I see your actions as you not honoring an auction, and thats untrustworthy. My feedback is just a warning for anyone who might be interested in participating in an auction that you run, that I'd recommend against it. When Theymos doesn't honor an auction, I'll leave him negative feedback as well.

If theres anything I've learned from the flat earth guys, or the super religious, its that you can't have a rational discussion when you can't agree on a basis. If I spend a few hours of my time finding cases of where people have been arrested or fined for self bidding on Ebay, you'll say that Ebay is not the same as your case. If I point out that auction houses do self bid, but they are closed soon after, you'll find some excuse for that. If I try to approach by using the definition of a bid as a contract, you'll disagree by another basis that we won't be able to come to an agreement on. I'll just end up frustrated, so there is no point. If you don't see wrong as wrong in the same way that 99.9% of other people do, so be it.

I've made my position clear and you've made yours. I added some feedback of my own just so you don't need to worry about Vod anymore.

A wordpress link doesn't mitigate the pages of legal documents that say you cant. So you are saying auctions are entirely pointless? I can immediately invalidate any auction that I might ever take part in by bidding a bazillion dollars on anything that I decide I don't want to sell, and the millions of breach of contract lawsuits against auction violators are just because they didn't know this magic rule? You found the loophole that made auctions entirely unenforceable after 3,000 years of history, congrats I suppose.
I can find you a bunch of links about why its our natural right as competitive animals to murder each other, and probably quite a few people that agree, but the law seems to disagree.

We don't even need to discuss law here for that matter. Lets say I concede and say you are right. Even if its legally acceptable, you don't think you are worthy of negative feedback for deceptive practices? Someone who might consider entering an auction you run shouldn't have the information that you don't honor your auctions, and they are wasting their time? I completely agree that its worthy of negative feedback. Vod was right, no one is out to get you, look at your own practices objectively and decide whether you'd feel wronged if it happened to you.

Again, you can't bid on your own item. A bid is a legally binding contract, and you can't enter a contract with yourself. If user A bids $10 on something, that bid means that they have entered a contract to pay $10 for the item, on the condition that a new contract (bid) doesn't outbid them. If the owner then bids $15, that bid isn't valid because the owner cannot enter a contract to pay oneself, so the current bid would still be $10 from user A.

If you are arguing that Shill bidding implies requires that you would have needed to placed a bid from an account named Anduck1, lets for the sake of argument that you are right and its not illegal. It is however still a void bid, and your offense is not honoring an auction, rather than trying to inflate the price.

If I'm selling a car worth $20,000 and the bid only gets up to $10,000. I can't just yell, I bid 1 billion dollars! To save me from having to sell the car.

Are you talking about an auctioneer that doesn't own an item legitimately purchasing it from an auction for themselves? You are the seller, you bid on your own item. Its shill bidding.

When you place a bid, you are entering a legal contract to purchase an item at the price you have offered, . You can't enter a contract with yourself, so bids by yourself are void. It was a crime punished by execution in Rome (same as fractional reserve banking  ) Ebay is a good source for information regarding auction fraud actually. Bidding on your own auctions is called shill bidding, and is a felony in the US, and Europe.

Of course, until there is a court case that proves me otherwise, I'd say that auctions done informally in a thread on a forum are honor bound at best. I doubt someone here could successfully press charges against someone for shill bidding, however my point is that its not something you can just brush off as a no big deal type of thing.

@Bluefire, Would you mind sharing your source? I can't find them on the MLSolar site. For $0.20-$0.30 / watt I'd absolutely buy some now. I'm certain that there would be additional charges or unfavorable terms involved, but I'd like to see what those are. $0.20-$0.30/watt is cheaper than I can make them myself, and I'd hope they wouldn't be as shoddy as mine.


Where we live isn't collapsing, its just becoming unfavorable for humans, and regrettably other species. The earth will be fine if water levels rise, or if it gets hotter/colder. It'll just suck for us. Everything is reversible, its just a matter of effort. Maybe it'd take X dollars and Y years to completely reverse the damage we've done so far. If we decide to start acting 50 years from now, it could take a million times more effort, but it'd still be achievable. From an efficiency standpoint it'd make the most sense to begin now, but we don't really operate on what makes the most sense.

