The way new members are directly heading to bounties does look like they have been influenced by word of mouth or there is a large amount of account farming going on to earn which I have no doubt is happening with the amount of people who don't contribute to the forum in any way and just update their posts on their bounties to get paid. As for it being profitable I don't know but I am inclined to believe that you can earn a substantial amount if there are so many people rushing to complete these bounties.

What you just said makes no sense how is Bitcoin not an investment? If you are buying it for a short while or even to keep and trade in Bitcoins permanently its an investment. It is the definition of an investment and just because its called a digital currency does not make that not a fact. It might have a high selling point but by no means does that mean its going to continue to rise. 

How have you setup up BTCPayServer? This might make it more clear how its sending to an address which you haven't set unless BTCPayServer comes with a default address as a placeholder and you have forgotten to define it in its settings? If you haven't already you should probably think about suspending payments until you get this worked out and test it on the testnet rather than with live Bitcoin to avoid further loss of Bitcoin.

If there was a way of proving there is Bitcoin on that hard drive and he could demonstrate he is the rightful owner then a 10 character password could be bruteforced especially if the bruteforcing was left for a number of years because that amount of Bitcoin is worth the time and electricity costs that come with bruteforcing it.

But should still be done in smaller increments to avoid theft and accidental loss of coins. I can't really stress this enough as anything could go wrong when sending that amount of coins to someone especially when using peer 2 peer exchanges where you are not sure if the person on the other side will keep their side of the deal. I'm not familiar with OTC but I am assuming there is a escrow process? 

Copy and paste the real link into a text document and keep copy on each device that should prevent most security and privacy issues because you are not logging into anything. You could password protect the document if you had a need to do that but I can't think of any reason you would want too. You could create a dummy account alternatively just for the purpose of sharing bookmarks or you can export bookmarks via your browser and import them into any device.

Even if an exchange did offer massive amounts to withdraw I would recommend against storing that amount of coin on a exchange at one given time and would recommend transferring smaller increments over because as the saying goes putting all your eggs into one basket is not a great idea. If something goes wrong during the withdrawal or if the exchange is compromised at the time of depositing your Bitcoin on the exchange you could lose your money.

You have Tor enabled inside Firefox? Do you mean you are using Firefox with a Tor addon? Tor browser runs on Firefox but is different from running a normal firefox and is a dedicated piece of software. If you are using tor it could be a problem with noscript as that can cause unpredictable things or it could be any extensions that you have installed on your firefox instance like privacy addons.

I would say that you should be backing any value that you can't afford to lose in cold storage and not just a defined number. If you can't afford to lose $100 then you should not be storing that amount in a hot wallet. $1000 for a lot of people is a life changing amount for those that live in poorer countries. I would recommend a trezor only when you are storing a huge amount of Bitcoin  because they can be pricey otherwise and a paper wallet generated correctly is just as safe and there are tutorials and tools out there to make this almost idiot proof.


But the question remains why would someone go out of their way to fabricate a story like this? They do not gain anything at all

His story is probably fake when considering that the people on that thread have already pointed out several inconsistencies in his story but assuming that his story is true then the reason that hes saying he lost Bitcoin was because he saw an offer to claim 10 Bitcoin cash which is a very small amount in the first place but when you start earning money and a substantial amount that can turn into a horrible mentality that you have to take every opportunity to make money which could lead to this story from happening. If his story lined up a little more and wasn't just a troll I would believe that someone could get so greedy and neglect security for free money and this is not the first time something like this has happened so I would say although the reason he lost Bitcoin was security related by downloading software which stole his Bitcoin the fundamental reason he installed the software was out of pure greed for claiming free money so the root cause of this would have been his own greed rather than just because of poor security.

You don't need a antivirus if you take precautions while downloading and browsing the internet. Anti virus is just bloatware which can slow down your computer. Linux does not use a antivirus and many people on Windows who are taking caring while downloading software don't need it. Anti virus is only there for people who are not tech savvy.

Screenshots should not be considered proof of anything and I'm particularly concerned about how online exchanges are accepting photographs of identification when they can easily be altered. By law I think physical copies should be obtained or at the very least video evidence. At least video evidence is harder to edit and get everything working properly whereas screenshots and especially screenshots of forums and websites is easily editable via the source of the page. There's no technical skills in editing because its already built into everyones browser with the inspect element function.

Username: funsponge
Post Count: 731
SegWit BTC Address: bc1qxpcxexs7htthp7sfmngtc09wylwhc3jwsjdawp

No. It would do something and it would prevent people who aren't willing to prawl through hundreds of vpns and creating new accounts. For existing accounts then no VPN restrictions do not effect it. VPN restrictions only occur when creating an account. Otherwise there would be a lot of banned accounts around here.

Have you reported him? I'm sure the request would be dealt with faster that way. I have noticed that there are loads of people currently doing this in the altcoin sub forum and it seems that they just create a new account whenever they get found out.

Account sale have always been a problem. We should hopefully see them die out as most people will be outpriced by the increasing prices because of the difficulty of getting merit. Which means the account farmers cant farm millions of accounts to sell.

Would be interesting to combine this data with data from their most merited replies/topics. COuld bring in some insight on why they received so much in a small amount of time. I think a few of these users probably posted a guide of some sort which resulted in them having a lot more merit in quick succession than normal.

Lets just hope that people start wising up to these types of threads and stop blindly awarding merit to topics which have already been discussed to death. I bet people won't though and they will be awarding merits again next week to topics just like this.

You did tag this guy and I thought you just removed it. I'm 100% sure that you did leave a negative because I had this discussion with someone last week.

Heres the message which I outlined this and was confused to why you removed it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4441505.msg40557671#msg40557671

This was was a poorly attempt of trying to earn merit. This is exactly the reason why you are still on 0 merit is because it just does not make any sense or you have brought up opinions which have already been discussed a million times this week.