How's the traffic?

Why would you use a service like circle or coinbase ? these places are a bigger scam than poker sites. perhaps you haven't read that most of them lost a ton of money in some way, which they pass on to the users. They get hacked, they get scammed, they make excuses but all them have the same fate.

You want to deal with BTC grab $20 cash and meet your local college nerd at the mall. Don't waste your time with things like VISA and online transactions. Only store small amount in a real wallet that you control and not some server like circle or cryptsy or coinbase.

Blockchain is good for small amounts. Anything larger download an offline wallet.

Not very good. Went up a bit then back down. Lots of problems and very poor user retention right now.

The actual numbers are about 150 player online to maybe 250 at peak.

Only a handful of those are actually playing. About 20 in game and the other 80 in freeroll and the rest are in chat talking about things I can't repeat here.

Are you really comparing circle and coinbase to the fly-by-night anonymous exchange, eastern european exchanges/others located in impoverished countries, or an exchanged litterally named "magic the gathering online exchange?"

There are legitimate reasons to not like circle or coinbase, but you can't compare them to those exchanges. The main reason to dislike them is your financial privacy.

It's far less hassle to use than than local Bitcoins, and you'll pay 1% juice to exchange your coins rather than 10% you'll find with these local traders. Why go through a bunch of hassle to trade someone in person for a whole $20 if you don't need to? Let alone that in many places it'll be difficult to find someone to buy from locally, and I would be very hesitant to make large trades with some random person.

Your odds of Circle or Coinbase going broke in the time it takes to get your bitcoins are near 0, but you can always move your Bitcoins elsewhere as soon as they are available.

I can certainly understand not wanting to store your coins on blockchain, but it's an option for those who are either lazy or don't want to be bothered securing their own bitcoins.

I'm not arguing for either but I don't like CB or circle or any BTC service. They can't be trusted and they haven't been around long enough to say otherwise.

Also why complicate things for a new user who doesn't know btc. Cash to BTC would be my choice and only a fool would pay 10% or any %. My local craigslist has plenty of people selling at daily avg rate and sometimes even less. Only the cash4gold types are selling BTC at a markup.

Cash to BTC

deposit

and if you win extract to local wallet or convert to cash or products/services.

Your next method to get BTC >> sell something online. I'm sure everyone has a gadget they no longer use. Advertise it for BTC payment only.

But of course go ahead and sign up, accept terms, get hacked, get logged, give away your personal info, open a new account and maybe even get sued.

Actually, in the beginning, coinbase did some really shady stuff while they were starting to come up. When they were one of the smallest exchanges, and BTC went up a lot in a short time frame, they reversed a bunch of people's purchases, because they would have lost a ton of money.

They have likely become big enough that we shouldn't have to worry about a scam, but isn't this what people thought about the banks that were "too big to fail"? I wouldn't put anything past anybody. That's really the whole point of BTC. To avoid the middlemen when at all possible.

Electrum is still the best client for short term purposes (paper wallets for medium/long term). Store your coins on your computer, and write down the electrum seed as backup. Sleep well at night knowing even if coinbase, or circle, or blockchain is hacked and all the money is stolen, yours is all safe.

You don't even need to make any other accounts on any other forums to do this!

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...l-marketplace/

That's a good point about coinbase, and I've never really liked that they did the exchange that way, rather than allowing you to put the money on and then exchange at your leisure once your bank transfer has cleared (can you do this now? I haven't looked at them in a while.)

Still, considering they've both received $10s of millions in venture capital funding and are US-based, it isn't fair to compare them to the other fly by night options. I definitely agree that this does not imply they are infallible, but I certainly wouldn't be worried about them going broke in the couple days it takes for a bank transaction to clear - at which point you freely move your bitcoins wherever you want.

But as long as you use common sense and aren't trying to trade your life-bankroll all at once, whatever method of exchange someone wants to use will probably work out all right (some charge high vig though). I have no idea what the best method would be these days if someone wanted to buy a large amount of BTC (>$10k worth). But for less than $1k I don't think it matters much.

Server down for everyone? Was on the bubble in a tourney then it froze now I cant log back in.

Yeah same here, the server is down

Server down here in CT as well. DDOS? Who knows? Blows though. Get better soon seals.

back up

Who is the biggest fish in the PLO/big O games right now?

