Thanks for sharing, it's a really interesting story, and it's very eye-opening. Even if we theoretically discuss how Bitcoin can help the unbanked, most of use here won't ever experience anything like what this guy did. And to me it's an example that even if Bitcoin doesn't reach mass adoption or is too volatile to be a store of value, there's still a lot of practical uses for it for at least some people, and in that Bitcoin is truly irreplaceable.

I'm happy that Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts in the same way Ethereum does, they only create hype and unrealistic expectations for everyone in the community, while failing to solve any real-world problems. When Ethereum was first launched, it was touted as world's computer, the idea was that soon every device will turn IoT, that centralized services will be replaced by decentralized ones, and it will all be thanks to ETH, but now 5 years later Ethereum's biggest achievements are lotteries, collectible tokens, and ICO scams.

Crypto gambling is booming because it allows gamblers and casinos to bypass regulations and bans, and as the result it even creates better terms for players, because it allows crypto casinos to have way lower house edge than the fiat money ones. Now when you add stablecoins, you'll either have to legalize yourself and rise your house edge due to higher costs of operating, and put obstacles for players like KYC and taxes; or risk getting all your stablecoin bankroll frozen.

It's a really bad idea to think that an address is your bank account, because an address should only be used to receive coins once, and you should give a new address the next time. So, it's closer to something like a one-time payment request. Unfortunately, people, especially beginners, ignore this and indeed use them as "bank accounts". This destroys their privacy and it becomes extremely easy to track all their Bitcoin transactions.

Inside jobs are probably barely a problem in this scenario, plus blockchain might not be immune from it if it's made to be editable, like it often happens with all these corporate blockchains.

The biggest problem is that this setup if full of centralized intermediaries - various validators, verified vendors, shipping companies and so on. In the end of the day, you trust that none of these entities have swapped the legit items with fake ones, or that they haven't tampered with in some other way. This is exactly what we have now with the centralized approach.

DeFi got so much hype already, that it's likely that sometime soon this bubble will pop, though knowing crypto markets, it's possible that this FOMO will last for longer, so it might be still profitable. I personally wouldn't touch this DeFi with a 6-feet pole, cause I'm happy with just owning BTC, but if you want to dive into DeFi, my advice is to not get too attached to it and make sure to dump it when you'll secure your profit. It can easily crash and leave you with worthless tokens, like it was with the ICO craze.

I actually do google for official website when I want to get the site or install some software, but I don't just click on the first google result, instead I look at mentions of it from multiple sources and check that they all lead to the same address.

It's actually easier to verify the more popular sites, because they will be mentioned by other sites a lot, so despite all the phishing, you'll easily find the real one, but with some less obscure things, it's hard to find even the references to them. For example, it's hard to find a legitimate cracks for software by googling and nearly all results will have malware, and you'd need to get to some specialized forums to find links to relatively safe cracks.

I don't think that new members explicitly choose to be spammers or bounty hunters instead of being good members, and as for scammers, those people aren't actually newbies, they probably have dozens of other accounts, some maybe even with higher ranks.

Some users who started as shitposters eventually changed their ways and became very valuable users, this is because when you posts are good, they will get merited without people going through your post history to check if you are worthy.


You shouldn't encourage newbies to earn merit via creating educational topic posts, because they are newbies, they will often fail to do so properly and will only introduce misconceptions.

If there's a 5 month gap between last time you accessed coins and the theft, it might mean that some malware stole your wallet file and bruteforced your password. You might want to move the coins from your other wallet to a freshly created one in isolated environment.

Your story is pretty strange, but I've seen similar stories before, and it's usually discovered that a seed or wallet file were stored insecurely and a malware incident or online hacking took place.

What a strange question, Bitcoin didn't fundamentally change from what was created by Satoshi, the structure of the network, the roles, the principles, it's all still the same. And Bitcoin doesn't have any puppet masters, the nodes are controlled by the community, the code is developed by hundreds of contributors. Nothing can force you to use centralized exchanges instead of alternatives like DEXs, p2p trading, Bitcoin ATMs and so on.

