I'm bumping this thread in the hopes that there will be some members here who still have an interest in Neblio and perhaps know anything about that proposed "buyout" that I saw announced in the Neblio subreddit.  Discussion there is pretty dead to say the least--it was given exactly one thread there and I think it was basically never mentioned again.

Neblio is a complete oddball of an altcoin, but it's one that I've always had a fondness for.  If PoS is going to exist, it ought to be done like Neblio, RDD, Pinkcoin, and maybe a few others--in other words, no validators or super representatives or voting, just hold your coins in a wallet and stake.

Oddly enough however, there is actually a new tab for voting in the Neblio wallet.  I'm not certain it has a function yet.

Oh my goodness, no.  There are sections much, much worse than the gambling ones, and at least OP got some responses.  There have been quite a few times where I've asked a specific question in sections like Altcoin Discussion, and since nobody there knows much or even gives a shit about any given coin (much less answering a question that would require thought) all I got was the sound of crickets.

OP probably will get used to it, but it takes time and can be extremely frustrating when you see that nobody is reading anything that anyone else has posted in the thread you're reading.  Ugh.

There are exchanges with relatively low BTC withdrawal fees, by the way.  I always check this site, which is helpful for altcoins too.

LOL, I almost shit-stained my already shit-stained bunny costume reading that.  It's Sceptical Chymist, by the way.  A minor detail, but one that Mr. party pooper didn't miss.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm feeling kinda bad that I'm poised to not vote in this again, as my reading habits are so constricted that I don't even have a sense of who's busting the most scams, or who'd be the biggest geek--and on top of that, my tired old brain isn't even comprehending what the titles mean.

But man, biggest fail:  o_e_l_e_o frantically trying to repair the damage I did to that unfortunate chipmunk.  I mean, the thing was just a meatsack on the wall after I was done with it.  Blame it on Theymos, the hero of good, golden feather, and niggard distributor of sMerits to all the sources (or maybe I'm just special).

Man, you wouldn't believe the shitty week I've had.  I won't bore y'all with the details, as I have no doubt that none of you care (and rightfully so).  What I wanted to tell the community is that I've had a massive backlog of post history review requests, with new ones coming all the time, and a dearth of sMerits just to put the poop cherry on the big 'ol wang cupcake. 

I haven't checked to see how many sMerits I have right now, but I do plan on spending some serious time trying to distribute them to all of you who PMed me.  Since Theymos is being an insufferable dick on multiple fronts and hasn't increased my monthly sMerit allocation, I think I'm going to have to limit the number of them I send to any individual member when I'm doing reviews, i.e., I likely won't be handing out 50 merits per month on a single member anymore.  I'm going to sleep on it.

Ah, fine logic--and I mean that sincerely.  The only problem is that lawmakers, law enforcement, and a multitude of government agencies don't give a single shit about logical arguments if it means that they might be seen to be twiddling their thumbs when a disaster like FTX (or take your pick from the many crypto has seen) happens. 

All of those entities I just referenced are extremely reactionary and always have been, so as to OP's question....it's anyone's guess if a crackdown could happen.  This just reminds me of all the times I've heard that crypto is bad because it's been used for illegal activities and therefore is dangerous.  That idiotic nonsense has been uttered by people who should know better.

I don't know if that was his biggest mistake with Casino Critique or not (since I have no idea how it's going), but I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that even though he concealed his identity for a while, there was still no scam happening. 

And that's kind of the reason I'd always respected you as a valued member of the community.  Maybe some members have a better grasp of what happened with Bitlucy, but I did read your thread on it and it definitely didn't sound like you were out to join in on some scam that they were pulling off.  Apparently a lot of people here do, though, which is why you've been getting such harsh treatment since then.

My suggestion is to roll with it, no matter how bitter it makes you feel, because memories can sometimes be short and people can be redeemed with time and the right actions.

Uh....this thread is almost exactly like this one, and I think the discussion has already been had.  Unless new members chime in, you're probably going to get the exact same answers.

You might want to consider just locking this thread up, OP.  Anyone please speak up if you disagree.

