Trust No One

[daviducsb]

This is an interesting thread, are there some of the exchanges out there that should be considered most worthy of everyone's trust?

[brickhouse464]

man I was looking for a place to store some bitcoins while i updated my wallet on my PC.

I found a site claiming to be instawallet at a hidden onion address: 3rlqkicvauds47ch.onion i clicked around until it gave me a fresh URL not the first one from the link on ahmia.fi. 

I did everything it said and i kept a written record of the url to save and i sent to the address my bit coins.  The transaction went through with 39 confirmations and it has been hours since the transaction. I checked       blockchain.info and verified the transaction.

From:

16U7oGXbGZrMPcExLH4X3znG7eqTuFkKfM

To:

1L9LtdNgS9fsbkenEszHNHBthuZMGgJUok

in the amount of 1.0169586 BTC.

it has been hours and the funds still have not appeared.
There is an email address at the bottom of the site that i actually took time to write to but was returned as invalid. that email is instawallet@tormail.org.
can someone help me or did i just get screwed.

You got screwed, but not for much.  I've lost a lot more than that.

[mountainskyman]

Thanks.. useful advice to say the least.

[manface]

It is good information, thanks! Sometimes we must remember there are a lot of bad people out there.

[PrimalHoss]

In Debt We Trust. 

[j28]

Good ideas in this thread now wheres my wallet   

[CaperAsh]

That all seems fine.

However, it is FAR TOO COMPLICATED for anyone wanting to use bitcoin for ordinary, everyday transactions.
And if you can't use it for such things, what good is it?

Finally, although I am no expert and therefore might well be wrong, I simply don't trust any encryption since somebody somewhere always has the key and it can be given. Furthermore, I don't believe there is such a thing as secure online cyber anything.

The internet is a great way to exchange information, but because of it's all being digitally encoded, it is also the most efficient surveillance system ever invented. And given it was funded mainly by intelligence agencies (and/or their think-tank, university proxies), anyone who thinks there is such a thing as security online is, I think, being naive.

Put another way: if Bitcoin takes off to the point of being a serious threat to fiat, privately issued currencies, it can be closed down instantly at the touch of a button.

I gather the inventors of Bitcoin say that isn't so. But the material is too complex for me to understand and/or there is so much of it I can't be bothered to find a simple one-page explanation if one exists.

So I don't trust anyone.

Especially online.

Nor Bitcoin.

Though I hope for all of our sakes that I am wrong in this case and that you guys end up making a viable alternative.

Until it has been firmly established for several decades, however, at which point I will be long dead no doubt, I won't trust it!

[siennamarshalllee]

Why are there so many newbie restrictions?

[mrbitbank]

bitcoins are a scammers dream

[aslam268]

You're saying.. 'Do you know their full name?" and that kind of things. But aren't Bitcoins supposed to be anonymous? So that doesn't really make any sense..

[aslam87]

cool stuff

[aslam56]

Goes for online and offline in life.
 

[FJBourne]

Thanks for the info!

[gtrslayer]

Thank you for the info... newbie here. So, yeah!

[HATA28]

Allright, sounds like everything I need to know. Thanks

[suvegastar]

Very reasonable... but I have to agree... this is a little extreme for most users.

If you are a hard core BTC or [ltc] trader... take these precautions.  If you are a casual user... back up your wallet.  That is about all you need to do.

[fireball74]

I don't trust the exchanges. For the most part, I don't trust people in general. I'm just starting out in all this, but it's not like I'm a total noob. Money is money, be it electronic of paper. At some point you have to trust someone, even just a bit, to trade what you have for what they have. Getting screwed over and theft happens in all forms of currency. It's a gamble you eventually have to take.

--Jay

[btmstr]

Trust and confidence is the underpinning of any currency. If trust cannot be established somehow, then  i doubt bitcoin can succeed as a viable alternative to fiat money.

[twelph]

I don't trust people who tell me to trust no one

[Gruu]

The only service you can really "trust" (at least relatively) are the massive ones (like mtgox).
But even then, banks in the real world get "too-big-to-fail". It's a good thing these currencies are decentralized so that doesn't happen: a service provider will fail or it won't.