Sure would be a great way to scam people, right?  And I'm talking about OP here, posting a pic of someone who's supposedly famous wearing a t-shirt with a QR code for "donations" to an unspecified cause.  I will refrain from pointing an accusing finger at OP, but he is a Newbie after all.

So who is this football player and what is that QR code being used for, exactly?  If someone were to send bitcoins to that address, what would they be used for?

I would have used it quite a few times in the past few years, especially when I was doing a lot of shitpost reporting all at once.  There were a number of times I went back to a member's post history and ended up double-reporting a post by accident.  It would have been nice to have been able to cancel those reports, and I think it would be a good function to have.  The mods would be benefited by it as well, probably even more so than reporters, since if posts are erroneously reported they have to figure that out themselves and waste their time doing it.

I don't really care much about my accuracy, since I'm not shooting to be one of the top reporters or the most accurate--but if this wouldn't be too much of a pain in the ass to implement, I think it would be a good function to have.  Personally I hate making a mistake when reporting a post just because I feel like an idiot. 

It's not at all pointless IMO.

Somehow I doubt terrorists use the darkweb to obtain their weapons.  I bet they can get them at much lower prices than the darkweb is probably selling them for--and I don't use Tor or the darkweb, so I wouldn't really know but I assume you're paying a premium on stuff there.  Terrorists and rebels and those sorts of groups tend to have weapons suppliers who are sympathetic with their cause.  Or I might have watched too many movies, because I'm thinking of Lord of War with Nicholas Cage.

Anyway, terrorists probably do use bitcoin for certain things but this is a non-issue IMO.  If I'm not mistaken, the media has reported on this as well as the fact that bitcoin has been used in all sorts of criminal activities.  But obviously cash is also used for the same things and probably a lot more frequently.  Bitcoin isn't completely anonymous and certainly not as anonymous as cash.  It bugs me that some people associate bitcoin with criminals.  That's the kind of thing that prompts regulatory legislation, so we all need to watch out for that crap.

Glad you asked, because I don't even know what that phrase means--not to mention what significance it has or why it might lead bitcoin to plummet to $3800.  That would be one hell of a drop, nearly 50% lower than where it currently is.  And if that were to happen, altcoins would probably get hammered even worse. 

You might see it that way and I might, too, but if bitcoin were to drop that much the market and a lot of investors and traders would be fleeing in droves.  It might be quite a while before we saw $7500 again and much, much longer before bitcoin sees its previous ATH of $20k or whatever it was.  I like buying opportunities but I'd prefer not to have as good an opportunity as that.  And I'm sure I'm not alone.

All that said, I don't think the market is headed back to the $3k range.  It's possible, true.  Probable?  I don't think so.

Jesus, don't be so sloppy with your writing.  It stands out more when you only write a few words in a post that has more words than the title of the thread its in.

We've only got one more month to go for 2019, and I seriously doubt bitcoin is going to be pushing $10k by the end of it.  Anything is possible, of course, but there isn't any momentum in the market right now.  If bitcoin had been steadily moving up and had just reached $7500 I might be more inclined to believe it could hit $10k by the end of the year, but that's not the case.  It's been oscillating for a while now, not really picking a direction for long.

Next year ought to be better as far as the market finding a direction.  I don't think bitcoin is going to go the whole year just flatlined--but that's another thing I wouldn't put it past bitcoin to do.  I am never surprised when it does exactly what I figured it wouldn't, which is why my predictions always end up being wrong.  Here's to a better year in 2020.

I don't know where those malls are, and the article doesn't say unfortunately--and I may or may not google it, because I don't shop at malls anymore. 

Awesome that these ATMs are popping up and I hope it isn't just a holiday thing.  My own experience with the one ATM near me was horrible, unfortunately since the machine malfunctioned when I tried to buy some bitcoin.  I do hope these ones at the malls work properly, because it's a frustrating experience when the process doesn't work.

And yeah, giving bitcoin as a gift would be an awesome thing, but it would be even better if you could give it as a kind of paper wallet gift card instead of just loading it into someone's wallet.  Obviously there would be some security issues with doing that and I don't think it's feasible, but the gift idea is still a good one.  Hell, I'd love to get some bitcoin for Christmas or my birthday or whatever.  It's just not the kind of present that can be giftwrapped and unless you know someone's wallet address in advance, there's no way I know of to give it to someone--and it wouldn't exactly be a surprise if you have to ask someone what their bitcoin addy is.  Anyway, good stuff here.

Or how the internet works, or how life works, or how anything works.  The lack of understanding is breathtaking--luckily I can't even view those posts since I have the sections on ignore. 

And then there's the laziness component, which can't be understated.  These are just typical spammers who are probably all sitting around a table on a spam farm with glazed eyes and half-filled bowls of rice scattered around.  Guaranteed.  It's got nothing to do with the hashtag and everything to do with laser-focused idiocy which takes many forms.  All of those spammy shitposts should be nuked.

