What happened:: User kii552007_alt posted a thread in Computer Hardware to sell their equipment which they have access to because of their high-quality manufacturing connections that produce top-tier GPUs and Motherboards. Many users have placed orders with this user and none have received their gear. Multiple users have reported suspicious activity, such as requesting multiple payments, delays, fake tracking numbers and disputes that have resulted in promises of refunds. The user has stopped replying in their sales thread for about a week at this point, but there are many users that have been promised their goods will be shipped or have been shipped, yet nobody has received a valid tracking number or a package. This has gone on for too long and I would like to save users that are interested in purchasing equipment the headache and time that would come along with this scam. Scammers Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1326951 - kii552007_alt Reference Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2928797.0Amount Scammed: Final amount unknown as of now, potentially $1000's. Payment Method: Paypal Proof of Payment: Proof of payment would be confirmed through the agreements made public by Buyer & Seller (There are more in the thread, and many in PMs that may be willing to come forward if needed): Started a transaction with seller via PayPal for a couple of cards that are supposed to ship out Friday via EMS; I will document the entirety of the transaction here good or bad.
I confirm I'm trading with this user, I hope this could be a good start for either of us. Thanks. I've ordered a motherboard from this guy as a test, he did say 7-10 days for shipping paid and will document the process to see if anything changes or nothing comes through.
I confirm the order with this member. I just found out we have a more competitive price on MOBO than GPUs. So if there's a need of MOBO, you can contact me as well. Thanks. I advise you to not deal with this user until this dispute is resolved. Hi guys
I did try and purchase some gear off OP. Phil you may recall in your thread when I was asking about different branded cards. The deal fell through.
Here's how it went: I had a thread looking to buy cards and OP responded. After some back and forth I decided to go through with a purchase of 6 cards using PayPal G&S.
After initial payment the payment was returned, it was a larger payment and the funds were in hold in Op's account.
He then invoiced me for 3 separate orders broken down into 3 cards each and one including shipping.
After payment we did communicate daily for 2 days as I tried to verify he placed the order or had the cards. He then contacted me presumably from his shop or the shop he purchases from, saying he had different cards on hand and that they would be a little cheaper, or I could pay a little more and step up to different cards.
This was a second flag for me the first being the returned funds, this one because in the PayPal terms multiple payments for 1 item voids the protection.
I had opted for the cheaper cards and a partial refund.
After this he began to ask where in Canada I was presumably he was thinking of delivering the cards to me, as he said he was coming for a business trip; first time it was mentioned. I told him I wanted the cards shipped.
I heard nothing for 3 days then started a dispute with PayPal. At this poi t OP contacted me and said he couldn't do business with someone like me, even though I said if he could prove shipment or ownership of the cards I would drop the dispute. At this poi t he was also apparently landing in Ottawa.
I received all my funds back through PayPal. So there was no loss in my part. And we parted ways.
Quick update - First batch of item has been shipped out
2nd batch will be handled tomorrow
Says they've been shipped, but nobody has seen their tracking numbers move. I got an EMS number today, tracking just says label created so it’s not actually shipped, but I’m remaining hopeful for now.
He just responded to me by PM saying he was picking up a delivery in a different city and would update the shipping information as soon as he got back. He also linked me some images of the GPUs in hand, but no forum username/date in the pictures, so they could be from anywhere.
Ok so still no movement, little to no response from the seller by PM, and no replies in this thread from him. I was really hoping this was legit but the red flags are becoming too hard to ignore, so guess I will have to file a PayPal dispute today if I don’t see movement on the tracking number. Sigh.  Update:
18/02/2018 I purchased GPU, seller confirmed receiving funds from me on PayPal
23/02/2018 Yesterday, order supposed to be shipped Friday
24/02/2018 Today, I messaged the seller where is my shipping number, waiting for answer.
Feedback left on scammers account. Will remove if this turned to be legit, which I doubt very much.
Also claim opened on PayPal:
I’m still waiting as well. I have an EMS tracking but whether it didn’t ship or it’s just EMS not tracking properly I don’t know yet. All I can do is wait a bit and see what happens. I already have paypal claim in and will cancel it if I receive cards.
Interesting, on the day I decided to order the motherboard, he refunded me.. However it takes 7 days for the refund to come through once you WITHDRAW into your bank account.
He had told me that he has not withdrawn the money, if he didn't withdraw the money why did paypal now say it's going to take 7 + days for a refund?
Fishy. Glad he refunded me anyways.
