I'm bumping this thread with a question for those who might have some knowledge of how the Ballet wallets function.

Seems to me that the only way to get your coins off a Ballet wallet is to use Ballet's app (which I recently did as an experiment with one that I had).  My question is whether it would be possible to get access to your coins if Ballet as a company just up and disappeared one day--and let's say that the app was no longer functional.  The private key is underneath the sticker, and then there's the scratch-off passcode, and it's the latter that concerns me. 

I think I tried to enter the private key into an Electrum wallet with no success and had to use the app in order to send my bitcoin to the wallet instead (this was a few weeks ago, and I can't remember exactly what I tried).  But if you're not able to do that and are dependent on Ballet as a company surviving for as long as you intend to keep your funds on a Ballet wallet, then I'd say that's a major problem.

Anyone know for sure about this?

They've already wiped themselves from the face of the earth and absconded with all their customers' money, apparently at the hands of the hackers you want to now do the job again....so that's not gonna happen.

Ah, Reddit.  A little exaggeration there.  There's no way the HitBTC debacle is the biggest scam in the history of crypto.  Not even close.

Huh, wonder why nobody has replied yet.

As to the above, I'd bet if you're talking about the United States it'd be the former (higher taxes for miners), especially given how much electricity is used.  The only way I could see anything being subsidized would be if a mining operation were to use green methods in their farming, e.g., solar or wind.  I haven't got a great sense of how the US government views bitcoin--there's nowhere near the amount of regulation I figured there would be at this point, but there's not exactly a lot of support for it on the federal or state level (nor by the banking system, which is in bed with the government).

I'm not a miner, but it is something I'm interested in, and I'd be curious to hear some wisdom from some experienced folks in this section, and I know they're here.

I'm also going to thank SFR10 for the link to bpip.org, as I so rarely visit that site that I tend to forget it exists (no offense, Vod; I think it's an awesome site).  I just happened to check my profile a minute ago, and I was shocked that I ranked 35th in the "most posts" category--never would I have thought I was that high up. 

Apparently I'm 52nd under the "most trusted" profiles, which isn't too bad considering how many members this forum has.  I consider that an honor, but it's sort of baffling to me how I achieved that--aside from not scamming anyone.  Pretty cool, and I think that would be my current favorite milestone.  My post count doesn't impress me all that much, and I don't post nearly as much as I did back in 2015-17. 

Also:  I'm the 12th most recognized profile.  Really?  That one I've got doubts about.

Lol, I don't think that's quite what happened.  More like governments across the globe have been providing their citizens with free money in the form of stimulus, and people have been blowing said money on all sorts of speculative investments, bitcoin and other cryptos being among them.  That and big purchases by deep-pocketed companies like MicroStrategy, Tesla, and others have led to the crazy bull market we're in--not that people suddenly realized the fundamental value of bitcoin.

As for what's going to happen to bitcoin (and the altcoin market, too) after COVID-19, I get a queasy feeling in my stomach when I think about what'll happen when interest rates start to rise or if unemployment starts to go up, in addition to the inflation of the USD that I've been expecting for years now.  In other words, if the economy in general gets fucked up bitcoin and all of its little duckling alts are going to suffer.  Massively.

However, I'm hoping for the best.  These have certainly been some of the darkest days of my lifetime, and I've got my fingers crossed that things aren't going to get worse.  Should that be the case, it ought to bode well for bitcoin.

I change my password occasionally--not too often, and usually after I get paranoid about the forum getting hacked.  It's probably not a bad idea for a member to do that from time to time (and to pick a strong one, too), because people have certainly lost their accounts to hackers in the past and no doubt it'll happen again. 

If there's a downside to doing so, I think it might be that it's a major pain in the ass to recover your account if you forget your password, but maybe a moderator can clarify that.  There's also the issue of people thinking your account might have changed hands if you happen to change both your password and your e-mail at the same time (which I think I've also done). 

The security on bitcointalk, as far as I can tell, is questionable and I do wonder how vulnerable the forum is to another major hacking.  It's been a while since the last one, but I've no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

I'm wondering if those big mining interests that chose Texas as their base of operations had some kind of lobbying power in effect that convinced Texas's government to adopt this stance on bitcoin.  Either way, I guess it's a step forward for crypto.

