Re: [Interviews] with Bitcointalk members

Quote from: zasad@ on August 23, 2020, 09:33:19 AM

Hello.
I want to interview you. I hope for your consent.

Please send me the answers, I will publish it or post the answers yourself, I will add the link in 1 post.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967

Questions:

When and why did you become interested in cryptocurrencies?

To answer that I have to go back to the world before BitCoin. At the start of the 21st Century I had been interested in Cryptography and, mathematics (from a very young age) and happened upon PGP. Reading through the documentation I could see the principals at work of one way equations. By 2006 I had done some key-signings with some people I know on both sides of the ditch and had even sourced out GSWOT ( https://sites.google.com/a/gswot.org/gswot/resources/policy ) whereby you can front up to people - show your I.D. and get them to do the same and then sign each-others' Public Keys. In a very James Bond moment, I turned up at a Military Base in the country I was in at that time, handed over my multiple Passports for scrutiny, a person was summoned, I was taken to a mess hall and did a key signing over coffee with a person stationed at that base.

Mid 2007 through mid / late 2009 I was living in a Motel and everything got put to one side until my home got built so I wasn't able to follow the trends around PGP. ⁽¹⁾ Then, around late 2011, I started hearing about BitCoin but the Journalists weren't sure what they were talking about, so I at first had the impression it was a bank-to-bank transfer system along the lines of a Time Magazine article from 1998 & 1994. ^{(2) & (3)} It was only when one journalist's article talked about BitCoin being developed on the back of the PGP key-signing / Public / Private Keys that I sat up and took notice.
When and why did you buy your first bitcoin?

Ah - I'd tried to buy a whole BitCoin from monbux. I'm still not sure what was going through his head at the time, but he wanted more and more information from me - date of birth, home address - the works. I came to the conclusion that he was data mining as his requests for yet more information went far beyond what a normal person would want for a transaction (even one that was Pay Pal based)

Instead, I ended up finding out there was a BitCoin ATM in South Brisbane in a Coffee Roaster's/Cafe. The coffee shop business was a front for criminal bike gangs to launder money, the local media had a frenzy when the police jubilantly announced they seized a BitCoin ATM in the raid (but the QPS never apologised when they found the ATM had nothing to do with the coffee shop other than some hapless owner of the ATM had chosen that particular shop/owners to approach to house their BTC ATM).

The ATM ended up in Fish Lane South Brisbane. Around the same time I went along to "meet-ups" for BitCoin Brisbane and met Lucas Cullan ( doof here on BCT) who was mining BitCoins with his PC and set up getpaidinbitcoin.com.au so between the BTC ATM in Fish Lane and the website I bought my first whole BitCoin which I divided into 20 bight sized paper wallets as gifts to the membership of LASFAPA - each receiving BTC 0.05000471 if you find wallet addresses starting 1Lasfapa... they were Vanity Generated by me. The 0.05 was worth about $20 at the time I bought the coins, now they're worth about $ 585 at the time of writing this.

It was at the time I was Vanity Generating wallet addresses that I first encountered the new kid on the block LoyceV who was earning some donations for generating vanity wallets for others. Occasionally I'd spot requests when he was offline, generate and post the end result for the user and always insist they pay LoyceV the tip not me.
How did you get on the forum?

As I said above I'd heard about BitCoin and did Bing Searches for it online. There were some sites, but I found the forum through a link on an eBay listing for some alt coins that probably don't exists anymore. At first I read many articles but didn't register. Eventually I found the alt coin section and of course found the SexCoin thread who's siren call led me to signing up for the Forum. After registering I would read posts, find something I wanted to comment on, log in, post, log-out, keep reading. My hours online were tiny compared to many others.
- You have spent a lot of time looking for cheaters on the forum. Is this a hobby or professional interest?
  
  Ironically, I've been diddled out of less than $100 from a hand full of scammers, however, by staying with the Forum (as a result of those scams) I've made many times that back (as evidenced above) which I wouldn't have made if I'd just found the forum, stumbled upon the SexCoin thread and joined their own dedicated forum on another site.
  
  So thank you scammers, I've profited from you scamming me.
- How do you think mass advertising of gambling projects has a positive effect on the development of the forum or harms the community?
  