Hate to say it, but yo ass is spot-on bro-man.  Just looky here:

There should be a category created in which I would fit, maybe Mercurial, Satanic Slob of Laziness and Chronic Beggar of Theymos for sMerits.  Should that ever become a reality, I don't see how there would be any other contenders up until the time of my death--which is no doubt swiftly approaching--whereupon the category should be retired and my ketchup and whatever-encrusted jersey hung from the rafters.

All of which is to say that it's LoyceV or some other extremely useful member of the community who should get the honors of "Hero of Good". 

I didn't vote last year.  Should I start afresh in this shitty-as-hell, year-of-your-lord two thousand twenty two?  Or maybe I'll just watch Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

That's true--however, when there's also a huge amount of ignorance on the part of the greedy "investors" (they're much more like speculators), the playing field is so uneven that no game ought to be played on it at all.  People who kept their funds on FTX were probably thinking it was as safe a a bank, and all of those celebrity endorsements and advertisements only lent credence to that belief.

And man, did they find out the hard way the meaning of NYK,NYC....hopefully.  I also think it's unfortunate that this whole disaster probably soured a lot of people on crypto altogether, in addition to attracting all sorts of attention from big daddy government.  Everything right now is suck to the power of suck.

None of this would have been as bad as it is had it not been for all of those speculators, too.  That's the crazy part; crypto has seen exchange meltdowns many times, but now that bitcoin, altcoins, DeFi, and everything else has gone mainstream there's a lot more money being funneled into shitty scams like FTX.

Meh.  Musk doesn't seem concerned, and frankly I have no idea what Twitter's "crypto unit" does or did.  It's probably a group that was just collecting a paycheck and deserves to be slashed.

I never cared for Twitter, FB, or any of these social media sites....but goddamn, this is an interesting time to be an observer of all this drama.  I remember vividly when those sites started going public, and I figured it was the internet boom 2.0.  I might have been completely wrong, since some of these corporations are actually profitable, but it does seem like they're all sliding downhill financially.

What I'm hoping is that Twitter survives under Musk; there seems to be a lot of politics behind it that could influence its viability, and that's kind of an enormous wild card.  Popcorn in hand and eyes peeled, tho.

I've been thinking the same thing for a long time now--increased regulation just goes against the spirit of what bitcoin stands for, which is to have a form of money/store of value/whatever that exists outside of governments and banks.  Once regulators start stepping in and controlling things, it's game over.  But we'll see what actually happens; it's strange that there hasn't been too much regulation so far, and bitcoin has been around for over a decade.

Probably not, and I'm sure this won't be the last disaster to hit crypto no matter what governments do.

I agree with that--I just woke up and saw that Theymos has added some text as a warning, and I'm very glad to see that.  And as far as wording goes, since I think it's primarily newbies that need the warning, and since probably a lot of those newbies don't have an extensive English vocabulary, said wording should be as simple as possible.  What's written looks just fine to me, and even better is that it's a link to the thread discussing all of this crap going on.

I'm glad you took this suggestion, Theymos.  Hopefully it'll help some members avoid scams or at the very least will lead them to a discussion where they can get information that'll help them be more informed.  Props!

What the hell is even that?  Lol.  I've never heard of an IUO before--in fact, I'm beginning to realize there's a lot of really big stuff in the wide, wide world of crypto that I've been blissfully ignorant of, including FTX, Liquid, and any other entity associated with FTX.  I just recently learned they advertised during the superbowl and had several celebrity endorsements as well, which is no doubt common knowledge to the rest of you who stay in the loop and/or have used platforms like the ones in the midst of collapse.

I know I'm not alone in wondering what things are going to look like once all of this settles down and when, perhaps, the regulators have had something to say.  It seems like the majority of bigwigs in crypto have done harm to it rather than helping it--or maybe that's me being overly pessimistic. 

I'll be drinking at the bar down the street if anyone needs me. 

It's not blackmail but apparently a straight-up scam--and it very much reminds me of the Mt. Gox disaster, where there was essentially one individual in charge of a lot of people's money, and that individual was inept at finance at best.  This guy SBF looks like a complete tool to me, and it's amazing that he was treated so well in the media prior to this given that he made a statement to the effect that he's in the Ponzi business.  I mean, Jesus.

