Chaos is perfect when you want to hide the really dangerous stuff, it's better to leave a few things in the open to make people believe that's the worst thing rather than trying to get everything in order and failing majestically.
 

Everyone does so, if you're going to sell a gold in most asian golds shops prepare to be asked to have it cut in a few random points, nobody is buying gold by the weight volume ratio anymore, with the advance in technology you can right now cast the fake gold bars in less than 0.1% deviance which would fool almost everyone.


It's actually the same thing, nobody is expecting you to keep that bar or the car, you can resell them the next day to get your money back, it's not a nonrefundable gift or something like that. Besides, the value of the car is based on how much do they sell that apartment and how much are they forced to declare as value
- the minimum fixed price is 500 000 and the real market value is 400 000 they will probably gift you a mercedes
- the minimum fixed price is 100 000 and the real value is 90 000 then you are going to get a used vw golf!


It's not only China, there are numerous countries in which gold is seen differently, both as a showcase of wealth, some safe way to keep your money hidden, a hedge against inflation, in some cases the distrust is so big they will embrace gold just because of that. Unfortunately and this is the second thing in this topic, Bitcoin seems quite unable to replicate this trust gold has on a larger scale, more are interested in the gains in value than in conserving that value over long periods of time or even security. But I guess you can't compete with things that have been around for thousands of years.

The world just keeps giving, after my previous topic about paying your debts with monkeys we go to the next funny one, new home gold bar gifts!

Yup sadly, it's gold, not Bitcoin, not even Dogecoin or a 2 by 2 pixels NFT!
And maybe it's even worse than that since gold can't be checked by a decentralized network for authenticity evey time, it might be something like this:



^ NOT a Toblerone !

The article is a bit old but it's the only one out of a few tens I've read that covers every step.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/12/gold-bars-used-to-lure-chinese-homebuyers-amid-market-slowdown

TLDR:

So, in the long version, how and why is this happening:

- Economic slowdown, deflation on the horizon housing sales have crashed
- The government can't allow the prices to go down that much because it will trigger something worse than 2008, with the main government and regional ones being in debt close to 300% which will be a disaster
- Since house estate developers are unable to cut fixed prices, they offer you a deal, giving you the house cheaper in reality but at the same time keeping the price up techically

So you buy 2 million yuan and you get a 400 000 yuan gold bar, so the price of the house stays at 2 million but you only pay in reality 1 600 000!

Now, we all know the Bitcoin situation in China is far than ideal, very far, like over the hills and far away, but could this be some breakthrough momentum when you're not allowed to pay what's worth but what's being said it's worth?

Let's look at it:
- Most are afraid that the bar will be fake, or of lower purity, total advantage bitcoin.
- Gold is harder to buy and once controls are in place no way near a million people a year will be able to get their bars
- Not that I'm advocating this but, it's a bit easier to deal with some accounting books once you deal with coins,I mean you can say that you gifted him 1 Btc and then send another 1 btc to some address. Again I'm not defending or advocating for tax evasion!
- The government doesn't like the gift loophole but doesn't like Bitcoin either so you got your hands already, but it will like a bit more since they are interested more in gold than in coins
- The developers won't have to pay one hundred armed guards to keep safe 1 ton of gold will the clients be afraid to leave the agency carrying a bar in their pocket, it can be done online

But more importantly, the seller can just say it's a worthless Bitcoin voucher code, it doesn't affect the price at all and besides, it's almost impossible to check if the voucher has changed owners. If I sell you a house and gift you 100 Pokemon cards I doubt pretty much someone will come to appraise it. Now that I think twice about this I'm really calling for tax evasion here  

So, do we have a potential usage scenario or I'm grasping at straws in a turd market full of bear dumps?

Bruh! There is SWIFT and IBAN!
I don't even have to know your currency, whether you live be it Uganda or Brazil or Thailand, you give me your SWIFT code and I deposit. I don't even need to have and USD account or an EURO account, exchange is done automatically between banks, that's the whole reason SWIFT was invented in the first place, a settlement platform between banks on foreign currency.

Do you think I need to open a peso account here in Europe to receive money from Argentina?
We have business partners in 20 different currencies, but we always use the same account, the whole international trade would be screed if you needed the same currency accounts in every country.


So you're telling me nobody in Europe can send you money unless we open a BRL account here? Seriously?  

Yeah, ironic:1000 post in 16 days total logged in time 
Must be karma!
Ps: you had a desktop one week ago when you were doing reviews!


Oh, the childhood cousin who will turn out to be your wife's friend's granddaughter!

