Thanks for the replies. I wound up putting in a bet on BetMoose because they had the volume to handle my wager.

On One Hash, the volume was so low, that my bet would crush their odds.

Nitrogen only had bets on US Senate Races, which I am not interested in.

Good luck, everyone!

I would like to bet on the mid-term elections in the USA. Are there any long-running legit prediction markets that are somewhat liquid where I can do this?

I haven't paid attention to the Bitcoin gambling space for a while, so I am out of touch with the scene. How can I vet the site that I bet on? There seem to be a few Bitcoin betting review sites, but they all have affiliate links, so it looks like they will shill for just about anyone that gives them an affiliate deal.

Mine finally went through and confirmed. The network is very congested right now and you have to pay slightly higher fees to get things confirmed in a reasonable time. Since your transaction is already on the network, it will sit there until a miner picks it up. It will not get returned to the sender or anything like that.

This is a good site that estimates how many blocks before a confirmation based on current network congestion and fees per byte.

Here's another cool chart that shows the size of the mempool. Mempool is basically all transactions on the network that are waiting to be mined into a block. Notice how just in the last few days it's gone from about 5-7 MB all the way up to 42 MB. Remember...max block size is 1 MB. So even if everyone stopped spending bitcoins right now, it would take over 40 blocks to clear out all the transactions that are waiting. Miners will leave low-fee transactions sit and include transactions with fees.

I didn't know any of this until I started asking around about my own stuck transaction (which is now unstuck).

Also, to be clear, even though it was a hassle to get my BTC back, Predictious has fulfilled their obligations to me at this point.

They've made good by me, too. Credited my account, which I withdrew to my wallet.

Only problem is that they skimped on the fees so the transaction has been sitting unconfirmed for several hours now.

Same here. See my post a couple messages up. I still have heard nothing from them, and my account still erroneously says it's empty.

I put money on the US presidential election and won when Trump won. Your website made an error when I tried to withdraw bitcoins, but it still deducted the amount from my Predictious account. So according to your website I have a zero balance. In reality, I should have about 550 mBTC - either in my predictious account or in my bitcoin wallet.

I have already emailed you twice through the form on your site. I wrote you immediately after trying to withdraw, heard nothing back, so emailed again 2 days later. It has been 2 days since my last email went unanswered, so I'm hoping you check this thread.

I know Predictious has been around for a long time, so I'm still hoping this is an honest mistake. Please check your email box or message me here.

I'm running Ubuntu and using Electrum 1.9.8. When I have my VPN turned on, the Electrum wallet says "synchronizing" for a few minutes, then gives up trying and says, "not connected." I have tried connecting to several servers and even made sure they were online at http://electrum.qc.to/

Anyways, if I turn off the VPN, then Electrum connects and synchronizes immediately.

Any tips on how to get it to work or settings I can check?

Thank you!

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Please follow this thread and someone will probably help you momentarily:

https://nxtforum.org/index.php?topic=806.msg12385#msg12385

I use the "official" client and once that is set up with the proper Java thingy, it's very easy to use. Everything is managed through your web browser, which connects to the Java program running locally on your computer. Eventually, you will just have to download the zip file, unpack it, then double click on "run.sh" to start the program. Then launch a browser window and go to http://127.0.0.1:7875/

If you have more questions, please post on the Nxt forum or in this thread.

First off, all figures are approximations, so let's not argue over small differences in what I estimate.

Assumptions:
* Mining is a specialized business with low profit margins.
* The mining market is pretty efficient.
* Transaction fees currently paid to miners are negligible.

Therefore, we can approximate the cost to run the network as being roughly equal to the block subsidy.

Currently, the block subsidy amounts to BTC1,314,000/year.
Current bitcoin price = $500

Total cost to run the bitcoin market for a year, including electricity, hardware costs, opportunity cost from tying up capital: $500 x 1,314,000 = $657,000,000 to support the network.

Bitcoin promises low transaction fees as one of its main features, therefore without a block subsidy, and with Tx fees @ 0.5%, the Bitcoin economy would have to be:

$657 million / 0.005 = $131.4 billion to support the miners at current rates.

