This surely is a useful site. But odds comparisons are mostly paying off in the long term.

It takes effort to create accounts and keep them funded. The benefits of course show when you are making larger bets rather than doing it casually and more often with smaller bets.

Personally I have been the kind of person sticking to a single platform for my bets. I wonder what range the people using these services bet at.

You're more than free to share your charts and predictions but criticism in the forum is usually a bit more harsh than usual unless you're showing bullish signals.
If you're after BTCUSD analysis though, I'm sure you'll love the wall observer thread. It's the largest and overall most active thread in bitcointalk through time. Most of the happenings related to BTC price are discussed there.

Overall I think this forum is quite welcoming to speculation. So long as you're not making outlandish claims, and aside from some bias towards negative predictions, bitcointalk is perhaps among the most friendly online forums to speculation about BTCUSD.

It's interesting but I'm not sure if it'd be a first.
A few years back someone had tried going on a forum where freelance women working the nights would often post and offered BTC to anyone of them willing to accept his offer.
This was a few years ago and no girl had taken the offer of 1 BTC being given to them for free essentially because they considered it sketchy. I'll have to try and find it because it was kinda funny tbh.

Things might be a little different these days in terms of how widespread knowledge on BTC is and how Bitcoin's reputation holds up.
But The thing is, prostitution could have been a place for acceptange of BTC but the current regulatory environment in the US essentially kills this possibility. At least for conducting it legally. Girls working the night even illegally will still prefer to  receive cash other than anything else because for a user without much experience it's still very hard to convert BTC bach to a form of currency they could easily spend on the super market. Especially without it being traced back to their activities.

For me, it would have still been more impressive to see women discovering BTC and utilizing it for their activities as freelancers. Girls working in clubs are employees essentially. But to their credit it's perhaps one of the few ways they can earn with their body legally in the states. Of course there's also the rest of the world but US is the biggest market hence why its always interesting to look at what's going on there for BTC adoption across various sectors.

BitPay used to have a visa card. Not sure if it stopped running at some point but it used to be considered one of the reliable services for US. Now loading up their page from my country tells me to sign up for their mailing list as their new card might be coming soon to my country. That's interesting to hear, some competition is always good. But it's rather sad the route BitPay took for their retail payment business. They adopted a controversial protocol for bitcoin payments and no longer support depositing to a plain address. Ironically Roger Ver's proprietary wallet is one of the few ones that supports BitPay's obsolete BIP.

But if their card has good rates it should be judget on its own merits. If they can offer a good product for conventional payments, hopefully they'll change their retail payment strategy for bitcoin too.


I had a thread monitoring bitcoin debit cards. Now with more cards coming in perhaps I should start updating it again maybe.

Definitely looks like a scam. It's one of the issues of Telegram in my opinion. Anyone can create an account and group without any verification, just an SMS to their number once.
It's literally zero risk to create new accounts and spam messages, be it scams or whatnot. Telegram barely regulates those anyway.

There's open source bots to program and repurposed any scam to your needs... From there, accounts in rooms can be botted, followers can be faked etc. For a means of social media networking, its very easy to manipulate. And moreover the service is also fully anonymous and the provider is known for protecting user identities, even of those commiting crimes in other countries. The only types of content they get off their platform actively AFAIK is ISIS and war front videos from terrorist groups and militia. You really shouldn't take offers via Telegram unless you know the person outside of the platform too.

Bookies would need some more professional teams to form and at least a tournament going on to add this game IMO. Currently they would have no idea how to calculate odds. Players in Valorant don't even have that long of a match history. Thankfully for them RIOT is already making match history and leaderboards public much like in lol, so it'll be easy to study that at least. However, it might take at least half a year until a pro league can form. And don't forget that the pandemic is still ongoing in the US so in-person events might be off for at least until after the summer. Which means that tourneys are also off to smaller revenues due to no ticket sales etc. It's a good time for starting a new game in terms of online viewers and/or a player base but not the best time to create a pro scene.

OP I would recommend you post in the Scam Accusation subsection of the forum with more info and following a format similar to this.

The perpetrators appear to have an account on bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=307265

It does seem like they already have negative feedback. Feel free to create a flag to go along with your claim too. That might get their account a second negative flag, which is enough to give them a red tag. If they want to appear with at least some reputation in bitcointalk, they'd try to resolve this.

To be honest, even if you had created a second account; seizing 100% of funds in this fashion is simply put shady... IMO you're entirely in the right to call them scammers unless they return your money.

Many people got into bitcoin with the wrong intentions and at the wrong time. There are quite a few people that are bagholders and would rather not hear or see anything else other than crypto going up all the time. I think it'd be in anyone's interest to act similarly if their buy in point was much higher than where today's price is at. But then again, these people just can't be happy that bitcoin doesn't seem to be getting in a bubble right now. All some people want is to offload some of their bags and be done with it. Given the volumes during the previous bubble, I'd venture to guess that there's quite a few such people.

This must be such a surreal experience for Americans.

In Europe it's often that teams can get penalized by their league because of their fans or player misconduct, and they can end up playing with no fans. It's a disincentive to acting out because it's also hurting teams financially. But also a season's ticket for games in Europe costs as much as a couple or so of seats in a game in the US so it's hard to compare the two. It's a completely different type of experience.

In Europe oftentimes fans are working-class while in the US it's more of a luxury to visit a stadium. The spirit is also different in the crowds. I don't think it'll be much of an impact to play without fans for a game of American football. It's better to have the game run than not anyway. But to have mock fans is just adding insult to injury.

