Have you chatted with a good lawyer that is knowledgeable about crypto?  Which country to incorporate in and your legal agreements are going to be vital.

Good luck, a good exchange is always a welcome addition to crypto.

On LinkedIn and Upwork I've received a number of contacts saying they would like to hire for a few different reasons. One was for finding some problems with their Web3 site, another for adding features, another to change blockchains, others for similar reasons. They would point to a github account which invariably included some react based node and asked to look at what exists and then schedule a call to talk.

The scam here is they expect you to run some random npm on a windows box. This would search your machine for any wallet software, upload it elsewhere, and then install any other files from an offsite host.  I'm not sure if any windows firewall or AV would catch the issue.  The nasty code has been hiding in jquery-min.js and similar, deobfuscating the code shows a long list of potential wallet file locations to grab and the IP addresses of where to upload and also download further files.

I have no idea on the effectiveness of this approach as any real dev shouldn't run unknown software on a local machine. However the javascript was 500 lines of rather interesting code so there was some work put into the scam.

Bitcoin is entirely decentralized. If you stay in Bitoin there is not a problem.  Tying Bitcoin to the existing fiat system is an entirely different issue beyond the original bitcoin whitepaper.
 
I have not used bisq, maybe as it uses bank accounts and not cash in hand the feds aren't overly worried? Maybe it's not worth their time just yet? No idea, because they're not shut down doesn't mean they're in the clear.

If the lotto game is designed badly then yes, calculations can be used to win more than you spend. There was a recent good movie, based on true events, of someone finding a flawed payout system. The guy won 26 million over 2 years. The flaw in this case was increasing the odds of winning when someone didn't win, he spotted the flaw and legally exploited it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8323668/

In the US anyone who transfers crypto may fall under money transmitter license requirements. It is easy to get into trouble for running afoul of this and is one reason localbitcoins doesn't exist anymore. Also I'm not sure how you would confirm destruction of any item without a large chain of trust of the actors. Crypto is all about Zero Trust.  Also easy transferring crypt to fiat without going through an exchange or other methods that by law must comply with Anti Money Laundering / Anti Terrorism laws is going to be faught against by every government.  Binance tried to ignore that, they paid billions in fines and CZ is doing time.

In effect the proposed solution takes a few centralized exchanges for the fiat / crypto exchanges to a slightly larger centralized network.

Of course it is always easier to point out problems than to come up with solutions.  I do like the out of the box proposal. Keep thinking of new options, if you can solve the problem it may be very lucrative to you.

The rumor is the felon is considering an official Trump coin. He conned his cult into buying his NFTs so not much of a surprise that he'd be all for a crypto grift.

ETH is more than a single coin. It's not simply Ethereum, it's also all the dozens of L2 cryptos that use the power of ETH to secure their blockchains. Bridging has made EVM compatible crypto a whole ecosystem.  Perhaps the reason there are fewer clones are that instead of something totally new, the people created a L2 that still ties into the ETH network while doing things different than ETH.

However the barrier to entry is low for a clone or fork, if a person or group feels like they have a better solution then go ahead. The community will decide if it succeeds or not.

Tokenizing real world assets is only going to be more common. For a project I was involved with, we spoke at length with lawyers on tokenization and we couldn't figure out a way to allow our project to work for the average person. Accredited investors would have been acceptable legally, yet that only applies to people with provable million+ worth of assets excluding the house.  Love how the average person can get into hundreds of thousands of debt but they can't toss $100 into a non public asset! 

If you've figured out how to get around this limitation, great!

I'm all for crypto being anonymous, distributed, buyer beware. Unfortunately, as soon as it touches fiat currency the feds have other ideas.

If you're a US citizen then you're opening yourself and any US users up to the issues that localbitcoins had. This includes users being charged with money laundering and unlicensed money exchange services.  You really need some good crypto legal advice to keep yourself from running into issues. The gov won't care if it's only a hobby project.

Not trying to be a downer, I firmly believe the more devs working in crypto the better. However, I've been around enough to know that any service needs a legal review before it goes live.  If you aren't friends with any lawyers look around. I had one that I could pitch projects to and he'd gladly listen and tell me what would be needed to launch without any charge. He would only charge if I then asked him to do work. He said it was a nice change from the typical business stuff he did.

Back in the dotcom days I was involved with a business auction service with built in escrow services.

Are you in the US? If you haven't, get a good lawyer that knows about escrow services. Many states had various rules about what requirements are needed to call yourself an escrow. I know initially we had to not claim to be an escrow in California because you needed to be a member of a certain trade association. This is decades out of date info but expect lots of hoops.  As crypto has become mainstream I would only expect more hoops.

