Archive for the ‘Bitcoin’ Category

You suck because that's all there is to do: an online shopping report.

Monday, June 14th, 2021

I'm typing this in a file named overstockhell.txt, but the name can't begin to encompass the pure and unadulterated idiocy I've been grappling with for my sins of attempting to buy some items online1. Had I but known how many hours I'd have to sink into the adventure at the outset, I'd've clocked myself, but in my optimistic naivite I imagined someone else would be doing most of the work, given as the payment was coming from my side. So I'll hazard a guess at six or seven hours of wrangling: idiots in online chat, sympathetic if powerless customer service over the phone, and a mountain of outright insanity on the website that calls itself Overstock, despite having no way to handle orders with multiple items. But I'm getting ahead of myself; structuring the chaos that ensued once I chose this outlet2 is the way I get to put some (hopefully final) hours in, so let's start at the beginning, where all good intentions go to die.

Overstock is one of the few online vendors that claim to actually accept bitcoin; others like Amazon predictably rope the shopper in only to require some shit-flavored bitcoin alternative a la coinbase. The guts of their system nevertheless eschew the beautifully simple, direct method of payment bitcoin offers in favor of a processing middleman; they use coinpayments.net. I've used this processor a few times for server bills and such and so didn't suspect any shenanigans. But somewhere in the strained relationship between them and overstock, the first ring of shopping hell was revealed to me. Here's what it looks like, for the morbidly curious:

1. Bitcoin transaction propagates and confirms on the blockchain.
2. Coinpayments sends an email confirmation of payment received.
3. Overstock sends an email confirmation of order completed.
4. Coinpayments sends an email that payment timed out.
5. Overstock sends an email cancelling the order.


At which point I used overstock's online customer service chat feature (which is where all attempts at finding help on their site funnel to) to try and untangle the mess. Whether they employ humans to sit at the other end or rely entirely on a shoddy Eliza emulator is still up in the air; any mention of bitcoin results in an appeal to "check your coinbase account", notwithstanding coinbase isn't used at any point in their purchasing process. The script, whether deployed in bipedal or binary, circles a drain of apology and helplessness, persisting even through my escalation to a "supervisor". They don't know anything, they can't do anything, but they're very sorry and how about you check your coinbase account. Coinpayments had nothing to say about its second email, but merely confirmed that the transaction had gone through, and refused to have any other part in the matter, such as for instance telling Overstock that they'd indeed been paid.


So I waited for Overstock's business hours and talked to Esther on the phone, who blessedly seemed to possess both a pulse and a clue. She spent a while trying to decipher the spaghetti on her screen, and finally came up with the notion that "Our bitcoin payments require two confirmations from the payment processor; the first one came back fine, but the second didn't, so the order was automatically cancelled". The funds being nevertheless transferred, she offered to reinstate my order, but this came with a hitch. In the time since the order was originally placed, some of my items (out of a total of forty one) had gone out of stock3. She could issue me a refund, but only for the whole amount of the order; if I wanted what remained of the items, I'd have to take store credit for the difference. So I did, accompanied by updating my shopping file with a row of asterisks and a new note for every item, indicating whether it was still in the order or had meanwhile become unavailable. In a perfect world where information was presented as just that, this wouldn't even be a problem, but of course the "client area" is designed for phones and the idiots who depend on them, making this process a lengthy ordeal of comparing several dozen descriptions of things like yes, socks, against what I'd pasted in my list. Is this the gentleman's cotton dress sock black/gray mix pack of 12 or the cotton dress socks --men's black and gray 12 that's out of stock, now? But wait! There's pictures! Before you ask, yes they use item numbers (I assume only because they haven't yet found a way to get out of having to populate their databases with them), which...well, they appear after about eight kilometers of url keyword stuffing, so highlighting an item on the site to see the url (which is the only place the item number appears) does...not so much.

At any rate, hot laptop sweat and cold coffee eventually brought me through another illusion of settledness, wherein I imagined that "order received and confirmed" meant something like order received and confirmed. I floated adrift in this hard-won state for two days, after which a new email arrived from overstock confirming my cancellation. You know, the one I didn't make. No other information, no explanation, just-so, thanks for canceling your order, would you like to spend more money with us?


I got back on the phone and waited ten minutes for the Esther-like, if differently-named, operator to "inquire with the team that knows what to do about this". She came back with a phone number for their loss prevention department, which had entirely different hours, being in an entirely different timezone, and so was then unreachable. She personally couldn't offer any further information. Imagine this state of affairs wherein you're tasked with triaging customer service calls, but your company's inter-departmental communication is so poor that you have no idea why an order was cancelled and have no recourse but to try, and fail, to reach out manually. I say "imagine this", but I know you don't have to --you work there, and live there, and try to keep the wool over your eyes there, on your own, and communally, as a foundation for all your activity and so-called drive. You accept this, and thus perpetuate it, reveling in your "safety in numbers" and telling yourself that everyone does it, it's just how things go, and that I and anyone else who dares to press against it are sociopaths.