Simple, you f! up! Man up, deal with it and with the consequences and that's it!
Let me tell you from years of experience what happens usually in those cases, instead of cleaning your reputation, you make everyone look at your account and more nasty stuff comes to light. I've seen enough accounts coming here to clear a misunderstanding and leaving with 10x more red tags and with an army of alts uncovered.

Even if you're that 0.001% who truly has a friend who lends him his phone to post on Bitcointalk, you will never be able to prove it beyond a doubt, it's easy to just call a friend, make him record a 5-second video of him claiming he is sakanwa, so what? I can post a picture of my cat with a paper signed "theymos", what would that prove?

People who live in developing countries and who don't have a bank account are certainly not the major part of the ones who need to sell 1 or 2 BTC at a time in a rush. Besides, things have changed a lot in the last decade, you don't need to transfer USD from an USD to an USD account, you can simply pay a guy from your currency to his national currency the same way, automatic fx exchange is the norm now.
Also, how will a guy with no bank account use a Cex to sell his coins?

I really want to skip a few years till this whole FOMO of missing a x10 return a year finally dies down and we start thinking less of investing and trading and more of real-life usage. Oh, wait, that thing Bitcoin was built to be!


Except that if we exclude a one-week interval there hasn't been any possibility of sending a below 6sat/b fee in the last 6 months.
If you don't split the inputs and outputs you're not doing anything so easily from a 4 cents tx of 1/1 input-output you need a 2$ tx with at least 4 times the size. Multiply that by 5 hops, then think of what extra transactions will do to the fees if 10,000 people will do so and, it stops becoming that trivial.


Yeah, it was perfectly secure in both MtGox and FTX case, big, old, trusted exchanges....

Learning?
You're following this guy for learning?




You must be joking! And if you're not and you really think you "learn" from him then I can already know how much you will learn from him, 1000 ways to lose your money and do stupid things! I'm really wondering right now what's worse, bitget in case it's a scam o this guy who gives "advice"



Guess your mentor hasn't managed to teach you what a recovery scam is!
Much to learn you have, your padawan, and much stupid stuff to forget you have!  


He didn't get any more advice from his wise advise influencer, that's why!

This sounds like those scams in which you need to send an additional $500 to pay taxes so you can get your $5000 in winning!

However, there is a bit of truth in this plan, indeed you can repay debt this way if there is a firm mechanism to do so set in place, basically, the exchange would issue these tokens to cover the debt and will start a buy-back process for them with the funds for that coming from future profits dedicated exactly at this, some sort of bankruptcy model, it would also allow users to sell these debt tokens is they want to cash out easier at a cheaper price but that would not force the other debt holders to sell them at market price.

A bit of what Bitfinex did back in 2016:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong-idUSKCN10I06H



The more I read about it the murkier it gets:


They fled Nigeria to Estonia, they want 50 million, they have 30k claimed transactions a day while employing over 350 people, although they supposedly fired 80% of them, but..they don't have enough money to pay back 2 million.
Also no they hold a Lithuania "license" for a company with 1 employee and no title filled this year, and their so-called Canadian MSB number is a business number and the company is listed as inactive, so they don't have a Fintrac license.

Mining doesn't care about volume on Binance!
When you think of mining there are two key elements, the amount of energy you can get and at what price!
These two are based on real-life economics, it doesn't matter if Bitcoin is decentralized or centralized or if SpaceX buys or sells coins, the amount of available energy and the price you can burn it for are the ones that dictate everything.

A second look at those countries in the top 10 list and ask yourself, why is barely anyone mining there?
Because cheap energy doesn't mean a huge amount of them, it doesn't mean stability, it doesn't mean that you an afford the capital needed since, well, the price of miners is in dollars, not shit-currencies that devaluate 50% a year, that the infrastructure is almost non-existent, that powercuts are more frequent than normal times, that there is need for constant bribing and so on!

No reason to be intrigued it's the same thing as discussed a year ago
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5405856.0
and it's just a bit of BS moving two values in an excel sheet as many miners have pointed out.

They take the average electricity price and draw calculations, forgetting one important thing, no miner mines at average prices!
And I have to add, no miner mines at consumer price either as they would simply go bankrupt.

If you look strictly at that map you see Mexico scoring twice as cheap as the US, but there are no major farms in Mexico while at least 40% of the hash rate is in the US, and the reason is simply, while that index price has the US at:

Riot does so at 2.5 cents:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1167419/000107997321000537/ex99x1.htm

700% is quite a stretch, isn't it?

