IMO we are going to see a lot more of this. Not because it's a new thing, but because it's being talked about more and more.
When nobody heard of crypto / BTC there were still a lot of people doing it and doing it in ways that may or may not have been 100% legit. Stealing electric, mining on hacked PCs, and so on.

I see it the same way we used to see a lot of marijuana growing places that were stealing electricity from nearby houses / businesses or setting up in abandoned buildings. Now that is, at least in the USA, not as big a deal with major business coming into it we see that less and less. Substitute BTC for marijuana and we are now seeing the same thing.

-Dave

Bit of snark but did you read the fees section? It's always been there $5.00 / month after 90 days of non use, it's what you agreed to when you signed up.
Agree the card sucks for other reasons, don't get me wrong. But they never hid that fact.

Most of them have that or worse:
https://support.unbanked.com/support/solutions/articles/44000411370-what-are-the-fees-to-use-the-card-

There are others but most are similar.
The main advantage of BitPay is that you can use it to get cash back so outside of the crap exchange fees you can use it for BTC -> Cash (at least in the US) so there is that.

-Dave

I guess the other question is, if it's not .com does anyone care?
Followed by, if they do care did they do any research into what extensions matter?

I was thinking about it while driving home the other day and actually thought this is one of those things that I could see some mid level executive spending thousands of dollars and hours of time on getting research done to see what domain extensions appeal to which people.

We see here and think xyz is not a good thing, but I'll bet there is somebody someplace who put together a 90 minute power point presentation as to which domain extensions appeal to which demographic group.

-Dave

That's his view and he is entitled to it. Judging from other things he has said, he seems to feel it's too speculative and risky and not secure / regulated enough.

Berkshire Hathaway made most of their money & profits from long slow low risk investments.
And BTC / crypto is the exact opposite of that, so you can easily see it's not an lack of tech knowledge or anything else. It's just a thing that is opposite of what they want / how they operate. So it's not surprising that he is against it.

-Dave

I'm guessing that in addition to all the large mines coming back on the colder weather in the northern hemisphere is bringing back a bunch of smaller home miners who are using them as heaters.
Last year I had about 40th that I was using to heat my place instead of gas. Lost money running the older units, till the bull run, but it still was better then just burning gas for heat.

This year for me personally I just have 17th or so, but my neighbor is running about 65th to heat his home & garage and workshop out back.
How many people are going the same. 10th here, 25th there and so on does add up.

-Dave

It's not even a question of explaining it to investors, it's a question of the opportunity cost of money.
If you are generating a fair about of BTC mining. You get a somewhat known amount with PPS you can then budget to get more miners & power knowing how much BTC you are going to take in.
You will probably over time get more BTC on a PPLNS pool, *but* if you are buying new miners out of the money coming from mining then unless you are in a huge pool, you would not want to take the risk since you want more miners coming in at a known rate. You might get more miners with PPLNS you might not. Can't run a business on might.

-Dave

Take a look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5363391.20
Finally got the miners but late. There were other similar stories on reddit, but I can't find them now, if you dig a bit I am sure they are someplace.
But, it does not look like they are out and out scamming and running with the BTC, but sold stuff figuring it would be here 'soon' but due to everything going on in the world soon never happened.
Keep bugging them, don't let up and keep posting about it. The more bad people see about them, the more they will (probably) want to fix the issues that are out there in public.

-Dave

KYC is not a bad thing. If you don't want to use services that require it then you don't.
Depending on where you live there are plenty that do not require it.
There are exchanges for other coins, ways of getting cash, gift cards and just about anything else that do not require your info.

IF on the other hand you want a regulated environment with more rules and security, then yes you are going to wind up with KYC.
I can go to localcryptos.com and get cash for my BTC, and hope everything goes smoothly (it usually does) OR I can go to Gemini give up my personal info and know that it will go smoothly.
The choice is up to you.

-Dave

Because mining is a very small market and dedicated miners have a very short lifespan vs, CPUs, memory and all the other things these companies still produce.
Larger companies, like Samsung have entered the market and left quickly since it was such a small portion of their revenue it was not worth dealing with.
Why fight to enter a small market with known players that is not going to increase your bottom line enough to matter.

-Dave

From the 'been there done that' department remember you are better off with heat sinks falling off then ripping the chips off the board when they take an impact.

The Arctic Silver that HagssFIN recommended is good as is Ther-O-Bond stuff:
https://www.mouser.com/c/thermal-management/thermal-interface-products/?tradename=Ther-O-Bond

Although it probably will not matter in a miners lifespan, the more thermally conductive it is the quicker the epoxy / adhesive breaks down.
It's just chemistry the more conductive stuff in it, the less adhesive you can put in there....