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OP has taken multiple orders from multiple users, nobody has seen their order shipped. I've left feedback on their profile and hopefully we can get a DT member to do the same. OP's last post was over 5-days ago, yet they were active on the forum yesterday. It is clear, in my opinion, they are avoiding this thread and trying to lead users on for a bit longer through PM. Multiple people have gotten the same run around story, about tracking numbers and what not, yet the seller is absurdly late on delivering what they are promising without explanation.
If anybody has yet to file a dispute I would highly encourage you to do so at this point.
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Tell me if someone from forum seen a low rank member here but given with positive trust.
I`ll be glad to know the info how they got it (From quality post, informative post, or humorous post).
This is pretty disgusting. You are a low-ranking member, asking if there are any low-ranking members that have received positive trust for some type of post so that you can hopefully copy what they've done in an attempt to farm trust yourself. When you're basically asking "How can I earn trust?" it puts up red flags for everybody, because our response is going to be "Why?"; there is no good reason or explanation. Anything you want to do on this site is possible without trust, so why are you even asking? |
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I have a couple different sales threads, but I do my best not to bump them (especially the ones on the same board) at the same time. I generally try to space them out, so that I don't clutter a board exactly as you've pointed out. I would have no problem with there being some more stringent guidelines on this sort of thing.
I don't think 1 is the appropriate number for every board, since some people sell goods of varied categories. This should apply to more than the currency exchange board, it should also apply to the lending section and some others. I would think this wouldn't be fair for the auctions board, but we could change the rules about bumping. It might be more reasonable that you are not allowed to bump more than 1 thread every 4-hours and never the same one more than once a day.
The way it is now allows scammers, spammers or people that are just desperate to get their threads noticed free reign over any board as long as their topics/goods are not identical.
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I will probably end up making a "To-merit" list and submitting it to various people such as Monbux that have posted within the thread that they would be happy meriting people if I run short. I'm running short, so the "To-Merit" list will probably become the 2nd post. If you're really impressive, I'll even ask a couple of the merit sources I know to review your under merited posts, no guarantee on that though, because they are their own people and I can't speak for them.
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What’s the risk of not doing so immediately? I’m not too familiar with PayPal scams, was under the impression you had 180 days buyer protection?  As Steamtyme said, mostly time is what you will lose, but time is money and money/investments compound as time passes. Time is too costly to waste; as far as PayPal is concerned though, they are on the buyer's side, especially if multiple disputes arise simultaneously. There is no rush to file a dispute, and in fact PayPal would probably see a few extra days as generous on your behalf; this shows you were willing to give the "merchant" extra time to resolve any issues that may have arisen on their side. If I had to guess, OP probably just wanted funds in their PayPal to attempt to withdraw ASAP so that it popped into their bank account. This way once thee disputes are settled, their PayPal will be negative, the buyer gets their funds back and OP has funds in their bank account. The outcome is that OP (assuming this is the case) will have more funds and the buyer will have less time. They even could've tried using their PayPal as a self-escrow to get the funds into another PayPal account, freezing/negative on the "escrow" account. |
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In my opinion. the weakness of POW is that it doesn't allow many individuals to join the network with the increases of network difficulty.
So having hashrates controlled by minority of people isn't a good thing, and we need a better solution.
There is saying that goes something like "Capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others." That means something like, sometimes we just don't have a better solution. POW is bad for the environment, and keeps regular users away from mining, but I can't imagine a better system for security. I don't know if there will ever be a point where more than a minority of users will be miners, so I don't necessarily agree this this is a problem warranting a solution. Look up the Pareto distribution and you will see that it is universal that the minority of participants will do all of the work and reap all of the reward. |
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I'd like to officially withdraw my interest in even knowing what price you'd say for motherboards. It seems to only make sense if I wait to even discuss anything, because at this point it seems as though there are many people that have placed orders. All I can do is wait to see how they turn out; a few people are claiming to have tracking numbers, but they have not shipped yet and were told they would ship Friday. I would say if there is no movement on the tracking number by Monday, and you have not heard from the seller a good reason why, then I personally would begin the dispute process; better sooner than later.
I hope I hear good outcomes, please everyone that has posted their orders publicly keep us updated or I am to assume that your orders are going well.
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If you have a VPS lying around, I'll build a script that gives you an English-only version of patrol, renewed every 5 minutes. I meant spam like AlexPromotion, spamming thousands of English posts all over the forum. You can read it in English even if it's posted on Chinese boards. I don't have a VPS lying around per-se, but I still might take you up on that offer. I'm a bit illiterate about this kind of thing, but it would be really damn helpful to have that as a resource at my disposal. You are taking me to school about things I'm failing to consider. I hadn't even thought about English posts in other language sections. I'll try patrolling with all of the unknown languages enabled before we go through all of the work of setting it up your way; see if I can catch some of the people you're describing/linking. I suppose, if nobody else has anything to add I'll end up locking the topic; since there are many things I had not considered and many solutions that are available. I'll lock this later tonight if nobody has anything to add. |
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As the increasing of capital required to mine, the Bitcoin should as well rise, or else there is no profit for the miners. Will this become price manipulation by miners?
