I've seen this so many times:
       
But I don't really know how to report it based on the unofficial forum rules.
This guy is clearly looking for Merit with his shitposts.

It's not even enough "news" for the Press board, and (apart from the incomplete link to only a domain name) OP doesn't add anything from himself. It's basically a link dump with additional copy/pasting. Is this lazy behaviour allowed? And if so, shouldn't that change?

Can we get a new Rule saying: "No link dumps"?

[Example:]

yehey another imgur topic

As you've probably noticed, images from imgur.com no longer work on Bitcointalk. That's why I've downloaded 801,550 images from imgur, which were embedded on the forum. Downloading took 3 days using 4 different servers, and another 3 days to process the data. I used the links from my unedited posts archive, which means I'm missing all images that were edited in later.
After some cleaning, I'm left with 5 directories:

Code:

4.1M    ./img.imgur.com
35M     ./i.stack.imgur.com < this one is still working
1.8M    ./www.imgur.com
132M    ./imgur.com
146G    ./i.imgur.com
146G

99.9% of the images come from i.imgur.com.

I made a .zip for each user. It includes all images related to that account (including quoted images). After extracting the .zip file, "list_of_posts.html" shows links to all images, posts (some of which have been deleted) and archived posts.

Example:
tmp.loyce.club/imagebackup/459836.html (note that the image links don't work without downloading the .zip).
Replace my userID by your own:

Code:

tmp.loyce.club/imagebackup/USERID.html

On top of that page, you'll find a link to a .zip file. Or replace "html" by "zip" to go there directly.
If there's no file with your userID, that means I found no embedded imgur-images for your account.
9999999999 is for posts without userID.
Update: if someone wants the full data, just ask. No need to download all separate .zip files.

Bonus: images posted/quoted by most different accounts (full disclosure: I counted 1 more than needed for each file):

Code:

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As expected, ChartBuddy is quoted the most.

Suggested new image host: TalkImg.com - Image hosting for BitcoinTalk.

Short version: you have a signed transaction with lock time, and the private key of the address where the funds will be sent. To reduce the risk of foul play, you want to sweep the second address the moment the lock time expires.
Is it possible to already create the transaction that sweeps the second address? That would make sweeping the funds faster, once the lock time expires.
I posted this in another topic:

I'm hoping you can create a transaction based on the (still unconfirmed) timelocked transaction.

Let's test this:
My (testnet) address on my made-up card is tb1qqngm2k9hpc4skrhxf5zl7m0p3m6tm9m0k3jv89. The private key is p2wpkh:cSSznAdAjUnBrL4EtkT1kPkygatqFhv8KrkiBUAY5j8iHcZW9uii.

From address tb1q7cevguh0kvpux8y9x9fczfuz2gxtlxrzvetfx4, I create a time-locked transaction to tb1qqngm2k9hpc4skrhxf5zl7m0p3m6tm9m0k3jv89. LockTime is 2428815 (1000 blocks from now). I can't broadcast this transaction yet:

Code:

02000000000101e0837ed3bfb89e4491c5cbcedbeda8b5a5e46254c23ad17a0c0bca027a39100e0100000000feffffff01ba7313000000000016001404d1b558b70e2b0b0ee64d05ff6de18ef4bd976f02473044022014954d7969c9ec9a61de472920645e4eff766d4e1e564ee536680e973904943102204f0601b7acc8e4b58ba27fb355029d3a20b8245080699d123e65d3c4ca8d6004012103cf78237d0e6a8bbe2829535515a504721651d8d65d2c5ef8e6b483c77db896a68f0f2500

With this information, I continue in an offline Electrum wallet, and import the private key (the one mentioned above).
I was hoping it would allow me to use the signed transaction and build a second transaction from there, but it knows the block height isn't sufficient yet so it doesn't work.

I tried again with Bitcoin Core, and I can create the raw transaction, but it doesn't let me sign it:

Code:

"error": "Input not found or already spent"

I really thought this must be possible, but I can't figure out how So never mind this plan

I couldn't get it to work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, or maybe it's really not possible.

