Agreed; Ponzi's by their very nature leave the last man hanging - or last group of people. There is no incentive to keep it running whatsoever once payments have been placed into the site... The owner of the site can simply say sorry; you were last!

Ponzi's are not gambling by any definition I can find. They are a form of fraud. It's as simple as that.

Strato

A ponzi cant be run by moral people u little kid .... do you tie your shoes alone ?

I was playing and saw it hit. Unfortunately not me

Strato

A Ponzi is not a game. Ponzi's are a type of "Fraud".  Fraud is a crime. Calling a crime by another name does not eliminate the crime. I could say we're going to go play a game called "Robbing Banks".... well I'm sure you get my point.

Strato

You should be.

Strato

I act as a corporation; so either way it gets tracked to my K1.

Strato

I'll give you that, that it would in fact simply push the bartering of accounts into other forums such as reddit, irc, etc.  I guess my point was simply that most major social services forbid this activity with good reason. You can't sell Twitter accounts; or Facebook accounts; at least not publicly. But it does happen.

Strato

Ponzi's are not gambling. These programs that are being advertised are as simple as this:

Send your coins here. You will get paid when the next person pays in.

Gaming sites, at least the legitimate and well known ones; use provably fair systems and other measures of control to create at least an umbrella of protection in terms of fairness to the player.

These sites are advertising "130% Returns Fast" Send Money Now! - I am sorry, but people ARE in fact going to fall for this.

There are already more Ponzi posts than traditional gaming posts (at least new posts).  With that said - are we to assume it's time to create a sub board under Marketplace called "Ponzi Schemes".  

Strato

Well to address a few points:

1.) Ponzi Schemes are in fact illegal. Typically a business or site however would not advertise however the fact that it is in fact a Ponzi. I don't think however, from a legal standpoint, that calling it a ponzi up front eliminates the crime (which again just going by definition is the "intent" to commit fraud). Fraud is both a criminal offense as well as a civil crime in most if not all countries.

2.) The Alt-coin scam of 2014; which saw it's heyday during the spring and summer months did not openly admit to being just that; a long series of highly orchestrated scams which raked in uncountable amounts of money from unknowing and/or naive investors. Many of the coins advertised themselves as legitimate projects with "road-maps"; "development plans"; and "innovative features". In time what the outsiders learned was that these coins had no plan at all. Many were outright and deliberate fraud, with hidden pre-mines, ninja-code; and or viruses packaged neatly into the provided wallet or mining software.

These coins used this very forum, along with Twitter, Reddit, and Chatrooms as their launch vehicle. At the height of the scam era a new altcoin was appearing on major exchanges nearly every single day. While no direct proof exists- at least not publicly; there is no doubt in many peoples minds that this was not individual scam artists creating coins for a quick buck, but rather a highly planned scam orchestrated between the developers of these coins, a number of exchanges, and certain pool operators.

3.) As far as the admins not taking any sort of action or at the least giving their position on this issue; justifying these posts based on the statement: "people have brains" is simply not the point. The admins have a responsibility to at least state their policy regarding these posts. Ponzi's are-- Acts of Fraud. The admins have created a number of policies in the past; the most recent to come to mind is banning pool advertisements within ANN threads.

I am quite certain that if users began advertising drugs, weapons, or worse in the marketplace - the admins would stamp that out quickly by banning accounts.

In closing; my post was not meant to question whether or not people are intelligent or savvy enough to differentiate a good investment from a bad investment. It was simply to ask the question do Ponzi Schemes; and the advertising of such; have a place here on the Bitcointalk forum.

Strato

Yes that is correct. But I do work in video production, and I work with a lot of 4k, 5k and 6k lossless media. The 8 disk SSD array allows me to read/write 5.7GB/s (gigabytes).

So my setup for working:  ( 8 ) 960 Crucial M500 SSDs - and these mirror to a Raid 5 Array overnight (7200rpm Enterprise Drives).

Dogie is correct, you can't rely on this setup for safely storing important data. But my project files are kept on a smaller drive which is safe raided (Raid 1 SSD) and only the raw media and transcodes (of which I have LTOs and HDD copies of) are stored on this raid while the project is being worked on.

The system is also on a dual 10Gbe NIC card - so I can push or pull media files from our server raid at roughly 2 GB  per second.

This may sound extreme; but many of my projects can run 3,4,5+ TB in size. So if I need to load up or load off a large project, this setup makes an enormous difference.

Strato

An Open Letter to the Administrators of Bitcointalk.org,

As everyone is well aware - this particular board has recently become littered with advertisements for 'Ponzi Schemes', which I can't but think is not a positive thing for this forum, the bitcointalk community, or the digital currency industry as a whole.

