As much as the scum who pull these life-threatening "pranks" piss me off, the real problem is we have a hyper-militarized police that acts like an occupying army and treats normal citizens as the enemy.  They're ready to go full Rambo at the drop of a hat, and even a 12 year old calling with a flagrantly bogus swatting gets their own personal army from these steroid-riddled buffoons.

Surely this is not the real L. Detweiler.

These are people who basically believe science is Satanic Western propaganda.  They are literally too stupid to run water filtration plants so areas under their control are infested with cholera and other water-borne diseases.  Usually, the lights go out soon after they take over because they are also too stupid to run electric power generation.  The idea of them successfully using computers is pretty ludicrous, much less using cryptocurrencies, which they would probably also view as demonic.

Especially considering the player base of Seals, the current largest site, where you have to provide literally zilch in the way of dox.  This Veridu thing demands LinkedIn, Paypal, Google, Twitter, etc. account information and the information you have to authorize through the app is incredibly intrusive, including authorizing this site you know diddly about to know all your contacts, your timeline, tweets, etc.

I can't see that if you take a Venn diagram of the people willing to play online poker for Bitcoin (basically the Seals playerbase at this point), and intersect that with the set of people willing to give up all this information, that you get all that many people.

Hmm.  Also, what do these guys even ask for from you?  Kind of defeats the point of an anonymous platform to provide names or whatever.

Not sure what you're saying, but I'm just pointing out that it is not something any idiot could put together given the idea.

His odds of reproducing are so near zero as it is that I doubt it would make much difference.

Slightly less of an idiot than the people who loan him money, who are like people who feed stray diseased cats, causing them to proliferate in an area.

Are you serious about that?  The concept took at least 15 years just from Chaum's original idea (not counting everything that led up to that).  The idea is one thing, and actually implementing it in such a way that there were no fatal flaws in the original implementation is a hell of an accomplishment and would require an extraordinary level of knowledge of basically everything involved, every potential vulnerability, and then, incredible attention to detail.

There is nothing obvious about Bitcoin or how to implement it.

He's just a blatant scammer.  Anyone who falls for his scam at this point deserves it.  My job is done here.

Sure you're not, Scammy McScammerson.

Bitcoin is MUCH better to recommend to the people suffering under the ISIS scum, who have ruined every economy they've touched, causing people in Iraq to flee the dinar in fears that ISIS is going to replace it with their own scam currency.

From this BBC story.




Wouldn't it be nice if they had BTC to flee to?

Bitcoin is hardly scratch-off lottery tickets.

Interesting choice of words.  It could just be that, a choice of words.  But if taken literally, it implies it wasn't always a mystery, at least not to Hal.

I'd be amazed if he didn't know exactly who Satoshi was (or was Satoshi or one of the group himself).

The first implementation was a lot more solid than most initial releases done by a single person, so I seriously doubt there is a single Satoshi.  Considering the nature of secrets--"three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead"--I'd guess it was a small group, but there was probably some degree of peer review on the code before it was made public.

It could be that one person was the main driving impetus and also the "voice" of the group, or that they were two separate people.

I doubt there will ever be a single person you can point to and authoritatively say "this is Satoshi Nakamoto."  It is also legally wise to spread out liability like this, even though Bitcoin is not illegal and creating it certainly wasn't.  But if some future repressive regime suddenly decides it was, the "conspirators" could all just point their fingers at each other, or blame it all on any member who died in the interim.  "His name was Robert Paulson."

My wild-ass guesstimate is the core group couldn't have been fewer than three or much greater than five.  There would also be very few outsiders (or even none) who knew about it beforehand.  I could be wrong, though.  I think the group would be mostly old school cypherpunks of the code-writing sort, a group inhumanly good at keeping secrets.

You could shorten it to Billy Bob I suppose.

A, you invest $100, which presumably you could afford, BTC collapses.  -$100 from where you would have been had you made the opposite choice.

B, you fail to invest $100, and BTC appreciates to $1,000.  -$900 from where you would have been had you made the opposite choice.

You can only compare a decision to the alternative decisions you could have made, and the difference between the value of each choice is how the proper choice is made.  Losing an easily affordable sum is clearly a less bad outcome than failing to make an enormous profit.

Additionally, the possible downside from the initial $100 investment is limited, while the failure to capitalize on a vast appreciation is potentially unlimited in scope.

Considering further that the odds of BTC suddenly losing all its value is infinitesimal and the odds of it appreciating in value is high, the potential loss from failing to invest is higher than that from investing and losing.

You went full retard.  Never go full retard.

There's a serious glut of dice sites out there, and I can't see why anyone would need a new one without some serious twist to it.  There's also just a limited number of BTC gamblers out there, as even a very popular game like poker currently only sustains one site, SwC.  Of course, there's also the fact that most of those other sites were run by hit and run scammers and/or had atrociously shitty software.

But it's not only a tough market to break into right now, but if you do get anything more than marginal success, you will immediately be targeted with a tsunami of bullshit in the form of DDoS, hacking and general cheating and scamming.

Spoken like a true retard, and a scamming thief.  Hi Robert!