theymos changes usernames only when he is convinced with their PM and would consider doing so only he does know your username to some extent. alia changed their name from alia_armalle (not sure about the name) by sending a message to theymos and he has said it would be done after going through the trust scores as well. So probably its kind of either your request of changing username may get accepted or rejected.

Mods are the ones who can change their usernames now and then without paying btc (Donators and VIPs)

AFAIK SMF allows changing of display names, but theymos changed the rule for usernames when there were scams going on with these changed usernames.

See this :


This was way back in 2011, then it was changed to the fact that forum users with good reputation can change their usernames if they feel like.

Added. Thanks

Recently we have been noticing quite a handful of username changes and some does seem to create confusion among other forum users like this situation or this situation. If there is a name change of notable user or someone who have been here for long time, it would be better if they have made a post or report on the same for their name change. Some forum accounts are identified only through their reputation and it is quite important in a forum where money is involved.

For instance, we never knew the real name of satoshi but the alias was very important in the creation of bitcoin. Similarly, there are quite a handful of us where this forum name would be literally well known and would be considered as an important identity. If someone is willing to report their name change in forum could use this topic or create a newer one.

Indeed very true. Either people should stop shitposting here to complete their signature posts or the topic should be locked to prevent further spams. Gambling Discussion board is turning into another frog pond like Altcoin Discussion where only a few good discussions takes place. 

This is probably the reason why I always stick to well known casino sites like Fortune Jack, PlayBetr, MintDice, Crypto-games, Bitdice for gambling with my money. Newer sites require far more reputation to have a pleasant stay here in the community and if they were created for the sole reason to scam or being shady (like the one with OP's so called legit gambling site) then they don't have a place here.

Shitposting for your signature   The post of yours is completely irrelevant and doesn't seem to provide any better insight to my post!  

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Though they are really handy, I would never compare a mobile with a PC. PC is always far better and secure when compared with the handy mobile devices. They have a lot more potential than what our mobile devices does. I have been rarely using my mobile for gambling in PlayBetr but it's quite difficult to play in a mobile to be hones. Apart from that, I feel hesitant to link my passwords/ privacy related stuff in my mobile. What if your mobile is stolen? You lose your security and privacy along with the loss of your mobile. On top of that, if you have bitcoin in your gambling site and once when your mobile is lost you have a higher chance of losing them as well.

The mobile interface is pretty bad and doesn't seem to be as good as in the PC. For some games which require a bigger screen, you would face the difficulty in playing in a smaller one. I have been gambling in PlayBetr quite recently along with the long term Fortune Jack, both have a good UI for mobile users.

BTCump...

2 more spots left to be picked up before we roll. Topic was read 198 times, but still difficult to fill up 16 spots?

The above addresses are related to testnet addresses. What it has to do with mainnet addresses which starts with 1,3 or bc1?  

Testnet private keys starts with character 'c'  Are you trying to send bitcoin from mainnet to testnet wallets or the vice versa? Either of them is impossible to do so as both have a separate chain and note that Testnet coins has no value in real world!

Privkeys with uncompressed pubkeys start with character '9' and Privkeys with compressed pubkeys start with character 'c' which is the one you have mentioned!

This. If you try to send btc from a mainnet to testnet or any other non-bitcoin addresses you would encounter this issue. See this issue : "Pay to" in "Send" tab detects invalid address: Invalid Lines found #3427

You should have accidentally logged into a testnet wallet and should be having this problem.

The issue is not related to virus. Rather you should be logging in a mainnet wallet and should sweep the coins.

P.S Never deal with newbies/forum users who ask for private keys in PMs or trying to assist you through PM.

Thanks for creating this unique topic. It always amuses me of how everyone in terms of posting change into a better person over the time here. Right from the beginning I have skimmed through the starting posts of the top posters here and I really feel grateful how good this forum has changed them over time and has helped them in bringing out their real potential. Almost 90% of the posters started off here as shitposters, trying to earn money etc and have changed to by far the best posters this forum has encountered. I would never quote myself as a decent poster/good quality poster as that is completely based on other's perception on me and how well I post/help others. But to be quite true, this forum has changed me a lot in terms of my real life and in my postings as well.

