Is BitCoinPlus a scam?

[DiamondPlus]

hrmm

[1713866190]

1713866190

[BitcoinPorn]

Could you please respond again and answer the following questions?

Actually no.  I am not representing BitcoinPlus, so I am keeping further information regarding myself and that site out, because I can see how my posts seem.  I have no personal affiliation tied with them past being a user on their site, I like their technology, and I still feel you are kind of over attacking them for something that still seems to me to slight user error.

And the line of questioning is going down a weird path "Would it hurt you to assume" lol, I assure you, I am attempting to put my shoes on the other foot with a lot of posts on this, but it is hard to take completely serious when you are considering taking a person to small claims court over time you spent mining digital currency but not at the rates in which it was advertised (I can also do a devils advocate regarding the client dropping the fees and how that type of algorithm still has yet to be worked out on their site or in the miner, hey, it's possible).

Before them I was using the Bitp.it browser miner (check my posts, I did not use BitcoinPlus solely for very similar reasons you were stating as far as clarity and their fees and I have even said that I wouldn't, yet now I do).   The one time I did see someone complain about something, the owner was in the forums correcting the situation, unfortunately that project has been put down so the owner can focus on his pool.  The code is open source.  I always look for threads of people interested in browser mining.

I am really sorry about your situation, but this whole thread is based on attacking a guy over his extremely poorly advertised, 18 cent USD fee, which is now should only 9 cents, coupled with some here may not have known that the 9 cents they were mining for was costing them far more.    Scam is just a big word that should be reserved for sites that deserve it, I see BCP's fuck ups, I still don't see it as a scam what so ever.

[BitQuestr (BitCoinWorldMarket)]

I agree with bitcoinporn.

It is easy to make a big deal out of it when you are talking on pennies to a dollar. Yes he may have not updated the transaction fee to .0005 but the client was only updated to allow that just a couple weeks ago.

Talking about getting scammed out of less than .50 cents worth of money seems a bit ridiculous to me. Most website affiliate programs don't pay out unless your commissions are over $50. I would have a hard time taking claims of scamming serious if the amount was under a dollar.

His program is much more akin to an affiliate payment program than a mining program. If you have no traffic to your site then the current transaction fee he charges of .01 will eat most of your (pennies) of profit. You ate wasting your time if you are only mining using your CPU.

Personally I like his idea a lot and if it was developed to give the website user a choice to shut it off or turn it on to donate I think it will be a great way to get people excited about bitcoin mining and the idea of engaging in the bitcoin economy.

Don't try to ruin this fledgling bitcoin business by yelling scam when it is only over pennies.

[BitCoinBarter]

Could you please respond again and answer the following questions?

Actually no.  I am not representing BitcoinPlus, so I am keeping further information regarding myself and that site out, because I can see how my posts seem. 

I can understand how you would not like to answer any questions about yourself. What I don't understand is why you will not answer questions about BCP (if you are not representing them). I also don't understand "how your post my seem" is a reason why not to answer.

I came to this forum to learn (first) and to help others (if I can). This thread is to teach (beware of BCP).

I assume you came to this forum for the same reasons. Another reason you may have come is to promote your site. I don't have a problem with that, I just wish that I could also promote something. My BitCoin address that is located in my signuature is not doing it  .

I like their technology

So do I. I admit that I don't understand it.
What I do understand is that they are not doing what they should. They promise something (BTC) and are not delivering (or at least putting up so many roadblocks that you don't want them to deliver).

I still feel you are kind of over attacking them for something that still seems to me to slight user error.

This is something else I don't understand. If you would have answered my questions, then I may have understood (beating a dead horse, I know).

Was my error is that I believed that they would do what they said they would do?  Was that my slight user error? If so, how can I correct this so it would not happen again? Sorry, another question (which I assume you are not going to answer).

you are considering taking a person to small claims court

No. Did you read what I wrote after that? It was:

Will I do that? No and this is why the scam is good.

This was me admiring BCP. As a scam it is good. What could a person who was caught in this scam do?

Email them? Been there, did that. See one of my posts to this thread to see what happened.
Short answer, nothing happened (other then they admitting that they should change things).

Go to the police? I am not a lawyer, however I would say no. After explaining what happened (and what a BitCoin is). Then it would come down to how much you have lost in money. When you tell the officer that it is less then $1.00 (really less then 50 cents, however you don't tell the officer that), then I assume that you would be told that this is a civil matter (which means suing them).

Granted, this crime is on the internet and crosses different states. So truly this should be a federal crime.
A federal crime on something that cost lest then 50 cents. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. I know this, (again) that is why the scam is good.

