Update (after posting on Bitcointalk  the other night):

On 2021-09-04 07:21, BetMoose Support wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I had our dev team look more deeply into this and I believe they have
> found the issue. Can you please confirm the IP address you were using
> when placing for verification? We will be able to reinstate it in this
> case.
>
> BM

What happened: deposit QR code pointed to wrong address
Reference Link: https://www.betmoose.com/
Amount Scammed: 0.05 BTC
Additional Notes:

I went to make a bet. Entered the amount (0.05 BTC), opened MyCelium, chose to scan the cute QR code with the moose icon in the middle. The bet didn't appear for days. Contacted support. They say the address doesn't belong to them.

- I've used BetMoose before, didn't have an issue then
- I used a bookmark in the browser (didn't go to a phishing site)
- I've used the same phone and same MyCelium wallet for years, made hundreds of transactions, nothing ever got replaced with a rogue destination
- I am unable to reproduce the issue - the correct deposit address comes up when I try it now

I am not accusing the BetMoose admin with selective scamming necessarily, but it's a possibility. It's hard to imagine that something on my end did it, because my wallet would have been emptied by now, many times over. It couldn't have been me going to a phishing page, either. It couldn't have been a bad copy/paste because I scanned the QR code when sending.

Be careful when using the site. As a reminder to myself and others: from now on, ALWAYS take a screenshot before depositing. Even if you've used the site many times.

Just putting it out there so Google can find it, too.

Your-BTC.co.uk is apparently a fake copy of the once functioning bittradex.net site, modified to claim that you need to deposit 0.02 BTC to verify your withdrawal address (I know, right?).

This is how the scammer approaches you:

: my ex owe me money, and he said that my money is on the exchanger, but i cant withdraw it, i dont know how to, there is $3900, i can give you 30%, if you can withdraw it

The rest of the scamlog is at: http://btcfaucet.com/logs/your-btc.txt

Would you like an easy and painless way to sell your bitcoins in the United Kingdom?

Cloud Sell has existed for a while now, but I think it deserves a mention here also, since not many people in the UK know about it. BitBargain is better known for selling crypto rather than buying it.



You just choose how much you want to sell, at what unit price (0% or market price is the highest you can ask) and how low you are willing to go.

As soon as you have posted the offer, the amount is reserved from your wallet and the sellers get a notification on IRC as well as on their "seller central" page. They keep getting notified of your offer periodically as long as it's up. The unit price listed will move with the market.

Since BB sellers sell all the time and typically buy their coins from exchanges anyway, it's much more convenient and cheaper for them to buy your coins first before they go to the exchanges. In practice this means that your coins will get picked up rather quickly, by traders who are reliable and have gone through rigorous ID verification. The type of people we have always been able to rely on to send a refund in case of any problems, despite no escrow.

You do not need to be ID verified to sell your coins, but you do need to provide your personal details and verify your bank account (which we check through Equifax, or if it fails using a card photo showing the sort code and account number as a fallback).

The higher the amount you want to sell in one bunch, the less sellers will have access to buy it. Their ability to buy from Cloud Sell offers depends on their reputation and their recent escrowed trading volume. The most reliable sellers can buy even 10K GBP worth of coins while new sellers with not much reputation may be restricted to much smaller amounts.

Cloud Sell has worked reliably for the last couple of months and coins put up get bought fairly quickly, even at 0% (except when the price drops and the minimum limit set turns the markup into a positive value).

The commission on completed Cloud Sell sales is: 0.5%, paid by the person selling the coins.

To list an offer, visit https://bitbargain.co.uk/cloudsell

WARNING - this shitcoin is being spammed and shilled on Telegram in a very aggressive fashion, including this Bitcointalk thread. Just one more indicator to know this will not end well. You have been warned.

* I'm just posting the below as info - these are all good suggestions and I appreciate them all. *



That seems like it's a feature more specialised for the payment-request page itself, not a general use interface to control Electrum or receive notifications for other addresses and events.



