Bitcoin Forum

So, apparently there's an event called Proof of Keys, it happens on Bitcoin's birthday (Jan 3rd) and participants simply move any coins that they hold on any wallets they don't control (like exchanges, online wallets, etc) to their own Bitcoin wallets. Read more here: https://wr.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/abzrzf/the_monetary_sovereignty_warcry_proof_of_keys_jan3/

I personally didn't do it, because I'm super lazy, and also I use a cold storage setup, so it would be slightly  inconvenient for me to move my coins back to online sites tomorrow (I'm investing a little bit in crypto casinos and sometimes trade on exchanges).

So, tell me if you have participated or not and explain why.

I did not participate, because i did not know about this event. But even if i knew about it i would not have participated, im one of those idiots with their (small) holdings on an exchange and im perfectly fine with that.

I never heard of it even though I remembered bitcoin birthday , so I guess that at here reason some of us did not partake in it and had I been aware earlier I don't think i could have had enough bitcoins to be transferring around and  spending transaction fees on them.

to the sheep
1. proof of keys is not about "sovereignty" it is about a subtle ruse/story to take funds out of an exchange in the hopes(of trace mayor) that the lack of supply of coins on an exchange will cause a flash price rise. but....
2. day traders that actually day trade will continue to day trade.
3. those that dont day trade and just use exchanges as a custodian, means:
       balance sat in exchange wallets(just for custodial purpose) is not balance sat on market order lines.
       thus are free to withdraw without impacting their normal daily activity,
       thus never impacted the price anyway.

so do not expect huge price movements via trace mayors ruse
i do not think trace mayor will get his hidden agenda of a flash price spike like he intends. as the only people that would withdraw ar the ones that are not actually day traders in the first place

...
what will actually cause more of a price surge. is the mining:market dynamic
new next gen asics are being received and set right now. with hashrates rising. the cost of mining rises.
those playing the "which is cheaper mining:buying coins" will see that buying can be cheaper. thus raising the price when they buy

then asic miners see the price rise that gives them confidence to mine more. which causes more cost of mining. rinse and repeat the dynamic upwards
and the dynamic plays out.


in october last year(3 months ago) the dynamic played out the opposite way.
old gen asics sold dirt cheap made mining cheap so less were buying coin. and more were mining and then selling coin for profit. causing the november down slope. other miners were not as profitable so stopped mining. causing more drama

the mining:market dynamic has always been a thing since 2009, so keep an eye on that as a influencer this month

Wow, I never knew about this thing until today but i think it's something very good. At least the initiative makes everyone know they own what they have and that no exchange is in control of their coins. But one thing I'm concerned about is how secure people should be during suvh times. Don't try to make scammers get hold of you during this time.
Anyways it's a nice initiative. I hope I'll join the next round.

No, because they're already in cold storage and I don't like people telling me what to do with my shit.

i saw it yesterday and i have to say that is the dumbest event that anybody could come up with. it has a very good point underneath but the idea itself is dumb.

basically what it is doing is that they are encouraging people to spam the blockchain for no reason whatsoever!
you should NOT keep your coins with third parties in first place and if you do then you must already have a pretty good reason for it which doesn't go away just because it is Jan 3. for example imagine a trader that is trading on Binance. he has to keep some bitcoin there so that he can open orders, this trader does have a good reason for keeping his coins there and he isn't going to "cash out" because it is Jan 3. and if he does then he is spamming the blockchain with a useless transaction because he has to put the coins back in his exchange account again! (of course unless he is done trading).

the good point in this is that it is telling people they should be in control of their own keys.
the dumb thing about it is that it is emotionally encouraging everyone to pull their money out of everywhere (mainly focuses on exchanges).

I personally think this is the whole point of the "event" in the first place though. The point isn't to just move coins to wallets for no reason at all, the point is to give awareness to the people to hold their unused funds(coins not being used for trading) on their own wallets(where they have access to the private keys) instead of leaving their funds on the exchanges. I personally don't find it dumb in the slightest at all; even if it gives awareness to only a small number of people, that's still a decent number of people saved that could definitely be hacked in the future if their coins are previously on exchanges.