Big O8? Probably me. I have no clue at those games but they're fun. I steer clear of plo though.

everyone

The answer should be nobody since 0 people playing on this site at the moment.

I was a proud supporter of this site until the changes. Now my advice would be to avoid or only play for fun and learning purposes (freeroll)

There are other options if you want play bitcoin poker but this should be your last one at this time.

it's 8 till noon east coast. do you expect that to be the high traffic hour? because it's not.

last night there were 2 or 3 200 chip big PLO tables, 2 or 3 100 chip big PLO games, several smaller. usually a lot of lower stakes NLHE games. i filter PLO8 games, but i know there are usually several of those every night.

The number of people logged on and playing barely moves regardless of the time. At noon there are 0 and at 8pm there are 3. Is that really a move.

In the global world of millions playing poker 3 is not considered a factor.
My neighbor has more players in his basement.

ok, then why are you wasting everyone's time in this thread? also, there are far more than 3 players playing omaha on this site.

Seriously. You can always find a game and can't beat the cashouts. Seals is a nice niche site that will hopefully grow. Its making the most out of what it has, I mean that in a good way.

I don't play Big O myself, but when I check the lobby there are usually multiple tables running at various levels. A few nights ago there was a .50/1 table playing really deep with avg pot size at 100bb.

If anyone hasn't checked the schedule in awhile there were a handful of new tournaments added recently.

One is the Midnight Monster Stack at 12am ET. 25 chip buy in, 10k starting stacks, 7 minute levels - blinds start at 25/50 with antes from level 1.

While I have no particularly strong or negative opinion of SwC, you can't blame anyone for not taking a site seriously if at certain times not a single game is running, and at other times it's a single table of Big O with stakes equivalent to $.25/.50 - $1/2 PLO.

Nobody is wasting time. Its a forum discussion and if you don't like it don't read it.

No wonder SWC poker sucks, its people like you who play there. You'd rather stop talking about the merits of SWC so you can go back to the previous topic which was "who is the biggest fish on a 3 man site" ..

It isn't even that. The low traffic is not the main problem with SWC. The fundamentals aren't there to support this anymore and I'm pretty sure most players agree with me. As evident by the fact that every good or average and normal player has left and only the few kids and degenerates remained as regular members.

There are many very experienced players who have not "left". Players with 5k krill, 20k krill, 75k krill, and even 150k krill show up every month. I know who they are, and how many. If and when the action picks up (and I am not sure if it will) they will be there. They have incentives to not leave, and they have not. The equity in the larger freerolls and the rakeback is good. These types of players have big rolls, and are in the habit of playing big over a long period. That is how they got many thousands of krill.

I disagree. I think SWC is the best option for BTC poker at the moment. I think that Betcoin has been acting really shady of late, including not reimbursing players for overraking tables late last year, soliciting positive reviews of the site from players in exchange for tournament tickets, and their security is a joke.

I pulled all my coin off of Betcoin after their latest security fiasco in which the usernames and e-mails of all their players (and who knows what else) were stolen. Their players started getting spoofed e-mails, so Betcoin responded by implementing an e-mail "security" system where there's a hash at the bottom of the e-mail next to a link where you can click to verify that the e-mail did indeed come from Betcoin. Aside from the idiocy of including the verification link in the same e-mail as the verification code, I noticed that the last three e-mails they sent me had identical hashes, which means that this is either a faux security facade to make it look like they care about security, or alternately, whoever implemented the system couldn't find their *** with both hands. In either case, it doesn't give me a lot of confidence in their site.

There isn't a huge amount of traffic on SWC at the moment, but the Big O games have been pretty juicy of late, with 0.2-0.5 BTC pots not uncommon. It's also the only place where you can play OFC, 12 game, etc. The tourneys rarely overlay, so someone must be playing them.

According to pokerscout, Betcoin and SWC are ranked 51 and 52, respectively, so there's not a lot of difference in the amount of traffic. Betcoin has WPN tourneys, so it looks like more players are online, but if you want to play WPN games I would recommend playing on ACR rather than Betcoin (you can both deposit and withdraw BTC from ACR, although you have to e-mail now for BTC withdrawals).