If I had the scratch to build my collection of Ballet wallets, I'd go crazy and buy them all (even though I think they're overpriced in general).  My last purchase was a 5-pack of the 2022 Lunar New Year wallets, which are pretty neat looking. 

Is it just me being stupid, or is it hard to find wallet variations like the pizza one on the Ballet website?  That link worked just dandy, but I tried to find it from the homepage and didn't see any links to special edition wallets.  It was listed under the "Real" category, but I don't think I would have stumbled across it had I just been browsing the site.

What was the announcement about?  On principle I refuse to click on any Twitter links even if Elon Musk owns the loathsome company.

I don't know if we're in any sort of new era or that we need new 'information providers' but you mentioned Vod and Lauda, both of whom were here and very active when I registered and remained so for years afterward.  They both had a lot of controversy surrounding them pretty much at any given time, and it made for some damn interesting threads.  I'm not suggesting that bitcointalk needs to have a bunch of drama to spice things up, but what I've noticed is that a lot of the fiery personalities have disappeared, either because they died or simply abandoned the forum.

Even Quickseller and OgNasty fit into that category, but I don't see either one of them posting in sections like Meta or Reputation as was the case a few years ago.  That said, I don't think any of what I just mentioned has anything to do with the ratio of active to registered members being as low as it is (I think I've already said my piece on that in a prior post).

LOL.  I've been following the Ledger subreddit, and although I've never visited it before I have to think that previously there was a lot of discussion about new coins, new devices, and all sorts of threads that were about actually using a Ledger.  Now every other thread is from someone who's switched HW wallets, and 99% of the discussion is about the recovery service.

And boy, for a subreddit devoted to a single HW wallet you'd think most of the participants would know exactly what the danger is if they continue to use Ledger devices.  But judging by the posts being made that is not the case, and they're not shill posts either, just Ledger users who don't realize that their coins aren't safe on any of the devices and who fundamentally don't see what the problem is.  And Jesus, I'm pretty tech-ignorant (as many of you know) and from everything I've read even I know Ledger users are potentially fucked if either Ledger or a government or a hacker or rogue employee decides it's time to gain access to private keys.

It really is a circus.  At this point I'm just wondering what Ledger as a company is going to look like in 6 months to a year.

Thanks for the update, joker_josue!

I'm happy to see that a lot of the recipients of merits are spreading them around themselves.  The only member I saw who didn't do so this month was vjudeu with the sMerits he got from Welsh.  Not to heavily criticize any member, but if you have enough sMerits to give out, please do it.  It keeps the merit system running smoothly, and to anyone who's unaware of how bitcointalk used to be prior to January 2018, it's very important that the system works as intended.  It may not be perfect as far as eliminating shitposters, but it's done one hell of a job in sweeping away all the account farmers that used to exist (which did contribute to a ton of garbage posts themselves).

Maybe I'm just an old fart, but if there are people here who have no clue what the volatility difference is between the stock market and bitcoin (not to mention altcoins) or simply that the stock market is volatile at times, they really ought to learn a bit about finance before plowing a bunch of money into anything.

And yes, as I said stocks can be volatile--but overall it's nowhere near the level of bitcoin.  The wild swings have seemingly settled down as of late, but you don't generally see 20% (or more) gains or losses in the course of a day in the stock market, and if that were to happen it'd be front page news.  But that kind of volatility has been seen in the bitcoin market repeatedly, and everybody just yawns.

OP, do a lot more research before trying to pick stocks to buy, and don't rely on people's posts unless they seem well-informed.  The fact is that we've been in a sustained bull market for well over a decade now and at the moment stocks are overvalued in general.  So if you buy some tech stock with no earnings or a P/E >25 or so, you're probably buying near the high.  The safest thing to do (and it's been recommended by many economists and financial advisors) is to buy into an index fund that tracks one of the major indexes.  That way you're basically betting on the stock market as a whole and not on a single company.

Good luck in whatever you do.  Markets are crazy right now, so get a feel for things before making a move.

Sweet, thanks for posting this update.  I haven't really been paying attention to the imgur situation, but I've seen a few threads about it and saw that some images had disappeared, so I gathered that there was a problem using them to host pics for use on the forum.  I've posted a lot of screenshots and whatnot using imgur, but it's not as if it'd break my heart if they no longer showed up in my posts (which are likely long since buried under the mountain of other posts and threads that keeps growing by the minute).

I'm too lazy to search the forum for answers, so what was the problem?  It wasn't just a bitcointalk and reddit issue, was it?

