I'm a US resident so I'm not sure if these option are open to others, but I can use Coinbase to send fiat to my PayPal or my checking account.  There's also BitPay, I know they're available in other countries but that might be limited to your local currency.

I just got an email from ShapeShift with a coupon code for a free KeepKey Hardware Wallet.  I think the offer is only open to those who've already registered with the ShapeShift exchange service, but if you've been considering getting one it might be worth looking into whether they're available for new registrants.

I already own a KeepKey and I'm not particularly thrilled with it.  The Pin feature is limited, making it slightly less secure than a Trezor or a Ledger.  It does, however support Bip39 seed phrases and passphrases, so it could be used as a back-up to your other hardware wallets.

The Chrome extension only supports legacy addresses (for receiving, it can send to Bech32 and nested segwit addresses,) but that can be overcome if you use it with Electrum.  I've never used mine with ShapeShift's web interface, so I don't know if this limitation exists with that interface.

Anyway, if you qualify to get a free one, I don't know why you wouldn't.  Shipping is also free, so the price is definitely affordable.  

Repayment confirmed, thanks again for your business.

That's your problem right there.  Electrum versions older than 3.3.3 will no longer connect to the network of servers to prevent phishing and malware.  Like Ninja said, you'll need the most recent version.

Make sure to download only from the official Electrum site: https://electrum.org/#download
And verify the download.

I remember that conversation a few months back, and remember thinking how you must have felt gypped.  Oh well, water under the bridge.  It is nice to have a goal, and I'm sure you'll make it in due time.

I was bored, so I put together a simple calculator to predict the date of the next Activity milestone for increasing rank.  The spreadsheet assumes consistent activity to the dates it calculates, and your post count is equal to or higher than the required activity.  Of course there are still those pesky merit requirements one must achieve.

To use it, enter the date of your most recent bump in activity score, and your current activity points in the yellow fields.

And, without further ado, the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-QJgAw9oZ0Rf6Y5uE53d3koEbgP4BoZaTsF6toJBAJY/edit?usp=sharing

This is about as friendly you're likely to find folks when newbies ask for a no-collateral loan.  Put yourself in the lender's position.  Would trust a complete stranger who just walked into your house, told you some sob story, and asked for $3000?

Everyone here knows that cloud mining operations that promise too-good-to-be-true returns are all scams.  There's no way in hell you'll earn enough in one month to pay back that kind of loan.  If you turn your money over to those operations you'll be scammed yourself.  Either you know that, the story is lie, and you have no intention of paying back, or you're gullible and will lose the lender's money.  Either way, the lender will never hear from you again.  Sound about right?

I'm US based and have done a couple transactions with OmegaStarScream.  The F&F fee is $2.99, and PayPal doesn't charge me to convert to his local currency.

ETA: OSS is great to deal with, I highly recommend trading with him.

The numbers don't lie, but I'm not sure they're telling the whole story either.  I haven't been keeping track thoroughly, but if someone were to scrutinize my posting history for the same time period it might look similar to those users in suchmoon's table.  I was participating in the bitblender campaign up until it ended, but I was contemplating stepping down right before that.  Due to lack of help at work I had to take on extra work load, and home improvement projects that I started were preventing me from spending as much time on the forum as I had in previous months.  It's only in recent weeks that I think I've become a bit more active, now that some of my projects are complete and my work load is back to normal levels.

The spike in bans and sig-bans also coincided with the northern hemisphere's summer months.  A lot of folks take vacations, or have children home from school and are spending more family or doing things outdoors.  I made time to go fishing and mountain biking with my son a few times, and took a couple of road trips with the kids and one with a friend.

Again, it might be as simple as it looks for some, and for other's it might only be part of the picture.  

A few signature campaigns don't pay for posts in the Off-Topic section, and I think that's how would approach it if I was managing a campaign.  But it is the off-topic section, and I don't see any reason to restrict a subject's worthiness.  If a manger wants to pay for posts about avoiding toenail fungus, I don't know if that really hurts the forum in general.  Sure, it may lead to sig-spamming but at least it's contained in that section.  Most of the threads in that section don't hold any interest to me, so I don't click on them.

Of course you're right.  Stooping to the level of mudslinging by CryptoSparks is beneath me and I should do better to avoid it.



He did ask for a 5 bitcoin loan offering nothing of value as collateral.  I'd call that fairly high risk.



There's nothing wrong with that strategy, other than the fact that he was promising impossible returns.  And I will take issue with your claim that he responded strongly to his detractors; all he's done is respond with insults and attacks.  Nobody really paid any attention to him until he offered to pay for promoting his service and requesting a $50k loan.  He might have actually made something of his service if he didn't start lying and insulting those who asked legitimate questions.  His responses also seem to contain a lack of knowledge of how bitcoin works, making it clear to me that he's no programmer.  He is an altcoin spammer who some how came across a trading bot that I doubt he developed, and threw in some buzz words to make it sound legit.

If he really does have a quantitative trading algorithm why would he share it with the two million members of bitcointalk?  That would effectively defeat the purpose of having such a tool.  The more people who employ a trading strategy the less profitable that strategy becomes.  Institutional trading giants pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary to their quant programmers.  Their code is a top-secret tool, not something they show off or boast about.  The algorithms they use are constantly in flux, what worked yesterday is certain to not work today.

