The reason why scammers lock their thread and make them self moderated is demonstrated by your case perfectly - they are able to censor out any sort of negative comments towards their scam, even though it's clear to anyone that no way is selling gift cards at such steep discounts a legitimate or sustainable business model. Essentially, scamming would be the only way that he will be able to

Any time you see the combination of a) Autobuy links b) Self moderated threads and c) Locked threads, please move away. A legitimate business would not try to stop people from asking them questions in public.

Most of these people are already tagged by DT anyways, so check their trust. I can guarantee you that if you see discounted gift cards being sold on autobuy, 9.9 out of 10 times, they've already have a negative trust on their reputation. Even if they don't, don't deal with them. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Not really. Crypto doesn't need government intervention and that's the beauty of it. Sure, there are scams and all that and with the irreversibility of bitcoin it makes it an easy target for scammers, but honestly if you just do your research beforehand and do your due diligence, you won't get scammed. Plus, how will taxing crypto exactly help with the issue for scammers? Makes no sense.

Obviously you should comply with whatever tax laws is in place with your country, though.

But it doesn't mean that what you pay in tax is necessarily going to benefit crypto, it just doesn't work like that. Governments could tax crypto, and at the same time restrict access to crypto businesses by having draconian rules on KYC and stuff like that. You don't really need that much funding to have the sufficient regulations needed for exchanges to operate, anyways.

I don't see any lagging behind right now for the ERC20 tokens as per this page: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/CoinInfo

But it's possible that it happened when you wrote this thread, I remember a few weeks ago there was a problem with Byteball deposits, and they were severely delayed, even after it went out of maintenance mode. Don't know what they're trying to do.

I'm not really sure what the kind of problem you are having with submitting support tickets, but even if you were able to submit a support ticket, it's unlikely that you'll get any helpful response from them in a short period of time that you would expect a normal exchange to respond to you by.

If it's just a verification email not being sent, then it's probably their email service provider being down or something like that. Most likely a fault in their system, and not actually them intentionally trying to scam you. But obviously it makes their services pretty unreliable to say the least.

Even though that I would definitely avoid HitBTC when I can, I wouldn't go as far as calling them a scam.

They are extremely shady though in the past, and they ask for tons of unnecessary info on your deposits like fund origin, ID docs, utility bills. Plus, their support is unreliable. All in all, I wouldn't use them even if they are not considered to be a scam.

So we all knew that LBC was already going down the path of forced verification for advertisers, and they made the move that all advertisers will have to verify themselves before they can trade back in January.. And then later there was a warning for all people who had a high trade volume and "recommended" that they verify their identity. But I never expected them to actually restrict somewhat high volume traders so fast, since I was greeted with this message:


I mean, you could still create new accounts and trade from them anonymously, but it's a tedious process to go through email and phone verification all the time. And a lot of offers won't be available to you because of the fact that you can't consistently trade up for a good reputation.

Time to move to a new p2p trading platform?

To be honest, we're probably going to see a huge correction soon.

It's funny as someone else said, that people were reluctant to buy when prices were lower at $6000-8000 and yet, right now, they are extremely bullish regarding bitcoin's price movements in the short term. Doesn't really make much sense to me.

$10k resistance is still strong, and we experienced a pretty big pullback once again after the $10k level wasn't hit. And again, even if BTC does break $10k, I can't really see this being the move we should be looking for. It's more likely than not that $12k is going to present even more issues as a resistance. Plus, buying now at such high prices when I believe a correction is incoming soon is a pretty bad move, at least in the short run.

Webmoney is probably the least risky to use, however, there is a lack of automatic exchangers for it.

My recommendation would be to withdraw your money to Payeer. The company is pretty shady to say the least, but there is no risk of chargebacks and if your ultimate goal is to convert your earnings to BTC or other electronic fund transfers, Payeer probably has the most amount of automatic exchangers out of all of them, plus you're not going to be holding the funds for too long anyways.

Once you get your Payeer funds, go to bestchange.com and seek out the best rates. I would recommend selling for BTC first, then exchange it on Localbitcoins to your local payment method if that is needed.

Yep, I checked their terms and conditions and it does seem like that they only say that there is a manual review needed for big withdrawals of the size 4 BTC or more. So if your withdrawal is below that, there is no reason for them to be holding it.

And even if they were manually reviewing it, it's been more than 48h. They should be finished by now.

The main problem is that the owners is most likely inactive. We don't know if the site is even active at this point. Should have really checked that before you deposited, there is a ton of previously active but now dormant sites still online at the moment.

You just have to wait and hope that the admin will come back and see your withdrawal is still pending. That's all you can do.

$10k-12k is possible by the end of May, IF this rally continues for that long.

For me, there is a huge probability that even if bitcoin does reach that psychological barrier of $10k soon, there will be inevitably a pretty big correction that may take us down to lows lower than previous dips.

And of course, there is the possibility that BTC just never hits $10k due to the resistance being extremely strong.

I feel like that one's gut instinct for the short term is extremely biased, and mostly based on market sentiment. Sometimes going against market sentiment is the right thing to do, especially in a rally/bubble that has gone on for too long.

A currency will only have value if there is a sufficient demand for it.

Sure, you could own your own cryptocurrency. Anyone can. But if it doesn't have any usefulness then in an economic sense, it doesn't have any intrinsic value. The reason why bitcoin has value is because it has a capped amount, and its supply isn't manipulable by any single entity. Plus, it is decentralised.