The only thing that bugs me is that I don't like the idea of bitcoin and government going hand in hand like this.  It isn't as though bitcoin is completely anonymous, and it'd be very easy for the state of Texas to track all your financial transactions through the blockchain if you decided to use bitcoin as a currency.  And yeah, I get that if you're using a bank card or any other form of electronic payment, they can track you just as easily, but it makes me a little bit queasy.

Sounds like you and I have similar feelings toward this announcement.  I'm all for less surveillance, though I think things are going to get much, much worse before they get better as far as that goes.

Yeah, I don't doubt any of that and I think in one of the threads about the hack I asked if any member with any reputation here had gotten a refund, but it was just all those newbie accounts posting.  The whole thing stunk of an exit scam anyway, and the story they told just didn't make sense.  Ah well.

Lol, no.  It definitely isn't, but that's apparently just part of their exit scam strategy for appearances--totally cock-brained, but that shows you who you're dealing with.

Wait a sec....in one of those threads it was stated that one of the requirements to get that 50% back that all those posts are claiming was that you had to make a post here saying exactly that--that you'd gotten the refund.  I still think those posts are nonsense spam, and I don't believe there really was a hack, but there certainly was an explanation for why those posts exist (and there is, I suppose, the tiniest of possibilities that it could be true).

That whole thing was a fuckin' debacle.  I just barely missed getting scammed by a day or so, and I feel badly for anyone who kept any significant amount of crypto on their exchange. 

It's good he edited the OP in that thread, but who knows if anyone made him an offer via PM or if he's going to try to sell those accounts via another channel, like telegram or something.  He was asking a lot for accounts that don't seem to have anything special about them, so I'm not sure what this dude was thinking.

Yeah, but why anyone would pay what OP was asking for a Reddit account is beyond me--I think they're a shitty website anyway, and it's not like you're going to make your money back if you buy an older account with tons of karma points. 

I must have missed reading those times when you wrote that idea, but nevertheless it's a good one.

Some of the best scam busters are/were on DT2 and not DT1, so I wouldn't want DT2 feedback to be lessened in its weight.  But part of me thinks that the trust system is so broken at this point, where we've got good members with bad feedback and vice versa, that the whole thing should be overhauled.  I get Vod's point, though I doubt Theymos is likely to share his feelings (but I've been wrong about that before).

You put a "lol" at the end of that, but I wouldn't put it past some members to do exactly that.

They're not really "adopting" bitcoin by making it part of one of their plots--they're just being as hip and modern as they know how, because they know it'll make their product more attractive to the younger generation.  That's my very cynical interpretation of this, but I have to confess that I do think it's pretty damn cool anyway.

I'm actually surprised that bitcoin hasn't been incorporated into more movies/TV shows than it has.  Maybe we'll see that change eventually, but the progress has been slow thus far.  Anyway, props to Marvel for this!

OP, assuming this is your only account, how many sMerits could you possibly have?  You haven't earned that many, certainly not enough for someone to ask you to buy some from you. 

Anyway, this shit has been going on since the beginning of the merit system and though I thought that everyone had given up trying to rank up, apparently there are a few members left who are still trying to squeeze every drop of income out of their signature spaces.  Makes me wonder if it's even profitable to buy your way up the ranks--buying a senior account might be, but buying merits seems way too expensive to me.

You should report PMs like this, OP.  There's no need for a thread like this, although personally I don't mind seeing someone named and shamed.

Part of me agrees with you, but I'm pretty sure OP is safe as long as he doesn't give out his address or do something stupid like that.  There are members here who must have tons of bitcoin, and I've never heard any stories of any of them being targeted in real life.  It's something that sounds like it could happen but hasn't....yet.

Anyway, moving your purchases off of Coinbase and onto your Trezor is a smart move, OP.  Just make sure you keep the seed phrase safe, and there are many different ways you can do that--keep reading threads here and you'll pick up a lot of good stuff.  It's definitely better than keeping coins on an exchange, even one as reputable as Coinbase.

This is a mantra here, and for good reason.  Lots of exchanges have either been hacked out of existence or have run away with their customers' coins.  You'll never have to worry about that if you're the only one who has access to your private keys.  And best of luck with your investment.

