Most of the Indian marketplaces like IndiaMart which claim they sell new ASICs miners are most probably a scam because as far as I know it's not really easier to import ASIC under such higher restrictions placed by our customs. But still it's quite possible to import miners and if someone has done that, they would be eventually charging higher fees obviously. I browsed through some miners last year through OLX but we couldn't guarantee they are indeed legit and thereby we would receiving the products.

If you have the idea of importing miners without getting through customs i.e using someone to buy ASIC for you outside India and bring them along with a friend to India, you can very well buy the miners from Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Goods > Computer hardware section. Most of the sellers are legit and you can use forum escrow for physical deals while buying them. On the other hand, if you are trying to import them legally by ordering it in a international site, I am very much sure you will never receive your package as there are various recent reports stating the seizing of Hardware Wallets which are being imported to our country.

If you are not willing to take the risk, I would suggest you to buy Nvidia's GTX Nvidia 750 Ti or AMD Radeon 7990 from Amazon and mine Monero. XMR is ASIC resistant and hence you can convert them to Bitcoin later which is much easier way of mining and accumulating bitcoins rather than taking the risk of importing or buying ASICs in India.

We had a discussion regarding the importing of miners last year and user jzk120 was sailing in the same boat as like you of importing/buying ASIC miners from Alibaba. I think you can contact them for any help regarding this.

BTW keep us updated, as many have been trying to purchase miners and your post could help everyone a lot.

I am from a third world country which has poor education, has hell a lot of scammers and mostly an anti-bitcoin country. If I end up showcasing myself that I deal with bitcoin and collectibles, there are possibilities that I would be questioned by police even before the scammers gets jailed. This is probably one of the reason, I am maintaining an extremely low profile with real life people over here.

AFAIK there are less than 7-8 collectors (including me) from my country and I have personally dealt with one of them on various trades  Also, there are various recent reports of my country's customs seizing hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor and importing ASIC along with mining any kind of altcoins are banned as well. Hence, I am unwilling to risk myself in the process of exposing such scammers to the police.

I would like to shed some light regarding an incident which I faced a few months back in Dec 2020 - Jan 2021. I was contacted by a friend of friend who indeed introduced me to a stranger whom he spoke with and became friends in a crypto related telegram group. The stranger (whom the friend of friend may know in real life too) initiated a chat with me stating that they have a 0.5 btc loaded casascius coins, a few bitcoin pennies, papersafe and polymerbits and was willing to sell them. They indeed asked me to help them with the sale which I was initially hesitant to move forward. Regarding myself, only a very few (less than 5) of my real life people know that I am involved in bitcoin and absolutely none of them know that I used to buy collectibles occasionally.

So I tried to help them and asked a few pictures along with the date and time written on a piece of paper. To the contrary, all the pictures provided were stolen from forum's previous auctions and some were as old as 2011 Bitbills sale from coblee. Once I said them they were trying to scam me, they blocked me and has never contacted my friend of friend as well. 

In this difficult occasion of various scams going all over the collectible market, I am requesting every collectible user who shares their collections in Instagram just like me to make their account Private and accept only collectors who are known to us to prevent further scams. Along with that, let us limit our transactions through Discord/Telegram and as others have suggested we need to pin this topic for the welfare of newbies too.

I have been a torrenter since 2004-2005 and have been using eMule back in the early days when file sharing was not really common like how they are used to be these days. Then after a few years in 2008-2009 I switched over to µTorrent and it has been my favorite torrenting software since then till today. Back in the early days of 2006-2007, I used to download and upload atleast 30 GB per month and currently I torrent atleast 750 GB - 800 GB per month. I have been watching bittorrent coin since 2020, but I haven't started using them for utlity purpose until last week. My questions are :

What is the real purpose behind bittorrent coin? I have seeded over 20 GB since creating a wallet in bittorrent web application but still I haven't earned anything for seeding the torrent files. Should the downloader donate us with BTT for us to own them? I mostly torrent with 1337x.to and yts.mx and both these sites are internationally available and have been quite popular for pirated content but still the application shows only 2-3 bittorrent token users in web application of Bittorrent Speed. The application says that we need to wait for 24 hours to get the balance updated and I have done that too but still the balance is same.

My next question is that : How is the speed maximized when we donate the seeder with bittorrent token? I haven't uploaded 500 GB anytime soon, but the web app shows that I have uploaded so! What does this mean and it has been the same since last week.  On what ration will I earn BTT tokens for seeding files? I have attached screenshot for reference :


Local Rule : Let us not discuss about the price action of BTT. I don't really want to hear about the trading opinions either as I am genuinely interested in the real use case and not on the price of the coin.

