[Site:]

Site: http://www.btcflap.com/

Ref: http://bitcoinwarrior.net/2015/04/btcflap-is-offering-highly-competitive-offer-for-bitcoin-sellers/

It appears they did a paid press release for exposure. Anyone making an offer to pay above market price is almost always going to be a scam. The desperate attempt to sound professional in the press release is another strong indicator of a scam.

Need someone to gather a list of URLs of Bitcoin (and altcoin) related sites.  Such as:

- Mining pools
- Exchanges
- Mining hardware vendors
- Community forums
- Official coin sites
- Software (Electrum etc.)
- Betting sites
- News sites
- Bitcoin shops
- Paper wallet sites
- Web wallets

Old or new, even pretty much dead is ok as long as they are still online.  I need as many as you can get.  Completeness is more important than accuracy.  So if 10% of them are not actually Bitcoin related that is fine.

Just scraping URLs from wiki.bitcoin.it or coinmarketcap.com isn't enough.  I could do that myself.  I need someone who will be thorough.  Scraping URLs from bitcointalk.org and trimming them down to relevant ones is one potentially good option.

Payment is based on number of relevant URLs and diversity of types from the list above.  A list of just official coin sites or just exchanges or just mining pools isn't that useful, I need sites of all types.

Best case scenario is a list of 1000+ relevant URLs spanning all types.  That is worth 1 BTC.  I'll even throw in a bit more if it's a really great list that I can tell somebody spent a lot of time and attention on.  For other lists payment is 100 URLs = 0.1 BTC so:

300: 0.3 BTC
500: 0.5 BTC
1000+: 1 BTC

The format of the list is just domain names or full URLs:

https://cryptsy.com
cex.io
nxtcoin.org
http://www.ghash.io
...

I'm not always the quickest to reply so if you feel this is your type of job just post a comment below claiming it and get started!

Just like the subject says, Blockchain.info is now blocking access from Tor exit nodes.  It used to be 1 out of 25 nodes would be blocked, now it's 1 out of 25 that is allowed.  It's clear they've made the decision to block access from Tor.

So much for a simple anonymous online wallet.

[Site:]

Site: http://bitcoin-trader.biz
Profile: xephyr (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=154893)
Self-moderated thread (negative posts are deleted): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=518602
Open thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=393570

xephyr says he's just a user of the site, but when you look at his posts you can see he spends lots of time making them and sounds just like a company representative would.  He provides daily updates on returns with charts and images and whatnot.   I don't think an ordinary user would take that much time and effort just for a few referral clicks.  An ordinary user also wouldn't start a self-moderated thread and delete negative replies that point out how the site is a ponzi scheme.

Regardless of whether xephyr is the site operator, the site is a classic ponzi/HYIP.

First warning sign:

FYI bitcoin-trader.biz was registered October 2013 (http://who.is/whois/bitcoin-trader.biz).  OP said they started in April 2013, six months before the domain was registered.  Maybe they used a different domain, but just something to be aware of.

Also 120 days means once you invest you can't withdraw for that long?  Sounds like a way to get lots of people's money, report that they're making lots of gains, but never pay out.  Why would you restrict when they are able to withdraw?

The 6 month difference is important because it implies that people had previously been paid back their principle after the lockup period ended.  Since the site actually started in October 2013 or later, zero or few lockup periods have ended.

An analysis of the claimed returns:

Has anyone actually received their principal back from this?  20% per month = double your money in 5 months.  Madoff promised 0.83% per month using magical arbitrage strategies and the smart people knew that couldn't be real.

What is the total size of the trading fund?  If you're doing arbitrage with your $1,000 account I could see a 20% return being possible.  But arbitrage opportunities do not scale.  There is a limited amount of arbitrage available in the market and lots of people competing to get it.  And according to bitcoin-trader.biz they are doing manual trading.  How could it be possible for them to get the large amount of arbitrage profits they'd need for those level of returns, especially when they are at a huge disadvantage to automated traders?

Plus they are reporting returns of around 1% per day.  That's a 3778% APY when compounded daily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_investment_program).  If they were getting those kinds of returns they wouldn't need to take anybody else's money.  1 BTC invested at those rates in April 2013 would be worth 4,100,974,661,233,895 BTC today.  Or you know, 300,000,000 times the total supply of Bitcoins.