  I'm not the first one to note this year that many users wouldn't give the forum the time of day if they weren't being paid to post. There are close to three million registered users, yet only ten or twenty thousand real users using the forum at the moment with BPIP.org saying there is around 90,000 actual active users. If we met somewhere in the middle, the true number is around 45,000 users. To put that into perspective, by doing a quick mental calculation says that's about 200 - 300 users per country world wide.
- You have been on the forum for a long time and spend a lot of effort fighting other old members. Give advice to young members of the forum how to avoid mistakes and conflicts on the forum?
  
  No, not me. I say my piece then I am done. You need to look to the flog-the-dead-horse threads such as the "pill addiction", "X is a Y" or "Z hurt my feelings" threads to see real inbred fighting occurring. I don't start threads against other users except for scam accusations, or Investigations - One of the only cautionary tales I'd give my younger self would be to label some of the threads as "investigations" rather than actual "scam accusations" (and leave NEUTRAL trust feedback as opposed to the negatives) - In the end, the squealing Butt Hurt ^TM by sock puppet owners might have been the same.
  
  If you want me to canvas a particular user or issue you might have to start naming names?
  
  Quote from: zasad@ on August 24, 2020, 10:08:30 AM
  (snip)
  
  I do not want to discuss old conflicts, because it can provoke new ones.
  
  I fully agree, as I said above, I say my piece and then I am done.
The most useful forum topic? Most helpful users?

I really should take more notice of such things. Some of the lists of topics should be pinned to the top. *edit* Actually, the multiple stuck threads at top should be rolled into one new thread that's stuck at the top of the board.
3 things you would implement on the forum?

Well...

The BitCoinTalk Forum is currently as toxic as Cryptopia was about four to six months before the first thefts of alt coins began.
- Introduce KYC, halt Copper/Gold/Platinum/Dilithium memberships and require signature campaigns to purchase a licence from the forum to advertise.
  
  A user shouldn't have more than a main profile and corresponding "mobile" alt, there's no need for more alts with the exception of an [ANN] user profile such as for a new coin. This feeds into my next point that Newbies shouldn't be allowed to post in certain sections. The top 1,000 users on BPIP.org 's Most Recognised (myself included at rank 38) should be the first to be vetted by a third party KYC verifying company. If you're in the top 1,000 chances are you are DT1 or DT2 (positive or negative) are likely to be a campaign manager, merit source, an admin, moderator or some other senior role in the Forum.
  
  With regards to signature campaigns, the Forum should (for want of a better term) "licence" Campaign Managers and also the Signature Campaigns themselves. The campaign I am participating in pays $60 per week with about 20 members. If we used an example campaign paying $50 to 20 users that's $ 1,000 per week to just one campaign equaling $ 50,000 (thereabouts) per annum. if there are twenty campaigns then that number increases to $ 1,000,000 per annum being invested year 'round in SigCamps. (and that doesn't even canvas the high end Campaign that's paying close to $ 450 per person per week.
  
  A one off license of $ 1,000 per campaign is not an unreasonable amount to ask I don't think. If a campaign is struggling to run for 4 weeks, then it probably shouldn't run at all. (same goes for the handful of campaigns that have moved from weekly to fortnightly / monthly payments to their participants). I don't have any figures for what payments Campaign Managers receive for services rendered, but a one off purchase of a shield icon (think the paint brush icon from the Art Competition) tells people at a glance the person is recognized as a Campaign Manager. The same shield/icon theme could apply to lenders, Merit Sources and Admin/Moderators etc.
- Allow some threads / sections of the Forum to be visible to the public, but once you are registered, you can only gain access to more threads once you have climbed the membership ladder. A Newbie really will have to earn their merits to rank up as they will be severely restricted in what they can read/reply to. I've installed SMF Forums on external domains as well as being a moderator on the SexCoin Forum and have tested the rank Vs access quite extensively. It only takes a few key strokes to implement. It was also good to allow the mock Forum to be subjected to DDoS and the like - all I had to do was place some links in my Signature and the Russians then the Turks (and two specific IP's in New Zealand - Dunedin and Wellington) came a knocking a plenty. I'd left the Forum unattended for four months and something like a terabyte of porn had been uploaded which must have taken (even a robot) a LONG TIME to upload. Again, with just a few key strokes that users' profile and everything they'd posted was gone in a matter of minutes. It really isn't that hard which makes me wonder if theymos doesn't have full control of certain functions SMF is capable of.
  
