OP, this is very circumstantial proof in my opinion but I think enough to flag him as a fishy character.

My primary concern with PryptoMontreal is that how he is able to get his OneVanilla gift cards at more than a 35% discount. This generally suggests that the method he obtains these gift cards (if he actually has them) is shady at best, or illegal at worst.

These are warning signs already. I haven't seen any legit gift card sellers that obtain their cards in legitimate ways offer such steep discounts.

If you were to deal with this guy, understand that even escrow won't protect you from a fraudulently obtained card. Escrow only protects the transaction process itself.

It's completely within the expectations of all users, in my opinion.

This was something that was bound to happen, sooner or later. They simply could not continue to offer non-verified accounts to U.S. users without the SEC focusing on them, and they don't seem to be interested in getting regulated.

I don't think that this is necessarily something that will hurt their long term business, though, because people can still use VPNs to bypass these restrictions. But consider this to be the trend to be the future - traders not willing to verify themselves in the U.S. may need to continue to rely on new exchanges that pop up, as older exchanges face greater tightening of regulations.

And why exactly? I don't see any explanation/analysis that would suggest to me that any research has been put into actually selecting these two figures, which seem to be arbitrarily chosen at this point.

I agree with the statement that BTC is likely going to crack 5 figures very soon, given the fact that the market sentiment is still primarily bullish with no signs of stopping any time soon, as well as the institutional factors that will likely drive prices up.

However, I don't agree with your exit strategy. I believe that based on history, this price level is only in the early stages of the bull market, and institutional investors haven't even started to invest on a full scale yet. Right now, it is still in the early stages of optimism, and based on historical data there is no real sign to suggest that we're peaking right now.

If these crowdfunding methods are overpriced, then the demand within investors will simply be less.

That's how the price mechanism works, and I don't see a problem with offerings setting their own price, even if it overvalues their securities/tokens, because there will simply be less demand for it.

I think though that a lot of the investors right now in all forms of initial offerings are probably putting too much trust in vaporware and completely unregulated, and completely theoretical ideas and all that, due to the speculative nature of them - but I expect as the market matures, people realizing that certain unfounded offerings are not a sustainable investment option.

I've had friends who have recommended me to use this service.

There is absolutely no guarantee that using a bot like 3commas will bring you any more profit if you just trade yourself and speculate on fundamentals. They don't make promises as to profit margins, nor do they seem to ask you to invest directly into their operations but rather use API keys to connect to your account, which is better than obvious ponzi schemes, at least.

But again, profitability is in question (given that you have to pay for a subscription) and there are previous accusations in terms of them skimming funds off trades. There are no reliable long term tests conducted either. I would personally not use the service at all, given the fact that subscription fees can eat deeply into any profits you make if you're a small time trader, and the risk of them having access to your exchange account API info.

I think that if they really want to disrupt the market, they need to find a solution where they are able to cater for customers from not only the US and EU, but also the majority of the rest of the world. That's where the money's at, imo.


I don't really get the rationale behind this distribution concept, though.

So if your contribution is out of the top 100, you essentially don't get access to phase 1's blockcard, and you lose out on your entire contribution? I doubt that there will be much of a market for people who would want to pay an absurd amount of money, just to spend their cryptos on a visa card. 

Unfortunately, unregulated exchanges I think will always have this notion of them being shady associated with their platform, and a lot of that will be of good reason. So you're definitely right in that regard.

However, p2p trading I think will continue to go on, independent of even unregulated exchanges. And I doubt that for their own profitability, all of these p2p platforms will be willing to comply with the standards of a regulated exchange.

I think we'll see the trend continue where smaller exchanges get popular because of the fact that they accept anonymous accounts, and then once they reach a certain size of operation, they are forced into offering KYC. But there is also a possibility that countries like Malta will offer a safe haven for services which do not want to do KYC, which it is already doing on a small-medium scale.

Same old Cryptual scam. They aren't even bothered to change the site title now.

The thing is that these Cex.io clones pop up in such absurd numbers that it is impossible to report all of them, and inform people about it. Victims getting scammed are generally approached on a third party platform like Discord, where someone with an apparent "withdrawal issue" will reach out for help, asking the person for help in withdrawing funds on this clone site, for a reward.

Of course, they will entice you to send first, and ask you to withdraw funds to your own BTC address, which it will never arrive at.

At the end of the day, once you see this kind of template on a site - assume that it's a scam, unless it's the actual Cex.io site.

I don't think that a compatible political ideologies are a necessary prerequisite for someone to use bitcoin at all.

One of bitcoin's essential features is that it is non-discriminant towards anyone, which is why it allows a lot of the unbanked to access global financial services in the first place. It doesn't matter whether you are left leaning or right leaning, all you need is a private key and address to start receiving and transacting on the network.

Thus, there is no such thing as "compatibility" with BTC, at least in my opinion. People in communist states can use BTC just as easily, if not providing more utility, than everyone else.

Unfortunately, I don't even think that lobbying will do much given the factc that a lot of these people have vested interest from the banking industry to tighten up regulations so that they can filter out competition or even enter the crypto space themselves due to their intrinsic advantage over smaller startups in terms of regulation.

But anyways, you're right. The main objectives for G20 right now doesn't seem to be trying to help crypto grow as an industry, or even how to incorporate it more effectively within the economy - but it's more so about tighter controls.

We have to expect tighter KYC, tighter AML, and with these draconian measures they are able to essentially discourage people from using it and raising the bar for users. However, whatever they do, they can't censor nor produce an entry barrier to the bitcoin network itself.

I think that there will always be certain platforms that are unregulated, or exist in jurisdictions where regulated exchanges allow for non-KYC accounts to use their services.