FTX's extensive advertising probably pulled in a shitload of money from people who otherwise would never have invested in crypto and who were too ignorant to know not to keep their crypto on a platform like FTX.  That's why this thing is much worse than Mt. Gox, which affected investors who were into bitcoin in the early days.  This brand of shenanigans attracts the attention of regulators like nothing else, and I can't imagine the outcome is going to be good for any of us.

Yep, and I hate to say it but there's no progress in financial intelligence because each generation has to learn the hard way on its own.  That's why booms and busts keep happening every 10-20 years, over and over again.

Some of the Youtube videos I've been watching are by people in their 20s, and they're talking about things that seem really obvious to me but are apparently new to them.  I'm not blaming any of this crap on the younger generation by any means, but SBF and other big time crypto scammers are all young and obviously ignorant, no matter how wise they've been previously portrayed in the media.

Everything in trading, investment, and finance is a "confidence game".  It always has been, going back to the days of JP Morgan and well beyond that.  Anyone who uses a centralized exchange has to have some sort of confidence in it, regardless of how little.  Anyone who trades with anyone else has to have confidence in their counterparty.  No matter how trustless we'd like things to be, if we're buying or selling bitcoin we've got to have a smidgen of trust somewhere.

This whole thing is ugly to the tenth power.

All of my technical ignorance aside, this sounds reasonable to me, as does the claim that this is a marketing ploy to tap into people's fears about crypto, which have obviously been stoked as a result of the recent FTX debacle among other things.

This attack vector might sound plausible in theory--and it might actually turn out to be a successful one for hackers--but as of right now I haven't seen any reports of hardware wallets being hacked....at all.  Have any of you?  And I mean by any method, not just this one.  I'd imagine as soon as anyone proves that a Ledger, Trezor, or any of the better-known HW wallets have a vulnerability that's caused an actual loss, it'd blow up all over this forum.

I've got nothing against BitBox, BTW.

Nah, you're doing great--all of your updates are greatly appreciated, and they're what I look to when I'm trying to gauge how the merit system is working.  I hadn't looked at that graph on the first page in a long time but did so now; I can't tell if the slopes of any of those lines have increased, but it sort of looks like it (or maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part).

In any case, congrats to everyone who ranked up!  I see a lot of familiar usernames this time around, and a lot of deserving ones at that.  Yay merit system!!  Four+ years and going strong.  Who'd have thought Theymos's experiment would have worked out this well, eh?

Yeah, it was true--but I'd like to point out that you can turn anything into a poison if you use a high enough dose and also that there are innumerable methods of committing suicide.  The news story about Amazon and the suicide kits was just another piece of sensationalism on the part of journalists.

That aside, I don't think the alcohol story has anything to do with the other one.  I'm not sure why alcohol-related deaths have been increasing so much, but it appears that they were rising well before the pandemic.  Part of me wonders whether the CDC changed its definition of "related" somewhere along the way, and the definition was probably very liberal to begin with.

But the mention of taxes on alcohol and restrictions on availability are what bug me the most.  People should be free to do what they want with their own bodies as long as it doesn't harm others, and restrictive measures just don't work--we had Prohibition for a decade in the US, and all the good drugs have been illegal for many years, and yet there was the opiate crisis and everything else....so government intervention is just going to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

Do you even understand anything Yahoo62278 wrote?  You seem kind of illiterate--not an insult, just pointing out a fact as well.

OP, get over yourself and just lock this thread.  It isn't likely the feedback (which seems inconsequential) is going to be removed, and if you continue to write a bunch of nonsense it's just going to work against you in the long run, believe me.  I've seen plenty of threads like this where members call attention to themselves and wind up with more negs/neutrals or even a ban if the community starts digging up dirt.

In any case, it seems nobody is in your corner and nobody is likely to be no matter how long you keep this thread open.

Dude, good luck with the tickets, but unless your lottery is fundamentally different than all others it's odds are stacked against you and you probably won't even make your money back.

I was just talking to a convenience store worker who I see all the time, and he was telling me how much he's won on scratch tickets--and he listed some pretty big wins (not millions of dollars, but thousands on a few occasions according to him).  But the thing is that I see this guy all the time with a handful of scratch-offs, so I know he's spent a lot of money for those winners.  And it's more likely than not he's given the lottery system more money than he's won....so as I said, good luck with your tickets, but any government-sponsored lottery is basically a extra tax on gamblers.