If the address you have generated has previous outgoing transactions visible on a blockchain explorer, then yes, someone else has access to one of the private keys that controls that address.

The chance that you have completely randomly generated the same address as someone else is astronomically small. Far more likely is that you have used a malicious version of bitaddress which is generating pre-defined addresses, or you have clipboard malware which has changed your generated address to something different, or potentially an error on your part.

Can you confirm the URL of the Bitaddress site you used. Did you download the site and run it offline?

No it isn't. Trusting another human being to act as an escrow has exactly zero influence on decentralization or otherwise of the bitcoin network.

We can certainly infer from what he wrote in the past. See the following two posts:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1283.msg14136#msg14136
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=750


He seemed to be well aware that human arbitrated escrow was not only likely, but potentially even desirable.

Bisq comes pretty close. Funds are held in a multi-sig escrow that prevents either party from unilaterally accessing them, but allows both parties to agree to release them once the trade is complete.

Just because I'm trading with another customer rather than an order book doesn't make your exchange peer to peer. Trades should actually be peer directly to another peer, not peer to centralized exchange to peer. If you have to create an account for me, and I have to deposit coins to that account, and the other party has to deposit coins to their account, and you have complete control over all those coins, then I'm not trading peer to peer. You could provide an escrow service via a multi-sig wallet which doesn't give you access to your user's coins like Bisq does, but if you are holding my coins and my private keys, then that isn't peer to peer trading.

If you want to collect KYC, that's fine, but you should be forthcoming about it. You can't say "we won't give your details to the government" when the fact of the matter is you would turn everything over to the government if they requested you to do so.

Absolute nonsense. Every time and every place you complete KYC you have to worry about your privacy.

You need to be clear that you are a KYC enforcing centralized exchange.

If you've never made a withdrawal from your Coinbase account, I would transfer a very small amount (maybe 0.001 bitcoin, around $10) first to make sure that you do it properly and it arrives in your wallet properly. If it all looks good, then you can transfer out the rest of your funds. You don't want to lose everything because you made a silly mistake with your first withdrawal.

Yes. If the mempool is full (as it is just now, thanks to the recent price growth), then it is more expensive to send a transaction. If you wait until the mempool is empty, then it will only cost a cent or two to make a transaction.

Sat/vB stands for satoshi per virtual byte. It is the way we measure fees. You have to pay a set fee in satoshi for each byte of space your transaction takes up. If you use multiple inputs, or send to multiple different addresses at once, then your transaction will be larger in bytes. The amount you pay in satoshi for each byte can vary, and the appropriate amount to spend depends on how full the mempool is. If you need a simple estimator for you, then use this site - https://www.coinb.in/#fees - and just copy the value at the bottom of the blue box labeled "Sat/Byte". At the moment the recommend fee of 65 sat/byte is quite high, and will indeed result in around a $1 fee for a standard transaction. If you make a transaction using a smaller fee, then it will still get confirmed eventually, you just might be waiting a while. Generally the mempool is at its least full around 0200 - 0600 GMT timezone.

Honestly, the whole thing makes Charles Sturt University look like a bit of joke. That someone could plagiarize such huge amounts of their thesis and still be awarded a PhD calls in to question the integrity of the University. Even the most basic of plagiarism software would likely have picked it up since he's copied entire paragraphs word for word. Some of his equations don't make sense since he either forgot to plagiarize the parts which defined terms and variables he later used, or because he didn't understand what he was plagiarizing and made errors when copying it.

The fact that this wasn't picked up on suggests that his thesis wasn't even read, or at least, wasn't read by anyone competent to do so. If they don't revoke his PhD then they are sending the message that this is the quality of work they accept, i.e. complete garbage. It would be a huge black mark on their institution.

We already have newbie warning flags, which only need support from a single DT2 user (of which there are plenty), to display a similar such warning at the top of threads. I don't think a "bullshit warning" would necessarily be that different.

Not that I'm arguing for a demerit option (I'm not), just playing devil's advocate. A demerit button, despite all your caveats about carefully selecting a small number of users, would invariably be used at some point for differences of opinion. Just as I have never agreed with red tagging trolls or altcoin shills, using a demerit option for this reason would be inappropriate in my view. While I wouldn't necessarily object to it being used against posts which are flat out factually wrong (I mean, read the second post I linked to above - it is utterly meaningless), just like with scams, it would be impossible to enforce this fairly and impartially.

