Illegal is relative as you stated. With only a few exceptions, people selling/buying something illegal in the US, located in Canada are allowed to do so. Hacked/Stolen accounts are essentially illegal everywhere. That said, I'm looking through the trashcan section looking for the thread in question, and I see a ton of similar threads, you are by no means the only one.


*edit* On a side note, I don't see your thread in the trashcan or in your post history? How long ago was it deleted?

The only way to recover an account is with a signed Bitcoin message or possibly PGP that is related to the account. If you ever posted your Bitcoin address, or sent someone a PM or something with a Bitcoin address you have control of, you can use that.

DT is not a unified front. For example, I care very little about certain things that others have very strong feelings on the matter, such as account selling and ponzi schemes. I'm pretty much of the opinion that as long as you have transparency, no service is wrong, even if its essentially just a can looking or handouts because of  how bad the terms are. (Though begging is against forum rules)

If Lauda cares about buying/selling accounts and they leave you a negative for buying/selling accounts, only people who care about buying/selling accounts will value Lauda's opinion. I however, who typically wouldn't care would disregard the comment, unless there was additional substance that made me care.

If you aren't doing anything shady, don't worry about it. People deal with who they want to deal with. I might have an extreme prejudice against anyone who speaks gaelic, and refuse to trade with anyone who can speak it. My opinion would then only matter to those who share a similar belief. ( I don't by the way, though I suppose I might be a little jealous)

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, the ban has more to do with the spam and threats. There are relatively few things you can do here to earn yourself a ban. Essentially it boils down to

1) Making the forum more difficult to read for others
2) Threats/Criminal activity
3) Dont post Malware

Most of the rules fall under those categories in one way or another, with the vast majority being spamming/advertising that makes the forum more difficult to read for others. The most beloved and legitimate services can still have their owners banned if they don't follow the relatively straightforward rules. The less straightforward rules typically have a lot more leniency, more warnings, less ban time, etc.

I wouldn't say your outlook is positive.

As expected, the mold didn't hold up too well. It kind of lost detail before I could even make casts in it from stress fractures. That said, I didn't follow the proper heating procedures of the investment plaster, so its not a huge surprise. I'm working on casting a silver ring right now, I'd show pictures, but the mold is in my furnace already. Hopefully tomorrow I'll actually have something to show. Currently working on finalizing a design for a semi Bitcoin related thing that I want myself, so others may as well. Will post pictures tomorrow.

It really depends on your definition of "a collapse scenario" are we talking fiat currency collapse of a single country, a global collapse of fiat currencies, a single country/global collapse of government systems due to wide scale emergency like you see in horror movies, etc?

First of all, Bitcoin/digital currencies are still very much in their infancy. Right now, its all a proof of concept. If you want to claim that digital currencies are stable enough to overtake the traditional fiat system, or replace them in case of some major global issue, I would disagree with that, and I'm speaking as someone who is a huge fan of cryptocurrencies. If you think in a scenario major enough to interrupt global economies/governments, that people will continue to keep network infrastructure maintained and the blockchain moving along, I'd beg to differ. Digital currencies heavily rely on major communication services and the power grid which would be disrupted in a global catastrophe. Things that are not necessary if you are trying to survive. In addition, if you take development and stagnate it because the Bitcoin dev teams are busy trying to keep the wolves out of their chicken coops, best case scenario, Bitcoin would be put on a backburner until things restore themselves.

Money is only a thing if everyone can easily accept it. Otherwise we go back to direct commodity trading. If you are starving, a can of beans is worth more to you than a pound of gold if no one is willing to trade you their beans. Bitcoin is relatively difficult to get into even today. You need a couple hundred dollar smartphone or laptop at the very least, electricity, internet connection, and relatively elevated technical knowledge. It would become near impossible to use under certain situations. Gold has been a standard of exchange world wide, so I imagine that if wouldn't lose that status for no reason. Silver is very heavily involved in medicine, antibiotics, etc, so I think it would fare pretty well as well. Not sure how useful Rhodium would be, but metals would likely stay useful enough to be a universal currency.

If we are talking about a collapse situation where trust is lost in government currencies, and they collapse but there is no major chaos, I think Bitcoin and metals will do pretty well. Otherwise, I'd invest in Solar cells, copper/silver/gold, steel, gun powder, medicines, and food/water.


*edit*

As a side note, government confiscation of metals is something that shady coin dealers try to threaten metal newbies with to get them to buy higher premium lower metal content collectible stuff that they make higher margins on. Its not going to happen, enforcement would be wayyyyy too difficult, and it would be incredibly dangerous to try and enforce. Even when gold was "confiscated" in the 1933 it was to essentially invalidate gold certificates. It didn't really stop too many people from holding gold, otherwise you wouldn't see any pre 1933 gold coins in circulation.

Newegg accepts Bitcoins, thats probably the safest way to go.