[My sales pitch]

My Signature is for rent I can make a deal per post, per week, per month or per year, payment in Bitcoin. Payment can be fixed in Bitcoin or dollars, but has to happen in Bitcoin. I prefer to be paid upfront, but I'm flexible if you're trusted enough.

At the right offer, my personal text can be rented too, but I prefer to keep that personal.

I only advertise services that I like. I reserve the right to reject offers I don't like. If the service I'm advertising turns into a scam, I reserve the right to stop advertising it without returning payment.

My sales pitch
I was part of the ChipMixer Signature Campaign since September 2017, until it ended (2 days ago). This campaign was generally known for accepting only high-quality posters.
I've created many data projects, varying from my Trust list viewer to Bitcoin block data. Here's a list of all topics I created.
Many of my topics are highly appreciated by the community, my Beginners guide to correct use of the Trust system for instance got translated into 16 languages.
At the moment of writing:
I have made 22,639 posts
I'm the 2nd most Merited user and 2nd most generous merit sender.
I'm the 8th Most Recognized user on BPIP.org.
I'm the 2nd most included DT1 member and the second most included user when counting inclusions from users with 250+ Merit.
I make no promises for the amount of posts I'll create in the future. but my weekly post count is usually around 50-100 posts (some of those posts (mostly bumps) are deleted the next week). Historic records can be found in my list of unedited posts.

History
1. Rollin.io: February 2016 - September 2017.
2. ChipMixer: September 2017 - March 2023.
3. Coinslotty: April 2023 - <still active>

Self-moderated against spam.

[TL;DR]

This post made me curious: how many private keys have been posted on Bitcointalk?
To find out, I searched all downloaded posts (which took hours) for anything that could be a Bitcoin private key. That resulted in 9375 potential keys (not all of them are valid, and no, I won't post the list).
Yesterday, I imported the private keys into a new Bitcoin Core wallet (this took only a few minutes), and did a rescan. This took forever, but was mesmerizing to watch: the balance went up and down by many Bitcoins, and this kept going for hours! I left it to finish overnight.
This morning, Bitcoin Core was hanging. I killed it, restarted it, and it took forever to load the wallet (which had grown to 2.2 GB during the rescan). Eventually, it worked! It's up to date, and the total balance is 0 (as expected). Every few minutes, Bitcoin Core is unresponsive for a few minutes, most likely because of the large wallet combined with a lack of processing power. It's not very nice to work with, and consumes 1 full CPU core.

Scrolling through the transactions, it's obvious any incoming transaction instantly gets sweeped, usually at a high fee. I assume many people have systems monitoring all compromised private keys, and they're competing against each other to steal the funds before someone else does. Back in the days, it happened to large amounts of Bitcoins, but the more recent transactions are mostly small. Except for last month (January 24): this address received 0.84362383BTC, which was instantly sweeped. The private key was posted 2 months earlier:

according to my notes the private key for that address can be: 5JgC6gcHCkyBqmgbyarpFHBHzpfNkZYKNJA3piM42ZYbvCUc1fW

Someone made a very expensive mistake funding it. I'm hoping pbies can tell me where the private key comes from.

TL;DR
Don't post your private keys! Don't post your seed phrases! Don't try to be smart by creating a brain wallet!

No spam
Self-moderated against spam. Discussion is of course allowed.

This is new:


This morning, I received 2 PMs, both with this warning. One of them links to BPIP.org, the other has an URL within code-tags. I'm not sure what triggers the warning, but if it's added to "normal" PMs too, users will just dismiss it after seeing it many times.

[Now the good part]

I found HostVDS on Lowendtalk.com and thought I'd share it because I've seen people in need of cheap servers.
Note: I'm not endorsing the service and from the reviews I know they've had quite a lot of downtime. It also was impossible to register with a Protonmail email address, and after I registered with my Gmail, I couldn't create a New Instance until a day later (customer support said there was a problem and they fixed it). So it's definitely not recommended for any production environment, and I wouldn't trust them with any sensitive data nor send them anything more than a dollar. Also, it looks like they charge 20% more on crypto payments.
It's not even a real Virtual Dedicated Server, it's just a VPS:

This is burst VPS, we guarantee 1/4 of CPU
~
Usually, you can use all 100%, but if you will run some high CPU usage things, like miners, you will be dropped to 50% for these plans, but after a few days only...

