I wouldn't be at all surprised if the "selected, rigorously vetted" borrowers turned out to be anyone who has completed their KYC procedures.

The word "Institutional" is presumably supposed to lend credibility. After all, when have institutions ever ripped off the average Joe!?

How long have blockchain.com been offering lending for? Because I thought it was a fairly new thing for them, meaning the borrowers cannot have "established track records" unless blockchain.com have been buying personal information regarding loan amounts, lengths, repayments, etc., from other companies.

At no point have I seen anything from blockchain.com which states they will cover your losses if the borrower defaults on their loan. This is your money they are gambling with. They are taking some of the profits and assuming none of the risk.

There are multiple problems with biometrics.

First, how easy they are to break. You leave your fingerprints on everything that you touch, including the very device you are using biometrics to unlock. An attacker can print a 3D model of your finger good enough to fool the most advanced fingerprint readers in a matter of minutes. Have a look at this: https://imgur.com/gallery/8aGqsSu. Face scanning on many phones can be beaten with a simple photo, like one of the ones most people have posted all over the internet and their social media accounts.

Second, if you are in the US (and some other jurisdictions - check your own), law enforcement can force you to unlock a device using your fingerprint or face. They cannot force you to hand over your passwords.

Third, biometrics can never be changed if they are hacked or compromised like a password can.

There is a reason that phones require you to enter your PIN or password after you reboot them before you can use your biometrics again. Biometrics are not secure.

The governments and people of Europe are dealing with this virus incredibly more effectively than we are in the US. As you say, some countries which have eased lockdown restrictions too early have seen a surge of cases and had to reimpose lockdown. However, large areas of the US seem to have given up on lockdowns altogether. I also haven't seen any reports coming out of Europe comparable to the ones from around the US of thousands of people refusing to wear masks or refusing to comply with basic infection orevention measures.

Many countries saw their peak back in March and April, and have been on a steady downward trend since then. The US also saw a peak in April, and is now speeding headfirst in to a bigger peak (see graph below - click for full size). This second peak also becomes harder to combat than the first. Not just for the obvious reasons of hospitals being more overwhelmed than before, but because of "lockdown fatigue". People who are only just being allowed to leave lockdown, to go out, to socialize, etc., will be very unwilling to re-enter lockdown, and many will refuse.



It is far too early to start talking about economic recovery in the US in any meaningful sense. We haven't even hit the peak of the virus yet, and the Fed have already blown their load printing trillions of dollars out of thin air and dropping interest rates to zero.

That's the point though - the funds are recoverable, and easily so, as evidenced by the fact that Coinbase have now swept OP's misplaced coins in to their central wallet. It's just that Coinbase only care about their own profits and don't care about their customers at all, and so they are quite happy to steal coins from their customers like this and simply take them as profit for themselves rather than spend 2 minutes to send them back to their rightful owners.

10 BCH is over $2,000, which is not an insignificant amount of money. Usually with Coinbase's customer support, it all depends on how much a fuss you cause and how much negative press you will give them if they just ignore you, like they do with most complaints or issues. OP should try to contact them, and try to publicize the issue on reddit, twitter, medium, etc. The threat of legal action also sometimes spurs their customer support to actually do something.

Yes. Since there are 2²⁵⁶ private keys, and each private key is 32 bytes, then that works out as 3.7*10⁷⁸ bytes, which is equivalent to 3.7*10⁵⁷ zettabytes (a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). Current estimates put global storage at around 2 zettabytes.

Humans cannot comprehend these kind of numbers. It is easier to just think of brute forcing a private key as impossible, because it is.

Well yes, if we look retrospectively then improbable things happen all the time. The difference is predicting which improbable thing is going to happen before it happens. Someone wins the lottery every week. Predicting which person that will be in advance is incredibly unlikely. The next private key I generate will be some combination of letters of numbers. Predicting that combination in advance is impossible.

If you are going to look retrospectively, then the chances of any event happening is so small as to be miraculous.

True, but I still think it's a better option to just avoid Google products altogether. Further, if you use a device with no connectivity, you will have to manually make sure the clock is accurate, as any drift from the real time can result in incorrect codes being generated.

Biometrics are one of the least secure forms of protecting data, with many fingerprint and facial scanners being fairly easy to fool or bypass. Better to secure your 2FA with a strong password.

Lol.

I did not omit anything as my post quotes the exact line you claim I omitted, and I also did not take your post out of context at all but simply pointed out reverse also holds true. If you wish to actually argument against my points - workers have faced real terms wage stagnation or decreases, and high unemployment contributes to low wages - rather than taking issue with the way they were presented then please do, but if you can't stand someone disagreeing with you without making it personal and throwing out insults, then I have no desire to continue this discussion.