Meh, I transferred what I could. Unfortunately, one of my withdrawal requests did not go through and I have to open a support ticket. (The exchange was cryptobridge. So much for "decentralized exchange." ::) )

I don't normally keep funds on exchanges since I've been screwed a couple times by hacks and exit scams. So, I wasn't in a position to participate. From the look of the network, not many other people did either. There were no signs of congestion on the network all day.

it certainly doesn't look like, at least not to me.
the sticky one /r/bitcoin for example is simply telling people to withdraw their bitcoins from exchanges.


all i say is that it is one thing to warn and educate people about the risks and downsides of keeping their coins with third parties and not have control over their keys but it is another thing to encourage them to withdraw their coins for no reason with a campaign!

I only transferred the coins that I had on some exchanges to my hardware wallet a few days ago. I reckoned that exchanges will be flooded with withdrawal requests on the day, so I did it well in advance. <I know some exchanges blocked people's withdrawals and even their accounts to stop this from exposing them>

If you were a victim of this, I would advise you to withdraw your BTC at a later stage and start managing your own private keys. <Just transfer coins to exchanges, when you want to sell> 

Not participated yet, i not really update with news from crypto and not save any coins much in exchange. But maybe that is what make some exchanger lock their withdrawal and make people can't withdraw from their site.

One of the reasons for this event is to test the solvency of those third party wallets. But I dunno how realistic it is, even if the event had gathered much more users.



There are some reasons, for example daytrading. Or, like in my case, investing. I'm willingly risking with the amount I can afford to lose to get some profit. There are probably other cases that require holding coins in third-party wallets.

I dont have any BTC to move to any online BTC wallets. This event is not ideal to me because I am not a bitcoin holder. I used to hold bitcoin before but after the market price down trend I have sold it already and probably will it in the time that I can receive some altcoin rewards that could be tradable to bitcoin.

I didn't need to, because this was one of my main principles already.

Oh come on franky1. It was nothing but a few Bitcoiners having some fun celebrating the anniversary of the genesis block. There is no need to be paranoid, and be suspicious about it.

OP, set up a hot wallet, mimimize trust. 8)

No, and i think its realy absurd becouse in that situation all centralised exchanges wouldnt be exist at all, i dont think its good idea at all we needt this ,its my opinion.

What do you mean? Centralized exchanges make money off your buy/sell offers through the fees they take, not through the bitcoin you deposit.

You know what's absurd? A full member thinking that withdawing unused funds from exchanges is absurd.

No, I did not participate in this event and I think that participation is an absolutely meaningless undertaking

It's absolutely meaningless if you don't know the risks of leaving your funds on exchanges. Do yourself a favor if you don't want to potentially lose your funds.

• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1631151.0
• https://cryptosec.info/cryptocurrency-wallets/

Don't let history repeat itself:

• https://blockonomi.com/mt-gox-hack/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfinex_hack

no paranoia. thats your emotional game.
i just think outside of the box. of multiple possibilities..  and laugh at those that only follow one storyline

I did not take part in this event for a simple reason, holding some big amount of coins in exchanges/online wallets for me makes no sense, unfortunately this is not the case for many crypto owners these days. Most users just use any online service because it is the the easiest way to start buying/using BTC, almost same as open new e-mail account.

Imagine that most of them start to download desktop wallets which are free to use, number of users who would lose their coins due fake wallets, malware, transaction to wrong address/chain would probably be significant. This means that the damage would be greater than the potential benefit from this event.

However this can be good in a way that users become aware how important is to have full control over private keys, and to never hold big amounts of coins online.

Well said! Nice to see someone see through Mayer's disingenuous blather.

An interesting event is something like a flash mob only on the Internet. I read yesterday in the news source that the threshold of Proof of action Keys Exchange HitBTC has frozen the accounts of users of bitcoin.
https://forklog.com/v-preddverii-aktsii-proof-of-keys-birzha-hitbtc-zamorozila-akkaunty-polzovatelej-bitkoina/

I don't store most of my Bitcoins in an exchange so I don't have to participate in the event. If the exchange that i'm currently using doesn't have minimum withdrawals I could move all of my dusts to my wallet and join the movement.

It's also not a good idea to use exchanges for storing Bitcoins. This event is just optional no one's forcing you to join.

The damage could be greater but it's unlikely that most of them will lose their coins once it's stored on a wallet where they have their private keys. Better safe than sorry.