I started off as a shitposter, but eventually got interested in the varied technology behind the workings of Alts and have been learning about the same quite deeply for over 7-8 months from my registration date. I was very active in Altcoin Discussion and was answering tech based questions by hunting them in the frog pond. Over time it was quite difficult to hunt good quality technical questions in the board and I certainly started learning about the technology behind bitcoin.

This can be considered as a major shift in my posting behavior from learning about tech behind Alts to tech behind Bitcoin. Later after knowing a little about the tech, learning to test Bitcoin Core PRs, translating the whole Bitcoin Core from scratch in my local language, I shifted towards knowing about the Collectibles and did learn a lot about the same. Once I got to know about almost 50-75% of the collectibles section, I shifted towards improving my local board. (Right up-to that moment I made only one post in my local board)

The local board seems to be better now with far less spam and quality contributions emerging and right after this I would like to shift towards the Mining section  Though I can consider myself as a Brand New member in Mining, I would like to learn a lot about that and simultaneously translate the bitcoin.org website in my native language from scratch.

The future would be like after knowing about Mining, I would like to spend a significant time on all the above and would like to have a deep and complete study of everything. Though I got to know about bitcoin only at the end of 2016, I never had an idea on what it is really about. All these were known only through this forum. 

Hello there General Steamtyme! You sound more like young Obi-Wan in your earlier days 

For someone to stay here and contribute for a longer time, they should basically understand the real purpose of bitcoin and must be really used to the forum practices. There are various topics being created by many of them all over the internet to make newbies understand about the true purpose of bitcoin. But as far as Indian community is concerned, we need someone from our local board to create a topic highlighting all the issues being faced by a fellow citizen while using fiat money and how bitcoin might solve the problem if they were used mainstream. Though we are using English as our primary language, the topic should have a native Indian English accent and must be created by a native Indian, who is well aware of the problems we are facing here. Quoting from B&H topic wouldn't be helpful I guess.

There was once a MS dedicated for our local board. Since they were inactive, I have applied for the same and was made a source of merits. But even after that, I have never been seeing any really interesting discussions taking place over here. Well, using English as a primary language could be seen as another problem and people would be posting such topics in main boards instead of our local board?  As far as Indonesian, Russian, French boards are concerned people are discussing about the prices, development, speculations, forum issues in their native language but since we have a wide variety of languages we cannot create topics something similar to that.

Newbies here aren't really aware of the purpose of these local boards but the purpose of the same have been mentioned in the Unofficial rules topics created by S_D or should we create a separate topic dedicated to describe Indian Child Boards?

It's not about creation of separate local boards, but rather the Regional Languages board should be made active by posting interesting topics there.

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The need for a moderator is required only when the community is too large and the global mods doesn't have time to moderate the local board. Neither of them are happening right now.

There isn't enough activity here in our local board and people are sticking towards global boards.


From my point of view, I still don't see a suitable candidate for the position of moderator. A moderator shouldn't impose power on the people or showoff their power to moderate the community. Whereas they should act like a fellow poster, should promote interaction and should be able to have strong grasp on the workings of the forum. As far as I have seen through most of the so called veteran's post they do seem to be the first case of holding a power for themselves and trying to oppress others by arguing what they say is always right.

As far as this forum is concerned it is highly a decentralized one with freedom of speech being considered as a foremost option. If someone in the name of moderator trying to minimize this then they don't seem to be a suitable candidate for that position. I have been browsing through some of the very older posts on this local board and majority of the Legendary-Hero members were trying to create a seniority kind of attitude over here and there were only 3-4 of them having the qualities of being a fellow knowledgeable poster and at the same time for being a moderator. None of those have expressed interest in being a moderator but were always better in thoughts than the so called veterans. Some of them are

1. Muhammed Zakir - If someone from 2014-2017 era lurking here still in the forum, they should be knowing about them. One of the most knowledgeable posters hailing from India and has always been really very helpful for other posters.

