Ugh, I feel for you and anyone else who got taken by the scammer(s) behind that site.  I'd played around with generating vanity addresses before but never quite trusted the method used to generate them (probably because of my own ignorance even when using a safe one).  The ones that you can generate using a web browser always raised a huge red flag for me.

Yep, sounds fishy as fuck.  I haven't checked out that link Tryninja posted yet, and I'm wondering if the scammer used some kind of SEO to get his site at the top of the search results.  That probably sounds like a noob, naive question but I'm pretty ignorant about such things.  And if the other site was at the top and the scammer just started his robbery spree, I also wonder if other people who've generated addresses from it have recently made horrible discoveries.  Yikes.

I've got mixed feelings on this one, OP.  On the one hand I'm happy you're happy and that bitcoin is being used as a substitute for fiat, which I love to see.  On the other hand, getting paid in any type of crypto aside from a stablecoin exposes you to enormous volatility risk, and you seem more than smart enough to know exactly what I'm talking about.  Are you getting paid a certain amount of BTC per week/job or is your pay tied to your local fiat or some other fiat's value?

I had this thread open and then fell asleep, and I just skimmed through it to see if you'd addressed that but couldn't find anything.  There have been threads dealing with the question of accepting wages in bitcoin, but you might be the first person I've seen who's actually done it.

You have good reason for not saying where you live, and that's a good call on your part--but damn, I really want to know because I'm curious based on the description of the situation your homeland is in.  All my best, man!

No!!!

All right, so you haven't been here long and I didn't realize it's only been since June based on your rank (I just looked).  Yes, it does take a while to figure out what's what here, but I do not hate new members because they're new.  I don't think I've ever said that, though I'm almost certain that I've said that newbies are the source of most of the post quality issues and similar sentiments--and I still stand by that, but I judge members on their contributions, not their rank. 

My reaction to your post (asking if you'd read the OP of this thread) was because it seemed like you hadn't read it.  If there was a misunderstanding, my bad and no hard feelings.  And look, don't get offended at shit like that or else you're going to hate being here.  If you grow a thick skin, make yourself known, make interesting/productive posts, and generally gain a reputation on the forum over time, people are going to look at you like the Legendary members that get called "sir".  It's just silly IMO, but that's the way it is.  But good on you for trying to call me out for bad....thoughts.  In a year or two, you'll be the next JollyGood!

That last part's a joke, JG.

Ugh.  This has always puzzled me.  In what way(s) is it risky to store large amounts of BTC in an Electrum wallet?  Obviously one way is the malware seedcrawler you mentioned, but how in the hell does one get infected with such a thing?

Are there other risks?  And I'm still wondering what really happened with OP's wallet and how it apparently got hacked.  I do agree that if there was such a big flaw in the code that there would be pandemonium throughout the entire bitcoin space, so it's got to be one of the reasons you mentioned....but I'm curious as to exactly how it got hacked, you know?

Lol....did you read the beginning of this thread where I made the offer?  It's bad etiquette to straight-up ask another member to give them merits without pointing them to a post that would be merit-worthy, but there have been merit giveaway threads similar to mine here ever since 2018 when the merit system was unleashed upon an unsuspecting and chaotic forum.  I think nearly all of those have ended since they basically became magnets for shitposters, but it's absolutely OK to ask for merits when someone invites you to (as I'm doing in this thread).

It's not that I dislike gambling; I just don't gamble myself and thus have a hard time telling whether many posts are untrue crap or if what's being written is legit and constructive.  I really hate to add this restriction, but at this point I have to. 

That isn't necessary.  What I'm going to do is put both of the gambling sections on ignore, and if someone PMs me for a review I'll only be able to judge their posts outside of those.

First I'd like to say that when I get requests for reviews, I'm always on the lookout for shenanigans.  The rule of this forum since I've been a member is that if something can be abused in order to milk it for all it's worth, there's going to be a bunch of idiot shitposters trying to do it.  Therefore when I started my offer to the community I expected people to get over on me in as many ways as can be imagined.

Over the last few months I've noticed that I'm getting requests from members who:

1. Post in a very similar style (which I'm not going to describe here, lest it cause those members and/or their alts to change their habits in order to drop off my radar).
2. Post primarily in the gambling section.
3. Are in gambling-related sig campaigns, sometimes the same one.
4. Sometimes have registration dates close enough that they arouse my suspicions.

I actually went back though my merit history and made a table of some of the above info and used it to judge whether there was something to my suspicions or if they were just me being paranoid.  I came to conclude that there's something fishy going on and therefore I am no longer going to give any merits for posts in the gambling section, since it seems like that's where I might be getting taken advantage of.