I tried importprivkey from the cmd line before, but that only works if I stop the software first. Otherwise it writes to the wallet, and the live one doesn't reload it, and after it's closed it saves the wallet in memory apparently. The 'importprivkey' isn't something I will want to use anyway: I'd prefer to subscribe to addresses only. But that's no problem, as I have a new plan now.

If I could get RPC to work, I could make very good use of its commands like listing unspent tx outputs. I could simply hook a bitcoin daemon to get notified of unconfirmed transactions & new blocks, send the info to my daemon which would request more info from Electrum, then it could update the database and send out any notifications.

One problem is that I'm still very confused about the basics of Electrum. I'm running it as a daemon, but can't get its RPC to work. It only ever listens on the daemon.sock unix socket. Never JSONRPC. And running an Electrum command at cmd line doesn't even use daemon.sock to communicate with the daemon (I deleted the socket, requested a command, it still executed fine). I don't know if two Electrums ran concurrently or whatever happened in the background. In the long run I wouldn't want to launch a process for every Electrum request (like retrieving utxo for an address etc).

*Update: it turns out launching the app starts the daemon temporarily to give it commands if it can't reach it. And RPCJSON I'm not sure if it exists with Electrum but no need anyway, I'll just connect to an Electrum server rather than the client's daemon. It might not even exist anyway.

I'm looking at it now (I've never chosen the 'use imported addresses' feature in the beginning, the other modes don't have importing menus).
I'll see if Electrum can work with a few hacks. If it does, I'll test it with a couple of thousand watch addresses / privkeys.

If it doesn't work out, I will likely post a job (but I will recommend using bitcoin-ruby for it - seems to be a better choice).

Are you sure about this? Does Electrum have near-instant address importing, and a feature to call a script/notify in some way?

Even if it does, there are other concerns. IIRC Electrum uses its own nodes and its own query structure and doesn't simply connect to Bitcoin nodes as some SPV clients (which is what I am trying to achieve).

Thanks for the suggestion regardless!

I have a bunch of sites and I accept bitcoin payments for good and services. I have done this with Bitcoind, BitPay, blockchain.info and other solutions. Unfortunately, they are not great.

* BitcoinD: 50+ GB blockchain, resource invensive, no HD wallets (or ability to import watch-only addresses - and no, hanging the RPC for 10 minutes per address isn't a real option).
* BitPay / bc.info / block.io / etc: third party (privacy and reliability concerns).

What I need is:

- An SPV based client (no need for 50+ GB SSDs)
- Either supporting HD wallets (bip32/37/44) with a custom (high) gap limit, or providing the ability to load custom privkeys or addresses (without hanging the software, obviously)
- Ability to notify (call a script) when a transaction occurs that affects any of the loaded addresses
- Ability to track the spendable balances on these addresses, so I still won't have to query third parties having the blockchain indexed

I could build everything around it and make it a lot more secure, convenient and reliable for all my sites to accept BTC using an internal API.

I'm hoping someone will put me in my place and tell me I overlooked something very obvious and simple. If that doesn't happen, I'm hoping someone out there will say ("Hey, I can just take SPV software X, add some notifications and realtime address-into-wallet importing in 30 minutes"). If someone actually understands what I'm talking about, and they're up to the task, I'm happy to pay them too (but I would prefer to share the end result publicly so accepting payments without third party payment processors would become easier).

These guys just harvested my email address from the web and sent me spam. lookslegit.jpg

Insightful comment, appreciated as always.

You may be right about how it will never work, but after much work invested in this it would be foolish to not even try. So I'm still doing some promos & ads, Reddit post, and most importantly increasing the number of bots, which is similar to a large userbase, only better (for the player) because it's easier to win against bots.

If there isn't a bunch of people using it in a month on a regular basis, I'll give up.

Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated.

