Insider's view of Dash's corruption
I've been a Dash masternode owner for two years and a dashhole for 3. During that time, I've witnessed a corrupt system get even more corrupt to the point now where it's basically all that holds the whole thing together. The public needs to know.

The corruption is centered around, what else, money. Various factions- miners, treasury feeders, and moderators fight for their share of the spoils and they fight dirty. They key is control of the forums on discord and reddit. With crypto, money is information and whoever controls the information flow controls the purse strings. As dash has slipped in market rank, from #3 to currently #20 on coinmarketcap and a loss of >94% of value, the fight for spoils has not abated but in fact intensified at the expense of the hodlers.

I told the other MNOs that if we didn't control treasury spending, eventually the market would force us to, and that's exactly what happened.

Miners also want to protect their 45% of block rewards even if it means giving a big chunk to power companies for marginal extra security. They also post coins as collateral for loans rather than selling to save on taxes and to create artificial scarcity. It's from this extra profit that they pay the toll to the gatekeepers and block any attempts to reduce their allocation.

Dash Core Group is attempting to potentially double the allocation of the treasury from 10% to 20% because they have a declared self-imposed cap of taking 60% of treasury asks and they suspect (and I agree) that 60% won't be enough if de-leveraging continues. Masternode owners are basically held hostage because we have no alternative if we de-fund them. The bullshit rationale that the Dash trust "owns" DCG is just that, because it does no good to own something you can't sell and can't control.

Another way the the controlling looters and pillagers from the inside are insulating themselves from a investor revolt is by establishing the Dash Investment Trust, basically a war chest and rainy day fund to keep them going even if hodlers and regular MNOs can't.

Venezuela is in the process of being cut loose, after the Cabal finally realized what I had been saying all along: it's a money sink and not a profit center. VE and to a lesser extent other emerging markets were merely a way to goose adoption statistics while adding almost no real value.

Dash transaction fees are also crazy low, and that allows the cabal to fake real TX volume for a low cost.

The much-anticipated second layer upgrade Evolution, now renamed Platform is also massively behind schedule, despite assurances that it's right around the corner.

With the trade war, corona virus, supply chain disruptions, and massive debt putting downward pressure on the broader economy, and Dash's pre-occupation for looting crypto- buyers and hodlers, I can't in good conscience recommend buying Dash at this time. If Dash is to be fixed, it won't be by the same people who turned it into what it is today.

The legacy of the insta-mine lives on in the Dash culture and anyone hoping for Moon and Lambos, or even price stability may be sorely disappointed, at least until a de-leveraging of the millions of dash effectively with loans against it one way or another and/or a substantial housecleaning takes place. Please feel free to re-post this expose wherever and as often as you see fit.

I wish I had better news, but the truth is the truth. It is possible central bank money printing or a general crypto bull market will lift Dash along with it, but The blockchain is getting longer, chainlocks for instant send, private send and eventually Platform functions will will increase the cost of operating a masternode while the service rewards go down, so it just doesn't seem like a good investment relative to other opportunities at this time, or at least dangerous for those who have too much exposure.

I haven't been able to log into uphold.com. It is telling me I've made too many requests. Is this just a problem for me?

all of the official dash forums are moderated by beneficiaries of Dash's revolutionary treasury system. I bought a Dash masternode and quickly found out that suggestions to improve the way treasury funds were allocated were not welcome.  I persisted and was eventually banned from even partaking in the discussions. Of course the moderators argued that I had broken some rules, but that was a thinly-veiled pretext.  Others broke the rules more often and egregiously than me without censorship. My comments could only be taken as infractions by the strictest, most biased interpretation.

The treasury fund was originally created to fund code development, and then to finance education, marketing and integrations if there was any left over.  It is still largely used for those purposes, but in ways that are getting progressively less and less efficient as power consolidates around a core group with an incentive to asymmetrically extract more value than they contribute.

