If you are willing to sell out for a couple of dollars, and say what the OP wants for that money, why should anyone trust your opinion in the future?

The OP says he will provide the "full text" of the review.

I think this will violate this rule:

I would consider "asking for donations" the same as "begging" :

Here is a copy of your thread.

I would refer you to this rule by mprep:

I also would refer you to another rule, also by mprep:

You posted that bounty hunters must post "proof of participation" in your thread:

I didn't look through your thread, but all the replies on the first page are "proof of participation" posts announcing they are joining. This is not allowed.

Correct. I was unable to find a non-custodial mobile wallet that doesn’t require a connection to a local LN wallet/node to operate.

The plan was to setup a local wallet on my laptop that I would transfer LN coin from to my phone when I would go out planning on spending coin via LN and transfer any excess coin back when I return home. This would reduce counter-party risk to only pocket money and only for short periods at a time, and could stop using their services if I noticed problems. As noted above, inbound LN liquidity is not free and this probably isn’t a good solution based on the current LN economy. I don’t have access to a computer I can have on 24/7, when I am away from home I can use for personal use. I could spin up a cheap VPS but this would reduce the cost benefits of using LN.

There appear to be several services that will open a channel to your node to give you inbound liquidity in exchange for a fee that is a percentage of the size of the channel plus what amounts to the opening and closing TX fee. The percentage these services charge depends on how long you want the channel to be ‘guaranteed’ to stay open, but this is really just their word and is not an actual guarantee. I found some of these services on 1ML, so I know they have at least many open Channels, or someone who does is willing to display their name. I haven’t figured out a way to gauge any of their reputation, so I cannot estimate the likelihood they will follow through on actually opening a channel that gives liquidity.

I had found one that claimed to open a channel of the same size if you have an open outbound channel to them, for only the cost of the tx fees, but the above still applies.

I don't think the "loaner" wants to take risk on someone with no posts, no reputation and no incentive to repay any loan.

I believe you are wasting your time if you are really trying to get a loan, and should try a bank or credit union, or local loan shark.

You should also lock/close this thread to prevent many people from posting garbage to increase their post count with their paid signatures.

Sent. Please confirm at your convenience.

It was a pleasure. This gave me the opportunity to learn about the economics behind the current LN ecosystem.

I think you are probably trolling.

You have nearly zero posts, and zero reputation here as far as I can tell. I don't believe you can explain why someone would trust you with $230.

If you can post an invoice in the next 15 minutes, I will pay you back tonight. It is nearly midnight in California, and I need to be at work by 7.

I am not a user, but I looked at their website just now. They look very similar to BitGo, and have a similar business model from an operations perspective.

They appear to be a new company, receiving only $2.3 Million in seed money in March 2018.

Based on my reading and understanding of their website and documentation, you will use their App on your phone that serves as one of three signing keys to a 2-of-3 multi signature wallet. Two of the signing keys will be on a hardware wallet and on your phone. They will have the third signing key, but it is unclear how they sign any transactions for you.

I found some security practices I believe are bad reading their FAQ
-If you sign up for one of their paid plans, they will ship a hardware wallet from their office. Hardware wallets such as Trezors and Ledgers should be received directly from the manufacturer.

-Backups of signing keys intended to be on your phones App will be stored in the cloud:
I prefer to not have any backups stored on my iCloud account, even if encrypted.

-They instruct users to not keep backups of a hardware recovery seed:
You should write down your recovery seed when generating a seed on a hardware wallet, and store it in a safe/secure location, preferably in a safety deposit box, or a fire safe in your house.

-They can restrict access to your money:
I believe this to mean they have the ability to restrict your access to your mobile key available on their App. It does not appear they can access this key, but you will be unable to spend any coin if they restrict access to this key. They would still have access to the third key. This will leave you vulnerable to them restricting access to your mobile key unless you sign a transaction sending some coin to them with your hardware key.

My opinion is you are better off buying a hardware wallet to secure your coin. If you want to use a multi sig setup, you can buy multiple hardware wallets, from multiple manufacturers if you wish.

It was reported that the Google related outage was around the same time as Level 3 Communications was having some problems. Another article says the Level 3 outage connectivity problems between various Google data centers.

Most, if not all, of the services cited in the OP article are reliant on Google Cloud at least partially. All the services cited are very major services that use a lot of computing power/resources.

Very disappointing indeed.

