They only work under certain conditions.

I'll give you an example:
I had some referrals made in 2017 and 2018 and on one casino I happened to have a regular player who kept wagering for more than a year. I didn't know them, they used my signature link and played from there. After a year there was a decent amount of money on my referral account to be claimed which I've eventually withdrawn.

On another casino I got a few bonuses, mainly ETH and Doge where they were being introduced. All legacy users got their shares back then and there was a lot of new players using altcoins because the bonuses were high. I never used them and ETH and Doge went up so much that my bonuses were worth 10x. It again wasn't a lot of money but I never say no to a random $100.

It depends. Signature promoters are being red trusted if they're aware the business they're promoting is scamming its clients, are they not? So, forum members actively work against fraudulent businesses. I'm not against mixers, on the contrary, but I feel like we've drawn a line in the sand when it comes to deciding what is fair and what isn't. IMO, if it's proven that Chipmixer wasn't deleting data as promised, it should be red trusted. Not that anybody cares at this point. It's not coming back.


It's a bit different because casinos are legal in most jurisdictions, until they start cheating clients. There's a number of bookies in my area and I could go there and place my bets, so promoting a casino in my country isn't illegal, even if someone gets addicted. Casinos are not held responsible for people's mental health, just as liquor stores aren't responsible for people getting drink, car sellers are not responsible for accidents and people driving their cars without a license.

Mixers on the other hand are in the gray area. They aren't illegal, but if people use them to launder stolen coins, the situation changes.

In the EU we have similar problems as tax offices accept your statements and you accept that if proven wrong you can be fined. It's very simple. The tax office will not ask 90% of taxpayers to further prove their statement. It happens usually when the discrepancies are very big, or you're operating on large sums of money. From time to time they'll ask you for something at random, just to show you they care but most of the time they won't.

None of my friends and family were ever asked to clarify their statements, so if you aren't claiming a $100k loss, they probably won't even ask for details.

Protonmail is encrypted. AFAIK they weren't able to access the emails, but the name of the email gave them a clue where to look next. They got to the email name, so they started to look for this email in various domain registrations, forum accounts, and also for the alias used in the email.
They were also checking IP addresses used along with the email for various logins, domains, and so on.
Basically they were gathering anything they could, like if the account had a phone number as password recovery, they'd check that number. If it had an IP address that someone used to log in, they'd search for that IP and if it was used with other email providers.


That's correct. The fact that a user registered a domain, or had admin rights, doesn't make him the only person running the show, but the US likes to give people the good old stick before the carrot treatment. The idea is to get him to talk, give up everything, and later screw him into a life sentence like they did with Ross. Poor guy gave up his wallet passwords in hope for lower sentence and got life anyway.

I guess that you wanted to say "to change your life and stop being a gambler."
To do that, you unfortunately need to either win enough to be able to afford your own business, or lose enough to reach the bottom and start from scratch, but not as a gambler.

You can use these guys as examples of how a gambler can grow, but this is an incredibly hard thing to do. There's over a million people gambling in the US alone right at this time and maybe one of them will one day become a millionaire, but it's like dreaming about winning the lottery. We all do it, but none of us actually win.

And scammers! Like Calvin, who out of his feel for charity supports a mentally challenged doctor of theology CSW. He probably made Calvin believe God made him invent bitcoin.

From wikipedia:
In 2012, Ayre was indicted by the US Attorney for Maryland on charges of illegal gambling and money laundering.

It's great that  they made their fortunes in gambling industry, I have nothing against that, but what's the point of the thread? If you think you can make it in this business, think again. These people weren't starting with nothing and aren't really role models to follow in all aspects.

So, what do we have?
A 49 year old Vietnamese who used gmail, protonmail, and so on, who had a lot of bitcoin, but was slowly exchanging it by offering to sell it to you $100 at a time if you send money to his paypal account?
I feel like this guy was the front man with the real coders working behind much thicker walls. They needed someone to be in contact with clients on bitcointalk and reddit, someone who'd pay the campaign manager, but I don't believe the same person did everything from answering questions on the forum, through managing all those domains to fixing bugs and trading bitcoin.

It looks like he was arrested in Germany but charged in Philadelphia? So a person who isn't a US citizen, who probably never went to the US, who lived in Europe, isn't going to be prosecuted and sentenced in Europe? It's funny that no matter where you are the USA is running the show and all governments bow down to the greatest bully.

Warning! There's a high chance the offer above is a scam.
Don't trust any cloud mining offers out there. In 2015 and 16 it was a popular way of scamming people.
Read before you invest in shady business.

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/is-cloud-mining-a-scam/

It's not gambling that is for the strong. Investing, taking a risk, starting your own company... We could argue that all of it is for the strong.
When we decided to have a child I didn't know how it would be, didn't know what to expect, but I was positive. The reality was much harder. We had sleepless nights, times when we didn't know what to do, days when we just wanted to stay in bed. Many people give up at the sight of problems, but those who endure do well in life.

Your friend is just weak and he has to go through this to become stronger. If not in gambling he'd face difficulties in business, family, or any other part of life.

That's what I thought after reading some posts here. It's amazing that bitcoiners, people who support the values written by Kirtchev can have opposite views. We can expect both left and right here, but all of us, regardless of what side we represent, should be libertarians not authoritarians.
The silver lining is that most people support mixers and the freedom they give.

Anyway, sadly, it might be the end, unless it resurfaces under new management.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-justice-department-announces-charges-in-connection-with-chipmixer-takedown

And you can't even read T&C and then make a big fuss how you were scammed.


