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Interested to know people's opinions....

So last March:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=519601.0;topicseen


And now, just gone to log into my HSBC account and found that I couldn't log in.

I phoned them, and it's almost exactly the same story as Halifax. I never received a letter they apparently sent, but, she read it over the phone and it's almost exactly the same words, just something about not conducting my account within their terms and conditions.

I barely use this HSBC account. I used it in the past to buy a load of computer components, and sell / buy a few times from LBC.

Apparently the letter they sent was on the 25th November 14.

Around that time, I hadn't used my account for quite a while. Since that date, I used it to sell and buy BTC about 4 times, not knowing the account was being closed.

So, I can only imagine that they picked up on some transactions for BTC in the past, maybe people I transferred to or received from have since been investigated and with my account being 'linked' I am suspected too?

It seems though that they don't have to tell my exactly WHY my account is being closed, just 'they don't want to do business with me'.

I have another account with Santander, and have never used it for BTC sale / purchase. I probably never will.


My questions now are:
- Will I ever be able to get a mortgage or bank account now with HSBC (or Halifax)?
- Am I black listed somewhere, if so, where?
- Who is there I can complain to?
- What if Santander do the same, and I can't get a bank account, how do I pay my mortgage, get paid my salary etc?

Scary stuff how the banks are so in control of our lives and can cut us off from civilisation by closing our bank accounts.

If CEX initially sells the mining power for say 0.01 BTC / GH, it presumably receives the 0.01 BTC which it uses to pay for electricity and the miners that are used.

Surely, that 0.01 BTC will soon run out with electricity and maintenance costs, so, where does the other income come from to pay for that, since the mining power GH is then traded between users, not bought directly from CEX.


So then, what about people that have put their BTC into this service and purchased mining power. I presume that currently they're getting 0 returns since the cloud mining service is turned off?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1evQi9q1T-8


So how long before the NSA can crack Bitcoin?

Hard to judge.

Massive sell off this last few days, sharp rebound from below $200 and now a steady climb in price.

Looks like a bull trap to me, the calm before the storm....or maybe people falling for the rumours on twatter.

Maybe it's genuine though, and we're going to get a steady recovery followed by another bubble now?

http://www.ig.com/uk/ig-forex/bitcoin-1

Hmm...interesting, client sentiment quite heavily in favour of BTC price going up.

Also interesting is the bar at the bottom showing the other markets people who are into Bitcoin are backing:
76% long on gold
62% short on DOW
90% long on Tesco (good news for me, I bought a ton of shares last week)

What gives Bitcoin its value?

Supply and demand?

Surely, as more merchants accept Bitcoin, more bitcoin gets sold for $$ driving the price down. The lower the price, the more people will panic and sell their BTC or trade it for goods, thus reinforcing the cycle.

I am getting to the point now where I am so tempted to sell my own BTC. I don't normally waver on things like this, I believed Bitcoin had a bright future, but my belief is shaken now.

I can't see anything in the near future that will increase the demand side of the equation....

I still have my Ripple from the original forum post where they gave away 40k to everyone. Right now that's about $850 or 2.5 BTC.

I want to trade them for BTC, but would quite like to pick the top of the market. Ripple seems to be booming right now. No idea why. It's really spiking.

At the same time, BTC is really getting hammered.

Any thoughts?

Basically I am wanting to know if there's an equivalent of Bitpay, but in reverse?

I think Bitpay is the problem and why the price of BTC is dropping. People have more outlets for their stored / stashed Bitcoins, so they use them to buy goods / services. Bitpay just sells them on the market driving the price down. The lower the price, the more people will panic and try to get rid of their BTC. It's a vicious circle.

I personally would use a service that was in reverse. I want to set up a small business, but I don't want to get a business bank account and get myself set up with Visa / Mastercard etc.

I need a payment processor that will accept Visa / Mastercard and then I receive payment in BTC. I can then either hold or sell them for cash as I please.

Does anyone know if there's a way to measure how Bitcoin is spread out currently?

I mean this in terms of numbers of users with coins. This doesn't mean to show how Bitcoins are spread among various public addresses, but how they're spread among unique users.

If it could be measured, it would be a useful index of how Bitcoin is spreading and becoming 'mainstream' or not.

Eg.

When bitcoin was first created, it would have looked like this:



Currently, maybe it looks like this:



When it's truly become what everyone thinks it could be it may well look like this:



Perhaps it may look more like the wealth distribution graph:

Interesting article with a very surprising end (related to Bitcoin see last 2 paragraphs)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10978178/The-dollars-70-year-dominance-is-coming-to-an-end.html

I have long thought positive thoughts when it comes to Bitcoin. In theory it's a really good thing.

