Yep, all of those businesses accept bitcoin (as far as I know), and I'm sure there are a lot more.

But even if there were no businesses that accepted bitcoin, that doesn't mean that it couldn't have value.  You can't spend gold doubloons or rare comic books at your local retailer, but those things can be converted to large amounts of fiat--so in other words, bitcoin is an investment and not just a currency.  In fact I've always thought of it more as an investment than a currency.  I would much rather spend the dollar bills in my pocket than bitcoin when I'm buying groceries.

In any event, bitcoin is not useless.  You can spend it; it's an investment; and it's somewhat of a store of value as well.  I'd also point out that useless things don't tend to be very popular, and you kind of have to admit that bitcoin is pretty damn popular and has been for years now.

Yikes!  That might sound like a positive thing for bitcoin, but it kind of scares me.  Just imagine if just a couple of those companies needed to dump their bitcoin holdings onto the market all at once--I would hope that they'd work out private deals instead of using exchanges, but who knows?

Aside from the fear of bitcoin being held by an increasingly large number of companies, I'm amazed that this is actually happening and I certainly would not have predicted corporations would start buying up bitcoin to hold as cash reserves/investment/whatever. 

So 2.85% held by these companies.  How much do the Winklevii twins hold?  And I can't even remember how much is in Satoshi's wallet, percentage-wise.  Makes me wonder how many individual bitcoin holders there really are out there.

No kidding, right?  That's why I clicked on this thread, hoping that they'd finally gone dark--for good.  But I had a feeling that wasn't going to be the case since they just launched that "virtual mining" garbage and have yet to reap the rewards from the suckers that give them money for whatever that service is supposed to do.

Then again, one of these days we might find Yobit closed for good due to a search-and-seizure effort on the part of law enforcement or something related to that.  If I'm not mistaken, that's happened to other exchanges not too long ago (though I think they were Korean).  Yobit is operating out of Russia, and I'm not sure how concerned their officials are about crypto exchanges.

I did understand, but perhaps my post wasn't clear.  I knew Yahoo62278 wasn't accusing DarkStar_ of incompetence; I was wondering out loud whether that was being discussed (by any members, not Yahoo62278 specifically) in the campaign thread, and I thought I'd add my $0.02 about DarkStar_'s excellent reputation as a campaign manager and choosy applicant selector.

Having said that, I'm going to go do what I said I was going to, which is to visit the Chipmixer thread.  Can't wait!

Nah, that wasn't it--and I have no idea what the problem was, but I just tried it again and I was able to generate a bitcoin deposit address. 

But as far as Dash goes, I just get this:



as well as for Neblio, which is just a random coin that I tried to see if I could get a deposit address.  I'm not sure why Kucoin has got multiple coin wallets in maintenance mode, though I'm assuming it has to do with the investigation of the hack....or something related to that. 

Well anyway, I'm glad they're still in business and I do hope they don't go under because of the hack.  It isn't as though the amount stolen was small.  Got my answer, and I thank everyone who tried to help.  Locking thread now.

I can certainly see the reasoning behind that suggestion, but I'd prefer to see campaign threads not be self-moderated.  What would be better is if the campaign manager made some local rules so that if/when members started breaking them, he'd have good ground to stand on if he reported the offending post(s).

I haven't visited the Chipmixer campaign thread lately, but based on what I've read so far in this one there's some drama a-brewing over some applications?  I'm not asking anyone to answer that, as I'll probably un-ignore the Services section and take a look at DarkStar_'s thread and see for myself.

If that's one of the arguments being bandied about, I'd have to strenuously disagree with it.  If he ever did a piss-poor job of selecting participants, it sure isn't reflected in the current roster.  I'd also point out that DarkStar_ is extremely selective when choosing from a pool of applicants.  I got rejected once, and I've heard other members have been rejected multiple times before getting in.  TL;DR: he's fuckin' good.

That time period in the months in and around October 2017 were effin' awful for the forum.  I recall that when I was doing a lot of reporting of shitposts (to soothe my nerves) and trying to link alt accounts, I kept seeing that many of them had registered right around that time.  I think the later months of 2017 were when a lot of ICO bounties were being created, and it brought out all the shitposters who no doubt created at least several alt accounts each. 

It was also when bitcoin was exploding in price, so it was extremely hard to find a spot in a regular bitcoin-paying signature campaign.  Anyway, that's why I think there were so many accounts registered between the summer and tail end of 2017.

