All good points, though I thought it was a pretty interesting article.

One thing that wasn't mentioned is that when you buy bitcoin through PayPal or Robinhood, you don't actually have control of your private keys (as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong). 

He might not have mentioned ATMs because of the outrageous fees on some of them, but who knows.  That definitely was a glaring omission, as well as not mentioning localbitcoins.

And Coinbase has caused a lot of bitcoiners a lot of headaches, but they still sell a hell of a lot of bitcoin to US customers.  The author of that article's main problem was his place of residence:  New York.  I've had similar problems in my state and it sucks monkey dongs.

I'm not a moderator, but I'd recommend reporting his garbage posts (I can only view two of them, and this one is pure fluff, obviously written just to satisfy a character requirement for the BetFury campaign). 

I don't know if you're concerned about your report accuracy or what, but it can't hurt to report shitposts when you see them--either the mods act on them or they don't, and at least you've done something to help clean up the forum.  For a while I thought the forum had rid itself of members like this nykka person (at least for the most part), but it is precisely members like him that need to have their bloated, nonconstructive posts deleted as fast as they can.

That's mighty nice of you, nullius.  I think if anyone deserves a second chance it's mdayonliner, and I think I've expressed that I never thought he had any nefarious intentions with some of the things he got tagged for (of course I can't read his mind).  He strikes me as a young member who is/was intent on establishing a reputation on the forum--for whatever reason--and just went too far in some areas.  Ambition will do that some times.

And just a little bit off topic, quickly:
I did make a comment in that thread about Lauda possibly having alts, but obviously this isn't something I'm confident of and I didn't mean to make a big deal out of it.  Hell, I'd love it if Lauda returned.  If you say he/she won't with as much certainty as you're expressing, I'll just go ahead and take your word for it.  Let's have peace all over the kingdom.

I hate to have to start another thread in the Exchanges section, but for reasons I won't bore the community with I recently tried to create an account on Bittrex, which provides service to US customers.

They require KYC, so I uploaded images of the front and back of my driver's license and took a fantastic-looking selfie (lol) that Bittrex apparently thought was acceptable, because immediately afterward I got this message:



So after waiting a few minutes, I got another message (which I neglected to take a screenshot of, unfortunately) saying that my account has been disabled.  Does anyone know what's up with that?  

Being a lazy ass I didn't read their ToS, but I'm going to do that right after finishing this post.  I'm wondering if the state I live in is excluded....?  They didn't say that, though.

Christ, it's tough when you're fond of an obscure altcoin that only trades on a single legitimate exchange--and one that I apparently can't even get access to!  Any help or constructive comments would be appreciated.

Edit:  Ahhhh FUDGE!!!  I did take a look at possible causes for an account being disabled....and it's because of the state I live in.  I'm still interested in hearing from everyone, as when I searched for threads on Bittrex most of them were years old.  How the hell do I find out what my state laws are regarding crypto?

Man, I was wondering what would happen to the stock of some of these companies (the ones that are public) if bitcoin had a correction or, heaven forbid, crashed.

If I'm not mistaken, bitcoin dropped a few thousand USD in the past day or so, yet the 6-month chart for MicroStrategy is looking pretty damn good:


And Square has also not done so badly, either.  I forget how much BTC they hold, but they're on my watchlist of bitcoin-related companies:


Then again, it's only been a day or two.  If bitcoin continued to decline I would think these stocks might be in a wee bit of trouble--especially MSTR's.  I just watched a Youtube vid with the CEO, and it's amazing how bullish he is on bitcoin.

That's not an investment plan, that's a form of gambling that Yobit apparently think it was wise to implement.  It reminds me very much of the stupid-ass HYIP schemes that are popular on the Investor-Based Games section here (does that section even exist anymore?).  You might get lucky, but you probably won't--and Yobit will be the only winner in the end.

Yobit's days are numbered, I'm telling you.  With all the exchanges moving toward a traditional KYC brokerage-type setup, unregulated and extremely shady exchanges like Yobit are going to become a thing of the past.  I have a feeling that they know this, which is why they're ramping up all of these money-making schemes instead of trying to go legit.

I wouldn't even try this, OP.  I'd be curious to know if anyone makes any money from it.

