Which boards?

I think it's good to have credit ratings stickied. As far as I know, Patrick is currently the only person publishing credit ratings. If more people publish them, I'll unsticky Patrick's topic and create a new sticky which links to all of the credit rating topics.

I added a warning to the top of every topic in "long-term offers".

Thanks for the detailed rebuttal.

It was fun, and still is! I have several bets and other deals related to the final outcome, which I'm excited to see resolved (hopefully in my favor). Ponzi schemes are a much more fun way of gambling than Satoshi's Dice, that's for sure.

I did win some BTC, which is rightfully mine. Pirateat40 is guilty of lying about the rules of the game, but the players are innocent. If a casino rigs a game, you wouldn't blame those players who made a profit (even if they may have guessed that the game was rigged) -- you blame the casino.

I never promoted BS&T, and I posted several times that I thought it was a Ponzi.


If I was only worried about morality instead of legality, that's exactly what I'd say. Nothing wrong with a crackhouse as long as there's no violence. I don't advocate doing drugs (I personally don't consume alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, or illegal drugs), but if people want to buy potentially dangerous drugs, that's their business.

This argument is equivalent to whether I should:
- Ban crackhouses entirely on my property. As a proponent of freedom, I would prefer not to do this.
- Determine which crackhouses may add poisons to drugs and ban them or put signs in front of them. This takes extra work and expertise that I'm not willing to deal with.
- Categorize the crackhouses based on how close to market levels their prices are, which may indicate the safety of the drugs sold there.

The forum doesn't promote anything. This is a platform for discussion.


That was a fun site which published all of the rules. No one was scammed there. I even called it a Ponzi scheme in my signature...

I don't worry about conflicts of interest too much. Moderators will hopefully do the right thing no matter what, but I can undo any damage a moderator does if this fails.

Why? If people want to throw away their money, I don't want to get in the way. That's what I said before BS&T crashed, and I feel exactly the same now. Perhaps in the future there will be a few borrowers that are legitimately providing enough value to the Bitcoin economy to offer such high interest rates.

I certainly don't want the forum to get into the business of identity verification or deciding whether businesses are legitimate or suspicious. Someone else should do that.

I have several problems with categorization based on interest rates:

- People can just as easily create low-interest Ponzi schemes as high-interest ones.
- If there are too few categories, legitimate investments might be categorized with the scams. If there are too many, each section (especially the intermediate ones) will receive fewer readers. Borrowers would be incentivized to standardize on certain rates.
- When investments have differing interest rates for different types of accounts (like BS&T did), where should they go?
- Interest rates in BTC are currently higher than USD interest rates, and they will increase over time due to deflation, so it's difficult to guess the best ranges to use for the categories.

So I tend to think that doing nothing would be better than adding interest-based categorization. Third-parties can do their own categorization and accreditation. We can link to these third-parties in stickies.


It'd be easier to just move the whole forum to a new domain name. I don't really want to move it a fourth time, though...

I stopped watching after the second season. All of the characters became unrelatable, and it seemed that the writers ran out of good ideas and started making up nonsense.

The first season was good. Reminds me of Prison Break, which also had a good first season and tons of terrible additional episodes that should not have been made.

That's only for newbies.

Pirate would have made it to "proven models"... It was around for a long time and had the support of a lot of highly-respected members.

I don't want the forum itself to tell readers what to think. Readers should make up their own minds.

Yeah. But have third-parties do this and accredit the investments.

The section is for long-term offers, not just HYIPs.

Having forum staff decide whether specific investments are dangerous is definitely something I don't want. Exact rules for what constitutes a HYIP could be defined, but services that don't meet the HYIP definition probably won't be that much safer than HYIPs. And interest rates in the Bitcoin ecosystem are much higher than traditional interest rates, so it's difficult to determine the correct limit. I think a policy of caveat emptor makes the most sense.

I'm pretty sure Bitcoin accepts scientific notation.

That was always the case for Blitz. He preferred the "donator" title over "staff".

Another moderator is needed for the Russian section. Who should be made moderator?

Slots BTC Person
4 3 cablepair
2 2 TangibleCryptography
2 1.75 edd

Slots BTC Person
4 3 cablepair
4 1.75 edd

It's always somewhere near six, though it's not too rare for a confirmation to take an hour or just a few minutes.

It's illegal to spend a generation transaction until it has 100 confirmations. The network disallows it. For other transactions, the recipient can choose how many confirmations to require.