This is roughly the GDP of Slovakia or New Zealand.

For comparison, Ireland's GDP is about $190 billion.

Currently, we can not send cheap transactions, but we do send heavily subsidized transactions that are paid for with the debasement of existing bitcoins.

Discuss.

There was a bug in the code that was released a couple days ago. A new version just came out today that supposedly fixes it. You should download & install the latest version.

I don't have any Test Nxt, but keep asking around and someone will send you some.

People can be listed and rated in the Web of Trust for anything. It's sort of a pain to get it set up and requires familiarity with GPG, but the online help wiki is good, and the people in #bitcoin-otc on Freenode can answer specific questions.

I am going to repost my opinion on trading here. I originally put this in the firehose thread:

IMO the smart money trades off exchange, preferably using the bitcoin-otc web of trust. Using this forum's trust database is a distant second, considering how many people stay logged in all the time, and how many times bitcointalk itself has been hacked.

The exchanges are better suited for weekend warriors that fancy themselves day traders or small retail purchases.

Mt Gox is only the latest in a long line of cryptoexchanges that have lost significant amount of user funds.

Until the crypto economy is bigger, we probably won't see an exchange that does security and oversight correctly because the space just isn't big enough to afford a reliable service. The exchanges just can't come up with the capital needed to do it properly.

Instead we still have a bunch of pikers that take advantage of the low barrier to entry. They open an exchange and only realize they are in over their heads after their users' funds are stolen.

But who knows, when the floating point decentralized asset exchanges start cropping up, maybe centralized exchanges will be rendered obsolete. Decentralized exchange may be here before a well-funded and well-run centralized exchange emerges.

So I've been told. He never wrote back to me anyways. Thanks for lookin out! 

I'm willing to buy all 250k.

Do this. There are people that do this with bitcoin wallets now. It's only a matter of time until they offer these services for Nxt, assuming Nxt itself doesn't die on the vine.

I really like the look of the new forum and think it will make us much more effective in discussing and debating Nxt.

to that end, I submitted a new post there: http://107.170.117.237/index.php/topic,35.0.html

It has to do with the currency settlement debate, but I am raising new issues that haven't been addressed. Please feel free to comment, especially Ian.

Can anyone tell me the best place to report bugs for Wesley's client?

The two most obvious uses would be as equity shares in a company, or as "bearer tokens."

A "bearer token" means that anyone that sends that token back to the issuer will receive something for it.

For instance, Anon136 had the idea of issuing tokens that would correspond to a specific type of 1 oz. silver coin.

He would sell these tokens on the asset exchange for enough money to cover his cost + shipping to the United States + some profit for himself.

So if he has 500 silver coins in his vault, he can sell 500 tokens redeemable for a 1 oz silver coin, including shipping.

Now these tokens can be traded freely on the exchange and function as a sort of currency. If one day I decide that I would rather hold the coin in my hand than just own it digitally, I can send my token back to Anon and he will mail me the silver coin.

That is one example. There are novel ways of using these assets to raise capital to start a small business, as well.

Is there, or is there planned to be a way to make payments to everyone holding an asset?

Suppose I am an asset issuer and I want to send 1 NXT per share to the Nxt account where the asset is held (like paying a dividend or interest). Can this be done?

Or would I need an external program or some sort of script to parse the blockchain, looking for accounts that hold shares of my asset and have it pay them individually?

I think you are wrong here, Anon.

Suppose I'm a weed dealer called Mr. Green. Suppose I get 10 oz. of product in from my supplier. I can issue an asset called "1 oz Mr. Green's Dank Bud" and issue 10 shares of the asset.

Dealers develop reputations for quality of their product, so 1 oz. from Mr Green may be worth less than 1 oz from Mr. Purple, but as far as a buyer is concerned...an ounce from Mr. Green is fungible with any other ounce from Mr. Green.

And not for nothing, but Bitcoin would probably never have gotten out of Mom's basement if it weren't for the appearance of the Silk Road early on in Bitcoin's history.

You're probably right that there are more elegant ways to run such a marketplace, but to say it couldn't be done in the AE is being shortsighted, IMO.

I could be wrong.