I was referring to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but after reviewing the law, it only provides protection against civil cases, and does not affect criminal cases. I don't believe any AML related law would apply to LocalBitcoins as a website, at least not in the US; there are AML related laws that do apply to their users.

I would speculate most of the Remittances go to citizens who are less wealthy, and not connected to the government.

A tax on remittances, say 1000% or 5000% would create market distortions that will cause less migrants to want to migrate to the US when the entire family cannot come immediately. Possibly a lot less migrants would even attempt to come to the US illegally, and some already here may leave on their own. A remittance tax may also pay for a border wall

If the current domain is involved in anything like what you described, I think the registrar would want to know, even if it is from a long time ago.

You can look up contact information on https://whois.icann.org

You can look at the website for the domain if one exists and look for a 'contact' page

You can email 'admin@[domain]' and he will receive your email if he has a mailserver setup and monitors that email

I don't think someone would need to open 5 channels if they only had 30 transactions per month, or even if they made 150 transactions per month. There are enough well connected nodes so 2-3 open channels will be enough IMO. There are several businesses whose primary service is to open many channels with many people, and collect various fees for doing so.

I also don't see any reason why a user would be closing all their channels after only a month. I believe a more realistic use case would be a person is paid by his employer on the 1st of the month, the person pays their various bills and expenses over the next month, and repeats on the 1st of the following month. I can see a person closing a channel after say 6 months if they accumulate so much money, they no longer have enough inbound capacity to receive their paycheck, but even in this case, the person could elect to receive their salary on-chain, and not close their channels.

 

If someone scammed you, the correct section to report the scam is here.

You can create a new thread, and be sure to use the proper format

This is not how Lightning works.

If you and I open a Lightning Channel, each with 5 BTC in the channel, there will be a funding transaction on the blockchain totaling 10 BTC. Each time we transact, we will both sign a new closing transaction, that we do not broadcast, that would "settle" the channel with the amount of bitcoins each of us will have upon closing the channel. At no time will the closing transaction reflect either of us having more or less than our respective balance, and the total will never be more or less than 10 BTC (less transaction fees).

Anyone, including you or I can write any proposal we want, and can write any code we want, even if we know it would not be a good idea. That person is proposing in a nutshell a way to make loans via the LN.

Yes this is a risk. There is this same risk if I were to buy bitcoins from someone in exchange for my cash; I could receive the bitcoins first, wait for a couple of confirmations, give you my cash, leave and realize the transaction is no longer valid after the transaction I received was double spent after a miner orphaned many blocks.


LN will not allow bitcoin to scale to infinity. The number of channels that can be opened or closed per day is not very high, but once channels are open, a very large number of transactions can take place over the LN network.

Additional technology improvements needs to be done before bitcoin can scale to Visa levels, but there is no need to create a solution that scales this much now because we are far from having that kind of demand. If I am in California, I have no reason to download every transaction someone does in New York, or in Western Europe. Having every transaction recorded on the blockchain is unnecessary.

If the cost to have a transaction confirmed on the blockchain is $2, if I wanted to buy a song on iTunes, or a cup of Coffee at Starbucks, there is no way I would use an on-chain transaction because the cost of a confirmation would be as much as what I am buying. If I already have a LN channel open, I can buy either of these items via a LN invoice that costs small fractions of a cent to pay, or if I do not have a LN channel open, I could pay $2 to open one, pay via a LN invoice, and pay for many other things over time, each costing a small fraction of a penny.

Most people are drawn to the US by its economy and social programs. The standard of living, even for those who are relatively poor, is much higher in the US than most of the world.

Many people have migrated to the US, work at a low paying, by US standards, job and make enough to send enough money back home to support their whole family.  

Do you have a source for this? I briefly reviewed the questions asked on the application to obtain a US Visa and didn’t see anything about casual drug use. I did see questions about drug trafficking and being dependent on drugs.

Look at page 72 of a sample Visa application. If you give materially false or misleading information, you could be permanently excluded from entering into the US, subject to criminal prosecution and deportation.

You have few rights when crossing borders, and this is in all countries. No country is required to allow you to enter their country, even if you have a Visa. If a country is not confident you are telling the truth to immigration officers, or on your Visa application, chances are you will not be allowed to enter the country.

I suspect the purpose of this is to check if anyone entering the country has any extremist views. If you have extremist views or have been radicalized, chances are you will be denied entry into the US.