I think this regulation is fair game. Game developers continue to have complete free reign over what they put in their games, but to try and lure children to spend money over "randomized" content such as in game items is just ridiculous. Some games with no age rating are featuring such mechanics and it was begging for regulation. It's amazing how companies were getting millions this way, paying no taxes, and still pretending it wasn't gambling. Big companies have gotten away with it for so long without even paying tax or being regulated, while even receiving subsidies (looking at you Activision Blizzard), and also paying their CEOs millions in bonuses even when under-performing. Corporations that are big in producing games can be very scummy. And they call casino owners shady...

Unsurprisingly, these rumors have mostly been circulating in pro-crypto news agencies and blogs. I'm not surprised they're not coming from a reputable source. Corporations don't tend to allow such news to go out early ahead of their planning. If it wasn't anything more that an unsubstantiated rumor it would have gotten a mention from official channels of paypal... Instead we get the same news from outlets that have pro-crypto bias over the last few days. But even if PayPal touches BTC, the way they do so is going to be the thing making a difference or not. It's entirely possible they do it in a way that most users even fail to notice. Probably not in their interests though anyway.

I was about to call this a legislative failure, but it seems to me that it's more about the system being at fault for allowing something like this to happen.

Greece had a similar case where executives of a company made the market consider their company has an great value by claiming they had more store locations than in reality. The company (folli follie) was forced to restructure after posting inflated sales records and store locations. It took a foreign fund to send out reporters in order for this to be uncovered. Of course Greek stock exchange already didn't have a great reputation but this was yet another blow.

For Germany to have something like this happen, it shows that the current financial system is full of holes. When the entire system for the transaction of money and value is based on trust, things like this are bound to happen. What if in Wirecard's case the auditor had decided to just take a lump sum payment and continue being dishonest? Probably nobody would have found out for at least a few years. The losses could have even been blamed on something arbitrary in the end.

The issue for me lies in the fact that the banking system and stock markets have not so far in their history cared to provide an independently verifiable way to confirm funds to the public. We've seen banks collapse and we've also seen company failures of huge proportions like the ones of Enron. With bitcoin, this could have been prevented. A simple signature from owned addresses and the issue of trust is solved on a whim...

Sadly many companies in the so called "blockchain space" look into permissioned blockchains and other such doomed to fail buzzwordy technologies instead of adopting the one true cryptocurrency.

TRON had some serious mishaps on release and I think it'll have a hard time ranking any higher in the market that it already has so far. The infrastructure and consensus algorithms they've been trying to build were lacking from the start. Not to deter bag holders though... Even after allegations of plagiarization TRON was still holding up somehow. Even if it came out that the code of the new update was completely stolen from other projects, fanboys would still somehow support it. It's how crypto communities work...

This is a very old thread that you linked. Coinbase has long ago stopped supporting the importing/exporting of private keys. They stopped pretending to be a bitcoin wallet after the buy/sell business started becoming a much faster way to part customers from their funds without having to play custodian.

Long story short for OP, is that there is no way for him to extract private keys from Coinbase now. What happened most likely is that after his message from Coinbase, some things must have changed and he wasn't notified.

I haven't seen such news being confirmed to be honest.
If paypal really comes through with implementing such after the rumors I'd be very surprised. Especially given their staunch anti-crypto past.
If any such institution-friendly payment processor adopted crypto, I bet it'd be much like robinhood and eToro do it. They kind of offer buying and selling crypto, but in reality they have no option to withdraw or deposit, so it's just a simulation of trading crypto based on market prices without any real exposure, and the prices are marked up too. It's too optimistic to believe that PayPal would do any better but in reality we can only wait and see.

In terms of the users, there are many incentives that are different that one could have in using bitcoin. It could be ideological reasons, love for math and cryptography, political reasons, a need to evade the law... Academic reasons... And the aforementioned can also be broken down to several sub-categories too. People using bitcoin to evade the law can be simple crook, to scammers to hackers. There's quite a lot of utility those interested in illegal activity can derive from a digital form of cash that can not be seized so especially for them, there are probably several sub-categories. 

If the large chess platforms also embrace betting in some capacity, it could lead the market to growing more. People would have more incentive to watch, more sponsors, more money flowing around. And then organizers and event hosts could also see benefits from creating bigger and better events. I could see chess up there with some of the bigger e-sports. A new breed of chess tournament is born if Chess draws some inspiration from modern esports. I'm surprised it took so long for chess to catch up but it's certainly holding up well.

I think Ethereum has the first mover advantage over smart contracts and token creation, and rightly so. It has the perk of being the network with the most participation and most miners. As a cryptocurrency that makes it have an advantage over competitors. Although, the node network isn't acting as a normal full node network. Ethereum has very few full nodes. They call them archival nodes and they host a few TBs. ETH is still number one by all measures, even market cap and daily volumes and is still strong in terms of technology. That's hard to topple.

The whales aren't gonna cut it alone. I don't think BTC's price is just moved upwardly by a few people holding onto a bunch of cash just to pump BTC prices. The reality is rather that they're more of the selling pressure if anything else. Those holding amounts of BTC are expecting their price to come so they can price out rather than just inflating the price.

I think it's more of an issue related to how much FIAT comes into BTC. In turn, that can also be attributed to the market sentiment. For a new bull run to take place, it could likely require some new blood to bring money in the game because whales aren't actively profiting for pumping prices when there's nobody to buy.

Parlay bettors can be funny some times.
I have several friends that bet in this fashion regularly. It's like their biggest achievement if they succeed in any such bet of course. The chances of a success in bets with many parlays are very slim but very satisfying.
They bet frequently and most of the time with tiny amounts. Yes, it can be a bit obsessive but since it's a small amount to lose for them I can't blame them. I think that they've found a way to gamble in a somewhat healthy manner. But of course for people betting this way, any decrease in the returns bookmakers can offer is noticeable to a much greater extent. Because ofc when you parlay with multiple bets a small change in odds has a greatly magnified effect.