  When a UID is nuked, the corresponding Trust Feedback & Default Trust should also be wiped clean.
- This third one is a little tricky. There needs to be a formal structure to the Forum, a board, department heads and employees (not just mod/admin). By all means theymos can keep the keys to the forum and be the department head for the forum's maintenance and upgrades (such as they are) but ultimately the Forum needs to look to protect itself with a more formalized structure and chain of command (and accountability). At the moment no one will own up to the various post/thread deletion sprees that are going on judging by the discussions started about it. Eventually someone is going to pull the plug on a high profile UID out of spite and not own up to it.
Do you trade on exchanges or invest in projects?

These days neither.

I lost out parking coins on coinex.pw and then again on Cryptopia.co.nz ... and NovaExchange.com ...

What alt coins I had left I sold en-masse at the end of last year.
Tell a story about your big profit or big loss?

Because I'm not actually spending the funds I'm receiving from the Signature Campaigns I've been in, I'm spreading those funds in a few ways, firstly I've built up a nice little group of channels on my Eclair Lightning Network Node, next will be some alt coins to HODL for a while and thirdly I'm still trying to nutt out the time delayed transactions so that I can lock coins away for a year, two years, ten years as a medium term retirement plan.
What do you think about the DEFI ecosystem?

Like everyone else, I haven't heard of it before. (I've seen some spin online this week about it, but haven't gone into it too closely)
Is your anonymity a vital necessity or precaution?

I wasn't aware we were supposed to be anonymous otherwise I'd've picked a different name to the one I use on Social Media, Wikipedia, etc...
The last cryptocurrency book you read?

Crypto Book I couldn't tell you, (the one's I've browsed are get-rich-quick style works of fiction which were probably originally written for the Avocado / Emu Oil / next mining boom and reworded for the unsuspecting Crypto novice), but I'm always reading news items on various crypto news sites, most I pick up from links they post on Twitter.
Advise 3 cryptocurrencies/tokens for investment in the next 1-2 years?

Hmm, tough one. The line between investing in Crypto as an end user and actually using Crypto for what it's intended has become very blurred. People are forgetting you're actually supposed to make transactions with Crypto. By all means invest in a project, but don't just HODL a bag or feed a whale by pumping and dumping.

For the next little while I'm putting the BitCoin I earn from Signature Campaigns into testing out the Lightning Network as well as creating numerous channels connected to far flung nodes, so BitCoin is my first choice.

Any crypto which ticks all the boxes:
- Is listed on an exchange
- Has a working block-chain
- Has a working wallet PLUS a working Android/iOS wallet
- Their advertising and Social Media presence is interactive i.e. they engage with their audience, not just spew out information.
- Was originally mined
Gets a tick from me (as long as it has a demographic that can make use of it. Yes, I'm talking about examples such as SEXcoin or GameCoin here. Having a "Tit, Titty, Nipple or Boob coin is just crass, but the name speaks for itself. As does any "National" coins (again as long as they have wallet, block-chain, exchanges etc in place) they may start out as gimmicks, but so are many thousands of other coins out there.

I've steered clear of all ERC 20 / ETH (and clones) due to their instantly generating Billions, or even Trillions of coins which goes against the ethos of mine and spend coins starting with BitCoin. "Be your own Bank" doesn't mean print all the coins yourself, or buy them from a central reserve - that's what Governments do - print money.

(Having said all of that I read a post only a day or two ago that suggested Bitcoin plus two new/near new and two old/well established coins, so I might have to broaden my horizons a little and invest in more alts...)
How much will Bitcoin cost at the end of 2020?

Probably sub $ 14k US
P.S. (Optional)

Best not feed the DT Trolls with anything they'd claim was an "ad hominem"
- Which is how I know that some of the UID's that have posted PGP keys were generated by the same keyrings as other UID's otherwise seemingly unrelated.
- Time Magazine - 27 April 1998 "The Future of Money" pp 46 - 55
- Time Magazine - 25 July 1994 "The Strange New World of the Internet" pp 46 - 52

Thanks for inviting me to contribute and your suggestion for me to post this myself (if a little later than I'd hoped to).