I don't care about fortnite or even gaming for that matter, but I agree with OP--and there was a time when I wouldn't have cared, but I've come to seriously distrust Google and Apple over the years, and it's pretty damn hard to buy a smartphone that isn't controlled by either one of those companies. 

Things were so much simpler when we had mobile phones that didn't even flip open.  Sure, they didn't offer all these great apps and were used for calling and texting, but at least you weren't handing over a bunch of personal data to Google or Apple and everyone else they share that information with.  I don't miss those old days, but I do wish mobile tech could free itself from spying eyes.

That is true, all of it, and it's unfortunate.  And I know that what's really needed (an honest, privacy-centric OS developer) is just a pipe dream.

That's true of tokens and a lot of other investments, too.  Just ask anyone who bought bitcoin at the end of 2017.

If you're talking about a well-known token with decent trading volume, I'd probably hold onto it and hope for the best--you only realize a loss when you sell, but until you do there's a chance it could go back up in value.  On the other hand, if you're talking about some shitty token on an exchange like Yobit that's subject to pump & dumps because of low market cap, I'd just dump it all. 

There's also the question of whether the drop in price of the token is following the overall trend of the market, although in the example of dropping from 1000 sats to 100 sats isn't likely to be happening all around the market unless there's a serious panic.  But assume the drop wasn't as severe as that and a lot of coins/tokens were dropping as well.  If that were the case, I'd just hold and hope for a recovery.

But my real advice would be to stay away from tokens entirely.  The vast majority of them are pure garbage to begin with.

I hate to admit that I still use faucets on occasion, but I do and I did see this advertisement.  Just a quick glance at it and you know it's a Ponzi scheme--and as such, I'm sure it'll attract a lot of suckers who love to gamble their crypto away.  I don't know what it is about the world of crypto, but a lot of people in it either don't understand what a Ponzi is or don't care and just hope they get lucky (those are the ones who call Ponzis "HYIPs").

Yep, and they're doing just that.  Anything that can be exploited or otherwise used to scam people in crypto will be.  That's been proven time and time again.

Edit:
Holy crap!  I didn't read your post above until after I'd written mine, but that just goes to show you how many suckers there are who'll throw money into schemes like this.  Unbelievable!

It's not really killing people at a rate that was seen during the influenza pandemic of 1918, and I think the media really hypes up the death tolls to make it seem like COVID-19 is deadlier than it is.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but this pandemic certainly did a good job of taking everyone's attention away from the Trump impeachment discussion.  If I recall correctly, that was being talked about quite a bit right before the media got fixated on coronavirus.  And hell, it's put pretty much every other important news story on the back burner, including the rampant money-printing and debt accumulation.  As I said, I'm not into conspiracy theories, but it was pretty damn convenient.

Just for the record, I don't think COVID-19 is a hoax or was manufactured by China (or anywhere else) for nefarious purposes.  I just think the world's reaction to it has been way overblown.

Very cool news.  I found this quote to be particularly interesting:


The bolded part caught my attention.  Was the CEO of Fidelity really mining bitcoin?  Props to her if she was, and if she was doing it before or during 2017 she probably made a lot of money.

I have no idea, but you bring up a good point.  Bakkt?  They're basically an options trading platform, but you can take physical delivery of bitcoin if you want as far as I know.  I seriously doubt any institution with deep pockets is using any of the exchanges the rest of us do.  Who knows?  Maybe some of them have deals worked out with companies like Coinbase and Gemini.

If you're going to attempt to find out the answer to that question, I'd be interested to hear what you come up with.

Yeah, I hear you there.  DT members do try to combat scammers, too, but bitcointalk is unique in that scamming is allowed.  I've never seen another discussion forum where that's the case.

And as far as the reasons for this, you'll hear all sorts of explanations that I think are excuses being made on behalf of Theymos. 

That's an excuse IMO.  There are very clear-cut cases of scamming, and yet the scammers never get banned.  True, their trust page ends up looking like it was splattered in arterial blood, but the end result is that their account is still active and they can pull off more scams if potential victims don't (or can't) see the red trust. 

I never understood why scammers aren't banned, but it's a fact I've come to accept in my time as a member here.  I always keep in mind that this isn't my forum and I don't run it.  That isn't to say you shouldn't try to suggest improvements, and I applaud OP for writing his post....but the sad fact is that I'm fairly certain nothing is going to change.

Similar to the Enron scandal even earlier than that, too.  If you've never read The Smartest Guys in the Room which is about that debacle, I'd highly recommend it.  If I recall correctly, Ken Lay (the CEO at the time) was shamed into giving back the bonus he was planning on giving himself as the company was going under.

I hate to say it, but this is the American way.  You never hear stories about this type of shit from any other country, and it just goes to show you how greedy top-level executives are.  If you've ever read a corporation's annual report, ever notice how much space is given to executive compensation?  It's unbelievable.  