Would I buy bitcoin when it's hitting its all-time high?  Nope.  As much as I love bitcoin, there's no way in hell I'm going to buy at what could be the top--that's how suckers lose money.  They give into that good ol' FOMO and buy when prices are too high (and I'd say a lot of times they end up selling for a lower price). 

These big companies like MicroStrategy and others, they make me wonder if they know what they're doing by buying bitcoin in a market like this.  I think they're smart for wanting to own it in lieu of cash, of course, but whether you make money or lose it all depends on what price you got in at.  That's always the case, always.

Now, having said all of that and seeing how far bitcoin has dropped in a couple of days, I might be inclined to buy it at $35k (or wherever it is right now).  But even then, I don't have a clue where the price is headed--nor do I have any extra money to buy crypto with.

Sure, everyone loves it when they're in on the game--but pump and dumps always have victims, the suckers that buy in at the top when all the insiders are dumping.  That's why it's illegal in the stock market to do that sort of thing.

It's kind of surprising to me that the laws haven't caught up to cryptocurrency in that respect, because I'm pretty sure it's still legal to pump and dump shitcoins at will.  It certainly happens all the time.  Anyway, I don't think it's "ethically acceptable" because of the aforementioned victims in the P&D scheme.  Nobody makes a profit in them without someone losing.

No.  In fact, when I realize that I've earned some merits I rarely even bother to look to see who sent them.  And as a merit source, that's a good thing; I don't really want to know who sent me merits, nor do I ever feel like repaying anyone for meriting my posts--that would be an abuse of the merit system for a merit source to do that. 

For someone who's not a merit source, you can do whatever you like with your sMerits as long as you're not selling them or trading them or whatever.  I don't see any problem with the average user meriting someone who had given them merits, though it isn't necessary.  Ideally you should be giving merits to posts that grab your eye and not as a thank-you for whatever.

That's kind of what I was thinking, especially since OP got this message:


That's a large amount of bitcoin you're talking about, and since Blockchain.com is a web wallet which holds your coins for you it sounds like they're under the thumb of some body of regulators. 

OP, hopefully you realize what this means and if so, I would seriously think about that fact when looking for a wallet to store your bitcoins in. 

There seems to be a strong vibe of jealousy around signature campaigns that pay a decent rate these days.  And OP, I'd never even heard of Bitcasino or its campaign, but if you think there's some shenanigans going on in it, you might want to contact the project owners.

Now, for these two:
Campaign managers have been known to make the maximum rate for the campaign as part of their hiring--I've seen one other case of that, and it was actually a campaign manager who was registered as Legendary member when he was lower than that.  If I recall correctly it did turn out to be legit.

As far as the negative feedback, it's from DT members but it wasn't left because mich scammed anyone.  And a disclaimer: I haven't read the Bitcasino campaign rules, so I don't know what their policy is on members with negative trust.  But all of that aside, I'm not sure why you're so upset about these things.

This poll is almost silly, but I had to cast my vote for Binance (even though I can't use it because of where I live).  It's miles ahead of the rest--even Coinbase--and there are only a couple of exchanges that have their level of trust and selection of altcoins.  Kucoin comes to mind, but it wasn't in the poll options.

As I'm expecting there to be some serious consolidation in the crypto exchange space, this is making me wonder what a poll like this will look like at the end of 2021.  I'm not sure how long it's going to take for buyouts/takeovers/attrition to happen, but I am expecting the total number of exchanges to decrease, especially as people stop using them because of their KYC requirements.  Should be a very interesting year indeed.

I've never heard of that coin before I heard of shorelinecrypto.  Is that like shoreline's own homegrown coin or something, like BNB is to Binance? 

Does NewEnglandcoin have any advantage over anything else in the altcoin market?  My guess is no if you guys delisted it already.

OP, I wanted to give the gift of BTC this Christmas to someone who knows nothing about bitcoin, and I bought a Ballet wallet, loaded a little bit of bitcoin onto it and gave it to him as sort of a stocking stuffer.  I'd created a thread about the Ballet, wondering if anyone had actually used them--I know about the security issues, but I figured it was a small amount and I did advise the recipient to transfer the bitcoin to a more secure wallet.

