Bitcoin Scam

[pmrid]

Both my wife and I (on separate phones) received SMS messages today telling us our account may have been credited with 1 Bitcoin and requiring that I register at a supplied URL.

Needless to say I don't have any Bitcoins and am not expecting any.

My advice is to delete these messages.

Peter

[leon]

Maybe i am just stupid but what is a bitcoin :shrug:

Leon :thumbsup:

[RickS]

Short answer is that it's a type of digital currency. There's no central authority that manages it. Transactions are recorded in a distributed ledger called a Blockchain. The value of a Bitcoin is whatever somebody is willing to pay for it (quite a lot at present.) Bitcoins can be used to transfer funds anonymously, so they are attractive for conducting dubious types of business. Bitcoin was the first instrument of this type but there are now several other CryptoCurrencies like Ethereum, et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Cheers,
Rick.

[Regulus]

I got a very early smsto say that the Commbank badly needed to update my info: please follow this link and answer all questions.
Idiot didn't make his ph number private :-)

[Robair]

Any chance you could post up the number Trevor?
I’d relish the opportunity to offer the prankster some “free” bitcoins.
I have had many a fun time with scammers over the years due to the fact they are not that smart and seemingly immune to sarcasm and their own short sighted games thrown back at them.
Rob B

[leon]

Thanks Rick, it sounds pretty dodgy to me .

Leon

[PCH]

Bitcoin itself isn't dodgy Leon, but that message received by Peter almost certainly was.

[RickS]

The technology isn't, but on the risk spectrum it's at the very high end... and that's even if you don't get caught up in the hacking and/or collapse of a Bitcoin exchange.

[doppler]

Isn't it a bit like buying shares in nothing? It looks like it's gaining value a bit quick this year for some reason, a big bubble ready to pop.


1 Bitcoin equals
6833.56 Australian Dollar

[multiweb]

My money's on catalan pesos. :P

[PCH]

Yeah I get that for sure. I read quite a detailed article on Bitcoin mining and the process was quite mind boggling. The reason I ended up reading that article was not because I was interested in mining Bitcoin, but because I went to some site that tried to install a miner on my PC and it got me curious. The article explained the massive processing power required to ensure you keep ahead of the game, which was why someone was trying to distribute their mining across other PCs including mine.

If that isn't an option, the processing power costs can be so much that the cost of the electricity required to run your processing is seriously going to eat into, if not entirely consume, any profit you may make. It all seemed too hard tbh.

[mynameiscd]

My brother is right into it.
He has an online shop as well as a food shop in Adelaide.
He's looking at getting a Bitcoin ATM sent from Japan??
Don't ask me how it works either......
I think you can deposit cash and get a receipt....???
Lately he's been making about 20k to 30k a day and buying gold with it..
Still don't ask me how it works....
He's been trying to get me into it but I like the old way under the bed in a tea tin.
Or was that in a sock on top of the wardrobe.. ..
Or was that buried out in the garden....
Hmm must go looking.
Andy

[The_bluester]

IIRC, the total number of bitcoins able to be mined is limited to a fixed value?

I recall reading stuff about it some years ago, in the very early days it was very much a curiosity and people would do bitcoin mining on a normal home PC (Mining IIRC comprises of a computer solving a mathematical problem, the complexity of which has risen rapidly with each solved problem. Solve the problem, get a bitcoin for "Free". That of course being free minus the cost of solving the problem in terms of equipment to solve it and power to run it) even in the early days the cost to solve the problem was probably more than the resulting bitcoin was actually "worth" but both the worth of the coin and the cost of solving the problem to get it was low. Now it is the other way around, the cost to solve the problem is very high but so is the notional value of the resulting bitcoin.

Now, if you had mined a few bitcoins in the early days and then lost interest in the idea you could be sitting on a pretty tidy sum.

[RickS]

The Bitcoin protocol has an inherent limit of 21 million bitcoins (less a few bitcents.)

One of my work colleagues made some money bitcoin mining in the early days using a room full of high end PCs. It didn't make him rich, but he ended up a little ahead after selling the hardware.

Apparently, it's a lot easier to mine Monero (at present) and there are no ASICs (specialised acceleration chips) so that's more suitable for a small home business :)

CryptoCurrencies are an interesting development but they are effectively Ponzi schemes. It has been claimed that they aren't because there's no intentional fraud, but that distinction won't be much of a consolation to the losers.