2. krishnapramod - Really helpful in exposing spammers, plagiarists and had a strong knowledge on the usage of forum.

3. amishmanish - We don't need to describe about this guys's contribution to the forum. But lately they have been highly inactive and I am not really sure will they be able to actively participate in this forum.

4. eaLiTy - Top reporter, silent reader and been present here for a quite long time from 2016

5. webtricks - Recently I have an eye on this user and they seem to be emerging as net positive on the forum and Indian board on the whole.

The first 3 were highly inactive and doesn't seem to be returning as active users anytime soon. While the latter 2 would be suitable candidates but it's completely based on reporter history, trustworthiness and their view on how neutral they are.

One who is self-promoting themselves for MOD role shouldn't always be given a priority and I have always seen the kind of self-promotion from so called veterans. And more importantly if someone tries to impose power in the name of moderator they don't fit for the role.

For quite a long time (may be over a year) we have been discussing various problems which are being faced in the Indian board after the prolonged inactivity of Benson right from the middle of 2017. Benson was a great moderator who had a major role in shaping the Indian bitcoin community in general. But after the legalization practices undertaken by our government, many of the forum members were not really used to the idea of contributing or posting in Indian section of the forum.

Apart from that, a majority of old timers has left the forum as a result of ongoing spam in 2017-2018. They felt like the forum was diluted with very low level of posts being posted here. To mitigate these problems and to bring back the board as to how it was back in 2013, we the remaining Indian forum members should take certain steps in minimizing these situations.

Please read this topic completely before arriving at any conclusions or making any posts. It might be a little lengthy, but most of us should have a complete read. Another important note is that, we must be reshaping the board well before another bull run to face the major horde of spammers who would flock here to spam or to destroy the board completely. These ideas, topics, games, evoking interest among other Indian members are for the sole purpose of engaging the community for quality discussions and also in preparing this board well before spammers flocking up here in huge numbers.

Here are some of the ideas which I have been thinking for some time and could help in initiating this discussion :

1. Pinned Topics

The foremost problem which we were facing is the unnecessary inclusion of pinned topics in the main Indian board. The topics didn't serve the purpose and were least helpful to any of the newbies here. To prevent the unnecessary spam, we have cumulatively and repeatedly reported the topics and hence the previous topics were unpinned from main board. Some of the topics which still doesn’t serve the purpose and are present here just to pollute the board

• An Easy way to understand Bitcoin – The topic was pinned back during the early days of the forum and they are no way helpful to newbies or seasoned members. We could report them and unpin them and instead have a kind of topic which will educate the newbies on bitcoin. I would like any of them to take the initiative and start a topic by explaining bitcoin in a very easier way.
• Welcome to Indians – The topic similar to 'Easy way to understand Bitcoin' wasn’t really helpful and has been used as a frog pond to spam with redundant posts like “Thank You”, “Pleased to be here” etc. Instead, I have thought of creating a topic (under construction) which doesn’t ruin the essence of “Welcome to Indians” topic but would be more of a decent explanatory. I would like to hear community opinions on what can we include on this topic as it could become one of the most important topics if our country got to know about bitcointalk on a larger scale.

2. Merit Sources

There was a long term concern on we don’t have any merit sources and people thought like, even after contributing we won’t be able to rank up and those finally came to an end. If you create good quality topics and posts, you would be receiving a certain amount of merits and if they are really good others who have enough smerits could help by meriting them as well. So people shouldn’t worry about ranking up or gaining merits as far as Indian board is concerned provided they post good content.
Try to contribute more, bring up quality discussions and I assure you that even Indian members could rank up to higher ranks.  Newbies at heart, try to contribute utmost and you will receive some decent amount of merits only from the Indian board.

3. Renaming and Creation of certain Child Boards

For quite some time, I have been unhappy about the minimal and confused usage of Child Boards here in the Indian local board. For example if someone comes up with a Scam Accusation on a particular Indian website or to solve their doubts regarding the reputation of an Indian website they don’t really have a board to post their queries apart from the main board. The Child Board Buyer/ Seller Reputations (India) seems to be useful only for posting the reputation of a trader or a particular person in detail and doesn’t seem to be useful for discussing about the reputation of an Indian company or something similar. Hence I would like to propose a solution for the situation by renaming the board to Scams / Reputations (India) instead of Buyer/ Seller Reputations (India).

