I don't think the conversation itself is fictional. The writing styles of the 2 users are too different, and the OP is not clever enough to take that into consideration. Even if he/she was, it wouldn't matter since his/her proficiency in the English language is clearly lacking to begin with. However, he/she tried to bolster his/her image by claiming that it was him/her who spotted the scammer and that he/she singlehandedly stopped that person from performing any further malicious acts. That is obviously not true since a trusted Bitcointalk user had already exposed that scammer beforehand, a fact which was noted in the actual conversation. There was no need to doubly confirm the intentions of that scammer, and the OP did not contribute any new information to the community. Also, since we are not living in the Sesame Street universe, the scammer would obviously not stop scamming just because he/she was ordered not to do so by some random user who fancies himself/herself an online superhero. However, despite all that, the OP kept insisting that he/she had done the community a favor and deserved to have his/her slate wiped clean, which would essentially give him/her a greater latitude in attempting more half-baked scams.

You seem to be missing the point of decentralization. In addition to having no central entity control the generation, distribution and destruction of Bitcoins, decentralization also allows the supporters and users of Bitcoin to decide amongst themselves how to determine the validity of blocks and transactions. If necessary, the Bitcoin protocol can be modified to ignore any entity involved with any form of malicious attack, leaving the attackers with a useless fork of Bitcoin. Also, if there should come a time that a single entity were to become powerful enough to acquire absolute monopolistic control over the Internet speed of every single computer in the world, I highly doubt that the first thing on anyone's mind would be "what will happen to Bitcoin?"

How much do you know about Bitcoin? Have you even read the whitepaper yet?

Vod will never remove it, and he really shouldn't. I'm actually surprised that your trust rating is not yet completely wrecked considering how many times you've tried to scam here. You tried to start a poorly thought out ponzi scheme. You tried to buy a gaming PC when your numerous loan requests made it extremely clear to everyone that you would be unable to pay for it. You tried to scam people for thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins by claiming to have found buried treasure on a private island jointly owned by your and your friend's family. You tried to get people to amend your trust rating by pretending to expose a scammer that a reputable member had already exposed before. Did I miss anything?

TLDR: You are a wannabe scammer. Learn to live with your red trust rating.

I have never needed to look for a Mac alternative myself since I always save my files on USB drives if I have to work on a Mac. Try this list. As always, please do your due diligence on any software that you intend to use. Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.

There's no need to pull out your hard drive. A well-known software like Recuva from a trusted company like Piriform can easily recover your soft-deleted files within 5 minutes. Do your due diligence on the software if you feel the need to, but I've personally never found any reason to distrust it. You need to minimize the usage of your computer before you are able to recover your file though, since extremely bad luck can still allow a stray file to overwrite a deleted file no matter how large your hard drive is.

That password is just for the deleted wallet. Any new wallet that you create will not contain your deleted addresses, so re-using that same password will not bring back your Bitcoins. Assuming that you didn't perform a Gutmann wipe on your wallet.dat file, then I highly suggest using a file recovery software to recover it.

That's not unfair. You are judged by what you do and how you behave. You are asking to borrow money which you plan to invest on a financial endeavour with a less than 0.01% chance of producing an ROI. In addition, you are asking for this loan from behind a wall of near-anonymity and without risking any collateral. No one is giving you "a bad rep" but yourself.

In reality, you don't even need to keep a wallet.dat file if you just need a cold storage Bitcoin address. Storing your cold storage address on a clean computer that has never been connected to the Internet is indeed a secure solution, but it's much less secure than not having a digital copy of your wallet at all. Since you won't be touching the funds on that address anyway (at least not for the foreseeable future), there is no reason to make it accessible to any Bitcoin client. Personally, what I would do is extract the private key of a newly generated address and write it down on a piece of paper. I would then store that piece of paper somewhere safe. But for most intents and purposes, assuming that you are not a high value target, then yes, your solution is secure enough.

Those Bitcoins were not given for free. They were purchased and paid for by the legal entity who won the auction. There was no extraneous luck involved there. If you had enough liquid assets to trade for those Bitcoins, then you could have made a bid for them too. Acquiring those Bitcoins were no different from acquiring stocks of a profitable corporation via auction.

I think the point of contention is not the fact that he/she might be illegally selling keys, but that he/she might be doing that and yet is telling his/her buyers that that isn't the case. Even in a capitalist market, scams and fraudulent businesses are not and should not be tolerated.

The following quote is taken directly from Microsoft's website:


The actual page is here.

When in doubt, you can always contact a Microsoft representative and ask them directly.

We're not really making up new terms though. We are simply affixing already established metric prefixes to the units that we already know in order to distinguish their denomination. Here is a link to a few common metric prefixes. As you can see, calling an amount a centibitcoin is no different from calling a hundredth of a dollar a cent. We can also call it a megasatoshi.

As far as wallet standards go, using different standard units is indeed an annoyance. However, as long as people understand how much a unit is as opposed to a satoshi, then there really shouldn't be a problem. It's not like a satoshi will be worth 0.01 USD anytime soon, so we won't be needing a new unit beyond it.

As far as I can tell, the only ones who have declared their participation so far are myself and another person who is not using an approved username (and is therefore not part of the competition). Until more people post their usernames, I don't think we'll be needing to keep a ranking list anytime soon.

Do you have a new username for this contest yet?

The OP is looking for someone to clone the script used by the site for him/her, not for the actual script used by the site to be modified. His/Her request has nothing to do with the aforementioned site itself.

This might be a decent idea if a way is implemented to curb malicious entities from abusing it. For example, if this feature is activated for Full Members and higher only, then griefers would either need to spend time or money to farm accounts gifted with this privilege. If that is not enough, then increase the requirement to having received no negative feedback from anyone on the default trust hierarchy.

Unfortunately, your chances of obtaining a loan of that magnitude without any acceptable collateral is close to zero. As with anything in life, there exists a very miniscule chance that someone might take a chance on you, but I am highly doubtful of that happening. Information concerning what constitutes an acceptable collateral for a loan can be found on this thread.

Frankly, I would recommend just waiting for your funds to get cleared. You just want to purchase something from a game anyway.

That's actually a very good way of looking at it, and a very apt description. Truly, the less trust required of you, the more trustworthy you appear to be. In theory, that is how interactions involving Bitcoin should be considering that Bitcoin is a trustless protocol that relies heavily on transparency and openness. (Although, weirdly enough, people are more cautious online against thieves stealing their measly 0.01 Bitcoin than they are against possible identity thieves and sexual predators.)

I'm confused now as well actually. He/She keeps saying that proof of legitimacy will be provided to "others" for free if they ask for it, but not to anyone who asks for it.

I say just direct a Microsoft representative to his/her thread. Microsoft, the BBB and the seller's government can sort out the whole issue of legitimacy themselves.

I'm not sure how bumming money for drugs from complete strangers and doing nothing productive benefits the planet. Would you care to expand on that?

Just have one of his/her "happy customers" ask Microsoft if the licenses are legitimate. Microsoft can easily tell if those licenses are pirated or are NFR. I'm pretty sure that a customer who cares about purchasing legitimate keys would not object to finding out if the key he/she just purchased was indeed legitimate. Name-calling and speculation are really pointless when you can easily contact one of his/her buyers and put the issue to rest once and for all.