I'm on the beta for 5d and have so far deposited 7.5btc with no problems. Over the course of 2 deposits, each time they gave favorable bitstamp rates with zero fees.

The main issue I find is they convert your funds from btc to usd, and if your plan is to cash out in btc after the bet, you are subject to the changing value of btc. As of now the avg bitstamp rate is $15 more than when I deposited, so if I was to cashout now, effectively I'd face a loss.
This could obviously work in your favour, but I'd assume most ppl that have btc right now is because they believe it will increase in price.

Ideally in the long run they just accept bets in btc.

if you just think of it as a deposit option its excellent though. keep your btc in storage, if you want to deposit on 5d just buy a few more btc, deposit, and convert it to usd. when you want to withdraw, do the reverse (or sit on more btc if youd like). this is massive in an industry where deposit and withdrawal methods are a huge setback.

If you can take the hard drive out yourself, you can get something like this. That will convert it to a USB external drive. Take the drive out first and check what type it is before choosing the enclosure. You can post the drive info here if you are not sure.

A bit unrelated but might be of interest:

Barring meaningful revelations of fact (which may come, there is already a slight stench of rotten fish wafting around certain details of this), the guy is ****ed.

This is not Roger Ver being a naive ideologue, pissing off an ATF agent and going to prison for fireworks (after starching the judge about being coerced into accepting a plea).

This is not Andrew Aurenheimer being prosecuted for crawling and indexing a public website.

This isn't even Kim Dotcom.

This guy ran a straight up darknet black marketplace. Whatever big ideals might apply are hugely, hugely trumped by the very cut and dry reality of law and consequences he faces.

You have to realize that many view him, even if guilty of all charges, as a hero. They let this try to find a way to justify that he will get off on the charges.

I do think he's probably going to be over punished and attacked, and a proper trial might never happen which I think is unfair.

However I don't want to donate to his cause, there's a lot of social injustices out there and a guy profiting hugely off a drugs website is pretty low on my list of people who I think deserve financial aid.

It also doesn't help that the guy was foolish and overconfident in his endeavors. And even if you believe he is worthy of support, the likelihood that it will even do anything is silly. But there are people who legitimately believe he will be acquitted on most charges.

I think he'll get off on most stuff. I haven't looked too closely but from my initial look a while back it seemed like the court would have to really bend and expand both the statutes and common law to find him guilty.

If any bears wanna sell some btc I have $500 usd on stars and am looking to buy. Right now at bitstamp avg price it would be .8 btc. Lemme know. We'll use the market price at time of transaction.

how is it silly? the outcome of the trial is going to change drastically if the donations allow him to afford the best lawyer in the world. if he gets a lighter sentence than he would have otherwise with a worse lawyer, it would be worth it to those who believe he wasn't doing anything wrong.

That's what courts do when the guy in front of them is a boogieman. When it's a swell guy/he ''cooperates"/is a fellow government employee, they bend the laws in his favor.

This is how statutory mandatory minimums were born.
A few too many sentences of probation for guys possessing 40,000 images of child porn, boom, 5 year mandatory minimum for the guy who has one deleted image recovered with forensic software who very much appears to have downloaded it accidentally.

I may be overly skeptical, but the odds he gets anything less than 20 years even given a dream team seems to be almost nil. Charlie Shrem has a much better shot and still I think he gets hit for something in the 1-5 year range.

Agreed.

Even if he does prevail on his argument that Silk Road, like other e-commerce sites, should not be held responsible for illegal activities perpetrated on the platform, the DOJ has him dead to rights on conspiracy to commit murder, which will carry with it substantial jail time. The alleged facts below if admitted and testified to will be enough to get him....

According to court pleadings, an FBI agent went undercover in 2012 posing as a drug dealer who wanted to do business on Silk Road. The agent e-mailed "Dread Pirate Roberts" (allegedly Ulbricht) directly seeking help finding a buyer for a kilogram of cocaine. Ulbricht allegedly instructed one of his employees to help. The alleged buyer, who turned out to be the employee, deposited $27,000 in bitcoins in a Silk Road account and arranged a shipment to his home. Federal agents arrested the employee, who is not named in court papers.

