Nah, it was GLBSE, BTCS&T or inputs.io!  MF Global The case with Mtgox is most likely same with MG Global. Betting with customer money and went bust. MF global was a ponzi. I would say that gox was more incompetence then betting customer money and was likely not a ponzi |
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I used to know a couple of people who would fall for those fake "Download" buttons that try to install junk on your PC. So it would be interesting to know more about how tech-savvy the participants of this study were. The fact that the task was posted through Mechanical Turk suggests that they weren't exactly computer newbies however. EDIT: Wikipedia has this to say about the demographics of MTurk: Overall, the US MTurk population is mostly female and white, and is somewhat younger and more educated than the US population overall.
The cost of MTurk was considerably lower than other means of conducting surveys, with workers willing to complete tasks for less than half the US minimum wage. It actually kinda surprised me the rate of people who allowed for it to run for just $1/hour, even if it is $24. Nearly half of those people didn't have any red flags going up?
I'm surprised at the number of people who allowed it to run for 1 cent an hour. 1 dollar an hour, I could understand. Since that would be getting you $24 a day or $168 a week; i.e. probably enough to pay the rent and then some. There are a lot of people on there that are willing to do actual work on there for only a few cents per several minutes. I guess MTurk is similar to faucets then. Faucets only pay cents per hour but they seem to be very popular. I would agree. I have even seen a knockoff of mturk that will pay you in bitcoin (it may somehow be connected as the jobs available were very similar). |
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Depends on an exchanger. Maybe its good to keep btc at different exchanges at the same time.
Definitely. I never keep all my eggs in one basket. For the coins I keep out of cold storage, I spread them out between BTCE, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp. I don't feel great about any of them, but there's no other way to trade.  Wouldn't it just be better to keep your coins in your own "hot wallet" that you control and only keep coins at an exchange when you wish to sell for fiat? sure, that works for swing traders. i keep some coins/fiat on the exchanges for day trading, though. if you're going to be making multiple trades in a day, or over the course of a couple days, it makes sense to keep coins on the exchanges. If you are going to be trading in and out of positions often then you really have no way around having coins at an exchange. In this case you should only keep what you plan on risking for trading purposes and when you decide that you no longer want to use a certain amount of bitcoin for trading risk you should withdraw from the exchnge |
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you will always have rare stories of robberies with p2p deals (same with craigslist). i have never had a problem doing in-person deals on localbitcoins, and it doesn't seem like things like that happen too often. +1 on public meeting places.
CL and LBC are both dangerous when meeting a stranger in person. You should always meet in a very public place with lots of potential witnesses. I have never personally been robbed but have dealt with a few very sketchy people. I've used CL and LBC loads of times. Never had any problems. Of course you hear of horror stories here and there. When large amounts of money are involved, certainly meet in a public place. There is really no reason NOT to meet in public with a bitcoin transfer. But I've sold some furniture and stuff out of my house on CL. I would say that the vast majority of CL and LBC transactions will go through without a hitch (I would say that you get a lot of "no shows" but the only thing lost here is time) but when things go wrong they can go very wrong. |
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all my coins are bought
Have bought a few games for steam, still hoping more places accepting them (or at least have trusted sites that help to convert it) so I can use more services without entering CC info.