I actually reported the post I referred to above, not because it is wrong (now that would be censorship), but since the code is largely plagiarized (for example: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/compute-sha256-hash-in-c-sharp/), and there is exactly zero chance a user with such a complete lack of understanding of what a hash even is could have written it, but the report has been left unhandled.

There isn't, other than to do what has already been said - correct their nonsense and don't merit them.

I've been seeing quite a lot of "guide" and "summary" threads recently that this could be applied to. Not quite the same "maliciously dishonest" threads that gmaxwell is referring to, but just as incorrect. The users obviously have absolutely no idea what they are writing about, but create these threads for the sole reason (I suspect) as they see making such threads as being a potential way to farm merit. I don't know if there has been a genuine increase in the these kinds of threads recently, or if I've just been noticing them more, but they are frustrating to see nonetheless, and newbies who don't know any better are reading and replying to the nonsense and believing it to be true. A couple of the most recent examples:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5246484.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5241509.0

Being able to put a warning at the top of those threads saying "This post is complete nonsense" would not necessarily be a bad thing. Having said that, given how petty some of the endless squabbles on the reputation board are, even among some of the most senior members on the forum, there is absolutely zero chance that such a feature wouldn't be misused.

Thankfully, there are often sensible members around to debunk any such nonsense (as is the case in the two threads linked above).

If you want to use fiat on Binance via any method, be it credit card, bank transfer, direct deposit, etc., you will need to complete KYC. They might let you deposit first but then lock your account and freeze your money until after you perform KYC though.

Saying KYC isn't an issue if you aren't doing anything wrong is complete nonsense. This is just the "nothing to fear, nothing to hide" argument dressed up in a new skin. I am not doing anything illegal with bitcoin, but that doesn't mean I want a variety of complete strangers the world over being able to stick their noses in to my financial transactions whenever they like. I assume you aren't doing anything illegal online, but you don't share the passwords to your email addresses and social media accounts on here. The principle is exactly the same.

Being a "top coin" on coinmarketcap means nothing as market cap is a meaningless statistic. Several of the top 10 coins are outright scams. You're safer just sticking to bitcoin.

As I suspected. You've gone from "peer-to-peer", to "we don't share your information with the government", to "we collect KYC via a third party", to "we share your details with the government if they ask for it". This is no better than any other centralized exchange in terms of privacy.

How can you claim your exchange is peer-to-peer if you have access to everyone's coins? That's the very definition of being centralized.

Both. Decentralized services could, theoretically, be taken down, provided an attacker has the means to do so, but doing so is far more difficult than taking down a centralized service. If a state wants to take down a centralized service, then they seize the servers or arrest the developers. If they want to take down a decentralized service, then they need to seize every server which is hosting the data, which could be in the thousands.

Realize as well that "decentralized" is a catch all term for a lot of different things. Bitcoin and Tor are decentralized, having nodes all over the world and millions of users. I could also set up a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system with 3 of my friends. The latter is going to be several orders of magnitude easier to take down than the former.

They will of course have back ups spread across the globe, but it isn't classed as decentralized because one entity - the corporation in question - still have complete and overriding control of those servers, despite the data being in several physical locations.

Speak for yourself. If you ignore my mortgage and other monthly bills which come out of my account automatically, for which I have not yet figured out a satisfactory way to pay using bitcoin, I use bitcoin as a currency more than I use fiat. Certainly the majority of my day-to-day spending on things like food, gas, clothing, electricals, etc., is done either directly using bitcoin, or via a gift card or store card which has been bought or topped up using bitcoin.

How can a settlement layer be developed if the underlying asset, in this case bitcoin, isn't something that can be used to settle debts?

Correct. Any privacy respecting or promoting service can and unfortunately sometimes do abandon privacy, usually in the pursuit of commercial interests and making their owners/developers more money. There have been many VPN providers which have sold out to some truly awful data harvesting companies. uBlock used to be the best ad blocker around, until one of the developers starting allowing companies to pay him to not block their ads (hence the creation of uBlock Origin, which is now the best ad blocker around). Brave browser has slowly been selling out by allowing Facebook trackers through their anti-tracking and embedding code from Binance in their browser.