On Jan. 26, the FBI says in court papers, Ulbricht e-mailed the undercover agent to say the employee had been arrested and had stolen funds from other Silk Road users. He allegedly asked the agent to have the employee beaten up and forced to return the money.

The next day, Ulbricht allegedly asked the FBI agent to have the employee killed because "now that he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info." The FBI says Ulbricht agreed to pay $80,000 for the hit and on Feb. 4 wired $40,000 from Technocash Limited in Australia to a bank account at Capital One in Washington. Ulbricht deposited another $40,000 after the undercover agent e-mailed him staged photographs of the killing, court papers say.

Make what you want in regards to whether Ulbricht is a hero or champion with regard to privacy and liberty, but in my opinion there is no justification for conspiracy to commit murder. And if the above allegations are true, AT BEST, he is at least going away for that crime.

There's a difference between not being aware of such things where it would be unreasonable to know, not being aware where it would be reasonable to know and stop such things, being aware of it but doing too little to stop it, and being aware and actively encouraging the illegal activity. Say I had a private club where I advertised it as a gambling hall, but inside the games were set up by whoever wanted to run them. I just charged admission or whatever. I'd still be hit on running a gambling operation.

The direct involvement in the FBI sting really gets him as well. It's interesting the FBI isn't bringing the murder charge, perhaps they save that in case this doesn't get him. Or it's too hard to prove that there is only one DPR and he was the same DPR that did that (or conspiracy that it was completely fabricated just to get people against defending him, and never intended to charge).

The murder charge isn't a charge he's facing, which is a big rallying cry for him. Making up a charge and then not even prosecuting it was a great way to sway public opinion and keep people who wanted to defend him from doing so, and most people don't even realize he isn't charged with the hit (yet).

I think that conspiracy is a bit far fetched although plausible, and it's more likely they can't nail that he is the same guy who was involved in that.

How do you get your Bitcoins converted back into USD and into your hands ?

Can you exchange Bitcoin for USD in a wallet, and then simply transfer the USD onto a PrePaid Green Dot/Debit Card, not connected to your personal bank ?

It seems most of the wallets/exchanges require your personal banking info.

I looked briefly at Coinbase, BetStamp, and BlockChain.Info, and also LocalBitcoins.com

I thought one of the values of BTC was not needing the US Banking System ?

....so......Can you exchange Bitcoin for USD in a wallet, and then transfer the USD onto a PrePaid Green Dot/Debit Card, not connected to your personal bank ?

Any help/insight appreciated....

You can use shady yet trusted services such as this to get money packs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133439.0

Or use Local Bitcoins to get cash, which is what I would suggest.

Within the bitcoin ecosystem banking is not required and it's very easy to move around. But if you want USD for your bitcoin or vice versa and your more then and arm lengths away a 3rd party is going to be required. That's a fault of fiat currency not bitcoin.

yep....not placing blame, or smashing digital currency.

for me, the value of BTC is so I can play online poker. but at SOME POINT, I need it converted back to USD.......and had thought I could just cash out to a debit card......but seems everyone wants my bank info

txs

investigating all alternatives

if you're in the right state in the us, you can try https://bitsimple.com/

maybe https://xapo.com/home/

in honor of sethseth, who used to post such yearly updates...

Exchanges are generally not wallets. A wallet can be electrum, multibit, blockchain.info or bitcoin-qt. In your wallet only you control your bitcoins. Exchanges generally store your bitcoins and if you request them they usually take some other bitcoins that they have.

Imo use exchanges to exchange bitcoin/usd, and wallets to store bitcoins.

Aren't all debit cards associated with bank accounts???

sure, but not necessarily MY bank account.
ya know....green dot....pre-paid debit cards....that type of thing