I was thinking that when one does taxes and wants to cash out earnings made off mixer campaigns into fiat, and the accountant, taxman or both, request context on earnings, we are going to have to send them a link to the post that contained your address were you requested to be added If you need a website as evidence of a source of income later on, you should just archive or print it. I guess it varies from countries to countries, but in my place there isn't even a tax framework where you can report bitcoin, let alone the place where you got your job, or the product you advertised and got paid in bitcoin. Here, the tax report field looks like this: That's it. If, however, they have questions later, it's up to the tax payer to give a plausible explanation. But let's say you cannot do this until after the 1st when all ulrs will be redacted with some wordfilter, what then? There may also be a lot of people that find old wallets, look around and find they got them from sign campaigns from 8 years ago for instance, then they see the threads have redacted urls. You sell to buy a house, taxman wants context, what do you provide? At least theymos isn't deleting the threads, so the post with your address will be there, that's something, however having redacted urls with "banned site" isn't helpful tax wise since it makes it less clear what the advertised service was. Some people may argue, why bother, just spend it on this on that gift voucher. Well those are small purchases, im talking about people that were there like a decade ago and continued for some years making a nice amount of BTC since it was being paid in bigger amounts due the very cheap prices, and these prices went up a ton and now they want to buy real estate with those earnings, what do you do? In one hand the taxman of your average developed country will always say to declare and provide context, but on the other hand they will make things miserable if you don't like your explanations. And most people aren't willing to move to some dodgy country. So yeah, not many options there that I can see. If they gave us a peace of mind of knowing nothing will go wrong, a lot of people would do it to diversify in other assets, but since that is not the case, I wonder how many people have considerable amounts in wallets that can only be spent on doing groceries with vouchers, gift cards, or the increasingly smaller set ofs called anonymous ATMS. Bisq and co leave SEPA traces so not that interest. Cash by mail seems dodgy. And meeting with IRL people for cash transactions has massive risks too. And again, you cannot really enjoy those gains, im talking 6+ figures, if you are limited to very small movements to live under the radar, specially if you pay rent and want to buy real state, and diversify and so on. There is no way around paying taxes there and there has to be a way to solve that situation. |
|
|
|
|
Given current events, I was wondering, how are previous campaigns that promoted mixers going to show up? I was thinking that when one does taxes and wants to cash out earnings made off mixer campaigns into fiat, and the accountant, taxman or both, request context on earnings, we are going to have to send them a link to the post that contained your address were you requested to be added, and I would appreciate if it isn't all replaced with something that's showing some text that makes you look dodgy, like "banned site" or something as I saw in another campaign.
I wonder how to go about this at all. As far as I know it's a perfectly legal activity of marketing, but if theymos is going to replace all previous links with some sort placeholder, I wonder what's going to happen from now on.
For some small amount, I may not even cash it out. But those people that participated for years and have staked a decent amount and want to a buy a house or whatnot, will have to explain the earnings from the signature campaigns and provide context, and this context will be marketing activities for casinos and mixers in most cases. Chipmixer comes to mind as one of the longest running campaigns, and this one ended up closed. This sucks because 99% of people just mix their coins to pay without having to reveal your BTC net worth in the process, which can easily be looked up if you stack considerable amounts on a single address, or if you have made payments that joined several of your addresses. This should be reasonable to anyone including the taxman. If we don't fight this false narrative of how mixing coins = criminal activity things will only get worse.
As far as cashing out earnings from sig campaigns, I wonder how that works in practice. If anyone has any experience with this please let me know.
|
|
|
|
|
Im assuming that the campaign continues on the 25th to 31th week, my question is, what happens if wearing a signature campaign about mixers is not allowed by the 1th? I will definitely not be available on the last days of the year, and I don't want to find my account banned because theymos starts instabanning everyone that was wearing a mixer link by 1th 00:00, so how to go about this? because if I remove it before the week ends, im assuming payments aren't sent.
|
|
|
|
I don't know but the Bitcoin developer or the ordinal developer should figure this out or the fee will be this high for a long time.