So being the psychotic, irrational maniac that I am, I waited for this new department's business hours and called them, only to encounter another flavor of Esther who told me some "agent" of theirs had gotten confused as to why I had first paid in bitcoin and then used the store credit that was refunded to me the first time the order was cancelled --essentially, they'd fucked things up so badly that now even they couldn't tell what exactly was going on with this order, so they "flagged" it, which is how you say "sweep under the rug" in bureaucratic peonnese. She apologized profusely and offered to reinstate the order yet again, though all she could do was add the items back to my cart. I'd have to go through it with another comb and confirm that everything that was supposed to be there was there indeed, and click all the required buttons to get the order "made" again.

Poor shopping file had to puff out its chest, suck in its brisket and take another pass of asterisks and notes, after which the order was supposedly re-confirmed (that's the third time, if you've lost count). Lo and behold, a few days later I started receiving some a barrage of emails from overstock reporting that certain items were shipping, or scheduled to be shipped, or that their delivery dates had been "updated", or that they were scheduled to arrive, or that they had actually arrived. Of the thirty-two items still left in my order after the multiple passes of delays-for-ensuring-shit-goes-out-of-stock, it looks like I'll be getting five or six emails for each. How long would you expect it to take to read and catalogue 160 - 192 emails?


And how much would you charge for your time? The damage in total comes to something like a coupla thousand dollars, give or take a cancelled item, but that's in terms of what's been exchanged on paper. The aggravation cost is through the roof, especially now that, weeks after placing the order the first time, in the long long ago, I've logged into my account in search of a receipt in some format apt for my shipping forwarder4, only to discover nearly every item listed has been updated with a "cancelled" status indicator. No explanation, no details, no email revoking the other five or six that promised x or y or z. I walked livid figure-eights around the house awhile, inquiring "Seriously?!" to no one in particular, until exhausted enough to sit down and attempt to make a list of all the newly-cancelled stuff. Halfway through, though, I noticed that most items have more than one entry in the endless phone-optimized scroller: one for "cancelled", and one for "delivered"5.


I don't know whether I'll bother calling back, whether I'll see if suing is an option, whether I'll wait and see if anything actually gets shipped or not, or whether I'll ever be able to try ordering something online again. What I do know is that the modern lie of convenience is an evil deeper and more insidious than nearly everyone else will admit. Far from being limited to suggestive advertising, product placement, or peer pressure, the current systems coax and groom consumers into whatever serves the systems best through outright mendacity, through discarding the genuine for the cheap, and through failing to deliver in any scenario that strays from the most common. You buy one pair of plastic socks at a time with your credit card, feeding the kind of life that keeps you limited to buying one pair of plastic socks at a time with your credit card, and the systems give back by turning a blind eye to the notion that anything else could be possible. You suck because that's all there is to do.

Until you stop letting it be so.

  1. Why buy online, then? Well, that'd be a last-ditch effort following month after month trying to source things locally. Really esoteric and exacting items like cotton fucking socks. Everything's got to be "improved" these days, a slapdash excuse of a label covering such a poverty of craftsmanship that it's questionable whether pure cotton socks even exist anymore. Shopkeepers are happy to perpetuate the lie, of course; if you conveniently don't read labels and so don't notice that their "of course we have cotton socks" translates to 100% bamboo or 60% cotton 40% plastic, or if you buy them with a label actually proclaiming 100% cotton despite a tangible plastic feel and then don't take a lit match to one of the threads once bought, confirming the curled, flash-burn of burnt lycra or whatever, then sure, you can "have" what you asked for. If you actually want the genuine item, though, all that's available is frustration and wasted time. Bonus:


    . []