I did the same but I feel like I have participated in the event by not keeping my coins on exchanges at all. One of the goals of this event was to make people aware that if they don't hold private keys the coins don't belong to them, and educate them about the risks of letting other people manage your wealth. I'm one of the ones that need no further education, but I would withdraw my coins if I had any online and to me this event was a huge success. I hope it becomes a tradition.

I didn't know about this event. But I think even if I found out about him, I wouldn't be involved. I want to keep my money safe.

History is definitely going to repeat itself. It's only a matter of time before savvy hackers overcome exchange pen testers once again. I got stung pretty hard by the Bitfinex hack and learned my lesson, but I also know that centralized exchanges aren't going anywhere. People will continue storing funds on exchanges because they want instant liquidity, real-time trading, stop-loss orders and the ability to hedge risk. If you're making money day trading or running bots and you immediately withdraw after long term trades, I think the risk of using exchanges is pretty justifiable.

I haven't heard of this event and also never had funds on exchanges. I keep my funds safe on my wallet. I only put funds on exchanges when I feel I like to trade, and I need money.

do not participate in the program you are referring to because indeed I did not get complete information about this event, and also to transfer funds from the wallet that we control to the wallet that we do not control is quite risky for me to be able to keep bitcoin safe in my hands
For friends who take part in this event, they are expected to be careful and always be aware of the bad possibilities that can arise when our bitcoin is not in control

I didn't participate because this is my first time to hear that kind of celebration. I'm going 3 years in the crypto world already and yet I haven't heard something like that in the past. Anyway, I still can't even if I want to because I'm not using an exchange. I'm only a small hodler which means thay all of my coins remain in my wallet as always.

Oh it definitely is. What's important is to make sure that when this indeed happens, that you won't be part of the statistics. While I think they're probably doing their best to secure the deposited funds, can you actually imagine Binance being hacked? That would be far more catastrophic compared to the past's MtGox+Bitfinex hack combined.

i have no idea the comment you quoted means but there has been cases in the past that exchanges did make additional money from the user funds they are holding. i believe it was poloniex which was attempting pump and dump of some altcoin with the user's funds. they used the bitcoins they had to pump it on some other exchange while pulling the price up on their own platform and then eventually slowly dumped it on multiple exchanges and got out with a lot of money.

Oh, yea. That's definitely possible, though we just probably can't confirm that. Probably also one of the reasons for this "proof of keys" event is also to hopefully see if the exchanges are actually solvent, if they actually have and are holding 100% of their user's deposits instead of using the people's funds to some shady practices.

this event which people are now calling "proof of keys" should be your motto every day that you are using bitcoin or any other truly decentralized currency like bitcoin. you shouldn't just find out about it and do it once per  year just because someone on the internet encouraged you to do it.

so my answer is both yes and no. yes in the sense that I always try to maintain control of my own private keys, no in the sense that I didn't do it because of this.

No I don't play games. 8)


Ok, I give you that. Although telling everyone that proof of keys' purpose was to make the "lack of coins on an exchange cause a flash price rise" is ridiculous.

I think for those who only use online crypto wallets, there is a great risk to do something wrong in process, but also after that. Let's take an example of Electrum and latest exploit which is use original wallet to deceive users in a way to update fake wallet. Many have lost their coins in that scam, so we can say that majority of crypto users are still not ready to take over and recognize the risks when it comes to possession of cryptocurrency.

No matter which way we store our coins there is always a chance to lose them, the key to success is to reduce the risk to the least extent possible. Hardware wallets or any type of cold storage is best way to stay safe these days.

I really want to be a participant of the event but the bitcoin assets that I have are trapped in the exchange and now all funds are still in the altcoin so I can't take part in this event, I prefer to keep the assets I have on the exchange because I don't want to sell assets at cheap prices just to get bitcoin and keep it in the wallet.

I didn't have to do anything because all my coins are already held in cold storage and a small amount I keep on a hot private wallet.  It seems like most people didn't even bother to withdraw their coins from an exchange.  It will take another MT. Gox for people to learn this listen, I hope this doesn't happen again but it is always a possibility.  Coinbase is probably the most trusted exchange because they are based in the United States and have strict regulations.

no i haven't.