Knowing a public key reveals zero information about the associated private key, and does not make brute forcing it any easier. You still have to check 2²⁵⁶ keys.

If you have a valid private key, then you can find exactly 1 associated public key. I'm not sure what you mean by "find other public keys" - there are none to find.

Apart from time, in that the sun will die before you get even a tiny fraction of the way through, and CPU power and storage, in that even just listing every private key (never mind calculating and storing the public keys or addresses) would take up approximately 1 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion (10⁵⁷) times more storage than there is in the entire world. For reference, the difference between the current global storage and that needed to store all the private keys (10⁵⁷), is larger than the difference between a single atom and all the atoms in the entire world (10⁵⁰).

Yes, and I've never stated otherwise. Such a statement also doesn't change the fact that regular workers have seen their real wages stagnate or fall for the last 50 years.

And you have not read what I have written. We are in agreement here.

As I said, when there is high unemployment, companies have no incentive to continually raise wages, and so at least in the short term wage inflation tends to be lower, leading to overall inflation also being lower.

Again, I wouldn't disagree. At no point have I said that the average worker hasn't had wage increases. My point is that the wage increases have by and large not kept up with inflation. They have nominal wage increases, but real wage stagnation or decreases.

I've never quite understood why people use a random website to check if their own transaction has confirmed. Once you've broadcast your transaction you can just monitor its progress through your wallet. Opening up a block explorer and continually refreshing a specific transaction is pretty much a guarantee to the block explorer that you made that transaction, and they can link your transactions and addresses to your IP, your browser fingerprint, and other information about you. The same is true of third parties like Cloudflare or Captcha services.

For what it's worth, Blockchair probably have the best Privacy Policy of any block explorer, which you can read here: https://blockchair.com/privacy.

I still wouldn't advocate for trusting any third party with your privacy, though. If you are going to look up transactions on a block explorer, use Tor.

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You have just looked up that transaction on two block explorers, which could both link your IP to it. Further, your VPN provider could potentially see you broadcast the transaction, and could see you look up the transaction just now. If you aren't currently connecting via VPN, then your ISP could see you look up those transactions.

VPNs do not provide anonymity. You need to use Tor for that.

I'm not convinced any of those charts show the economy is recovering.

The first four graphs are all markers of lockdown being eased as opposed to economic recovery. Apple Maps directions, restaurant bookings, hotel bookings, are all a sign of restrictions being lifted and people being allowed out again, but they don't say an awful lot about the state of the economy. The last graph regarding mortgages shows a relative increase, but that is on the back of a huge decrease over the preceding few months. It's more likely a simple rebound from all the people who had been planning to take out mortgages in March/April/May finally being able to, as opposed to any actual growth in the market.

This all also assumes that these trends are going to continue. We are seeing further spikes in cases recently, escalating death rates, and several states talking about reimplementing various lockdown procedures. I would be very surprised if the economy recovers to any meaningful degree this year.

Correct. Your offline wallet will always show zero balance because it never connects to the internet, never receives updated information from the network, never receives any new blocks, never sees any confirmed transactions, and so on. All it does is sign the unsigned transactions you generated on your watch only wallet.

Your offline wallet will also show all the addresses it initially generated, but like any wallet, can generate as many more addresses as you need. Given that you are using the master public key from that wallet to generate your online watch only wallet, all the addresses generated by both wallets will be the same.

The table you shared on the previous page directly contradicts this point. As a company starts to sell their goods and services at a higher price, and therefore their gross income increases, then it is the top 10% - the directors, the executive, the board, the upper level management - who see their wages grow. Everyone else, the bottom 90%, including middle managers, line managers, and all the workers, see wage stagnation.

We are on track for levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression. There is no incentive for companies to keep real wages increasing. Their workforce will be reluctant to leave since most would be unable to find a new job, and any vacancy they do have will likely have dozens of applicants.

Agreed. Ignoring for a moment the impossibility of the task, the US "eliminating" bitcoin would be an act of self harm. The government would be cutting the entire country off from a global market, and you can guarantee that countries like China and Russia would try to use that to their advantage to gain power and leverage over the dollar.

Having said all that, I do expect an attack to come from governments and law makers at some point. Traditional banking pays the salaries of our politicians. Banks bankroll their campaigns, lobby them, bribe them, grant them meaningless executive rolls with substantial paychecks, and so forth. Banks aren't going to passively accept the growth of bitcoin, which threatens their control over the government and the people, and so they will bribe politicians to act against it.