  2. Really, I've no reason to believe any of the bullshit is particular to Overstock itself, especially as they were chosen for matching a few baseline criteria and otherwise at random. I'm always tempted to confine negative experiences to the specific actors involved, but sometimes that's not warranted, and after years of unneccessary, byzantine difficulty with procurement, I know things wouldn't be much different if the name was swapped with some other. To wit, out of the voluminous grab bag: back in Argentina I convinced MP to try ordering some sushi from a local restaurant that'd previously been vetted in person, to have it delivered. I don't remember why, perhaps it was the sort of unforgivingly hot day that place occasionally cooks up, or maybe someone was sick. You've no way to access the depths of what I mean when I say "I convinced MP", and even looking at it now I wonder what miraculous event actually occurred --it could'nt have been convincing, but must have been some sort of logical or maybe pity-inducing gymnastics the likes of which oughta make me apt for courtroom work. Anyway, estimated delivery time was something like forty minutes, and after an hour I called them, pretty pissed. They assured me the order was on the way and would arrive any minute. Fifteen minutes later I hacked lunch together myself and swore to never take restaurant delivery seriously again. Another two hours later some derp on a motorbike started raising the alarm downstairs, sushi's here, etc. Why anyone would want three-something hours' old sushi is utterly beyond me, and should be beyond you, too, except that when I told this story to friends what I heard was "Oh, I hate it when that happens." Like it's a thing, like it's regrettable but necessary, familiar, oh well, whatchagonnado. The whole fruit is rotten; by now it's on providers to prove how they're different, not on consumers to supply good faith and confidence upfront. []
  3. Out of stock, at overstock, which apparently keeps one or two units around at a time. This is a mere international sourcing "solution", not some hoity-toity neighborhood fruit cart, to stock something more like dozens or hundreds per item. What do you think this is, the 21st century?! Pssh. []
  4. Why I have to use a forwarder, and why such a service wants a receipt, are just extra aggravational dipping sauces on the side of this platter of fail. []
  5. Most, not all. If it were the case with everything at least it could be discerned whether the order failed or not. But why pass up another chance for screwing things up tighter and more frustratingly than a fifty year old tangle of christmas tree lights? []

Reading #ossasepia logs, or: my jig is up.

Sunday, November 10th, 2019

My IRC channel, #trilema-hanbot, has been registered for some years, though as noted there it served solely as my testing grounds for a long-defunct bot. While it has ever been welcome to both the lordship and whatever stragglers the republic has accumulated over time, I never explicitly stated as such, nor did I take any steps to populate it. Mircea Popescu recently gave me the task of getting up to speed with Diana Coman's rather successful channel/castle, with a view towards cultivating my own. This was both a very pleasant and a very unsettling experience --unsettling in the literal sense, it shaking loose some rather long-held and not fully examined ideas and practices. In that order, then, allow me to recount.

I was aware that Diana had attracted and retained some folks intent on contributing to the republic, but I hadn't a clue of their quantity or quality. What a pleasant surprise to find several people clearly throwing themselves into the chaos and churn! What fun to set aside a few days to read logs peppered with others' struggles to read logs! I quite enjoyed discovering the often long, arduous journeys to speaking up recounted by Diana's pageboys --it's about as good a guide on "what's with/what happened to the lurkers, dabblers, and would-bes from back in the day?" as we could hope to get. I'm glad to see there's apparently a great deal to be salvaged from that heap, which was previously written off in my mind.

Moreover Diana's firm and level hand is remarkably fit for the sort of pedagogy herein desired. What particularly struck me was her precisely codified structure; featuring a straightforward pledge of submission and a clear hierarchy of development, the ossasepia castle doesn't leave its inhabitants much to remain in the dark about, as far as their own involvement and commitments stand. I'm curious to see how this works as a driver, and will be closely observing how the potential for love of title and recognition to poison love of work plays out, or doesn't.1

So why was the experience unsettling? Reading #ossasepia's logs made something very clear to me: as it stands, I am inaccessible. To wit, I found that one of Diana's recruits actually thought I might be a bot2. Moreover, discussions of setting up a home3 or sourcing irons in Costa Rica4, and of trading BTC in Panama5 didn't find me, nor I them.

In all honesty this enraged me at first, but then I realized my own, rather severe, culpability: I haven't been talking about any of this, nor making it clear that I'm available to talk about it. All there is consists of some (by now aged and by that reason suspect of irrelevancy) blog posts and milquetoast mentions in the logs. The cause for this vaguery is two-pronged: one is sheer laziness and neglect. This can be dressed up in whatever flavors and finery of "other priorities" you'd like, but that's neither interesting nor relevant. It's true that I have heavy offline duties, as the man himself has occasionally alluded to, even, but everyone has their own, and I'd be dishonoring the very duties I most respect and believe in if I used them as an excuse to slack in other areas that need attention. The second prong is my struggle to coexist as the functional head of Mircea Popescu's household and as a lord within the republic. Even attempting the description of these titles is daunting, inasmuch as they've fostered a great deal of tension for a long time. Who shall you know me as? Where do these roles overlap, and where may they not? Suffice it to say I've been steeping in these questions for years, and clearly I've not come to any useful conclusion.

