implement an account age requirement. However there is no posting requirement, so there is no point spamming.

**Active accounts are fine too, but there are much better signature campaigns for those out there. As far as I know, this one is the only one that rewards inactive accounts.

The price of a single bitcoin skyrocketed in the last decade. You would think that this would provide a huge incentive for scientists to do research on time travel. Even if you were to argue that scientists, generally speaking, tend to be motivated by reasons other than money, often times their research is funded by those who do expect to see a return on their investment.

I remember there was a guy called Ronald Mallett who did some experiments with ring lasers about 10 years ago (and whose own motivations for pursuing said research are also equally fascinating) but he hasn't found much success and his theories drew criticism from the scientific community. Other than that, there hasn't been much going on in this field.

If you want to get into the more fringe side of things then a few years ago, someone set up a website selling a time machine called the Hyperdimensional Resonator. But it hasn't found much success either and reviews suggest that it might only work for astral time travel rather than physical time travel, or that it might even be a scam.

The first person who manages to build a working time machine could go back in time to 2009, put a few dollars in Bitcoin (or alternatively, mine it using a standard desktop PC) and emerge a multi-millionaire in just a few short years. Solving a Millennium Prize problem or being the sole winner of a Nobel Prize only gets you a million bucks. And even with time travel, things like lotteries and sports bets are vulnerable to the butterfly effect. Compared to these, investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies seems like an almost foolproof plan in retrospect.

A while back, I decided to check to see if the domain names for defunct services (either ones that went out of business or turned out to be scams) are available or not and each time, without failure, they are still registered. What's even more interesting is that they are constantly being renewed year after year.

Cryptsy.com? Still registered. Gox.com? Registered. Inputs.io? Registered. Bitconnect.com? Registered.

Heck, even the more obscure ones like Altcoinherald.com and Cryptory.com that most people have forgotten about are still registered.

If you typed these addresses in your browser, you'll just see a blank page. At first glance, it seems like they are gone for good. But checking their registration status by doing a WHOIS lookup reveals a different story.

What's the reason for this? Personally, I was interested in registering Altcoinherald.com and using it to set up a Reddit-style website where people could post news articles and press releases on altcoin-related subjects but it looks like I'll have to settle for another domain name instead.

Hi. I'll be studying computational biochemistry in the fall.

I'm mostly a Windows guy but have dabbled with Ubuntu, Mint, and live distros in the past. I have two laptops: an 8th gen i7 with 16 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD and a Celeron with 4 GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD. So far, I've looked into the following distros:

Scientific Linux: Apparently this comes with very few actual science-related software since its main purpose is to provide a consistent environment for HPC clusters/compute servers in big organizations like CERN, Fermilab, etc. who write their own software. Recently discontinued.

Bio-Linux: Leans more towards bioinformatics than computational chemistry. Includes 500 bioinformatics tools on a Ubuntu base. Last version is from 2014.

Poseidon Linux: Used to be a more general science distro but many of the included programs were removed in recent versions. Now primarily aimed at oceanographers.

Debian: Not a scientific distro per se but has optional "pure blend" metapackages containing chemistry and other science tools.

VigyaanCD: Live CD based on Knoppix intended for bioinformatics, computational chemistry, and computational biology. Sounds absolutely perfect but hasn't been updated since 2004.

Fedora Scientific: Seems to be more for data science/numerical computing.

So far, I managed to get Debian up and running and installed the pure blend packages. It seems to be working well so this is what I am leaning towards. Vigyaan doesn't seem to work with my hardware and is too old anyway. Bio-Linux works but with some minor driver issues which are probably fixable. Are there any others I might have missed?

I posted this question on Reddit but got no answers so I thought I'd ask here instead since you guys seem like a knowledgeable bunch. Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone.

I used to play Agar.io a lot during the game's peak of popularity but lost interest as things like college and stuff got in the way. Recently, I went back and found my old accounts and started playing again but since I made so many accounts, I decided to sell some. Now, you might be wondering, why would I buy an account for a "free" game? Well, in Agar.io, you can use coins to purchase things like skins and power ups. However, these coins are not free. If you are a skilled player, you can spend days to weeks earning them manually or buy them from Miniclip (the owners of the game).

Here are the "official" prices for coins on Agar.io:



As you can see, the best deal is the first one, which puts the value of each coin at $99.99/125,000 = $0.00079992. Or roughly 0.08 cents each. These are the accounts I have for sale (more coming soon):

Level 28. 9,406 coins. 50 skins. $5 ($7.50 value not including skins)
Level 28. 34,386 coins. 53 skins. $20 ($27.50 value not including skins)

Edit: Sorry for the lack of information. I accidentally posted this thread prematurely when I pressed the post button rather than the preview button. I will update this thread with more details regarding skins, power boosts, etc. in the coming days.

