Please don't, this is to much fun!

Any servers still available for use with the Electrum wallet?

None of these seem valid:

myr.theblockexplorer.com 50009
myr.electr.us
myr.theblockexplorer.com

We do use other countries (as in their currency) to price bitcoins.

I don't feel any pity for him, just disgust.

He doesn't understand the mathematics of emergence from chaos.

Bitcoin will eventually fix itself. I have as much faith in Bitcoin as I do in mathematics.

I started selling stuff on Ebay about a decade ago, mostly electronics that I found and refurbished. Didn't make much money at it though and I lost my connection for stuff to refurbish. Decided to try selling bitcoins in 2014. I put a five day waiting period for delivery and made sure I withdrew my funds/bought new bitcoins before sending the purchased ones. I had around a 20% profit margin, which PayPal takes 3% and Ebay took 10%, leaving me with 7%.

Things went okay for a couple months with just a few minor chargebacks that still left me with a comfortable profit. I contested these and showed PayPal proof of delivery on the blockchain, but they always favored the customer.

The next month, one person bought about $3000 worth of bitcoins, so I decided to play it safe and also send them a letter with proof of delivery, with the tx inside of it and a printout of the blockchain address with it's contents.

The month after that I sold another batch of bitcoins for about $3000, but then suddenly before I could withdraw the money, there was a chargeback on the previous month's bitcoin purchases by that one person. So PayPal basically grabbed the money belonging to the latest batch of customers to give back to an older customer. I contested that chargeback and thought I would win this one since I actually had a PHYSICAL proof of delivery for the letter and the customer was actually claiming a failure to deliver. PayPal still denied me.

BTW, even though PayPal claims there is an appeal process, there is no such button on their decision page, so it is impossible to follow their directions to appeal. Also I have never found any other page or button to file an appeal. I did ask for an appeal with a direct email, but I never received a response. The only thing left would be to file a small claims.

So the last batch of customers, I cannot deliver their bitcoins since I never actually received their money (since PayPal confiscated it). I was certainly not going to give up my own personal bitcoins, but I didn't want them to lose money either, so I attempted to issue a refund through Ebay, but Ebay refused since I had no money at PayPal. So I sent emails to that last batch of customers, explaining what happened, asking them to file a claim for no delivery and that I would not contest it. They would get their money back and I would get a negative balance on my PayPal account. I figured PayPal could try and sue me, but then I could respond to their unwarranted confiscation of my funds, and besides, I am pretty much immune to lawsuits.

So here is where it got strange... none of these people filed a claim.

About six months later, I decided to try and sell some more bitcoins. Ebay said my account was suspended with some vague complain of customer complaints, yet no negative feedback on my account. I appealed it, they denied, so I called and talked to someone, they looked at my account, laughed and just said that it was absolutely final and that I would not be allowed to appeal any further.

A couple months later I deposited $10 into my PayPal account as a test. It is still sitting there today.

$10k during 2016...seriously 

I think there is a 50/50 chance we will reach $1k again during 2016 though 

I also put the odds of being past $2k at the end of 2016 to be somewhere between 1% and 2% 

I try to be aware of "what is my product?". I figure that people want to feel good for helping someone out. So I always try to give a heartfelt thank you. If they give a large bill, my response is along the lines of "thank you, WOW, that is a lot, thank you very much, I am very grateful".

Yesterday, somebody gave me a large box of new pens. I was giving a pen to anyone that gave me money. Also tried selling them for a while. Either way it really hurt tips though and I figure it is a lot like trying to hawk jewelry, people think you must be doing okay and ignore you.

As for owning bitcoins, I never heard of them till summer of 2013. Immediately recognized the genius/beauty behind them. Bought a dozen at $120, and yes, the price has more than doubled in the last 30 months, which is good, but at that rate, it will still take at least a decade before I feel rich enough to spend any of them. Thanks to panhandling, I was able to buy 3 more last month.  

I tried selling jewelry, made less than $2/hour.

I tried writing articles on hubpages. Wrote 100 articles, made less than $0.01/hour.

The most successful thing I ever did was start a computer store with $3000 seed money. Slept in the back, spent several hours a day advertising on craigslist. Open 9AM-9PM for 84 hours a week working. The first couple months, I barely made enough to pay the rent, by the end of the first year, I was making over a $100/day after expenses (and actually only working a couple hours a day, even if I was there all day). Had over $5k in inventory, ran the other nearby computer repair shops out of business.

The problem was my parole officer discovered it, he was doing everything in his power to keep me from working with curfews, job seek radius, ect. so he had me arrested, then talked to the owner of the building, they cleaned everything out. The judge threw out the violation (I was never forbidden to start my own business), but when I got out everything was gone. They destroyed my life so many times for something that happened over 40 years ago when I was suffering from psychosis. I barely have the motivation to start over. Besides, in this area, I would need about $15k to open a new computer store.

Maybe after another year of panhandling.

I am to old to do manual labor at $8/hour.

