I've started this thread to keep track of some important items I desire to have at my fingertips. In the future, I may lock this thread, but continue to update Post #1, thus not causing the thread to be bumped up.
FTFY
Also go fuck yourself.
No name was stolen, a brand got built though, and AFAIK it was here first
etc...
I for one will think twice before using your service from now on, seeng your unprofessional attitude here.
I was thinking the same. I will not use bitcoin-central.net and will not recommend it to anyone.
+2
I also quit using bitcoin-central because of davout's childish behavior here on the forums. Long ago, that is.
Ditto. Its hilariously unprofessional to just scream 'go fuck yourself' at someone who makes you an offer, and in the public eye. If the offer was too much/overpriced or whatever, should have just been like 'lol no thanks' and left it at that. Totally uncalled for, especially when you didnt even respond to him (her?) at all. Why would anyone want to do business with you if your just going to be a total bitch when a deal doesn't sound good to you?
+4. The lack of professionalism displayed by numerous proprietors in the bitcoin economy is, in a word, disappointing. Bitcoin is very young with incredible potential. YOU GUYS - the first movers creating and operating businesses in the nascent bitcoin economy - are the public face of bitcoin, and the most important points of contact with the masses of future users. Especially with bitcoin's still dubious reputation and coming off of a year of ugly scams and nonsense, to have anything less than stellar and pristine public behavior by cornerstone members of the ecosystem is unacceptable.
Every time I see such unfortunate behavior I sigh to myself and think bitcoin has a bit farther to go than I'd assumed. Obviously this is a community of aggressive, mostly young, often previously inexperienced entrepreneurs who are more interested in building businesses and value than worrying about civility online. But still....come on. Act like the potential we all know is here.
Just sayin'.
bitcoin is made possible by cryptography
cryptography was created to preserve secrecy and anonymity.
when we have a full bitcoin econony , WITH NO NEED TO CONVERT FIAT TO BITCOIN, this will be a beautiful thing.
At the present time secrecy and anonymity provide fertile grounds for hackers and scammer activities.
And the point at which bitcoin and fiat meet are a real problem for us all.
DO NOT TRADE BITCOIN FOR ANY PAYMENT FROM THAT CAN BE REVERSED.
MONEYPAK
CREDIT CARDS
BANK TRANSFER
PAYPAL
SERVE
ETC
UNLESS YOU KNOW AND TRUST YOUR TRADING PARTNER.
While you can purse scammers after fact you'll have more luck and less trouble if you vet your trading partners or use some sort of trust system (bitcointalk.org, bitcoin-otc) IN ADVANCE.
Even banks and Paypal do not pursue scammers after the fact. THEY ARE NOT PAYING FOR THE LOSS - YOU ARE. They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars of fees paid by merchants that allow them to write off these lossess. The only thing banks and paypal, etc are concerned with is preventing future fraud as they do have to pay for the present fraud. That is passed on to the consumer.
http://btc411.com/bitcoin-100-charity/Prosperity is in general the result of the working of free markets. The one caveat to this observation is that market participants have to be responsible. It doesn't matter so much if they are intelligent or not, it doesn't really matter if they're good christians or devout muslims or anything else, but they do have to be responsible.
When some people behave irresponsibly the result is that they lose their money, which flows, albeit indirectly and circumvolutedly but nevertheless unerringly, to more responsible participants.
When a small majority* of participants behave irresponsibly however the net result is not just pain to their own fortunes, but pain spread across the board. All of a sudden you have to be very intelligent, and very experienced, and very well informed to manage to keep your money safe, and often enough even that's not going to suffice.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot has the unpleasant effect of creating a high powered idiot. He can now wreak havoc on the exchange rate, which increases volatility and on the long term hurts everyone involved in bitcoins, because volatility is, much like inflation, an indirect tax on users.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot has the unpleasant effect of creating half a million bitcoins' worth of valueless receipts, which are pretty much indistinguishable to the naked eye from valid receipts. Thus, if you pay on anyone's credit you are basing your judgment not on actual fact, but on an unknown and pretty much unknowable mixture of fact and hogwash.
Giving over half a million bitcoins to a random idiot is a bad idea. There are people whose personal responsibility in this matter is greater than that of most everyone else, people who have in effect acted as lieutenants for the random idiot. This thread is a convenient spot for all of them to avoid the indignity of being called out, and instead freely and willingly admit their mistake, and by admitting it learn from it. Specifically, learn that they aren't nearly as qualified as they thought to play the "banker", and by this make one step towards maybe one day actually being bankers.
The wanna-be bankers are not alone in their hour of humiliation. There are plenty of others who spend their entire day spouting nonsense on this forum, either under the guise of being "journalists" for some monthly magazine that does a couple issues a year or just as random internet experts in everything. Obviously they won't be learning anything on this opportunity as they haven't learned anything on any of the previous ones in their lives. That's after all fine, what would a mining town be without the drunks and general scum?
Aside from these practical considerations, there are some more general points to be taken home by anybody who wants to be a little smarter today than last month, and possibly have a little better shot at actually making money than before.
1. Learn the pecking order. All opinions are
not equal. Some people are to be respected. Learn who. Some people are irrelevant and easily ignored. Learn who. More importantly than the who, learn why. Is it just because "everyone else seems to think so"? That's no good, forget it. Is it because they were right when everyone else was wrong? That's perfect, especially if it occurs with any sort of consistency.
2. Business means something very specific. Only the permanently poor imagine business = "anything to do with money". There's no business without a business plan. If something purports to be a business but "it can't" or it just won't share its business plan
it is not a business. This means
you can't be investing in it. Sure, you can throw money at anything you wish, as for instance the toilet bowl, Ponzi scams or scantily clad girls. However, in order to invest you absolutely need a business first.