Ah, thanks for that.

I thought my browser was acting up. Can confirm it works here too.

Hmm... Can anybody else verify this? I've tried for a good 20 minutes so far and it doesn't seem to be working on my end...

Google has flip-flopped on their stance on cryptocurrency ads in the past. Here's an article from 12 months ago when Google completely banned all cryptocurrency-related ads from their program:

https://www.reinisfischer.com/google-adwordsadsense-ban-cryptocurrency-related-ads

And then four months later in October, they (partially) reversed their decision:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/25/17901326/google-cryptocurrency-ads-ban-lift

Even so, they are still fairly restrictive when it comes to cryprocurrency ads. For example, ads for ICOs, crypto wallets, and sites that contain trading or investment advice are not allowed at all. And while ads for exchanges are allowed, there are many hoops that they must go through before being allowed to advertise.

Here is a more detailed article on the current situation:

https://blocksdecoded.com/crypto-advertising-restrictions/

And finally... this is just speculation on my part but one of the benefits (privacy issues aside) of using Google AdSense is personalized advertising. If Google thinks you like sports, then you might be served sports-related ads even if the site isn't about sports. If Google thinks you're from Australia, then you might be served ads for Australian companies even if the site isn't based in Australia. This system works well on most sites but probably less so here, because bitcoiners and cryptocurrency nerds tend to have similar interests (namely Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies) and cryptocurrencies by their very nature are international and do not respect national boundaries.

Yes, people who call Obama and Biden socialists will always vote Republican. However, centrists in swing states who would vote for a moderate democrat like Clinton or Obama might instead refuse to vote at all if Sanders was the only option.


Left-wing populism might work in South America and Europe but I doubt it would work in the States.

The American white working class who probably stand to benefit most from socialist and social democratic policies is also well known for voting against their interests. They are the kind of people who drink beer, shoot guns, and go to church on Sundays. As Trump shows, it's easy to convince them that illegal immigrants taking their jobs are the source of their problems. Convincing them that the capitalist class structure is what failed them is going to be a much harder sell.

Outside of the youth vote, anti-socialist sentiment in the US is too strong for a Sanders win, in my opinion. Biden has more of a chance and his association with the Obama administration will benefit his campaign, but he is also a weaker candidate compared to Obama. Incumbent presidents tend to have an advantage when it comes to winning elections so I think a Trump win is the most likely outcome.

Also with Sanders being 78, Biden being 77, Trump being 73, and Warren being 70 next year, this will probably be the most elderly US presidential election by far.

That's what I suspected. Being a blockchain developer today is like being an aerospace engineer in 1910 or a web developer in 1992.


They're a big accounting firm based in the UK. They tend to be more involved with consulting/advising/auditing the financial matters of a business rather than market speculation. Their clients are usually large businesses and corporations.

Hmm... You're right. The link works when accessed through Google, but fails when accessed directly. Very odd.

Anyway, here's a rough mirror of the original article (same content, just worded differently):

https://cryptoslate.com/major-accountancy-firms-race-to-offer-auditing-services-for-crypto-and-blockchain-companies/

Edit: I've replaced the original link in the OP.

According to this article, PwC hired 400 blockchain experts in 2018:


And that's just one company. That number doesn't count those working for other companies like EY, KPMG, Microsoft, etc.

My question is, where do these companies find them? What qualifies someone to be a "expert" in this field? Given that the cryptocurrency community is still a fairly small and nascent one where everyone knows everyone else, the actual experts tend to be well-known figures, and Bitcoin degrees aren't really a thing yet (other than the one or two rare exceptions), how was PwC able to find 400 of them?

In fact, the number of people who have contributed code to the Bitcoin codebase over the past decade since Bitcoin has been around is only about 500. For Ethereum, it's only about 300.

Or do these companies just treat anyone with a computer science degree to be an expert? (Heck, I'm a computer science student. Can I be a Bitcoin expert too?)

That's social democracy (aka. Nordic capitalism), not socialism.

A strong welfare state might make life a bit more comfortable for the poor but it is still squarely within the framework of a free market capitalist society. There is nothing about removing the capitalist class or abolishing private property or nationalizing large swaths of the economy for example.

In recent years, it's been made more confusing by the fact that many democratic socialists (e.g. Bernie Sanders) and democratic socialist parties in Europe run on what are more accurately described as social democratic platforms. Democratic socialism and social democracy both arose from the same roots but while the former aims to implement socialism gradually over time through democratic reforms, the latter is essentially just capitalism with regulations and a big safety net.