In case it was unclear, I don’t respect you.

In addition to the above, you failed to respond to my criticism and instead resorted to ad-hominem attacks.

You have a different definition of respect than I do.

Perhaps you should learn what it means to respect someone who doesn’t want something.

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Am on mobile and voted yes because I misclicked. I meant to vote 🗳 no.

Trump is not in your poll (To win the presidency). 

I expect Sanders to make it past the early primaries because of his grassroots fundraising ability and as such will likely be one of the last to be eleminated from contention. Out of those who have a realistic chance of winning the nomination, he has the least damaging platform as the party has moved far to the left.

Biden is very well known and may win the primary but if he does, he may have exposure from his potential involvement in the spying on the trump campaign (this mat have to do with why trump hasn’t declassified relevant information that many are calling for).

Harris was too hard on crime during her time as CA AG which will make her struggle with those who might have voted for her because of identity politics.

Booker has written he has sexually assaulted a woman in the past and should have no chance of winning the presidency because of this.

Pocahontas has too much baggage from pretending to be an Indian for her own personal financial gain and it will be easy to highlight the unfairness of forced “diversity” in addition to the fact she is a fraud.

Klobuchar Is too moderate to have a realistic chance. She has the least damaging platform of those I am familiar with. The WSJ editorial board endorsed her candidacy.

Beto Francis seems to have come out of nowhere and likely raised as much as he did because Democrats were trying to win the Senate and that seat was the easiest path to do so.

Gillibrand has changed her views so dramatically it is difficult to tell what kind of administration she would run. She appears to take whatever position she thinks is most popular and has the best chance of getting elected. I don’t think she is a serious candidate.

Everyone else I either don’t know enough about, haven’t heard of and/or doesn’t have a realistic chance of making it past the early primaries.

I suspect someone with extreme views/platform will win the nomination and lose to trump. Trumps criminal reform will likely get some moderates on the left to vote for him and more will vote for him once the effects of his tax cuts are more well known and understood by the masses.

The forum will never hold users’ money.

People are free to open LN channels and send tips if they so choose.

hisori approached me via PM and offered similar rates. I tole him I would require advance payment and that I would want to review what I would be advertising before agreeing to any deal, to which he replied in essence he would not pay in advance. I responded I would be willing to use escrow at his expense, but did not hear back, although he likely hit his PM limit when he sent his second message.

He is not making a fake vouch (or any vouch for that matter), he is only disagreeing with your conclusion that on its face that thread is a scam.

I think vb2005 is wrong, as I think the claims the OP made in that thread regarding the specs of their miner are fraudulent on its face. However this is based on my own experience, and if anyone wants to disagree with me, I am willing to back up my position with my reasoning.

I don't think it is appropriate to label someone a scammer because they disagree with you as to what is automatically a scam in non-explicit cases. It would be more appropriate to explain to him why you believe his conclusions are incorrect/inaccurate, and hopefully he will change his position. 

Perhaps his (what I believe to be) flawed reasoning is due to his inexperience. Some in this thread say patriotism might be influencing his stance. His worldview might be causing him to make this conclusion. Or maybe he is in fact a shill of that scammer.

I would not say it is a foregone conclusion that vb2005 is a shill, and I cannot rule out other reasonable possibilities. Until and unless you can reasonably rule out alternatives to him being a shill (within reason), a negative is not appropriate.

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You can ignore anything suchmoon says. She will never tell anyone with power they are wrong, except in a dispute with two people in power, in which case she will take the side of the one with more power. She is a "yesman", or in her case, a "yeswomen" and should not be taken seriously. Any advice you get from her will not be useful to you.

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tagging either one of these people is not going to prevent anyone from being scammed. Potential customers can read Phil's comments and reach the conclusion not to do business with that person. Tagging vb2005 is certainly not going to prevent this specific scam. 

No. in the above example, a 50 bit, no collateral loan is being made after the “down payment” is accounted for. There is no reason to require a down payment.