There is no "Ordinals developer". There's only a bunch of people throwing programming shit at the wall to see what sticks. As for bitcoin developers, well the default tendency is to do nothing, except for a small minority of them. There's no easy way to undo ordinals at this point. You are going to need to gather enough capital and mining power involved to basically push for what would be a BTC hardfork without ordinals, and this would need to be done in a way that guarantees no future ordinals are possible, but then again, how do you this without causing another hardfork civil war, and how do you do it without getting rid of taproot? because if taproot is possible, I believe there could be ways around any restrictions put into ordinals to come up with alternatives. |
|
|
|
I am a strong believer in the right to privacy (even if some people take it what I believe to be too far), and a centralized mixer has the potential to enhance privacy. Also, however, mixers have the potential to give nothing more than the illusion of privacy and highlight your transactions to governments and other nosy people. I agree. Anyone who uses a mixer should consider that they might be a honeypot. And that's why it makes little sense for a real criminal to put these services above Monero and coinjoins, which are trustless. Sure, if mixers can be the cause to shut this place down, no matter how sad it might be, forbid them. It just makes little sense from a government's perspective. If I was a government official, I would want such services to run, because they would be central point of failures that I can go after. Forbidding them would push everyone (especially criminals) to decentralized, trustless solutions which I cannot control. Most people use mixers to have any reasonable privacy before making a payment. It's crazy that the government puts everyone in some sort of "potential terrorist list" for using a mixer. If you get paid from an ad campaign and want to buy some stuff or pay someone, it's not a big deal to anyone reasonable, but now im not sure if it's worth the risk of cashing out any payments. Who knows what could happen. I think cashing out any coins that weren't bought in Coinbase or other KYC exchange will be a risk by default since they threat people like they are from Hamas if you didn't buy them on their favorite exchange basically. The government should understand that Bitcoin has no privacy at all unless mix the coins before a payment. If you pay someone, they can look up your address and see your entire BTC networth easily, so mixing it before sending a payment is only reasonable. Unless someone fights this politically and explains them how this works things will only get worse. |
|
|
|
He doesn't wish to use a crypto currency as its intended, he wants more value.
That is the tenor of many, the complaint goes: its value is too little.
Which is the "use of a crypto currency is the one that is intended"? I am perfectly fine with Micheal Saylor and whichever use he wants to do with this coins. I am certainly less ok with people looking at MS as a mentor, or a Bitcoin evangelist A figure that we need to follow in order for Bitcoin to succeed. No, bitcoin doesn't need a marketing department. Bitcoin doesn't need a marketing department but if no one what Michael Saylor does, Bitcoin may be less known, which would mean less market participants, which would mean less price. Same goes as not having fiat proxies, like ETFs, or MSTR itself, which I believe is better than any ETF. Michael Saylor uses debt in a great way, borrows at very low interest, buys BTC, and increases the holdings of BTC of their company. Instead of charging you management fees diluting your BTC exposure, he increases it. This guy is great and is putting his money where his mouth is. He isn't bluffing, and he gets BTC. As a result, he does great marketing for BTC while helping the price. There's also nothing wrong about being on BTC to hold and see the price increase, that is a legit use case, basically the most basic one. |
|
|
|
Yes the government has a lot of debt and it paying large amounts of interests on that debt. I think a trillion a year or so. It’s a crazy amount. And it would be best if they lowered interest rates so they spend less and have less deficits. However they can’t do they because …
If they lower rates right then it can be a repeat of 1970s. Where inflation came back and was much worse. And instead of 5% interest we can get 10% interest. It’s cheaper for the government right now to keep rates where they are instead of lowering them to raise to even higher next year.
Yeah I believe there could be a second wave of inflation that hits the economy bigly due the FED cutting rates way too song, if not too fast. They said they will leave them high for as long a needed, but you already know if the market starts crashing, specially during election years, they are going to lower rates again, which will cause inflation to go up, which will make the FED raise again, but this time even higher, and that will as well cause an even bigger recession. Im not sure 2 figure inflation rates are sustainable at the current debt levels. Who knows how much shit will break at these rates. So the FED has to pick their poison at this point. |
|
|
|
That gives bad actors the opportunity to build a months/years long sustainable ecosystem to price many users out from using the network. The "protocol" of Ordinals by itself is not the attack, but it could be used as an attack vector. It's going to be an annoying few months until the hype goes down, but it might not be the end of that. It goes, then it comes back.