I would like to BTCump this topic regarding the hunt behind this ecash.pdf mysterious version. @DdmrDdmr pointed out to a site which hosted a comparable copy of ecash.pdf here : https://draftable.com/compare/rCuIgdwzImUI but what I found out is that whichever paper referencing itself as ecash.pdf should have less than 8 references in Page 8 as said in gwern!

As per satoshi's first published email :


So based upon this scenario, it seems like Satoshi contacted Wei Dai to get the year of publication and thereby presented his paper! So going by this, W.Dai's b-money should not have been referenced in ecash.pdf hence what we found seems to be a highly modified version and thereby should not be trusted upon as said in the gwern website. I hope this wasn't addressed in our previous topic discussions and I firmly believe this ecash.pdf to be a lost collectible forever in this digital era!

Or is there any other way to hunt this down? I think, it is one among the important pdf for the future generations to come.

Strangely I am hearing about ZEN coin for the first time but it seems like they are listed in larger exchanges like Huobi and Binance. Nowadays it's better to invest some minor amounts per week or month in bitcoin or other top cryptocurrencies like ETH, XMR, ADA, DOT and wait for 3 years after halving to make gains rather than wasting our time in faucets. Even merged mining coins like LTC (+DOGE) have been profitable to mine and GPU mining of XMR could be profitable due to the price hikes too. On top of this, we can learn mining cryptocurrencies which many of them aren't aware and could be helpful in the long run too. Today our market has changed, there are far less people from 2017 pump (like me) and even far less people from 2013-2014 pumps (just like you) who have stayed this long in the market as people who are entering are trying to make quick profits and leave the market. Every bull run market is dominated by greedy developers, shitcoin traders and faucet abusers and this is nothing different. But very few realize the importance of cryptocurrency and even use them.

An interesting thing to point out here is : Faucets were introduced by gavin to bring more people into bitcoin and make them stay longer but today, those faucets has changed from being a entry point for newbies to greedy people abusing them. With current crypto trend, I think even testnet btc will become valuable and would be used to scam newbies 

As OcTradism, ETC is a shitcoin but the only use case of this is that they are good at mining profits. Eventhough ETC is suffering serious 51% attacks for most of the time, they are being adopted by the community for being a good profitable coin in terms of mining.

Decentralization has gone a far away and we have shifted completely to a new era of cryptocurrency after stepping up of Binance and its overpowerful actions on the community. For instance, we do know BnB is highly centralized but still people support them because of the extraordinary growth rate of Binance and the scalability factor of Binance Chain. There is an interesting event to cite as an example here :

Last month, there was a poll ongoing in one of the reddit groups focused on crypto that where users are willing to hold their coins and there were 3 options given to choose from : one was exchange wallet, second was private wallet like Electrum/Trust Wallet/Exodus kinda and third was Mix between Exchange and Private wallets. Out of 33 voters, 17 had chosen they hold their crypto only in exchanges. From this vote we can very well say that cryptocurrency on the whole has become speculative and centralized. Majority of the people who come are only meant to be useless traders who has no knowledge on why bitcoin was created and why it is advised to store bitcoin off the exchanges.

You should be aware of the famous Beeple Digital Art auction which had the winning bid of $69 million which shook the NFT market. It has become easier to make money in crypto and every new 2020 users are enjoying this bull run without knowing where these would end. 95% of the new joiners never know what happened to Mt.Gox and why oldies are afraid to store crypto in exchanges. Either we need to educate more and more or should move along with the crowd by becoming greedy and trading shitcoins!

Oops, seems like I added a zero. It's around 2 million players and by calling them professional players, I am counting people who play matches for a living. In India many companies hire you if you have played cricket for the current state you are residing in and I have seen various examples for the same! The numbers could be nearly equivalent to what I have posted as for instance consider :

People playing cricket professionally in the age of 15-20 could be around 50,000 from each state and data from popular states alone could bring numbers ranging between 500,000 - 1 million. If we consider people of the age between 20-40 they could range anywhere between 500,000 - 1 million again. Hence there could be an easy number ranging between 2 million users who are playing cricket professionally to earn a living.