I would only argue with the 1:3 odds, which I'm not sure how you ended up with.

The worst case scenario would be a game with an unpredictable (50-50%) outcome - and that would still make it better than any dice sites with a house edge.

Odds are basically created by people who place bets, and you know they haven't all done their scientific research, so plenty of times you'll see games where the less likely outcome has the more bets (especially now, with bots posting bets).

Not to mention with some games, the outcome depends not just on the result, but other players' bets. I'm talking about the 'estimate' type of games (where you bet a number) and the 'sorter' type of games where even if you only get one word right in the sorting, you win everyone else's bitcoins if they scored zero.

I'm thinking I will use part of my budget to add more bot votes. I suspect most visitors are like you - it's not worth their time to play just to win small amounts (and you would definitely win considering most bets are posted randomly, by bots).

The only thing I don't get is, how is it worth anyone's time to play anything, when with most typical gambling establishments (dice, blackjack, whatever) the house wins in the long run by definition.

Personally I would much prefer to play on sites where the outcome isn't completely random and I have at least a small chance to play smart, and it's not mathematically predicted that I will be losing in the long run. Sure, maybe I make less per game, but at least I have a chance to stop playing with more money than what I started with.

They already have the chance to try out some games before cashing out, they just choose not to. You're right though, it would probably help, but it'd be too complicated and probably not worth the time to build a wager system to enforce a ratio (but still make sure the users are allowed to spend and withdraw their own coins) just to counteract greedy users.


Decent idea. I'll try something like that eventually. Currently I'm giving out higher value codes to ID verified users on my marketplace and will post the link on Reddit (with detailed info) in a few days. We'll see where it goes. For now it's mostly just people saying it's a good idea and not playing. I don't take it to heart though. When I created BitBargain, I was the only seller for months, I had to beg sellers to log online and accept trades. Now it's one of the biggest marketplaces in the UK. I'm not saying BETwitter will definitely become successful, I'm just saying the lack of interest in the beginning doesn't mean much.

I've been observing the use of these codes I posted (gave out ~1.5 BTC on the site so far). Pretty much every single time all the coins are spent on the next upcoming game, and the users never even log in, they just get the automatic withdrawal for whatever they win. Some people just claim the promo coins and don't even use them.

I'd be happy to give out some free coins again if it meant some extra players, but realistically my experience after the last ~2 weeks is that people here just want free coins and don't really care about the game itself. I have a 10-20 BTC budget for this. I'll give out a few coins on Reddit. If there's genuine interest there, I'll just share the remaining budget with them. If not, I'll find some other way to spend it on promotion.

The sad part is (and I've mentioned this a bunch of times) that if someone took even 5 seconds to think about how the site works, they would quickly realise that there's much more coins to be gained by playing smart than sweeping any promo codes posted here.

I mean, there's bots posting COMPLETELY RANDOM bets, and the games are never 50-50% chance...

New game type added: "SORTER".

Instead of betting on a word or more words, you are betting on the order of words.

For example: https://betwitter.com/game/579/sorter/which-are-the-most-popular-colors

The more words that are in the right position after the game has finished, the higher score you get and the more coins you win.

This is just a quick summary. I guess a separate presentation video explaining the numbers only belongs on the todo list.

Personally I think the concept is easy to understand (we count tweets and followers and bet on stuff) and the there's a /help/game page to explain the very details.

The video is ready. I hope this helps to explain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um4FZP78DfQ

I just bumped into this topic by chance.

It's sad/funny how someone asks how to up their rating on BitBargain and the two replies are "use another marketplace" and "you must be talking about BitcoinTalk instead of BitBargain".

Detailed help to achieve a higher score is here: https://bitbargain.co.uk/bitrating

Recommended steps:

1) verify phone number (giving you a 53 rating, more than the default one)
2) make at least one trade (after that, your score keeps going up for a while as time goes by)
3) complete ID verification if you can / don't mind (that will boost the score)