Ponzi/HYIP schemes are much more likely to collapse than any gambling site. Gambling sites have incentive to stay open because the longer they do, the more money players wager and the more money they stand to make. Sites that open investing to the public usually take a commission on the net profits of investors and make money that way, so there's generally less risk than with things like bitconnect.

I'm only familiar with casinos/dice sites offering investments, but I can tell you that there are a few pretty decent ones that can get you fairly large returns. I'm currently invested in YOLOdice (ref link). Their minimum investment is 0.005 BTC.

Poloniex is pretty dodgy. I've had deposits take waayyyyy too long to get in there, and withdraws that sometimes seem to take days for no reason. I've known people who had to contact support just to get their own coins released from their system when they were mysteriously locked up. I've stayed far away from them since.

Recently Coinhive has been pretty popular with website owners as it allows them to just include a script on their webpage and make money, mining on user's machines often without them knowing. Even more scary is people have been abusing continuous integration services like Travis CI on GitHub, which operate for free and replacing tests with coin mining code which then gets run by the free Travis CI service.

This kind of behavior is only going to hurt Bitcoin in the long run. People are going to hear about the evil websites that slow down and overheat their computer, destroying battery life on laptops. If websites want to move from ads to user mining they need to do it in a transparent way, i.e. a switch in the user's profile/settings that allows them to switch out ads for browser mining. Unfortunately for Travis CI, it may not be so easy for them to stop people from abusing their great service.

What can we do as a community to keep this kind of stuff in check?

Plenty of college kids know about Bitcoin, especially students in computer science related fields.

I don't think they need to give anything away. Free image hosting is a benefit among itself. Sure, it's not imgur but why does it have to be? Direct links to images nearly all work the same.

This is just my opinion but we shouldn't settle for "regulated" any more. That's why we have cryptocurrency, so we don't have to trust anybody.

Amazing news, Ethan. Thank you again for pretty much doing the hard work for us. Looking forward to the (hopefully) free money.

Do you strip the EXIF data from uploaded images? Don't want people accidentally uploading the GPS coordinates of their house for the world to see.

Quantum computing could iirc make cryptography, including ECC weaker (a 4096 bit key would be as easy to break as a 2048 bit key is now). However, if we could get people to agree on it, we could change Bitcoin to use a newer, quantum resistant system.

• If you host something all on Amazon servers yourself, that's not decentralized. That's centralized.
• You have nothing worth investing in. Bitcoin poker already exists, nothing about your idea is new or innovative
• Wordpress? Really?

All I'm getting here is that you don't have anything worth investing in, not an idea, not a project that you've even started, you just want to make a generic online poker game, and have other people pay for it. This isn't an ICO, this is a donation.

To sorta piggy back off this, are there any provably fair slots? All the slots I've seen were made by third party companies and aren't provably fair.

I've had poor experiences with ACH deposits being needlessly delayed by Coinbase in the past. I use Gemini now, which pre-credits your Fiat deposits so that you can trade with them instantly and withdraw your crypto once the deposit clears. I've had much better experiences with them and don't support Coinbases stance on 2x.

I believe the ledger has a method to ensure the hardware was not tampered with, but that doesn't help you if the code itself is generating bad addresses. You should look at Ledger's Is Ledger an open source project article.

Do you think you could fix the problem many people seem to have where the unexpected error occurs upon loading the site until you clear your site data?

Glad to hear you'll be doing that. Do you think you'll be able to do the same with 2x? I.E. will overcoming the technical challenges be worth it?

If anybody had a crystal ball to tell us how the market would react to 2x I'm sure they'll make a fortune, but they don't. I also hate the notion of people that own Bitcoin being called "investors". You're not an investor if you hold any other currency. I realize that some people only buy BTC to hope to see a profit but that's not why Bitcoin exists.

It's nice to invest and see returns on top of the money you make by the bitcoin price rising. And when it's bear market season, it softens the blow a little bit.

I've written a bet verifier for bustadice, albeit with a lot of my own code stolen from previous verifiers. You can find it here

Edit: Just like my other ones, it supports things like URL parameters to link directly to specific bets on the verifier

Edit edit: I've also introduced my chat bot, AMBOT into chat. Still in early stages so could be bugs. Do things like convert between currencies, check the last Bitcoin block and see when a user was last seen.


If a command fails, most of the time AMBOT will send you a PM with a reason, but you must add it as a friend first before you can receive PMs.

Glad to know you've been hitting the same roadblocks as I have. I'd love to figure out how to create a system that's provably fair, for players and investors, real time, and trustless. Not sure if it's possible though...