[rally]

They are all rising in value because people are now "investing" in them.

Lets see where it sits when people decide they no longer want to invest, or that group of investors is exhausted !

Plus I think there is a new fork occurring soon and people might be wanting to get in before the fork happens.

Its like most investments in a rapidly rising market - everyone is making money and all want to tell everyone else about how good an investment it is.
They and their friends then invest more, but at some point they need to enact an exit strategy and most amateurs have no idea when to do this and they are the ones that invariably lose the lot.
Some investors who understand what they are doing make a lot of money and the rest lose.
Its not uncommon for people to lose their homes and their businesses at that point because greed and inexperience has left them highly geared against their other assets and unable to keep repaying or even just servicing their "investment" loans etc

A good rule of thumb is when the common man on the street is telling you its a good investment - its time to get out as there will soon be nobody gullible enough to keep investing and pushing the price up !
Thats where I see Bitcoin - as an investment.

Will this apply to Bitcoin or not is the question ? - the graph of its value over time indicates, at least to me, that it has the hallmarks - but I could be very wrong and maybe its new value just becomes its new permanent value and it can never have a downside.
. . . the "Perfect" investment if so.

[Octane]

The reason for the BTC all time high in the last week or so (hence the ridiculous media coverage and surge in scams) is due to everyone cashing in their alternative coins, purchasing BTC, awaiting the fork in 6 days; each BTC you hold, will earn you one BTG (Bitcoin Gold). What the value of BTG will be, is yet to be seen. But, everyone will just end up dumping BTG (on day one of it being listed on exchanges) and pouring the earnings back into BTC and alternatives, such as ETH (Ethereum) and NEO (Antshares).

My pick for 2018: Power Ledger (POWR). I've got a bit invested, and, hope it leads to an early retirement. If not, no biggie; I still have a job.

H

[xelasnave]

My tip is to buy real estate in Mozambique.

I saw 35 acres beach front for $165000 us.

They are on $1 a day and when that grows to say $5 a day or more I expect real estate should follow.

Seems a reasonably stable place and all going well how much will 35 acres beach front be worth in twenty years.

but at least you are buying real stuff that hopefully will always exist.

alex

[xelasnave]

I add a caveat... I have not done all the research yet so there may be something I have yet to notice... so if you decide to take my advice please do your own research and rely on it rather than my "feelings" on the matter.

alex

[The_bluester]

The only real difference I see between Bitcoin et al and a Ponzi scheme is that they crypto currencies can be used to actually buy and sell something tangible. Exactly how useful a currency will prove to be when you will need to be able to buy something with say 0.0000001 of a bitcoin remains to be seen. Sort of inherent in a currency limited to 21million "Coins" in a world with billions of people. When you need to write down a googol of zeroes with a one on the right and the decimal point on the left to buy a loaf of bread it is getting pretty silly.

[Octane]

It really doesn’t take all that long to start thinking in terms of Satoshis.

H

[Shano592]

I'll see your Catalan Peso, and raise you a Venezuelan Bolivar.

[multiweb]

nah... that would be money laundering. :lol:

[sil]

You could argue we are using cryptocurrencies by default, most people use credit cards and no cash or gold or anything physical changes hands, its all numbers and trust. No different to bitcoins really.

Only the taxman and banks dont make a cut every time a number moves.

I have done well out of bitcoins, was mining them in the early days just for fun, cashed in most at last peak, so in hindsight I should have kept them all. But thats how hindsight works.

For those confused at what they are, they are everything, really digital cash. If you take $20 out of your wallet do you worry how many hands that piece of plastic/paper have been through before it became yours? Now many rapist, murderers, pedophiles, etc had it before you? Bitcoin is not for people commiting crimes, so is cash, so is gold , so is anything with an intrinsic value.