If people are impersonating you, you can also report them and they'll be banned. Someone with just a similar name like Jets4Cash wouldn't be, but JetCash_ or JetCash~ would more than likely.

The platinum bar is calling my name... no I don't need 10 oz, but platinum sure is fun to work with... Hopefully it sells for you, but I'll register my interest as on the fence.

0.005BTC

Just so I can retake photos without flash on.


*edit*

OP quoted by owner's request, just for peace of mind.

Woohoo! If I order two of the 1 Lb assorted, could I get 1/2 lb of the Raspberry/Salted/Chocolate/Ginger? Nothing against your regular unsalted caramels, but the Chocolate and Raspberry are my favorite, and I prefer the Salted over unsalted. Never tried the ginger before, but I'm sure they'll be great too.

The last time I had planned on purchasing solar panels, commercially available, they were 17-20% efficient. Now, maybe 6 years later, they are more or less the same, though the price has decreased. $0.40/watt is absolutely a good price, there are a lot of additional costs that go along with solar setups, but I won't disagree, that under $1/watt is pretty nice. I'm not sure if you've looked into getting them yourself, I was considering purchasing solar panels, and was quoted around $70,000 for 5 KW from two or three companies after inverters, charge controllers, and installation. I have quite literally built a (small) nuclear reactors for less than that. Of course I now build solar panels myself for a fraction of that cost, but mostly for low power applications as I don't have a square meter of space to place solar panels.

Passive power is nice, but I do not think professionally installed solar panels are even slightly worth it at the moment. The projected, "These will pay themselves off in 20 years!" mentality doesn't factor in depreciation, degradation of their efficiency,  the chance that a limb is going to fall and break them, and the amount of pissed off you'll be in 3 years when the same system costs half what it does now. Building your own isn't the most cost efficient either, but sometimes its nice for convenience sake. Though its also illegal to tie them into the grid, so I can only use mine for pranks and off site small machinery. 200 Watts, even 1 KW is a toy in my opinion. Consider what miners are using for electricity. If a $2,000 mining rig draws 4 KW of power, they'd need $20,000 worth of solar panels to offset it anyway.

Again, my point isn't to stop solar research or to call it pointless, in my opinion its just pointless at the moment. Many clean energies are produced for under 1 cent per kilowatt hour. Solar just can't compete with that for the time being. When we see $1/Watt installed, at 50% efficiency, I'll reevaluate.

Article published November 15th, 2018:

https://www.solarpowerauthority.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-install-solar-on-an-average-us-house/

Ah, the age old question, is it gay if its a four way.

That aside, you are absolutely right, I highly doubt we will ever perfect physics, however we are at the point now where with our current models and projections, we can do practically anything anyone would possibly want to do. We might not be able to traverse inside of a black hole yet, but even with proper understanding of the universe, we'd still be ages behind in practical application due to material science constraints. Its been a while since we really had a massive breakthrough, but as we have more and more breakthroughs, we are just adding one additional digit of certainty to our calculations. Though, don't get me wrong, there is still a massive amount of value in increasing our understanding.

There are a ton of ways to define the Kilogram, and for all practical purposes, we can take the least accurate method, and we'd still be able to traverse space with it. Its kind of like, whats the point of calculating pi to the 400th digit, when we just round it to 3.1416 for all practical applications.

(hides from the mob of mathmagicians with pitchforks)

Its an interesting thought, but there are still the other issues that'd take place. For time to move from forward 1 second/s to -1 second/s, there would be a point where time is stopped. As an object approaches the speed of light, time in its reference frame comes to a stop, and its mass approaches infinity. If you could continue to supply energy a proportionally larger amount than infinity, perhaps you could reach a state of negative time? I haven't done the derivation in quite a while, so I don't recall what the physical implications of negative time would be.

I'd be interested in whether black holes have some sort of observable temporal distortion, they are the only infinite mass application that I can think of. Maybe thats a stepping stone in figuring out negative time?