If they could get here in time for Christmas, that would be preferable, if not its not a big deal. I'll shoot you a PM in a bit.

Mold didn't turn out too bad, will update this post after I pour, hopefully get the piece out without breaking the mold, and then how it looks when its done/finished.

I just remember talking about the survey being bullshit after friends took it. The most obvious flaw, was that they characterized all things as sexual assault. Regretting having sex with someone the next day, but being of complete sound mind at the time and consenting is considered sexual assault now? There were some iffy questions on there as well, mainly alcohol related stuff. I suppose its really up for debate after how much liquor can someone truly legally consent to something. I dont remember what factor that played, but I wouldn't be surprised if they considered any sexual relations after any quantity of alcohol as rape.

all men had a mandatory ~3 hour lecture about it afterwards.


TLDR: The study was extremely flawed, and its just good shocknews. Does rape culture exist? Maybe, but the study referenced was complete trash and should be tossed out and redone by competent people without an agenda. I'm not sure what their agenda would have been in publishing the misleading study, but I refuse to believe that anyone is as incompetent as those who made the survey and scored it.

I'm also interested in placing an order. Which bars do you have available right now? I see the four that you have listed, but noticed you didn't have the pack available, which is why I'm asking.

I'm interested in 8-20 bars. I love giving high quality food gifts, because a lot of people I give them to have never had any non-US trash chocolate.

Not to make light of those who actually are victims, but that survey was absolute bullshit. The study referenced (or at least one of them) was done at my University (The University of Maryland) and a few of my friends actually took the survey that gave the 1 in 5 figures.

One of the questions was if you had ever had sexual activity with someone and then regretted it the next day, and that counted that as sexual assault/rape. Another was if you had hooked up with someone under the influence of alcohol, with which you wouldn't have otherwise. That also constituted sexual assault.

So I know its late for a daily update, but I had some buddies over for a fire, a few cocktails, and some blast furnace action, and I surprisingly made a lot of progress today.

I printed out this:



Alloyed a kilogram of Argentium 97% silver, 2% Germanium 1% copper:




And I made a mold out of jewelry grade investment casting powder, essentially fancy concrete. Placed the 3D printed Seahorse inside of it, and set the mold in the fire overnight. Tomorrow morning, the mold should be fired and ready to use. The plastic has already melted out of the mold leaving a perfect seahorse shaped crevice in the plaster. Just need to pour it in the top and see how it goes!

I'd have a picture of that as well, but my phone died, so I'll post it tomorrow morning. What this is is a proof of concept. Custom molds are very very expensive. The investment powder is expensive as well, but its fairly workable and would be super convenient for mold making. However, when lost wax casting - A jewelry creation method that I'm essentially doing, the mold is normally cracked open, so its a one time use. If I can pour multiple seahorses before the mold degrades and loses detail, that is a proof of concept that I'll be able to produce low premium high detail pieces. If I have to make each coin one at a time, they will be higher premium and I'll put a lot more effort into making them SUPER high quality to justify the price and time spent making the molds. If this works out, my options are greatly widened.

I ordered another phone a few days ago, and it arrived today for that very purpose. Didn't use escrow this time, and once again Magicphone delivered. Still no throttling, data caps, or service shutoff on my first magic phone.

As a side note, I tried the phone in Eastern Canada, and didn't have a signal. To be fair though, it was a pretty remote area and there wasn't much cell phone service to begin with.

I'll look into these as well. I'm just wondering if you actually believe in the aether, flat earth, motionless earth, etc, or if you are just curiously looking into the possibilities of phenomenon found from prominent experiments? I absolutely don't reject the idea that you should always question anomalies, if we didn't we wouldn't ever discover new things, but if you do actually believe in the contrarian points of view, I'm genuinely interested why.

As I said, I haven't looked into the cases you recommended I look at yet, and I intend to, but whats great about science, is that its typically mostly absolute, and repeatable. I can probably list 50,000 ways to prove that the earth is round, it is in motion, and that there is likely no aether (that last one I'll put a question mark by, because there could be some medium of interference in the atmosphere which we could call aether). A good portion of them that you can verify for yourself with cheap and simple experiments. If you ever read a lot of posts by flat earthers, they are absolutely ridiculous, and rely heavily on semi logic. Taking bits of conclusive data that progresses their point of view, and rejecting the parts of the same experiments that work against it.

I used to write out this math expression that stated a+b = a^2 + b^2 and solved it algebraically to prove it was true. It had a few conditions, but the algebra stated that it was true. It used to annoy the hell out of my elementary/middle school math teachers, because they couldn't disprove it. After taking differential equations, I figured out that the trick was that half way through, I was using an identity for linear transformations, but the expression was affine rather than linear. It was something like a 50 step problem to setup, no one would notice that I was making a misleading step, because typically it would have been true, except for a tiny detail that most people don't think about. I find that a lot of these countertheory explanations use similar tricks to mislead people.

