I think you ought to try not writing like your posts are texts or that you're on some gaming forum, because when I saw 'cod' I immediately thought of the fish and didn't know what the hell you were talking about.  Doubtful I'm the only one who's an old, non-gaming curmudgeon.

As to your idea, meh.  That's my long answer, because even if I had a very strong opinion on going back to square one it doesn't really matter--Theymos is the one who'd have to approve it, and there have been so many other ideas in the past that he's turned a deaf ear to that it's not likely he'd even consider this one.  Not that anyone knows what he thinks, since he rarely telegraphs his thoughts to the community, but just from experience this doesn't sound like something he'd get behind.

And that's why this statement is not necessarily true:


If, for example, something happened that was catastrophic to bitcoin--some black swan event that no one probably saw coming--its scarcity would mean diddly-squat.  I've heard people go on and on about the fixed supply guaranteeing bitcoin's price will just keep going up, but you're talking about supply and demand; note that there are two factors there, not just one.  Here's an example, Bitcore (BTX).  The supply is also capped at 21 million coins, yet just look at its price chart spanning all the way back to 2017:



Doesn't look anything like bitcoin, does it?  And it's obvious why: there's no demand for it, which goes the same for all the other shitcoins with fixed supply.  What exactly is there to discuss here?

Bismuth is definitely used in pharmaceuticals like bismuth subsalicylate (Pepto Bismol, the pink stuff used for upset stomach), and for some reason there's a tiny voice ringing in my head that it might also be used in nuclear medicine--but in any case, I still had no idea that demand for it had grown.

And gallium....man, I was just re-reading Plastic Fantastic, a book about the physics fraud Jan Hendrik Schon (I don't know how to put that pair of electrons over the 'o' in his last name, as he's from Germany, lol) and early on there was mention of research being done with copper gallium selenide.  The physics of it has to do with n-type conduction, which is way beyond anything I studied in physics when I was in college, but my point is that it was studied decades ago by researchers in the semiconductor field and by this point might have actual utility in electronics--though that's just a guess on my part.

The above book is an excellent one, by the way, even if it goes back a few years.

It's kind of sad that I get most of my world news from posts on this forum, but nevertheless I'm thankful that there are people here from all over the globe and that members like you write about thing like the above, which would probably never be reported on the TV news where I live (so thanks).

And being somewhat of a chemistry geek, I found that pictogram (or whatever the hell you call it) informative; some of those elements I was aware of in terms of their industrial importance--like copper and the platinum group metals, but bismuth and gallium and a few others I had no clue about.  So people are just barging into your area to dig up these metals?  That has got to cause some serious tension, not to mention legal issues.  I'm trying to picture that happening in the US, and my guess is that any foreign miners might last a day before law enforcement booted them out on their asses.  Man oh man.

It is, yet so many people seem to love the taste of it and don't care about its toxicity in the least.

I'm going to have to go back and read about the details of this debacle, but is there anything preventing other HW wallet manufacturers from doing something similar?  I would imagine so; I even recall when the Electrum wallet for Dash was taken down from Github for what I think were political reasons, and I'm not even sure if those Dash could be restored if you didn't have the Electrum software.

Yep, my technical knowledge is still sketchy which is why all of this seems just a wee bit frightening to me.  You'd think in the world of crypto, you'd truly be in control of your coins as long as you had the seed phrase....but that's not 100% true, is it?

Well in the US I believe when situations like piracy happen and they affect corporations, it's up to the 'victims' to take legal action against the people pirating stuff.  If the music/movie/whatever industries never paid attention, the government wouldn't take any action.

At least that's my non-lawyer take on things.  I can't stand lawyers, by the way.

Shit like this should be treated as nuclear war, i.e., blow his ass to hell with as many missiles as you can.  Give him a neg, report him, and lock him up in a gibbet right in the middle of town so everyone can ridicule him.  That's what I'd do circa 2016, and it's what I'd do in 2025.

Yeah, buying a 10-year old merit source account with positive trust and an excellent reputation....how bad could that end up being, right?  Fortunately I think he would have been caught very quickly if he made a lot of posts; his PM just doesn't read like anything you'd write, Jet Cash.

BTW, always glad to see you here.

