Dhaw sent me some of his debug.log files. Symptoms I saw:
- In most of the files his block count remains “stuck” at 1698.
- In one file he accepted blocks beyond that, but it went back to 1698 after he restarted Bitcoin.
- Any blocks he receives after 1698 he probably considers invalid. I haven’t seen the actual block rejection (it keeps getting removed by the auto-trim), but his debug.log is full of “block xxx have” messages for blocks that he clearly doesn’t recognize as valid.
- He is connected to real peers. He connected successfully to IRC, and he was able to connect to me with -addnode. I verified at my end that he is successfully sending getblocks messages.
I’m almost sure that Dhaw is not a scammer, and is a victim of some bug. My guess is that every time he restarts Bitcoin, his block database is corrupted.
He speaks ‘Portuguese (Brazilian)’. A translator would be helpful.