That's nitpicking, IMO.  If you compare earning money by working as a plumber to earning it through dividends, "passive" is a matter of degree, and I'd say giving something your attention sporadically doesn't even qualify as effort--and it truly is passive.  And what about owning a coin like NEO?  You just leave it in a wallet and earn GAS, and you don't even have to have the wallet open.  That's about as passive as income gets.

OP, do you really expect people to disclose their various streams of passive income (assuming they have any) on this forum?  Not likely that's going to happen.  But I'll bite.  I have some stocks that pay dividends, but that's it, and those dividends don't amount to much.  Certainly not enough to live on, or even to pay my utilities for a year.  I used to have a lot more, but it's a long story. 

Wouldn't that be irrelevant?  Archival is basically the trashcan where dead threads go to die, so it's not as if members can create threads in it--and they certainly wouldn't be worried about whether those threads were self-moderated or not.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong there.

Sweet--thank you to Theymos for publishing this data.  I kind of made a feeble plea in one of my recent posts, but I didn't expect any stats to be released.  And as I expected, I'm not on the list; my reporting rate has gone down significantly since the inception of the merit system.  Before that, I think I was in the top 20 reporters for whatever time frame was reported.

Congrats to the top reporters!  Too bad there hasn't been a "top reporter" badge created yet.  Even Theymos thinks it's important to the forum, so why not give at least the top 5-10 members a little something for their effort?

I'm not sure you can categorize entire countries as left-wing or right-wing as Hydrogen has done (though I confess I'm pretty ignorant as to the political leanings of Brazil, El Salvador, and other South American countries).  And while FL and TX are generally right-wing, I disagree that political decisions are "religiously fueled".  There might be remnants of religion in the politics of southern states, but it's nothing like it used to be.

Anyway, as far as Visa's move here: I don't expect it to be a success at all.  Bitcoiners in that country aren't likely to want to spend their bitcoin any more than those in other countries.  And those citizens who don't own bitcoin sure as hell aren't going to go out of their way to acquire it in order to spend it.  It's the same issue bitcoin has had ever since 2009--it's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist (yet).

Well, he didn't read the reviews on the forum.  I just Googled "1xbit" and there are no red flags on the first two pages of search results.  I have no idea how people come across crypto-based gambling sites, but obviously people are finding them without being members of this forum.  They obviously also come here after getting scammed, though I don't know how that happens.  Maybe if you search for "1xbit scam" you get results from bitcointalk (I didn't check that, but it seems likely).

In any case, I'm not going to rub salt in OP's wounds; it's good that he created another thread about these jackasses at 1xbit, even if there are quite a few of them already.  The more there are, the more likely they're going to show up if somebody does search for whether 1xbit is a scam. 

OP, just curious: how did you find out about 1xbit and how did you find out about this forum?

That's what I was saying:

And it's been around waaay longer than the 1940s.  In the days when William Randolph Hearst was a publishing magnate, "yellow journalism" was probably at its peak in the US, and journalists didn't even care if what they wrote was true or not.  Things have certainly gotten better since then as far as mainstream news goes, but ultimately it's still the sensationalistic stuff (news/Youtube vids/whatever) that grabs attention.  

But right now, as far as Youtube is concerned, we're dealing with a bunch of amateurs acting like trained journalists or academics, and there's really no way of knowing what someone's background is when you're watching their videos.  But they all seem to be operating by the same cookie-cutter playbook, and what we're all left with is a bunch of sheep doing the same thing in order to produce the same style of content to get the same results per Youtube's algorithm.  That means everything has to be family-friendly, of a certain length, and in addition to that usually means there's always going to be some kind of product sponsorship mentioned in the videos.  It's maddening.

As an aside, while we're on the subject of Youtube: something I saw yesterday made me want to rip my pubes out: a fairly young woman quit her PhD program to become a full-time Youtuber.  She said in one of her videos that she connects more with her subscribers than she does with anyone in her academic program.  That's repulsive to me, because I see people being satisfied less with face-to-face communication and more through texts and likes and comments.  Now I know PhD studies are notoriously hard, but choosing to be a Youtube celebrity/influencer over a career in academia or research is baffling to me.  And then there's this woman who quit her PhD program and puts a lot of blame on "the patriarchy".  Ugh.

Now, having written that rant, where the bitcointalk channel at??

Huh, that's interesting.  I wasn't aware of that, but I guess it makes sense.

