It seems extremely unlikely that he actually lost the money in gambling.  Ponzi scheme operators seldom do extremely stupid things like that, as they're clever at manipulating people into giving them money rather than getting manipulated into losing their own.

It could just be an excuse to try and slightly ease the wave of hatred and possibly attempted tracking that could be coming his way.

It's pathetic that Ripple is listed on exchanges, coinmarketcap and other sites as if it's a decentralised cryptocurrency.  Ripple is designed for the bankers and for the greedy developers, which is why they're clearly intending to gradually dump their own coins onto exchanges to make them millions of dollars. 

Banks are unlikely to do business with Ripple, sure, but if they do it'll be a sign of how pathetic some cryptocurrency users are for throwing their money into this centralised garbage.

I PMed ranlo after he invested a large amount.  He called the investment "high risk, high reward" and said "I know the risks here".

I thought the same thing when mettwuerstle invested 0.5 but since djord basically scammed as soon as he received that large investment, I'm assuming that ranlo wasn't in on this.

Probably not.  If anyone could figure out your private key using the username and password of an account, they would have stolen your Bitcoin before you could count to three.

I guess the lesson is, there are only three things which makes a person trustworthy:

-Proven business activity

-Strong government regulation of business

-Pays out more in returns than they receive in deposits (therefore unlikely to be a Ponzi scheme).

No amount of nice words will make an investment safe.

Sorry OP but the clock is ticking.

Tick, tock;  tick, tock...

For as long as ranlo hasn't received his first payment after depositing 3 Bitcoin, I'm skeptical.  Don't break this trust.

No, because they're not sent on the same blockchain.  Even if they're exactly identical to Bitcoin in every way (which some shitcoins are or nearly are) they're not counterfeit Bitcoin, they're just worthless [insert shitcoin here].

And in the case of altcoins which change significant parts of the code, they're even less similar to "counterfeit Bitcoin", as they're not related to Bitcoin but just take inspiration from it instead.

No, that's why the mining system exists - to confirm that the transaction definitely happened with real coins (which by the way are real money as fiat money represents nothing except previously created fiat money, while Bitcoin has a limited supply).  

However, while there can't be counterfeit Bitcoin, it's possible for people to believe that they have received Bitcoin when they haven't.  That's why zero-confirmation transactions are dangerous, because they can be double-spent.  From the receivers' perspective in those situations it could be like they received "counterfeit" Bitcoin, but they wouldn't actually be able to spend it again themselves, thus making it worthless.

I've invested 0.105 more.

ID:  00d7fb2600eead14a84649f6e2a5914d964a22ffcc13fd166af6660f28130eba

Good luck OP.  Please reinvest my profit - I should end up with a 0.591 balance.

Yes.  Any malware, even a keylogger which can't be detected by most antivirus programs, could steal your Bitcoin and Blockchain is notorious for phishing attempts.  You also have to trust various aspects of Blockchain as a third party.  With a TREZOR you can use several different wallets, like Electrum, with it which are all better and sometimes even more convenient than Blockchain with its broken fees.

There are no cases that I know of involving a hardware wallet's funds being stolen.  Without the seed, it's impossible as far as we know.  Even in the case of a 5-dollar wrench attack you can use a decoy passphrase which you remember in addition to the seeds.

A TREZOR is extremely secure, and for current purposes a Ledger is too, although there are elements which are not "ultimate" security, like how they advise you to set it up from a trusted device while TREZOR says that it's safe to set up with a compromised computer.  In nearly all cases and for conventional purposes I would regard them as equal.

"Over time" yes, but the amount of miners that there are will only increase as their revenue does even though they're not needed.  The network is as secure as it's going to get - paying no transaction fee or a token fee for large transactions would be all that we need right now and have done for quite a while.  The fees should definitely not spiral out of control as the network just can't deal with the transactions we want to send.

Come on.  The recommended fee is 480 satoshi/byte.  That's not normal.

The Ripple developers can do whatever the hell they want with that pointless XRP that they're holding.  They could dump huge amounts of it on exchanges to line their fat pockets a bit more.  As well as being centralised and controlled by bankers, that makes it much worse than any of the scam coins that premine 15% and then dump.

