Obviously it did and still that volume is a peanut, a tiny drop in the ocean

Completely false but i guess you know it and you are just trolling.

No, not yet, hope Bitcoinorama can get those answers for next week.

It's peanuts. Bit pay has a joke volume. But still, Gox needs to pull his shit together or die. Hope Mark wakes up and go for a tour to find a fancy wall street company to buy his shop.

Bitfury is legit, and worth the gamble IMO.

Avalon looked riskier than BFL in October, and we know how that played out

I love how some of you can be so optimistic, I just hope all this enthusiasm doesn't cloud your judgment when taking financial decisions.

But in my book no expectations are met whatsoever until the units are hashing.

Correct, but that's small, I will be surprised if they are not bigger

So clear and true words, +10000 on this, lucif

All the derivative financial products and this creating money out of thin air is a blatant scam and a cancer for the economy, but the saddest thing is that actually these types of scams are driving the world economy, they reached its core, and they have infected every bit of it.

Thanks for that reply, pretty honest and pretty clear. I have to say I agree with many of your points, especially on the fact this is no "democracy" and much less a "libertarian community".

Wr have the forums we have, "it is what it is", but let us all debate to try to improve them.

I also agree on what you said about what Garr255 did, in my book that's very wrong too.

Sorry Goat, but libertarianism/anarchism has nothing in common with deception and unethical behavior. "free market" does not equals to "everything is allowed in the name of greed". In libertarian communities the members of that community debate in assemblies to reach consensus about rules, even if no one is forced to follow them at gunpoint.

The fact is here a lot of people call themselves "libertarians", but still we just see the typical hierarchical structures that have nothing to do with libertarian ideals. Did you see any kind of poll or public call for the people to debate and reach consensus about what to do?

Not a hint. We have a hierarchical structure represented by the mods and specifically theymos, that tell us what is "the forum policy". We either accept it or GTFO.

Yeah, libertarian my ass. Someone needs to read some books by Prudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin or Rudolf Rocker. Maybe the guys in here read a couple of texts by Rothbard and think they understand what the word "libertarianism" means, but they are very mistaken.

Edit: just wanted to add that until now I was pretty satisfied about how the conflicts were resolved on this forum. I had the impression that the mods followed "common sense", and that their resolutions satisfied the huge majority of the community. In this case I'm not so sure, I know I was disappointed, and it seems to me that the vast majority of the members dislike how this matter was handled. It's sad, but it seems that the ones defending Garr255 are either their friends or have common business with him, while all the others are not satisfied about the final outcome of this "shillgate affaire"

Due to scam issues you have decided to invest in scams.

Nice job.

I think this should be stockied in order for everybody to know forums policy.

No gun to head, no scam.

Shill bidding is allowed.

Auctions mean nothing unless everything is agreed on beforehand, including the fact that the auctioneer will honor the winner.

I don't know if you realize that new members see the auction subforums and might think its a serious business. There are business transactions conducted in here that are based on trust, and it has been demostrated that this trust is not broken if a long time member uses deceiving tactics and blatantly lies to the community and/or his business counterparts to pursue personal gain.

If what Garr255 did does not deserve an "untrustworthy" tag, then what does? Serious question: please mods let us the regular folks know what kind of behavior is needed for an untrustworthy tag to be applied. Money and ethics are at stake in here.

And please consider that this shitstorm was triggered by a decision that a huge part of this community doesn't understand.

Don't be so hard on him Goat, he honestly took part in a dishonest auction and now seems that the victim deserves to be beaten up.

You know that being honest and being tricked by dishonest people feels bad, and more so if it seems that the long term members in here indulge on the guy that did wrong, and ignore the victim (at best) or directly mock him up.

I'm a new member in here, I've been lurking since late 2012 and registered since Jan 2013, so I really don't know any of you, but from the outside the impression I have is Garr255 is somewhat close to many long time members, including you... For example, honest question: does he knows Theymos in meatspace? Are all of you friends and involved in common business? Because it kinda seems so by the out of ordinary indulgence he got from the mods except John K., who as usual gave a very straight forward, no BS, impartial vision of the facts...