You can show me code of his bot, and I wouldn't be able tell you if it's real or not, because I'm not a coder.  But I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, either.

What's really going on with FruitBasket and CryptoSparks?  At first blush I was suspicious that the two are alts of one user, but I am unable to find any evidence to support this suspicion.  But I did find that FruitBasket does have an alt that was busted for being a paid shill...  Things that make you go HMMMM...

Not long ago CryptoSparks started a topic offering to pay for shilling his trading bot service.  The same service that any rational person would scrutinize with a healthy dose of skepticism.  Lo and behold, here's FruitBasket, defending and promoting CryptoSparks scambot.

So, @FruitBasket are you a paid shill for CryptoSparks?

2 Accounts Connected:

FruitsBasket,
BestWebCreator

Proof:

http://archive.fo/isuP1#selection-473.0-473.34


http://archive.fo/a9RLa#selection-7085.1-7085.35


Related Addresses:


Miscellaneous:

N/A

When I first accused you of being the OP's alt it was tongue-in-cheek, a sort of half-assed joke.  Now I'm starting to think my initial intuition was correct.  Otherwise, I have no clue why anyone in their right mind would align themselves with, and continue to shill for this toxic troll and his shady service.  And shill you have, becoming toxic yourself in the same way.  Here you are, just the two of you, promoting this service that quacks like a scam, fighting an unwinnable fight for acceptance against the whole forum.

If you're not the OP's alt, what could you possibly gain from continuing to shill his service?  You can still benefit from his service without promoting it, correct?  It's quite baffling.

I hope this user wasn't able to deceive anyone into actually entering their seeds into that site.  It would be pretty cumbersome to track it if he did, since we would have to know which public keys were part of the HD wallets.

It looks like Timelord was able to connect dj6230 to another scammer account, funkydog three years ago.  The user funkydog has been banned for spreading fake Electrum malware, so the pattern fits.  If dj6230 isn't banned for sending malicious links in PM, he should be banned for ban evasion.

It's been ten days since dj6230 has been active, but somehow I suspect he's just moved on to another alt.  

There's nothing suspicious about that vouch.  It couldn't be an alt of the OP.  He's not so stupid to think that anyone would fall for such blatant shilling.
[/sarcasm] 

Actually, he really is that stupid.  Just go through his post history for proof. 

Most lenders require at least 120% collateral to loan value.  At the current exchange rate you'll need 0.423 BTC for collateral on a $3500 loan.  I'm not offering to fill this loan, I don't have any stable coins.  Converting some of my crypto to fill this loan would essentially be the same as shorting bitcoin, which I'm not interested in doing.

I will say, it's nice to see a newbie actually make a rational loan request.

If you need someone to act as escrow I offer my services @ 1%, or I recommend DarkStar_ or Hhampuz.

@asu,
I went through your previous loan history, and I realized you qualify for my Loyalty Rates since you've already paid 0.005 BTC in interest on your previous loans.  I've adjusted your amount due to 0.1105, and updated the table in post 2.

Your scheduled payments are as follows:
Payment 1: 0.057
Payment 2: 0.0535

---

@theyoungmillionaire,
Your loan has also been adjusted per my suggestion in PM, and I'm sorry the discrepancy in your proposal didn't occur to me sooner.  

Your scheduled payments are as follows:
Payment 1: 0.096
Payment 2: 0.09075
Payment 3: 0.0855
Payment 4: 0.08025
Total repayment amount of 0.3525

Alternately, if you prefer to have 4 equal payments of 0.088568, we can use the formula for loan payment calculations used by most banks:
(L*R)/(1-((1+R)^-P))
Where:
L= Loan amount (0.3)
R= Interest rate (0.07)
P= Quantity of payments (4)

Note that this second option causes you to pay a little more in interest.  Because part of the interest of the first two months is amortized into the payments of the last two months you are effectively paying interest on some of the interest incurred during the first two months.  Total repayment amount would be 0.354274, 0.001774 more than the first option.  I'll leave the choice up to you.

Despite the vulnerability score of this phishing attack, the severity can't really be calculated by anyone but the victims.  The loss of 0.1 BTC might be a slight irritant to some while it may represent another's annual savings.

One thing the CVSS may not take into account is how trusting people are.  Here's software that they've been using and trusting for years telling them they need an update.  It's not surprising that many fell for it.

Most of us who hang out here on Bitcointalk understand the risks when dealing with crypto and tend to be very diligent when it comes to our own security.  But, those who are only passively involved with crypto may not be as scrutinous.  I think that makes a lot of people who use Electrum vulnerable.

As for the use of Electrum, I use it for just about everything; Desktop wallet, off-line to create or access cold storage, and to interface with my hardware wallets.  When using electrum as a desktop wallet I treat it like I would my actual physical wallet, as in I would never keep more than a few hundred bucks in there.  It is the most vulnerable, and the funds you keep in there suffer from the greatest risk, respectively.

Congrats to those selected, and good job DarkStar_.  I'm sure it wasn't easy.