Almost makes me want to take up a life of crime. Right now I'm trying to live my life with a "Do No Evil" attitude. If I decide to drop that, then I would consider a BCP type of scam.

not at the rates in which it was advertised

The first thing I thought was that you are missing the point. I could be wrong (it has happened before and will happen again). What do you mean? Sorry, another question (feel free to not answer and explain your answer).

I am really sorry about your situation

Do you really mean that? If so, thank you (?). There is nothing you can do for me (that I can think of). You may be able to help the people who are still being scammed (I know you don't like that word, give me another word I can sink my teeth into). How can you do this?

Do not support BCP and warn others to do the same (until BCP decides to do the right thing). Doing this will cost you BTC, however I believe it is the thing to do.

some here may not have known that the 9 cents they were mining for was costing them far more. 

That is some very good information. People should know that, however that is missing the point.

Scam is just a big word that should be reserved for sites that deserve it, I see BCP's fuck ups, I still don't see it as a scam what so ever.

Maybe I am starting to understand you. In your statement, you used the word big. Is size important (set aside your porn business )?
If the amount of BTC was worth $1,000.00 and BTC kept the same policy. Would it be a scam then?

If not, how much does BTC have to be worth for you to consider this to be a scam? I know, more questions.

[BitcoinPorn]

Was that my slight user error? If so, how can I correct this so it would not happen again?

Research more, take the time you took to take apart my post in pieces for I have no clue what you are wanting to get out of that.  I'm sure if this was a movie, this thread represents you screaming up to the sky "WHYYYYYY" after you lost someone you loved.  I still am overall sorry for your situation.

I assure you I am not jumping into your sadness further with discussing things, and use that energy and direct it at the right people

[BitCoinBarter]

Yes he may have not updated the transaction fee to .0005 but the client was only updated to allow that just a couple weeks ago.

He also hasn't disclosed his policies. Why?
I assume it would be easy to put up a FAQ on this site.

Talking about getting scammed out of less than .50 cents worth of money seems a bit ridiculous to me.

True. I assume that most would not. They would accept the lost and accept that they have been scammed.
What about the people who are still being scammed? Go to BCP and you will see them generating BTCs. Little do they know, that the fix is in.

I am trying to live a "Do No EVil" life. Based (in part) on Edmund Burke's quote of, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."* Looks like evil is triumphing.

Most website affiliate programs don't pay out unless your commissions are over $50. I would have a hard time taking claims of scamming serious if the amount was under a dollar.

This is why it is an outstanding scam.

His program is much more akin to an affiliate payment program than a mining program. If you have no traffic to your site then the current transaction fee he charges of .01 will eat most of your (pennies) of profit. You ate wasting your time if you are only mining using your CPU.

Do affiliate program state how they work and what (if any fees) are involved? BCP doesn't.
For wasting time mining with a CPU. Missing the point.

Don't try to ruin this fledgling bitcoin business by yelling scam when it is only over pennies.

Even if they are scamming people. Is it better if they scam people for more money. Could I tell people it is a scam then?

I don't want to ruin his business. I just want him to do the right thing. If the right thing will ruin him, them pick another business (I know, easier said then to do).

* Yes ladies, he should have said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing." Don't let that stop you from joining the "Do No Evil" life.

[BitCoinBarter]

I assure you I am not jumping into your sadness further with discussing things, and use that energy and direct it at the right people

You are right, I should direct it to the right people.
The people at BCP (OK, person) are not the right people. They are the one who caused this and seems to not want to change.

Hopefully, I would run across the right people (at some time). Wish me luck (or not).

[BitQuestr (BitCoinWorldMarket)]

Technically it is not his fee. It is the fee built into the system of bitcoin.

Yes he should probably make it clearer on his site I'll grant you that. However I don't think he is intentionally and maliciously trying to scam people out of their hundredths of a penny accounts. If you took a survey I would guess most people ignore or don't report the transaction cost of sending bit coins. In fact I was surprised to find there was a transaction at all when I first started reading about bitcoin.  He does state his fee clearly on the site and I would assume before I went spending weeks on mining .01 bit coins I would have run across the fact that to send a bitcoin it costs anywhere from .01 to .0005 btc per transaction.

If anything this is not his failing but the misrepresentation by the popular notion that sending bitcoin is free.

What are you feeling hurt by more, that you lost a potential seventeen cents worth of bitcoin or the hours you spent trying to make that seventeen cents without fully educating yourself on the true costs of that  seventeen cents of value?

This kind of feels like you are angry at a tollbooth operator for charging you 17 cents because the toll road wasn't listed on your map and you can't turn around.

By all means start a truth in bitcoin campaign to require all bitcoin businesses to list the transaction fee they use in their client on their websites and FAQs. 

[Test Bank Guy]

I've made this in 1 day with 4 computers and using the wordpress plugin on 2 blogs... 

Balance: 0.00157821 BTC

[BitCoinBarter]

Technically it is not his fee. It is the fee built into the system of bitcoin.