This just popped into my head today as I was visiting my (semi) local bitcoin ATM after seeing a Coinstar machine at my (truly) local grocery store.  You all know what I'm talking about, right?  These guys:



I've never come across any threads here that have suggested a coin redemption machine might be a good thing to combine with crypto-buying.  Have any of you heard of an idea like that floated around?  I think it'd be fantastic to be able to cash in your change and get crypto in return, and I betcha more people might be inclined to dip their toes into the world of crypto if they could do it this way. 

Any of you think this is a good/bad idea?  I'm certainly no entrepreneur, so there's no way I could create such a thing--nor do I know if Coinstar has a patent on the coin redemption machine thing--but I know there are people with business skills and motivation around these parts who could create such a machine if they wanted to.  I'm just curious as to whether this sounds like something that would gain traction or not.  Bitcoin ATMs seem to be popping up all over the place, so I have to assume that more people are using them.

Yeah, and PayPal is probably the most popular payment processor when it comes to individuals sending money to one another.  This news, while a little bit old right now, is still huge and very bullish.

But as I understand it from the above post and others that you're still not able to withdraw bitcoin from PayPal, right?  That's something that I hope PayPal changes in the future, because then they'd become basically what Circle was back in 2016, which was a very convenient and legitimate bitcoin vendor.  There's been nothing like Circle since they stopped buying and selling bitcoin IMO.

And yeah, I'm not sure how they're going to keep track of all the international money sending and whatnot, but I'm sure they'll have no problem dealing with details like that.  I'm just hoping they evolve into a bitcoin exchange of their own--it could be very profitable for them, but I bet it's a huge pain in the ass regulatory-wise.

I've heard of Hotbit (I think; I think I get it confused with HitBTC), but do you know where they're located?  If it's in a country with even fairly strict financial laws you might be able to make a complaint with the authorities, but for some reason I suspect that isn't the case.

And OP, you might want to visit the Scam Accusation section and fill out a proper form with all the information about how much you lost, blockchain evidence, and so forth.  At least then you'll have documented your complaint publicly with all the details and perhaps you can point someone at Hotbit to it eventually.  Good luck--I know how it feels to get scammed by one of these shitty exchanges that think they can do whatever they want with their customers' money.

Lol, I guess I missed that thread completely--and I never paid that much attention to what Electrum displayed as far as the units of the fee, so I never realized there was such a thing as vbytes.  I see from that thread that I'm not the only one who finds it confusing--or I should say I find it not worth trying to figure out with the limited neuronal RAM up in my noggin.

I just upgraded to 4.1.0 today but haven't really taken a look at what's new.  Probably stuff that's too technical for me is my guess, as I'm a very simple Electrum user who doesn't require all the fancy features that keep getting added with these updates.

It's still the best software wallet out there IMO--the best looking one and probably the easiest to use, too.

It's 125BTC not 1250, right?  That's what I remember reading a few days ago, and I was surprised that the forum held even that much.

This idea has been floated around before and has fallen upon deaf ears--which will likely be the fate once again, since I don't think Theymos has any interest in creating a shitcoin/token based on bitcointalk.  And frankly there's no need for another coin in a market that's already oversaturated with ones that have no need to exist.  Even if one were created, I doubt it would be popular since most members here are bitcoiners at heart and wouldn't care to screw around with a forum token/coin that would doubtless have zero innovation behind it.  It would just be a novelty coin, and there are already too many of those in existence.

TL;DR: Bad idea.

Yep.  If I was a bitcoin hodler from the early days (and had a significant amount), there's no way I'd be advertising that fact here.  And I'm not sure how many people were smart enough to hold onto their bitcoin throughout the crazy ups and downs we've seen over the years, but I'd imagine the people who struck it rich no longer have any use for the forum--especially since it's nothing like it was back in 2009-2011, before signature campaigns and bounties destroyed the quality of posts.

Some stayed (like TECSHARE, rest in peace) because they continued to do business here and you'll still see some of them around, though I have no idea if any of them still have any of their bitcoin they acquired in the early days, assuming they acquired a significant amount to begin with.  Nevertheless I bet you that there are a lot of crypto-wealthy members here who just keep quiet about that fact.