You can check my post history to see that I've recently advised people to stay away from a casino that would not engage in discussion about a case where a player was accused of multi accounting and denied payment after winning about 9k USD and successfully completing KYC. I'm far from being on the side of any casino that takes player's money, but you're clearly wrong.

They say "escrow available" in the thread. Why didn't you use that, OP? Escrow is made for this exact reason, so you won't get scammed by people who ask to pay first and get the item later.

My friend had an encounter with an old beggar once who said she'd tell him his fortune. She asked him to lay a bill on his palm and show her the palm with the bill so she can read it. When he did that she took the bill, said it's for prayers to the almighty, pointed to heavens, he looked up and while he was doing it she put the bill in her bra and walked away
I guess you've just experienced a similar thing. May you learn from it.

I've been saying it for years:
If you want to exit bitcoin, exit into physical goods and services. If you can't do it for some reason, get cash or store credit via gift cards. Don't exit into a centralized bank, but all of these options are better than exiting into a stable coin. Stable coins have no benefits, unless you're trading and have to pay tax for every transaction.
Everything is better than a stable coin for an average bitcoiner who doesn't care about making a few bucks by peddling bitcoin back and forth every day.
Those who are worried about the future of USDC can stop using it and go back to uisng other options like cash, fiat money, and so on.

The answer is simple - it was the first and it was the only real deal. The rest is simply trying to copy bitcoin by adding their own twist to the mix, but bitcoin pure and simple, it doesn't need that addition to be good.

I'll give you an example from cooking. You must have a dish that's well known in your country and it's something that your mother and grandmother knew how to make and everybody loved it.
Nowadays, there are many chefs that want to renew the dish and slightly change it so it's not boring anymore, but all they get from it is that some people like it more, but the majority stays with the old one that their mother used to make. There will be that 10% that thinks chef Joe makes it better, but they will come home and want their mothers to make the traditional one. It remained popular for centuries and it's going to be there next year.

Why change something that works? Why take bitcoin and add PoS, premine, ICO, a foundation, a CEO and the rest of the board, centralized element, full anonymity, if the good old bitcoin has it all perfectly balanced?

That's why ETH will never be number one and it's the same for Ripple, Cardano, and all those other wannabes.

Not all of it was looted of course, but probably as much as 30% was missing.
Also Russians acted very suspiciously by putting concrete slabs over the crash site. There was no need for that because the crash site was in a remote field, where there was completely no danger to the public whatsoever, but Russians came with bulldozers, leveled the field and covered it with concrete to make digging impossible. Why would they do that if not to hide evidence?

They also did not give Polish doctors access to the bodies. They put the bodies in sealed metal coffins and shipped to Poland, where against the orders of Russians the coffins were unsealed and it was found that body parts were completely mixed and people were lying with arms and legs belonging to other victims.

I agree 100%. BTC is very cheap at the moment because its price is being suppressed.

Who is doing it?

IMO there are at least a few people who want to destroy bitcoin because it collides with their plans of launching CBDCs. For this reason we're witnessing a coordinated attack on bitcoin from a number of US Congress reps, the World Economic Forum members and institutions like World Bank.

You can call it a conspiracy theory, but I'm fairly certain the following events are a part of the campaign against bitcoin:
FTX and its bankruptcy. SBF was so tightly connected with politicians and Gensler that it's not a coincidence that he was lobbying for regulation and after his bankruptcy we are getting exactly that regulations times ten.
The attacks on Custodia Bank by the SEC and Federal Reserve. Its CEO said a few times that there's an anti-crypto lobby actively working to stop crypto companies from getting money and permits.
The recent debates in congress against bitcoin mining when representatives for power companies came to testify that they see no problems in mining and don't see any shortages caused by miners.
So why are they trying to stop mining if it has no negative influence on people's lives? Because they can attack all altcoins with the "security narrative" and tax them, but since bitcoin is a commodity the only way is to attack its funding (banks) and mining by trying to paint it as "useless". I've heard some guy claim (at a Congress hearing) that bitcoin mining should be banned because "we" don't need it. I don't know who he meant by "we" and who gave him the right to represent all Americans, but that's what came out of his mouth.

Only he/they? These days you can't be sure what their pronouns are

Let me start by saying that bitcoin is different from cryptocurrencies.
I'm not against the existence of altcoins, but let's be clear here, there are altcoins and there is bitcoin. All other coins more or less copy the idea.
Let's not forget that altcoins are securities and bitcoin is the only commodity. That single feature makes bitcoin superior. If people can't handle the facts, too bad for them.

That's why I wrote "extremely nice" which implies far above average response. I wouldn't expect that, but I also believe that this should be decided on a case by case basis.
Imagine that someone made 2 accounts, got no warning upon registering because the system did not detect it, deposited only on one of them and played on 1, until he got caught. He did no damage to the casino, did not influence other games, did not cheat. I see no reason to ban or deny him his win on that 1 account that he used.
As a representative, I'd ban the unused account and let the player know why it got banned, that's all.

Are you maybe referring to an issue with Metaspins?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5444025.0

In this case OP did not admit to having 2 cards. OP claimed to have only 1 account and there was no proof provided by the casino. The player also went through KYC and despite that was denied all funds.


I agree with this. KYC should always clear things up.
There's also many ways to handle a user with 2 accounts from being extremely nice to him and asking him to choose 1 account and transfer all funds out of the other because it will be closed, through denying him wins on one account, through denying him wins on both accounts, up to a blatant scam IMO, which is taking his wins from both accounts along with all deposits.