The capital required to mine increases as the difficulty of mining increases. The difficulty of mining increases with the speed at which blocks are mined/solved, which is proportional to (I think) the computational power being put into the network. So, Bitcoin has not traditionally correlated with difficulty otherwise we would be pretty consistently rising without the significant dips we've been seeing. The profit for the miners would be the block reward, even if there were no transaction fees (I think?). Though, powerful miners and developers still stand as our biggest weakness when it comes to manipulation in many forms. They would be able to manipulate the progression of Bitcoin, indirectly affect the prices of transaction fees and transaction confirmation times among many other things. If miners are holding most of the Bitcoin supply, it is pretty easy for them to manipulate the price to ensure their profitability, this might make Bitcoin overpriced, creating illusion for other buyer and ultimately stealing their money. Not sure if this is healthy for Bitcoin network.
I actually have no clue what percentage of the supply miners are currently holding. I'd be willing to bet that it is indeed significant enough for them to dump coins and cause a crash. We should look at the criteria and parameters for development/developers and miners being able to manipulate and operate for their own gain rather than the health and longevity of Bitcoin. |
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I too was just guessing.
Well, at least we're trying to get closer to understanding what's going on. The exclusions in the downloading would help to some degree, but it still remains inconvenient (maybe I'm being unduly whiny). Certain spammers spam all boards, those can be spotted on patrol without being able to read other posts on those boards.
I had not considered that, but I'm wondering if it would be appropriate for me to report posts that I believe to be spam, simply because they are from a spammer; since, even if it is across boards I cannot read the other languages, so it might not be fair to assume this is spam. I would just feel more comfortable reporting/patrolling only those posts which I can understand. |
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I've noticed there are many people that come back to the thread and have no clue whether or not they've been reviewed; not sure how this happens, since I normally plaster your name into a post before I update it and until recently I kept all of the denials in the OP. Ideas on how to combat this?
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I'm actually really impressed that our merit stats continue to rise the way they are. Payment received, that makes week 3 for me.
I didn't manage to catch up to LoyceV this week, but I did manage to report over 100-posts this week with 100% accuracy.
Thanks DarkStar_ and good work everyone else, I always enjoy my conversations with other ChipMixer participants.
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Imo, to increase the development speed and advance the technology, users should be the majority in the network rather than miners, users are being incentived to use a better currency, while miners are being incentived to make money.
I don't think that regular-users will ever be the majority of the network power, because like you said there simply is no incentive for them to acquire this much power, while there is endless incentive for the miners to hoard this power. I think we need to make mining a more specialized niche, where more transactions are being processed, the blocksize is larger and the equipment for mining becomes increasingly specialized, expensive, yet competitive. As long as there is profit in mining there will be incentive to competitively mine and so long as this is the case I believe there will be sufficient decentralization to maintain the network satisfactorily. Satoshi themselves was speaking of this in their original e-mails; they mention that fewer and fewer people would be running full-nodes or mining blocks as Bitcoin was adopted to a greater extent. They explained that there simply is no need for this and in doing so it doesn't actually increase decentralization effectively. It's worth a read if you haven't already, but we can maintain decentralization with the current framework without attempting to force resource equality. |
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In Satoshi's old e-mails they imply that handling as many transactions as Visa should not be a problem.
What does this imply about the development of Bitcoin?
Specifically, what is one parameter that would need to be changed and to what value to accommodate such heavy transaction flow?
Satoshi implies that handling the amount of transactions that Visa processes should not be a problem in time because it was expected that computing power would keep pace with network and transaction growth. There were concerns with blocksize limits at the time because the bigger they got the more power that would be required with both upload steams (to broadcast to the network) and computing power (to process the transactions). The blocklimit was set so that mining operations could not out-power single person operations.
Satoshi's emails re transaction processing imply that higher block limits were anticipated and were an expected development of bitcoin. This is controversial as a number of people see off chain scaling as a better method instead of increasing block size.
At 150,000,000 transactions a day that makes 1,041,667 per block (given it can be mined in 10m), and with a transcation size of around 1kb it would need to be just over 1gb. My understanding is that upload/download speeds should be able to keep pace with this size.
