Don't believe in FOMO buying, but don't believe in panic dumping either.

Both of these things are what causes people to lose out on their long term positions, because they are affected by emotions. Look at the fundamentals of bitcoin, it has not changed since the ATH of nearly $20k in 2017, yet people's perception of it are clouded by the fact that the market sentiment is extremely bearish.

What you should be really thinking in a bear market like this, assuming that you do believe in bitcoin and have the capability to invest for the long run, should be to load up as much cheap coins as possible through dollar cost averaging, instead of trying to time the bottom absolutely correct and/or panic dumping when others are doing so.

Unless that particular person is willing to spend a ton of money on promoting, have a company that is registered in real life, and their exchange is able to provide pseudoanonymous accounts to people who aren't necessarily willing to verify their accounts, then no.

I think that the exchange space has honestly become quite saturated and this point, with Binance obviously holding the majority of the market share.

It'll be quite hard to take over that spot, or any other major exchanges for that matter, unless something major comes up. Just like how Binance took advantage of the downfall of poloniex and Bittrex, though even then, the marketing efforts that are needed are just way too costly to be afforded by any average exchange.

You're absolutely right.

I have no idea why this exchange was set up in the way that was essentially bound for this to happen, since it is terrible practice to have a non-multisig cold storage wallet that holds all the funds, which only one person has exclusive access to. That kind of set up is just waiting for disasters, and I wonder how many more exchanges are doing this.

But as you say, exchanges shouldn't be trusted as a wallet, nor should you store funds on there for longer than necessary. The facts are simple here, you don't know how their internal security is run, and you don't know when there is a risk that your funds will be frozen/suspended. Bitcoin is made to be trustless for a reason.

As Soha says, Luno seems to be compromised.

This is why it's good practice to always check the person's reputation before dealing with them. Even though he is a senior member, ranks don't mean much when accounts are able to be traded, and often hacked as well, especially for older accounts.

Escrow should always be used, unless you are willing to take on this type of risk. But using escrow should be able to mitigate a lot of these occurrences. BTW, did he redeem the keys already?

Another open scam accusation against the same guy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5102033.msg49413064#msg49413064
Suspected hacked account: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5102065.msg49414774#msg49414774

To be fair, he probably already does. The fact that he has shown interest in cryptocurrencies (even though the Petro is essentially renowned as a scam at this stage) means that he likely has some BTC in reserves.

But I think that your point still stands. Firstly, bitcoin can be transacted with much easier compared to gold. Especially with moving large amounts of it. The liquidity that is within the bitcoin market is probably no less than the physical gold market, either. Governments who hold bitcoin instead of gold also won't have issues with storage, and in this case, being blocked from accessing the gold since bitcoin is trustless.

Perhaps governments and central banks are still concerned about the volatility of bitcoin compared to gold, which is a valid concern given that they may need the assets to perform monetary policy at any given time. But I still think that in a few years, more countries will hold bitcoin because of the increased liquidity given by institutional investors and the increased stability as the market matures. But that's not to say gold isn't a good store of value, it still is, and it will continue to be. But custodial concerns are present with it, no doubt.

Exactly, they are so obviously trying to their fullest extent to not pay you. They initially said that you needed to provide proof, which is because of they probably thought that you wouldn't be bothered to provide that proof. And when you demonstrated that you would be willing to do that, they backed out, and said that we'll give you a second chance instead, essentially avoiding paying you altogether.

I guess in this instance, trust the reviews. When I was fauceting I only went with faucets that paid out instantly after you claimed it, like faucethub. I found that a lot of these faucets that had their own account balance system and a minimum withdrawal was quite sketchy.


I honestly doubt that google would be able to handle your case. The fake reviews are indeed annoying, though, considering that they flood the reviews section which makes it hard for others to see the real reviews.

You are absolutely correct.

The article makes it seem like that bitcoin is the problem here, but it's really got nothing to do with bitcoin.

If anything, this should be called an analysis on the success rates blockchain startups which use sort of an IPO structure to raise funds in the beginning. It's not a surprise to me that the success rate is so low even though again, the article may be completely biased with their data collection and wanting to make a sensationalist headline.

Most of these so called blockchain startups have absolutely no substance with their project, and their end goal is raising the money that they need, and not to develop their projects to their fullest extent. Most of these also aren't regulated by anyone. That's the underlying problem here. Not bitcoin.

Where did you even find this guy?