No one is pushed out of using the network . Anyone has the right to increase the fee to a level that will make his transaction enter into the next block . Isn't that the purpose of the fee market , to make blockchain space as much valuable as possible ? Well , mission accomplished . To be honest , i see current fee market at a low level . As soon as more protocols start to create defi's etc on btc , fees will increase in thousands of dollars for a single tx . The unfortunate ones will be those that will have to exit from LN for whatever reason and those stacking sats . A new era is coming . Really? Tell that to a person willing to buy $10 worth of BTC. According to you, he now has to pay like what? $50 in fees?  No, we're not pushing anyone out, never. And to "make blockchain space as much valuable as possible" is the ultimate goal for miners not for all bitcoiners or market in general... . they will charge a high fee to move it off the exchange. But technically in an exchange it's not actual Bitcoin that you're buying, but mere numbers in their ledger. It only become actual Bitcoin if those units are transferred in a public address with a private key that's under your custody. In the subject of Ordinals and transaction fees, have we seen the network maintain such high fees that users are willing to pay more than one month? I believe not, but if it does, wouldn't it make Bitcoin more profitable to mine that BCH and BSV miners would start pointing hashing power to Bitcoin? Governments have an huge incentive to not have people withdrawing bitcoin from exchanges and putting them into local wallets they can't control, so high fees play on their favor in this sense. At the same time, it limits the use of bitcoin as cash easily, or at least for now, when LN is not that mainstream and well understood. On the other hand, governments would like big blocks, since they could just control the nodes at will. They would be datacenters that are registered and basically would get told what to do and what software to run. So you have to factor in both. What is more important? I think it's clear, the second one is. Paying higher fees is worth avoiding datacenters as nodes scenario. Ordinals are a waste of block space but what can we do? miners just want profits and they'll mine blocks irrespective of what they contain. |
|
|
|
|
The most important part is the no questions asked part. In this sense, you asked about Spain, and I wouldn't recommend that, beside the taxes which will be around 30% + the wealth in most of the country, you are going to be asked all sort of questions.
Alot of people think because a country has lower taxes, it will not ask about things. For instance, Andorra is often cited as a tax haven for people that want to live near the mediterranean, but after the 00's, they ask all sort of questions, there is no bank privacy anymore, they will ask as much as your average EU country.
Im not sure how Switzerland works these days. Back then, if you were VIP client, they would give you a pass and bank your money, nowadays, it's probably harder, they will ask about things, to what extent im not sure.
So it sucks but you may be forced to go to some dodgy place like Dubai, where supposedly, you aren't asked much, but I've heard they are starting to make that difficult as well.
You will also need some sort of income or be forced to do some investment within the country in order to achieve passive tax residence. Some people think it's as easy as hoping in the country and that's it. This may be the case only for super wealthy clients but not for a few $million.
|
|
|
|
before rate news is released people prepare for the worse. so they buy before news.. locking-in certain rate.. then when the news is released that rates are not as feared the market corrects.. and people can short/refinance their asset at the lower rate
before 2000, market rates were alot higher so people fear rates going back to the 1980's highs..
mortgages used to be 14% and many fear those numbers again so when there is a "rate risk" announcement approaching many will buy from 2-6 fearing the feds call for 10-14
after all we have just seen inflation reach 11% recently so numbers above 6 are a possible risk.
But those rates are insanely high if you consider the current amount of debt. How realistic is that interest rates goes to double figures? It's not the same as 20 years ago, now debt is higher, the higher the debt, the less leverage they have to make higher rates viable, this is why I think the market is betting on the rates going low, and even long term rates are considered to be good enough to start going low, meaning that people are buying TLT at current prices because they see it going lower, they don't believe the FED is going to be able to sustain anything above 4% for any longer. And as you can see on the link I posted, whenever rates have gone down, a recession kicked in and SP500 dumped. I want to see how will BTC perform in such scenario, considering that BTC has just followed SP500 more or less so far. Gold used to perform well in those scenarios, we'll see how BTC does. I think a TLT+BTC+some SP500 just in case we have a soft landing, would be a good bet. |
|
|
|
Hello everyone!
I'm trying to use my old laptop as an air gap devices, how do I know if it's air gapped because I already used it before for internet connection but but it has been a very very long time and I also removed the wifi adapter so it can be er go online again.