I apologize for taking so long to reply and merit you. I've been running around like a chicken with their head cut-off, very busy trying to get a small bitcoin mining operation started among other things. Your numbers are a little different from mine, but I was going off of the # of transactions that were happening back then, so I'll give it to you. Your reasoning, logic and everything else arrives you at the right conclusion. It seems like pugman has been running the questions for now, so I won't hop in the way; just wanted to give credit where it is due. Correct, Merited I'll post another question when Pugman seems stumped, out of ideas or requests for me to do so. |
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All of your posts read like an economic conversation; they are decently interesting to read, but they just aren't the type of posts I'm looking to merit. All of your submissions are buried deep inside a mega-thread; nobody is going to read them, nobody is going to merit them, and you're just wasting your own time. 1000th+ replies that just repeat information already in the thread are not helpful. None of these will be getting merit from me. The same thing goes for your posts, they all just read like economic conversations. There is nothing wrong with this, but this is not the type of post I will be meriting at this point. At least you aren't posting in mega-threads from what I can see in these submissions. None of these will be getting merit from me. There were 3 or so of your submissions that I wanted to merit, but they just seemed like they were lacking something in my opinion. I was speaking about Bitcoin's energy usage for mining the other day, but it just isn't a conversation worth meriting unless there is a revolutionary idea proposed along with it. These are really good reads though, I've watched the thread and if I have to link/reference any of them I will throw you a merit in the future. These have all received some kind of merit and they mostly seem to be an economic conversation as I have refused to merit people for all day. I had fun reading them, but they just don't seem to fit the bill for what I'm looking to merit. Maybe I'm being extra picky today or something, but please feel free to re-submit. |
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I think the whole point of patrol is to see all posts. I must misunderstand the purpose of the Patrol board then. I don't see what good it does anybody to see boards/posts they cannot read or understand; although, I've been wrong before and I could easily be missing an important nuance of the system. I thought the point was to patrol the posts of newbies to see who was deserving a report and now to potentially see who is deserving of a merit. This cannot be effectively done if 80% of the board is foreign languages. This removes all posts in Разное from my downloaded patrol.html, and creates a new file patrol2.html. If you make a list of all boards you want to exclude, you can strip all unknown languages from your local patrol.html. This is a helpful solution, but it is a lot of extra work for something I feel should already be implemented. My internet connection is horrendous, so every page I load is a chore and process. Downloading the page would longer than I'd like. Is the purpose of the patrol board contingent upon being able to see posts one cannot understand or adequately patrol? |
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I actually asked the same thing a few days back. There is a thread dedicated to reporting the types of people and posts you are talking about. If you post the proof and report them in this thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2855895.0 , then there will be action taken. archive.is their posts, for sure. People get banned for re-posting the same thing as another user. Copy + Pasting is highly actionable in our spam-ridden environment. |
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Both of these submissions just fall flat for me. It looks like you put very minimal effort in actually trying to get the word out about these incidents. I would need further explanation, clarification, etc. before I would consider giving either of these a merit. This just reads like an economic conversation, but if anybody was going to merit you I would assume it to come from the person you're speaking with. I didn't take away any significant information from the post, so I'm not sure how helpful anyone will be able to find it. 2000th+ reply in a mega-thread and it already has received a merit. This will not receive a merit from me, didn't even read it. While that was an interesting thread to read through. I'm failing to see the implications or conclusions that should be drawn from the information presented. Besides, it appears that post has received a good chunk of merit, and so I wouldn't say it is under merited by any stretch. You made this easy for me; all I have to do was click pretty quickly through your posts to see, Mega-Thread, Mega-Thread, One-line opinion, Mega-thread, I won't be giving merit to any of these. '
I am going to bed, and I am considering all previous submissions complete. I know I missed people, but I got like 95% of you and it got pretty chaotic as I ended up going through it in a sloppy disorganized manner. If I missed you, re-submit your posts below |
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All of your posts are just regular conversation, opinion and things that have been said many times before. I won't be giving you merit for these submissions. Your first submission is simply sharing your opinion on an issue. This is just regular conversation and not something I merit generally. Your second post is the 200th+ post in a mega-thread, as are multiple other of your submissions. No merit. Your post is very pleasant and helpful, but it appears that it has already received the merit that would be appropriate for a post such as this. Keep up the good work, but no additional merit from me at this point. Your post is the 900th+ Post in a mega-thread so I didn't even bother to read it. Seems like you've already received merit for this post. I don't believe this post is under-merited. You asked a question, got some good answers and then updated OP with your answer. I'm surprised you received merit for this, but I won't be adding to it. |
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