The second reason for my decision is that I'm not a gambler and have a hard time judging the value or even the veracity of some posts about gambling.  I can usually tell if someone has put in a decent amount of thought and effort into a post, and I've always given great weight to that when deciding to give out merits, but I think I've been too generous when it comes to gambling posts.  This is going to apply to requests that arrived anywhere in my waiting list, i.e., retroactively.

I'll leave this thread open for a bit.  I'd apologize but I'm not sorry.

Agreed.  While it might be a neat-o thing to know if the people who make bitcointalk happen are bitcoin ballers, it's not a question I'd ever ask--and for the same reason I wouldn't ask any member here how much they've got.  It's none of my damn business unless for some reason it is my business, and since I have no stake in the forum's funds or the earnings/holdings of the moderators I'm not looking to see any data on that.

I mean, come on.  This is bitcoin we're talking about.  You know, cryptocurrency.  I'm fairly certain that along with cryptography being used in the code to make the network secure and functional, the spirit behind it is that there ought to be as much anonymity among its users as humanly possible.  Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous of course, but blabbing about people's holdings in a thread?  Eh, I wouldn't go there.

OK, so it is true then that if you use Electrum (or Sparrow I heard?) and just stay away from any coin that doesn't have a 3rd party wallet that can interact with the Ledger in place of Ledger Live, Ledger can't see your IP address?  The first part of the above statement seems to say the opposite, whereas the second kind of says that explicitly.  From my scant knowledge of even the basics of how wallets and everything else interact with the internet (I know, I'm as good as fucked) it was always my understanding that avoiding LL was the solution to avoiding Ledger updates--especially the one introducing Recover--but when I fooled around with my Ledger I never really considered IP addresses.

Jesus.  By the way, I don't think I mentioned that I used to be a fan of Ledger despite the warnings by dkbit98 in particular but now have turned 180 degrees....so that makes me an anti-fan, I suppose.  Anyone buying used Ledgers?  Lol.

I completely agree with the above, and even though I see your point about the biggest issue being their capability of extracting their users' private keys, it would be much more ominous/hideous/[add your own descriptor] if they had already done so and if in fact that's where they got that 20% statistic from.  That would just be straight-up evil.

Does the use of the device transmit a user's IP address, or is it Ledger Live that does that?  Yeah I know I'm no noob, but I'm still an ignorant lunkhead when it comes to computer science. 

OK, this is the first time I'm reading that quote and if he knows that information, then Ledger obviously knows which coins are being kept on Ledger wallets and how many.  Hmm.  D'ya think the disclosure that your private keys could be exfiltrated from the secure element that went along with the Recover announcement could have something to do with that?

In other words, do you think Ledger has already got something akin to a master list of every Ledger user's private keys?  Just thinking out loud here, you know?

I wonder how many of those 500 or so employees are various government spooks.  Christ I need a drink.  And I don't even drink.

That's not especially encouraging to me, since a lot of the dPoS coins like ATOM, DOT, and the like have massive issues with scammers and their attempts to get funding through bogus proposals, which is on top of the fact that governance introduces more centralization and the end result is a voting system where the rich get to control the coin and the poor have to go along with whatever the rich want to do (which is usually to further enrich themselves).

Yeah, latest wallet.  From 2021.

I was listening to the radio the other day (AM talk radio to be precise) and the host was talking to some guy who mentioned almost in passing that it was a fact that the US government is soon going to recall all physical currency and implement a CBDC.  Mind you, I was driving when I heard this and I swear I almost drove right off the road.

When I got home, I made a bee-line to my computer and did some googling to see if that was true.  I got down on my knees and prayed to my fallen angel of choice that it was some sort of hoax or rumor that isn't true.

As to OP's question.  Governments want to control the currency their citizens use.  With bitcoin they can't do that.  It's just that simple.

I'm glad you and the previous two members are voicing skepticism with this project, and you're all spot-on with what you wrote.  This coin's creator didn't even bother to employ brand new alt accounts to bump the thread!  That surprises me, actually.  I'm not sure what's up with all of these cookie cutter coins using the ghostrider algo, but there's nothing innovative about any of them and the descriptions given in the ANN threads all look the same.

And wouldn't you know they've all got that nice, fat 10-20% dev taxation included in the block reward distribution.  You know there's not going to be any fuckin' development.

If you're doing that and writing at the level that you are (which indeed is above average for bitcointalk IMO) you're definitely not burst posting.  The way I see it, burst posting is like hardcore pornography.  It's hard to define it precisely, but you know it when you see it (that's paraphrasing SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart, FYI).  When I look at my feed of unread threads and I look down the list at the most recent poster and see that the same member's name appears in most of the first ten threads and maybe even more, when I look to see what that member wrote it's a few lines of nonconstructive, generic nonsense.  Every single time--and I've seen that happen more times than I'd care to.

You got accused of burst posting?  That's just plain stupid, and your accusers ought to flog themselves in shame.