Guys, do you realize that is exactly this strange indulgence what triggered a 14-pages thread full of arguments, right?

Never made a friend to bid for me to pump up the price in my auction, that thought never even crossed my mind, some of us believe this is a community and also believe in ethics, if in your book greed justifies scummy and unethical behavior as the victim in this scam said earlier now I know whose auctions I don't have to participate in.

For once I liked the Gox statement. It looked almost professional, that's some good news

We don't know if they ordered the chips yet, and this is very worrying.

All other doubts are now secondary to that.

SEPA transfer around 85€ for biggish amounts (high 4 figures or 5 figures). But I really don't know if it Gox charging it, my bank or their bank. I just know that if I withdraw 10,000€ I receive 9,915€.

Never tried 3 figures or low 4 figures withdrawals, I guess it will be less.

Yes he did, more than once:


I'm having the ugly feeling Garr may be close to Theymos or other mods. Maybe they are friends in meatspace? I see a lot of indulgence.

I really don't want to beat on Garr, the mistake is not so huge and he is so young, but really puzzles me seeing his trust status so high, no tag of any kind for him, when he was just caught using shills to support his business ventures and artificially raise the price in his auctions, and then he lied to everybody until the evidence was too serious to deny the facts.

I have to say all this makes me a little sad, I've been investing a lot of time in these forums for the last months and I always had the impression that this was a fair and well balanced community, where mods were totally impartial and judged everyone by the same standards.

Man, this guy is a SCAMMER, we should expose him as much as we can to warn newbies, but unfortunately people will still throw money at him. As he said a few days ago, we are not his "core target", because we know he is scamming, his "core target" is people that never heard about bitcoin and that will gladly buy his contracts... And when they see they spent $1,000 and get only 4 or 5 Bitcoins, there will be two options:

a) BTC will have raised in price, so they will still be happy with their return, because they will not realize that they could have bought 10BTC with that money (or a miner that would have generated more than 4 or 5 BTC for them)

b) BTC price stays more or less the same or go down, and they will just think "this BTC thing is unprofitable"

The truth is that it is almost impossible to discover a shill bidder unless a the cheater makes a mistake (like Garr255 did by posting with his sockpuppet account by mistake).

If there's no incentive in being honest and ethical because unethical and dishonest behaviour is tolerated, then the honest folks with principles get ass-raped by the unethical guys doing their thing.

I strongly disagree on "shill bidding" being a "secret reserve", ebay for example forbids this and in my opinion they rightly do so.


Clear enough.

I have to say I've been surprised by things going on the auctions subforums. We constantly have:

a) People pumping up price through PM that cannot be verified
b) Bidders that do not honor their bids
c) Auctioneers that did not set a reserve price and then decide not to honor winners because the price is not good enough for them.

I have to say that for me that's utterly amateurish and disappointing. I'd like to see some serious business going on, and not only jokes and scams. In this sense, I think the new trust system will help a lot. People can RATE other folks, and this is a huge improvement that also makes mod's life easier.

That said, I think a clear set of rules should be stickied to the auction subforums: for example, we should say that shill bidding is allowed. That not honoring the winner is OK unless the auctioneer signs a contract that obliges him to do so (which is kinda contradictory, because the whole point of an auction is to be binding, but I guess we have our very own system here). We should say that auctioneers have the right to constantly change their "reserve price", and that they can say they received any offer through private messages. And so on... I really think this will improve a lot the current auction subforum, so every interested part won't believe they are participating in a "real" auction, where a set of basic rules are implied (first of them is that the winner will be honored, if not, what kind of auction is this?), while on these forums ANY rule and condition has to be stated on beforehand, including: no shill bidding, honoring winners, no artificially pumping price up by "accepting PM offers", etc.

This will make people wary that ALL THE CONDITIONS must be stated in the OP.