That's actually a great thing. Most places know of Bitcoin and have started to consider Bitcoin so we might hear less of credit card fraud. Credit card fraud? That's a strange thing to worry about considering one out of every 16-17 Bitcoins belongs to someone who stole it. If you ignore the 5 million or so of hoarded Bitcoins and that means about 1 in 6 Bitcoins have been stolen. There is a thread on this forum that shows a fraud total of 818,485 stolen Bitcoins worth around $500,000,000.00. That means almost 7% of all Bitcoins in existence have been taken by fraud. Could you imagine a credit card company, or any company for that matter, staying around long if 7% of their business was involved in fraud? I don't think so. Your $500 million figure is misleading as many of those frauds took place when the price of bitcoin was much lower. As per https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337.0;all the 2014 equivalent BTC stolen is roughly 22,400 BTC or ~$14 million. Another point is that some of these coins have subsequently been traded to other users either from the perp selling the coins or from them exchanging them for goods/services. In theory some of the "coins" that were stolen could have been stolen more then once (thief steals coins from victim a, transfers coins to an exchange, and the exchange has all their coins stolen from thief b). It should also be noted that there is a large percentage of cash that has been at one point stolen. You're right, it is closer to a billion in today's dollars. Don't forget to add the Gox coins to your number. The Bitcoin economy compared to any other economy in the world is minuscule. The market cap of Apple computers is 50 times larger than Bitcoin. Facebook is 17 times larger. I wonder if 1 in 6 Apple computers are stolen? Of course cash is stolen but Bitcoin isn't cash. He was comparing it to credit card fraud. Oh, with credit cards you are only responsible for the first $50 of loss. If Allinvain were using credit cards his total loss would have been $50. I was only counting actual thefts in my rough calculation, I would not consider the gox incident a theft, at least not yet. Bitcoin is very similar to cash, with cash whoever is in possession of the cash can spend the cash on goods and services of their choice, the same is true with bitcoin as whoever is in possession of the private keys can send the bitcoin to the address of their choice. The fact that many of the stolen coins have since been spent after being stolen and the fact that bitcoin is fungible would make it so that 1 in 6 btc are not really stolen at the present time as many of these "stolen" coins have been acquired legitimately |
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The amount it is public record I tried to tell you guys this at the start, burtw filed as soon as he could and I commend him for his swift action. The bitcoin community is to retroactive and not proactive in general.
I did it for grins. It turned out to be way easier than I expected. I may file some more just for the heck of it. What exactly were you requesting from your FOIA request? It is already known that the Tim guy was the person who won the auction
I asked for how much he paid. They have to tell me or come up with a good reason not to tell me. Its not protected by any "trade or business secerets" he declared the coins as personal property on the live press release. The only question is how long will it take , you can also ask them to waive the fee's. He also has said that he is going to use the coins to increase adoption in third world countries. If it were to get out that he paid "x" for the coins but ends up selling the coins for more to third world citizens then people could get upset with him and demand that he charge only what he paid. |
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Low transaction fees is one of the strengths of bitcoin. If adoption increases, near zero fees can sum up to a good amount in every mined block. There is no real concern.
This is exactly the theory behind how bitcoin was setup to have the block subsidy reduced over time. |
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its better if you invest all of those 50k into mining gear
and mine btc!you will be reach!
This is very bad advice. Most miners will never ROI |
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There's almost 29M usd swaps now on bitfinex, and to me it looks like the upward momentum has stopped. If the price ranges from 640-660 for a while with no upward movement the probability of a long squeeze is going to increase dangerously.
Quite a lot of money they are holding. What stop them from running away or claimed hack like tradefotress did? They make money off of trading fees and earn a portion of the interest on Swaps. Over the long term they stand to make more money off of these fees would outweigh the amount they could get away with if they were to steal the coins from their customers. You don't have to worry if they run off with your money. You should worry about how to get your money out in case of insolvency The only way to get your money back in the event of either would be to withdraw your funds prior to the theft/insolvency happening. |
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Now Angela Merkel will learn what PRISM is.
I tend to think she already knew of the existence of PRISM its all just pretending just like she pretended how furious she was when she learned that the NSA is tapping her phone. And we all know that her government is in bed with the usa gov http://rt.com/news/us-drones-germany-ramstein-625/Germany is very big about being against surveillance. Hitler "watched" germany's citizens very closely prior to him taking away the rights of Jews and was able to do so because he was already watching everyone. I would agree about german experience in this area. Stasi, for example, was one of the best intelligence services in the world. In fact, sometimes it was even more competent than KGB. You are right, madame Merkel is pretending to not know. No idea why you Germans still vote for her  Truth is, Germany is sending personal information of German citizens over to the States 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In turn, the German secret service gets access to the PRISM user interface. Don't worry about it, you have nothing to hide, they only kill you based on this data Do you have any kind of source on this? This kind of surveillance is against the law in Germany and is taken very seriously. They go to great lengths to destroy even surveillance of the roadways when the police is looking for a stolen car for example (to make sure it cannot be used later). |
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It actually kinda surprised me the rate of people who allowed for it to run for just $1/hour, even if it is $24. Nearly half of those people didn't have any red flags going up?
