That is not an excuse, it is indeed a basic rule.  If you are a plaintiff, you (or your lawyer) should have contacted the lawyer in charge, and should talk to him only.

Sorry if the trimming gave the wrong impression to someone. I though that there was enough context, given that I am agreeing with you.  (In general, to save the readers' time, one should trim quoted text and leave only the point that one is replying to.  But yes, that rule should be relaxed for cross-thread posts.)

[ Replying here since a post on the AMT official thread could get deleted. ]


Indeed, trying to to get money from a scammer by force or harassment would a stupid idea, it will almost certainly turn the tables in court and cost you much more than what he stole from you.

There is no easy and quick way to recover scammed money, unfortunately.  The only way that may work is through the courts.  Since the company may have no assets left, it may have to be a criminal process in order to get the scammer's personal property seized.  You must check with a lawyer.

Are you promising to refund him if that happens? 

Those doors on the back wall of the temple look like fire escape doors to me.

Throughout the "mini-bubble" that started on May 20, until a week ago, I see the price as having drifted down most of the time.  Until a week ago, the price was pushed up and then sustained by a few sparse events of concentrated buying.  Since last week there seems to be a more calibrated effort to keep the price just above 3600 CNY/580 USD, by continuous buying around that level. That huge wall at 3600 on Huobi may be part of that effort. At least, that is my impression.  Without that stabilization effort, I would expect the price to continue drifting down towards the mid-May level.

For someone who is not a computer geek and has not owned bitcoin yet, getting some seems indeed a hassle.  (People recommend signing transactions on a separate computer, not connected to the internet, and then moving the signed TX to the main computer via USB stick. I presume that 99% of mankind would stop reading right there.)

It is surprising, but not TOO surprising, that a 75$ discount wasn't enough to drive people to do it.  Maybe they suspected a scam or something? ("Is the bike worth 75$ only?" "Why is there a discount for paying with Drugcoin?")

If there is no discount other than the fees that the credit card takes from the merchant, paying with bitcoin is still not worth it for domestic purchases.  Paying via bitcoin costs X = (bank wire fee) + (Bitpay fee) + (bank wire fee), whereas paying with dollars through bank wire costs only Y = (bank wire fee).  Obviously X is greater than Y, and those fees will be added to the bare item cost, no matter who pays them.

It is not right to compare X to Z = (credit card fee). People normally pay merchants with credit cards instead of bank wire because it is easier, faster, safer (can be cancelled) , and delays the actual payment until after receipt of the goods.  On these aspects, the bitcoin route is a lot worse than paying the merchant with bank wire.

The bitcoin route may save money on international payments, since it replaces one international bank transfer by two domestic ones plus the money-to-bitcoin and bitcoin-to-money conversion fees, which may still be cheaper overall.  However, for international purchases the possibility of delaying and canceling the actual payment is even more important for the customer, so he will probably choose to pay with credit card anyway.

Bitcoin payment processors like Bitpay and Coinbase presumably know this, so they are targeting people who already own bitcoin and want to spend some of it.  There are some 12 million coins already in bitcoiner's wallets; if each of them gets used only once for purchase through those companies, at current market price that means they would process 7 billion dollars and collect perhaps 70 million dollars in fees -- not bad.

To convince the average joe to adopt bitcoin, someone would have to pay the difference X minus Y for him.  Some bitcoiners may be willing to donate their money to the cause, but companies are created to make profit, and they would never do that.

If you own 1 BTC that you bought for 10$, it is worth using it to buy a TV that costs 600$, because you will be realizing a 590$ profit in that purchase.  Basically, whoever buys that BTC from Bitpay will be paying those 590$ for you.  It would be almost the same thing as selling that BTC for 600$ on an exchange and paying the TV with that money.

However, if you then were to buy 1 BTC for 600$ to "replenish your reserve", that profit will vanish: you would be paying 600$ for the TV, plus several fees.  If you don't want to reduce your BTC holdings, it is better to buy the TV with dollars, by bank wire directly to the merchant.

A judge does not have to understand the bitcoin protocol to understand that, by delivering some prepaid goods 6+ months after the date due, a merchant can cause substantial loss to a client -- a loss that is not compensated by delivering said goods or some other vaguely similar goods.  Consider a baker that delivers a wedding cake six months after the marriage ceremony.  People should consult a lawyer if possible, but I would expect any small-claims court to award the client with full refund AND indemnity for the loss.

If the client can show that the merchant also lied about the goods being on their way, it makes matters much worse, because it shows bad faith.  Even worse if the cake that was delivered was half-baked and smelled of rotten fish.

Well, I know that the most promising ones were made of glass with spider silk cables, which hopefully would make them invisible to cops and taxmen. 

Why, thanks!    And here is a parabolic fable for you:

In 1903 the Wright brothers flew their first aeroplane, the Wright Flyer I, and Scientific American published a paper about it.  Some young mechanics nerds became excited by the invention, built some replicas of the plane and started playing with them. They predicted that the Flyer would radically change the way people moved and lived, e.g. by flying through coffee shops and picking up their drinks with special hooks,  or flying through their friends' windows at Christmas instead of sending them postcards.

