I'd argue, as you suggest, that this isn't even a tax.  It's just a robbery.  At least in theory, a tax is something proposed in a legislature and with some advance warning, so that the voters can get input (or throw the bums out of office).

The advance warning allows rational actors to modify their behavior to reduce (or in some cases eliminate) their tax burden.  In this case, people would have chosen either not to deposit their money in these banks or to deposit it elsewhere (or move to Bitcoin).

This is more of a naked robbery than a tax.

The Scientology cult hired Prolexic, which is a good solution if you have nearly unlimited cash.  Prolexic is the premier commercial DDoS mitigation service, but they also charge substantially more than even their closest competitors. 

The problem is finding DDoS mitigation at a price where it blocks the attacks but without costing you all your profit. 

If this is the same guy doing this to all the BTC sites it seems he's getting more experienced at it.  I hope the BTC sites are communicating about how to respond to this.  It'd be nice to find out where he lives and pull out all his fingernails with a pair of pliers, but I guess that is unlikely.

Cloudflare is a joke.  I suppose it would protect you from a 12 year old.

Then either you don't know what Bitcoin is, don't know what a Ponzi is, or know what both are, yet are not able to determine why they're not the same thing, or you do know what both are, yet are unwilling to tell the truth.

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi by any possible definition of either term.

Yes.  The way every civilized country does it.  Honor the value of insured accounts, and if the bank can't, the government honors the insurance policy on them.  In none of these other nations are insured deposit accounts plundered.

What is the value of a share in a business so corrupt and incompetent that it has to steal from its customers (including me) to stay afloat?

What I find rather comical about nonsense like this is the very people making excuses for this clown and enabling him to keep operating after basically stealing his customers' money are the very same people who scream bloody murder when someone does the same with fiat currency, like the government of Cyprus.

Basically, this guy screwed up and lost a bunch of other people's money, then stole it to stay afloat.  That's really the best spin on it.  That's assuming the story of the heist is even true, even though there's about zero evidence there was even a heist in the first place. And frankly, even that is about as believable as that O.J. Simpson was really looking for the "real killer" on the golf courses of Florida.

That's as much as you'll be able to do, because the real scammers are the ones in charge of the bogus "scammer" tag, which is a sick joke.

I think we can expect more of the same bullshit from BFL.  Don't respond to the substance of any accusations.  Instead, pretend to get angry and start foaming at the mouth and insulting the questioner to try to distract from the criticism.

Then, if the initial questioner responds in kind, an innocent bystander might conclude that both people seem to be being kind of jerks.

The difference between Micon and the scammer, though, even if you think Micon was being more of a jerk than necessary (which I don't) is that Micon isn't sitting on a huge pile of other people's money while not delivering a damn thing other than lie after lie.

This is the kind of behavior you get from cultists and other scammers.

I don't think we have to worry much about bad press from people who don't understand Bitcoin in the least.

It is when we start getting attacks from those who do understand what it is and what it represents, because it represents a threat to their interests, that we have to worry.

It is difficult to comprehend the short-sighted insanity of this decision.  Basically they are saying, stay the fuck away from our banks.  I'm not sure how you could devise a policy more likely to generate long-term instability.

Just sent this transaction:  9412e3e6b503739714dd81b8f883241671fe02b81974d60d780d1db9b039622f

Result:  nothing.  Not pending, not anything.  No animation.

Hates my address or something.

Worked fine earlier, but this transaction disappointingly locked up just as it was bouncing between a 2 and a 0 result.

It is still listed as pending.  Perhaps you ran out of entropy.

EDIT:  Incidentally, the transaction after mine went through as a lose, but mine is still "pending."  May be a quirk.

That's pretty useful if you're a player and just want a half-decent basic strategy.  But it doesn't really give you the precise EV of each play or the more exotic rules, so it isn't really that useful to someone who wants to set up a blackjack site.  Stanford Wong's Professional Blackjack and similar analytical material is probably more useful to someone in that category.

Seems like the edge should be pretty low, though I'm sure one of the math guys can give you more exact numbers.

You could also throw in things like five-card (or six-card) charlies though I'd be careful not to move the edge far enough to offer a losing bet for yourself.

No shit.  Seriously, quit making us piss into bottles.

Has anyone figured out the adjustments to basic strategy for the progressive blackjack?  Some are obvious, like always drawing to two 7s or, even more obviously two 7ds, but I assume (possibly incorrectly) that autoplay just plays BS.

Also, anyone noticed any interesting inflection points where the size of the progressive changes the strategy?

That's true.  You still have shit for brains.  Nothing has changed there.

I hope he makes you wait to the last possible minute, you fucking douche.  Seriously, GTFO.

What was so hard about doing this instead of being a giant douche?

EDIT:  Unsurprisingly, the confirms did eventually show up, but I'm still curious as to why the Bitcoin-Qt client behaves as described in the post.  Anyone here have a clue why it does?

This question pertains to this transaction (txid 002fa752ba66602fa3cfa8b60b2d1094e057a99011e46881b196a2b75cda864f):


It's a 2.5 BTC transaction between addresses 12Mhqv7s1W6yCD1fGQCZ8URGG2urv4xL29 and 1JHvM69LhkJPUFjDipfdtWMxEEpHUmqTLbj with a .00008192 transaction fee (a wallet and a Coinbase account).  I made the transaction, then sold the Bitcoins for ACH earlier today.  

The reason for the unusual transaction fee size is I was testing the free transaction relay policy earlier, and it was seemingly not working.  I'd added the node for the policy by using the commandline flag -addnode=173.242.112.53, and changed the default transaction fee to .00008192 BTC which is the fee for that server.

Now, I should have changed it back at that point, but instead, I gave up on it and went on to other things and forgot about it.  I didn't think about it again until, prompted by the price of Bitcoin lately, I did a small cashout to Coinbase and sold the BTC for USD.  I noticed it was a bit odd it didn't prompt me for a transaction fee, as it usually does.  However, the transaction seemed to be taking longer than usual to confirm, so I checked the details, and was surprised to notice the transaction as 2.500008192.

Sure enough, it had finally used that transaction fee, despite having refused to use it for every other transaction I had tried.  I also noticed it was relayed by 184.152.8.228, and seems to have propagated through the network.

To make sure, I used Blockchain's pushtx page and pasted the raw transaction into it, and got the "Error Pushing Transaction Error Pushing. Transaction already exists" message that indicates the transaction already went through.

So now, the questions.

1)  Why did Bitcoin-Qt not use the free transaction relay, or the default transaction fee I set in the Preferences menu, until this transaction?
2)  Why does it not seem to have used 173.242.112.53, the free transaction relay node, for the transaction?
3)  When is it likely to confirm, given these circumstances?  (I'd assume after some possibly substantial delay, but this question might answer itself before anyone answers.)

I sent another 2.5 BTC to Coinbase to cover the sale in the interim while I wait, but it's rather curious (and inconvenient) that using this transaction system didn't work when I was testing it, but then suddenly decided to "work" the moment it would inconvenience me.  It Bitcoin-Qt broken?

I'd kind of like to actually use the free transaction relay policy for micro-transactions that I don't care when they get there, but am more willing to pay the recommended fee for "real money."