We could consider another example for the above situation, where a particular forum member is asking about that if freebitco.in is legit or a scam? Does that really need to be present in the main board?

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I have been disheartened about the involvement of Indians in bitcoin or how badly bitcoin is being preached to the general public. We have some of the better programmers out in our country but none had been involved in the development of bitcoin or generally to the contribution of bitcoin. Everyone have been trying to trade and weed-out profits and trying to shed bitcoin in a bad light.

To counter this and to increase the adoption, I suggest for the creation of a separate Child Board dedicated to learning about the Bitcoin Development and also for Translating Bitcoin Whitepaper, bitcoin.org and Bitcoin Core to various Indian Languages. What are the communities thoughts on this idea? If there is a board for the same being created can we name them “Bitcoin : Development and Translation (India)”?

4. Languages being used in the Indian board

Well this section seems to be one of the controversial in terms of our country is concerned. According to the Articles 344(1) and 351 of the Indian Constitution we have over 22 major languages but all of us present here doesn’t really know all these 22 major languages and we abide by the fact that English is the common language which connects the Indian netizens and thereby we have been using them for quite a long time.

How can we overcome this barrier of teaching bitcoin to the non-English speaking or in the sense bad English speakers we have in our country and who could sign up here in future? Is Regional Languages board enough for them to learn all by their own? Should Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu be restricted only to the Regional Languages board? Is bitcoin.org and Bitcoin Core is sufficient to be present in English?

P. S To prepare the board for bull run and to create a healthy community in future, I would like everyone reading this topic to chime in and give your thoughts on these ideas and suggestions. If you have any additional interesting ideas, please post them here and we can discuss regarding the same.

Self-moderated to prevent newbie spam.

Thank You newIndia. OP has been updated with localcryptos and Bitrefill sites. Bitrefill is a noteworthy and must have additions to the OP. Though I have used Bitrefill only twice, are they really trusted in terms of Indian economy is concerned? I am aware of the fact that they have really good and trustworthy reviews for international markets but is there any problem when we provide them with our mobile numbers or use their gift card codes?

Side note for new Bitrefill users : Bitrefill is one of the fastest adopters of Lightning Network for smaller payments and they have received over more than 1BTC through lightning payments!

I have dual thoughts on this topic and on the OP. Do they really advertise their shady site in the name of creating a topic?  Brand New member advertising their shady site? The site doesn't look really good enough for a gambling website though.

Though there isn't any lotteries being conducted here in our country and to be more specific they have been banned a long time back. I would go with freebitco.in lotteries as they are one among the most legit gambling sites out there in this bitcoin ecosystem and the newly launched LOTEO as well. I don't really endorse the second one though, as I haven't tried them still but they have been proven to be legit based on the earlier reviews!

I have had some bad experiences when gambling using a smartphone. I gamble only with really meager amounts like $10,$20 but have lost that on occasions when I was gambling using a smartphone. Multipliers and autobets always have a negative impact while playing through smartphones if we are careless about what we are doing. Accidental use of autobets using high multipliers has resulted in loss of money and has been the same for many gamblers present here.

Coming to apps, are they really trustworthy as online casinos? I have never seen such kind of apps in playstore and for most of the time as mindrust said, casinos are designed in such a way that they are usable for both PC and mobile screens. Apps seems to be glitchy for most of the time if something similar was developed by the casino company. I have gambled in Playbetr and FortuneJack using a mobile phone and both of these casino sites were adaptable to smartphones and looks quite like a app itself!

Bitcoin, ethereum and monero has far little and almost no flaws when compared with these shitcoins and they are decentralized to an extent and can be worked even better with advancement to destroy these useless alts miserably. You can call me a bitcoin shill but I can always talk positively about bitcoin and other two major currencies and can trash other useless currencies.