Then some libertarians realized that a Flyer would be handy to carry away their "dirty" cash when the police came knocking, and so they all started buying Flyers from the nerds.  Drug dealers then thought that the machine could be used to smuggle drugs across the Rio Grande, and started buying them by the hundreds too.

Then several Wright Flyer dealerships opened in China, and the Chinese started buying them like crazy. 

Each of these surges in demand drove the price up by 10x.  Seeing that, other people realized that they could become filthy rich by investing in Flyers.  They calculated that if, in the future, only 10% of the people who then traveled by horse would use a Flyer instead, each plane (which they could still buy for a few thousand dollars) would be worth millions.  This thought drove many people crazy, and they invested all their worth, and then some more, in those machines. 

The 1000% per year growth of Wright Flyer price then attracted troves of finance businessmen and venture capitalists. Soon they were offering hundreds of financial instruments and services based on it -- such as bonds backed by fleets of Wright Flyers that their owners wanted to get rid of, and services that would exchange Flyers for horses, for Flyer owners who needed to go where planes could not land (which, at that time, was pretty much everywhere).

There were some setbacks, for sure; like when the feds seized a huge fleet of Flyers from a drug cartel, when the Chinese government prohibited any use of Flyers that involved flying, and when thousands of investors lost half a billion dollars buying non-existent Flyers from a Japanese dealer.  Those and other mishaps caused the plane's price to drop somewhat; but, by that time, thousands of enthusiasts had become firmly convinced that the Wright Flyer I was the means of transportation of the future, and continued to believe in its longterm appreciation.   (They actualy welcomed the temporary price drop, since it allowed them to buy more Flyers with their strained paychecks.)

Meanwhile, many inventors (including, some suspect, the Wright brothers themselves) had been busy developing bigger, better, safer, faster aeroplanes.  But Wright Flyer I enthusiasts scorned them.  They pointed out that those competing designs were just minor variations of the basic idea, and did not have the extensive network of repair shops and part suppliers of their original model, nor the public confidence that it had accrued in those four years since it was invented, nor the mllions that had been invested in ventures and services based on it.  They were certain that, in a few months, those alternative designs would fail and would be forgotten, while the Wright Flyers that they had piled up in their backyards would continue to grow in value, 10x every year.   

And they laughed at some pessimists who predicted that governments might one day regulate aircraft and air travel ("Ha! How can they enforce regulations on machines that can fly away from them?"), ban the Wright Flyer I from the skies, or even use aircraft to expand their power, e.g. by using them to chase drug smugglers and spy into people's private land.

I do not know what happened next, but surely time must have vindicated those Wright Flyer I enthusiasts. 

As I understand, you can now send bitcoins to BitPay, Bitpay will sell them and send dollars to GlobalPay, and GlobalPay will send the apprpriate national currency to merchants overseas.  For their usual fees, I presume.  isn't that so?

Reposting a post that was posted to the wrong thread ("New Official AMT Thread") and then deleted

In that thread, AMT is asking for people who have complaints to buy more from them.  Amazing.

But at least he has now posted photos that prove, beyond a shade of doubt, that some person who may look like him was at some time sitting somewhere next to an Oriental-looking guy and some cardboard boxes that contained some black boxes, or were photoshopped to look that way.  So, why are you guys still complaining?  What else do you want?

Wow! So I will be able to use bitcoin to pay my credit card bill? 

Is there a site that computes a single cumulative order book plot by merging the order books of all exchanges (obviously only those that post such data)?  Is there such a tool for other things that are traded in multiple markets (e.g. commodities)?

Obviously some adjustments are necessary to convert prices between different exchanges.  Ideally the conversion should be the one used/implemented by arbitragers.

I don't know.  But if it costs that much more to take money out of Huobi/OKCoin than to take money out of Bitstamp...

Also Bitstamp charges trading fees, say X%, so I would expect it to lag behind the Chinese exchanges.  If these start going up, Bitstamp should follow only after the price in China is X% higher the upper end of Bitstamp's spread (now 581).  When they go down, Bitstamp should stay put until the price in China is X% lower than the lower end of Bitstamp's spread (now 579).  Or something of the sort.  Makes sense?

Bitcoinwisdom says they get the conversion rate from some public source every day.  But arbitragers have their own rate, which presumably depends on withdrawal fees etc.

Beware that the bigger the code, the more costly it is to validate, and the higher is the risk of an exploitable bug going undetected.

Does the processor inside the Trezor have some sort of memory protection, that would prevent some function from accessing data of an unrelated function?

Can the firmware modify itself?

Something like this, perhaps?

Did you know that Alexandre Dumas was writing a running novel for a magazine and being paid according to the number of lines he wrote each week, so he came up with a character whose sentences were just one word long, but  when the magazine editor decided to pay only for full-width lines, that character met a sudden and untimely death?