JC Penny doing this is particularly galling to me, because I'm pretty sure they know there's not going to be any turnaround, so they don't need to give retention bonuses, or bonuses of any type, to their execs.  They were headed for the grave well before COVID-19 struck.  

Thanks for posting this article, OP.  Very interesting reading.

Edit:

Yeah, you're probably right--and it's not like there are business news stories trickling in to the US media sources from Croatia, so I'm likely just not hearing of these shenanigans taking place in other countries.  And greed is in human nature, so I guess I shouldn't assume the US is the capitol of bonus-giving-before-bankruptcy-filing (although it might be).

Well, that's pretty much the textbook definition of "ban evasion". 

OP, take heed of the above post (if you can understand it clearly).  When you're banned from the forum, you--the person behind any and all bitcointalk accounts--are banned, so the result is that you're not allowed to post here anymore.  Those are the rules.

Let's see, there was the reason for the original ban and now he's guilty of ban evasion.  If you keep giving rule breakers like this guy multiple chances, why even have the rules in the first place?

Lol, that isn't likely to happen, although I do think it's an interesting choice of gift that was given here--makes me wonder if there's some kind of meaning behind it.

Then again, this also reminds me of Justin Sun's gift of Tron to Warren Buffett.  If I'm not mistaken, he donated it or otherwise got rid of it as fast as he could. 

Yeah, that would make more sense to give that as a gift than, say, bitcoin or ETH. 

So if it's a digital currency that you buy from the Bank of Lithuania and which they store on your behalf, what makes that different from Lithuania's fiat currency?  Now I'm curious as to what they're trying to do over there.

A lot of times you don't need to be a doctor to know if someone needs to see a doctor (lol).

That's probably part of it, but the reference links for those negs leads me to believe that this is a guy who's gone off the rails even before that.  From the looks of it, OP claims he got scammed by Coinbase, is that right?  I just took a glance at the first page of his post history and a lot of rage was directed toward Coinbase.

But OP, if you're getting posts deleted (which I'm assuming is why you created this thread), perhaps it's because some of them got reported for trolling--whether you agree with that or not.  Sometimes when it looks like members are going off on an incoherent rant, their posts will get reported. 

And if that isn't the case, then why not explain exactly what happened instead of just calling the moderators names.

I agree, and I also posted in that thread.  Upon revisiting it just now, it looks like two members got defensive and it escalated way past the point that it should have.  

You and dkbit98 are both helpful posters as far as I'm concerned, and I don't see any real issues you two should have with each other, though I understand you took offense to him alluding to you satisfying your "signature quote" (lol).  I get the feeling dkbit98 thinks there's an extreme bias in the HW section toward Ledger products, and he was feeling just a little bit grouchy about that while making replies.  

My suggestion:  both of you bury the hatchet.  You're both valuable members of the forum.  And even if dkbit98 doesn't want to bury said hatchet, at least take the high road yourself and let it go.  No harm, no foul.  And the consensus seems to be that what he wrote about you isn't true.

Edit: Just noticed dkbit98 gave you a merit, so perhaps that's his form of an olive branch....?

Since I'm not a real trader, I don't have any pearls of wisdom to give you--but if you're looking for stability in between altcoin trades, going the stablecoin route is probably going to be your safest bet.  If the coins you're trading are correlated in any way with bitcoin, that might be problematic if you hold bitcoin while waiting for your next trading opportunity.  I've never owned stablecoins, but I know they're made for situations exactly like this.

Right, and that's exactly what you'd be doing by holding bitcoin instead of a stablecoin.

Have you noticed this yourself or have you read it from other members?  How long did you lurk before creating an account here?  Regardless of your answer, what you wrote is absolutely true, and the big change came in January 2018 when the merit system was created.  If you were a lower-ranked member then, it suddenly became extremely difficult to rank up (depending on how good of a poster you were, of course).

Members aren't expected to rank up at all.  It either happens for you or it doesn't.  But if you're asking how to rank up, this question has been asked probably hundreds of times in Meta and other sections ever since Jan. 2018.  May I suggest going back to the end of that month in 2018 and check out the threads in Meta, because they pretty much all dealt with the merit system and the problems it was causing members as far as ranking up goes. 

It's good reading, but even if you choose not to take my suggestion the answer to the question of how to earn merits/rank up is fairly simple, and you're essentially going to hear the same thing from everyone:  you have to make good posts.  In addition, those good posts should not be posted in spam sections like Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion, because they won't be noticed. 

Also, the more posts you make, the better your chances are of earning merits--but they still have to be good enough to stand out from the rest of the crap that abounds on bitcointalk.  If you put minimal effort into writing a post and it ends up looking just like every other post in that thread, it isn't likely you'll earn merits.

The answer (IMO) is always: "I want to maximize my earnings".

I don't think law enforcement in any country would consider investigating a hack on a discussion forum account, and even if there was some financial loss it's questionable as to whether they'd consider it worth their time.  It definitely sucks what happened to bitcoingirl.club, but any justice is going to have to be gotten from within the forum if that's even possible.  Figuring out who Side chain really is would be a great start.  Sadly, that makes me think of Bruno, who was pretty good as a forum detective.