You could make this same argument for anyone who has a very substantial stash of coins. I believe Tim Draper purchased enough coins from the DOJ (who got them from SR/DPR) to do similar damage that you describe. The Gox trustee is in a similar situation (who actually represents the interests of thousands of people), and ACTUALLY DID crash the price by nearly 2/3 in late 2017/early 2018 by selling off a portion of its stash. Once the GOX coins are eventually distributed to former accountholders, there is a good chance many will sell, similarly crashing the price as if a single person was selling as many coins.

Similarly, we do not know if satoshi is one person or a group of people. We also do not know if he was mining for himself or mining for many people when he was mining -- for example, 10 people could have each given him a list of addresses to payout the block rewards to, and satoshi used a custom implementation payout the block rewards to those addresses.

You are highlighting a flaw in a POW based cryptocurrency that has diminishing block subsidies. I believe etherum initially had a solution to this by never dropping the block subsidy to nearly zero, and having constant, small inflation (which actually also solves some economic problems, but that is off topic here). IOTA's solution to this problem was to require a small amount of POW to confirm your own transactions, and have nothing resembling a block reward.

Your solution also will only delay the inevitable when these long unspent coins are "recycled" back to the miners. It would also encourage spending coins without a corresponding economic transaction, which will result in higher tx fees for everyone. 

A lot of the controversial ratings are highlighting what is often a far cry from a "red flag" although it is often framed this way; there is often a weak/no link between the highlighted "red flag" and the potential to scam in the future. There are also some instances in which someone is displaying a lot of actual red flags, and would be appropriate for them to be labeled a "scammer" because the only reasonable explanation is they plan on scamming in the future.

I would argue when there are a small number of "red flags" AND when all the red flags taken together do not indicate this person will (try to) scam in the future, a neutral would be most appropriate.   


The guidelines have little effect if you are explicitly saying you will not enforce them (within the DT network).

If you have a set of rules and exceptions are consistently being made (or not being made) to a certain person or group of people, then perhaps there is a problem. If there is clear overreach, without accountability or at least an explanation or defense of a rating, there is another problem.

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When the DT system was first introduced (or at least when I joined the forum), those on DT1 were businesspeople with a lot of (ongoing) trading/business experience within the forum. These people would select who would be on their trust lists, and when someone they "sponsor" did something wrong, their reputation would somewhat suffer, especially if this person was not removed from their trust list. A good example of this happening was CITM who had an outsized trust list that was not kept up with, which resulted in many scammers eventually getting onto DT via him; after some time, it became widely known his trust list was not good, and there became calls for him to be removed from DT1 (IIRC, he was only removed when he gave a frivolous rating to Dogie, which IMO was far too late).

I think a good solution to DT troubles is to display the sponsor of each rating for ratings given by someone not directly on a person's trust list. For example, if I was looking at kano's trust page, I would see a rating from -ck, who is in my trust network because theymos, OgNasty and cyrus all sponsor him, who are all in my trust network because they are trusted by DefaultTrust, so adjacent to ck-'s rating would be an indication I am seeing this rating because of themos, OgNasty and cryus, and that each of them are in my trust network because of DefaultTrust. This would give a bigger incentive for those on DT1 to maintain a trust list comprised of good/accurate/fair ratings.

In addition to the above, the DT1 selection criteria should be changed back to those who have an ongoing business interest in the forum marketplace.   

Actually there isn’t any allegation that they have done anything that is reasonably described as a scam or scam attempt, not on their trust page or elsewhere. The negative feedback they have is from people not liking trying to get people to distrust Lauda and using negative trust to discourage others from siding with them. 

I don’t think any of them are particularly trustworthy, don’t have any of them on my trust list and certainly would not trust them with money. I would treat them as any other person with neutral trust and little/no trading history.