-Dave

It also depends on how the seller is looking at it.
If I have something that cost $45000 and sell it to you for 1BTC which as of now is $51000 I can convert most of it to fiat / USD and sit on the rest as an investment.
If it goes up I make even more. If it goes down I make less. No matter what I have converted enough to cover CoGS so it's not a big deal.

It's just like taking any non local fiat for something. If between the time I sell something and take a payment in other then $ (I am US based) I can take a hit. EURO vs USD changes and I sold something to someone in Germany I could take a big hit by the time I get my money.

-Dave

For me it comes down to I like it here, I spend time here, so if I am able to make some BTC why not.
If all signature campaigns went away tomorrow I would really not change my habits.

I would like to think that most of the longer term higher ranking members would not really change their habits or if they do change it would not be that much.

-Dave

Nah, he will just create another scamcoin to sell to his followers and it will all be good or have someone rewrite parts of the BSV code to give him 2 million coins, sell them on the market for $100 each and poof he has the money.

And since he could "move" those coins that means he must be the creator.

-Dave

Because the OP is the developer / builder of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5364371
I see it as an interesting thought experiment but not much more then that.

---

Sadly although at this point both Flash & Java should be taken out back and shot there are still 1000s and 1000s of sites out there that rely on them that are just about unusable now because no modern browser supports them.
To make matters worse, some are done by governments & major institutions and some people are forced to use them. Now that Microsoft finally killed Internet Explorer 11 there are more and more people having issues. You see it on other forums.

I actually have some clients who are now running Windows 7 in a VM so they can go to some sites that are no longer useable anyplace else.

So I do see someone trying to figure out a way to make some money off of writing a browser that still supports it.

-Dave

Are you talking about https://bitcoinofficial.org/
If so when you created you wallet did you save the private key?
Should be 52 characters. That should be all you need to import into a local wallet.

FYI bitcoinofficial.org and all web wallets are not safe.

-Dave

Going to have to disagree with you there.
From what I see square is everywhere¹. Just about every small merchant I have been in lately is using them.
I think between their aggressive CC processing fees and cashapp integration and online ordering included for restaurants and so on they are just grabbing business.
Add in the payroll and banking stuff that they do and I really see them just taking over.

-Dave
¹ Admittedly it's a small everywhere, but all over the place in downstate NY and NYC, southern CT and northern NJ. Which is admittedly all urban / dense suburbia. For all I know they don't exist out of this area.

Since he came back and posted more from the non banned account do you think all his accounts should get a permaban from the forum for ban evasion?
Since you are well....you and staff / mod I'll follow your lead on this. But my gut says get rid of them all.
I understand leaving the post up as you said for an example for others, but don't see why we should let him stay.

Just my view.

-Dave

Yes, it's in their ToS that you agreed to. Full stop. End of discussion. You agreed to terms that are not good for you. Deal with it and learn to read things before you agree to them.
Does not matter if you are a scammer or not, I think you are but that is not important for this discussion.

They said they could keep your money and they are keeping your money, you can come here and cry about it, but none of us really care.
You look like a scammer from all the info they provided, but that is not the point. They can keep your money because they is what you agreed to. The fact that you are a scammer just makes it look better for them. IF they said we confiscated the XMR because the ToS said we could they would still be within their rights.

-Dave

Sadly yes, it's quite common. A bit of bad contacts on one of the pins, so more power is pushed through others, which put them over limit, which cause them all to short / burn.
If you do not have the skills & tools & parts most better electronic repair places can replace the PCIe sockets.

-Dave

As I said in my post I was thinking in a totally different scenario. Around here a lot of stores rent space to vendors. Be it a regular ATM or those DVD rental machines or whatever.
The contracts differ based on what it is and what the store owner wants and other factors. Usually it's a base fee and a cut of the profits.
If some BATM operator was saying that last week this BATM moved 1BTC in and out when really it's 2BTC in and out. And the profit was .1 instead of .2 (since most are in the 10% above and below range) so here is your .05BTC instead of .1BTC After a few months did they go with a even higher skim since the OP was obviously not paying attention?

Busy locations, I could see that happening. He is saying that it "lost"1721 59BTC transactions . I could see them just not being told about them.
Or to put it another way they were only skimming about .25BTC a week. In 2021 that is a lot of money. Even at the highs of 2017 it was only $5000 spread between 3 locations.
If you don't know how much you are supposed to be getting but are still making money, in the $1000s per week I could see it happening. Especially if he was not keeping tabs on them.

There was a news story around here a few months ago about a bar / restaurant operator who was being ripped off by his manager who (and I do think this was an epic scam) swapped one of the POS registers with one of his own. So they had 4 terminals, 3 went to the owner 1 went to the manager. Because COVID and the drop off in business it took a while for the owner to catch on.

-Dave