Solar panels aren't great at the moment. I like the concept, but they are too inefficient to be worth the time and cost. I build my own solar panels, but its more for convenience of not having to tie into the grid, rather than any sort of cost savings. Given ideal situations, the intensity from the sun is around 800-1000 watts/m^2 at the surface of the earth. At 20% efficiency, you are getting under 200 watts of power for every square meter of solar panels, and thats also only during the day, and if you have the panels tracking the sun. I wouldn't say 200 watts is anything to sneeze at, but a square meter is also a lot of space. If they were more efficient, I'd be more likely to advocate their use, but they are really just a toy at the moment. I would say hydroelectric is probably the most useful, however that relies on having a river. Nuclear is my favorite form of power, but the initial investment required is high. Windmills are neat as well. I don't know very much about them, but I can't imagine they are cheap either.

I'm surprised that geothermal and tidal power haven't caught on as much as I thought they would. Geothermal is expensive for sure, but its really reliable and doesn't require much maintenance. Tidal I guess might be hard to service? But tides ripping have a tremendous amount of power. Lets get some space tethers going!

I'm not anti solar panel, I'm pro, lets do more solar panel research and advancement before bothering to install them, so we don't need to "upgrade" them as frequently as people upgrade their phones.

Something to note, Platinum has historically been more valuable than gold, sort of a strange series of events going on with metals right now.

There are very few benefits that gold hold over platinum, the industrial uses are different, but besides market manipulation and other difficult economic factors to figure out, I'd say that gold holding a historical "gold standard" as a store of wealth is why someone would choose gold over platinum as a first instinct.

Platinum has some incredibly interesting and useful properties, however there are other "platinum group metals" like Palladium that can be used for nearly the same industrial uses. If the demand for platinum for industrial use increases, then industry will switch over to Palladium, until Palladium becomes more expensive, and then back to Platinum. Thats an over simplification, but it serves as an example for why the component of the value from industry has a certain shifting asymptotic value.

As far as jewelry applications go, I certainly believe that Platinum is sort of all around "better" than gold, at least structurally, you may prefer gold visually. 24 Kt gold is absolutely useless for jewelry, and you have to essentially cut it with less desirable metals. Platinum is often alloyed as well, but for slightly different reasons, and the purity is much greater than with gold in most cases. It also doesn't scratch and lose weight. Platinum has a sort of strange property where mass is displaced but not removed when damaged.

All of that said, spot price is just what a paper certificate on the stock market says the metals are worth. You don't find any metal at spot price (under normal situations) and Platinum holds more of a premium than most other metals. Its difficult to work and machine, so the costs associated with a hunk of platinum are greater than the same hunk of gold.

I'm also of the opinion that accepting a bid 1 second late is a bad move. If you use any auction site, Ebay for example, and you place a bid that comes in one second late, because you are trying to snipe the auction, the system automatically rejects it. the auction is over at the time it says its over. We don't have an automatic auction end here, so when someone says an auction is over at 12:00 its over at 12:00 not 12:00:01, and we use the time stamps to determine that.

Do I think you are a scammer? Ehhhh.... maybe by some definition? But I'd say generally no. Are dishonest trading tactics like that something people should be aware of, and should it be reflected on trade reputation (trust)? I absolutely believe so.

I might be tempted to give you negative feedback rating for it personally, but I'm relatively careful with my negative ratings. A neutral telling people not to expect your auctions to be quite fair would be more than fair in my opinion.

A way to prove the direction of time, is by stating that time increases in the direction of increasing entropy. Every second that passes, global entropy increases. Weird things happen when you play with the limits of time or try to go beyond them. You start getting difficult to imagine descriptions of whats going on, such as size and mass of objects changing. If you take time as a negative value, you end up with nonreal answers. Mathematically at least.

The people who have "merit and power" are the people that have been active posters here for years, and have managed to not get banned. By power, I'm assuming you mean a respected role in the Bitcointalk community, which also comes along with time and activity.

The rules apply to everyone. A prerequisite for becoming a recognized part of the community is not breaking the rules. 

Will be watching then!

Also, I think Jan's bid is 10x that of the previous bid.