So no, just because anyone is able to make their own cryptocurrency, doesn't mean that they won't be motivated to work anymore. There is just no correlation between the two. It's like saying that me issuing my own banknotes will make me wealthy, but if my banknotes aren't demanded by anyone, I'm just wasting my time in the end.

The main reason is simply that we are not ready yet. We're not out of the bear market, yet.

As I expected before, there is a huge sell wall at the $10k that is keeping prices down below 5 digits for over a week now. BTC actually recently made another jump and hit $9800, although still unable to go over that $10k barrier which just proves how strong it is.

It's either going to be broken next week, or we'll see a pretty big correction due to the fact that the selling pressure at $10k is too strong. I personally think that we may actually get up to $10k+ before the correction hits.

Can you use this format and edit your initial OP with the relevant details:


Is the site that you're talking about that scammed you http://www.btcmt4.com/?

There seems to be multiple complaints against this person and the site that scammed you:

http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/community/threads/scams-btcmt4-com-by-phillippe-ballesio.55167/
http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/community/threads/beware-of-the-swindler-philippe-ballesio.54528/
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/beware-of-a-guy-named-philippe-ballesio-he-is-a-scammer-who-operates-with-cryptocurrencies.30463/

What exactly did he promise you and what did he do to rip you off of your money? If anyone is claiming that they can make you rich in a short period of time without much work or skill, they're bluffing. There is no easy system to make money.

I definitely don't think it's right now.

It's either when bitcoin has already bottomed at the $6000 level where prices were able to stabilize for a few weeks before making its way up in dramatic fashion is the accumulation stage that we're looking for, or it's going to be after the correction of this rally that we're in right now trying to get above $10k that the accumulation stage hits.

Either before or after, not currently. The prices have been pushed up by fomo buyers way too much for it to be a real accumulation stage.

Ice rock mining is almost a confirmed scam or ponzi. The only thing is that they have posed as a legitimate mining ICO, but they are promising way too much and guaranteeing everything.

They promise you 321% ROI per year, which is just ridiculous.

I also remember that they promised some sort of buyback program which essentially guaranteed profits, again a very shady thing to do since nobody can ever guarantee returns on any investments. If they're not paying the original ROCK1 investors, then imho they're just trying to milk their ICO scheme a bit more in the form of ROCK2 before they finally close down. Watch out for these ponzi schemes that will turn scam as soon as they get enough money in their pockets, posed as ICOs.

Their account on the forum was last logged in on January 2018, which is pretty much 5 months back. Their facebook page seems inactive and their site design doesn't seem to be updated at all. All very big warning signs that you should have picked up before you deposited.

If you look at their official thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=599410.20, you can see a ton of complaints of the same issue. Deposits from bank transfers not being credited into user accounts, etc.

You just have to wait for them to respond to you(unlikely in the meanwhile), or take action. You could file a police report, though chances are you'll not get a positive result as you're in different countries. You could also try to talk to your bank and see if reversing the funds is possible, again very unlikely.

This is the risk of using a not well known exchange with little reputation, they can literally just take your money and run. Good luck.

It's been well documented and these cases have been popping up left right and centre since last year.

As Darkstar mentioned, press the report to admin button and they will handle it.

Although, I don't think that it necessarily means that this person is necessarily in control of the account when that message is sent. Could be possible that his account was hacked, then was used to spread these messages. I think we saw this with one of sportsbet.io's forum reps being hacked, and spreading these links.

Thanks for the heads up, and as always, never click on random links from people don't know in PM.

I don't know about bitcoin's price cycles reflecting on the wider economy per se. Ultimately, bitcoin is bitcoin. And currently, it isn't really used for commerce "in the real world", as some people would say.

Sure, there could be statistics derived from bitcoin's value fluctuations that indicate which stage of the economic cycle we're in currently. But I think that it's hard to draw correct conclusions all the time, and there are obviously no guarantees of the predictions being true in the future. And don't forget that bitcoin isn't just used by one country, and it's global. So even though US's tax day may have influenced prices, it's definitely not the only factor.

It's probably much more appropriate to analyse bitcoin's own bull/bear cycles with its prices.

One day, we won't even measure bitcoin's value in fiat, because ultimately, fiat can be printed off in as much quantity as needed by the government.

The only reason bitcoin is so volatile right now is because there's a lot of short term speculators around still. I feel like once we reach a stage where bitcoin is actually adopted widely as a form of payment, that's when prices will start fluctuating less.

So yes, even though bitcoin will probably always be regarded as an investment which all currencies and assets are, in the future, its volatility will drop as adopters continue to grow and markets mature.

It's interesting to see that, because the $9500 resistance has just been breached.

However, again, we're seeing a pretty evident pullback when bitcoin hits around the $10k level, even though this time round we have broken the major resistance that was holding prices back for so long.

BTC could break $10k in 24h, there is nothing that says it cannot. However, I believe that even if it does go above $10k the room for growth is pretty small. You have another strong resistance level at $12k, which means that ultimately we are going to see a strong correction even if BTC goes above $10k.

Scams like this will always tell you to deposit a certain amount in order to withdraw previous funds. When they make requests like this, you know for sure that they are out trying to scam you. A legitimate business will never ask you to give them more money, in order to get money that they already owe you.

Telegram bots are the most favoured type of scam that these con artists like to use, because it's anonymous, it's cheaper than building a site from scratch, and people feel more comfortable talking to a bot.

If they promise you too good to be true returns, like in your case, they literally are promising outrageous returns as soon as you deposit and get the "keys" (whatever that is), then it probably is.