The reason that guy's Twitter isn't insanely popular is because he's lying.  If the Ripple organisation dumped all that XRP, the market cap would be next to 0.  The only thing that matters to the market cap is the circulating supply (not that the market cap itself matters anyway).

"Hacking" wouldn't work the same way with Bitcoin as it does with other monetary systems.  With a bank, you hack the bank.  With Bitcoin, you need to be the bank - you need to have enough money and mining power to implement changes to the network.  That's not some can do without hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin to spend.

Spam attacks already exist, but decentralisation is always the protection against any real hacking, because unless you can completely dominate the whole network, you can't hack it.

Individuals, however, can be hacked if a hacker can find out their private keys one way or another.

My advice to you is to make sure this is repeatable. 

If you look on Coinmarketcap, you'll notice that a good 95% of coins on there have gone up extremely dramatically in the last month or so.  It doesn't actually take a trader to earn profit from that.

You don't want to let profit blind you because it can be luck.  Stay humble, because altcoins have peaked, at least in the short term, and won't be doing that again.  I hope you analyse the charts nicely when you're doing day trading, and I hope you're really putting effort into finding the best coins.

Oh dear.  DannyHamilton's suggested fee was 0.000499.  You just set a fee of 0.00000499, making the transaction fee a hundred times less at about 2.2 satoshi/byte.  Maybe that's the same mistake that you made when using the recommended fees page.  Your transaction will stay unconfirmed again...

Now your choices are to:

-Let it sit unconfirmed until it returns to your wallet.

-Pay for transaction acceleration by contacting the users Quickseller and macbook-air, by using ViaBTC's secondary paid service, or by using pushtx.btc.com.

-Use a replace-by-fee transaction to resend it with a higher fee.  Not all wallets will support this.

Not having escrow doesn't make it absolutely definitely be a scam, but it does mean that everything they say should be deeply questioned. 

The obvious avoidance of direct escrow which Lauda pointed out makes it dramatically more likely to be a scam.  Failure to show the ICO address is just yet another sign.

Considering just how easy it is to make an ICO scam, the chances are through the roof.

I can understand the idea that the donation amount should be denominated in Bitcoin, but not that the amount should be static forever.

If you're determined to avoid measuring Bitcoin against the dollar in order to consider it a currency in its own right, then you could measure the value with the Big Mac Index, against gold or something similar.  It's impossible to deny that the actual buying power of Bitcoin has changed, and therefore the donation should be similar as you're contributing to the forum for similar things that you were contributing for years ago.

Furthermore, many of the costs of the forum that we're talking about will either require the forum to convert it to fiat at some point to pay, or for the person receiving it to consider the fiat value of the coins in order to accept it.  In either case the US dollar value is still relevant to what a donation should be.

To look at it from a neutral perspective:

Someone can be "active" without actually paying attention.  He could be leaving his computer on when he's wandering around, or he could just be checking his PMs regularly instead of posting on the thread all the time.

Typically, a scam will not end with the admin being less responsive.  It ends with the admin being extremely responsive and desperately scrambling for a few more deposits before they vanish (often promising higher rates etc).

However, this wouldn't necessarily be the same as a "typical" Ponzi because the OP is an individual, not an entity like a website, and therefore could lose interest instead or move in a different way.  This would be more likely if the OP originally has legitimate intentions, like he appears to now.

The OP has given legitimate reasons for his current actions and we should give him about 2-3 more weeks before passing much judgement.  If you're paying attention, you shouldn't be worried.

There are three known addresses, which are coded into the software so they're mostly likely the only ones that they have.

Address 1: 12t9YDPgwueZ9NyMgw519p7AA8isjr6SMw
Address 2: 13AM4VW2dhxYgXeQepoHkHSQuy6NgaEb94
Address 3: 115p7UMMngoj1pMvkpHijcRdfJNXj6LrLn

Fortunately, it seems like most institutions and even individuals will have regular backups.

It's sort of possible, but fiat arbitrage is a much better choice because:

-Bitcoin betting sites are extremely loosely regulated and could scam you at any time, especially the smaller ones.

-The larger sites have relatively similar odds, so you might have to venture to pretty questionable sites to get decent opportunities

-If you're looking to avoid verifying your identity, you're probably out of luck.  Sites detecting suspicious activity like very frequent deposits and withdrawals in the way that an arbitrage better would do it might end up asking for ID, so you might as well go for fiat anyway.