Now the good part, and the reason why I posted this: the value for money is amazing! $0.99/month gets you 1 vCPU Core, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB NVMe storage and 50 Mbps bandwidth. Usually, you'd only get these specs at this price when you buy an annual subscription on Black Friday and pay for the year. Now, you pay $0.001333 per hour for this, and can turn it off (wipe it) when you're done!

So I deposited $1 with a low-fee altcoin.

To test, I've setup Ubuntu 18.04 in Dallas. It's been 56 minutes since I created the VPS Instance, and after some testing I started syncing the latest version of Bitcoin Core (pruned). It has downloaded 6.4 GB already, while CPU steal mostly around 1-2%.

After another 8 minutes, it downloaded 7.6 GB. That's 9 GB per hour, and if it keeps going like this, it will be synced in 2.5 days. I'll update this thread on my progress. At a cost of $0.032 per day (about the same price range as the energy consumption of a Raspberry Pi), I'm impressed

No spam
Self-moderated against spam.

Just after I reported 4 incoherent offtopic shitposts (1, 2, 3, 4, although now it lacks context without the topics) from hasan21, I found Umaiya:

They're both bounty spammers, and now found the serious boards. The posts look almost random.

The first 4 posts were deleted quickly after I reported them, but I feel like it's not enough. Considering the recent hype on text-spinning AIs, and considering how easy it is for shitposters to produce massive numbers of posts that take some time to read through to realize it's bogus, I'd like to see them banned quicker. Maybe we can still stop this before it reaches massive volumes.

If you find more of this, please post them here as examples.

Today, Cloudflare was blocking scraping bots again. For 8 hours and 24 minutes, my scraper wasn't working. Anything between posts 61513760 and 61515614 (1853 posts) is missing, and amongst others my notification bot wasn't working. I already delayed my Merit and Trust data updates (which normally start on Friday and Saturday morning).
This happened 18 days ago too.

Public request to theymos: Is it possible to get an exception from Cloudflare for popular scraping bots? I'm thinking of BPIP.org, Ninjastic.space and loyce.club, but there are probably a few others that provide useful features for the Bitcointalk community. It would be really nice if DDOS-protection doesn't interfere with features.

[Man arrested on suspicion of money laundering of cryptocurrency worth tens of millions of euros]

Man arrested on suspicion of money laundering of cryptocurrency worth tens of millions of euros

In the early morning of September 6th 2022, the Dutch police arrested a 39-year-old man from the village of Veenendaal on charges of money laundering of cryptocurrency worth tens of millions of euros. The police identified the man after tracing bitcoin transactions. The funds were  stolen by making use of  a malicious software update purporting to be from  the open source Electrum wallet.

Investigation showed that the man converted bitcoin into the privacy coin monero [vice versa], which makes the trail of transactions more difficult to track. His service was provided via the anonymous online network Bisq. It is suspected that the man earned a lot from laundering in this way.

When the man was arrested, his home was searched and several data carriers were seized. The police investigation into  the data carriers and the virtual currencies held by the man is ongoing. The expected profit that the man made from money laundering was seized in cryptocurrency by the police. The man was released on Thursday 8th of September and remains a suspect.

The investigation is being carried out by the Dutch Police Cybercrimeteam of the Central Netherlands in collaboration with the Cybercrimeteam of the Eastern Netherlands.

If this guy "only" laundered the money, I expect he earned "only" a few percent of the tens of millions of euros. I guess the real malware makers are still far from getting caught.

It's a good Dutch police tradition to quickly let criminals go. This guy was held for 2 nights!

I couldn't find back the topic about the malicious Electrum "update popup", so I choose Press.

[loycev]

D@rkBASIC created this: loycevu3e75xlfrdxqueln6mk2dl2ditaqohpxgc35k2jezww6sxs4qd.onion! It's a mempool.space clone on the Tor network.
For unknown reason, the "Total sent/received" amounts aren't showing.