Enough is enough, though. I cannot be useful to the republic or its members while things I could contribute lay fallow for the sake of what ultimately boils down to solipsistic thumb-twiddling. That it's taken me quite so long to give it up is shameful, and I'll work to make amends, if they can so be made. For many years the bulk of my output was invisible, and I suspect some portion of it will remain so, but meanwhile various things I never thought would be made public, have been. I intend to do a lot more testing of the borders therein.

This, for my part. For yours, dear lordship, I beseech you: lean on me, expect from me, as much as you would from anyone else. Take me to task if you see me failing or flailing. I am not fragile, nor should my proximity to MP exempt me from anything. I will grow with or without your help, but I'd much rather do it with. It'll be faster, anyway, and fuck knows I need all the speed I can get to keep up.

A page organizing and detailing my channel will be available Monday is available here.

  1. So far I'd say the majority of Diana's court is natively mature enough to avoid the problem. []
  2. It was perhaps forseeable that #trilema, like #bitcoin-assets before it, could and would use various bots, whether for logging or carrying out mundane tasks, but what can I say; hanbot had been my handle for ~all of my existence online, and for much of my life before I did much of anything online other than grief people in Diablo. I'll pay the price for the confusion, and assume the responsibility of making it more clear that no, I am not a robot, though I can dance like one. I'm not changing my handle, administer all the Voight-Kampff tests you want. []
  4. 1 []
  5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I'm sure there was another even recently between Mircea and Diana that I can't now find, but at some point the exhaustiveness is truly exhausting. []

Localbitcoins cracked corn, and I don't care.

Sunday, August 25th, 2019

On June 1st, localbitcoins silently switched off the ability to select "cash in person" as a bitcoin trade option on its site. Unsurprisingly, it "temporarily disabled" its forum at the same time. I know this, or at least, I knew it as quickly as I did, because various members of the WoT I built there over the years wrote to me to decry the fact and point out that they were still available for cash trades; I've only to say the word.

I've been trading on localbitcoins for about five years. I've used it on four continents and in more than thrice as many countries. If you looked at my profile, you wouldn't know any of the foregoing. Why? That's implicit in the word used above. I don't give a shit about some dorks and their wanna-be website, or about what they think are good criteria for trading. That's *my* call, and the kinds of people I want to trade with in the first place are also the kinds of people who rely on their own damned research. That means absolute bullshit in the vein of "verified accounts" is more of an anti-signal than a real one. Always has been, always will be. The very idea that a third party, not in my WoT, with unknown incentives1 can do the work of verifying someone for me, is antithetical to Bitcoin itself. What do I care how many trades some anonymous randos (for all we know, and likely so, bots, or as close to bots as humans get) say a trader under my consideration has done? Why would I take some website's word on the matter, even if I were interested in the foregoing; why wouldn't I talk to those randos myself?

And therein lies perhaps the most damning aspect of the use of sites like localbitcoins as the maintainers themselves would propose it be used --just like every other such layer of obfuscation, it attempts to separate you, the user, from what is a potential member of you WoT. It attempts to exploit your natural disinclination to talk to people you do not know, to automate and opiate the uncomfortable, so all you have to do is click here or there, compare one and two. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone already knows, consciously, that giving in to such a thing is tantamount to selling oneself in the worst way --that is, selling one's willingness and ability to think, to decide-- but I know I don't. It's too goddamned tempting to walk the "easy" route and let someone else do the dirty work of uncomfortable interaction for you. But you're giving up control, and while it's easy now it'll be a damned sight harder later, when you're older, when you need the fruits of your control that much more, and you haven't the ability to wrest it back.

So no, I'm not especially concerned that localbitcoins is handing itself and its users over to the forces of evil2 The people who will be negatively affected are either attempting to "be involved with bitcoin" in ways that directly oppose what bitcoin is, or else belong to that sad group that was however slowly attempting to figure out how it ought to be used, correctly. They built relationships, but kept them on-site. They traded when they absolutely needed it, but didn't trade for the sake of WoT-building. They acted, in one way or another, out of hesitancy and avoidance of their duty, which is to be responsible for their connections.

The necessary corollary being, of course, that making strong, exhaustive connections isn't optional! That state wherein you need an intermediary to tell you when you may and may not access "your" money, and how, and how much, and you can rot on your couch ordering ramen to your doorstep and making friends/masturbatory fodder on okcupid is called Unified Silly Dosidoe banking. Bitcoin isn't it, and it doesn't matter how many "regulatory agencies", "trading platforms", "websites", or ads masquerading as media try to proclaim otherwise.

Do your work, use tools as a human uses tools. Anything else is slavery.