I'm surprised at the number of people who allowed it to run for 1 cent an hour. 1 dollar an hour, I could understand. Since that would be getting you $24 a day or $168 a week; i.e. probably enough to pay the rent and then some. But the software being used could potentially damage what would be at least a $500 piece of equipment. This would mean that after just one hour (or less) that the damage would be done. Also if you read the article you can see that participants can only participate one time so they would only work for one hour and then stop. |
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...
If a country is holding dollars then these dollars can purchase a certain amount of goods/services. If the value of the dollar were to fall then the dollars that the country is holding can now purchase less goods/services
And the dollar is certain to lose value so countries would need to put those dollars into safer stores of value as quickly as possible to avoid loses. That ups demand for safe havens making raw materials more expensive which makes essentials more expensive for all economies no matter how strong, that further increases demand for safe havens and the end result is global hyperinflation. fact realy is that dollar is falling, but will bitcoin realy be the solution, im not so sure, but there will definetly be people who will spread FUD about that happening. ive read about russia forgiving large portion of debt to korea, and germany that is allying with china, but it all may be a big hoax, we cant know for sure. Do you have any sources regarding these rumors? Both sound contrary to what russia and Germany would likely wish to do. I would also disagree that the dollars is falling in value |
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A stock market crash right now wouldn't affect too much bitcoin. There's still not enough infrastructure/awareness to allow stock traders to quickly move to cryptos.
However, if it happens in a year or so, the scenario might be completely different and cause a major buy in into btc.
Yes, there needs to be an easy way to sell stocks and buy bitcoin (or a proxy thereof) on the same platform. If/when a bitcoin ETF becomes tradable, it will then be possible for average investors to buy into bitcoin easily. The ETF will also likely increase public awareness of bitcoin, causing more people to adopt bitcoin. Probably true, but direct investment will have a much larger effect on bitcoin price than adoption. Additionally, a bitcoin ETF would grant access to a lot more capital as people could then invest with 401ks and other retirement savings. A ETF would not be available in most workers' 401(k) accounts as the investment choices are limited by the plan administrator of the accounts. I would be very interested to see how fungible a BTC EFT is compared to bitcoin. That is how easy it would be to go from a share in the ETF to bitcoin. Really? Plan administrators restrict the ETFs you can buy in a 401(k)? I didn't know that as my retirement plan only allows investment in mutual funds. Maybe I was thinking of IRAs. In any case, thanks for pointing that out. I wouldn't worry about people pouring their retirement funds into bitcoin when the ETF comes out, I would be excited about large institutions buying into bitcoin. If consumers wanted to invest in bitcoin they could simply buy it via an exchange. |
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you will always have rare stories of robberies with p2p deals (same with craigslist). i have never had a problem doing in-person deals on localbitcoins, and it doesn't seem like things like that happen too often. +1 on public meeting places.
CL and LBC are both dangerous when meeting a stranger in person. You should always meet in a very public place with lots of potential witnesses. I have never personally been robbed but have dealt with a few very sketchy people. |
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When will people feel comfortable using BTC ??
When there is a completely dumbed down simple to use secure brain wallet ..
Triff ..
Brain wallets are already dumbed down. A brain wallet is nothing more then a password to get to your private key. The issue is that humans are generally not random so it is easy to guess the "password" to any given brain wallet. |
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Regardless of if the chances are one in 10k or 1 in 20k, the chances of hitting the jackpot make it so unlikely that you will hit it that you are doing nothing more then wasting time on this or any other faucet.