I would LOL at this if it weren't so un-funny.  That's a fuckton of ETH to just disappear in one fell swoop, and I'm probably not the only one who's suspicious about this--but we'll see what happens.

Don't know if you're referring to ETH or bitcoin, but bitcoin jumped since last I checked it and is sitting above $7500 right now.  I wouldn't expect any particular coin to be reacting to this hack and bitcoin in particular has proven to be resilient in the face of exchanges going kablooey.

I don't know if that's true or false, but it wouldn't surprise me.  I've heard lots of stories about exchanges, especially smaller ones, inflating their trading volume to make it look like they're way more successful than they actually are--or at least I'm assuming that's the reason for it. 

Anyway, this shit never ends.  Either the security of these exchanges is really piss-poor or they're stealing their customers' funds and claiming they got hacked.  I'll be very interested to see how this all plays out.

I don't know, this statement at least gives a little hope to their customers:


Then again, it could mean nothing--and if they really are working on this reconciliation it sounds like it's going to take quite a while.

And now we have Upbit with their alleged hack, and who knows how much money their customers lost with that.  One of the first thing people should learn when they get involved in cryptocurrency is not to keep coins on an exchange for any length of time.  Those words of advice have been repeated endlessly around here, but I'm not sure everyone is aware of the risks.

I always withdraw whatever coins I'm trading right after I make the trade--but then again, I'm not a very active trader at all and so I never have a reason to keep anything on an exchange.  I feel bad for those folks who lost money in crap like Cryptopia and Upbit and the rest of these exchanges that either went bust or got hacked or whatever.

I wasn't aware Yobit offered such a thing, but I would never take advantage of something like that with an exchange like Yobit, nor would I keep a substantial amount of crypto on any exchange for longer than a few hours at most.  Look what just happened to Upbit and how many exchanges have been hacked just this year.

Depends on which coin you're staking.  If you stake with NEO, for example, you're constantly earning GAS with it and you don't have to wait until you win a block like you do with other PoS coins.  

OP didn't mention masternodes, but those are mainly for people with a lot of investment capital they don't mind tying up for the long-term.  Having a Dash masternode is a way to earn Dash while you sleep.  In any case, I think staking is probably the best way to do it.  Lending?  That's way too risky and you're always wondering if the borrower is actually going to pay you back or if you'll have to sell the collateral--plus you have to be careful about collateral scams and whatnot.  It's just not worth it to me.

Right, that's what I was getting at.  I've only lent money a couple of times in the past 4 years, and each time was very stressful--plus I got scammed on my last loan to the tune of 0.3BTC and learned my lesson from that.

LOL, I didn't understand anything except "bitcoin" in that entire trailer, but even though the mention was made by what looked to be criminals in a dark room, it was still pretty cool.  Awesome summary of bitcoin in cinema here, OP.  I always thought crypto was popular in Ukraine and Russia and eastern Europe, more than it gets credit for anyway.  And if it's being mentioned in movies, it must be going mainstream at least somewhat.

Those movies don't seem to be the kind I usually like, nor would I be able to understand them even if I had a way to watch them, but at least the trailers were cool--and they feature bitcoin.  I don't know if there's any American films that can claim that except for documentaries and those aren't the same as having bitcoin as a plot point for a drama or comedy.

It definitely is.  I met another person yesterday who knew what bitcoin was, though the extent of her knowledge about it I didn't find out.  If you look at financial news coverage in the US, you'd certainly see that bitcoin gets a lot of coverage and many people know about it at least.

Man, I hope it stays that way and that ICOs and the bounties that come with them die a quick death.  None of them are any good as far ask I know, which is why ICOEthics did what he did in exposing the scammy ones. 

Hopefully he's OK, but who knows.  Usually members like him who were very active don't just disappear out of the blue, but it does happen.  Nullius was one example of that, but usually people might stop posting for a while but eventually come back. 

Me, too.  He was definitely focused on busting ICO scammers, and the forum needed that and he delivered. 

I agree with all of what you wrote, starting with how OP lazily created this thread--and there's already another thread about it, too.

The first thing I thought was that this might not really be a hack, but a Cryptsy or Mt. Gox-type exit scam, but I have no idea what the real truth is.  As I said in another thread, I noticed that Upbit was the object of some sort of fraud investigation in 2018 so who knows what's going on with them.  But at this point nothing would surprise me as far as the claim of "we've been hacked!" goes.  Seems like we've heard that so many times before that the first feeling you get upon hearing it again is one of total cynicism.

Regardless of whether the hack was a real one or not, it looks like they lost a lot of money and I don't think this is going to be like Binance's 700BTC hack that they easily recovered from.  My guess is that this is going to put them under for good.

Yep, and all newbies ought to take note of this advice--no doubt there were at least some members of Upbit who got screwed from the hack because they were keeping their coins on it even if it was overnight.