From an earlier post from JoelKatz posted on this thread (please read it and set it aside):

The fee is per transaction, not per recipient. Assuming he's paying 10 people at a time out of a block he mined a few hours ago, he never would have to pay anywhere near .01 per recipient. Maybe it's a scam, but maybe he's just too lazy to group his transactions. If he keeps doing very small payouts from the same block, he's doing one transaction per payout and they're all going to be with newish coins.

Yes he should probably make it clearer on his site I'll grant you that.

Thank you. He (BCP) knows this too. He responded in part to an email I sent him with (see one of my eairler posts on this thread for my emails sent/received to BCP) :

"I should make it easier find out about the fee, you're right."

Also PandaMiner posted on this thread that Donny (owner of BCP?) admitted to this by saying, "yeah, I guess it does seem scammy" and "I'll have to put it on there" but never did.

So BCP knows this. Why not disclose? Maybe it is because that if it is disclosed, people will not go there (some people would still go).
I think that is called, "lying by omission".

However I don't think he is intentionally and maliciously trying to scam people out of their hundredths of a penny accounts.

Lying by omission is scamming.

He does state his fee clearly on the site

True, however it is only after you want to transfer BTC. See PandaMiner's post (on this thread). Notice how now it is nice and big (in red too). If you look carefully, you will see that BTC's disclose is not the truth. Right next to Amount, it says "minimum 0.01 BTC"

If anything this is not his failing but the misrepresentation by the popular notion that sending bitcoin is free.

Are you Donny perchance? If so, start doing the right thing.

What are you feeling hurt by more, that you lost a potential seventeen cents worth of bitcoin or the hours you spent trying to make that seventeen cents without fully educating yourself on the true costs of that  seventeen cents of value?

Are these my only choices? If so, I would say B, "hours you spent trying to make that seventeen cents without fully educating yourself on the true costs of that  seventeen cents of value?"

If I had another choice, it would be C, "I got scammed by BCP and it is still happening to other people."

This kind of feels like you are angry at a tollbooth operator for charging you 17 cents because the toll road wasn't listed on your map and you can't turn around.

I like that. I would add that I see other people driving down that road and want to warn them. Will you help?

By all means start a truth in bitcoin campaign to require all bitcoin businesses to list the transaction fee they use in their client on their websites and FAQs. 

I like that also. Any ideal how to get started?

[BitCoinBarter]

I've made this in 1 day with 4 computers and using the wordpress plugin on 2 blogs...  

Balance: 0.00157821 BTC

Assuming every thing stays the same (BCP has been know to lower the pay out amount), then it would take you 7 days to get to at least 0.01.

0.01 is not enough with BCP to transfer BTC. You will need at least 0.02*. That would take you at 13 days.

I suggest you quit BCP.  If you read this thread (EDIT- please read this whole thread), you will see that I dislike how BCP does things. Others also agree.

Others would not a say that BCP is a scam (I do). However, most would agree that there is a better way to generate BTC. It would cost you more in electric power, then it would cost to get your BTC. A lot more.

I wish I could provide you other options, however I hope that someone else will.

Have you went to the BitCoin Faucet yet? If not, go there and you can find out how to get 0.001 for free. Not much, but it is a start  .

Best of luck.

* I assume this is correct. It could be that you get to 0.02 and find out that you can not transfer BTC for some reason. Read this thread for details.

[Test Bank Guy]

I like BCP because I can run their script on my blogs which get a couple thousand hits a day without users even knowing it.  I don't have to use my own electricity for that... know of anywhere else that has something like that?

[BitcoinPorn]

I like BCP because I can run their script on my blogs which get a couple thousand hits a day without users even knowing it.  I don't have to use my own electricity for that... know of anywhere else that has something like that?

Yes, it is called PPC and if you are a good SEO you'd be making real money.

Browser mining is good in theory and hopefully will help some websites.  It still needs to be perfected, and it definitely needs to be better understood.

[BitCoinBarter]

I like BCP because I can run their script on my blogs which get a couple thousand hits a day without users even knowing it.  I don't have to use my own electricity for that... know of anywhere else that has something like that?

When you put it like that, then I say that BCP may be a good deal for you. This assumes that the visitors to your site know what is going on.

For you, it becomes a matter of trust. Do you trust BCP to do right with you, even if it doesn't with other people?
If you are generation enough BTC through them, then they would be a fool to messed that up.

This reminds me of a story I heard about fashion (or was it about running shoes). It came to light that the clothes were put together by children in third world countries.  These kids (I assume there were adults too) worked long hours for little pay (I assume the pay was not that bad for the area). So when you are buying these clothes (or shoes), you are supporting this.

When you support BCP, then you supporting their treatment of how they mistreat people (read this thread for details).

