DannyChiarelli wrote: A lot of the sites/companies I do business with got PayPal back...

Slowly, one by one...

Only one of the sites I use got PayPal back, though to be fair, I don't use many sites these days...change of job makes me less around a computer 24 hours a day.

Well, yeah - they're incredibly dodgy, and everyone knew it would collapse eventually.

It's just surprising that it collapsed during a stable (by their standards) point in their operating history. There have been lots of points at which one would panic-withdraw in the past. There were only minor (again, by their standards) issues recently.

Paypal really hurt a lot of sites. Payza is going to hurt a whole lot of the same sites before they've recovered, and a whole lot of new sites on top.

There could be a blessing in disguise for the sites strong enough to weather the storm.

Or we may be out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Too early to tell, give it a few months.

I took an even bigger hit than when E-Gold got busted.

Should've learned by now...

Venezuela did some really awful things a few years ago, like free education, free healthcare, literacy programs, nationalization, land reform, and worst of all a new constitution guaranteeing all Venezuelan's equal rights under the law. As a result of these evil, wicked policies, the US instigated trade sanctions against them...which is going to be interesting when North Americans start buying Petro.

splat44 wrote: Well I first started with dial-up through BBS(s) 1986-90 before world wild web got integrated.

BBS mean: bulletin board system

We could post message and download game!
There were several kinds
it was addicted,

So did I. I got very, very lucky with where I happened to live. We were not a well off family, if we had to pay for it ourselves, we wouldn't have had it at all - but by chance I lived right in the middle of one of the earliest local networks in the country. I did the antiquated version of stealing your neighbour's wifi (but because it was so slow, and only connected for a few hours on a night, you had to actually have permission because they definitely noticed).

Still, folklore says 1993 was the September That Never Ended when 'normals' started leaking into Usenet and never going away, but I stand by 1998 - it was definitely a middle class and/or institutional thing before then because of the price of computers, the cost of dial up, and the difficulty of setting up. Perhaps a bit earlier in North America. We had Compuserve and Demon, but AoL took off a bit later here - and before AoL started spamming their own CDs, the other two didn't put much effort into making their own services any easier.

splat44 wrote: 1971, you're kidding right?
Computers back were very big, minimal functions and costly back then
The general public didn't even had access to the internet until over 10 years after!

Today for a fraction of cost, conputers are smaller and have better functions

We had Fidonet in 1984 - which I still use occasionally, but it's mostly Russian now. I wouldn't exactly call that accessible to the general public. It was, and still is, a massive pain in the arse to set up. Even in the 90's with the modern internet, you had to write your own connection scripts a lot of the time. It wasn't until 1998 - with Windows setting up an ISP account via a wizard, and AoL creating their own personal landfill of CDs polluting the planet for hundreds of years that the general public had access to the Internet...so it's more like 27 years than over 10 years.

LuisAphex wrote: Bitcoin is not dying and never go die


is just get stronger and more stronger

There's a hell of a lot wrong with Bitcoin, and nobody has any intention of fixing it - you can tell, because the problems that exist today are the ones that existed right back in the original white paper. It is going to die.

It's just the crash was blindingly, crashingly obviously going to happen, it was blindingly, crashingly obvious where it was going to bottom out, and it was blindingly, crashingly obvious what the reason was.

"Bitcoin is dying" and "Bitcoin will never die" are both equally naive.

Only you said Bitcoin died last month. If you scroll down the page, there's another thread, where I explained why you were an idiot for claiming that even while it was still "dying".

I think it offers a whole world of opportunities for a company like Xapo to extend their service in some really awesome ways...but whether it's any good or not depends on how many people want to run, and how many people want to use companies like Xapo.

Bitcoin is worth as much as it was a couple of months ago. It's worth $3,000 more than it was in October.

The hype train crashed, and it's back to where we'd expect it to be.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there are massive problems in Bitcoin, and the network has done nothing to convince me they can fix their problems, but let's be honest, the spike was the anomaly, not the drop...in fact, if you run the numbers and draw a graph of the trend alongside the price (Wolfram Alpha can help you), you can barely even see the spike.

Day trading isn't Investment in the same way Weather isn't Climate.

You want to know what people think about it, but without anyone mentioning the reason for it? That seems...odd.