I don't know a lot about what that "evil fee" is, though I've certainly heard of it.  That's for when you get IP banned, is it not?  Well, in any case it also doesn't shock me that there's a lot of "evil" accounts generated in 2017.  And boy, the numbers have stayed quite low ever since the merit system kicked off, eh?

Yep, with all the exchanges out there it's extremely hard for a complete noob to know which ones to avoid, and they also may not have developed a sense of smell for shit offers/programs/whatever like this one from Yobit.

This drives me nuts:



Very unprofessional, and obviously Yobit hasn't improved in any way whatsoever in the years they've been around.  Good warning for the newcomers, JollyGood.

I just logged into Kucoin and tried to deposit some bitcoin and was surprised to see that it gave me an error message saying it was unable to generate a deposit address.  Just to check that it was a problem with bitcoin only, I went through the steps to deposit Dash....but they gave me a message that Dash is in maintenance mode.

I haven't used Kucoin since they got hacked and haven't read a lot about what's been going on with them since it happened.  Does anyone have any inside poop as to whether they're still a functioning exchange or are they on their way out?  I also noticed their FAQ page was down, which I took to be an ominous sign.

Any input would be appreciated, thanks my peeps.

The above about sum up my opinions based on what I understand of this thread--scammers are gonna scam, and they're going to be trying to do it everywhere they can.  Unfortunately that also includes faucets.  I think most people grow out of using faucets early on when they get into bitcoin, but it's in that early stage when they're ignorant about a lot of things that they're the most vulnerable. 

That example given almost looked like an arbitrage trade, and those aren't scams--except by the time you get around to advertising an arbitrage opportunity, it's already gone.  Therefore it most certainly has to be a scam, not to mention that the referral to a specific exchange is very sketchy in itself.

I get that there's a problem, but I'm a pessimist as far as thinking it's going to get solved.  Faucets aren't motivated to vet every "business" that wants to advertise on their site, just like CMC and Coingecko aren't motivated to verify trading volume and all the other exchange stats.

I'm not so sure the problem is with members reading the rules or not--I think it's more insidious than that, i.e., these are intentional bumps that might even be paid for.  We've had this problem going on in the ANN section for years now, and there's no way any one mod (or even a dozen of them) can clean them up, no matter how many reports they get.

Yeah well, they should have been banned but I don't think that would even slow the problem down much anyway.  There are so many people here with alt accounts and it's way too easy to just create a new account and write one of those stupid "great project" or "joined" posts in order to bump a thread.

Disappointed, but I bet you're not completely surprised.  It's like a silly little game of wack-a-mole being played--and unless you have a serious interest in ANN threads, I would advise you not to waste your time reporting this shit.  Sure, you'll accumulate a lot of reports, but it's a battle that you're never going to win.

Since never, and I have a feeling OP might not know that you don't have to use any sort of leverage when buying stocks (or crypto).  And if you don't buy either one on margin, you're never going to get completely wiped out unless what you bought goes to $0.00, which is unlikely unless you're screwing around with penny stocks or 1-satoshi wonder shitcoins on Yobit.

Now I'm pretty sure you have no idea what you're talking about.  Nothing you wrote in the above post makes any sense to me whatsoever. 

Broly46.  Where do I remember that username from?  Did I have you tagged as a shitposter at one point before the merit system came along?

No offense, but assuming this is your only (or oldest) account, you've only been on bitcointalk since roughly the time COVID-19 started becoming a real problem.  And the reason I bring that up?  Because it's obvious to me that you haven't done enough reading--because if you had, especially in Meta, you'd know that suggestions like yours have been brought up before and they invariably get ignored by Theymos.

Scams aren't even moderated on the forum, so there's no way Theymos is going to put the burden of judging the legitimacy of a newbie's thread onto the moderators.  And I'm not even saying it's a bad idea, just one that you can pretty much forget about. 

My suggestion to you is to read more and figure out what the culture is like on the forum, how things work, what the "leadership" is like here, and so forth before you start making recommendations on how to improve bitcointalk.

This piece of shit scam project didn't even have a bounty going yet, but you're absolutely right about projects similar to this one paying their bounty managers (and participants) in tokens--is that actually still happening?  I would have figured all the bounty hunters that got scammed during the ICO craze would have learned their lesson by now.  That whole "do the work for us first, then we'll pay you later" scheme is ridiculous. 