I'm just sharing it here, the more block explorers out there, the better you can hide your private data from prying eyes.

Self-moderated
Self-moderated against spam.

[The first chip]

ChipMixer started in 2017. It provides privacy by dividing Bitcoin into indistinguishable chips of the same size, starting with 0.001 BTC, and doubling the size up to 4.096 BTC (and since 2018 up to 8.196 BTC).
Chips existed long before ChipMixer, and anyone can create them on their own. For a while now, I've been curious how many chips are out there. The more there are, the better privacy they offer. So I collected the data

I took Blockchair's Bitcoin data, and used the following assumptions:

• Any address with a deposit of 0.001, 0.002, 0.004, 0.008, 0.016, 0.032, 0.064, 0.128, 0.256, 0.512, 1.024, 2.048, 4.092 or 8.196 BTC can be a chip.
• Any address that received more than one deposit is not a chip.
• Any address that sent more than one transaction is not a chip.
• Chips are counted if they're still funded at the end of a day.
• Chips are not counted from the day they're emptied.

The first chip
The first chip was created on April 29, 2011, with a size of 0.016 BTC.

Full data
As far as I know there are no false positives or negatives in my data. If anyone's interested in the full data (27 GB of "which chip exists on which day"), let me know.

Graphs
To keep the number of graphs manageable, I'll limit myself to Legacy addresses (starting with 1: solid lines) and native Segwit addresses (starting with bc1q: dotted lines).
Note: check the scale for each graph, I zoom in on the vertical axis to better show the larger chips.


















(0.001/4.096 and 0.002/8.196 have the same color, but it should be obvious based on the numbers which line is which)

No frequent updates
Currently, my data ends on August 20, 2022.
Processing the data takes a while, and updating the graphs is a lot of work. So don't expect too frequent updates, maybe in a few years, or maybe when Taproot becomes more popular.

No spam
Self-moderated against spam. Discussion is of course welcome.

[5]

Considering how Royse777's casino promotion ended in him being tagged by several DT-members, I'm curious what the community thinks of the following:

A week ago, Gianluca95 (Trust: +5 / =1 / -0) created a signature campaign with "Trusted and Safe BTC Mixing" in the title. That's a very strong vouch, without any proof whatsoever. Gianluca95 refers to their ANN thread, in which it was mentioned 5 days before the signature campaign was started that there's no reason to trust this site.

The user (Shaker_finance) who promotes the site shows red flags that I've seen many times before. Typically, this is how a scammer respond when someone doubts their legitimacy.

Some examples:

Trusted and safe bitcoin mixing solutions

I don't trust sites that claim to be trusted. That's up to the users to decide.

Unlimited max amount: Send any amount and mixing will go smoothly

For unlimited amount - we have reserves and able to serve big amounts

It sounds like they don't want to share yet at what amount they'll pull an exit scam.

Those are stats from our tests. Try to make mix you will see that they're dynamic. The problem is that we almost don't have users yet that's why stats are fixed atm

Hardcoded "live mixing", I've seen that before. Needless to say: that mixer pulled an exit scam.

Sgning is not safe

He's either hiding his lack of funds, or he found a massive vulnerability in Bitcoin! My money is on the former.

we will deposit soon around 40-50k$ on forums deposits, including wwh-club, exploit, xss and some others where we have advertisement or planning to have it, arranging this moment with project investors

Right. Some third party future action is supposed to convince us now that the site is safe.

For unlimited amount - we have reserves and able to serve big amounts

Sgning is not safe

Combining those two statements is a very big red flag. Signing a message is an established method to provide proof of funds. Claiming you have "unlimited" amounts and refusing to prove even a tiny 10BTC balance doesn't inspire confidence.

signing is not safe that's correct

Bitcoin mixers rely on trust. Lying is the one thing a Bitcoin mixer should never do. I've seen signed messages from addresses holding thousands of Bitcoins, and they didn't get stolen.

claiming unlimited and 20 BTC was actually the same to us

Right....