That value extraction can actually be measured by Dash's slow descent down the coin market cap rankings.  additional info can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dissidentdash

My account was 99.9% in USD at the time of the hack, but I got a 36% haircut anyway. I am trying to compile a list of other victims so I can go lawyer shopping.  There are several basis for claims:

1. Failure to safeguard funds.  There is absolutely no excuse in 2016 for that much bitcoin to be stored in a hotwallet. Either that or the BTC was siphoned off a little at a time and they didn't tell us.

2.Failure of fiduciary duty. If someone's storage unit gets broken into, the manager of the storage facility can't break into the other units and auction off what they find to help compensate the victim. My account was in cash, but I got punished the same as the gamblers.

3. False, misleading and deceptive statements regarding security and insured deposits: Based on the BFX website security pages, we were led to believe that the vast majority of BTC was in offline cold storage. This couldn't possibly be true if the funds were really stolen from a hack and not the exchange operators themselves.

There are other claims to be made, but that's a good start. If there is already a list of victims, then I want to be on it. Otherwise, I will compile it myself. Please PM me if you were screwed by BFX.

Oh, it gets worse. When I was finally able to log in, it was strongly suggested that I change my password as it was possible that it was compromised during the hack. I promptly did so. Then I tried to immediately withdraw my funds but was told that there was a withdrawal freeze on my account because the password had been changed recently. At this point, I will consider myself fortunate to even get the 64% left in my account.




 

I have a wallet.dat file with hundreds of coins on it from version 0.3.21
I can't get it to work with the newest version of bitcoinQT. I can't even read it to extract the private keys manually.

I know the coins are still there from checking the public keys on blockchain.info.  any ideas?

sold 1.5 BTC and got paid $459 via PayPal.  The payments were reversed. I investigated the address i sent the coins to and many coins were going to the same address, meaning no way for them to know who to pay. What is worse, there were many attempted double spends from that address.

http://minerscenter.com/

here is the address:

19CrVPsyhvTM431kN5A3xJ5f6ux5gphgF9

blockchain.info suggests this is sketchy at best. record of attempted doublespends:

https://blockchain.info/address/19CrVPsyhvTM431kN5A3xJ5f6ux5gphgF9


this is being advertised on marketwatch:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exquisite-golden-gift-offered-to-bitcoin-sellers-by-miners-center-2015-10-23

21 unveiled it's $400 standalone miner based on a Raspberry Pi. 

21 is promoting paying for content directly as opposed to ad-supported content. That is roughly analogous to broadcast TV vs. cable.  It's a different business model, but one that can only be done with microtransactions. To continue the metaphor, it would be like paying for cable every time you changed the channel instead of a monthly bill.  Currently, that cost is supported primarily by the block subsidy, and runs at about 65 kWh per transaction. (300 MW mining network, 1.27 transactions per second.) That's about $4 per transaction. Also, at the current 7 TPS (or less) transaction limit,  There couldn't possibly be more than a thousand users of this premium internet before it bogs down and takes our entire network with it.

Weirdly, 21 publicly supports BIP100, the proposal to increase blocksize and therefor transaction capacity only when a majority of mining votes to do so. Why?  The only logical explanation is that they expect to dominate mining and vote to increase blocksize FASTER than BIP101 would automatically increase it!

1900 bitcoin bought in the last hour per fiatleak so this is something to be happy about. Now, we press forward.

Monday is coming now, it should be an interesting week with all the stock market woes and so on. I still believe BTC is as good or better an investment, as in any other time, despite the core vs. XT debate. 

Playing the stock market amounts to guessing which way the Fed will go and when: print or raise rates. The fact that the current BTC market amounts to guessing which way Core will go and when should tell you that they already have too much power.

I would like to one day throw a party where the cost of admission would be some token amount of BTC that, and here's the catch, has to be sent from an address with a minimum amount of bitcoin in it. In my neck of the swamp, it would prolly be 1 BTC, but bigger more lavish parties could be planned where each guest had to have provable holdings of thousands.

Best. promotion idea. evar.