Thanks for your help
You should also plan on how are you going to transfer the unsigned/signed transaction to/from your offline laptop. After you install the new OS, and configure the way you want it, you should physically disable all ports, USB, HDMI, Ethernet, SD card reader, Wifi/WWAN, etc. (Unless you carry it around 24/7 and you sleep with it, LOL). Use QR codes and laptop cameras to transfer the data between your air gapped computers. You could buy one of these QR readers that do nothing but read QR codes, this way you minimize a lot of variables. I think you can find them for cheap on Amazon, just make sure they don't have any internal memory or wireless smart crap on them and you are good. Use these to read the raw transaction that you have converted into a QR code from the air gapped laptop in order to sign in in the hot wallet laptop. This way you don't need to move the laptops awkwardly in front of each other to read the codes. Also you don't want the screen of your cold wallet laptop to be visible at any moment to the camera of a computer that is connect into the itnernet. |
|
|
|
|
This is why you should forget about getting any bitcoins-specific hardware at all and just stick to good ol laptops, ideally laptops that can run free as in freedom firmware, that will not have any running spyware chips or unnecessary blobs there. This is where you will have the most peace of mind when doing bitcoin, anything else is compromised and if not, then just a target to be. If you have something specific to store bitcoins that is a bigger target than some laptop with linux for obvious reasons.
|
|
|
|
|
Im starting to question if taproot was a good deal. Unpopular opinion, but does the pros outweight the cons? As far as I can tell stuff like Ordinals were never possible before taproot, so at this point im wondering, if it should have passed. I just see BTC as good enough as it is withotu any more bells and whistles. Transaction must move from A to B, onchain, even if more expensive, at a reasonable rate. But ORDI is just artificially cluttering the blockchain, by artificially I considering anything that isn't moving coins from A to B. Perhaps it's worth it for the LN improvements in delivers. We'll see how it plays out on the long term.
|
|
|
|
If you look at a chart that puts the sp500 on top of the FED rates, you will notice a pattern that shows how whenever the FED has lowered rates, the sp500 has crashed pretty bigly. So im wondering, is this going to be different this time? https://en.macromicro.me/collections/9/us-market-relative/91/interest-rate-sp500Since the year 2000, when I believe the dynamics of the FED changed and the QE era started, the baseline for rates is basically near 0, with small pumps here and there whenever inflation was starting to go to high, or whenever government spending was needed (see the Covid incident) So basically, why is people buying, if with 100% of certainty, this has been working since the 2000? Shouldn't you be considering a scenario where prices will be lower? In that case, how would BTC perform? Will it successfully decouple from the markets, or is it going to mimick SP500 and just crash harder? Will the ETF hype + halving be enough to counteract these dynamics? |
|
|
|
|
Anyone having problems with Tor for the past couple of days? It's going insanely slow for some reason, im trying rotating nodes but everything seems like there's no bandwidth or something, but it's specially slow when it comes to getting successfully logged in on here. Im tying to get the captcha to show up but I get an error. I would have been locked out of the account but luckily I had saved my captcha code, but if it wasn't for that I wouldn't have logged in at this rate.
If anyone knows if Tor is having any problems and how to improve this it would be great. Im assuming it's not something that has to do with the forum. I cannot try to access the forum without Tor so let me know.
|
|
|
|
|
Basically you can be greeted a buyer that wasn't a buyer for some sort of government entity, this would be one of your main problems, since you are now under all sort of checkups which may lead to your main BTC stack. Then you have the risk of meeting some deranged bastard that just wants to perform a good ole 5$ wrench attack and steal your coins. As a general rule ot thumb you shouldn't even bother meeting with random people, p2p is only done in serious web of trust dynamics where you know you are meeting with someone reasonable and not some psycho or government agent.
|
|
|
|
|
Im definitely interested in buying shares of this thing if they went public. Looks like they've got some good tech going where they are aiming at really decentralizing mining unlike the current scenario in which we've seen miners can get compromised into censoring transactions. OCEAN is an effort by Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) and has the likes of Luke Dash-Jr collaborating with the project. If anyone has any news about this please let me know if there is going to be some sort of an IPO or something.
|
|
|
|
|
Has anyone studied how companies have performed in previous halvings? Im looking at some exposure on the mining industry and im considering the 3 following stocks:
-MARA
-BITF
-RIOT
What's going to happen with these post halving? I've read BITF is the most efficient in the game. MARA has got the #2 biggest stack of crypto so im assuming they are going to be pretty wealthy to reinvest on their business. 13,396 BTC by MARA vs 385 by BITF. RIOT got 6,974 BTC. Of course there are more things than holding BTC on a mining business. Apparently BITF got some cool proprietary technology.