Speaking for exploit, if you think it's not trusted that doesn't mean it's not trusted, people have 0.5-1 mln $ deposits here

I've seen this before too: using large numbers to convince people, instead of a simple signed message. Anyone can make up a large number, not many people can sign a message from such an Bitcoin address.

I can't say how much time to wait, summer at the moment and part of the team at the vacations.

There's the excuses, always nice to see the team goes on vacation right after launching.

And there's the character attacks:

I understand that you are serious guy trying to make 1$ advertising chipmixer with your signature but we can do good without your advice

only you lie here, I say how it works
~
you won't even go and check it because it's easier to flame on my topic and get 1-2$ for advertising chipmixer lol...

what's not clear here ??!!!!! You lie here only and try to interpret my words absolutely other way for some reason

You are piece of shit spamming on my topic, ~ I try to be polite with people but not with assholes
~stop this bullshit flood on this topic
~you start behaving aggressive

This kind of language typically comes from scammers who see their "business model" evaporate. I've seen it so many times.

I don't care what you think at all and I'm professional until people start behaving way aggressive. ~ Toxic commentators are nowhere welcomed

And there's Trust abuse:


When this site scams someone, which I think is quite likely to happen, will Gianluca95 take the fall for them and get tagged?

Just 3 days ago (4 days after Gianluca95 started the signature campaign), he left Royse777 the following positive feedback:

Trustworthy user that have always worked correctly. A great signature campaign manager and a great communicator. I like his style. Forum needs more member like him.

I don't know what to make of this.

[This user is engaging in homophobic hate speech against the wider LGBTIQQ community as evidenced in the referenced "satirical" thread. https://archive.vn/vgDQzI now know why alts hilariousandco u=164822 / hilariousetc u=397737 / hilarious* u=1424594 are Trolling me with their constant threatening behavior.]

On 2020-08-26, Timelord2067 gave hilariousandco, hilariousetc and hilarious* this negative feedback (Reference link):

This user is engaging in homophobic hate speech against the wider LGBTIQQ community as evidenced in the referenced "satirical" thread. https://archive.vn/vgDQz

I now know why alts hilariousandco u=164822 / hilariousetc u=397737 / hilarious* u=1424594 are Trolling me with their constant threatening behavior.

Just recently, Timelord2067 reached DefaultTrust (again).

I think this is Trust abuse:

Negative (shown as -1)

• If you believe someone is a scammer, or someone is likely to scam, that deserves negative feedback. Please provide evidence.
• If you really hate someone and he's a terrible troll, that does not deserve negative feedback.

"The forum" shows this is Trust abuse as it has nothing to do with trade risks:


Theymos thinks this is Trust abuse:

The system is for handling trade risk, not for flagging people for good/bad posts/personalities/ideas.

Negative feedback isn't your diary.

Now why this topic, I hear you ask? And why not just add Timelord2067 to my list of Trust exclusions? Because I like some/many of the feedbacks he sent! If only he'd omit the diary part, the remainder could be useful.
It also helps I'm currently not on DT1, and Timelord2067's DT2-strength is (1). That means he'll need 2 Trust exclusions to be removed from DT2. I'll exclude him if this feedback is still negative by the time I win the DT1 lottery again.

My earlier more subtle attempts didn't help:

I'm surprised Timelord2067 is on DT again. That's a good moment to clean up bad ratings made in the past, and this is one of them.

@Timelord2067: what's with the trust abuse on hilariousandalt?

The system is for handling trade risk, not for flagging people for good/bad posts/personalities/ideas.

It's ironic Timelord2067 accuses hilariousetc of Trust abuse.

[Flag]

User lazygurumaster posted a no doubt fake mixer as "the best". Post archived. The domain advertised as "the best mixer" was created only a week ago:

Code:

Domain Name: foxmixer.org                                                                                                            
Registry Domain ID: da3a19ae782e457eb3ed965d7a8e8c16-LROR                                                                            
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com                                                                                          
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com                                                                                              
Updated Date: 2022-05-23T08:34:31Z                                                                                                    
Creation Date: 2022-05-23T08:34:17Z

A topic about the .com site was created 5 years ago, but it closed. I'll Flag this Newbie as a warning.