  1. We can imagine their incentive is to part me from at least some portion of my money, and that their hope is I'm the sort of fool towards whom this sort of incentive works. []
  2. If turning off the one desirable trade option without notice while denying easy access to discussion thereof isn't enough for you, consider Jeremias Kangas and family took the further step of confiscating all coin in wallets not verified to The Great Old Ones' satisfaction on August 1st. []

The State of the Cards

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018

As a companion item to http://btcbase.org/log/2018-05-22#1816592, here's the current state of supposed Bitcoin-linked Debit cards.

tl;wr At some point there may have been a market amongst these things, if we're to take the mass of reports, reviews, and similar pretense available online for anything other than ad-copy and scam fodder. In any case, in January of this year the company (Wavecrest) responsible for processing, verifying, or otherwise fucking with the Bitcoin-to-Debit conveyor cut all ties with card providers and their clients, resulting in a sinkhole of empty promises, feeble forward-looking statements, and absolutely zero actual utility.

The Would-Be Contenders

BitPay (bitpay.com)

Leaving aside everything else that's wrong with this outfit (see here: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-11#1787563 and here: http://trilema.com/2015/time-to-rehash-that-old-strategic-superiority-discussion/ and here: http://trilema.com/2014/bitcoin-in-argentina-exactly-nothing-to-do-with-the-derps/ and here: http://qntra.net/2015/09/bitpay-claims-hack-amounting-to-5000-bitcoins/ ), BitPay's debit cards (should they actually exist) are only available with in the United States, and applicants are required to hand over their Social Security Numbers --something no non-governmental agency is legally permitted to even ask (and something you're well advised to resist, seeing how the principal source of information used in identity theft comes from the inept maintenance of computer infrastructure by these exact culprits).

Cryptopay (cryptopay.me)

After a 15m registration process and a stroll through the extensive KYC verification required to get its cards to spit out more than a pittance, Cryptopay rewards applicants with a note: "Unfortunately you can't order a new Cryptopay card now due to the sudden programme closure by our card issuing bank. We're working on the solution, stay tuned."

Wagecan (wagecan.com)

This one has no notes about advertised products being mysteriously unavailable lurking in your lunchbox, but this at the cost of $200 upfront for the card and the usual KYC requirements, which can only be completed after the fee's been paid. How much the bribe to get the verification "approved" is isn't mentioned on the site. Plainly obvious scam, in other words.

Spectrocoin (spectrocoin.com)

If I see one more ad with that salt-n-pepper-haired fuck winking at me I'm going to lose my shit, you know? Especially since the card is advertised all over the web, and claims about it are plastered all over the site, but you'll have to talk to support to read that "Unfortunately our cards are not available, though we expect to have them this quarter."

Wirex (wirexapp.com)

Waits for users to sign up before mentioning that cards "will be available in a little while." With an account, you can sign up for a wait list --which as of today puts one at the 55k mark.

UQUID (uquid.com)

After an especially toilsome registration process which includes making no less than three separate passwords and takes a good half hour, UQUID simply spits "Sorry, service requested is not available. Please try again later." Whether "later" is more or less than "a little while" isn't indicated.

Xapo (xapo.com)

Despite still showing up on various card review lists etc, Xapo (a member of the F.DERP shame listing has silently erased all traces of offering any sort of card from its website.

Shift (Coinbase) (shiftpayments.com)

Advertised as a card that "plugs into" a Coinbase account, Shift is only available in the United States, and goes so far as to block IPs outside the zone from engaging in this "plugging". In any case, there's a reason Coinbase has been identified as a scam as far back as February 2013.

Bitwala (bitwala.com)

Nearly every sentence on Bitwala's site is appended with an asterisk. Why? It's not actually "launched" yet, but you can "pre-register" --which as of today puts one at the 25k mark.

Coinsbank (coinsbank.com)

"Cards temporarily unavailable."

Bitnation (tse.bitnation.co)

This was referenced as a card issuer on some list of reviews, but seems to be nothing more than a few images of geographical regions, idiot mugs, and links to social media accounts. I still don't know what it is even supposed to be.

Bitplastic (bitplastic.com)

Expired domain. And I thought there's value in such "virtual real estate"!

Raxcard (raxcard.com)

No verification mentioned, but between the $50 charge for signup and multiple reports of the payment being made only for the operators to respond with a "Sorry, we sent you the wrong address to pay to, please send us another $50", there's little doubt this is a simple scam.

Coinsbank (coinsbank.com)

First there's an announcement that "withdrawals to VISA cards are temporarily unavailable." Then "no debit cards available."