Regardless of bitcoin fees, I think people would continue to bet using bitcoin. BnB has been dominating the market with the really good scalability and cheaper fees but they are literally centralized and same goes with TRX. I think to prevent the higher fees, casinos could partner with popular bitcoin exchanges and consider doing an internal transfer too. The underlying problem is that, both casinos and exchanges charge the users a little higher than the withdrawal fees i.e bitcoin fees currently stands at $10 confirmations but exchanges like Binance and a few gambling sites have a fixed withdrawal fees of 0.0005 btc

In future, if Lightning Network gets adopted on a larger scale in every exchange and casinos we would be seeing drastic reduction in withdrawal fees.

If a person is from US, they would consider betting in bitcoin or ethereum since majority of the altcoins are still not being allowed to be traded.

I like the way how you come up with scenarios which could indeed pose a danger to the future of decentralization in various projects because of POS. Proof of Stake might be a better alternative to prevent huge emission of heat and preserving of electricity but they are the way through which we could always attain decentralization. I wouldn't say Bitcoin over powerful reliance on ASIC would make them decentralized but ASIC resistant mineable coins like XMR would achieve true decentralization. Apart from this, POS could possibly solve the transactions faster while comparing to PoW but they would prefer users to stake a certain amount for prolonged periods of time.

CZ was trying to manipulate Bitcoin mining while the Binance hack took place, but it was disregarded by the community but in terms of PoS CZ has greater control on miners than PoW miners. This is why Bitcoin should move to ASIC resistant mining in near future to improve the decentralization on a grander scale since every home user could mine bitcoin with their GPU alone. Nowadays I do believe, XMR has solved the problems which were put forward by bitcoin and could act as an better version of cash in the near future. I have no clue regarding the internal workings of Delegated POS model but POS on the long run would be surely malicious and end up with huge exchanges having the power to control the transactions and mining.

Truly speaking hiring such services aren't illegal or wouldn't put the hirer behind the bars but if the bettor service helps a person who is residing in a place where gambling is illegal, it might probably pose a danger. This has been an old practice and has been discussed on various online forums as early as 2005-2010 too, but bookmakers strongly urge the account owners to place the bets instead of someone controlling them. I have seen such laws in online betting platforms, hence hiring such service is considered illegal in terms of the gambling platform but considering based on law it might depend on the residency of the person and the location of the service company. As others have pointed out, there are services being offered though through various sites but are they all trustworthy depends!

I assume a betting broker is different while comparing to the service since, they guide the account holders to placing bets but services like these operate to rake in profits for most of the time. You can check out bookielink for the same as I think they provide services for betting but I couldn't guarantee you how far they could be trusted! However, you need to be careful while handing over your account to third party since they could move away with your money on rare scales.

DOGE's insane price pumps was driven by Elon's manipulation and we all know that there was nothing more than that  The last known full node client version (before 1.14.3) was released an year back and there were no updates for the same nor any github PRs favoring them for 1 year. Dogecoin Core 1.14 had some not really bad improvements to full node but pumping with just some manipulative words is possible only in crypto market.

Check Dogecoin Core 1.14.3 release over here : https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.14.3

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I used to get paid 2-3 DOGE per hour in 2018 through freedogeco.in and it was really cool to make some free doges by solving captchas. Currently with insane prices of both bitcoin and a worthless dogecoin, calculating our faucet payments in bitcoins wouldn't be worth it but probably through satoshis might be helpful.

BTW As others say, Freedogeco wasn't closed because of the price rise or lower profits but was due to malicious actors trying to ruin the fun of faucets to other new users by hacking them and stealing more doge! You can read the news over here : Free Cryptocurrency Giveaway Site Shuts Due To Hackers Freedoge was really a great site with no ads but the greediness made to shut the business down 

There were days when decentralized exchanges like IDEX were truly decentralized and we can trust them with our information. But now they are claiming themselves as DEX but have become more like a centralized exchange. Some DEX could change their terms over time, but majority of them still function in a highly decentralized manner. As you have said, there could be regulations pitching in from time to time but the XMR - BTC atomic swap could probably be a game changer of the industry when realized and when proved successful, there wouldn't be really a need for DEX in future transactions. OTOH, centralized exchanges like Binance do charge a hefty fee on its users during withdrawals and have a poor customer support for issues hence DEX could always prove to be an alternative to these highly expensive centralized exchanges.

If an exchange to function properly like Binance DEX, they should be regulating them properly so that there aren't really huge malicious transactions going through them.

