Huge Black Woman is that you 

It's always coming down to that stupid fucking money laundering argument.  And OP I agree with you that the public will probably just blindly go along with whatever these big wigs decide, with no opposition whatsoever.


I wouldn't be laughing at all, as absurd as that statement reads, because the implications it has for this new monetary system are dire.  Not joking or exaggerating at all here:  this frightens me to no end.  Eventually this brand of bullshit money is going to make its way to the US unless it's stopped in its tracks, right now.  If I had any suggestions as to how to make that happen I'd gladly bring them forward....but I don't.

Does any of this frighten any of you?

In coal mines, canaries sang as a warning--so your analogy here is unfortunately very wrong.  Too bad she didn't give any warning that things were going kablooey at FTX or Alameda, but I'm guessing she was clueless.  But I've no doubt you're correct that she's talking to authorities with a promise of some kind of immunity. 

OP, I don't know how important these texts are in the grand scheme of things.  They do make it look like it was amateur hour at FTX at least, and probably Binance as well.  But stuff like this comes out after every big financial disaster--the only difference with these texts is that they have to do with the crypto industry. 

Eh.  We'll see.  The whole story hasn't been told yet and it's still relatively early on in the process of investigation, prosecution, and forthcoming regulation and whatnot.

To my knowledge, that isn't true for every coin and I've seen notices on Coinmarketcap that Yobit wasn't allowing withdrawals for certain ones.  True, I haven't seen that many complaints about them lately, but I'd assumed that's because people smartened up and stopped using them for anything other than gambling.  As an exchange, they're a joke.

Aren't they based out of Russia?  That was probably stated here, but I'm pretty sure that's true and I wonder how the war is affecting them.  And lastly, it still blows my mind that they're still in business after all these years.  Better exchanges have come and gone and yet Yobit is still around.  Nutty, just nutty.

LOL.  That brings me back big time.  And hey, this is kind of like poker; three 2nd place wins is better than one 1st place win--and certainly better than my hand (though I'm still grateful for the votes that were dealt to me). 

That's funny, because I didn't realize there was a bitcoin prize.  Maybe there should be a category next year along the lines of "shortest attention span" or "details ignoramus", in which case I would have to come in first place with little competition. 

Hear, hear.  You might think my enthusiasm for the contest was muted at best based on what I posted in this thread, but things like this and other contests on the forum are great morale boosters and motivators for members who perhaps haven't been here that long or who don't participate that much.  If you consider the forum as a whole to be one big community, it's an honor just to get some votes in any of the categories, you know?

Huh, that is weird, because he doesn't have any referral link or anything, and MEXC is (as far as I know) a legitimate exchange, not some fly-by-night thing.  They've been around for a while and I haven't seen many complaints about them on the forum.  Damn newbies, ya know?

And I guess I missed this thread when it was started, but what I'll tell OP is that Coinbase did exactly what they did to him back in 2015/16 (can't remember exactly when).  It was because of a stupid error I made with a checking account I had linked that I closed but never unlinked from Coinbase.  They didn't contact me, didn't try to figure out a way to keep me as a customer, just closed my account. 

I can't stand them, even if they are one of the most legitimate exchanges out there.

The bitcoin halvenings don't reduce supply or increase scarcity--admittedly I've been awake for 38 hours straight, and my logic might have grown some fuzz around the edges, but I don't see any relationship between that and what AMD is doing.

There's no scarcity of graphics cards in general, just the overpriced new ones that are being doled out at a rate that gives the impression of scarcity--but it's artificial of course.  And Jesus, I'm not a gamer but how much do you need out of a GPU anyway if you're not mining altcoins?  You can check eBay and see a whole bunch of very powerful GPUs that were selling for outrageous prices prior to September of last year, when ETH moved to PoS, but are now pretty much bargains.  I don't know how much of an improvement a 4080 or 7900 XT really is or why anyone would buy one at MSRP.  It's astonishing how the manufacturers are trying to hold onto the GPU boom that was due solely to ETH mining.