You're trying hard to not get it!

Electricity is the most important thing because with basically zero cost you can stay in the game till everyone else collapses. You don't pay for the electricity as you're in some kind of program where you have excess capacity that you can't feed into the grid, you have the generator but you don't have a next-door consumer as your biggest one has moved away or something else, then you don't really give a damn if it goes to 5k!

It's a matter of survivability, Bitcoin can go now back to 40k and you will still see miners losing money as more farms with cheap running costs will push you out of the market. It easily can turn into a  situation where the same guys that were making profits at 20k could go bankrupt at 30k.

As for derivatives, yeah, how about no!

I think there is a tiny difference between minting and transactions and the price those things fetch on the market.
While Bitcoin maxis would have little interest on how much a monkey is valued in some fake auction, what most here are concerned is the amount of "spam" those things do, and if you look at the statistics:

% of BTC Transactions
https://dune.com/queries/2432967/3996835


Number of BRC-20 Inscription Minted
https://dune.com/queries/2433706/3998316


Not that much has changed, one might say it's even worse.

Till I'll be able to create my own review as being on the mercy of a hotel wi-fi for Tor is a pain in the ass, I wanted to point out two things on the review page:


Both links are dead, faucethub.io redirects to faucetgame.com which is up for sale on sedo and Bitcoin-mixer.biz is on saw.com (also a domain broker).

Auch! 

Lol! 

I know it's just 2 hours, 16 blocks but common, let's all agree that forgetting all the tears when running income numbers it will be funny as hell seeing a 20% jump in difference right now. I even lost count, what would that be, like 600k machines?
Now on the serious side, I expect a drop, it just has to be, if not the price the heat:
https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/ercot-issues-texas-weather-watch-expects-18307411.php

5.9 cents per th! Damn!
You guys remember late 2021? 40 cents!

The company was previously called Brainspark.
It got into a development spree, including some amusement parks and a hotel chain, and changed to Clear Leisure.
That went south, they lost a a ton, lawsuits eveything , saw the crypto hype and they became Quantum Blockchain
Technologies PLC.

They have a few companies that were supposed to be mining but they are inactive, like MINER ONE LIMITED,  and a bunch of others, same thing, no fillings no activity, no actual mining gear. So they are probably just trying to get investors on board, fill the pockets and get ready for the next hype, they started this in 2020, it's been 3 years and there isn't one trace of them or one tiny proof they actually have a miner.


Does anyone have an idea why did they mention this? Seems strange!

Just to clarify things!
I wasn't referring to you, but to those who post just to post, the ones that are still doing it even after two people including a mod have stated that this isn't Turkiye, and look, they keep coming! They've read the title and that is for them, they think now Turkiye is the best country for Bitcoin.
Oh, wait, what about Salvador?
And yeah, cleavage and tits sell everything, if this was a 50yo guy saying it would have gotten like minus one hundred views!


People in Argentina and Turkiye and Russia are buying euro and dollars, Salvador had the $ as a currency, Salvador never had an inflation above 6.5% since 2000! Why do you think "they had no option" ?

This thing alone is of no surprise, my previous reaction of anger was to those who pulled others into this, not that I don't understand the ones that think they can game the scam.

We had a period of Ponzi schemes right here on this forum, just go here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=207.3880
and check the titles:


the same game, those that get early double their money the rest lose, and it went like that for years with enough players to be lucrative.


Bruh, this is beyond anything I can describe in words.
To be completely honest I wish I hadn't even read it, I have now a hundred images in my mind I will probably never be able to erase.

Loan Purpose: Personal
Loan Amount: $300
Loan Repay Amount: $330
Loan Repay Date: 09-26
Type of Collateral: none
USDT-TRC20 Address: TVEZXq13ZR2pdepbpvyXzukcSArZhTaxcm

And NO!, I didn't get hacked! 
Drop me a PM if the interest is too low, I just copied the sum from an older post!

Spent a bit of time looking at what could be different and 5 minutes after not finding Waldo on those pics I thought it might be a mistake with 3 million and 3 thousand. But an update after makes more sense, I doubt they will leave even 3k, that's $100k/month without basic KYC.

Now the other thing:


The first service I ever see that mentions Catalonia, like for god's sake, why not Galicia or Basque also? Why not Flanders! But, let's ignore that cause ......what the **** is " Knights of Malta", did I travel back in time by going circling half the globe and it's 1571?