Furthermore, due to the decentralized nature of bitcoin, it is extremely hard for there to be a global consensus for lawmakers as to what path to pursue - especially when revenue is on the line if a country does choose to allow more progressive crypto laws.

But you're right in terms of the fact that we're heading in this direction. Nationally, U.S. I think has already tightened their regulations so much that essentially all regulated exchanges will require KYC from you. Exchanges like Polo and Bittrex used to allow semi-anonymous accounts, but not anymore. But globally, it is extremely hard to enforce, and I think p2p options will always be open.

There's a reason why their rates are so good, and it's most likely because their funds come from either fraudulent sources, or that their paypal accounts are somehow tainted in the past.

Which is the probable reason why people are complaining about their service, as others have mentioned in this thread:


No one in the exchange business with clean funds with a clean source will ever give you a markup (of $400!) when you sell your BTC to them. There's a reason why accounts are getting limited. Furthermore, Paypal is intrinsically risky due to the nature of chargebacks. You simply do not want to deal with them, period.

Did you carry out all procedures as normal, or did you do something different that may have affected your deposit?

I really don't get why Coinbase would have an issue in an apparently straightforward deposit in this case, and it's absurd that they would take such a long time in order to even respond to your ticket, let alone taking 5 days to refund a very simple transaction and not even get the job right.

This just seems really unprofessional, that a group of so called "specialists" at Coinbase can't even competently calculate a refund.

Either way, I've quit using coinbase long ago since I realized the risks of hosted wallets and essentially entrusting your private key to an unknown third party. Besides, their support has been historically a disappointing aspect of their service, and they haven't made much progress towards that at all, it seems.

I don't think that buying coins in their platform is necessarily going to be a good idea, given the fact that even though they do advertise a decentralised trading platform, from my own anecdotal experience there is a huge lack of liquidity available, which means that your spreads will be super high.

Personally, I'd echo Omega's sentiments. The wallet is not open source as per my knowledge and therefore, you should avoid storing large amount of funds on there. But I don't think there will be an issue with smaller quantities.


No. Cex is one of the notorious exchanges in terms of their fiat operations. Nor should they be ever used as a wallet.

Of course a scheme that is offering such absurd returns would go bust. From a legal standpoint, they probably never even have had the proper licenses to accept investments in the first place, let alone the mechanisms to allow them to make that much profit sustainably.

It'll be interesting how the case will turn out though, given it goes across jurisdictions and it'll probably be harder to prosecute those in charge.


Just use your common sense and don't invest in something that offers ponzi or ponzi-like returns? It's not like this is something obscure at all.

I think that BTC has always been an alternative for people who are affected by stricter capital controls, that want to move their funds off their country/diversify away from simply having domestic deposits.

However, I don't see the instability in Hong Kong as some sort of miracle factor that will all of a sudden boost adoption on a grand scale, or encourage demand for BTC even.

HKD is already something that is relatively liquid and openly traded, as opposed to something like the CNY. Besides, the demand created by this very niche market is likely to be insignificant in the overall grand scheme of things.

It's going to be interesting to see which major crypto exchange/wallet service first comes out to push their cards outside of the EU and US.

I understand that the regulations elsewhere in the world regarding these cards are going to be more unclear and potentially tighter, but there is also a much bigger market to be served. Wirex used to be one of the services that offered this, before they were forced to stop offering anonymous cards due to Wavecrest issues.

I echo LTU_btc's sentiments regarding Coinbase, though. Their PR over the past few years haven't been close to good by any standards. I think a lot of people are going to be discouraged to use these cards not only because of their absurd fees, but also the track record that Coinbase has with their relatively unresponsive support mechanism, as well as constant account suspensions.

Banks will still be capable of operating on a fractional reserve basis, even if the loan is denominated in bitcoin.

Much like how we suspect a lot of exchanges and hosted wallets right now to not be keeping full reserves all the time. It's not something impossible to do at all if their operations involve transactions which require coins to be transferred into the receiving entity's sole possession, which is what happens the majority of the time with hosted wallets anyways.

But this involves a ton of trust, and I doubt that a lot of bitcoin users will buy into a fractional reserve system like this given the fact that one of the fundamental aspects of bitcoin is its trustlessness - that you don't need to trust anyone to hold your wealth when it's on the blockchain. But given enough demand, even traditional banks which already have mortgage operations can simply re-denominate loans into BTC, while maintaining the same legal hold over the collateral of the mortgage (the property).

Blockchain technology doesn't always translate into decentralised cryptocurrencies. It can be applied in a variety of ways, including by corporations to streamline their own internal processes, or develop their own centrally backed coins. There is nothing wrong with that.

It's just that these coins most likely will not pose any significant advantages to existing decentralised cryptocurrencies. People may get hyped up like a launch of a token from an institution will change everything, but they are two separate entities altogether that aren't necessarily related.

I also don't see it as "drifting away" from decentralisation. The people will benefit the most from bitcoin's utility will continue to use it; it's not like they will cease to do so simply because some company issued their own blockchain token.

It's interesting statistics, but at the end of the day, it's not concrete. You need multiple reliable sources to arrive at an actual conclusion, in my opinion. However, it's not the first time that a report or article has stated that bitcoin mining generally uses up excess energy off the grid, or that it uses mostly renewable energy, so it probably carries at least some truths to it.

The main thing still is to still realize that energy going into bitcoin mining is not wasted - it's used to facilitate the network.

It is really intriguing why a lot of the criticizers of bitcoin mining say that it's wasting energy, yet they have absolutely no problem about banks and other financial institutions that use energy, and probably more natural resources (given the fact that they need physical headquarters and branches as well) to facilitate their operations. Bitcoin is the same. The energy going in is used for securing the network, and confirm transactions, it's not just for nothing.