I don’t really understand why so many people are willing to defend lauda. He is a scammer who has extorted at least one person (unsuccessfully), is not transparent in his business dealings to the extent it is likely he was advertising multiple scams and stole hundreds of bitcoin (priced at 10k+) in his escrow dealings and is very immature. I have not seen him provide any original research in finding alleged scammers, as he is mostly reacting to reports found in reputation and scam accusations. If you ask my opinion, I would say he is using his title of “scam buster” to shield himself from criticism and from being held accountable for stealing from others.

This sounds like a scam. There is no reason to ask for this. 🧻

With the Green New Deal^TM, fossil fuels will be eliminated, so no matter how much electricity crypto mining uses, it will not add to global CO2 output.

Electricity will also probably be too expensive (and unreliable) for mining to make sense unless price or difficulty changes dramatically if the GND is passed.

Bitcointalk was something that helped get Bitcoin off the ground and sparked adoption from near zero levels. While Bitcoin was very new, most people involved in Bitcoin (and the forum) largely valued their privacy/anonymity and had high levels of technical expertise. Companies had a fairly small customer base and as such did not need to communicate with customers as efficiently as possible.

Today, many Bitcoin (and crypto) users have much less technical expertise and value privacy less. Being that Facebook, Twitter and reddit are already used by many, newer Bitcoin users are likely to already have accounts on these platforms, and as such, to interact with others in regards to crypto. With bitcointalk not being very good to communicate with customers efficiently, companies will not push their customers onto bitcointalk to communicate, but rather to platforms such as FB, telegram and zendesk.

Having many people labeled as scammers by people who are not held accountable, and are labeled as scammers for arbitrary reasons, often unrelated to being a scammer is not helping anything.

If bitcointalk is going to grow, there will need to be better tools for companies to interact with customers. One solution might be to allow multiple people access a single PM inbox without having to share a single password. For example, "cryptostore" might have their customer send a PM with a problem, one employee might respond, and when the customer responds, a different employee could respond. This could be done by allowing multiple login credentials to access a single account, with different access levels (such as the ability to post, send PMs, and add/revoke access to either of these). The "mother" account could be a premium (paid) account and PM limits to these types of accounts could be lifted.

Perhaps buying a copper membership (or some other premium membership) should be a requirement to wear anything except for a very basic signature, and the same to participate in any of the bounty subs.

You could even say everyone will be walled off from wearing a signature unless they buy a copper membership.

I am not aware of any allegation that anyone in that thread has stolen money/property, or tried doing the same, nor am I aware of any of those people doing anything that might be consistent with a long con. Do you care to explain why you believe these people are untrustworthy?

Perhaps you should review Lauda's sent trust and evaluate that statement again.

Most of his sent trust ratings are for SMAS blacklist (a potential moderation issue, not a trust issue), someone potentially having a lot of alts, sometimes in signature campaigns (not reasonably a "scammer" by any reasonable definition), criticizing him (not in any way a scammer), breaking forum rules (a moderation issue, not a trust issue), and disagreeing with him (not in any way a scammer).

These people are alts.

Also this is very likely a scam.

Chase is actually using Blockchain technology to implement a stable coin such as tether and the Gemini Dollar. I don’t believe they are even using etherum as most other stablecoins do.

Diamond’s comments were in relation to Bitcoin specifically, and not crypto nor Blockchain technology.

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Im not sure why you think this.

Banks, like all other corporations, exist to provide the most long term value to their shareholders. They can listen to their customers, however if they do, they will do so for business reasons whose purpose is to increase the long term value of their business.

Interesting data.

I would be curious to see any patterns of trust circles in which a group of people all trust each other.

If memory serves me correctly, some of the accounts associated with bitcoin Black Friday were purchased accounts.

Presumably, the OP purchased his account from someone who also sold the bitcoin Black Friday accounts to those scammers.

Obviously if he was actually part of that scam, he shouldn’t be forgiven.

How many people do you think would participate in such a thread?