I’ve posted my about my frustration and disappointment with the Keepkey wallet a couple of times—for some reason I bought one on Amazon last year when I didn’t know too much about hardware wallets.  Long story short, it’s been hiding in its box since I tried using it shortly after receiving it but last night I gave it a second shot.

I got an e-mail from ShapeShift that had the wonderful title of “Buy Bitcoin Easily With Your Debit Card”.  Why wonderful?  Because ever since Circle jerked us all around and made their way out of the bitcoin world and wesellcrypto.com shat the bed, I haven’t had an easy way to do what ShapeShift is telling me they can help me out with, i.e., buying bitcoin with a debit card.

Another long story short, I didn’t read the fine print and did not realize the significance of that omission until after I’d gotten myself all set up and KYC’ed with ShapeShift (sort of; I didn’t have to submit a photo but did have to give them some personal info).  Turns out my state is excluded from being able to partake in that buy-bitcoin-with-debit-card service.

As I said, I finally got the damn Keepkey working.  And it’s so goddamn annoying in comparison to a Ledger, it’s not even funny.  The main issues I find head-slappingly, teeth-grittingly irritating:

1) The number of altcoins supported is laughable.  
2) The PIN input is a stupid puzzle-type thing that’s completely unnecessary.  
3) The Keepkey/ShapeShift website kept opening new tabs whenever I clicked a link.  
4) They basically required me to register with ShapeShift in order to use the Keepkey, and I find that ludicrous—I’ve heard there’s a way around that, but it sure isn’t obvious from any of their instructions.  And again, if you compare the Keepkey’s ease of use to that of the Ledger, the Ledger wins hands down every time.
5) And my final thought and last foul morsel of annoyance is that the Keepkey is just a mechanism to get people to use ShapeShift, but you wouldn’t know that if you were just on Amazon and saw the Keepkey description, which is exactly how I got suckered into buying this piece of shit.  

Luckily it wasn’t that expensive and the box it came in will make a nice place to put my silver coins in.  If I can figure out what to do with the actual device, there might be some closure for me but I won’t hold my breath.  It’s too light to be a paperweight and too plain looking to put in the display case.  

Some people might be able to figure out a way around the ShapeShift thing and may love their Keepkey, but it's way too hard to just set up and use easily and intuitively.  As many of you probably know, I'm no tech geek and I also have little patience for bad design, so the Keepkey seems to be aimed toward either suckers or tech-savvy people who like figuring out stupid problems that shouldn't be problems in the first place.

Love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts.

Edit:  Oh wait!!  I forgot that I had to download the fucking Brave browser in order to get everything to work properly.  I found that to be almost a slap in the face, the icing on the shit cake, and the last straw.  To me, that's just downright disrespectful.

As stated in the title, I need $50 to $75 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  Deal done with notserp.  Locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $50 to $75 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

As stated in the title, I need $25 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

As stated in the title, I need $25 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  deal done with DaveF.  Locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $25 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  Deal done, locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need exactly 0.00211885BTC at preev 1:1, which is about $15.35 right now. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.  You'll have to be able to send the bitcoin to a segwit address.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  Deal done, locking thread.

As stated in the title, I need $20 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  deal done, locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $35 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  Deal done, locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $30 worth of BTC (or Dash) at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at for bitcoin or the CMC price for Dash, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Edit:  Deal done!  Locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $50 worth of BTC (or Dash) at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at for bitcoin or the CMC price for Dash, at the time we finalize the deal. 

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

[Edit]

This has been something that's been bugging me for a while now, and instead of making the title of this thread "A call for members to stop using huge, gaudy, unnecessary graphics in their threads" I thought I would solicit the community's opinion about this and see if they agree with me.

There are a few members who consistently use gigantic images in threads they create, usually right at the beginning of the OP.  This drives me nuts, because it causes more scrolling than there needs to be and those images are completely unnecessary.  They add nothing to the topic being discussed.  You see this same nonsense in articles from the media, the most common being a picture of physical golden bitcoins when it's an article about bitcoin in the mainstream press.  I don't think members here ought to include that kind of crap in their threads, as it wastes the time of every single person who has to scroll past the image to get to the text, and it probably wastes bandwidth and who knows what else.