I would like to hear the view of someone that actually has money in the game or is considering making an investment. Some of these are around 100 to 200% up this year already. How higher could they go before it becomes ridiculous to get in?
|
|
|
|
And for SSD, if you use full disk encryption, im not sure if they would realistically recover anything. The same applies to HDD  Unless your password gets compromised, in that case it's better to overwrite sectors. I sometimes use a "quick and dirty manual full disk overwrite" after deleting data: mkdir crap; cd crap
echo -n '0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000' > tmpfile
i=1; while test $i -le 50000; do cat tmpfile >> tmpfile2; echo $i; i=$((i+1)); done # This creates a few MB temp file
i=1; while test 1; do cp tmpfile2 $i; echo $i; i=$((i+1)); done # This fills the partition. Do this as root to also fill reserved disk space
CTRL-C when it runs out of disk space
sync; cd ..; rm -r crap This also works on USB sticks, or to reduce the size of a compressed partition image by not backing up deleted data. At least this way I'm sure wear leveling doesn't mess up wiping data. But it's only one rewrite, so for the truely paranoid it's not enough. You know what, I think im just going to hop by some shop now that is xmas sales and just pick up some kind of an HDD that you can plug and play into a laptop or in any computer on the go for that matter. An external HDD I think it's called. Im assuming those exist. I would simply just plug it into an USB port, and have the private keys in there, and have a separate SSD that acts as the watch-only wallet that has the full blockchain, which I already got synced, and it's 1 TB so it should last me for 4 or 5 year last time I checked. Do you recommend any external HDD for this? I remember there were some sort of hybrid between SSDs and HDDs that had some dodgy firmware on it, so you have to consider all these things before buying. |
|
|
|
TL:dr; i wouldnt invest in microstrategy saylor done a recent interview where he was saying how his shares have grown better then his competing markets the problem is from just his business function he is not doing well. its the bitcoin that is propping up his share value to appear as doing better then his competitor businesses. https://youtu.be/Kn3JAUuqVKw?t=475listen to him saying bitcoin from aug2020 to oct 2023 has gone up 190% which he calculates to 40% and then he lists other assets/competitors doing like 25% he talks about leveraging the coin he had to then buy more coin to get him to a valuation of 242% for microstrategies. the only problem is as he hints at his business and his holdings can take a dump and due to leveraging can wipe him out im not talking about if bitcoin at (oct)$30k dropped to $10k having 33% value left. im talking about the leverage if debts are called in, wiping him out and putting him in the minus. complete bankruptcy and still owing money even after liquidating everything yes his strategy of "buying low" because yes bitcoin is at a low compared to expectations of the next halving cycle but anything can happen in the next couple years before those amount value up to then pay off and settle the debt in later years so lets take microstrategy march 12th 2021 listing -> today $788 -> $562 = 71% of start value so lets take bitcoin performance from march 12th 2021 listing ->today $61.288 -> $41.755 = 68% of start value so microstrategy real business performance (without bitcoin added value) has only grown 3% in 142weeks thats not even 2% a year. not even 1.5% a year its not even 1.1% a year growth of the actual business meaning his private business is not even growing above inflation. micro strategy is being held up purely by bitcoin, but its actual business is not growing to even meet inflation think about it if the S&p is up 25% but his business if it held no bitcoin would only be up 3%.. which is a poor performing business which would need to do some cutting to bring it to double figure % to come into line with 2.5 years of inflation. if it cant slim down to get more business performance it may end up having to take some assets out to keep the main business running (staff wont want to work with only a 1.09% yearly payrise)
unlike a SPOT ETF which is not about leveraging and is instead collateral pegs. microstrategy valuation is based on leveraged assets.. meaning there is hidden debt that can be called in if things take a turn ETF management fees will eat up a lot of the profit, so MSTR will remain an attractive Bitcoin proxy. Saylor's management of his borrowings are exceptionally well placed and the chances of getting liquidated are insanely low that you have to question if you would still hold the underlying if it went that low. There's nothing wrong with debt and leverage as long as it's reasonable. If one is long Bitcoin then the risk:reward that MSTR offers is not something insane to the point you wouldn't sleep at night thinking you would get margin called. His business continues to offer a product that a lot of companies use and he will continue to expand to AI and at the end of the day he has willingly turned his company into a Bitcoin's holding and he is doing it how someone that wanted this proxy would expect. If Bitcoin does not shit the bed I believe Saylor is on track to be remembered for making the most profitable bet ever. https://bitcointreasuries.net/ |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
