I'm not entirely against that idea, but the point of arbitration in the real world is that it's legally binding.  A lot of scams here are for relatively trivial amounts and arbitration seems like an absurd amount of effort for the mere awarding of a tag (which most scammers don't care about anyway).  It seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity and expense for transactions which aren't high value.

I'm also somewhat against this forum being the policeman for the entire Bitcoin economy.  We've recently seen a thread in the scam forum regarding a BTCJam transaction and I'm not sure that this forum should consider awarding tags on the basis of activity which hasn't taken place here.

If the scammer tag process is too laborious, it's not much use - it warns people after the horse has well and truly bolted.  But I also think a trend is developing where people make little effort to actually resolve issues before posting scammer accusation threads and expect to have the tag apllied on the basis of little or no evidence.

If we're going to make any changes to the way we deal with scammers in this forum, I think we need to review the whole thing and decide whether the forum should play any active role in policing scammers and to what extent. 

It's been suggested before, and maybe it's time to revisit the idea of splitting Marketplace off from the forums proper.

Veridian part owns Dwolla so they have no reason not to trust it's transactions - they're essentially moving around funds already under their control.  Other banks/credit unions have no reason to trust the system.

People constantly try to warn others in threads where likely scams are happening and get told to "stop trolling".

The scammer forum is pretty much for after the fact warnings and having glanced at the crap it's filled with now, it's become pretty much useless.

Introducing a post/time threshold for certain types of posts would increase the effort required to start trolling for victims.  I'm hesitant to use SomethingAwful as a reference point, but the requirement that you must be a member for 7  months before you can sell something on their SAMart forum helps make scammers look elsewhere for easy pickings. 

You're not going to stop scammers looking for victims.  You can only exert some measure of control over how easy it is for them to find them here.

It would also be a shame if the emergence of a new player in the ASIC market doesn't lead to more competition and more vendors to choose from.  This is a golden opportunity for vendors to emerge who have short order to delivery times and for the now ridiculous never-ending pre-order saga to die a far overdue death.  It would be a shame if it's squandered on merely reinforcing the status quo.

Look how many previously trusted community members now wear the scammer tag.  People need to stop being so open-minded that their brains fall out.  This community vouching for the trustworthiness of its members hasn't worked too well so far and there's no reason to believe it would in the future.  It's a role/responsibility it should emphatically reject.

Or on an exchange, for that matter.

It went offline a while back and came back up.  The forum and the website are both down now, though.

It's BTCJam.  Neither defaults nor people violating ToS and contacting defaulters directly are unexpected.

What do you suggest changing it to which won't be breakable with quantum computing (assuming anyone cared to throw quantum computing resources at breaking it in the first place)?

Well nobody's spending $100,000 on mining hardware or buying BTC at USD 40+ just so they can buy a pair of shoes with Bitcoin, that's for sure.

What an interesting way for the OP to boycott BFL.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/1337-can-i-get-free-sc.html

 

No, it's an important point which I think you're right to raise.  BFL have never said that all pre-order money remains untouched, only that it wasn't being used to fund development.  They could very easily clarify whether or not pre-order funds have been untouched except for refunds if they wanted to (tired, poor grammar).

Your powers of inference are getting shaky Phin.  Stating that no pre-order funds were used for development in no way implies that they haven't been used for other expenses or that they're quarantined.

Let's hope the transition of their customers to CoinLab has considerably less hiccups than their trading engine has been having lately.  There's a hell of a lot of people who need to agree to CoinLab's ToS between now and the 29th if that transition is to go smoothly.

Nobody's disagreeing that BFL has contravened this regulation, but it still only entitles customers to a refund. 

Exactly.  And if escalating fees are the only way it can deal with large volumes of transactions, then it's going to be pretty useless for P2P micro-payments, rivalling PayPal, or anything else - you might as well just use your credit card or bank transfers and spare yourself the hassle of acquiring Bitcoin and dealing with extreme volatility.  Bitcoin needs to be able to process massive volumes of transactions in real time in order to be viable as a payment protocol.  Delaying the problem by cutting out trivial transactions isn't a solution - especially when gambling is one of Bitcoin's growth industries.

If I recall correctly, I joined the forums when about 2 million BTC had been mined and Satoshi had already vanished from public life before then.  Yes, it's possible that he's continued to acquire BTC at every opportunity but it's also possible that he gave away a substantial amount when they were worth nothing, as did other early adopters, and/or sold some of his BTC.

PayPal does have a policy relating to processing transactions for the sale of digital currencies.  I can't see that policy extending cover anything and everything Bitcoin related, though.  If they intervened here, it would be more likely to be because products haven't been delivered in a timely manner than because the hardware itself is Bitcoin related (there's nothing stopping you using PayPal to sell Bitcoin T-shirts, for instance).  Again, this isn't likely to happen unless customers open disputes with PayPal and they have no incentive to do that while BFL is honouring refund requests.


It's precisely this "must have an ASIC ASAP" attitude which allows BFL to do what it's doing.  People could cancel their orders/hold off ordering until BFL has actually delivered and closed the order/delivery time gap but they want to be "in on the ground floor of the next big thing".  BFL exploits that just as pirate did, but at the end of the day the choice to hang in there is being made by BFL customers - their fear of missing a "once in a lifetime chance" is greater than their fear of being screwed by BFL.  Nobody "needs" an ASIC right now just as no-one "needed" to give their BTC to pirate.  At the end of the day, people are responsible for their own bad choices even when those bad choices have been encouraged by others. 

Hell, you don't even hear BFL customers complaining that the timeline between delivery of Batch 1 and the bulk order (which would have given early adopters a significant advantage) has been compressed any more - lots of them are planning to order more units and they want those units sooner rather than later even if it means hash rate will climb much faster than under the original timeline.

People developed these during the volatility of 2011.  It might not be much use given the ridiculous lag time MtGox has been experiencing lately when things get volatile. 

I'm fucked if I know what customer service is so busy with given that they should have been spending most of their time on putting units in boxes and shipping them by now.