Those days are long gone and aren't coming back as far as I can tell.  AMD and NVIDIA better wake up and realize that.

Ahhh.....that's a different thing entirely, and if that's what he's doing--which I've no reason to doubt after the clarification--then that's just wrong.  For one thing, it causes more drama with members trying to get neutral feedback removed, and for another it's squeezing free advertisement out of members who likely will never have a shot at getting paid because they won't be able to get feedback removed.

I'd prefer it if Royse777 just didn't accept members with neutral feedback attesting to those members' lack of post quality instead of letting them in contingent on them getting whoever left the feedback to reverse themselves.  The chances of that happening are usually small.  There can't be that much of a shortage of applicants, can there?

I audibly chuckled at that with no one else in my house, that's how funny I found your metaphor. 

I am calm, and in fact I've gotten caught up on all the requests I needed to do and have about 160 sMerits left.  So I'm going to relax that last rule about people needing to have consistently requested post history reviews since September.  If you're under Legendary rank and/or have fewer than 1000 merits and would like me to take a look at your posts, drop me a PM and try your luck.

Should I get overwhelmed with requests and run out of sMerits within a day or two, I'll have to tighten up the requirements again of course.  Thanks for bumping this thread, else I probably wouldn't have posted any updates about my offer.

Really?  I've had a few PM conversations with aTriz, and I could swear his English was at least 5 times better than jamalaezaz's.  I suppose the aTriz account could have changed hands, but that connection seems strange to me.

In any case, there seem to be a lot of people supporting OP based on his promises.  That's all fine and dandy, but apologies are useless and promises to not repeat shady behavior are just words until actions prove whether said promises were kept.  And from the point of view of a DT member who left a feedback that was meant to warn the community about some serious dishonesty, there's no way I'm going to remove a negative based on apologies and promises.  I've seen too many of them, and I'm too jaded to reverse a feedback in a case like this.

Gah!  I don't believe in TA, but if I recall correctly Coinbase stock fell off a cliff after a piece of news came out--and I'll be damned if I can remember if it was an earnings forecast or report or if it had something to do with bitcoin's price plopping in the shitter for a while.

But just like Meta, Coinbase rebounded.  We're still in a serious bull market as far as stocks go, and when prices are sky high and there's a lot of speculation going on, any news or even rumor can cause a massive swing in a stock's price.  That's been true of every raging bull market, and I think that's because everybody is waiting for the crash to come.

So COIN is back to being an overvalued stock.  That shouldn't be too surprising given that the stock of every company that has business in the crypto space is sensitive to bitcoin's price, and bitcoin just rebounded big time.  If it fell back to $16k tomorrow, I bet COIN would get hit pretty hard.

Yeah, sure.  Of those members above, only Lauda had a real scam accusation made against them with evidence strong enough to at least make it a debatable issue.  As for the rest of them, I don't recall any scams that resulted in reputations being destroyed.

That's what I'd advise Poker Player to do for now.  I can't see the future of course, but I'd be willing to bet Royse777 will be able to restore his reputation if given enough time.  I've seen plenty of shitbag scammers on this forum, and I don't think he falls into that category; he may have used some poor judgement in the Bitlucy thing, but I don't think he's here to rip people off.

That's not a ringing endorsement, Royse777, but nor is it a condemnation by any means.  Please prove me right.

Uh, yeah....that's not just something that happened overnight or only since Biden's been president.  That debt clock has been ticking away for years at an alarming rate. 

If tax revenue were sufficient to fund all of the US government's expenses, do you think they'd even be in debt?  Taxing citizens is just like putting a band-aid on a slit artery that's gushing blood.  And the worst part is that I have no idea what the plan is to stem the bleeding in the long term.  Money can't just be printed indefinitely without serious consequences, like we've already been seeing with inflation.

The US might be stable in my lifetime, but I think it's a sinking ship that's just going down very slowly, and it's the next few generations that are either going to drown or figure out a solution.  Good luck, kids!