As to marketing the service you'll have to dox yourself so people know who they are trusting. Also be very upfront about where funds are held. Also be sure you can publicly say you are using them, one bank didn't like us using their name in any fashion without it being cleared by their legal.

Is this the right topic for a quick code example?

I had need to find ownerOf on a private Ethereum test network. The library being using was missing the call. A workaround was far less complex than fixing the library. It's a quick hack but it may help others in the same situation. Plenty of other examples were found to modify to get here, thanks other random devs.
 
Needs - geth

First, you need to define an ABI. The Ethereum Application Binary Interface (ABI) lets you specify how to interact with a contract and return data in a format you’re expecting. I only care about ownerOf.

Add a new file, ownerof.abi :


Then a quick script with two passed arguments the NFT contract address and the tokenID of the NFT you are querying for ownership: NFTcheck.sh


Then run this command like so ./NFTcheck.sh <contract> <tokenID>

You can run the script from any other language/script, for example PHP would use exec().

Note, the address returned is a byte32 and all lower case. You will need to slice the last 40 characters and use a checksum address to get the proper upper and lowercase of the actual address. For comparison against a known address it works fine.

The web3 that comes with geth is 0.20.1 so you can't use toChecksumAddress() on the return.


If there are better ways feel free to post.

I did mention there is collateral that can be discussed. The post is a general request, I'd prefer to talk over the details one on one - use of funds, project overview, collateral, loan terms, etc. 

Not trying to be evasive, simply trying to make sure I don't break any of the variety of laws about funding and dealing in an open forum.

You are both correct that it is a big ask and people should be skeptical. Most of the time something like this would end up having a new business partner or investor, yet this isn't an angel network or crowd equity site so I can only ask for a loan.  

Use of funds is more than a simple reskin and adding a few tweaks. There is also an additional service that will be added that will compliment what is already there.

A full use of funds and project overview is available, I'd prefer to speak one on one about the details.
There is also some collateral that can be discussed.

Bringing the service back up as is and waiting for the income would delay a full relaunch by a few months. It is of course an option yet I'd prefer to move faster than that as crypto waits for no one. I may also go the traditional bank route although my first thought nowadays is to see if crypto can be the solution.

Also, I have seen a variety of business loan structures used.  A business loan can be quite creative other than a simple term and rate.

Options can potentially include percentage of profit for a duration as part of loan arrangement, with some loan requirements lasting beyond loan repayment.  I'm open to discussions.

I ran a gamified dollar auction service for a few years, allowing players to win crypto at below market rates.  The site was moved to a demo mode due to a potential conflict with the 'day job'. That is no longer the case.

I plan to update the service to use non custodial wallets, redo the UX, and add enhanced functionality. I'm a little illiquid at the moment so I'm seeing if this may be a valid way to restart the service.

I'm looking for a business loan of 50,000 USDT with a 6 month term, at a reasonable rate. I anticipate a few month development time before a relaunch and revenue generation begins.
PM me if interested and more information can be discussed.

The suggested method was really no more than a glorified localbitcoin process of meet and exchange funds, and hope the wire after the fact is legit?

There are professional bitcoin services that can offer this already, there are professional escrow services to protect both buyer and seller, including those offered by HSBC (mentioned in the steps to handle this).

Of course anyone with 500 BTC today has already eluded the scammers so far, I assume they won't fall victim to something.   

Listing scammers is a whack-a-mole approach and sadly most people scammed are the newbies to crypto who don't even know of this forum. Not to say something shouldn't be tried, but the suggestion to educate users may have better long term consequences. Also the negative trust system does label posts strongly to be careful so there is a basic system in place.

Look at the recent PlusToken scam, it ended up touching up to 1% of all bitcoin which is a huge scam. However the millions of people scammed were new to crypto, mostly talking into it via wechat, and were walked through how to buy in. Unfortunately nothing done on this site would have helped those hit by PlusToken.

Maybe we should ask Craig Wright on how his "Hold my 1 million Bitcoin until 2020" was done? 

If everything is in an array you're almost there. Loop through the array to construct the sendmany variable, adding each address/value.

Each iteration add a comma to the end of the constructed variable, except for the last pair as it is not required.

Then perform the actual sendmany using the variable you have just created.

Are you on linkedin? Even if you're not looking for work if you have crypto projects listed in your profile you will get contacted by headhunters.