Bitcoin has higher confirmation times but they can be eradicated in future with the better development and usage of lightning network and probably developers do come up with additional tech as well. Similarly monero is highly decentralized and is a privacy centric coin which can have major breakthroughs in dark web marketplaces. Ethereum functions like a world computer and companies can use them to create their own blockchain based tokens.

Individuals who are quite newbies or doesn't really know the purpose of these three would be moving for other currencies and many of these alt/shitcoin traders look for get-rich-quick ponzi schemes. Bitcoin was created to counter physical/government backed currencies, Ethereum was created for promoting blockchain to a greater extent and none were created to trade.

Long story short

[1]satoshi came up with the idea of bitcoin somewhere from mid of 2007 and they were working on the code right then.

[2] As UserU said, bitcoin.org was registered on 18 August 2008. Then on 22 August 2008 satoshi sent Wei Dai a mail about their Electronic Cash project along with a whitepaper. This was the first written document mentioning about bitcoinE-cash. Note that bitcoin wasn't named back then. You can find the first whitepaper draft here : https://draftable.com/compare/rCuIgdwzImUI

[3] On 31 October 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper was published with minor changes in the ecash document. The name E-cash was renamed to Bitcoin. The registering of bitcoin.org and publishing of E-cash paper to Wei Dai were only written documents of the not-still materialized project.

[4] On 16 November 2008 satoshi sent the basic codebase to Hal Finney, Cryddit and other several cypherpunks to have a code review on Bitcoin.

[5] On 3 January 2009 satoshi mined the genesis block thereby launching the bitcoin network and on 9 January 2009  satoshi released the software for public use.

So concluding that today is the creation of genesis block/ the launch of bitcoin network and August 22, 2008 was the real birth of E-Cash which was known only to Wei Dai back then.

Very true. But does miners really mine bitcoin even for a loss? Let us consider the same scenario such that the total electricity costs were $100 for a miner and they receive $150 worth of mined bitcoins now. They sell $100 and have the extra $50 worth as a profit. With halving coming into practice and let us consider that bitcoin price stays in the same level then they would be receiving a fair share of only $75 for mining. An additional $25 in bitcoin should be sold to cover their expenses.

But well, many doesn't mine for a loss and when these miners leave these operations to prevent further losses subsequent decreasing of difficulty takes place and bitcoins could be generated more easily than before which will reduce the cost of mining it. But all these incidents might happen on a longer term after a minor dump.

They are indeed expensive as there are only a very few good copies in existence. You need to spend atleast somewhere around $50,000 - $80,000 to grab that piece of paper and if you are willing to spend, post a WTB topic in collectibles section and someone would contact you and its not really guaranteed as they are quite rare piece of crypto history. It's been over 11 years since the paper came out to the public and for those years someone should have preserved them safely to sell them to you.

In the previous auction, the paper went for a mind-boggling $60,000 in bitcointalk. Some claim that there are only less than 25 copies in existence and each sells for more than $200,000. All I would say is that if you don't have $50,000 - $80,000 to buy this piece of crypto history get a digital copy of the paper and print them on a piece of paper of your choice and hang them on your wall.

Here are the past auctions for The Times newspaper on bitcointalk :

1. [Auction | NO MINIMUM BID] The Times 03 Jan 2009 | 10% to FreeRoss.org

Price Claimed : 7.4BTC at the rate of $8000 per bitcoin

2. WTS Original copy of The Times Jan 3 2009 quoted in Genesis Block

Asking Price : 10BTC at the rate of $3500 per bitcoin

This is one of the most cheapest price you could ever see for a Times paper and they have climbed more over the years with the popularity of bitcoin.

3. [SELL] Original Times Newspaper from 3 January 2009 - genesis block newspaper

More info on the paper here : https://www.thetimes03jan2009.com/

P.S How much did the seller ask for? If you would really like to buy one, I would like you to visit collectibles section and have a discussion with some of the premium collectors out there!

I would like to stay bearish than being neutral at the moment and I guess the bitcoin would be staying in the price level of $6250-$6300 at April 1,2020.