So I was trying to explain to this dime at the bar that I couldn't afford to buy her a drink because I sunk all my  personal injury settlement money into cryptographic internet tokens when this glazed look came over her which I almost didn't catch because she had these huge sweater puppets that were really distracting but all of a sudden I was struck with inspiration.

I asked her if she was ever told as a child that something would go on her permanent record. She might have misunderstood me because she pulled out this really obvious fake I.D. that said she was born in 1994 so I said "No, I mean have you ever wondered what the permanent record was? Well it turns out there really wasn't one but a crazy genius and a bunch of government-hating supernerds invented one and I buy space on it so even though I have no moral reservations about plying your underage ass with alcohol for the purpose of tapping it (So long as she was still over 18 that is. What do you think I am, a pervert?) I couldn't afford the fruity little girly drinks she was sucking down like a wet vac in a flooded basement. However I assured her I could still ridicule her taste in said drinks in a subtle yet disparaging way designed to heighten her insecurity to the point that she would seek sex with a middle-aged firefighter for validation.

Well it turns out the sex wasn't all that great because she made me do all the work and then started crying even though I offered to give her half the bus fair to get back to her dorm. Freshmen are such a pain in the ass and I never have this problem with sorority chicks but I'm willing to take a risk on an underclassman if she has good qualities such as d-cup frost detectors. So anyway what was I writing about? Oh yeah:

The BLOCKCHAIN IS THE PERMANENT RECORD. ANYTHING WORTH RECORDING CAN AND EVENTUALLY WILL BE RECORDED THERE. That's what these mouth-breathing Luddites need to understand.

it's night and it's slow so I'm going way off topic. I have an idea for a game show called BITCOIN BURN and we could put it on youtube or...something. The idea is that you have contestants competing at....something and the viewing audience votes for the winner, who then gets a prize.  but here's the catch:

You vote for your favorite contestant by sending bitcoins to an address with a lost key. Each contestant is assigned a different address and the one who gets the most money destroyed on their behalf wins the prize. Contestants can vote for themselves if they wish.
The idea of course is to prome bitcoin as a voting mechanism and to get as many bitcoins as possible lost forever, making OUR bitcoins more valuable.

So what I need is a good contest that's entertaining to watch, relatively inexpensive to produce, and wont get me sued or in prison. any ideas?

How the hell are legacy financial institutions going to implement blockchain technology without a distributed network of miners to secure it? If they do get miners, where is the financial incentive for them to mine?

Any way I look at it, it would be more logical for these unimaginative anachronistic glorified pawn shop operators to just use our blockchain whether side-chained or colored coins or something like that. The Bitcoin blockchain is more powerful than the world's top ten supercomputers combined, even factoring in recent reduced difficulty.

These johnny-come-lately corporate bozos had better come out with an answer, give up or get on board because we're doing it ourselves with or without them and I kinda hope it's without them.  

Power companies face a big problem: they generally have the ability to produce power at a more or less constant rate while the demand for that power fluctuates sometimes dramatically. Many schemes to store power have been designed such at giant batteries, artificial lakes with pumps and turbines, massive coils, etc, but non have proven efficient or cost-effective.

A potential solution to this problem could be giant bitcoin mining farms that the power companies only run during off-peak hours. Rather than storing the electricity, the power companies use it to generate bitcoins or other crypto that they can store much more easily. Then they can sell the bitcoins rather than selling the surplus electricity.

The nearly free electricy would put them at a competitive advantage over other miners and the ability to more fully utilize their power generation equipment would put them at a competitive advantage over other power producers.

Thoughts? Comments?

Bitcoin may be a commodity, currency, unit of account, medium of exchange and/or a store of value, but I had not considered until recently that it is also a gamble that provides entertainment value.  Casinos can be very profitable as entertainment venues so let's examine how bitcoin trading compares.

As a bitcoin holder, I am both a customer and a shareholder in the casino. I have coins in cold storage and in exchange accounts. Some people go even further and are also employees. The advantage of this is that a gambling loss as a customer contributes to my profits as a shareholder and rewards other players, encouraging them to continue playing.