Y'all got that right, and it doesn't help that Bitcoin Discussion is still a spam filled cesspool when it ought to be where some of the best discussions are being had.  Meta and most of the sections I haunt have definitely been boring-ish ever since Lauda, Vod, TMAN, and a few others packed up and left the forum.

You're right, though.  This is the kind of thread that's going to attract shitposters, whether they're in a campaign, bounty, or are just trying to earn merits and rank up.  IMO nobody really needs to toot their own horn about forum accomplishments, and there's already at least one thread like this one that's still active.

On the other hand, at least OP is trying to pump a little life into Meta.  Gotta give him at least a teeny-weenie dollop of props for that.

Are you kidding?  Tons of people fall into that debt spiral you described, OP.  That's been the case for many years, and I'd be willing to bet it's been much worse in the past decade when interest rates were at or near 0%.  Many people (at least in the US) live well beyond their means and use credit cards with high interest rates to buy shit like smartphones, TVs, and all sorts of luxury goods--not the types of things you should only buy if you have enough cash to do so.

So true.  They're all over the place where I live, and they're as bad or worse than pawn brokers.  Usury at its worst--and frankly, a lot of credit card companies charge interest rates nearly as high as those places.

LOL.  I didn't even realize the bitcointalk Youtube channel got any votes for Failure of the Year.  Ouch.

A'ight I didn't want votes or to win anything, but I'm no sucker and will gratefully accept my 3rd place win:

bc1qhaxv7dathsjwfpyntfep5rl475cfuygatmu0z4

Congrats to all the winners!  It was a shitty year overall, but at least this contest was some fun.

Yes, the cardiomegaly was noted on my last chest x-ray.  But if you're implying that a soft, cuddly teddy bear lies just beneath my gnarled and hardened exterior....well, you're probably right.  In this particular case however, I see very little hope for jamalaezaz getting his red trust removed (from me; I can't speak for everyone else who negged him all to hell). 

I don't like to use the word never, since my mind can change if situations change, if behavior improves, etc.  Honestly though, does jamalaezaz really think he's got a shot at scrubbing his trust page clean?  As you pointed out, Lutpin and marlboroza seem to have left the forum, and I think there's an infinitesimal chance of their negatives being removed.

Exactly, and hopefully OP understands this.  When the media reports that Elon Musk has lost billions in a day, they're basically using mark-to-market accounting based on how much Tesla stock he owns or some other yardstick.  It isn't as if billions of dollars suddenly went missing from his bank account--it's a "paper loss", not something the average person experiences or has to worry about.  Even Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other uber-wealthy people aren't seen crying about those kinds of losses, because things could go in the opposite direction within days or weeks.

In the case of Zuckerberg, I think he recouped a lot of his paper loss in the past few weeks when Meta stock rebounded from the big dip in October of last year (though it had been going down steadily long before that).  OP, if you want some solid advice: don't pay attention to 90% of what the media tells you, especially if it has to do with finance.

I've got your thread open in another tab, and I'm going to read it shortly--but even without reading it, I have a very definite opinion on 'diversification' in crypto.  That term is applicable to the stock market, where there are different industries whose earnings vary based on a number of factors, and they aren't all correlated.  But crypto?  First, very few coins aren't correlated with bitcoin and second, 99.9% of altcoins are pure shit and will never be used for anything but speculation when there's interest in them.  Some are red-hot for a while and then just fizzle out, and even with bitcoin being as volatile as it is I think it's far safer to hold it rather than buying a basket of altcoins.

As for the points OP made, they seem to be targeted to newbies who haven't heard those terms, which are regurgitated so many times all over the internet and even in the mainstream media that it's annoying at this point.

That sounds like strange advice from a nurse.  I don't know anything about the hospitals in your area, but a lot of electronic medical records are available to multiple hospitals if they're affiliated with each other.  Where I live there's been massive consolidation of ownership over the years, and if I walked into a hospital 50 miles from where I live, chances are they'd be able to see at least part of my medical record.

But all that aside, I'm happy for you despite your frustration.  I'm also not just a little bit amazed that you kept posting as much as you did through this whole ordeal.  You are a dedicated bitcointalker, my man.