Once the proof of concept took off in its early novelty phase, clones cropped up and died away and exchanges came along to allow people to swap their money into and from bitcoins. It works like every other money market but also like a commodities market essentially. You could invest $1M in gold if you want but you will never physically own that as a pile of actual gold. So much of the existing markets are just as vapourous and based on nothing as cryptocurrencies. You could buy $1M worth of physical gold and sit on it at home and sell it off later, but actually owning it will produce problems of proof of ownership and provence etc. The markets are only concerned with the movement of numbers, bitcoin has just become another one of those numbers. People make money when the numbers go up then make a little more when it goes down, this is happening constantly, They rarely get rich by buying stock today at one price then waiting for it to just go up and sell once. Moving averages are typically where people get rich when markets move suddenly.

You can use bitcoins as purely cash if you like to bank your cash out of the banks that whittle away at it with fees and won't pay you interest.
You can use bitcoins as an investment, it doesn't always move for the same reasons as the traditional markets move.
You can mine bitcoins for free but not really anymore as the system ws designed to increase in difficulty with use and slow the mining down and years ago it passed the point when the cost of electricity to mine a bitcoin was higher than the value of the bitcoin or satoshi you actually get from the process.

It was the people mining that made anything from the bitcoin system, these days you can try it for fun but it wont be for profit. Eg at the rate I mine today my estimate is over 25yrs to mine 0.1BTC, so you think 25yrs of electricity is less than $700 odd in return? but what do you think that 0.1BTC will be valued at in 25yrs time when it pays out? will it grow 100 times, 10000 times? Hell I never thought $100/BTC was going to be possible and my goal when I started mining as a novelty was maybe it would buy me a DVD one day, a free dvd just for letting my computer which is on 24/7 do a little extra work seemed worth it.

If you are already a savvy investor in the stock/money markets you stand a chance of investing in bitcoins and coming out ahead. But like the other markets buying and selling itself has its commission fees etc and then theres banks and their currency conversion/transfer fees and the taxes on top too. As bitcoin has grown and matured so have laws and you still have those fees to deal with now, it the earlier days there weren't as many hurdles from exchanging your $ with BTC.

Trust ran it all and yes many people, myself included got burnt by theft. To mine bitcoins you really need to join a mining pool, these cropped up regularly and like anything new nobody knew which are trustworthy unless they give them a try etc. Similarly exchanges could be the same. And once the values went up the operators of those sites could give in to temptation and keep the bitcoins for themselves, nobody knows who they are or where they live after all. The mining pools operate by portioning out small packets of data to process(mine) to its users from the current block that needs to be mined. Every packet mined gives you a share of the block value, so its lots of machines mining away and sharing the profits according to their effort basically.Typically this means you get maybe 0.000000017 BTC for the effort maybe as there were thousands of people mining the same block in your pool. So this amount is held for you by the pool and the next block to be mined you get a different amount again in proportion to the mining effort your computer contributed and so on andso on. The usually once you'd earnt say 10BTC you cash that out from the pool and at that point it gets sent to your bitcoin wallet. Once its there you have your bitcoins in your hand, nobody can spend them or steal them , only you. But until then the bitcoins are in the pool owners account. So imagine now you run a pool, you have thousands of users and they typically payout at 10BTC so they all have some amount they havent claimed yet therefore you probably have tens or even hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in your pool owner account, and now the value of 1BTC is suddenly not a novelty $1.03/BTC but $1,500/BTC. A bunch of pool owners just vanished, keeping the entire pool of btc for themselves and anyone who hadnt claimed their share got left in the lurch. As I did with one pool. But now there are pools that have been around for long enough to be considered trustworthy for miners wanting to dabble in it. Like any company or brand or anything, with time the trustworthy tend to be the ones who've been there all along. Its no guarantee of anything really but a good indicator.

Scams, bitcoins is not and never has been a scam. People use it to run scams however. Just like taking your cash and credit card details, it depends on the scam. The scam itself doesn't make money itself meaningless, thats just people being a-holes as normal. Bitcoins are not to be feared by people only governments and banks as the money is held by the people and doesn't sit somewhere the banks and governments can continuously take chunks of it from you forever. It is truely open and accountable and every bitcoin transaction can be traced as far back in history as that bitcoin existed unlike that $20 note in your wallet.

Doesn't matter the currency of valuable object, someone somewhere will use it for purposes you disagree with. Government backed or approved it doesn't matter, bad people will find ways to do their bad things.


If you find this information helpful I greatly accept donations to my medical expenses in bitcoin and litecoin. Any amount no matter how small is appreciated.

