You have just been sent a personal message by Btcspot on Bitcoin Forum.
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The message they sent you was:
Hi kblaidd, yea I see your post about me and some1 accusing me of trying to fraud you but i wasnt. I was truly trying to help you so i could get a reward. Yes that wallet site isnt a scam ive been using it for 5 months nothing wrong also Electrum wasnt that secure until they fix. Yea 3 btc was alot to ask my bad but if I was in your shoes id at least give someone 1 bitcoin. Well glad i could help and im not well off like you think Im struggling also so if you could tip me just .5 or .4 that would help me out. My address I already gave you. Later man.
Btcspot. At one point you asked me whether I had recovered my funds yet. If you knew as much as me about Bitcoin you would have looked up the address on blockchain.info and seen that I hadn't. I agree you sent me a link (which I had already found for myself, though you were not to know that) but you also gave some advice I consider to be quite poor and hassled me to an extent I found unpleasant. I like to keep quiet about my Bitcoins. The reason I posted here was that I didn't understand why I was having trouble with the transactions and wanted guidance to avoid making expensive mistakes. I was really hoping not to have to resort to raw transactions. Not that I wouldn't have been capable of it (remember I downloaded the software in Summer 2010) but because there was a lot of detail I didn't want to have to learn and such a clear potential for getting things wrong.
Have you ever been to the
third developing world? The crushing poverty can be overwhelming with poor kids and beggars hassling you for money. It's deeply distressing and yet hard to do anything about. I'm not generally a fan of Bill Gates but I believe he said that it's as hard to give money away effectively as it is to make it in the first place. I'm afraid I see no indication that giving away money to you would be particularly effective - which is not to say I'm not sympathetic, though it may not seem that way to you.
It may sound a bit crude, but I keep thinking of an unkempt man who owned a van and apparently cruised the streets of of a local city yelling 'Want a f**k?' at any women he passed. One or two in a hundred apparently said 'yes' and joined him in the back of the van, in which he had a mattress. It's one way to get laid, I suppose, and as far as I can imagine it's not illegal. But the cost is that the 99 women who say 'no' feel distressed and perhaps threatened as they go about their daily lives. Likewise, it's very corrosive if you are trying to discuss technical matters against a constant backdrop of begging letters. Perhaps not as bad as the example above, but it still leaves me with something of a bad taste in my mouth when I visit the forum.
Having some money feels very odd. I've worked very hard at school since I was 4, got into a very competitive course at university, continued to work very hard ever since. Ended up with a mortgage on a fairly modest house that I expected to pay off when I was 62 despite overstretching myself financially to pay for it. One day I read an article about Bitcoin on Slashdot, downloaded the program and mined 50 bitcoins that 7 years later are worth more than I earn in a decade. I'm not complaining but neither am I kidding myself that this is anything like 'normal'.
Being around people with money can be very harmful to your perspective on life. Bitcoin is about money, so for a little help on the forum you suggested I pay you $50,000 (or whatever 3 bitcoins were worth at the time). At the moment I also need a bit of help with a carburetor with a flat spot. If somebody helped me out on the carburetor forum, would you expect me to pay him $50,000 for his expertise - which these days is at least as specialised and scarce as expertise about Bitcoin? In my job I could easily kill somebody if I'm not careful. A few times I've even saved somebody's life by spotting something other people had missed*. Do I get a $50,000 bonus every time I save somebody's life? Should I? The answer is 'no' on both counts. There's nothing special about advice about money that makes it more valuable than advice about other matters.
So, cultivate a sense of perspective. I get the impression that you are young and I am aware of how hard life can be these days. Although my mortgage has been crippling, I considered myself lucky to have one at all. I know that quality jobs are not as common as they used to be - the salary for my job is far lower than it would have been a decade or two ago. Something is going fundamentally wrong with the way society works. But that doesn't mean that hassling people for bitcoins on the internet is an acceptable thing to do.
Paradoxically, I think the reason I have made money out of Bitcoin was because I was interested in it for its own sake and never really expected to. It seemed like a fun experiment and I was intrigued by it. What else are you interested in? By all means keep whatever bitcoin you own, but can I suggest you try to think of them a little less. I think your life will be better for it.
* true, that works both ways