That's one of the lamest, most half-assed excuses for anything that I've heard in a long time, no joke.  It doesn't make sense, and I get the impression he knew he was busted and had to write something before locking the thread.

Sadly, I'm pretty sure whoever is really behind this Yieldly turd won't be deterred and will just come up with a new idea for a scam and learn from this episode (in the negative sense, of course; they'll just learn how to better conceal their scam).  Nice catch, OP.

Egads, that idea is fraught with serious problems.

Merit sources aren't just a random group of members that Theymos keeps topped up with sMerits; most of them had to apply for the position by creating a thread in which the community could voice their opinions (and some threads turned into shit shows as people piled in to give reports of negative behavior on the part of the applicant and all sorts of other stuff). 

Some merit sources (like myself) were "tapped" by Theymos via PM at some point in September 2018 IIRC, and I'm pretty sure he selected members who he thought could be trusted not to abuse the position and/or ones he thought would do a good job distributing merits fairly.

If you gave "newer members" a chance to be merit sources, there are all sort of things that could go wrong.  I'm not sure most newbies, Jr. Members, and probably even some of the Member rank understand the importance of the merit system, and that it's not a mechanism whereby you merit your alt accounts, friends, and certainly not to sell merits.  I don't think members without track records of trustworthiness would be appropriate as merit source candidates--and I also think Theymos already realizes this fact, because I've seen a lot of the members he's chosen to be sources.

Yeah well, that happens everywhere--it's just that this is a dramatic case of how much is being spent to print the Bolivar bank notes (or whatever you call them) compared to how much they're worth.  Frankly I think the Venezuelan government ought to have picked out the cheapest paper and included as few security designs built into the notes as practically possible.

Definitely sad, and I hadn't heard any news out of Venezuela since before COVID-19 hit.  I thought their situation might have been improving, but I guess not.  What a fucked up situation they're in--and hopefully Venezuelans have adopted a more stable currency (like the USD) for their day-to-day financial transactions. 

And yes, bitcoin was built for situations exactly like this.  Even if it's volatile, it's not in a hyperinflation situation and isn't controlled by banks or governments. 

There's no reference link for midnightmagic's feedback below, so to me that's just some accusation being hurled against BAC with nothing to back it up.  And what is this about a complaint with the SEC?


OP must not be aware of how many publicly traded corporations are registered in Delaware, and the address is usually in a file cabinet on floor 79 of some building in some city in the state of Delaware.  There's nothing strange, odd, or nefarious about that--though to someone who's ignorant about the advantages of incorporating your business in DE it might look that way.

I've been kinda-sorta helping BAC promote FreeBitcoins.com with some stickering.  If I thought or had evidence that he was doing anything illegal, I'd drop him like a flaming potato--but I don't.

Why in the world would any member do shit like that?  I understand why you'd copy/paste the application format, and that it could be a mistake if you didn't change the payout address, but how many times can a mistake like that keep happening?

I also just don't understand what is going on here as far as registering for bounties using other member's user names.  OP, is that what you're pointing out examples of here?  I don't completely get what these members are doing--and more importantly, why.

If someone could explain this to me like I'm a 5-year old merit source, I'd sure appreciate it.

Well, yeah....cryptotalk.org basically scraped the bottom of the bottom of bitcointalk's barrel and recruited them to be the core community on the cryptotalk forum.  Anyone who's been a member here long enough to notice the shitposting problem could have predicted how that was going to turn out.

Did I just read that cryptotalk members are now being paid in some token instead of bitcoin?  That's something I didn't see coming, but I guess it shouldn't surprise me if it's true. 

OK, fair enough and I've argued the same thing when people say members are making peanuts on bitcointalk signature campaigns.  It all depends on where you live (and how you live).

Very interesting story here, and this is really making me wonder what the hell is going on such that we've got publicly traded companies buying up bitcoin as their cash reserve.

I put SQ on my watchlist and took a look at some of their stats.  This in particular does not bode well for the long term:



A lot of companies on the NASDAQ don't pay dividends, but that P/E and the fact that it's trading at the very top of its 52-week range make me think this is one of the stocks that speculators drove up during the COVID-19 lockdown. 

But we'll see.  I'm keeping my eye on it, and thanks for posting this OP.