3. Learn how to deal with your own mental limitations. If you think you don't have any you find yourself most likely in the situation described
here:
If one skims through the psychological literature, one will find some evidence that the incompetent are less able than their more skilled peers to gauge their own level of competence. For example, Fagot and O'Brien (1994) found that socially incompetent boys were largely unaware of their lack of social graces (see Bem & Lord, 1979 , for a similar result involving college students). Mediocre students are less accurate than other students at evaluating their course performance ( Moreland, Miller, & Laucka, 1981 ). Unskilled readers are less able to assess their text comprehension than are more skilled readers ( Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994 ). Students doing poorly on tests less accurately predict which questions they will get right than do students doing well ( Shaughnessy, 1979 ; Sinkavich, 1995 ). Drivers involved in accidents or flunking a driving exam predict their performance on a reaction test less accurately than do more accomplished and experienced drivers ( Kunkel, 1971 ).
In short: if you're not aware that there's anything wrong with your judgment of "business", "finance", "investing", "money" and so forth that is almost certainly due to the fact that you are
very weak on all of these topics, likely significantly below average. You should spend a good deal of time reading and a greater deal of time testing things out methodically before you promote yourself mentally to "average", or even "crummy". This means years. Years.
The advantage of BTC is that it's a very cheap and very clean way to learn about finance. The disadvantage (if we can call it that) is that it's much akin to falling in love: very, very, very hard on the knees. Vitriolic to the ego.
4. Step outside of your ideology. You might have been brought up in a very repressive social milieu in which some particular ideological slant was drilled into you. This is working to your disadvantage, get rid of it. Are you sticking up for your friends because they're your friends rather than because they have a point? Great for facebook, horrible for BTC. You will lose money. Are you following the crowd like a welfare state lemming? Great for the white collar slave, horrible for BTC. You will lose money. Do you think form is above content and as such it's okay to invade foreign countries and slaughter civilians just as long as nobody says shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker or tits on TV? Great for being an American, horrible for the free world. You will lose money.
5. Re-read this entire post. It probably didn't fully sink in on the first pass. Seriously. Alternatively it is always easier to just not like me. You will lose money.
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* This term of... art, let's say, will go down in BTC history.
Bitcoin has seen plenty of scandal in recent weeks with things like the Mt.Gox and MyBitcoin catastrophes, but these episodes have been totally within the realm of normalcy compared to what happens every single day to conventional merchants who accept credit card. The Visa/MC monopoly controls business much like the mafia do. And like the mafia, these things aren't discussed much. So here are few of the horrors of credit card processing, especially relating to internet based sales, that you might not be aware of:
* That 3% rate you see quoted everywhere is a lie. Card-not-present transactions (i.e. anything online) are billed at a much higher rate. Rewards cards, business cards, and any of dozens of other types of cards are billed at different rates too. A more typical base rate is going to be around 4.25% On top of that, there are authorization fees both to the gateway and the processor, which will total about $0.60 per transaction. That puts total fees on a $9.95 sale upwards of 10%. Keep in mind that's coming off of gross. Even the IRS doesn't charge this much because they're just grabbing a share of your profit.
* Chargeback fraud is getting out of hand. Once designed as a failsafe to protect against stolen cards, the chargeback is now being used as a catch-all for unreasonable customer demands. Wanted the product in a different color? Charge it back. Found it somewhere else for a better price? Charge it back. Changed your mind about a purchase? Charge it back. Simply want to have your cake and eat it too? Charge it back. There's no reasonable time limit either. We've received chargebacks up to a full year after the purchase was made.
* In addition to losing the money from a sale and the goods or services your customer stole, your processor will also hit you with a chargeback fee. These fees range from $20-40 per incident. Think about that in terms of how many new sales you have to make just to cover the cost of that fee. You'd probably lose less getting mugged in an alley.
* Credit card authorizations occur within seconds, very much like an unconfirmed bitcoin transfer. At the end of the day, a batch is processed and sent to the processor with that day's transactions. The processor typically holds that money for a week before it gets deposited into your bank account. A week!
* Get too many chargebacks in too short a period of time, and your processor will shut you down or start suspending deposits. How many is too many? That's arbitrary (despite whatever you may have heard about a 1% limit).
* The processors can do anything to you without notice. They can shut down your account for no reason without even telling you. They can withhold deposits to your bank account. They can increase their rates. They can refuse to process certain transactions even after they've been authorized without even telling you. They can implement a "reserve" on your account where they withhold some portion of your money (like 20%) just for "safe keeping", again, without even telling you.
* If you complain about anything, or if you encourage your customers to pay by other means, you can be shut down without notice.
* With that one week delay on your deposits, getting shut down means losing an entire week's gross revenue. We have a client who got shut down about a month ago and still has more than $30,000 stuck in limbo. The former processor is claiming we have to wait 270 days before they will even consider releasing the funds. There aren't even any written contracts or bank statements to substantiate our claim.
* To even get processing, the principals of the company must pass personal credit checks and the products/services offered must meet various arbitrary and unpublished requirements. You can be rejected simply because your product is "too commonly available," or conversely, "too unusual".
I could go on, but I think you get the point, so I'll stop here for now. Successful businesses just have to fight through this as best they can by passing as much of the cost onto their customers and employees as possible, and that's not good for anyone. Bitcoin can solve every problem on this list. If the user base grows enough, merchants will flock to it. And they'll even be able to offer huge discounts to their customers for using it.
tl;dr:
The Visa/MC monopoly is choking the life out of us in ways many people don't realize. Bitcoin has the potential to save us.