This is one of those things that should probably be made a new feature on the forum, the ability to switch back and forth between moderated/unmoderated threads.  It would probably piss a lot of people off if members started switching normal threads to self-moderated ones and deleted all the posts, but I don't know how many times I've meant to create a self-modded thread and forgot to.  It really would be nice to be able to switch, even if there were a time limit for a member to do so, e.g., you can't change a thread to self-moderated more than a day after it was started or whatever.

Don't know how much additional coding would have to go into a change like that, but if it's easy enough to do....why not do it?

This would probably be best moved to Bitcoin Discussion, but whatever.

So that subreddit is an anti-bitcoin one, right?  I read through two of those posts so far, and they remind me of James Randi's old forum dedicated to skeptics, which I used to browse frequently when bitcoin was a few years old, when I thought bitcoin was a scam, and before that forum disintegrated.  They were hugely skeptical of bitcoin, and they made pretty convincing arguments, some of them sounding exactly like this:


That's from one of the Reddit posts OP linked to, and I don't know about anyone else but I can't debunk it.  In fact, I could have written it myself--and that's in spite of me being a fan of bitcoin.  I've always maintained that it's a lousy currency, and the reasons listed above are just some of the ones that support my opinion.

Are you in a flame war with these guys, OP?  I'm sure members here can give you some good counterarguments, but I wouldn't expect anything but shitposts if this thread does get moved to Bitcoin Discussion.  Good luck.

Yes, but it only happened with one coin, not all of them.  The "missing" coins reappeared after closing and reopening Ledger Live about an hour later if I remember correctly--this happened a couple of times, but not recently.  I figured it was just a bug since there was no evidence that there were any outgoing transactions, though I can't say I wasn't a little bit worried when it first happened.

But if you're not....then you're at the mercy of LL's buggy-ness.

I didn't even get that far such that I'd ask questions about whatever the fuck OP means--I just put him on ignore.  This thread is obviously an attempt to earn merit by creating a thread with a fairly lengthy post, except it's a post that's pure frontier gibberish.

When a post is written this badly (see snippet above), I just tune it out completely.  OP, even if I could completely understand what you're trying to say, what's your point?  What you've written looks very much like an attempt to earn merit.  Why?  The post is in Meta, where a great deal of merits circulate; it's about plagiarism, which seems to be a trending topic lately (though I don't know why, because it's nothing new); and you've taken a stance--I think--in line with pretty much every merit source and senior member who might have sMerits to give.

We don't need another thread about plagiarism.  Members are going to keep doing it, and they're going to become more clever about how they go about it.  There's nothing to do but report it when we see it.  Period.

I'm sure he does enjoy it.  Why else would anyone spend significant amounts of time on a forum writing things, no matter how strange they may seem to the average person?  And as I said, there are forums where tin-foil hat brigades congregate and debate back and forth about some garboon's frame-by-frame analysis of the latest mass shooting.  They not only enjoy doing this stuff, I think it gets them off sexually.

That said, I haven't looked at BADecker's posts lately and don't know the last time I've seen one.  But whatever he's writing, it's probably not for the purposes of trolling anyone.  Just because someone takes a very nutty stance on something doesn't make them a troll--a lot of people really believe there are paid crisis actors at every mass casualty and that the planes that hit the towers on 9/11/01 were holograms.  Crazy, right?  Well, when those people show up on this forum it probably appears like they're trying to get a response out of the community, but to them they're just following their own pretzel-twisted train track of logic.

True, but I just saw ivermectin being sold over the counter in a tractor/feed supply store.  Don't ask me why I was there, because I won't answer you (lol), but it's certainly readily available--and it's been hyped as a cure for COVID for quite a while now.  And believe me, drugs of all kinds make their way out of the supply chain all the time.  There are many, many ways that can happen.  Not to mention that any drug can be synthesized if you know a little bit about organic chemistry and have the right lab equipment.

I wonder why someone would pick this forum to rant and rave about politics and oddball conspiracy theory stuff.  There are plenty of forums dedicated to those sorts of things.  My guess is that he probably belongs to some of them, but it's weird that he found his way to the P&S and Off-Topic sections of a forum with bitcoin as its main focus.

The culture has shifted, but that has absolutely nothing to do with why clickbait thumbnails/descriptions are effective.  When you boil it down, it's nothing more than sensationalism, and that's been around for as long as publication has existed. 