CoinJar (coinjar.com)

Waits for users to sign up to notify them that the card, if it exists, only works in Australia. Needless to say, this is exactly not how cards work.

ANXPRO (anxpro.com)

Visit the site as a guest, be regaled with heaps of boilerplate on their fabulous card etc. Sign up, and all mention of any card magically disappears, but "new card solutions are coming".

Advanced Cash (advcash.com)

"The card platform is not available." As usual, you have to sign up to even see this.

Mobi (mobi.me)

No card mentioned on site, despite being referred to variously online as a debit card issuer.

Worldcore (worldcore.eu)

Notes that its card is not available for use in all regions, but requires extensive KYC verification process before they'll even tell you whether your region qualifies. Pro tip: no, it does not.

Revolut (revolut.com)

"Currently only available in Europe." Also requires some application to use, which can't be downloaded on non-Euro IPs, not that there's any hope it'd work at all.

BCCpay (bccpay.co)

"We're performing maintenance at the moment. Sorry."

Panama Makes Me Ill

Friday, April 27th, 2018

And not just because of that stupid palindrome1. It literally made me ill after ~15 hours spent in its clutches, I'm a 5'9" congestion, ghow dho jdhoo gdoo?

Those fifteen hours saw about 20km of walking, which would've been no big deal were it not for the 20kg of gear and Panama's delightful wet-oven that spends all day doing free interpretations of the weather. Thirty degrees at ninety five percent humidity seems a lot more apt for making bagels than a livable climate, but one can only spend so much time in cafes.

Speaking of which, here's Casa Sucre, in the gussied-up part of Panama City, Casco Viejo.


Decent carrot juice and non-Costa-Rican-coffee2, if you're in the neighborhood and feel like imbibing at your imaginary grandfather's house. The Mac didn't have Oregon Trail, and that note on the piano kindly asks that you keep your children away from the instrument's crotchety old keys.

Panama City has a fairly massive littering problem, replete with the kind of odor you'd expect from a trash-happy city in a hot place on the water --I'll spare you particular description. Casco Viejo, however, is a proper tourist trap, where refuse is magically handled with care, paint flows o'er the walls afresh nightly, and pavers hold the train of your dress while laying flat before you the paths ahead.


The tourism board apparently foresaw a lot of outdoor entertainment happening around here, though every time I've gone it's been deserted, save for the occasional shaved ice vendor, one of whom ran towards me when she saw me throwing on another layer of sunscreen. You'd be hardpressed to find anyone so grateful for something so small, and indeed, on the whole Panamanians are good-natured. They've been cooked, trashed, and hustled into something like an exhausted, stressed-out cousin of the laid-back Costa Rican, though.


They're also living like bugs in a city with pretenses to "the Dubai of Latin America"; there's not much difference in costs of living between Panama and the US --at least, not anymore--, but the same air-conditioned bastions of North Americanity that beckon tourists to go from TGI Friday's in Cincinnati to TGI Friday's in Panama City ostensibly for the benefit of saying they've traveled have no fantasy in store for the locals. One cabbie I talked to described 14-hour stints in his totally-not-a-Tata to get bills paid after he left his job as network manager of the city's second-largest mall. He figured there had to be someone willing to pay more than $1000/mo for it. "Turns out, there isn't." He described buying gold bullion in 2012 after considering whether it was a better buy than btc. Then he was quiet for a while. He may be showing up in #eulora if the cockroaches don't eat him first.


It's not a concrete jungle so much as a trash heap smoothed at the margins and covered in glass; a place where pretty much nobody walks --even for a few blocks--, and the one-upping edifices of US imports lid all, attempting illustration of a greatness and identity of which only regional managers and their braindead acolytes could be proud.

*** Interlude ***

Didja know Panama has a "Blockchain Embassy"?


"What the fuck does that even mean?!" you ask. Well, it's in a strip mall, and that's all I've got.


I go in, Wingus & Dingus are seated on stools, hunchbacked over whatever on macbooks. I ask if they'd like to trade som'fin'. Dingus can't talk to me over the wobble of his mouth. Wingus says they have a bitcoin atm. But it only sells. Except it doesn't have any bitcoin to sell yet.

"So...the market here is basically non-existant?"

"Basically, yes."

But they have t-shirts.


I'm still not sure what these shits are for, and I'm not convinced anyone involved knows either --unless it's outright a case of "ensure anyone clueless & curious about btc who approaches one of these things gets a clear signal that it's retarded".


Anyway, as I was saying, Panama makes me ill. I worked for a stint as a supermarket cashier in college, and the nicest old lady working there was from Panama City, made it sound like the sort of place where parrots3 sit on your shoulders and the plantains are like mana. I should've realized there was a reason she had moved to Ohio.

