Man, I have no background in computer science or anything related to that, so most of that article is Greek to me--but I do appreciate the link.

I have not yet set up the Ledger S, but I think I'm going to do it today and may add my NEO onto it.  I don't suspect I'll have a problem as long as I can follow the directions.  We'll see how it goes.  For better or worse, I'm not all that concerned about my coins getting stolen, but I'll be careful about that.

I think I congratulated you before on this achievement, but congrats again.

Whatever happened to the thread you started where you told all about your introduction to bitcoin and all that crazy stuff that happened to you?  I was going to post a reply there, but the thread seems to have been deleted.  It was an amazing story.

I don't think it's completely off-topic here to mention that I received my Ledger Nano S today, along with the steelwallet.  Both are things of beauty, but that's about the only thing I can say about them right now since I haven't actually played around with them yet.  So far I'm very happy with my purchase, and I've no doubt that these are the real deal and not some counterfeit garbage.

The Ledger and steelwallet arrived late in the day and I'm tired, so tomorrow I'll see what I can do about storing some crypto on the Ledger.  I'm mostly interested in keeping NEO on it since it'll earn GAS without having to be running all the time. 

If anyone else has any good advice for me, I'd greatly appreciate it--and I did read this thread.  Hardware wallets are new to me and I'm not sure what the pitfalls are, if any.

Unbelievable, and I agree with you 100%.  I had to check the gold price after reading this thread, as I don't really follow the metals markets anymore.  It's at $1399, which is somewhat of a pop I agree, but I don't think it's anything anyone should be pissing their pants over. 

Gold and silver have been the worst investments (IMO) since 2011 when they both came crashing down to earth.  If you'd invested in the stock market or in bitcoin at that time, you'd have done quite well for yourself.  But yep, the same goldbugs keep saying the same things over and over again like an idiotic mantra.

When I check precious metals prices, I use coinflation.com, and on that site there are always pro-metals articles.  Always, and they're all the same, with the same arguments for owning gold/silver, and they're all bullshit.  If these people are anti-crypto, they're even more idiotic.

I can answer this from my experience on the forum battling shitposters:  there are a LOT of desperate individuals on bitcointalk who are poor and are looking to make some money here.  They couldn't care less about what project they're shilling as long as they get paid--and these people come from all parts of the world.  Believe me, there are probably very few members who really care about whatever new ICO is coming to market or whether it's going to be successful or even the least bit useful.  Most are not.

I suspect most bounty hunters don't do any due diligence before they join a bounty.  That would be giving them far too much credit.

Right.  I don't see any reason why campaign managers should necessarily be merit sources, and I'm not sure what OP's angle is on this.  Does he think that campaign managers would start handing out merits to posts made in their campaigns?  I'm not sure that would happen, nor do I think it would really be a good thing.

There are really only a handful of good campaign managers on the forum, and they're the ones managing the bitcoin-paying campaigns.  Some of them might even be sources, who knows.  I wouldn't trust a shitty altcoin/token-paying bounty manager to be a source, since most of them are indifferent to spam and might abuse the privilege.

Yep.  Theymos has been known to make members merit sources without them even applying (*ahem*), but I seriously doubt he's going to do what OP is suggesting.

Yes, thank you as well for helping me out.  Going to lock the thread for now.

I've become a very big fan of NEO myself, and of some other PoS coins.  As I've mentioned in other threads, the thing that really attracted me to NEO was that you don't have to leave the wallet running all the time in order to earn GAS.  I stake PIVX and sometimes my internet gets spotty and it disconnects.  It doesn't bother me that the price of NEO got beaten down in the past year, because that allowed me to buy in relatively cheap.  We'll see how that whole project works out, but in the meantime I'm happy to at least be earning some income from it.

I don't know about that.  I've heard it won't be happening soon--but who knows?  I'll tell you one thing, though.  If ETH does move to PoS, I'll probably invest in as many coins as it takes to start staking.  I've heard it isn't too many--but I just can't bring myself to start buying any right now.

I'm not sure that you really have any responsibilities being on DT other than leaving accurate feedback--and you were never a serial scam tagger anyway, so I wouldn't worry so much about that.  It really is a mark of respect people have for you that doesn't come with many obligations as far as I can see.  You're a good guy and deserve to be on DT--even if you're detaching from the forum.  

You've probably given this a lot of thought, so I won't advise you to think it over.  But I really don't want to exclude you from my trust list, bro.

Fully agree.  DT should be loaded with more members like Hhampuz.

Nope, not allowed but yep, it happens constantly.  Those members are obviously trying to disguise an advertisement as a genuine post, but IMO all of it qualifies as spam and should be reported.  Did you report these posts?  If not, please do so.  Mods will probably delete the posts and perhaps nuke the members.

Currently looking for $60 worth of bitcoin at preev 1:1 rate, which is about 0.00505475BTC.  If you're interested, let me know via PM in case I miss a response here.  Thanks.