Flag: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=2977

Well, that's useless: the Newbie Flag doesn't show up in Bitcoin Discussion.

[No spam]

I've said before that I think tagging Newbies for "bounty abuse" is futile. Accounts with high Activity and 0 Merit have nothing to lose, because they can easily create new accounts. Worse: it makes negative feedback very common instead of reserved for scammers, which leads to more and more people (including bounty/campaign managers) ignoring the warning. So I don't think tagging them makes the forum better.

The bounty scams don't even care about the duplicate accounts: they pay with made-up tokens created out of thin air, designed to make the creator rich. There's no way all of them are unique projects, and I'm pretty sure a couple of teams are behind most of the ICOs, Defi and other useless "disrupting" pump and dump BS that gives crypto such a bad name. They don't care: the more spam, the more they earn!

But if you do insist on tagging bounty spammers for bounty abuse, why not just tag them all? There's no way thouse bounty spammers all have thousands of real followers. All they do is spam Twitter and Facebook, and they exchange followers with other bounty spam accounts. So even if a bounty spammer uses only one account on Bitcointalk, they're still cheating with fake followers on social media!

The way I see this entire "business": there are a few multi-millionaires at the top, and there are a few (maybe hundreds or even thousands) of bounty spammers at the bottom. Together they produce millions of useless posts all over Bitcointalk and social media, hoping to convince more greedy gullible victims to hand over their money. It's a terrible concept and the entire business model is deceitful.

Yes, the topic title was clickbait, but I'm trying to make a point here. If tagging them doesn't work, if the forum doesn't ban their low-quality posts, and if they don't bring anything good at all, can't we just ignore them completely? Don't mention them in Reputation (sorry, I'm guilty too), don't mention them in Scam Accusations, don't look for "alts" as long as they have nothing to lose, don't tag them, but just ignore them completely?

No spam
Self-moderated against spam. Discussion is of course allowed.

This post reminded me the forum doesn't have a "Split Quote" button.

There's "Insert Quote", which does this:

Code:

[quote][/quote]

(and I never use this button)

I have no idea if it's easy to implement, but I'd like to see a "Split Quote" button that does this:

Code:

[/quote]

[quote]

On a PC, I don't really need it, but on mobile, typing this is slow. This could also help less experienced users to use proper quote tags.

The topic title comes from Security bounties:

$1 000: If you can move or delete a post that you are not supposed to be able to

The Auctions board has this description:

Auctions may optionally be placed in this section. Topics and replies in this section can't be modified or deleted.

There's a long known "bug", which I've just tested and confirmed: if I move a topic from Auctions to another board, I can edit or delete my own posts, and then move it back to Auctions. This shouldn't be possible.

Proposed solution: users shouldn't be able to move topics into or out of Auctions.

I broke the bounty requirements:

You must report the bug to the bugs email address listed on the contact page. You must not publish it elsewhere or share it with anyone else.

This was on purpose because this bug has been mentioned before. I'm only posting it now because it's explicitly mentioned on the bounty page.

Someone asked me to sell Forkcoins: 500 BCD (Bitcoin Diamond) (worth about $128) and 50,000,000 XEC (eCash) (worth about $3565). The coins were mined in 2010 and only recently moved.
Is anyone interested? I don't trust most of the exchanges that trade those Forkcoins. Binance trades eCash at .com, not at .us, but requires KYC.

Update: I no longer need this.

I just found out Electrum can't handle "send to pubkey" inputs. If you for instance import 1PTYXwamXXgQoAhDbmUf98rY2Pg1pYXhin (to create a new watch-only wallet), it shows all the spam transactions it received and a total balance of 0.00181009 BTC. The real balance is 3,233.17181009 BTC.
I can't really find much information about this, searching on keywords give completely different results. Is this a bug? Does Electrum simply not care about the few (but highly funded!) old addresses out there? Or am I missing something?

Until a week ago, I didn't even know "send to pubkey" exists. I clearly joined Bitcoin late.