Edit: Whoops, never mind.  I just saw Theymos's thread pop to the surface and will read it now.

If we all had to sign a message to log on to this forum (assuming there wasn't the "stay logged in" option), that would not only be a huge pain in the ass for members experienced with bitcoin and signing messages, but it'd turn away potential members who might not even know how to do it yet and wouldn't take the time to learn just to be a member here--and that would be understandable, since it seems like a lot of newcomers think bitcointalk is a throwback from the 2010 era.

But you know?  Theymos tends to make things extremely complicated (like the merit and trust systems); this idea sounds like something he'd go for if it weren't for privacy and/or security issues involved.  It's definitely not something I'd want to see come to pass.

Also, I agree with the member above who mentioned that OP's response to OgNasty's post is just a wee bit inadequate to spark a discussion.  It would be nice for thread starters looking to get people's opinions to start by giving their own.  Just a suggestion, OP.

Oh, man....I can't tell you how many one-time use accounts I've seen all over the forum (actually you probably have as well), whether it's to troll someone, make a scam accusation, or like you mentioned to spam and all the other reasons. 

I also think a lot of accounts that got created during the various bull markets went dormant once bitcoin started to slide, and the late 2017 to early 2018 period comes to mind immediately.  There were a ton of new accounts created to participate in the ICO bounties, and I don't think many of those people stuck around to the present day.

I didn't think there were 'only' 58k active accounts, but when you think about it that's still a pretty high number for an old-school discussion forum.  If signature campaigns went away, though?  I bet that number would drop off a cliff in a heartbeat.

Signature campaigns, even if they were advertising something illegal, are so small in comparison to other crypto crimes that governments have prosecuted that I seriously doubt they're of any concern to government agencies.  But of course in all honesty I don't have a clue what's going to happen in the future or what agency in which government has eyes on, because there are a lot of them and they don't usually broadcast what they're investigating to the world.

So even with all the scrutiny crypto has been under, campaigns probably aren't even a small blip on the radar of anyone in power, and it's not likely worth the resources to go after either campaign participants or project/exchange/whatever owners for running campaigns.

I'm not exactly sure that's the takeaway message from what happened to Mr. Beast.  Maybe if the robber had actually noticed and stolen that bitcoin it would, but this is like the opposite of that.

That's not to say that if you own bitcoin you should keep everything locked up tight as if you had stacks of cash in your home--you absolutely should, but the lesson I learned from this is that the typical home-robbery perpetrator is still most likely looking for physical valuables like cash, gold, etc.

I'm not all that familiar with Mr. Beast, but these big Youtube personalities, man....they'd better step up their home security, because I imagine a lot of outlaws know they're pretty rich and thus are, or will, become the target of break-ins just like this one.

Going to play devil's advocate here and suggest that they might have been too small an exchange to pack up and leave whatever country they operated out of, or to afford lawyers, or whatever IT support they'd have needed to protect themselves from attackers.  When I think of crypto exchanges, Hotbit wouldn't even pop into my head.  I can't imagine they ever had a high volume of trades or made a profit anywhere near an exchange like Kucoin or MEXC, much less a leader like Binance.

I always get Hotbit and HITbit confused.  Is Hotbit the one with the shitty reputation and numerous scam accusations against them?  Regardless, they were small potatoes and I doubt they're going to be missed much.

I made a post about this in the HW wallet section right after Ledger made this announcement, and since then I've learned a lot more about what kind of clusterfuck this really is and how dangerous Ledger products are for people who value not only their privacy but security.  Needless to say, I'm no longer going to put up even a feeble defense for any of their actions as I used to do. 

They fucked all of their current customers who likely didn't buy the device they thought they did, i.e., one from which the private keys couldn't be extracted without the owner's consent.  Now that they've disclosed that it can be done, I think they've also fucked themselves as a company--but time will tell.  One thing is for sure: I'm going to be following this drama very closely.

My personal suspicion is that Ledger is being pressured by government agencies to implement this service, or at least to announce that key exfiltration is possible so as to circumvent whatever illegal surveillance law they'd be violating if they got Ledger to seize users' funds for whatever reason.  I didn't come up with that theory, of course, but I believe it fully.

I think this might just be a wee bit off-topic, but I took a look at Zilon's recent posts and they're not only quite numerous but most of them are generic crap that I see a lot when I'm doing post history reviews.  Nobody can read minds, but I think it's pretty obvious when someone is posting just to get paid.  Lack of effort and thought put into posts really sticks out when you're reading closely.