I've been checking the Ledger subreddit pretty often since their idiotic, trust-destroying Recover service was announced and looking at it today, I saw a thread that linked to a Twitter post that in turn linked to some other source saying that Ledger is laying off 12% of its employees.  Having read through the reddit post, I'm seeing opinions about the cause of this ranging from "this is expected during an economic downturn" to "Ledger fucked themselves because of Recover and/or the behavior of their CEO".  Those aren't direct quotes from the post, by the way.

Frankly I was expecting a thread about this on bitcointalk, but apparently there isn't.  What do you guys think about this development?  Was it mentioned on any crypto news sites?  The reddit thread also mentioned that Ledger has something like 500 employees, which seems like a hell of a lot for a company that basically makes 3-4 products (unless a lot of programming/coding is needed).

I also wasn't aware that there were very negative opinions about Ledger's CEO.  Very interesting.

That's not true (though I'm not sure if by "currencies" you mean cryptocurrencies or are including fiat ones).  I often see people writing USD amounts like this: 1$.  The standard is to place the dollar sign before the amount--that's true in the US, and since it's the US's currency and the US's standard, it should be the standard.  I just used USD as an example, but my thinking should hold for any country's currency.

I voted for putting BTC before the amount, but honestly I'm OK with either and I think I've written bitcoin amounts both ways.  But in any case, it's no government's currency, it's not controlled by any person or group, so even if somebody could set the standard for symbol placement, everyone would still do as they please.

Why is this even being debated?  Lol.  A much better discussion is the one about units, e.g., sats, mBTC, etc.  Even then people are still free to do whatever they like.

Oh really?  You're making that claim in your fucking ANN thread  Also, your English is atrocious.

Wow.  Wow.  Wow.  All of that fluff could be said of bitcoin, and if I'm somehow wrong about that I think I'd be correct in saying it's true of many other older, better coins.  In other words, you created a stupid shitcoin to enrich yourselves with that sweet 10% dev taxation scheme.

Beware: this coin is no doubt going to the graveyard; the "developers" (coin-cloning scammers) know this, and so you can count on there being no active, actual development.  Don't be a sucker.

I was randomly browsing miningpoolstats and came across this coin and, since it had AI in its name, decided to check it out.  I have the website pulled up in another tab and haven't read it in full yet but this statement in their description has me confused:


1. Saying "With coin X, you can mine" is more fucking retarded than someone born with spina bifida, fetal alcohol syndrome, and trisomy 21.  There is nothing special about being able to mine any coin.
2. Does the running of a smartnode function differently than any other coin that has a smartnode feature?  
3. Saying "With coin X, you can buy and sell coin X to others" is just a nonsense statement.  Hey ladies, with this 9 inch dildo, you can buy and sell this 9 inch dildo to others!

Christ, I hate to call someone an insult as old as mouthbreather, but I think that's exactly what most of these new shitcoin developers are.  Clone someone else's clone, use alt newbie accounts to bump the ANN thread on this forum, get Zergpool, RPlantxyz, and the usual pools that don't give a shit to let idiots mine it, and get it listed as fast as possible on Xeggex so that the devs can dump the premine coins or what they get from the block rewards generated from other miners (which is basically just like a tax on mining).  That's the formula.

Don't be a sucker who follows that formula.  Electricity is expensive and these shitcoins are useless.

That's fucked.  But did you really have to quote that huge block of text just to make that comment?

Uh, yeah.  OP's whole description of what he thinks is being offered is just straight-up too bizarre to be true, even if the CIA was trying to pull some psy-op job advert.  On this forum?  It's much more likely to be total bullshit, because we've had it oozing out of every crack in the structure for years now.  Over time it's gotten to the point where I think maybe 30% of what people write is true, and that comes primarily from members who've been here for at least a couple of years.  Most posts are made by bounty hunters and others just trying to maximize their earnings from bitcointalk, so I think they just make shit up just to pump up their post count.

But hey, that could be my own tinfoil hat malfunctioning.  I would never rule that out.

I knew it didn't show up in one or two sections, but I'll be damned if I ever paid attention to the trust stats being missing.  I thought about it for a few minutes, and I'm of two minds about Theymos's decision to do that.  On the one hand, a positive or negative trust score could definitely influence how other members weigh the posts of the person with that trust, which could be very unfair in most cases.  That's being pretty damn fair, I'd say.

On the other hand, as we all know trust can be given for any reason and if a DT member tags an account for changing hands (*ahem*), that might be something you'd want to look into if you were curious when reading a post written by that account.  You could be thinking you're reading something by someone who's not who you think they are. 

And dammit, that's as far as my fatigued, pea brain got in cerebrating on the topic at hand.  If I had to weigh the points I made above I'd have to say it's better to keep it like it is.  The less unnecessary bias the better, I say.