How is it different from a centralized database that also stores and tracks ids of their products? A lot of companies that have to deal with scammers counterfeiting their product were using these methods even before blockchain was invented. And what would stop scammers from doing the oldest trick in the book - copying the identifier of a genuine item and slapping it on their fakes?

I'd seriously rather use a bank than storing my fiat money in a stablecoin, a bank is less likely to go down, and in the event it does there's even some chance to get some of your money back. Banks can even get bailed out by central banks, but with stablecoins you get all the downsides of centralized custodians, plus some of the downsides of crypto, like managing your private keys, and then there's no of the benefits, like legal protection, deposits, cashback, etc.

Bitcoin is not and never was a safe haven, a safe haven is something that has very high chance of preserving its value during a crisis, or at worst only loses at little bit of value. Bitcoin goes randomly up or down by a few percents almost every day, and it swing by tens of percents many times per year. This already disqualifies it from being a safe haven, just like no one ever considers penny stocks to be a saf haven, but now that Bitcoin followed stocks at the beginning of the covid-19 crisis, investors have even less reasons to view it as a safe haven. It might take decades before Bitcoin will start showing these properties.

You can try posting the addresses or reporting it to the police, but there's practically no chance that your coins will be returned.

What you need to do now is to analyze how your coins were stolen, so that it won't happen again in the future. Did you store your seed in your email, cloud storage or your computer? Could your coins have been physically compromised, i.e. someone physically stole/copied your seed? Did you use some unsecure wallet generation method, like picking the seed words manually? Do you use a cold storage setup, or did you access your wallet from a live machine? Is the password on your wallet file strong?

I had to rank from Hero to Legendary after the merit system introduction, and it was a little fun to finally reach the highest rank, especially considering that I had to get 500 merit, but overall it was nothing too exciting. I'm looking forward towards celebrating when I'll earn 1000 merit, so I will be able to consider myself a self-made Legendary, but I don't do anything special to earn merit - I don't try to make high-effort posts, guides, translations, etc.

It's more of a bell curve, on one side you have a totally controlled markets which makes people nothing more than slaves to their government, like it was in the USSR or in North Korea. Things like owning a small business or trading on currency markets, or flipping commodities were considered a crime punishable by prison or work camp. Even unemployment was illegal.

But totally free market with zero government intervention aren't good either, this can easily lead to monopolies, poor work workplace standards and lower salaries, no benefits for workers, lower quality goods. People will be theoretically free to do anything they want, but on practice they'll have no choice but to work under horrible conditions and have very little spare time.

No one in real world pays serious attention to crypto markets (I'm speaking about businessmen, government officials, lawmakers, etc.). Tether, altcoins, even Bitcoin all can collapse tomorrow and it will have no effect on the fiat economy.

Plus, there's no mechanism for a chain reaction like you are suggesting. Small currencies collapse pretty often and they never drag other small currencies together with them in some sort of mass panic that jumps borders.

I don't see any dilemma here, it's not like bitcoin.org was compromised and started hosting some anti-Bitcoin or other inappropriate content. If that will happen, then it will be a time to think before solutions, but before that, let's not be hasty and create more confusion with competing sites and so on. So far we have just some small, local drama that doesn't affect the community as a whole.

It's important to understand that just because an address isn't in this public scam list, it doesn't mean that it's not a scam. In fact, I never use these scam verification services, because you just need a good common sense and a bit of experience to avoid scams. If you are dealing with a person, try to use escrow service, if it's a service, thoroughly research their reputation. Anyone can create as many addresses as they want, so only bad scammers are reusing their addresses.

Unfortunately, just joining this forum and reading it daily won't protect you from scams, it may even lure you into scams if you visit wrong boards at a wrong time. For example, if a newbie will join this forum and then only visit the altcoin and bounty sections, they won't learn much and will likely invest in some scam, because those boards have a lot of shills and clueless newbies who easily say "good project".

Always direct people to this board first when you introduce them to this forum. And warn them about the dangers of altcoins, cloud mining, hyips and other scams, don't rely on them learning it on their own.