They're not "accepting Bitcoin".  They're allowing you to pay with Bitcoin via a payment processor - there's a difference.  They're also opening up CC payments to the rest of the world within the next couple of weeks.

I like this idea but it's trivially easy to clock up hundreds of posts in a few days by shit-posting in Newbies/Off-Topic/Politics and Society/Speculation, so I'd like to see some time requirement added as well - and I think it should be a substantial one.

To be honest, I wonder if some of the forums shouldn't be invisible until certain benchmarks are reached.  At least that way people would have to put some effort into maintaining an account instead of just being able to open 5 newbie accounts and get them white-listed all at once.

Post count and duration of membership aren't everything - I could be a scammer for all any of you know - but at least we can discourage drive-by scammers.

Why would he need investors or even a climate controlled environment for hashing power equivalent to 2 BFL Singles (a cost of $2600)?  Who the hell is going to want to rent such a trivial amount of hashing power as more ASICs come online?  It's not even a mining pot plant, much less a "farm".

It actually does make sense if you think in terms of Tom being an inherently unstable person who melts down and becomes irrational under stress.  You're not going to get rational behaviour from someone who has gone into meltdown - they're not being driven by logic any more.  There seems to be at least some evidence of Tom acting irrationally in the past, and it's not all that unusual for people with mental health issues (substance related or not) to be perfectly competent until something causes them to start disconnecting from reality.  That's not an excuse - the appropriate thing to do when you realise you're starting to melt down is to hand stuff off to someone else before you totally fuck everything up. 

Given the bitterness in some of Tom's posts, I'm not sure it was as much about the money as it was about the kudos.

The big question is how much of this project was real and how much of it was delusional on Tom's part - how far did it actually progress, if at all, before collapsing.

Last word from Ari was that it was being investigated by the RCMP.  If no-one actually fell for it, I'm not sure how seriously attempted fraud would be regarded.  There are no doubt a ton of US laws which were technically broken, but not every crime gets prosecuted.

It's likely that investors were also lied to and they may decide to take action even if all customers are refunded.

ASICMiner now has the trifecta on BTC Guild.  Highest hash rate, most shares and most blocks found at this difficulty.  And they have less than 25% of their first 12 TH online.

Yes it does.  BFL's target ship date is only a week away and once their units start hashing ASICMiner's proportion of network power will drop dramatically.  It would be crazy not to exploit this small window of opportunity to the max.

2,066.23 GH/s now.  Most shares and most blocks found this difficulty as well.

Congratulations friedcat and all at ASICMiner.

It goes beyond mere mismanagement.  The whole CAN-ELECTRIC hoax was outright fraud.  The fact that it was so transparent that people checked with the real company doesn't change that and neither does the current wave of refunds.

So it's OK to borrow fiat money to buy "bit gold", but it's not OK liquidate "bit gold" to pay back the loan and buy nice things?

Gotta love how people don't bother reading beyond the OP even when the thread is only one page...

And for goodness sake, Rassah is a young man - he's not a Baby Boomer who just risked his paltry retirement savings.  I'm not saying it was a smart risk he took, but it's OK to want and have nice things to enjoy now rather than being obsessed with what your bank/Bitcoin balance is going to be at the expense of actually enjoying your life.

lulz

Read it and weep.

He sold them.  Check his post history from a few days ago.

You kind of hope that the punchline is he sold them on the weekend for triple what he paid for them, paid off the HELOC and now they have a sweet little nest egg.  That said, had someone borrowed against the equity in my home without asking me, they would have been homeless the moment I found out.

Mystery solved.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=141821.msg1512996#msg1512996

No, it's not a problem - it does that for everyone.  Be aware, though, that if you're not in the US you may have to pay taxes/duty to collect your unit when it arrives in the destination country.

Your husband must be a very understanding person.  Something like that would have been a deal-breaker for me.

Yeah but he can use the voucher he gets from the singles ordered in June to upgrade his Jalapeno order to something useful instead of being stuck with two $150 paperweights.

12 blocks now.  Going to hit the top of the "most shares" table very soon, too.

They have a right to be here.  The community also has a right to be deeply skeptical of any claims that the PPT operators were victims and to regard them as willing accomplices of pirate.