And if the city somehow fails to encurmudgeon you, the airport will: 30min cap on Wifi, several gates with broken A/C (the "causeways" aka mall parts are permafrigid tho'), and plenty of the kinds of logistics problems you'd rather not think about when handing your body over for flight, from frequently changed gates to directions that include lines like "you have to go down the unlit hallway behind the Chicken Port".

Happy trails!

  1. When your name's a palindrome, people seem a lot more eager to recite others they know to you, and that Panama shit gets stuffed in there 99% of the time. Here's one that reads better backwards than forewards. !uoy kcuF .setydolgort fo edaclavac a, gniretlews a, hcnets A []
  2. By now I'm convinced this is the only distinction that really matters, did the coffee come from CR or not? []
  3. In stark contrast to its northern neighbor, Panama, or at least its capitol, are devoid of wildlife. I saw one gull cooling its feet by the water. Otherwise, they've got roaches. []

Line Betting on BitBet, Closing Out

Sunday, May 8th, 2016

GPG signed statement

During BitBet's receivership PC4 saw a total of eight refunds (eight wagers on four bets), and one payout on a lost call (for Silver at or over $19/oz before April). This netted 4.23647291 BTC, less the five final BTC in bets resolved, resulting in a loss of 0.76352709, making the final period one of the worst on record, and putting the all-time loss at 4.1275986.

The anticipated closure of MPIF naturally means no more line betting for me. It remains to be seen if the new owner of BitBet will do anything useful with the won assets, but given BitBet as it was operated was the sole functional venue for such activities, I'm inclined to believe its specific operators were an integral and necessary component of that functionality. Though BitBet's underpinners kept the thing going but a few years, and I count its sale as unfortunate, I'm glad to have had the opportunity to use the service both on my own and as manager of PC4.

There were some upsets, such as Blatter's tumble last fall after a five-month waitout, and some brighter points, like last September's DJI call. The overall loss of about 8% is a disappointment for me, and one I would've liked to chase with the greater breadth of bets and longevity of betting I believe was key to the house's superior performance --though perhaps my lost calls were simply too numerous1, or my early blunders too damaging.

In any case, I learned a great deal even if I earned nothing, and I remain indebted to the many folks who lent me their knowledge and time these past two years, directly or not.

  1. Eleven out of forty two, 26% if we discount the five refunds. []

Line betting on BitBet, February and March 2016

Sunday, April 3rd, 2016

Report 23. Joint statement, April 2nd, 2016

GPG signed statement
Accounting url: bitbet.us stats/18bCNXjdT2NUjcip6KdbFR5EEFAu3oTgTq

Total wagers made: 0; all time: 94 (2x wagers on 47 bets)
Total wagered: 0 BTC; all time: 47 BTC
Total bets resolved: 1; all time: 421
Total calls won: 1; all time: 32
Total calls lost: 1; all time: 10
Total calls pending: 5 (10 wagers on 5 bets)
Total amount won: 1.03843410, less 1 BTC resolved wagers, for a period gain of .03843410, with all-time loss at 3.36407151.

Outstanding wagers: 5 BTC

In light of BitBet's turmoil over the past month, it looks unlikely that PC4 will be able to keep operating, and as such no new bets have been placed. As noted, there are currently 5 BTC in bets still outstanding, none of which have actually had their resolution criteria met, which should mean they'll be refunded, assuming BitBet's receivership and wind-down are well-executed.

It's been a bumpy ride, with ultimate results obviously less than stellar, and whether the line betting idea has its conclusion is still somewhat unknown to me; certainly a greater sample size would've better aided any sense of certainty. Assuming the profit center does indeed close with BitBet itself, I'll be putting together a post-mortem to see what can be seen.


  1. Bets resolved from earlier placing periods: 1208. []

How to Unmake Money in Eulora, Sorta

Monday, February 15th, 2016

You'd think losing fifty eight million ECU1 would take some careful planning, or at least a good day's worth of acting irrationally. Good news, friends! Such a feat can be achieved in a mere two hours, and all it takes is a simple question: would it be better if Eulora's grand Sunday auctions were doled out piece by piece, rather than in one set? Since specialization is a path evidently sought out by nearly every frequent player --we have a top farmer, a master tinkerer, dedicated miners, and plenty of other niches where dominance is still being decided--, wouldn't it be great if people could bid only on the items that most appealed to them, without having to shore up a major sum for the whole thing?