And back on topic....hasn't this issue been put to rest already, even if it wasn't to OP's satisfaction?  I'm not sure what the big deal was, since JollyGood left a neutral, which I think is entirely appropriate.

Yeah, that's just plain stupid squared--but I guess Ledger and Safepal and anyone else in the future who rolls out features like this are playing to the uneducated masses who think owning crypto is like keeping money in a bank.  It just boggles my mind that Ledger (and now Safepal I guess) are doing this, as ostensibly their core customer base consists of people who do know what they're doing in the dangerous world of crypto and never wanted a device from which private keys could be exported.

And yeah, I get that Ledger was always known to be closed-source and thus should have been looked upon as not-completely-secure.  You've been saying that all along, and I wish I'd taken heed of that the first time I heard it.

I'm pretty much soured on all HW wallets now.

OP, I understand what you wrote (barely), but I'm having a hard time trying to understand what your point is and why it was so important that you had to start another thread about 1xbit when it's been well-known for a long time they're scammy as fuck.

Doh!  I was skimming to find the post of another member I wanted to quote when I saw yours; I'm glad I'm not the only one who's still trying to grasp the point of this.  My first guess was that he's just trying to earn merits (and it's probably true).  I looked at his merit history and there are a couple of members whose back he scratched.  Not accusing him of anything, but his English is so bad that I don't know how he was able to earn as many merits as he has with so few posts.  Curious indeed.

Don't hold your breath.  That issue has been brought up many times before, and it's fallen on deaf ears without fail.  I don't buy all the excuses people make, because other forums don't seem to have any problems whatsoever banning members if there's enough evidence that they've scammed somebody--and there are plenty of proven scams that have happened here over the years where there was no doubt about the guiltiness of the scammer.  Theymos just doesn't want to do it, and it's as simple as that.

Will do the second and won't waste any time complaining to a company who would do something so mind-bendingly dumb that they've probably won the world record for losing the most customers in the shortest period of time.  One complains to a company usually if they want them to do something better or correct a wrong.  In this case, I don't think there's anything Ledger can do to walk back this blunder.

I'm still shaking my head over this one.  And dkbit98, you were right in your criticisms all along.  The closed/open-source thing is enormously important when it comes to any sort of crypto software, and it doesn't matter if a HW wallet is sold by a well-known company that's been reputable for years, because shit like this can happen if everything isn't transparent.

I'm not sure what's actually going to happen as far as the SEC or whoever else declaring bitcoin or any crypto to be a security, and from the small bit I've heard there appears to be some division among the ranks there, and Coinbase is pissed that they won't clarify shit and instead just fine them for violations....it's absolutely nutty.

But ladies and gentlemen who live in and are allowed to vote in the US, if crypto regulation is a significant issue for you my suggestion is to vote Republican, and it doesn't matter if fuckin' Trump is running again.  This is what the democrats want--larger government, more regulation, less freedom.  If you're not registered to vote, you might want to look into it.

I tend to agree with OP on this one, given how popular Ledger wallets are and how big this story is.  There might be people who aren't members of the forum doing google searches about this unholy debacle and who might find their way here for some good discussion about it--and guaranteed it'll be better than Reddit.

There have been a lot of important things that have happened in the world of bitcoin that don't warrant mention in the important announcements section, but man....I seriously think this ought to be one of them.  This whole situation is fucked, and I really should have listened to dkbit98 a long time ago.

Um, I hate to break it to you or to speak ill of the dead but that just isn't true--at least it wasn't true for the serious disagreement TECSHARE and I had.  He was as hard-headed as they come, and I'm going to stop right there.

I'm curious as to why this thread got bumped by yeosaga and I'm concerned that it's going to start being active again when there's really no need for it to be.  There can't be that many members who just came back from a long break and discovered that TECSHARE died, so all the members after yeosaga saying "RIP" make me think they're posting just to post, if you know what I mean.

Yep, that fact has been established for a long time now.

Hey OP, I'm just sayin' now:  you've made 355 posts since you started this thread and from what I can see you've still got members (in sig campaigns of course) congratulating you with extremely vapid posts.  You might want to consider locking this thread so it doesn't keep getting bumped indefinitely.  No insult to you, but I'm not a big fan of self-congratulatory threads and certainly not ones that turn into shitpost magnets.

By the way, is there any way to tell when you reached a given number of posts aside from checking a campaign spreadsheet?  I'm curious as to when I hit 10k posts.  I don't think I even noticed at the time.