I forgot I was a shit-eater and forgot all about xolxol and forgot all about this thread.  The xolxol account is obviously a throwaway troll account and is most likely somebody's alt being used for the purpose of slinging crap against DT members.  Even if a flag was warranted, I'm not sure I'd even bother with it now.

As far as Lauda's claim that you'd be in danger of losing funds to this troll....that may be true, but I don't think there's hard evidence of that.  I sure as hell wouldn't do any deals with him (and I'm sure that's mutual), but aside from the slanderous BS I have no reason to suspect he's a thief. 

Yep, that's what a lot of them are doing--creating threads so they and their alts and friends in bounties can post garbage.  It's been happening for at least a few years now.

Unfortunately, Theymos doesn't seem inclined to impose any restrictions on newbies starting up new threads.  He seems to be very much for free speech, which I greatly respect.  On the other hand, because of that we get the nonsense you mentioned.  It's annoying, but my suggestion is to hit the ignore button as many times as it takes.  In addition, you can report shitposts to the moderators and they'll usually take care of them.

Yeah, I don't think that was ever on the table for bitcoin.  I keep hearing ETH will be moving toward PoS, but it's always followed by "not in the foreseeable future". 

I happen to like PoS coins, but only a small handful of them.  Currently I'm a fan of PIVX and have earned quite a few coins by staking.  I've played around with RDD and Gridcoin, but I'm really not a fan of those and don't think they'll have a real future.  And who knows what's going to happen in the future--PoS, PoW, and anything else could become standard.  Unfortunately I think there are already way too many coins on the market, and the more that get created the more saturated the whole crypto space becomes.

OP, I didn't read your blog post but I'm going to comment on this anyway.

I've used probably only a handful of exchanges since I've gotten into crypto, with Cryptsy and Coinbase being the first ones, followed by Yobit, Poloniex, Kraken, and some of the "instant exchanges" like Changelly and ShapeShift.  Out of all of them, I'd have to say I've had the best experience with Binance and after they got that 7000BTC stolen from them recently and didn't run away with all their customers' funds, I have faith that they're the real deal.

In addition to that, they have a great-looking website which is very easy to use, and I've never had any trouble with withdrawing my funds.  The only thing that annoys me is all the layers of security just to log in, but that's not a huge issue.  The only problem now is that I don't have access to my cellphone and can't receive the SMS code to access their site.  That's truly a pain in the ass.

But I'd have to say that definitely Binance is probably the best exchange out there right now.  If anyone knows of a better one, I'm all ears.

Oh, you're loved, Foxpup.  But love from trolls and vicious morons is a cheap commodity that I myself don't wish to own--and this guy OP is talking about sounds like he fits well into that category.

Members do occasionally get banned for spam, and they certainly get banned for ban evasion.  Hopefully this dude'll get nuked to high hell.  Sounds like he's very deserving of it.

What a total tool.

Ehhh....I don't know if they're by the official team, but I'm assuming so since what I just purchased is brand new.  It's definitely not a second hand thing.  

Maybe I'll make a followup post here once I receive the item.  This is the link to it on Amazon, so maybe you or someone else can advise me on whether I made the right choice or not.  I'm a complete ignoramus about hardware wallets, but I'd heard great things about the Ledger Nano S.  

Edit:

Thank you so much for that information, it really helps.

They are indeed.  I think I posted what I thought was a legitimate comment about some USB stick miner and I'm pretty sure it got deleted.  That section doesn't tolerate low-quality posts, and their threshold for them is pretty low.  I've become interested in Philipma1957's solar mining stuff but I've refrained from actually commenting there for fear of having my posts deleted--so I'm just reading for now.

OP, other sections you could probably get away with the posts you made that got nuked.  But regardless, don't just post silly things that don't add much to a thread, because chances are someone will report it.

Word.  Obviously OP is just here to earn money and probably doesn't care much about bitcoin.  These are the types of people who shouldn't be here, because it's almost a certainty that every post they make is motivated by how much they're going to earn from it.  Hopefully OP does some reading in some of the more educational sections and actually comes to appreciate what bitcoin is all about--and maybe my assumptions are wrong, too.

And yeah, I was in the 777Coin campaign once, and they paid a bonus for posts in the gambling section if I recall correctly.  I'm not a gambler at all, so there wasn't much I could contribute in that section.  

Yep, I have P&S and Off-Topic on ignore, but I'm well aware they're both spam fests.  Campaigns probably think advertising there would be ineffective.

Yep, those posts aren't merit-worthy, but that's my opinion.  Merit abuse/misuse is so inherently subjective that I stopped tagging people for doing it a long time ago.  And unless there's some seriously blatant and persistent abuse, there's not much that's going to happen in terms of repercussions.  

Maybe this guy has friends or alts, but who knows?  It's good you reported all of this here, but I'm not sure what's going to happen in terms of action about it.  We'll see what other members have to say.

Eh?  I always called them "huevos mas grande".