Though I am neither a technical analyst in guessing bitcoin prices nor a trader, I would like to guess the price based on the increasing/decreasing demand of bitcoin and some of the news favoring the halving event at the current stage. For past 2 halving events (2012-2016) prices have stayed neutral before the event and bitcoin was always trading sideways. On the other hand, there is only a reduction of 6.25 bitcoin per block but the earlier events had 12.5 and 25 bitcoin respectively which is quite a bigger number which should be taken into consideration.

We can relate based on the facts such that, we won't be seeing much of an increase in terms of price and we would be seeing miners holding their bitcoin to sell them off later once after the halving has occurred. Miners should pay for the electricity and after the halving event comes into practice, they would be receiving only fewer bitcoin and in order to cover the fees they might sell their bitcoin onto a later stage. This scenario would likely keep the price stable for a specific time period.

Another scenario is that currently we aren't seeing any really good breakthroughs in the cryptocurrency space in general. The 2019 May price hike was probably driven due to the Libra hype and there weren't any other noteworthy events happening through. If in these 4 months another corporate giant jumps into the market, we might see a higher price hike but that isn't really guaranteed to happen.

Thank You micgoossens for being generous and helping the community always. 

I always speak in favor of appointing merit sources in local section. These sections are some of the promising places which will be used to spread the word about bitcoin in a native accent and will help the people with little English knowledge to get more encouraged towards the community. Your posts were quite informative and they were really undermerited while comparing to the English board topics. I have merited some of those posts after translating them to English and they were really informative.

And on top of that, I do see that there are forum users who have received quite some amount of merits after skimming through the replies but the problem is that they don't really merit any of those posts. The problem with the local boards are such that, many members aren't really aware of how merit works and doesn't really like to spend their merits. If the merits were spent at a regular rate, we won't be finding any difficulties of merit distribution in some of the local boards.

As logfiles said, if you find a undermerited post in your local section and if you really don't have any smerits to spend the best way is to Report those topics to global merit sources. Blacknavy is one among the respected merit sources with a large amount of smerit allocation hailing from Turkish section but if the topics present there deserve more merits, either you should request theymos to increase the smerit allocation of Blacknavy or any of you (who have applied for merit source) should be appointed additionally to help Blacknavy in spreading out more merits.

Pretty much this. Ripple and their coin XRP is highly centralized destroying the purpose of a cryptocurrency. The basis of decentralization i.e mining is not really present in Ripple and the way they centralize and trying to gain power in the cryptocurrency space is not really good.

Either way centralized coins like XRP and the ecosystem like Ripple doesn't have a long way to go unless the real purpose of bitcoin starts to emerge on the market. I am a Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero supporter and so well I do hate other coins as well. All 3 of them have a purpose in the cryptocurrency space and are highly decentralized when compared to a coin like XRP. On top of that, they are gaining interest from banks which isn't really pleasing for crypto enthusiasts who does hate the centralized mechanisms of banks.

A wild guess has landed me here.  Let me try my luck out in solving this puzzle but I don't feel like they are right!!!

Here in the OP Christmas means the Halving day i.e May 20, 2020 (the major event which almost all the major miners, traders and general crypto enthusiasts are waiting for)

Since Pine Cones is a symbol for being a closed one/keeping something secret so that might mean block of the bitcoin network. Blocks tend to have the transactions binded together.

Kwanzaa is a giveaway celebration being held and hence they might mean that bitcoins are being given to miners once they solve the block during the halving day or later.

Another random theory, Kwanzaa is celebrated using 7 candles and the current bitcoin price is staying in the range of $7K?

This means that miners can kneel in front of the computer screen with a keyboard and mouse while pressing the keys with their fingers to solve the hash and receive the bitcoins in return. 


This quote should be a modified version of "Nothing comes easy in Life, Even Santa comes with a Clause."

Noteworthy replacement of kones with cones. But why too much of K's in the OP? 


There are a total of 20 K's being mentioned in the OP and that might symbolize bitcoin reaching $20K after halving? Or the 20 K's were written to symbolize the year 2020?

Too much of speculative theories and I hope atleast one of them to be true!