BTC: 14CTRNqHCoq2AX145qCoHwGP6VWFmjQMDR
LTC: Ld7V1BbXbrBqtncLBCYT6R2eoxRo67J1Ax

:)

[pmrid]

I take issue with this. With credit cards and the like, you know who you're dealing with. They are listed on the Stock Exchange, have a registered office, can be sued, taken to court, scrutinized by regulatory authorities, have statutory reserve requirements and held to a raft of other requirements and limitations, and all that. Hell, they even have a web presence and a phone number. If they are found to have facilitated money-laundering, funding terrorism or the commission of crimes against international and national arrangements, they can be held to account. They are subject to scrutiny and control at a national and international level. With Bitcoin, you throw your money into a legal black hole and hope. You know it is the preferred medium of exchange for criminals, terrorists and all the rest. It is no coincidence that the recent ransomware attacks all required payment in Bitcoin, for example.

Peter

[multiweb]

I'm always amazed by people who have the capacity to make money out of thin air. To me crypto currencies are just that. It's like playing poker. If you play the game you've got to know when to leave the table because there's only one bloke walking out with all the dow.

[Moon]

You can use the same arguments about cash. Bitcoin is just digital cash. What people do with it is just a reflection on society. You make out like all bitcoin transactions and users are criminal - which is a really silly thing to say.

In fact criminals still prefer cash because it can't be traced. Bitcoin can (and has been) successfully traced and in some cases even confiscated.

[pmrid]

I agree, but it was you who said it. Not me. Read my post again. I said Bitcoin is the "preferred medium of etc etc." How you managed to wring "äll transactions and users" out of that is a mystery to me.

Peter

[Octane]

Today has been a very profitable day! And, it's not over, yet. The Americans will be waking up shortly to find BTG to sell.

H

[sil]

:thumbsup:


You may have missed India in recent years outlawed its own high denomination notes. Simply declaring they are no longer legal tender and anyone owning them a tax dodger. Because people were keeping bundles of the notes at home for the cash economy they live in. There has been talk Australia may do the same with $100 and even $50 notes. If you actually trust any bank or government then good for you, from experience on the inside I just dont. I would never say put your money into bitcoins, its merely a medium to move the numbers around . If criminals are using bitcoins its just because its a better and safer way of exchanging money for goods. By safer I also refer to BOTH parties. A drug dealer can't be beaten up and have his bitcoins stolen like cash transactions, likewise a buyer doesn't have to put themselves at risk of physical harm in the presence of a dealer and have their money taken. Think what you want of criminals but markets exist because people want to BUY something the government says you can't have and there will always be people willing to SELL in order to make money. Might as well declare all forms of money null and void and only used by criminals and terrorists. Just depends on your point of view and what level you want to examine whats going on.

I can look at our government refusing to support medical treatments as a form of torture to those suffering. You could say the armed forces are socially acceptable murderers. I do apologise to those serving in Defense, I'm just boiling down the essense of an entity to the end results. Don't just dump on bitcoins for your own ignorance of what they are and who uses them. The media, government and financial sectors have been proved wrong all along the way it their declarations about bitcoins and its obvious when someone gets all their opinion from those sources.

[Visionary]

Dutch Tulips

[doppler]

Had to google that one.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp

[Moon]

:thumbsup:

Well said. Unfortunately not many Australians think this way yet, but that is slowly changing. In my view Bitcoin (like the Internet & Uber etc) will be a wonderful driver of change in our society and will trigger a fundamental re-evaluation of the appropriate role of government and regulation in our daily lives. Uber is a classic example. Why on earth should the government be attempting to centrally plan transport? Finally they have just about given up here in Victoria and will allow Taxis to set their own pricing. The full impact of Bitcoin is still many years away, but it's unstoppable and the changes will be massive.
As for the price of a Bitcoin on any given day? If you are focused on that then you have missed the point.

[Moon]

If anyone reading this is actually interested in the question "Is Bitcoin a bubble?" there are far better attempts to answer on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Bitcoin-a-bubble

Simply comparing Bitcoin to Tulips is silly and lazy.

[PCH]

Hi James,

Well I've definitely missed the point because I know very little about it. That said, are you able to clarify "the point" in laymans terms please?

