You quoted my questions but didn't answer either of them.

It isn't, and that is the point.

* The buyer is paying because he wants it to be different than a direct trade.
* He is paying for an impartial escrow agent.
* He is getting an escrow agent who is secretly also the seller.
* So he isn't getting what he paid for.
* That is why it isn't fair.

Do you follow that argument? Which of the five lines do you disagree with?

On the 12th of May 2014 a snapshot was taken of the BTC, LTC, and DOGE blockchains. All addresses bearing a non-dust amount at that point in time were given 4.60545574 CLAMs for free. This was the initial distribution of CLAMs, and it how all the CLAMs were created. The intent was to make the distribution as fair as possible, since everyone involved in any of those three coins automatically got free CLAMs.

The specific blocks at which the snapshots were taken:

   BTC block 300377 (2014-05-12 12:48:17)
   LTC block 565693 (2014-05-12 13:06:31)
  DOGE block 218556 (2014-05-12 13:09:17)

And to modify your scenario a little, what if:

Escrow = QuickCellar (100% honest)
Seller = SpeedyBasement (100% honest except that he sometimes likes to escrow his own deals using a pseudonym)

Keep everything else the same.

Now will the Escrow side with the Buyer or the Seller?

It seems very unlikely in this situation that BadDaddybear is getting any refund, since the escrow knows for a fact that the seller sent the honey. BadDaddybear would be lucky not to end up with red trust from the escrow's 4 alt accounts.

The easiest way is probably to visit Just-Dice.com, go to the 'chat' tab, type:
  /dig Ljfik3gh938f82g132789gf

where that's your LTC address, and hit return.

It will tell you whether you have CLAMs waiting for you or not.

If you're prepared to tell it the private key as well, it will claim the CLAMs for it, and credit them to your account. Then you can withdraw them to an address of your choosing.

Unfortunately I cannot quote your username, which says "TooDumbForBitcoin".

Consider correcting it to "TooDumbForCryptocurrenciesInGeneral".

What if that one party used to be sufficiently trusted, but later on it came to light that he was tricking people into letting him escrow deals he himself was involved in? That might be enough to make you not want to deal with him in the future, no?

Fuck Daniel. I always knew he was up to no good.

Well, yeah.

Someone who uses clam-qt should build the latest version from github (master branch) and check that my fix is reasonable before I make a release with it in.

That is apparently true of Netcoin, up to a point(*). They actively encourage decentralisation by having large wallets stake disproportionately faster than smaller wallets. By doubling the size of your wallet you more than double the return from staking.

That seems like a silly thing to incentivise, but that's what they do.

I don't know if any other coins have the same. As I understand it, most don't.

So why would we want to use a staking pool?

 1. the pool runs all the wallets for us, saving us the trouble / bandwidth / disk space / maintenance / etc. of having to do it ourselves

 2. pooling our resources reduces the variance; we achieve our expected return much more quickly than by solo staking

 3. some coins stake better (ie. higher expected percentage return) the bigger the wallet balance is (eg. netcoin) and so pooling makes sense

And why wouldn't we want to use a staking pool?

 1. we have to trust a third party with our coins; there's no way of using multisig for staking coins, since in order to stake, the staking wallet needs to be able to sign a transaction with our private key; with the same private key the staking service can steal our coins

 2. the staking service presumably takes some kind of fee (or 'penalty', call it what you will) which reduces our expected profit

 3. if we were solo-staking, we could evaluate each coin and decide which one to invest in; with this setup it appears that such decision is made by the pool itself which leaves us vulnerable to manipulation (pool owner buys up some shitcoinX for himself, then buys a bunch of the same coin for the pool, then dumps his personal holdings at the pool's expense)

These downsides could be alleviated to varying degrees, but the current lack of transparency and control really don't help potential investor confidence.

(*) Netcoin balances stake better as they grow to 10 million, and then the growth stops. 10 million netcoin is current worth a little over $5000, which is probably more than most altcoin speculators are willing to hold in netcoin, and so there is clear pressure to pool. It appears that stakeminers already hold over 10 million netcoin, and so adding more won't increase their return, but from my point of view it does increase my return.

He's talking about TF there, not tsp.

It's OK to call tsp a scammer without proof, because he was paid some small fraction of a bitcoin more than he deserved by TF, where the small fraction was earned by a b0t, and that was against terms and conditions that were added to the site after the alleged 'crime' took place.