Uh, yeah.....that would spike popcorn sales amongst forumites for a good while, but I'm voting that they're not the same person.

Snappa looks to be a very small, very new company.  If they've bought bitcoin to keep as their cash reserve, it's still nowhere near the importance of MicroStrategy doing the same in terms of newsworthiness.  Protonmail and Overstock.com also keep bitcoin in reserve too, as far as I know, so this isn't even a new "thing" except for the part where companies are buying and holding bitcoin instead of cash. 

I don't mean to downplay the importance of these stories, though.  I don't know if it's the best move for a corporation to be keeping an asset as volatile as bitcoin as its reserve form of money, but it certainly says a lot about how far bitcoin has come in terms of mainstream adoption.  It'll be interesting to see if these strategies work out well for the corporations that adopted them, and only time will tell.  If bitcoin crashes, I don't think the shareholders of MSTR or whoever owns Snappa are going to be very happy.

You not only enjoyed reading nonsense posts but actually learned something from them?  That says a lot about you, my friend.  And if it's any comfort, Altcoin Discussion still exists and last I checked it was wall-to-wall shitposts, so you might avail yourself of some of those gems.

OP, this argument is a tired and old one.  If bounties didn't exist, there wouldn't be non-English speakers trying to post in English and there probably wouldn't be such a huge plagiarism problem.  I've got nothing against bounties or sig campaigns per se, just the members who are clearly not qualified to have what amounts to a "write posts about cryptocurrency in English from home" job.  If these bounties would pay for posts in the local boards, we'd be golden.  And there's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to read and write English--what is wrong is when you destroy the quality of a forum because you're trying to write in a language you don't have competency in.

Again, these are all points which have been made many times over the years.  I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here.

This is the second scam accusation I've seen against coinswitch in the past week or so, and my guess is that there's something fishy going on there.  Does coinswitch have an account on the forum?  I didn't find a link in the last thread I looked at.  Tagging them probably wouldn't help anyone get their funds back, but at least it would be a warning.

I do still have a Coinomi wallet (though I don't use it anymore) and I have noticed that they're affiliated in some way with coinswitch, as there's an option for instant trades within the wallet, with Changelly and Totle Swap (whatever the hell that is) as well.  Coinomi ought to think twice about offering swaps through coinswitch, because it does look like these are legitimate scams and they're not for small amounts either.

Sorry for your experience with these jokers, OP.  I had a problem with Changelly a while back and I know how frustrating it is trying to deal with companies that you really don't know that much about.

Yep, that's the way I see it as well.  When you see a bunch of different asset classes rising all at once, you know there's an impending problem--and by problem, I mean a bubble that's going to pop.

I'd be interested to know what you mean by the scuttling of your real estate plans, but I'd understand completely if you didn't want to share that info publicly.  As for buying those "risk assets" on the dips, that's good advice for short-term traders, but not for long-term holders such as myself.  I probably ought to be selling everything for cash right now, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

Nah, companies with no earnings have P/E multiples of infinity, and though it's been a long time since I cracked open a math textbook I think infinity>1000.  Then again, you can't divide by zero...but that's nitpicking just a tad.

OK, I actually knew most of what you wrote (but thanks for writing it anyway).  I guess I'm confused as to LFC_Bitcoin's relationship is with Sportsbet.io and why he sent those PMs--and I might have simply forgotten.  What was written in OP's post wasn't written very clearly--or I'm brain dead.

One thing I wasn't fully aware of was that LFC_Bitcoin denied asking for opposition to that flag, and whether he actually did  ask for opposition (or just asked people to "look at the flag").  Is that the big controversy?  

Edit:

Ah, gotcha.

OK, all of that info is helpful, especially the first part about the relationship between the two casinos. 

I'm going to give the OP another read-through just for shits & giggles.

Well now that you indirectly brought me into this (and are implying a conspiracy of some sort), I'll have to go back and re-read this entire thread, because honestly at this point I have no idea what exactly happened.  I do remember getting the initial impression that LFC_Bitcoin had engaged in some low-level shenanigans, but sentiment among some of the members posting in this thread seem to indicate that it was worse than that.

Just for the record, I've got a cycle in my avatar but nobody has tried to sway my opinion on this drama in any way.  I ended up tuning it all out until about five minutes ago when I read several of the most recent posts here.  The fact that the "cyclers" happen to be agreeing with one another doesn't surprise me at all.  That's usually been the case on other matters from what I've seen, but I don't think there's anything going on behind the scenes if that's what you think.

I need a TL;DR.  If anyone wants to write an unbiased one that succinctly explains what has transpired with LFC_Bitcoin and the hack and everything else, I would be happy to give merits generously for anything useful until I've been brought up to speed.  This would be a perfect use of the merit system.