That's how the site attract many users by saying "Sign up and win upto $200 in free Bitcoins every hour playing a simple game!" Even though it says "upto" I would consider this to be misleading as there is not really a reasonable chance that this would happen. I wonder how many of those freebitco.in users realize and understand how low the chance is. The chance to hit "10000" in 1 roll = 0.005% The chance to hit "10000" at least once in 100 rolls = 0.49876% The chance to hit "10000" at least once in 10000 rolls = 39.3477% You should also make not as to how long it would take to "roll" 100 times. If you were to not go to work and do nothing but roll every hour and sleep then you can roll 16 times per day. It would take almost a week just to have a ~.49% chance of winning the jackpot. EDIT: I think your math might be off for your 10,000 rolls chances. |
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future of bitcoin is paying for everything with bitcoins, everyday grocery etc
I don't see many people paying with it through a drive through. 10 min wait could stall fast food lol I wish people would stop bringing this up as if it's a problem. You don't have to wait ten minutes. Have you ever actually sent bitcoin? Why do u think that u dont need to wait 10 min ? Unless u wait, there remains a chance of double spending ...is no it ? There is always the chance of a double spend attack, even after 6 confirmations (via a 51% attack). Once a TX has been propagated throughout the network nodes will consider the inputs as spend and will reject any TXs that contain the same inputs even when the TX is 0/unconfirmed. The only way to double spend would be to include a block in the blockchain that spends at least one of the same inputs. With small purchases like fast food this would generally not be economical. Frankly speaking, most of the APIs do not work without at least 1 confirmation. So, when u r building an application, u'll most likely wait at least 1 confirmation, unless u are spending time to build your own API, which is again very unlikely for startups. When there is a demand for bitcoin payment processing that accepts 0 confirmations payments then companies like bitpay and coinbase will build systems to support it. Right now there is very little demand for this kind of system as most companies that accept bitcoin sell over the internet or accept bitcoin for money owed on an account (direct tv) and they will not ship until after 10 minutes passes anyway. |
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Not invest in altcoins. Instead invest in 1000 $1 scratchers.  This would probably actually be a better investment then the vast majority of alts outthere |
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all my coins are bought
Have bought a few games for steam, still hoping more places accepting them (or at least have trusted sites that help to convert it) so I can use more services without entering CC info.
That's actually a great thing. Most places know of Bitcoin and have started to consider Bitcoin so we might hear less of credit card fraud. Credit card fraud? That's a strange thing to worry about considering one out of every 16-17 Bitcoins belongs to someone who stole it. If you ignore the 5 million or so of hoarded Bitcoins and that means about 1 in 6 Bitcoins have been stolen. There is a thread on this forum that shows a fraud total of 818,485 stolen Bitcoins worth around $500,000,000.00. That means almost 7% of all Bitcoins in existence have been taken by fraud. Could you imagine a credit card company, or any company for that matter, staying around long if 7% of their business was involved in fraud? I don't think so. Your $500 million figure is misleading as many of those frauds took place when the price of bitcoin was much lower. As per https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337.0;all the 2014 equivalent BTC stolen is roughly 22,400 BTC or ~$14 million. Another point is that some of these coins have subsequently been traded to other users either from the perp selling the coins or from them exchanging them for goods/services. In theory some of the "coins" that were stolen could have been stolen more then once (thief steals coins from victim a, transfers coins to an exchange, and the exchange has all their coins stolen from thief b). It should also be noted that there is a large percentage of cash that has been at one point stolen. |
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The private key is uncrackable for now. Who know if this is true 10 years down the road.
If technology was progressing to the point where it was feasible for a private key to be cracked, couldn't the devs just upgrade the encryption? Firstly , you cannot 'crack' a single private key , you just need to find all the private keys in the entirety of Bitcoin. Secondly , it's not possible that it will be cracked , by any force in our universe.
Okay, at first they said the speed of light in vacuum was the highest possible limit, but now it turns out that everything is not that simple. So how can we be that sure about it being impossible to crack? The amount of energy that would need to be used by the amount of computing power necessary to crack a private key is so enormous that it would literally take lifetimes to crack a private key if all of the sun's energy were captuted If we could walk to the Moon Sun, it would also take the lifetimes of many generations to get there (let's assume for a moment that we have an interest of getting there). That is what people assume. We can progress at exponential rate if we put our mind into it. Walking on the Sun could be done if we set our mind into it. We are still a very long ways away from being able to potentially accomplish the possibility of cracking a private key. It is much easier to use social engineering to steal coins as evidenced by the number of thefts and hacks that in some part used social engineering. |
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