It's not OK to call TF a scammer without proof, because he only 'lost' hundreds or maybe thousands of other people's bitcoins, most of which should have been in cold storage but weren't.

One could argue that charging for an escrow service while actually being the counterparty that the purchaser is looking for protection from is scammy in its own right. It could be considered that the purchaser of the escrow has been ripped off for the amount of the escrow fee.

I would much rather see escrow providers make a clear statement that they will inform you whenever they are also the person you are trading with, rather than a wishy-washy statement like:

    "no representations are made as to the identity of the person you are trading with, this includes the possibility of trading with an alt of QS, as well as trading with someone other then you believe them to be".

I mean, why not just tell people that you are wearing two hats at the same time, and let them decide whether they want to take the associated risk or not? In fact why even set up 5 or more alts in the first place, if not for trust farming and abuse?

I don't understand that part, sorry.


The weight of each output is the same as its value in CLAMs. It shouldn't increase ever, except that the weight is 0 if the output is immature or has been involved in a transaction in the last 4 hours.

If the coin control panel is showing changing weights, I think it must be wrong. I only ever use clamd, not clam-qt, so that's where I focus all of my bug-fixing attention. I don't think anyone is putting much effort into fixing clam-qt bugs, unfortunately. It's probably still worth creating an issue in the CLAM github issue tracker to make a note of the bug.

On the other hand, it's normal for the "expected time to stake" to go up and down a little, since it is calculated using the current network difficulty, which also fluctuates. It's typically around 500/balance days, give or take. So if your balance is 25, that's 20 days.

Edit: I made an issue in github:

    https://github.com/nochowderforyou/clams/issues/224

I'm pretty sure it was tsp who contacted me, and that his account is back under his control.

Don't use a 'secret question' on your account, people. And scammers, when trying to compromise accounts by guessing their secret answers, don't be stupid!

Neither, but really quite lucky. You should stake about once per month with average luck, like kolloh said.

So what did you mean when you said that you were "busted" when you accidentally outed yourself here?


I read that as an admission that it was your alt, and figured that this jokey "it was a co-worker" story was only made up later when people seemed to start taking notice of the situation:


What next, QS comes up with a "Panthers is actually my little brother" story?

That looks like he negatively rated a bunch of 0-post alts which were doing nothing but abusing the trust system.

Why would you have a problem with that?

I'm still in benefit-of-the-doubt mode, in which maybe he simply misunderstands a few things or hasn't thought them through, rather than being deliberately obstructive.

I know you know this already, but since the wallet is open source I can change the numbers in the source, rebuild it, and have the program overlay them on whatever fancy theme I want.

Edit: if screenshots were proof of anything we wouldn't need cryptography. We could just trade screenshots of Bitcoins and forget all this silly cryptographic signature nonsense.

Since wallet screenshots are untamperable, here's solid proof that I in fact own all the BTC that will ever exist. And then some:



Edit:

DIY instructions: edit OverviewPage::setBalance() in src/qt/overviewpage.cpp to display whatever numbers you like.

I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm aware of Bruno's tendency to go off on tangents with his crazy Google skills, and wanted to bring him back to the main point here: forget which direction his roof points. Is it a Ponzi or isn't it?

I received a PM reply from cyberpinoy giving a list of staking addresses, and the same explanation that "we can't publish the addresses because people might send deposits to them". I replied that Just-Dice is effectively a staking pool and has always published its staking addresses and never had a problem with people sending coins to the staking address. Each user has their own deposit address. If they send coins directly to the staking address they don't get credited, and nor should they. I checked the addresses he sent me, and they have coins in them. But that's not enough. For a proof of solvency we need:

  1) the address(es)
  2) proof of ownership of the addresses (typically via signed message)
  3) a list of liabilities (user balances, effectively)
  4) check that the assets proved in (1) and (2) exceed the liabilities in (3)

So far I only have (1), and even that is apparently to be kept secret.

It's not clear to me yet whether he is being deliberately obtuse or not. I see no reason not to prove solvency if it's possible to do so, and every reason not to if it's impossible.

On that other forum thread I see comments like the following which make me feel bad inside:



You can steal coins from an address just by knowing the address? And there are images which can't be edited by Photoshop? Cause for concern...

OK, but do you have any evidence that his staking thing is a Ponzi?