Possibly the digital yuan could be a new entry to blockchain space backed by government. They are still on the initial testing but China has been spending millions on the tests so that they could be proven as a really good competitor and could possibly replace currency like Tether in future? India on the other hand, has been planning to issue Digital Rupee thereby banning cryptocurrencies which could pose a threat again, but currencies like XMR which is highly privacy centric might become the future of digital trades if bitcoin were traced back to owner on higher scales by government.

Installing package.json is kinda simple though. When you have enough time, try to give a read of what package.json does in : NPM Docs. You can install package.json by typing this command in terminal :


This should probably create the package.json file for you in your directory and then try the procedure which I mentioned in post #16 Based on my previous experience on this altcoin creation and stack overflow answers, I believe you should be running an older version of Node.js but I am not really sure though!

Some important links which helped me during the npm install process :

1. npm can't find package.json
2. npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\Users\Nuwanst\package.json'

I am a evangelist bitcoiner not just because of the insane prices hikes but just because I am aware of the technology behind the currency which rules this world! As I have said above, I don't trust Saylor's words not only because of his 8 year old tweet but because of his dot come bubble crash where Microstrategy was filing fake profits while the company was almost failing. There was no reason to deny the fact that companies like MSTR was one among the companies who were responsible for dot com crash back in early 2000s. We are driven by fake manipulation and speculation which investors who doesn't know a shit about bitcoin and still investing must understand. There has been a huge surge in DOGE prices because of Elon's manipulative tweets but was the demand for DOGE the same? Atleast 75% of the investors of bitcoin never know what is bitcoin but are driven to price actions because of manipulative actions from bulls like Saylor.

On the other hand, whales like Winklevoss twins could be trusted because they not only run a business on top of crypto but they have been a early bitcoin supporter since 2013 onwards and similarly Jack Dorsey who is working on solving bitcoin's scalability by organizing funds and bringing in new developers! I consider Saylor is similar to Mcafee who drives price to rake profits but jack and Winklevoss aren't the same.

How often can we trust a stablecoin like USDT to have all the tokens backed to USD? A bitcoin economy could one day become mainstream but until then the speculation and price shifts would continue. I am eagerly waiting for Lightning to become mainstream so that most of the merchants could start accepting bitcoin as a means of payment which could drive prices due to the liquidity which are being created in the process. There is a difference between calling bitcoin a deflationary currency and as an asset.

The people like you and me (who registered during 2018 era) very well know that how random threads would pop up now and then to express the excitement during the bull market  it's very well known people from 2017-2018 has matured similar to how people from 2013 were matured in 2014. All these NFTs, altcoins and the Defi trend are meant to rob Bitcoins from bitcoiner and turn them into a nocoiner during the long run and that's how the ICO guys did and ran away ruining the whole market.

We could say that people who sustained the 2019 drop are more or less driven towards the tech behind bitcoin and not regarding these no-brainer price predictions. Having lost some serious amount of bits in alts, I believe people believing in NFTs and Defi would end up in the same way. On top of this, there are still quite minor differences between the 2017 bull run and 2021 bull run i.e 2017 was driven by insiders, whales and ICO scamsters but 2021 is being fuelled by institutional investors and NFT and Yield scam artists! If a whale like Saylor dumps his coin, the FOMO would kick in but I personally wouldn't trust Saylor's word after his DotCom crash words and knowing about his tweet from 2013


Sadly, bitcoin has moved completely away from the way how Satoshi envisioned it to be. If this continues, the commerce market of bitcoin would die very soon (i.e none would use Bitcoin to buy or sell goods) because speculation would rise in huge percentage and HODLERs will increase the demand for the same.

Cashout bet in gambling is similar to trading cryptos at times. Cashout bet is pretty much difficult to predict in terms of football games where the pitch is quite large and every player should contribute equally to win the game. Whereas in games like NBA or Cricket, cashout will play a really good role depending on the time and the players on the field. I have once lost a minimal percentage in a game between LA Lakers vs Miami Heat where Heat were pretty close to winning the game but lost on the final minutes.

I am not sure what caused the situation of losing the game, but it was one among the earlier cashout bets I did when I was not really good at gambling. I supported LA and bet on them but while the game was slowly shifting towards Miami, I cashed out to prevent further losses but to the contrary on the final minutes LA won and I lost a few bucks.