I just started panhandling about 2 months ago and I have decided it is my new profession. BTW, I just ran the numbers for last month on an Excel spreadsheet, I worked 50.5 hours and made $1250, which is $24.75/hour. Previous month was $594 in 36 hours, for $16.50/hour.

Anyway, all my sign says is "HELP /n NEED MONEY"

Are you saying I should put a "Please" above the "HELP"? I really don't think it would improve on my tips and I would have to shrink the font size of the "HELP" which would make it more difficult for people in cars further back to read the "HELP".

I always thank people.

I wouldn't say that chart is worthless. The power regression formula makes the most sense to me and I expect (90% confidence) BTC to break $1000 again before 2020.

I started buying bitcoins back in summer of 2013. I was so excited by this new technology and when the price shot up in November, my excitement became contagious. My brother bought a bitcoin for $1000 from me, my mother asked me to buy her one too also at $1000, my niece bought a tenth for $100, my boss bought a few from coinbase, a co-worker bought a few dozen or so until the price dropped to $800. He died about a year later and his family threw away his computer. So those were all lost.

I continued buying in 2014 and then spent a bunch early this year to take care of some things. Anyway, I went over my buys & sales, and discovered that my remaining couple dozen bitcoins cost me around $500 each, despite my use of cost averaging. And I know I did much better than all the people that I know who started buying later than me.

Now I am ashamed to even mention Bitcoin. Everyone I know has lost money and a lot of it. If they ask me about it, I refuse to talk about Bitcoin.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the concept. I am sure the technology will take off in a decade or two. I even use it to send money overseas (using bitpesa) and to fill phones (using bitrefill) all the time.

Anyway, just curious to hear how you all deal with the bitcoin shame from friends & family.

If the penalties were great enough, I would stop using it. However, I would move all my coins to a single brainwallet first, destroy all bitcoin related paraphernalia/web links/ect., and move on to other things. But if Bitcoin became legal again, I would be back.

In theory "yes", but who do we both know that we can trust?

I am willing to trust Roger Ver, but I am not sure he is still doing escrow or how much he would charge.

PayPal is actually a form of escrow and they always side with buyers on chargeback claims. Even with dual proof of delivery (blockchain tx and a mail delivery), they will still side with the buyer. I have to send them a demand letter & file a small claims case to get them to be honest and release my money whenever I have a dispute.

You are correct, but some people don't have Circle or Coinbase accounts. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to sell on Ebay for spot + about 20%.

Who the fuck are you? Are you mentally retarded? Have you ever lived in Kenya? I send money to my wife in Kenya using Bitpesa all the time. The shillings arrive on her phone within about 90 minutes. There are a million little MPesa shops everywhere that you can get shillings using you phone. You just text the money over to them. It beats Western Union on all factors.

It is actually easier and faster to use Bitcoin in Kenya than the United States. I just got back from Kenya after about six months and going through my mail, I discovered that my bank account is messed up/suspended/closed (they never emailed me and prevented me from logging on...they only sent snail mail). I have bitcoins but no easy way to convert them to cash now. This would never be a problem in Kenya.

As for internet, I used, Orange, a 3G USB device for only 3000 shillings ($33) per month, at over a MB per second, it is significantly faster and cheaper than my internet here in Hawaii. You can use an internet cafe for about 25 shillings ($0.28) per hour.

Hi, I have been selling bitcoins on Ebay for a while using PayPal as a payment method. I wish to try and sell here too.

In order to minimize fraud and chargebacks, I have a 7 day waiting period before sending your bitcoins.

Minimum purchase is 0.1 BTC ($25)
Maximum purchase per person is 4.0 BTC ($1000) per month (state law here)

If you are interested, please send a personal message to get my PayPal handle.

Edit: 7 days (5 business days)

Send the ten digit MyCash code and your BTC address to me thru the bitcointalk message system, if it validates okay, I will send the BTC to you within 24 hours.

I find it interesting that almost 15% of the population on this forum (which probably has above average intelligence) is so full of envy that they would destroy someone else's wealth.

It is to early to say yet, but Satoshi's algorithm may end of changing the world. If Bitcoin succeeds, we may finally see a reversal of the government centralization and corporate corruption. Decreased wars, end to mass plunder, and greater respect for property rights.

The fact that I can store wealth in my mind is something I never imagined before. I sleep much better at night knowing that I can travel the world without worrying about borders or governments confiscating my bank accounts.

I will admit to feeling jealousy of those who heard of Bitcoin before I did in summer of 2013. However, there is a big difference between jealousy (wanting something for myself) and envy (wishing to destroy something owned by someone else).

If nothing else, just think of Satoshi's wealth as a user fee for using his algorithm. The church asks for 10% of your earnings and all they do is make people crazy. Certainly we can honor Satoshi with less than that % for Bitcoin.

The real miracle is how all those marsupials made it to Australia after the great flood.

Why is there a $ limit on WageCan? Are you converting BTC to $ before you actually need to use it?