I'm calling it: PONZI

See the main posting in Bitcoin section:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587012

Paying 0.5BTC 1BTC 1.5BTC for a tool that does this:

Code:

./wallet-tool [wallet filename]

--help                  Show this help
--is-encrypted          Outputs "Encrypted" or "Unencrypted" depending on the status of the wallet file
--passphrase=PASSPHRASE Specify passphrase for encrypted wallet
--test-passphrase       Simply tests the passphrase and outputs "Unencrypted", "Correct", or "Incorrect".  "Unencrypted" and "Correct" exit with 0, "Incorrect" exits with 1.
--determine-coin        Outputs the coin acronym and "otherversion" in the format "<coin acronym>,<otherversion>", e.g. "LTC,48"
--list-keys             List public and private keys in the format "<public>,<private>" one per line
--list-public-keys      List public keys one per line
--list-private-keys     List private keys one per line
--list-contacts         List addressbook contacts in the format "<address>,<label>" one per line
--balances              Lists balances for each key in the format "<public>,<balance>" one per line
--explorer-url          Outputs a direct URL to explore each public address in the format "<public>,<URL>" one per line

0.25BTC bonus for including:

Code:

--max-balance   Lists the maximum balance for each key in the format "<public>,<balance>,<timestamp>" one per line

Notes:

• Must run on Linux.  Any other OS support is not important.
• Must work with encrypted and unencrypted wallets.
• If the wallet is encrypted and no passphrase or an incorrect passphrase is provided, output a warning as line 1 of stdout.  Continue to run the requested operation, outputting the encrypted private key anywhere the private key would normally be output.
• If the wallet is encrypted and the correct passphrase is provided output a notice as line 1 of stdout
• Must support the top 50 coins listed on coinmarketcap.com (sorted by market cap) (excluding coins like NXT that don't use wallet.dat and coins that don't have a functional block explorer)
• Must work only with a wallet.dat file (no directory or blockchain), so you'll have to make calls to online block explorers
• Must be able to easily add support for new coins, e.g. by adding a coin name, acronym, and root URL of block explorer to a config file
• Feel free to use any open source code
• Put the final code on Github under an open source license.  You're not required to maintain it, but can if you want to

Any questions ask in the thread.

[Market Cap]

Let's say, theoretically of course, someone had 100 BTC and wanted to make some more.  100 BTC is greater than the daily trading volumes of even some of the altcoins with the highest market caps:

	Market Cap	Volume (24h)
Primecoin	10,276 BTC	98.67 BTC
Nxt	47,642 BTC	74.98 BTC
Vertcoin	7,275 BTC	72.08 BTC
BitShares-PTS	14,462 BTC	42.66 BTC
UltraCoin	910 BTC	11.18 BTC
Digitalcoin	1,198 BTC	7.62 BTC
MarineCoin	8,637 BTC	4.19 BTC

* Source: Coinmarketcap.com.  May be missing some exchanges but includes the major ones and most minor ones.

It seems like there's a huge opportunity to manipulate these markets: buy cheap and drive up prices, then sell.

How exactly would someone do that though?  Just buy up all available inventory in the morning, re-list it at slightly higher prices, keep bumping the prices up slowly through the rest of the day?  Would new sellers willing to sell for less ruin the whole plan?  Would people even buy at the higher prices?  These markets don't seem to be based on any actual value of the coins (such as 10x earnings like with stocks), so my guess is people will buy at whatever the current price is if they think the price will rise.

Or maybe buy half of the inventory in the morning, and then keep being the buyer willing to pay the highest price, gradually driving up the price throughout the rest of the day?  Then dump it all at night at the new, higher, price?  Would the sell pressure from the dump reverse the price rises made during the day?  Could you hold and sell gradually over the next few days, or would the price collapse as soon as you stopped buying?

What other scenarios could a whale use to profit from these markets?  Is there a term for markets like these that have no intrinsic value (e.g. no 10x earnings, no well-defined usefulness like gold or hog futures)?  I'm not saying all altcoins are useless and have no value (ok, I do think that applies to most of them), but there is no standard way of determining their value.  Surely there's been research done into how people act in markets like these, right?