I would never wait till the end of the game or wait for the game to end if there are key players on the opposite team. The key players like Lebron could change the game altogether and its probably very risky to bet against them. So the same goes with Cricket too. We never knew the finals of World Cup would end up in a Super Over where both NZ and England were too good with playing in the finals. So it's always better to cashout on what you think the likelihood of the game would be rather than waiting and watching them by ourselves.

How did this information leak?   Did I mention them anywhere apart from github repo or to you personally? With the removal of Will Binns from bitcoin.org maintainers, the progress of the site and translations are moving at a snail pace. Hence, I don't think there would be any really ground breaking improvements in the nearby time frame. The github repo of whitepaper was removed recently and there are far less translations going on for the site while comparing the days when Will was active. I have personally hired some people known to me to work on the translations of the site in various Indian languages.

Regarding the whitepaper, Yes I am working with some pro language speakers and tutors for the Tamil version of the whitepaper but sadly it would take a few more months I guess since the work for them has risen to higher scales. This doesn't mean I am just concentrating on the Tamil version alone since neither I am good with Tamil nor with Hindi There is already a Hindi translation of the whitepaper done by Nischal Team, hence I am not going to work on it. Once the Tamil version is done and hosted, I am going to move onto Malayalam or Telugu probably and when I start that I would probably get in touch with you! Apart from this there are various exciting plans going on in the backend and I would be announcing them one by one and slowly over the months or years to come.

I would like to shed some light on this too. There are works going on for an excellent guide which would cover information related to current laws and complete regulations, while we are awaiting for the final WOM from the government regarding the regulations to finish writing the guide. Once we have finished it, a very familiar person in this subforum would be creating the topic and hopefully we need to ask Cyrus to pin them if the community agrees to it.

I have been trying to clean Regional Languages board from the beginning but it was literally a pain in the ass as the topics were overwhelming and huge to clear, hence I left them as they were originally available. BTW Thanks for reporting and cleaning the board   I recently reported a few from Off-Topic and main board, hopefully they would be removed once global mods comes over!

Renaming should be done for sure since the title of the sub-board is misleading and I hope we need to ask theymos/Cyrus for the same. We need to send a message and link this topic over there, until then let us wait for the responses from other members.

You very well know that India is comprised of 22 different languages and there is no other go other than using English as the only language in the main boards. To discuss through Hindi/other regional languages we do have a separate board for to serve the purpose.

Good thought on this. From the next raffle, I am thinking of placing a rule that X posts should have been made by the participant in X number of days in our local board. But before that, I would like to have opinions from other members regarding this. During the introduction of merit system back in 2018, BTCforJoe organized a similar contest : Joe's Signatureless Challenge: Win $25 + 4 Merits every week! where new members would be making helpful posts and Joe would be judging them and pay $25 from his pocket. We could probably organize a similar kind of contest to improve the community activity and I would be creating a topic to discuss this very soon to gain members opinions on this contest. BTW I have been recommending users to join our forum in various reputed Indian BTC telegram groups but haven't seen quite a huge interest for the same.

Hey mironkraft, I didn't notice the bump and hence forgot to post an update regarding the above post.

Checkpoints were an important part of the core software back in the early days but they have become far less important to reduce the power of developers on the bitcoin network. For instance, checkpoints will consist of data of the blocks up until which the transactions are valid and you cannot modify the transactions before the specific block through a forking.

I think you got passed through that and the next lies is the creation of genesis block and adding the block hash to the client. I think I have found a solution for your above mentioned issue. All you need to do is that there should be 1 file and a folder created during the npm install process. So you need to delete the file "package-lock.json" and the folder "node_modules" and then delete the caches using this command written in terminal


This is one among the very common errors and most of the time this solution worked for me while practicing years ago. Hopefully this should work for you too. But before this, try running npm start using sudo command.

As mindtrust said, there would be betting on Olympics in every crypto casino. The crypto and bitcoin market was quite smaller when 2016 Rio Olympics held, hence there wouldn't have been much casinos to integrate crypto betting. But with increasing popularity of casinos and bitcoin in general (which is very much different while comparing to 2016) we would be seeing a huge surge in casino numbers which helps the user to bet on Olympic games.

There were reports back in 2019 claiming that Japanese banks were integrating crypto payments for Olympics and the popular shitcoin XRP was shilled to get accepted in 2020 Olympics  : Make XRP the official cryptocurrency of the Tokyo Olympics 2020!

See this :

Tokyo 2020 Olympics: Blockchain Could Make Games a Tourist's Dream

Japanese banks embrace digital currencies for Olympics