I'll start by saying, no one really knows what light is. Everyone including Einstein knew that Relativity is not 100% correct, there are a number of experiments that find fundamental flaws in relativity, however the degree of error is so minor, they haven't be consequential to physics applications thus far. Relativity is currently the closest model we have today, but there are some pieces that we are missing about light. Relatively doesn't account for light having momentum but no mass, no mass, but being effected by gravity, etc (relativistic mass aside). The current theory that light is a photon is to some degree wrong. The Aether theories are pretty fundamentally incorrect though. The vast majority of them were based on the classical physics assumption that light is a wave and therefore requires some medium, like sound to travel. Classifying light as a photon states that its some sort of "mass-less particle that exhibits some wave behavior" which rejects the need for a medium. Though I theorize that light does have some amount of mass, just to an inconsequentially small degree.

Neutrinos which share a pretty high rate of similarity with light (minus the wave behavior) were discovered in the 1990s, so the laws of physics are still changing to minor degrees. Both are quazi energy emissions from the sun's fusion reactions. Neutrinos approach the speed of light, but have mass so likely don't exceed the speed of light (though thats been a subject of study for a while).

My point being, there are a ton of topics that haven't quite been proven yet, but that doesn't mean our existing understanding is wrong. Hell, look at magnetic monopoles, there is absolutely no reason that they don't exist, but no one has yet proven their existence. Throw some irregular electric fields into the equation, and that might correct the 0.000000000000000000000000000001% error that exists in current mathematical projections, and solve all of the experiments that had strange conclusions.

I've heard Sagnac's theory mentioned before when talking about orbits/satellites, but I had never looked in depth about it. It has applications within relativity that it wasn't trying to create. From what I read into it (on both sides of the argument pro and against) it looks like a frame of reference experiment. I found that this page pretty well described the experiment and what can be drawn from it, without bias. http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s2-07/2-07.htm

Are we actually discussing rocket science here? I can address half of the posts that I've seen while skimming through this thread. That said, I haven't been able to tell if they were a joke or not since sarcasm really doesn't translate well through plain text without. Before I spend an hour writing how thrust/motion/momentum/etc works from a current and theoretical standpoint, figured I'd ask if anyone is actually interested, or if this is a joke.

I'm well on my way to getting a PHD in Nuclear Physics. Its not quite Rocket Science, but theres a good deal of overlap with quantum mechanics/dynamics/etc.

FYI Earth isn't flat, rockets do work in space, gravity/light/inertia are really strange subjects that are just best current models and are subject to change.

I agree 1 BTC = 1 BTC. But if you load 1 BTC onto a Physical coin made of $16 worth of metal and sell it for 1.5 BTC, TYPICALLY, and I emphasize that because that is typically the case with collectibles, but seemingly not Bitcoin collectibles, when you go to sell it, it will be worth 1 BTC + current metal value + some premium. These aren't really coins that have tens or hundreds of thousands of people looking to buy and hold them for 20 years like fans of government mint bullion or other collectible coins. These never really leave circulation, because no one peels the sticker, redeems the coins, and melts down the coin, so they aren't ever growing more rare.

It really is a phenomenon in collectibles that defies all traditional rules. The first law of collectibles, is anything made to be collectible often is not. You need a massive evergrowing fanbase to keep something designed to be collectible collectible, otherwise you end up with a van full of beanie babies.

People are weird. I've been a numismatist in non Bitcoin collectibles for a while now, and the premiums associated with Bitcoin collectibles is unheard of. The most valuable silver coin I've ever gotten a hold of was one of seven that existed, it was produced by a government mint in a pretty collectible series, graded MS70, and it sold for ~$300 over spot. Tuvalu isn't a super well known mint, but I'd conservatively estimate there are at least 100,000 people that collect their coins world wide.There are ancient roman/greek silver coins graded and with historical significance that sell for less than that of what mint produced silver blank pressed physical BTC are selling for.

The free market is what it is, obviously a business is going to charge the most it can while maintaining its customers patronage, but if you try to explain the Bitcoin collectibles market to someone who deals in rare coins, they will just look at you dumbstruck when you start talking about the prices. I've seen the same baffled look three or four times now.

Just FYI, you can contact Sunshine Mint, OPM, or any number of generic bullion mints and get a quote for a run of custom coins. Depending on the complexity of the coin and the min order size, you could probably pay as little as $2 over spot / oz + $200-300 for the dies.

Very strange situation to be in. Not a huge deal though, just request a signed message from the Bitcoin address that sent the coins, and thats guaranteed proof of ownership.

As far as returning payment goes, you may want to hold off doing so. If someone sent you the BTC straight from an exchange or service with shared wallets, there is a chance they wont be able to receive their coins back. Then again, thats not really your problem I suppose.