The answer, apparently, is no. I mean, it might be fun as a sort of novelty, but the willingness to pay for individual items rather than the agglomeration is laughably low. Fifty eight millionly laughable. That's right: I, Grenadine Sippycup, took today's main auction to 140 million ECU to secure the package and, having immediately climbed the podium2 and announced the happy divisioning of the provisioning to those present, found myself repaid with a measly 82 million3 once the gavel'd gaveled its last. Leaving me almost half in the whole, or as the boss so blithely put it, I basically "donated 70mn to s.mg lol". Well, 58mn. But who's counting.

What followed was a lengthy, lively ruckus amongst the winners and assorted bidders and bystanders to determine who'd use which spoils, how, and amazingly, by what freshly forged deals. Though Grenadine will weather the experiment4, it's an interesting, and I suppose merely further, warning to would-be entrepreneurs venturing into Eulora's easily misleading mists: this market isn't terribly predictable, and it was never very kind.

Who knows what today's flutter of butterfly wings will bring to our island hereafter, or who will take a hit or a helping hand along the way.


  1. Eulora copper units. Fifty eight bitcents. []
  2. There aren't really any podiums in Eulora, but I did stand up extra straight, promise. []
  3. For the curious, it breaks down like so: One Three-Pointed Thorn, q31,415, went to Daniel Barron for 70k; Ten Petrified Bubbles q200 went to Mircea Mircescu for 11M; Four hundred Pointedly Odorous Charcoal Conceptions q200 went to Mircea Mircescu for 2.5M; Two hundred Misshaped Ampoule Designs q200 went to Mircea Mircescu for 6.5M; Two hundred Black of Desspayr Recipes q200 went to Daniel Barron for 12M; and One hundred Apprentice Bouquinist Considerations q200 were won by Mircea Mircescu for 50M. Stay tuned to DPB's Eulora buzz, apparently he got the whole thing on video. []
  4. Insa Allah! []

Line betting on BitBet, January 2016

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016

Report 22. February 2nd, 2016

GPG signed statement
Accounting url: bitbet.us stats/18bCNXjdT2NUjcip6KdbFR5EEFAu3oTgTq

Total wagers made: 2; all time: 94 (2x wagers on 47 bets)
Total wagered: 1 BTC; all time: 47 BTC
Total bets resolved: 3; all time: 411
Total calls won: 2; all time: 31
Total calls lost: 1; all time: 10
Total calls pending: 6 (12 wagers on 6 bets)
Total amount won: 2.27631211, less 3 BTC resolved wagers, for a period loss of 0.72368789, with all-time loss at 3.40250561.

Outstanding wagers: 6 BTC

New bets this period:
1. Bet 1243, EUR/USD Parity reached before June; .925 on No (bet 10), .075 on Yes (bet 9); status: ongoing.

Pretty miserable results this month, dual-pronged: that 1147 lost a few bitcents despite being correctly, and in my opinion rather strongly, called, is an artifact of the piss-poor volume on the lower side; notice the house took a similar hit. Nevertheless, the importance of having a large field of bets trumps either waiting to observe interest (costing weight) or declining to bet based on an assumption interest could be low --which assumptions that I've admittedly had are frequently shattered, see for instance that Star Wars box office blowup. As such, I'll still be working towards that larger field, attempting to pinpoint the prop odds and not the popularity odds.

And prop odds bring us to the second prong of pain this month, that being 1228. This'd be my penultimately worst call (first last place is reserved for that BTC <$200 disaster a year ago). I was confident in the split I made in November; in December I twice considered an attempt to hedge, and twice decided to hold out. My call sucked, and whether it would've been improved either by better study or a stronger inclination to hedge is something I'll keep looking at and thinking about as I push towards a larger field. PC4's goal isn't necessarily to win every call, but obviously this sort of thing needs to be a product of bad luck rather than bad analysis if the results are going to come out of the red.

  1. Bets resolved from earlier placing periods: 1147, 1220, and 1228. []

Line betting on BitBet, December 2015

Saturday, January 2nd, 2016

Report 21. January 2nd, 2016

GPG signed statement
Accounting url: bitbet.us stats/18bCNXjdT2NUjcip6KdbFR5EEFAu3oTgTq

Total wagers made: 0; all time: 92 (2x wagers on 46 bets)
Total wagered: 0 BTC; all time: 46 BTC
Total bets resolved: 0; all time: 38
Total calls won: 0; all time: 29
Total calls lost: 0; all time: 9
Total calls pending: 8 (16 wagers on 8 bets)
Total amount won: 0, less 0 BTC resolved wagers, for a period of stasis, with all-time loss still at 2.67881772.

Outstanding wagers: 8 BTC

Obviously a couple of placed bets were involved in the yearly changeover; they'll be reported and discussed next month as per usual. May 2016 be faster & fuller.