Mods don't moderate trust, and if you don't provide the scammer's username on the forum then how do you expect anyone to help you tag the guy?

I see that you've been scammed by gift card scammers at least two times now. Anyone offering gift cards at such steep discounts are scammers, I'm sorry to tell you. And anyone operating with a locked and self moderated thread most likely has something to hide as well.

In the future, avoid all heavily discounted gift cards that are selling without receipts or proof of purchase, and avoid gift card sales in general from untrusted members of the forum. Don't send first and use escrow, and look at the reputation of the people you are dealing with. The guy that you got scammed by previously (YoutubeTV) is a well known, long term scammer, which is why his trust is in the red.

Good on you for picking up on the scam.

All of these exchange scams use sort of the same procedure of scamming people. They usually open a cex.io clone of some sort (each time they do it under a different domain name), then have shills that have sob stories on discord which lures people into helping them, and eventually, you are asked to send BTC directly to either the discord shill or the fake site itself, without actually receiving anything yourself.

Unfortunately, it will be extremely hard for anyone to completely shut down this type of scam due to the fact that scammers are able to essentially open new impersonator sites and use different accounts each time that they conduct the same scam. You just need to use your common sense here, no one legit would trust you with this high amount of BTC without there being some type of catch.

I think that it is very possible for bitcoin to go down further.

Prices in the short term are often unpredictable, and due to that fact, dips in the short term is completely expected even when prices are this low. But I think that based on bitcoin's historical bear markets and factors such as market attitude, we are extremely close to the bottom at the moment even if we are not fully there yet.

It would be absurd to pass up this buying opportunity because of the fact that this may not be the absolute bottom. Dollar cost averaging should be used at its full scale if you do have funds that you want to invest into bitcoin for the long term with. I've expected bitcoin to bottom out at $3-4k since last year, and there is no reason in my opinion for that expectation to change at the moment.

I'm still wondering why they think that it's banning people from holding a certain limit of bitcoin is something that is enforceable at all. It is next to impossible for them to check each person that they come across for their exact bitcoin holdings.

But at the moment, it seems like that at least the ban has been lifted. What they are essentially saying is most likely treating bitcoin like any other foreign currency, with similar capital controls placed upon transactions involving them.

And with their "sovereign rial backed cryptocurrency" which was mentioned in the article, it does sound a lot like what Venezuela has done. Though we see how the Petro was basically nothing but a money making scheme for the Venezuelan government. This will likely be something similar, if they are going to conduct an initial public offering of some sort.

I don't personally know of anyone who is making this switch.

Bitcoin is fundamentally very much like gold, but it is more convenient. I'd argue that on a retail level, bitcoin is probably much more liquid and the spreads are much lower than gold, which takes lots of effort to transport, verify the purity of, and buy/sell.

The only way that gold can be as liquid as bitcoin at this point is through allocated/unallocated gold accounts, but then you aren't holding the real thing.

So tbh, unless there is significant, backed proof of this happening, I'm not buying this story. On the contrary, I'd expect gold investors to look into bitcoin increasingly due to the fact that bitcoin is indeed decentralised and a long term hedge against inflation, and gold investors like this aspect of their investment.

Is this just going to be a payment network based on blockchain, or will it actually have some sort of token that is used as an underlying asset of the network? If the former is it even fair to say that this is a step towards "cryptocurrency", or rather is it just Japan's move towards cashlessness from its current cash reliant nature?


I don't think that it's bad news per se.

There was very little chance that a centralised, potentially government endorsed body would ever take the route of a decentralised cryptocurrency to begin with. Launching this doesn't hurt bitcoin's growth one bit, since the market that it's going to take away from is going to mainly cash usage.

Japan's still pretty progressive in terms of policies for crypto businesses, overall. As long as that stays the case, bitcoin's use as a store of value and an online currency shouldn't be affected.

I don't think that you need to load a multisig address. While the deposit addresses that localbitcoins use are multisig, these aren't the addresses that you are going to be dealing with when you actually trade with people. After you send BTC to the deposit address your deposit will reflect in your balance, and this balance will enter into escrow whenever you are entering into a trade. There isn't a setup where you hold one key, buyer holds one key, and LBC holds one key etc.


LBC is also centralised but it generally is very reliable and very rarely freezes funds, because it doesn't involve itself with the individual transactions. Though one downside now is that if you want to list advertisements you are forced to verify yourself, and once you hit a certain trading volume threshold you are unable to trade until you verify your account.