I think I created an account on Upbit a while back because they were one of the only exchanges that sold an obscure shitcoin that I was interested in, but I don't think I ever ended up trading with them.  They're not a huge exchange to my knowledge, and I'm wondering if they can recover from this or if this will be the end of them.  

Where do they operate out of?  Does anyone know?  I haven't read anything about that yet, nor do I know if they were one of the "legit" exchanges that were accountable to government regulators, but I'm thinking they weren't.  Anyways, yikes.  Another big hack.

Edit:  Well, that just took a simple googling to find out that they're a S. Korean exchange.  Looks like they were the subject of a fraud probe last year, something I hadn't read about until just now when I looked at the Wikipedia article on them.  Interesting.

Yeah, those are stupid ones and are probably made for post count--I see a lot of those whenever I visit Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion, which isn't that often.

I think I've asked questions here that I probably could have gotten answered with a little research, but that's because I value the opinions of a lot of members here, and I like to get people's opinions and facts that I might not find on a website.  A lot of sites have biases (especially news sites) and some of them I just don't trust or understand.  It is rare that I start a thread with an easy question, though.

A while back, one of the big questions I'd see was "how do I earn bitcoin?" and there would be a new thread asking this question at least once a week--and there would be variations like "what's the best method to earn btc?" or something like that, and I think I used to report those threads as being in the wrong section or for being a garbage topic.  I have no idea what became of my reports, because they were probably 2-3 years ago. 

Anyway, I wouldn't mind if mods would either nuke stupid questions like the ones OP mentioned or at least moved the easier ones to the B&H section.

I totally agree, and I'm not even sure why anyone would want to own any of those outright--I can see the need for them on exchanges, where you'd want to have a cash equivalent (maybe) in order to make more trades or something like that, but why bother holding a stablecoin instead of cash? 

That may well be true, but bitcoin is still rocking the house as far as cryptocurrencies go, except for its price lately.  But every other crypto, including ETH, has also gotten hammered by the market.  It doesn't matter if bitcoin doesn't achieve mass adoption as a form of money.  It will still remain a good investment tool.  It's got the strongest community by far, lots of miners, lots of support.  All of that can't easily be taken away from bitcoin, believe me.

I don't know anything about the dude, but my gut feeling tells me that he doesn't have as much bitcoin as he claims--and I don't know whether that's 900BTC or 1.5BTC or whatever.  And though he's certainly not obligated to take TMAN up on his challenge, it really wouldn't hurt for him to sign an address with however much bitcoin he holds.  It wouldn't even have to be done in public, with LoyceV offering to arbitrate this matter.  Hopefully he does rise to the challenge.  If not, this shitshow is just going to continue unabated.

We've even got TOAA in on this, so you know it's going to be a rough ride.  C'mon Cryptosparks, sign the message.

Oh, and thank you to TMAN and Cryptosparks for the explanation in the other thread about the API thing and so forth.  I understand it now.

Oh yeah, it's been known probably since right after the merit system was implemented--I fell victim to the glitch early in 2018 if I'm not mistaken and learned to be careful about accidentally refreshing that page after merit has been sent.  I thought Theymos had somehow fixed it, but apparently not even if there's a timeout period.

It's not a big deal except if you don't have a lot of sMerits, and then it could be a really big deal.  Plus you don't want the merit-watchers to think you're doing something shady, either--if there are members still watching people's merit giving habits, which I'm not certain about.

Sorry for your sMerit loss, OP (lol).  Just be careful next time.

Yeah, that's exactly what I do and have always done.  That one mistake I made, I don't know how it happened.  I'm not sure why I would have reloaded that page but I did.

Agreed, and that's the first thing I thought when Cryptosparks opened up that thread trying to get TMAN banned.  TMAN adds a little flavor to the forum, even (or especially) when it's at the expense of someone's feelings.  As I said in the other thread, I don't exactly understand the service Cryptosparks is offering, but if he really is guaranteeing a return of 794% as bitmover said, that seems to be too good to be true--and we all know how many too-good-to-be-true schemes there have been in bitcoin land that ended up with a lot of penniless victims.

So Fruitsbasket is a single, apparent, satisfied customer of Cryptosparks.  That's one data point.  I'd love to hear of others.  Barring that, I'm inclined to believe that this trading bot (if that's what it is) is a scam--but I'd like to get answers to my request in TMAN's thread to explain what exactly Cryptosparks's business is.

I can barely understand what Cryptosparks is being accused of doing since I don't understand exactly what's being offered in the thread TMAN linked to.  That's because of my own tech-ignorance, and I admit that. 

I would be happy to merit someone who could explain to me in a dumbed-down fashion what the API key thing is, what kind of bot Cryptosparks is offering (I assume it's a trading bot), and whether it even could be legit.  Promising a fixed return like he seems to be doing sets off all sorts of alarms in my head, simply because that's a hallmark of Ponzi schemes.  The merit offer is valid to anyone except OP and Cryptosparks just to keep it fair.