I don't think that DEX ever had a command, they have always been in the shadows of CEX, from MTGox and Bitstamp times CEXs have completely dominated the scene, and, no, fake trading of billions of tokens on shitty Defi platforms don't count. Even counting those Defi makes only 4% against CEX. If we only count true Bitcoin DEX, like Bisq, well, let's not do it as it's one hundred times worse.

I really wanted to stay away from this clusterfuck but well, I fee like saying it

First, I really don't believe there was a "team", and more like a leader that employed a few guys who helped him with minor stuff like customer support or with programming, this didn't look like some organized thing with schedules and so on. The delay between withdrawals that was happening quite often made me in the last weeks go instantly for cash out my notes and I stopped using it for other purposes, I really felt like there was one guy behind that was sleeping for 6 hours doing a bit of work take a nap and then keep processing things.

As for their activity here, the guy knows Bitcointalk, I wouldn't be surprised if he was a user here for a long time, and if he isn't active even right now, let's be real, he did almost perfectly to gain trust, both the mixer itself and the campaign trying to mimic Chipmixer, a manager with good reputation, depositing a few thousands in an escrow, making it look like they are here to stay for years, he knew how to do it, no outsider would. And despite the other red flags he earned more of our trust than he should have, let's just deal with it.

For the scam, I really don't know:
a) They were planning on a long scam to get enough money in their mixing, then delayed the processing and resolving only cases that surfaced, keeping unclaimed money till it went boom,  so selective scamming then full scam.
b) They got enough now and say to themselves they are spending more than they will ever gain
c) The unexpected accident as the guy who is behind this, again, I don't believe it's a team, that multi-sig doesn't matter, he either got in a stupid accident, or got arrested or something else, and the extra guys employed d for support at first responded then saw no news from him and decided it's better to abandon ship out of fear.
d) very low probability, the business was not productive at all, they were losing money, they tried but failed and decided to just drop it and go MIA!

Nobody likes how this turned out, that is obvious, it also means that new services will get a real cold shoulder treatment, but that is what we should have done before acting like my notes my coins.


That's a press release article, unfortunately yahoo doesn't take them down even after being deleted by the original issuers.
https://www.accesswire.com/755660/Bitcoin-Mixer-Offers-Services-Enhancing-Privacy-and-Anonymity-in-Cryptocurrency-Transactions

Btw it was paid by bitcoinmixing(dot)org. which is a scam.

Fortunately, they only link to clearnet, with that down it might deter newbies for searching for the tor link!

A bit of sleep, two coffee sips, and I feel like yeah, I was just paranoid.
Not so much about the BATM and the whole ID thing but what pissed me off was the attitude of those guys, it was like they were laughing knowing what I was trying to do and found it funny or whatever...don't care anymore!


Yeah, that's how a normal guy would have thought and should have reacted also, probably because I'm on vacation and I want to enjoy myself I'm acting like a 10yo.


Yeah, no chance, I'm soon off to packing bags and moving to the next destination, and anyhow I don't want to see their faces anymore.
Thanks for the offer but I'm sitting on a pile of cash wanting coins and not having access to mine, so I'll take the advices above, offer a kidney to Shasan or a piece of liver and just deal with it the easy way with nothing complicated that can again go wrong and give me a headacke again!


Yeah, but what puzzled me is why it hasn't done it the first time, maybe they have some ratio and they let x times with no check-up and only 5 ot 10th time and I just got unlucky? Maybe if I went back inside it wouldn't have asked again? God knows! Can't test it anymore anyhow


Even when I see 5% I think is a rip-off, we're talking deposits here not withdrawals, one of my acquaintances runs a coffee shop that accepts Bitcoin has one of and he customized the fees so you pay only 2% to encourage people to buy coins. Total fuckery that's why I hate BATMS, got charged on forex fees to get cash, pay 2 euros for each ATM withdrawal, 7% tax on bitcoin, 1% lost in bitcoin price since yesterday, 20$ on the taxi...


It gave a warning that I needed to accept that in order to go on with the purchase I had to agree with something, that's when I tapped cancel and bye-bye, I knew what was coming!
And yeah, I just got paid $200 I nearly forgot of so it's not even $400 anymore, I'm not going to run around like a headless chicken for that much.
But a lesson learned, if you deal with crypto, keep more accessible in some form around you especially if you go away for that long.


Yeah, I should have panicked that much, trying to be cool I acted more suspicious, probably these two were laughing cause they recognized me from the day before? And it wasn't a smirk more like being happy they get foreign customers?
I'm not used to staying in the sun for so long, need to chill by a pool with 1001 SPF sunblock and a beer and stop overthinking everything!

So locking this as obvious the answer is number 1.