They can act on it all they want - this is what bitcoin was designed for. No third parties, decentralized, censorship resistant. I might even go so far as to say the US government trying to "shut down bitcoin" could give it a huge boost. A government like the US' trying and failing to shut down bitcoin does two things. First, it shows that bitcoin does what it claims - that it really is decentralized and can't be controlled by governments. Secondly, it demonstrates why bitcoin is necessary in the first place - because governments don't like their citizens having freedom.

If a government tries to shut down bitcoin, all they will end up doing is justifying its existence.

When he was tempbanned the first time, he had his 20 or so posts which weren't yet deleted nuked. When he was tempbanned the second time (most recently) he only had 2 or 3 posts still up, and they were nuked too. This was a few weeks ago though, so those actions would have been cleared from modlog by now.

Reporting his posts works just fine - he's had 100% of his posts deleted, 88/88 according to BPIP. What isn't working is the refusal to ban him. All his posts are the same copy and paste trash. All his posts are deleted. He's been tempbanned twice and his behavior continues unchanged. He contributes nothing of meaning to the forum, and simply abuses it as free advertising for his clickbait "news" site. I say "his", but it is quite clearly a bot. It's a complete waste of reporters' time and moderators' time.

I don't understand why he (and others) are allowed to continue turning the Press board in to their own personal advertising board.

As much as I advocate for peer-to-peer trading and hate centralized exchanges, what is the volume for peer-to-peer trading like in Nigeria? There appears to only be a single bitcoin ATM in the country according to that map, which won't exactly be convenient for most people. A quick look on Bisq doesn't show any offers for buying or selling in naira, and the situation is the same for Hodl Hodl. There does seem to be quite a few buy and sell offers on LocalCryptos in Nigeria though: https://localcryptos.com/Bitcoin/Nigeria.

Agreed. Any platform without an accurate reputation system is dangerous place to trade, especially for newbies. Better to stick to a dedicated platform such as those mentioned above, or at the very least, use a trusted escrow.

OP also didn't mention the Currency Exchange Board on this forum. Again, be safe and use an escrow unless you trust the other party.

When they say "there is nothing that they can do", what they mean is "it isn't worth our time to fix this error". They absolutely could recover your coins - they have the private key to the BTC address, so therefore they have the private key to the BCH address. They just don't because they are a terrible company.

It is unlikely that a malicious Coinbase employee stole your BCH. More likely is that Coinbase simply did a batch recovery of all the BCH sent to BTC addresses and all the BTC sent to BCH addresses, and decided to pocket all the coins as profit rather than go through the effort of returning them to you.

Your only possible solution here is to contact Coinbase again and demand your funds back. If it is a large sum of money, consider taking legal action against them.

Even if an attacker did manage to gain access to OP's account, the attacker wouldn't be able to access OP's BCH that had been sent to his BTC address either. As Coinbase is completely custodial, the only people that can access the private keys of the addresses, and therefore recover BTC or BCH sent to the wrong address, is Coinbase themselves.

Tether use an unheard of bank by the name of Deltec, which is conveniently located in the tax haven and generally sparsely regulated Bahamas.

The only communication from this bank regarding Tether is the following letter dated around 2 years ago, which could have been written by a child, has an illegible signature and no name, and suspiciously talks about the "cash value" rather than the actual amount of money:

https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Tether-Letter.pdf

They might not be able to shutdown down USDT (the token), but they can definitely shut down Tether (the company), or Bitfinex/iFinex (the parent company). Doing so would cause thousands of USDT holders to immediately sell, which would cause a bank run and the value of USDT would plummet, since it isn't actually backed up 1-to-1 at all.

If you are looking for a trading pair with bitcoin, I don't have much faith in any stablecoin, but Tether is the worst of them all. Much preferable to just trade to actual fiat if you can.

I mean, Cloud Mining is a scam 99.99% of the time, but even so, there are enough red flags on this website to make anyone realize it's a scam if you just take 2 minutes to think about it. Return on investment of almost 200% a year? The best bank accounts will give you maybe 2% a year at the moment. High risk investment accounts will make you in the low double figures percent per year, with a significant amount of risk. 200% a year? Absolute nonsense.

At some point OP they will likely ask you to deposit more funds to "unlock your account", "verify your address" or some other such nonsense, before you are allowed to withdraw. Don't fall for it.

This site is another template site which pops up every so often with a new name. Here are a few of its previous incarnations:
https://clevedoncapital.com/
https://intelcryptofx.com/
https://www.theminers.net/
https://salcidobitminer.com/

All exact copies of each other. All complete scams.