Bitcointalk.org has certainly established itself as a leading source for the discussion, collaboration, and innovation within the digital currency arena. I have learned a great deal here, and I applaud theymos, ckolivas, malevolent, and the other admins of this site for creating this community and working so hard to keep it running and growing.

With that said; I find it disheartening, yet not surprising, that these posts have begun to spark up like wildfire, very similar to the Alt-coin Rush of 2014. Let's not forget how many of those very Alt-coins which were promoted here turned out to be scams in and of themselves.

While I am all for freedom of speech and expression, and I certainly am not a fan of censorship, I feel that clearly advertising 'Ponzis' on this forum, and this being tolerated, cannot be good for the Bitcointalk community in the long run.

We can all agree - Bitcoin and crytpo-currencies have had enough of bad press, and it is only a matter of time before a spotlight get's thrown on this particular aspect of how bitcoins can be used for nefarious purposes, or at the very least these posts will be used as additional ammunition by the anti-bitcoin groups to further push Bitcoin down.

A Ponzi scheme by definition, is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator. Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. Taken from Wikipedia.org

So the question I ask is do these advertisements, clearly and openly advertising ponzi schemes, have a place here? If so, where will the line be drawn? Will users openly be able to post ads for narcotics, or other illegal items such as weapons for sale in the Marketplace?

Again, I don't think this comes down to censorship. Users of Bitcoin can use their bitcoins to buy whatever they please as long as it doesn't harm other people. But Ponzi's are designed in nature to harm other people. To steal their money. To defraud investors.

With that said, I am respectfully asking that this issue be considered by the Bitcointalk staff and owners; and for thought to be given as to whether these types of services and programs should really have a home here in the Gambling section of Bitcointalk.org.

I certainly welcome comments and thoughts on this issue.

Strato

Personally I see no problems with the current trust system. It allows people to set their own depth of how many levels they wish to see at default, and it is simple enough for a user to view all feedback posted prior to doing business with any particular user.

This may have been said; but the bigger issue at hand that I see is that the forum openly allows users to buy and sell accounts.

Many online services, and nearly all of the big tech/social media sites strictly prohibit this-- and for good reason.

Personally I think it is simply too easy to jump into the marketplace; buy a Hero or Senior Account, perhaps even with no Trust Posts, do a small number of micro transactions to gain some posts, and then run any number of scams to steal peoples money or information.

I know theymos has more than enough on his plate right now, especially with the recent outage and disk issues- but personally I think instituting a simple ban on buying and selling accounts would provide greater security and be of greater benefit to the community than completely revising and restructuring the entire Trust System. The later also being, from what I would imagine, a whole lot of work.

Strato

Nice to see things back up and running. I run an 8 disk Raid 0 SSD Array as well. Certainly safer than spinning drives and knock on wood no failures yet. But backups are a must.

Thanks for your hard work getting it back and running so quickly.

Cheers!

Strato

I ran a lot of spot instances on AWS about a year ago - mostly for CPU coins - like Primecoin, MemoryCoin, etc. The only way you can make it even remotely worth your while is if you use Spot Pricing, and you automate the instances so that they launch automatically with scripting; and start mining - with no user input. Reason being spot instances will pop up and drop off as pricing fluctuates.

That said; Amazon's policy is if you are cut off in any given hour you are not charged for that hour. So if you can find sweet spots in the pricing, where you will likely be kicked more often then not within any given hour, you could make profit.

Is it worth it? I am not sure there is much worth mining these days unless you get in early on a coin that gets pumped or actually has legs and will hold a decent price.

Personally I wouldn't bother.

Strato

Our order was held by FedEx. They required our EIN. Perhaps due to size of order/dollar amount.

Now... What do I do with these stock S5 Fans???


pic host

Strato

Getting rough 240-250 kh on one of my Dual E5-2697v2 Machines. Running it bound to 23 Cores/46 Threads.

Using Wolfs AVX Miner. May try other versions of his miner to see how they do.



Thanks Wolf great work as always. Any tips or advice on tuning for better results would be welcomed.

Cheers!

Strato

I posted along these lines in the thread dedicated to created a liquid cooled S5.

Not sure what the point of doing this is... I'm hashing on my S5 units pretty consistantly at 1200ish (some more, some a tad less) by simply using 1 replaced Delta AFB1212SHE fan.

I mean, factoring the time, materials, cost, to mod an S5 into a liquid cooled S5 - just doesnt seem worthwhile unless you can end up getting 1500ghash or even more.

Am I missing something?

Strato

My brother did the same thing. He powered it up while holding the edges. The thing blows so fast it swung upwards and over just from the airflow... sliced his thumb right open.

Strato

Thanks for the update!

Looks great!  Looking forward to trying the new features - keep up the good work!

Strato

Is this coin still worthwhile mining on CPU?

Was GPU kernels ever developed?

Strato