People have been pirating movies, music, and whatever else since the 90s (and that's just as far back as I can remember).  It kind of surprises me that piracy has taken a huge chunk of profit out of the music business and yet that industry never really cracked down on piracy in earnest.  There was a time when people were getting sued, but that didn't last for long.  That tells me that pretty much nobody cares if stuff gets pirated, including the government.

What I hate, absolutely hate, is that this subscription model has been adopted by so many industries because it's such a money-maker.  I've heard about having to subscribe to having your seats heated in the car that you bought....and damned if that isn't taking things way too far IMO.

Never heard that analogy before, but damned if it isn't as funny as it is true.  Unfortunately, TO had been around for quite a while and developed a reputation (justified or not) as an exchange that wasn't out to scam its customers, so I assume a lot of people became comfortable keeping their crypto parked there--and that's obviously a bad idea no matter what the exchange's reputation is.


Where did that document come from?  Looks to be an injunction of some sort, though I'm by no means a legal expert. 

My guess is that TO's situation has a lot to do with the crackdown on privacy that's apparently sweeping the globe.  That's a guess, mind you, and one I really don't hope is true.

You have that right, 100%.  Most HW wallets are pure crap, and that assessment is just from me browsing Amazon and bitcointalk.  I'm guessing there will come a day when people figure out that they can build their own or don't really need to shell out money for a device that may or may not be secure.  That day might be a long time coming, but I'm confident it will arrive just like the day when people wake up and come to the realization that the thousands of altcoins on the market are mostly scams designed to enrich the coins' "devs".

I'm getting more curmudgeonly and pessimistic as the years pass--I can't imagine what my attitude is going to be in about 5 years or so.

Oh lordy, no.  We definitely do need another section dedicated to gambling, whether bitcoin is mentioned or not.  You said you checked out the gambling section(s) so you must have realized that most of what gets posted there is 96% garbage churned out by members in gambling-related campaigns and who never stray very far into other sections.

I've seen plenty of threads where gambling topics that are only tangential to crypto are discussed for dozens of pages, so how would a new section narrowing the focus to altcoins add much to the slop that's already there?

I'm voting a hard no on this one.

We absolutely do not need another thread along the likes of "can bitcoin reach $X?" because they're just unnecessary and there have been so many of them over the years that they just turn into a nice little thread with an easy question that can't be answered wrong as the title, and that attracts shitposters like a neodymium magnet to iron filings.  My advice would be to lock it; OP, I'm guessing you don't care what anyone else has to say on this anyway.

But should anyone doubt that $1M, $2.5M, or whatever price level can be reached, all you have to do is be patient and pay attention to the market.  There's an enormous bull run happening in the crypto world, and it hasn't finished trampling the suckers, the weak-handed, and the bears.  I was a doubter when it was sub-$1k, and I thought there would have to be a global financial catastrophe before bitcoin got to, say $5k.

And yeah, the years just kept proving me wrong and hence I never made any money....but I'm not bitter, even though the noose has been installed nicely in my garage and is just waiting for another failure before I call it a fun ride but quit having anything to do with money altogether.

Psst:  Don't take that last sentence seriously (except about me never making money; that part is so damn true it brings salty bitch-tears to my eyes).

Note: I haven't read the rest of this thread yet, so there may have been a response clarifying Irfan_pak10's activity and/or whether he and the other two members know they're merit sources.

Being a merit source and not being around for a month is kind of giving the community a kick in the ass, especially if there aren't many sources relative to how big the local board is (and I don't the numbers regarding the Pakistani board).  My opinion is that if you took on the "job" of merit source, you really should be spreading out those merits far and wide

Sure, some sources have been at it for years (like me) and have suffered some burnout, but that's ostensibly why Theymos added some more sources recently.  And with that.....I'm going to read the rest of this thread, because the merit system is near and dear to my heart.

Well OP, let's say I fully agree with you about your assertion regarding every other member of the forum except you.  Let's say that I didn't find it overtly psychotic in a you're-the-goddamn-center-of-the-universe sort of way.

Why are you still here?  The internet is an enormous forest with many strange and interesting birds that you could play with instead of the horrible ones here.  It makes no sense for you to keep raging against this place when it doesn't do you any good and obviously doesn't garner you any support from the community.  Surely a highly educated individual would see the logic in that, no?