Even with escrow protection, you should look for trustworthy sellers with high positive feedback rates, and a large amount of trades.

Jeez. This is exactly how far scammers are willing to go in order to get investors biting. Though my Myetherwallet extension has already started to block this site.

I guess they thought that fabricating their team from people that are already deceased would avoid detection, as there wouldn't be anyone that would be able to see and recognise that the images used on the sites are indeed themselves. But they forget that reverse image searches are completely possible.

If you look at their ANN thread, it's poorly made with no images or formatting. Their mission statements are vague, and the idea of a crypto loan ICO has been reused countless times. As an investor, you should avoid all projects that have these characteristics. If you are, make sure you research, and do so in depth.

Firstly, I wouldn't say that reviews/comments regarding Cryptopia before the hack were positive at all. In fact I know of a lot of people who had consistent issues with their deposits/withdrawals due to the fact that wallets of certain coins would often go into maintenance without any updates or schedules. Their support was pretty trash as well.

I think that the best you can do to see whether an exchange has good security is to research yourself. See if they use cold storage, if so, what percentage of coins goes into there (if you can find publicly known addresses). However, information such as how many copies/backups of private keys are there and overall competence of their security teams will be extremely difficult to find.

That's why there's always a risk with exchanges, no matter how professional they appear, and a reason why you shouldn't be storing any coins long term on there. But if they do appear to be professional, have responsive customer support and have a good reputation etc. they are more likely to have good security.


Agreed. Even though decentralised exchanges may be the way to go to solve this problem of security and risk of exchanges exit scamming, I feel like that there are still many features of centralised exchanges that may not necessarily be feasible with decentralised alternatives.

None of the financial instruments used by investment bankers are legal tender. Options, futures, swaps etc. aren't legal tender at all. Gold and silver aren't legal tender. Shares aren't legal tender.

So what? Something not being legal tender doesn't mean that you can't use it in a transaction legally. People who cite this as a negative of bitcoin obviously don't know what they are talking about.

Legal tender currency is usually only issued by the central bank of the country in question. What really matters is laws and regulations relating to bitcoin use within a country. As long as there are no regulations or laws saying that bitcoin transactions are illegal, it is perfectly fine for a transaction to be conducted with bitcoin as the currency. That's why there are local/alternative currencies worldwide as well.

Thanks for letting us know. I actually had no idea of this until I came across this thread.

It's really a bit surprising to me though how small of an amount has actually been compromised, when an entire forum has been breached into. I wouldn't doubt if the hacker has held onto some account details which at the time did not have any funds in them, because just 6 cases seems to be way too small

Even if you didn't sign into the forum during this time it's probably best to be safe, change your password and enable 2FA if you haven't already. It's a good thing that LBC is taking responsibility it seems and refunding people, which is at least professional on their part.


Don't think it's the first time that LBC has given us a scare. I remember back in the days it used to be down every once in a while and people would panic. Small hacks had happened a few years back as well.

I'd say that escrow is always better than no escrow. There is always a risk even with escrow, especially when you are dealing with reversible forms of online goods like this which can be easily retrieved after the ownership is transferred and the escrow is released, but using escrow does at least reduces the risk that the person just takes the money and exit scams like what happened here.

But you're right, this is why account sales whether for accounts on forum or off forum is generally a bad idea.

OP, this is why you shouldn't trust someone solely based on their ranks. The person in question had no reputation on the forum. Bitcointalk accounts can be easily bought and sold, and ranks don't tell the full story. Since there is another outstanding scam accusation against the same user, I would seriously doubt your chances of getting your funds back. In the future, be more careful. Do research about the user's reputation you're trying to deal with, before commencing.

The government's regulations and decisions on bitcoin still has a lot of weight on the bitcoin price, there is absolutely no doubt about that. Especially in the short term, prices could be extremely volatile as people tend to overreact to these types of news.

But I definitely doubt what people say about "if the government wanted to shut down bitcoin, they could do so instantly". With a distributed ledger like bitcoin, it is quite proof to events like this from happening, and it would simply be unfeasible both technically and financially for a country to actually do this on a large scale.

So yes, short term speaking I think that government policies remains one of the most influential factors of bitcoin price (other regular news is probably more influential, though, like exchanges). But in the long run even if government's aren't 100% supportive of bitcoin, I don't think bitcoin will be affected much.