A few recent events have started to shake my belief slightly, for the following reasons:

- Although there is more acceptance, there doesn't seem to be a growing 'mainstream' acceptance. It is still too difficult to use and way too difficult to understand for the vast majority of people.

- There's no incentive for buyers to use Bitcoin. Why spend one's fiat to buy Bitcoin to spend on a product when one could just spend the fiat directly? By buying Bitcoin to buy a product, one will likely be paying more in fees via companies such as Bitpay and losing out on any sort of 'buyer protection' offered by credit card companies.

- Too many clones and copies are diluting the market and causing even more confusion among 'ordinary' people that don't understand the difference.

- Talk of impending financial collapse in the US and the collapse of the dollar at first would appear positive for Bitcoin. When one takes into account the likelihood of civil unrest leading to martial law and the internet kill switch, suddenly a hoard of Bitcoins look less like the smart move.

- The expectation of massive growth in the price deters use of Bitcoins. I made the mistake of paying 2 Bitcoin for something a year ago to pay the equivalent of 30 Euro, if I had kept the 2 BTC I would have had closer to 1500 Euro.

- The only reason the authorities aren't taking it seriously is because it isn't big enough to do any real damage. Once it is, who can honestly say that the US/China/Russia won't shut Bitcoin down. Pah!! Shut Bitcoin down? That's impossible.....well, no, not really. If they impose enough of a penalty for dealing in Bitcoin, the majority of people won't touch it with a barge pole, and certainly any large investors won't come within 100 miles. The extreme end to this scenario is that they force ISPs to block P2P traffic. I don't know if or how that would work, but governments are NOT going to give up their power without a fight.

- Lastly Bitcoin itself has nothing special to offer when compared to all the other copies other than it was first, but, so was Myspace and where is it now, and where is Facebook?


Don't get me wrong I am not a Bitcoin hater, I hold Bitcoin myself and I do hope that I am wrong, but these doubts are (IMO) real and quite worrying for the long term.

Does anyone have any experience in e-bay disputes along the following lines?

I sold a 6970 GPU on ebay (well, I actually sold 5 of them). The item was marked as returns not accepted.

All 5 cards did work OK and I received feedback from 4 of them.

4 weeks to the day after the last auction had ended, I received a 'case open' message. Item not as described. Just the text from the buyer "no screen shown".

So it could be a few things.
Either he hasn't tried it for a month, now he has and found it doesn't work, or he has been using it and cooked it or whatever and it's now blown.
Also it could just be a scam to claim the money back through Paypal.
Or it could be that he just plugged it in wrong.

One of the cards I sold went to a guy that contacted me to say it didn't work. Luckily I lived only 20 minutes away so went to his house. He hadn't plugged the PCIE power leads. Simple.

Anyway, Paypal have now put my balance on -£75.

The buyer will probably try to escalate to customer services, and I guess if he wins, Paypal will try to whip £75 from my bank account.

I am now selling other stuff on ebay. I guess that when I get paid for those items, I won't be able to withdraw the first £75 of that until e-bay resolve this one....which means that I will just not accept paypal as payment until it's resolved and also cut the link between my bank account and credit cards with Paypal.


And case 2, for all of you that think Paypal ebay always side with the buyer:

I bought Office 2010 on e-bay. It was a serial key for £51 or 60 Euro.

It turns out that it doesn't work, counterfeit or something. I tried to claim on ebay buyer protection, and they reply:

Item not eligible for buyer protection - even though the advert clearly states it is, and still now, even after all this back and forth with them, shows up on e-bay as having buyer protection.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/331193696011?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

I have appealed it and they come back with more crap about it not being eligible for buyer protection. They acknowledge that the serial key doesn't work, doesn't activate on Mircosoft servers, I have sent them a phone call recording trying to activate and they tell me it's probably counterfeit, still, they won't refund me, and tell me to sort it out with the seller....

How the hell do I get my money back

Anyone know?

It seems that anyone wanting to further the interests of Bitcoin would be pushing HARD for Riot to accept BTC.

If you don't know - Riot run League of Legends. It's by far the biggest game in the world, see here:



See it has 3 million individual users every month compared with about 600k playing the top 100 PC games on Steam.

They make their money by selling RP (Riot Points) that players use to buy character upgrades. People spends small fortunes on this crap. Look on e-bay, there are accounts for sale with literally hundreds of skins which equates to hundreds of $.