Here on the speculation forum, we brag about wins, cry about losses, gloat about good predictions and jeer those with blown calls. It's entertaining, so entertaining that we have people who hang out here who don't even own BTC. All this with a much smaller rake and better odds than conventional casinos.

"Here comes the blind commissioner. They've got him in a trance. One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker. The other is in his pants."~ Bob Dylan

http://www.coindesk.com/ben-lawsky-friend-foe/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOuSxal8pf4

Markets always turn at some point. Could this be it?

In times of relative stability, coins are bought up by people who are looking for returns on an annual basis rather than income on a daily or weekly basis. Coins are being sold for various reasons, but who's buying them? The price is too high for day tarders to turn around and make a quick profit. So liquidity is getting soaked up, slowly under the RADAR by people with the time and money to wait until the long term logarithmic trend reasserts itself. We saw this happen twice before and there is no reason to assume it's not happening again.

At some point, perhaps in weeks or months, but possibly over a year, this liquidity will completely dry up and we'll have another parabolic rise. Only next time, people will have access to ATMs, local exchanges, etc. to continue pumping in money until the hodlers start to take profits. This is the time to accumulate. Most of you won't do this. The smart ones will.

So what went down?

http://national.wellsfargobank.com/VirtualCurrency

This is a fantasy thought experiment. If I was Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the most powerful central bank in the world, I would be buying bitcoin like mad. I would use the precedent set by the purchase mortgage-backed securities (intervening in a market other than government debt) to authorize a stealth acquisition of as much BTC as possible before word got out and then I'd buy it all. I'd guess I'd get about 20-30% of all bitcoins in circulation before the price skyrocketed into the millions, but I'd keep buying anyway.

I'd keep buying until bitcoin hit $1 Billion/BTC. and then I'd keep buying.

I'd do this because the Fed is in a massive dilemma right now. The fed has a dual mandate for price stability and full employment.  This cannot possibly be achieved because capital has been so misallocated by decades of money printing that the necessary correction to reallocate capital into the hands of the people most likely to use it most productively would cause a horrendous depression that would dwarf the great depression in size and scope. To make matters worse, staving off that depression ca only be accomplished by massive increases in the Fed's balance sheet, which increases the money supply and causes inflation and exponentially growing rates.

So basically the Fed is printing money only they call it "quantitative easing." Inflation was getting too high, so they tried printing a little less. They're still printing billions every month, but just slowing down the amount of counterfeiting has caused the capital markets to dive.

So instead of creating money out of thin air and giving it to the banks, I would create money out of thin air and give it to sellers of bitcoin. This would cause upward pressure on prices, but it would be counterbalanced by the downward pressure on prices caused by rising interest rates. The banks would be saved because people would be borrowing as much money as possible in order to buy bitcoin.  The profits and interest from these loans would offset the losses from all of the bad mortgage loans that would likely go into default. People would eventually get the idea that it was smart to only borrow money to buy bitcoin and not to buy anything else. The would learn to only sell bitcoin when they absolutely needed to. This would encourage capital formation, which is necessary for increased productivity and sustainable economic growth.

Assuming a neutral reaction from congress (this is a fantasy, remember?), I'd use my unlimited ability to create new money to buy bitcoin until I cornered the market. At that point, I'd create a policy of fixing the price of the bitcoin to the U.S. dollar, essentially making the dollar a bitcoin derivative. Due to bitcoin's limited supply, dollar deflation would start immediately, making U.S. exports prohibitively expensive. At the same time, imports would get cheaper and cheaper. To counter this, I would advocate a repeal of legal tender laws and allow legal transactions in any national currency, cryptocurrency, gold or whatever both parties agreed to.

Then I'd retire.

http://www.coindesk.com/skyhooks-open-source-bitcoin-atm/

An opensource project from my home town! this could really change the landscape. only 1.3 BTC at current exchange prices!  Ok, it's really only a BTC vending machine because it can't dispense fiat, but it's 1/4 the price of it's cheapest competitor.  Go Stumptown!