I could have just made a paper wallet, but the Ballet makes for a nice gift presentation (which I think is important, but your mileage may vary on that).

Huh--I think I'd heard the name of them around somewhere, but I'll have to look into them.  I suspect this isn't the last time I'm going to be giving BTC as a gift.

Yeah, somehow I have a feeling miners aren't exactly holding onto that many of their mined coins--true, some of them could be very bullish on bitcoin and could be waiting for an even higher price to sell at, but these big mining farms are businesses.  They're not really in business to gamble on bitcoin's price like that (that's my guess anyway).

I would imagine that at least some of the coins that the big institutional investors are buying are coming from the miners in off-exchange deals.  In fact I thought I'd heard something about just that a while back.

Anyway, I've been very interested in all of this deep-pocket, big-company bitcoin buying as well, though I haven't been paying attention to it in as much detail as you OP--so I thank you for the info you put into this thread.  It's definitely a seller's market right now because of all the big-boy buying.  I watched a Youtube video with the CEO of MicroStrategy last night, and man is he bullish on bitcoin.  Hopefully the market doesn't crash, because his company would take one hell of a hit on its books if that happened.

I just looked at B1tUnl0ck3r's post history, and yeah....a lot of his posts are just plain bizarre, to say the least.  Admittedly I'm just reading his posts out of whatever discussion context they were in, but some of them seem like they wouldn't make sense in any context whatsoever.

The guy's been around since 2016 so I don't think he's trying to pinch merits from the WO thread like some member do.  I've no explanation for the weirdness he's writing, but even though WO is a thread unto itself, there should be a "local" moderator who takes care of spam in that thread.  I know they don't want moderator interference (I remember some people getting very upset when a mod had deleted some posts in the WO thread a while back), but someone ought to have the power to nuke nonsensical/spam posts.  The ignore button only goes so far, you know.

Mmm hmm.  I'll believe that when I start hearing some actual communication from them, which I don't believe has yet happened. 

One thing I've learned by observing all sorts of scammers on this forum through the years is that they love stringing their victims along, giving them false hope and watching that hope dashed.  I can't say with 100% certainty that that's what's going on in this case, but Livecoin is starting to grow feathers, a beak, and is swimming like a duck if you know what I mean.  Shortly I think we can conclusively call them a duck unless they start trying to make things right with their customers.

I hadn't heard anything about that, though I think I do remember reading something about the so-called privacy coins not being very popular in the eyes of the government--but that doesn't mean there are laws on the books as we speak prohibiting them from being traded in New England or anywhere else in the US.

As an exchange operator, I'm assuming you're aware of state and federal laws but please correct me if I'm wrong (and if I'm wrong, you probably should be aware of those things).  It's too bad there don't seem to be many lawyers frequenting bitcointalk.  Their advice would be much appreciated in situations like this.

Man, I didn't understand a word of what you wrote, but that's likely my ignorance more so than the quality of your explanation. 

But the plain fact as I see it is that governments are creating and giving away money like it's going out of style, and I don't see how in hell that can't eventually NOT lead to inflation.  I'm thinking this is the reason why companies like MicroStrategy and others have decided to fill their cash reserve coffers not with fiat, but with bitcoin.  They see a massive devaluation of fiat currency looming and are being very proactive about it--and they're protecting themselves from it.

That all assumes that bitcoin doesn't implode like 2014/2017, but I think if we did start to see crazy inflation in Europe, the US, Canada, and some of the bigger countries bitcoin would perform very nicely. 

As to who's paying for all of this?  I've been saying that the can has been kicked down the road so far that it's going to be our kids and grandkids who are going to foot the bill for all this insanity.  I'm hoping Joe Biden can appraise the situation rationally and come up with a plan that doesn't bankrupt the US.

I haven't experienced exactly what you did, OP, but I've had bad experiences with Coinbase in the past--and the line for complaints about Coinbase stretches around the block, too.  They're definitely a legitimate exchange, but I think they're being run by a bunch of idiots with no sense of what customer service is all about.

Makes no sense to me why they'd cancel your trade for no apparent reason, and unless they themselves provide you with an answer to that I don't think you'll ever know for sure.  Hopefully it wasn't to prevent you from making a profitable trade, but who knows.  Anything is possible with those jokers.