Let's pretend it wasn't bitcoin. Let's pretend is was Japanese Yen.

Payza have raised the minimum withdrawal of Japanese Yen from $20 to $50 as a result of the financial services increasing the transaction fee for processing Japanese Yen from 30 cents to $15 overnight. If you're paying a $15 fee, the amount of money you're transferring has to be in the thousands before anyone can seriously think it's worthwhile.

It is no longer possible for reasonable people to spend Japanese Yen.

It is no longer possible for reasonable people to spend Bitcoin.

$50 is 0.0034 Bitcoin. To send this money, the cheapest fast price is 0.001 bitcoin, or $15. The $50 is probably too low. If you're paying a $15 fee, the amount of money you're transferring has to be in the thousands before anyone can seriously think it's worthwhile.

Ultimately, Bitcoin is an abject failure of a technology that merely reinvented the problems it was created to solve, and is currently undergoing a bubble which once popped, will never recover, and if you're even slightly surprised by the current state of affairs, you should probably do some reading - of the code, and the white papers, not the forums.

I mean, I've got money in Bitcoin, but this is roulette, not currency.

It looks like an RS232 Serial Interface (the thing we used to hook printers up with) had a baby with a VGA cable.

| MINI DISPLAY PORT TO DVI |

There is a 98 year old guy in my club who was already talking about hanging up his wheels when I first joined...thirty years ago.

In those days, I did the short rides, and he did the long rides. These days, I do the long rides and he does the short rides, but he's still there.

Quote:it just seems unfair to me to pay everyone the same thing

That's not what universal basic income is. Rather, it's a safety net paid to everyone, that nobody can ever fall beneath. You can never earn less than universal basic income, but you can always earn more.

Remember what AoL tried to do in the 90's? You were locked into a portal you thought was the internet, but was only actually a tiny part of the internet, and nobody realised they were missing all the good stuff.

Net neutrality laws were designed to stop someone doing that - only better. In AoL you weren't actually *locked* in, it was just tricky to get out.

So, massively - it's now perfectly legal for ISPs to close or charge an additional subscription to the parts of the internet they don't own. History says this is incredibly likely to happen. Most likely, you'll get a phone/TV/part-of-the-internet-we-own package from your ISP, and an additional fee to access the real internet.

Oh, and also, check the SMART with smartmontools. It'll confirm whether your disk is dead/dying or not (if your disk supports SMART, most do these days)
Download – smartmontools

That would normally indicate hardware failure, though there are three more things I can think of to try...

Have you tried changing the USB cable? You said you'd tried the ports, but not the cable. If it's a thin cable, also make sure it's straight. I have a Seagate that played up for months until I finally discovered it just didn't like it's cable being bent too much.

Did chkdsk actually fail, or did you give up? It can take a VERY long time. If you gave up, rather than chkdsk giving up, try again, but do it overnight while you're asleep.

And you could try mounting it from a Linux live CD. NTFS is fully supported on Linux now, but it didn't work properly for years and years, so it's got a whole bunch of error handling and fault tolerance that Windows doesn't. If you get a live CD of Ubuntu, Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux or something like that and boot from that, you might still be able to mount your drive and backup your files. Whether it mounts in Linux or not, as long as it's detected, fdisk may still be able to fix it. For NTFS and FAT drives, it's not as complete as chkdsk, but it works orders of magnitude faster.

If none of those things work, you're looking at photorec.

Something with a pretty UI that's easy to use, I have no idea, but you should try to find one of those if you don't know what you're doing. After you've done that and it's failed (or if you do know what you're doing) try the low level advanced tools at CGSecurity - Data recovery: TestDisk & PhotoRec

Hope you've just lost a partition table and testdisk can save it.

If you haven't lost a partition table, and testdisk can't save it, photorec will recover anything that is still readable on the drive.

Testdisk is the dangerous one - it writes partition tables and actually makes changes to the disk. If it works, it recovers everything easily, but if it doesn't, you can make things worse - that's why I said to use something else with a pretty UI that you can't screw up first.

Photorec is safe, it doesn't write to the disk so it can't screw anything up, but it's the tool of last resort - it loses filenames and directory structures, and recovers everything that can still be read. Everything. You'll probably get most of your films back, but you might end up with gigabytes of temporary internet files from a browsing session ten years ago to sort through too.