So what about the people (like me) who see right through that crap and are in fact sick of it?  Where does that leave people who stopped clicking on Buzzfeed's ubiquitous and nonsensical advertisements a long time ago?  I know I'm not the only one.  If you watch videos on Youtube long enough and have half a brain, you'll figure out that these video makers are manipulating you with tactics that are akin to blowing a bubble in a baby's face and expecting them to say "Goo Goooo!!".

I'm not having any of it anymore, and I'm at the point where I refuse to click on any videos with thumbnails like those in the thread I created in Bitcoin Discussion.  If you think you have to do that in order to be successful on Youtube, you're just following the crowd and aren't thinking of a new, better, or original way to do things.

I guess this belongs in Economics....?

Satoshi is the king of kings as far as cryptocurrencies go, and I'm not sure Vitalik would have achieved anywhere near what he did had bitcoin not been created first.  I mean, who knows what would have happened, but every innovation we've seen in the crypto space is basically improving on what bitcoin is.  And that's not to take anything away from Mr. Buterin, because I think there are so many things that can be done on ETH's blockchain, and he's the man as far as that goes but I'd say he'll always be remembered second when the history of crypto is written 50 to 100 years down the line.

He also looks like he could use a good, home-cooked meal or two.  The guy is skin and bones.

I don't know; sometimes what those anonymous sources say turns out to be the truth--but believe me, I get what you're saying.  Those types of statements are one of the reasons why I don't trust much of what the media throws at us.

OK, much of that article is blah blah blah, but after reading OP's post I was left wondering "What the hell does Coinbase need $2 billion for?" and after looking at the article the only thing it says is:


"General corporate purposes", eh?  I assume that means big, fat bonuses for its executives.  But the latter part of that quote seems purely speculative, so I'm still wondering what Coinbase needs all that money for.  I bet they have something big planned, because that money they're borrowing in the form of junk bonds isn't cheap.  If they didn't think they had an idea that justified that much, I doubt they would have issued all those junk bonds.  I wonder if they're going to buy out some other exchanges.

My man, I like actmyname's explanation much better because it cuts to the truth of the situation much better than yours does. 

The facts are these:
1) Signature campaigns/bounties most often pay for posts in English.
2) Many participants in those campaigns/bounties are non-English speakers.
3) Many are also dishonest and lazy and think nothing of trying their luck with the rules, knowing they can just create another account if they get caught, even if that itself is against the rules.

That's the long and short of it.  Also, I would suggest that we don't need an in-depth analysis of why people plagiarize on this forum.  It's not rocket science.

Say what, now?  The middle class didn't suffer at all because of the Game Stop shenanigans as far as I know.  If anything, those Reddit retards (who I assume are pretty middle class) made out like bandits because of their manipulation of GME stock.  But you can't have people who work for financial institutions doing that, else there would be utter chaos in the markets. 

MassMutual was right to discipline Roaring Kitty for making social media posts related to Game Stop.  Can you imagine if stock brokers or hedge fund/mutual fund managers were allowed to make bullish statements anonymously on sites like Reddit?  There would be so much manipulation that nobody would ever know the true value of anything because of all the noise.

OK, that part confused me a little bit since Electrum, for instance, doesn't make you choose a server (although you could if you wanted to).  I didn't play around with the wallet since creating it, so I'm not sure how the bitcoin core node works.  That's the one I selected initially, but it doesn't connect.  When I selected the public server, all was good except I got the warning message "Using a public server means it can see your transactions."

How bad is it that my transactions can be seen on a public server?  

Edit:

Because I'm a dumbass and haven't learned how to do it and why it's important to do.  You'd think I'd have learned more about the technical aspects of bitcoin by now, but nope.  I pick up dribs and drabs as time goes on.  I didn't even know what a GPU was until about a year ago.

"My, what a big vocabulary you have," said the wolf.  Lol.  I haven't even seen that word since I studied for the GRE about 20 years ago.

And yeah, things could be arranged a lot better on this forum, but that's the way Theymos slapped the buttons and links together.  I don't think he's got any plans to change where they are, and I didn't even think that they might seem oddly placed to some folks.  I've been seeing them in the same place for so long that it's hard for me to imagine the merit link-thing anywhere else--and same goes for the rest of them.

I like the merit link where it is--but as I said, that's probably because it's always been where it is and I'm used to it.  I'd rather keep it where it is than to move it someplace where dumbass merit sources like myself would have a hard time finding it again.