Now it's mainly kids that play this game, I guess lots of them take money from Daddy's credit card to buy this stuff, but surely this is a prime example of where Bitcoin (internet cash) could be king?

Put yourself in a 15 year old's position - you have no credit card so can't pay for RP with Paypal or Moneybookers, however you do have some cash and could buy some Bitcoin. Send to Riot, get the RP, everyone's happy.

Riot games must turn over millions of $ selling these skins, if 25% of that was Bitcoin it would be a big boost to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem.

I have read a lot recently about the pending collapse of the Dollar.

The amount of currency being printed is insane, the US are shipping their inflation across the globe by printing so much money, and when it comes home to roost, it's going to destroy the Dollar. There will be hyper inflation at worst, but a total lack of confidence in the Dollar and formation of a new world monetary system at best.

Already China are buying up all the gold and there's real credible talk of China linking their currency to Gold. It'll be the only currency in the world backed by anything and there will be a massive rush to get it pushing the value up. It'll be the end of the petro-Dollar as we know now for international trade and world reserve currency.

There's also rumours of gold being professionally debased, bars drilled out and filled with Tungsten metal. If it's the American government doing this, it's exactly the same thing that ended the Greek empire and the Roman empire.

So, either this year or next when the Dollar collapses and the Yuan takes over, what are the credible options for Bitcoin?

In theory the price in dollars should rise in line with the massive inflation, but that will be dependant on people spending their worthless Dollars on Bitcoin, maybe they will, maybe they wont. There will definitely be a rush to dump worthless fiat currency and go for something solid, either gold, a gold backed Yuan, stocks (maybe?), property (again risky?), Bitcoin?

Interesting article. UK government now no longer need a warrant or to win a court case to empty our bank accounts, they can do it and leave anyone with as little as £5,000.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100012871/did-you-spot-this-budget-gives-hmrc-power-to-raid-your-bank-account-like-wonga/

I have no idea whether or not this is Bitcoin releated, but today I received this:



I contacted Halifax, spent 30 minutes on the phone only to be told an internal review highlighted my account as 'no longer suitable' and that is literally all they would say. The guy I spoke with said that the closure team that sent me the letter would not give any more information than that.

I went to my branch and they couldn't tell my anything else. It was getting close to closing time so they said they would make some calls tomorrow, however the notes on their screen on my account said a 60 day closure notice had been issued and just said 'following a review'. I fully expect the bank manager to get nowhere with this too and to tell me that it's just following a review too.


The problem for me now is this: I tried to sign up to a first direct account and got denied.

How is this possible?

What the hell am I supposed to do without a bank account in 60 days now? How do I pay my mortgage and how do I get my salary paid?


I have 0 debt other than my mortgage of about £180k, but that is with Britannia and just goes out as a DD payment of £1,300 a month. I have no credit cards, I have no store cards, no hire purchase and no bad credit history.

I got a statutory report from Equifax and it's all green, I have 0 bad debt and 0 missed payments, ever.

My Halifax account is always a few thousand in credit, I never use the overdraft. My salary goes in, my mortgage and bills go out.

I have used it for a couple of bitcoin sales only, maybe a total of £2000-5000 at most in 3-4 sales. I have also paid in 2 lots of £2,500 in cash from other sources recently.

I use multibit. I created a new wallet within multibit as I do from time to time to move my coins.

I sent 0.1 BTC from my old wallet to my new wallet to make sure it went across OK. It did, so I sent the other bitcoins (19 BTC) from my original wallet to my new wallet.

That went OK too.

Both transactions showed in Multibit as seen by 4 peers awaiting confirmation.

After nearly half an hour, the first transaction of 0.1 BTC has 2 confirms. I can click on show transaction details and see it on block explorer and blockchain.info.

The second transaction for 19 BTC still shows as seen by 4 peers. When I click on show transaction details it comes up as transaction not found on blockchain.info. The first transaction showed up on blockchain.info well before it got its first confirmation.

So why doesn't the 19 BTC show up?

They are now not in my original wallet and still pending in my new wallet and unspendable. Where have they gone?

I have been keeping track of mining payouts from Fast-pool mining DOGE.

According to coinwarz and the pool itself, at my hash rate of about 12 MH I should be generating about 300-400k coins a day, fluctuating as difficulty changes.

Now this is what I have observed, just taking balance and time from the transaction page and letting the spreadsheet work out the number of hours and coins / hour:

As you can see, the number of coins per day never reaches what it should. The sudden spikes in coins are usually when I have had an extra 4MH rig running over night on test.

Now a pool with a little bad luck is fine every now and again, but this has been almost a week now with consistently low payouts.