Also correct. You need to keep an eye on every service you are using.

A decentalized site or service still has people who work on it, develop it, support it, host it, etc. Being decentralized doesn't mean a project is automatically immune to what we've described above, but it would generally need a majority consensus of the developers/nodes/community/whatever to do so.

You're right, but there is exactly zero chance OgNasty isn't aware of that and hasn't read the whitepaper many times. The point he was making is who today defines bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

I wouldn't disagree with that, but I don't think such a definition is mutually exclusive with the definition of bitcoin being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Crypto "news" sites like coin telegraph, coin idol, etc., are almost universally complete trash. They are largely clickbait, very poorly researched (if at all), often inaccurate or completely wrong, and should be avoided.

I would suggest that if you are struggling to grasp what bitcoin is, the website of a trader aimed at teaching people to trade is a poor place to start. You'll do much better following some of the links in this thread.

Bitcoin is money. Bitcoin fulfills the three main criteria for being classed as money:

• a medium of value - the price of other goods can be expressed in bitcoin.
• a store of value - bitcoin can be safely and securely stored and accessed when required, although it has a very unstable value over time compared to most types of fiat money.*
• a medium of exchange - self explanatory. Bitcoin can be exchanged for goods or services.

*Fiat money is what most people think of when you use the term "money" - currency created and maintained by the government of a country.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Rather than reading random blogs and watching YouTube videos, the best place to learn about bitcoin is directly from the source.
Read bitcoin's whitepaper here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
After that, take a look at the https://bitcoin.org/ link Lucius has provided above. You'll find plenty of simple to understand information under "Resources" and "FAQs" as well.

No, he isn't. This has been extensively documented in the past. See here for a good summary of information: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/b479rk/please_excuse_the_craig_wright_spam_but_this_is/ej4oxvj/

He has displayed nothing but repeated and consistent gross incompetence when it comes to anything to do with programming, math, cryptography, or bitcoin itself. I would also recommend everyone has a good read of the medium article that OP linked. He is so incompetent, that even when plagiarizing he still manages to introduce errors in to formula, use terms and variables that he hasn't defined (because he forgot to plagiarize those bits), and hopelessly confuses himself in the process. The whole thing would actually be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. Anyone who still thinks this criminal could possibly be Satoshi is deluded.

Plagiarized his research, plagiarized his thesis, plagiarized his degrees, plagiarized his code, plagiarized bitcoin, even tried to plagiarize Satoshi's identity. You aren't far off with "CSW" being synonymous with "plagiarism".

Serial liar in "trying to claim credit for something that isn't his" shocker!

Turns out you can't hardfork somebody else's thesis and claim it was yours all along.

Yup, it's a scam.

I opened a new session using three different browsers, on three different devices, from three different IPs, giving three different withdrawal addresses, and it generated the same deposit address for me every single time. (1Q3JtzMGHdtdNy7DgHYVZgCC1yXz7EjEWQ, in case anyone else wants to verify this is a scam.

This page (https://www.penguinxmixer.io/concept) is plagiarized from a known scam mixer (https://smartmixer.io/en/why-mixing).

Their reviews (https://penguinxmixer.io/#roadmap) are plagiarized from this page of fake reviews for another known scam mixer (https://bestbitcoinmixers.com/bitcoin-mixers/ultramixer-review/).

Their FAQs are plagiarized from cryptomixer (https://[banned mixer]/faq.html).

Completing KYC at an exchange doesn't reduce your risk of being scammed in any way. In fact, completing KYC puts you at a higher risk of being scammed since you are sending all your personal information to a complete stranger, who can then do whatever they like with it, including commit identity theft, fraud, or sell your details to others. Keeping your personal information, KYC documents, email address, etc., private is a good way to protect yourself from some scams, and taking due care and due diligence will protect you from the others.

As mentioned above, LocalCryptos, Bisq, or Hodl Hodl are the best non-KYC peer-to-peer exchanges at the moment, which allow you trade safely and protect your personal information and privacy.