Topic: Trust No One - page 108. (Read 161312 times)

thanks

Well, there is always some risk. All we can do is to minimize it. Fiat currencies have its own issues. Some economists say US government will default in the future and value of USD will go down sharply. Others make pessimistic predictions about Euro. What else? You can buy gold, but unless you are going to keep it at your house you have to trust someone to store it for you. You can buy stocks but again you have to trust other people.

Being paranoid is also costly. If you keep all your money/gold/whatever in well secured vault in Swiss bank then you have to go there if you want to spend some money. The same applies to bitcoins. You can choose to trust no one but in such case it will be probably impossible even to buy single bitcoin because how are you going to buy it without taking any risk?

Too much trust is bad and can cost you money. But no trust at all is also bad. It also costs you - time and lost opportunities. In the end everyone should find his own golden mean.

Crap... so it's like walking through a minefield.

I have been selling bitcoins succesfully on EBAY and using Paypal through forums, or ebay for months and have only had one chargeback which was small.  There have been many scams though and is very risky.  We as ebay sellers are now trying to look out for each other, report the scammers, leave positive feedback but stating the user is a bitcoin scammer do not sell to them, since you cant leave negative feedback for a buyer which is so dumb.  Also I have been very proactive to help new sellers and other sellers in general of bitcoin, pointing out the signs of a scam, and ways to prevent being scammed via paypal.  A very easy method is to request an email from the users personal email account that is the same one linked with paypal.  If it is a hacked account, they would have to hack the ebay, the paypal and the users personal email.  Usually it is just the ebay, which is linked with paypal so the user can make payments and send a note through the paypal and ebay purchase.  I also wait a day or two to send, if I am worried it might be a scammer, a normal user will email and want to know where they are, once I get a personal email, and they request, I send, havent had too many issues following this platform.  Also you want to check the feedbacks of the buyers see what they have bid on, see if they have been buying up bitcoins over two or three days, contact other sellers that have sold to the buyer to see if they had chargebacks, and go with your gut.  Also dont sell more then 3 bitcoins per auction.  A coupe people got burned for big auctions of 25 bitcoins each auction, just dumb to sell that many using ebay.  NOTHING IS SAFE OR LOSS FREE BUT WITH BITCOINS AND VIRTUAL CURRENCY, THERE ARE STEPS THAT YOU CAN TAKE TO HELP IT BE AS SAFE AS ANY OTHER SALE ON EBAY

Apparently PayPal is way too easy to scam with so I've made arrangements with someone to exchange Amazon gift card for BTC, since you cannot 'rescind' an Amazon gift card. Just an FYI for anyone else in a similar bind who might want to make an offer of a trade with someone 

Trusting people has gotten me screwed many times, when it comes to bitcoins i refuse to trust people.

Thank you for an interesting wikipedia entry point !

As always caveat emptor. However that gets a bit difficult with a currency which purpose is precisely to have as much anonymousity as possible.

You can trust all ip addresses from Australia. We are all good peoples.

Is this forum about scams of all sorts now? That's fucking sad!

You should contact ebay. If you payed using paypal, your chances of getting a chargeback done are good, I assume.

I seriously got scammed on eBay last week. I know I was a complete idiot of trusting too much.  I purchased an iPad from eBay some time ago; the user claimed a friend shipped them out without tracking numbers. So I listened to his song and dance, and going on the belief that all people are good, I believed he would send me an iPad. Well, here I am 2 months later with no iPad and out $350. What a shame. The only thing I have is his phone number that he gave to me in an e-mail. I tried to search his number here just to check his identity. And no name is registered to that phone number.  That will be the last time that I'm gonna trust someone online.

Is there anything else I can do to get back my money? Should I contact ebay for this or paypal. I am not sure what am I gonna do now. I would appreciate your help guys.

Gödel? Is that you?

especially do not trust this post.

Well meanwhile i made my own expirience with some Bitcoin Users

You guys are right, there are so many scamers that think to steal bitcoins from someone doesnt get prosecuted, they are wrong, bitcoin is a currency and meanwhile i had to report some incidents to my local police autorities

Its realy sad but some guys simply think they are anonymous cause they use btc

I usually just wait till they get good reviews from other users. But then again, somebody has to be the first one to buy...

Nah, the main problem is that people will run anything if they think they can make a quick buck.

For miners, it isn't and doesn't need to be. Anybody is welcome to use MY mining workers ID and password and contribute THEIR hashrate to MY account

The only time it's going to be a problem is if a noob doesn't RTFM and reuse the same id and password they use for other more sensitive stuff.

The main problem of all bitcoin software seems to be awful lack of security. Plaintext password storage in all the miners, how is that secure?

Yeah, this is all a little OTT for me. Admittedly the non-reversable and semi-imaginary status of Bitcoin makes it a hugely attractive target for scammers and theives, but just don't expose yourself to too much risk and you should be fine.

I know a lot of the miners are from the tech "deal" sites like Anandtech, ARS, HardOCP, etc.  I found out about BTC through Anandtech (man if I was back in my 20's I would have been mining last year but with a family....).  Most of the hardware traders on those forums rely on heatware to see a person's rep.  Heatware can be compromised if the hacker has the same password you use there as your mining site passwords but as a rule Heatware rep is pretty reliable.  Until a decent site is up with BTC addresses I'll use Heatware as my guide for any purchasing I do.

Looking through their top 10 trader list - I've traded with 9 of the 10 and haven't had a problem with any of them.  Makes me feel warm and fuzzy knowing I'm still in the Top 100 traders by rep and I haven't traded in 2 year I think.

Oh here's the link to Heatware if you plan on trading a lot: http://www.heatware.com/index.php