the address isn't "bad". it's just that the owner of the address has not configured it to receive transactions multiple times. tell your friend to read instructions next time instead of blaming it on bitcoin.
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Grue, I understand people might not like these sites...I am in the middle honestly. But it is in the gambling section for a reason. The house always wins in gambling and thus if he makes money so be it. As long as someone besides the owner wins, I don't see a problem with it. However I will agree there has not been any proof that the owner isn't bidding it up or winning these auctions so only time will tell to see if anyone high in trust here can vouch and prove they won an item and rec'd it with no affiliation to the owner prior.
the problem is that penny auction sites obfuscate the house's edge and makes it really easy for the house to cheat.
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two more bids should do it
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Got a war going on between a miner (hes all in with the rest of his address balance) vs. Rhoman. Lets see who wins the only person who's winning in this bidding war is the site owner.
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LOL: 500 Internal Server Error If you are the administrator of this website, then please read this web application's log file and/or the web server's log file to find out what went wrong.
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We don't operate in this way as that would be outright theft. If this was happening, why would we be auto-refunding late bids that didn't get confirmed on time? http://blockchain.info/address/1Run22BoTPt94XbxoeLA24jxbX7sqPmjcWe have set up a system where we either make a profit or loss on each auction. If people want to play, then we will make money; if they don't we will end up shutting down. I realise appreciate why there may be some trust issues at this point, but time will show that we are being honest. That's a strawman. No one never accused of you of stealing the bids.
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Do you have any suggestions how we can prove this is not happening?
This is where Bitcoin needs some kind of identity feature in the protocol; so people could only bid from "verified" addresses.
you can't. that's why the whole penny auction concept is broken. it's free for the auctioneer to bid on his own auction, either openly or through a shrill/proxy. meanwhile, each legitimate player has to pay for each bid he makes, regardless if he wins or not. but each buyer has an incentive to bid all the way up to the market price, so the highest bid will always approach the market price. the only way this will fail is if every bidder gives up. but when that happens, the auctioneer has made insane profits, or if the price isn't high enough to pay for the goods, he can always insert a fake bid (at no cost to him, of course). Due to the possibility of participants spending a lot of money and still losing an auction, or ultimately spending more than the retail value of the item they end up winning, some analysts have criticized the model or compared it to gambling, even when operating without fraud.[5][6][7][8][9] [...] A penny auction may make the seller a far higher price than the item value.[1]
Potential fraudulent practices which can disadvantage buyers even more include shill bidding, where a human or software (bot) bidder covertly acting for the seller places bids which make legitimate bidders continue bidding where otherwise the auction would end, and simply not sending out goods for which a price, albeit low, has been paid. no rational person will participate in a penny auction. it's almost a guaranteed net loss for all actors.
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I understand why you may think we would bid up, but this would be stupid as it would quickly become apparent that nobody ever wins. Why go to the bother of building a site & game mechanic on top of the protocol just to scam people out of a few coins? We hope that it will be profitable in the long-term and make more than a few coins. We will also be releasing more bitcoin projects, so I see my reputation as far more important than a few coins...
because it's a really good way to make money. set up a few auctions, let the first few auctions go freely. after that, start inserting your own bids whenever you don't feel that you're making enough money. since inserting your own bids costs you no money (aside for pennies in transaction fees), you can put as much shrill bids as you want. hell, you can probably create fake bidding wars and generate even more profit. and to top it all off, it will look totally legitimate. there is " someone" winning and the transaction shows up on the block chain.
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The problem I have with this is there's currently no way to prove you're not bidding us up.
If you see that iPad Mini for example nearing the end and you're making a net loss on it, you'll add a bid which will cost you nothing and save you from having to give the iPad away.
How can you counter this claim?
There is no way to prove that it's fair. That's why I stay away from these auctions. Note that I don't claim that it's a scam. this. game theory says that penny auctions are a net loss for every bidder involved. just don't bother with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_auction
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This listing was ended by the seller because the item is no longer available.
Pure SCAM i guess.
alternately, the buyer and the seller worked out a backdoor deal to avoid ebay fees
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Please explain, grue, how a receiver of a transaction can include "a damn fee" when they receive a transaction?
I meant getting the sender to include the fee. As in, 1 confirmation or the goods aren't sent. The cost of paying pools to include transaction is going to get passed down to the customer anyways. Might as well let the customer decide whether paying an extra 50 cents is worth the faster delivery time. Why bother creating all this complicated infrastructure over a problem that doesn't exist?
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China can produce fake USD bills that are of superior quality to the originals
[citation needed]
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Convenient yes, but also very expensive. Most airport locations are expensive and that means over paying for everything. A Bitcoin ATM located at an airport will have to either charge an additional fee or offer a less favourable exchange rate than one located somewhere else just to cover the additional overhead of being located at an airport.
this is the reason why exchange rates are terrible at international airports to begin with. adding bitcoin ATMs will not lower fees.
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why do you think that the BTC ATMs won't have worse exchange rates?
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Well, yeah. That's expected. But 21 hrs? yep, deal with it.
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...or just include a damn fee when you're sending a transaction.
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The work would have to be hard to fake, yet easy to independently verify. Bitcoin achieves this by using hashing functions. Projects that use distributed computing like protein folding, finding prime numbers, or calculating pi does not meet this criteria. Protein folding, for example requires centralization because some organization has to come up with which proteins to fold. Finding pi or prime numbers isn't feasible because they take as compute as to verify. (mathematicians, feel free correct me on this if I'm wrong)
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fiat, as in? paypal, bank transfers? If you're dealing with any method that is ripe for fraud (paypal, credit cards, (maybe) wire transfers), you might be scammed yourself.
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