Edit:  This practice reminds me of Youtube videos that all seem to start off with extremely loud music that just shouldn't be there, because it's often louder than the content that follows and adds nothing to the video.  It also reminds me of the late 90s where amateur Geocities websites often had gifs that took forever to load and froze the page.  This isn't a critical forum issue by any means, but goddamn....it annoys me to no end.

I'd like to know what everyone thinks about this.  Below are some examples by members who are doing it.

cheezcarls:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202796.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202659
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202536
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202426
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202397
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5201229
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5200828
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5200516
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199712
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199583
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199496
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199432

Debonaire217:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199202
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5198588
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197994
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197984
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197808

CryptoBry:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5195491
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193728
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193608
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193471
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193035
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5192587
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5192467
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5191238
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5151758
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5150934
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5149952
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5149417
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5147417
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5146138
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5145625
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5145151
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144825
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5143835
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5143306
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5142952
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5142447
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5141796

As stated in the title, I need $40 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.  Right now that would be 0.00457508BTC

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Thanks.

As stated in the title, I need $75 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.  Right now that would be 0.0085616438BTC

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Thanks.

Edit:  Deal done, locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need $50 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Thanks.

As stated in the title, I need $75 worth of BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Thanks.

Edit:  Deal done, locking thread now.

As stated in the title, I need 0.0075BTC at preev 1:1. We can use whatever preev is at, at the time we finalize the deal.

I will not send first unless you have significant green trust or if I've done business with you before.

This will be a neutral feedback transaction.

Send me a PM if you're willing to help me out, as I might miss seeing this thread if you post here.

Local rule:  Please do not post here unless you're interested in doing this deal.  PayPal is very risky because of the chance of chargebacks, but I have never done this and won't ever.  Also, I won't deal with anyone under Full Member unless they're willing to send first.

Thanks.

Edit:  Deal done.  Locking thread now.

This thread has nothing to do with any particular hardware wallet; it's just a question I've had on my mind for the past week or so.

I haven't visited an electronics retailer like Best Buy or the like in a few years, and I rarely shop at big box outlets like Target or WalMart, but I'm assuming that you wouldn't be able to find anything crypto-related in those stores.  You can find tons of stuff that has to do with money in those places (safes, leather wallets, coin wrappers, accounting ledgers, etc.), but I'm wondering if and when we'll start to see these places sell things like hardware wallets.  IMO that would be a pretty good indication that crypto is moving toward being mainstream.

Note:  I'm well aware that online retailers DO sell hardware wallets.  I'm more interested in retailers with physical stores.  In order to get shelf space in any of them, a product sort of has to be popular and have a chance of selling in a reasonable volume.  

Two questions:  Are there any places that sell hardware wallets (or anything related)?  And if not, do you think we're ever going to get to the point where this is a reality?

I don’t start many topics, and certainly not that many in the altcoin section, but I’m very interested in knowing 1) the community’s opinion about proof-of-stake coins, and 2) which ones are the best in terms of rewards AND potential price gains.  I don’t see a lot of discussion about PoS coins, which sort of surprises me—I would think more people would be interested in the passive earning aspects of them, and owning them seems to be a decent alternative to mining (hard to do these days).

PIVX was one of my favorites for a while, but I gradually lost interest in it since I wasn’t staking many coins and the price kept falling.  It was $3 when it first caught my eye, and it’s lost most of its value since then.  I’m of the opinion that you have to cut your losses at some point, and I finally had enough.

NEO is currently the only altcoin I own, and it’s not strictly PoS if I’m not mistaken.  One of the draws for me is that you don’t have to keep a wallet running 24/7, and since my internet connection is pretty spotty at times, that’s important.  I’m not sure if NEO is ever going to get back to where it was at its high (and it’s down a lot now), but it does seem to hold its value better than PIVX has.
Has anyone had any success with PoS coins? 

Anyone here prefer them over the typical PoW altcoin?  If yes, I’d like to hear which ones you like as long-term investments and why.   Thanks, guys.

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