[Moon]

It's a new technology - probably the best way to describe it is peer-to-peer electronic cash. Yes you can invest / speculate in it, but if you only focus on that part I think you are missing the most interesting elements of the bitcoin story.

The original whitepaper is still the best pace to start:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

James

[RickS]

It's very likely that Blockchain technology (the distributed ledger that underpins Bitcoin) will be big. There are huge advantages in being able to do safe peer-to-peer transactions without having to trust a central authority who is almost invariably clipping the ticket.

I don't think it's as clear that Bitcoin will be the winner, or even a survivor, in the the battle between many cryptocurrencies. I'd rather put my money in the new 100-year Argentinian bonds. I'd go for the Catalan Peso, but Marc has that cornered ;)

[Moon]

We are getting off the original topic a bit... but I think there is a flaw in your argument : Blockchains are most useful when they are peer-to-peer. A private blockchain controlled by a bank or government is no better than our current centralised systems. Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and financial incentives to stay number 1 forever. The argument is probably better summed up in this recent article:

Why Bitcoin Matters More Than Blockchain (https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankelly/2017/10/24/why-bitcoin-matters-more-than-blockchain/)

James

[RickS]

I thought it was pretty clear that I was talking blockchains without central control, that being the whole point of the architecture.



First mover advantage might have meant something once, but it's not an unfair advantage these days. A patent or clever trade secret technology might have some value, but not just being first in a field where there's no barrier to more agile competition.

The article is fluffy crap. The author conflates blockchain with big banking and Bitcoin with cryptocurrencies in general.

Blockchain is a technology with potentially many applications. Cryptocurrencies are just one of them. Bitcoin is just a single, albeit historically important, instance of this.

[Moon]

For a peer-to-peer network to function you need peers. Only Bitcoin has the financial momentum to sustain and fund such a colossal hash rate. It's strength draws in more trust and users over time and crushes alt-coins. A great idea or technology is not enough - you need the whole financial ecosystem and that takes time to build. It's like saying gold might surpass silver one day. In theory yes, but in practice it will never happen.

[Visionary]

The reason why Bitcoin has enjoyed so much oxygen? It was the easiest way for wealthy Chinese to avoid the draconian prohibitions on currency movements.
As of a week ago the Chinese Gov has moved to restrict trading in Bitcoins. As the Chinese trade in Bitcoins constituted 80%+ of the total world trade in Bitcoin, the Chinese Gov restrictions will have a massive effect on Bitcoin.
Further, the Chinese are unsophisticated in share/currency trading. They have only had a stock exchange for a handful of years. Their exchange has been filled with bubbles and blips as everything that moves is leap upon with unbridled enthusiasm.
If you had the good sense, or good luck to buy Bitcoin low, sell now!

[sil]

:thumbsup: true, oh wow there was a sudden jump or drop? so what? its what markets do, its like a pathetic pre-teen fad but amoung the financial sector, who know nothing about bitcoins, that same mob used to go giggly over pork belly futures not so long ago. if you're doing anything with bitcoins then just get on with it, no need to bleat on a load of rubbish about it when they clearly havent a clue.

it was just a curiosity for me back in the day and when i started exchange markets didnt yet exist, you could mine and trade bitcoins and nothing else. but as an interested geek i liked the concept of it and see the need for a global digital currency so i gave it a go with mining. today I could have retired if i hadn't spent most of my btc by now, but then again if i'd invested in Apple in high school maybe i could say the same there. 20-20 hindsight is meaningless. I dont think investing in bitcoins or apple today will yield thousandfold returns in ten years. I could be wrong, but the growth spurt of cryptocurrencies has been and gone and there is still profit to be made, just not on the scale early bitcoin adopters saw.

for something that started for me as a bit of fun its amazing to see where its reached, certainly further than i ever expected, its why i spent during an earlier boom as i expected a big crash, didnt think its level could be sustained but its plodding along at a good level. No idea where the true ceiling will be. Maybe it'll be reworked to satoshis and maybe they will level towards $1 each. Or maybe this will see the birth of the triganic pu at last :)

"The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change." - Douglas Adams

[Octane]

We went past $10K AUD for 1 BTC last night.

I got on the PowerLedger train and doubled my money overnight. It's only the beginning. :)

H