Yes, I believe you should support people/business depending how they treat you.
I also think you should treat them by how they treat others.

To support or not to support, that is the question. This question will have to be answered by you.

[josephholsten]

As the operator of bitp.it, I don't think BitCoinPlus is a scam. It's just the most inefficient way you could possibly mine.

We've stopped offering the service to new users because it's hardly making anyone any money. For most users, the best you can hope for is to annoy the people that go to your web site.

Honestly, we thought web mining could be really awesome before we built bitp.it. It isn't. But it's not our fault, or BitCoinPlus' fault, or any user's fault that it sucks. It's just not something that can be efficient with today's browsers, javascript implementations and CPUs.

Someday I hope that will change. But today, web mining is just a great way to burn bandwidth and electricity.

[mj0nes]

Eh, never tried them out. Might be a scam

[BitCoinBarter]

As the operator of bitp.it, I don't think BitCoinPlus is a scam. It's just the most inefficient way you could possibly mine.

I believe you are missing the point. I think they are a scam because of their lack of disclosure.

I assume that most of the people who go there know very little about bitcoin. Why? It seems that everyone (that has knowledge of generation BTC) knows to not go there. The exceptions are people who would use it in connection with their site (but that's a special case).

So here is why it is a scam. Imagine you now know nothing (or very little about BitCoin). You stumble across BCP somehow. After some hours, you get your first payout. Great, you attempt to transfer BTC to your wallet.

Hold on. Warning, you are told that you will need at least 0.01 to transfer BTC. Did you miss something? You check the site to see it this is mentioned somewhere else. It is not not. You decided to continue generation until you get at least 0.01.

Hold on. Warning, you are told you can not transfer BTC because of a 0.01 fee. What? You check there site again. No mention of a 0.01 fee either.

You decide to contact the site. Through emails, the site admits that you really need 0.02 to transfer BTC (of which 0.01 would go to fees). They know about the lack of disclose and write, "..If I get some time I might post on my site about these things. Thanks for emailing me..."

This is a scam. It is a very good scam. As I write this I chuckled. It is just that good of a scam.

Here is something else. No one in this thread has confirmed that BCP would transfer BTC once you get to 0.02. There was one poster who said that BCP did transfer BTC to him (I think it was a he), however that was before the 0.01 transfer fee (start of the scam?).

Of course I could believe Donny (owner of BCP?) that they do transfer at 0.02, however I don't trust him.

[slamcore]

I totally disagree that BitCoinPlus is a scam.

One of the goals of the BitCoin project as a form of digital cash is to enable micro transactions.  In order to make micro transactions pay off, you need a lot of them.  Having a visitor to a website compute a few hashes is a microtransaction far less objectionable than most ads, and it is far more reliable in terms of payout than an ad's click through rate.  Getting thousands of visitors a day to a website is what it takes to make BitCoinPlus work for you.

User Error.

[BitQuestr (BitCoinWorldMarket)]

If you actually have a wallet to transfer to then you aren't THAT new. It is clear in the client settings that transactions  can have fees. The client clearly says:

"Fee 0.01 Recommended"

Your beef is with the bitcoin itself not BitCoinPlus...

Even the wiki at en.bitcoin.it is out of date listing:

"0.01 BTC fee if sending any transaction less than 0.01 BTC"

Anyone know if the current minimum amount that can be sent without a transaction fee anyways? Is it still .01 or has that lowered to .0005 as well as the minimum transaction fee?

[Seaco]

man this rant is way more popular than mine! hehe BitCoinBarter , nobody wants to listen to reason here!

I only used BCP because i had a pc on at work running a low user ftp server, so i figured id make me some bitcents. I understand how mining works, i have a small rig myself, overclocked my cards, etc, etc and as most everyone around have a degree in CS.

so, just roll with me on this one:

OK so why deepbit (to say one) lets you send micro payments with no cost? because they group trx and then discount the fees from the healthy 3% they take from the mining. And that im okay with, heck, it is a business.

So as said before, BCP is either lazy, or expects that by using these tactics an important number of users will:

1.-Get tired of waiting and simply never cash out their BTCs (especially smaller fractioned amounts)
or
2.-Accept that they charge up to 50% in fees for their service as modeled .


Another option i'm strongly pondering is that BCP simply doesnt have enough power to find blocks on a daily basis -but have to make you believe as if you're constantly getting small amounts-, so they have to block out and pospone cash outs somehow, and this way, to get to a true 3% fee on a normal pc you would have to "mine" for like 33 weeks. So maybe something extra funky is happening with his payout/share proyections, with difficulty rising rapidly over a short period of time, if his turnaround is not quick enough the older payouts can throw everything out of whack. Keeping the 0.01btc fee per cashout would have that effect, and help cover losses.