Oh hell no.  I'm not sure why exactly you believe that, but signature campaigns have basically acted as the biggest billboard advertisement you've ever seen in your life.  Imagine everyone in the world can see it, it's that big.  And what it says is:

"WRITING JOBS AVAILABLE, NO PROFICIENCY IN WRITING OR KNOWLEDGE OR EVEN INTEREST IN BITCOIN REQUIRED.  COME ONE, COME ALL!!"

And it's typically been the lower-ranked members who've made this place so polluted with crap.  So if it's true that there aren't any campaigns with spots for Jr. Members (I haven't looked at what campaigns are available in a long time), then I tip my fedora to whoever made that happen.

OP, I'm not sure if you're really a newbie, since I never trust newbies who write posts like yours, but on the off chance you are, why don't you go back to December 2017, right before the merit system was fired onto the forum like a ballistic missile.  You'll see that there were tons of members with alt accounts talking to each other in the same thread, cheating in campaigns, more zero-quality posts than interesting ones and much more.  It was a nightmare for those of us who love bitcointalk.   All of it is still there for anybody to read.

Um, yeah--I've been away for a few days and I guess I missed this substantial injection of drama, as I've no clue what link OP is referring to, nor did I realize there was a temp ban involved. 

So not having all the facts, I'm going to hope I'm safe in saying that BitcoinGirl.Club didn't get a permaban (though again I'm not even certain what the penalties have been in the past for doxxing).  But whatever the truth is, just realize that Vod is generally a very well-respected member of the forum, although a controversial one and certainly someone a lot of past and present members resent. 

Now I have to figure out what your beef is with him, OP.  Not for entertainment value or the drama as philipma1957 alluded to, but because I'm curious on a very personal level.

Sure, but I'm at least 90% sure--I'm no economist, so keep that in mind--that even if the US had abundant natural resources that it could export, that still wouldn't cover the debt that it owes.  I could be wrong, but somehow I doubt it.  And taxpayer revenue?  So many people I know can't even get menial jobs right now, so raising taxes in the face of a lousy job market isn't a great long-term strategy.

It is ugly times ugly here in the states.

Tell the truth now, was it ever really that hard to doxx you?  Even if the average retarded AI monkey here could do it, it's a form of people making and enforcing their own laws when they don't trust anybody in authority is going to do anything about a problem with someone.  You sound like a whining toddler because someone trusts someone you don't.

Waaaah.  Where's the nearest closest you can be locked in so we don't have to hear screaming babies?


Oh LoyceV, you've no doubt read some of my angrier posts over the years, the ones I make when I've got a belly full of angry fire.  I could go toe to toe with TMAN any day of the week when I'm in that headspace--and I'd be damn glad to have him back on the forum as well.

Thanks for sharing that anecdote about the situation in your country.  I keep hearing about how bad it's going to get in Europe in terms of privacy, and even though I don't live there and am not bound by whatever nonsensical laws they have passed or will pass in the name of [terrorism/money laundering/pornography/save the children, please!], I'm hoping it does not turn into a dystopia for you.  Or one that's going to be so entrenched in the upcoming generations that it'll be nearly impossible to reverse.  And then of course I'm also hoping these slobs who make the laws for us in the US don't start putting on another transparent magic show, full of misdirection in order to get bills passed that obliterate privacy online, offline, and probably in the afterlife if they can do it.

Christ, what a shit show this is.  Somebody please change the channel to a program where everyone is sane and there aren't aspects of the scariest horror movie playing constantly.  Either that, or we need to lock arms and fight these elected criminals in the streets.  Not for nothing, but that's how things were done centuries ago.

And please, I know this forum is probably infested with government spooks.  So I here and now declare for the record that I am not calling for armed insurrection.  Any non-spooks can PM me.

I hear cheers when Michael Saylor announces another huge bitcoin buy or when another company jumps on the bandwagon of starting up a crypto treasury.  I have the opposite reaction, because those people and institutions are the man, people.  I don't think any big company is buying up Monero to basically cook their books and make it look like their core business is more profitable than it is.  All of this talk about privacy, and yet there's this big elephant in the room:  you can jump through all of these hoops to try to make your bitcoin usage more private, but if you really wanted privacy why not use a coin that was purpose-built for it and didn't have to have a bunch of layer 2 strap-ons to make good after the fact?