Far too many people already entrust their BTC to third parties. Coinbase is rapidly approaching 1 million BTC of customers' funds which it is holding on their behalf, which is utterly ridiculous. As the link you shared pointed out, exchanges have already been caught lending out customers' funds without their knowledge or consent. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Coinbase were doing this too, given their long history of shady activities and complete disregard for their customers. You can add that to the list of risks when storing your coins on an exchange or web wallet - if there was a sudden down turn in the markets, your exchange might just find themselves unable to recoup what they've lent out and therefore unable to process your withdrawals.

We already have fractional reserve operating in crypto. For example, Bitfinex and Tether are no longer peddling the lie that USDT is backed up 1-to-1 with USD. They openly admit that it is only fractionally backed up, and even then, including by a variety of non-USD assets. If everyone who held USDT tried to cash out, it would essentially trigger a bank run, the price would crash, and many would be left holding bags they couldn't sell.

It is not the cheapest option to spend, though. Although you can send bitcoin to your Opendime as much as you want (because it will show you the public address when you plug it in to a computer), if you want to spend the bitcoin on it you have to break it to reveal the private key. Once you've done that, what you've essentially got is no more secure than just storing a private key on a normal USB stick i.e. not secure at all. Given that each one costs $15, you are paying $15 per transaction, and any change from your transaction would need to be sent to a new Opendime.

The physical security of the device is also massively inferior to that of a hardware wallet. A simple pin push is all that is needed to expose the private key. Anyone who steals your Opendime will be able to access the coins inside within a matter of seconds.

And as squatter says, it is impossible to back up without first breaking it to view the private key, in which case you have defeat its very purpose.

Opendimes serve a particular niche - transacting bitcoin in person without broadcasting a transaction. They are absolutely not a hardware wallet and should not be used as such.

So every time you want to use your wallet to send coins you have to go and collect two of your four cards from their secret locations? That seems like a massive pain, especially if you are storing the four cards in truly secure locations and not just hiding them in various places around your house.

You are also recommending for users not to write down their recovery phrase at all. Can a user still extract their seed in plain text from a combination of the cards? What happens if the wallet itself breaks? How can a user then extract their seed from the cards without buying another wallet?

Lots of people already use Shamir's Secret Sharing to split their seeds. Why does using your electronic cards protect against "hacks, thefts, environmental damages like fire, earthquake, eternal fear of loss" any more than paper, card, engraved metal, etc.? I'd argue the opposite: you are now adding hardware failure in to the list of potential things which could go wrong.

There is no way to directly access the private keys for an address which Blockchain.com created. If you want to see the private key, you have to export the seed phrase to a wallet like Electrum, and then use it to extract the private key. Blockchain.com will only show private keys which have been manually imported to the wallet.

The only way OP can have a "non-spendable" address in his blockchain.com wallet is if either he or someone else manually imported the address. OP will need to answer your other questions before we can go any further with this.

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how the "without I/O" hint applies to using a phone keypad?

I'd suggest trying my method above in the first instance, by concatenating your 27 digit number with the 21 digit prime (both before and afterwards) and hashing them with SHA256 to get a private key. I would try it but I'm away from home and on mobile at the moment, and don't really fancy trying to do it manually on my phone.

Phemex made another tweet yesterday, saying they will release the final clue to the puzzle on Friday: https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1228318202247237632

The site is very bare bones at the moment. I would work on the UI.

The "How it works" button doesn't link anywhere. I am also unable to create a test money pool as I am repeatedly met with the error "must contain at least one and up to 10 tags", regardless of what I enter in to that box.

It seems like users first have to make an account and deposit bitcoin to you, and can then use that bitcoin to fund projects. In addition to the questions asked by hugeblack - who is escrowing these funds and how can you be trusted - you also need to explain how and where are you storing deposited coins? How can you guarantee security against malicious third parties?

So many red flags on this page it's unreal, even ignoring the fact that it is a site selling template HYIP, cloud mining, and ICO sites to help scam other users.

Immediately, unsecured connection with no https.

Most of the text, blurb and images are entirely plagiarized. Any text they have written themselves looks like it was written by pre-schooler. Their Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, and FAQs, are all also entirely plagiarized. Or should I say "Privay and Ploicy":



After a bit more poking around, looks like the entire site is a clone of this other scam site: https://hyip-designers.website/index.html

This couldn't be more obviously a scam if they misspelled "This is a scam" at the top of every page.

It's been suggested many times that it would be useful for the merit stats underneath everyone's user name to split airdropped and earned merit, so something like xxx (yyy), where xxx is total and yyy is earned. It seems theymos hasn't taken to the idea though, since it has never been implemented. I'm glad to see that it's on suchmoon/ibminer's list of ideas for their BPIP extension though.

Precisely. The people who are posting for the primary reason of receiving merits are the ones who are least likely to earn any. I always cringe whenever I see a "How to earn merits" guide or similar. If you need to follow a guide to earn merit, you are doing it wrong. The best way to earn merit is to forget merit even exists and simply use the forum to read, learn, and discuss, as it was intended.

DdrmDdmr gave some really great stats about this in this thread: Analysis – Merit per post per Section/Subsection. They are over a year out-of-date, but I'd be surprised if they had changed significantly.

I've never heard of that before. I'd be interested if a mod could confirm or deny this.

If an entire thread is deleted or trashed, then you do not receive a notification about your replies in that thread also being deleted. If your post specifically is deleted, then as far as I am aware you will always receive a notification.

Loyce's site archives every post (unedited) that is made here: http://loyce.club/archive/posts/

Yes, absolutely. There are endless threads on here and reddit about people who have entered their seed or private key on some website promising them free coins, who have sent bitcoin to some "giveaway" promising to return it 2/5/10 fold, and so on. Greed trumps sense every time.

If they can be fooled with phishing sites for online banking, then they can easily be fooled with phishing sites for cryptocurrency, exchanges, wallets, etc. The difference being that unless you are in the minority who have set up some sort of multi-sig or 2FA wallet, then there is no verification process via your phone or an app that is required to empty your wallet.

I think this is one of the biggest hurdles to adoption. Being your own bank is hugely liberating, but also a huge responsibility, and many people are just too careless with their own personal security.

I had only read the negative reviews on the legal motions I linked above, but after your comment I also went to Glassdoor to have a look at the positive ones. As you say, they all look very suspicious. The "Cons" section of many of these reviews is nonsense, and contains more "Pros" in disguise. Things like:
"Sometimes want to keep working and need to remind myself to take a break!"
"You can get addicted working with this company - with high energy, lovable team members."
"Pretty much the dream job for me"
"The company is growing too fast."

It does seem like Kraken leadership are either posting reviews themselves, or maybe incentivizing employees to leave positive reviews?

From reading the reviews, it doesn't sound like this was an isolated incident though. If they don't like you or you don't "fit with their culture", they just cut your access and email you to say you are fired. They give no reasoning and no explanation, and they use this process as a threat to existing employees. Hugely unprofessional.

It's certainly concerning. If they are willing to expend the time, money, and resources to subpoena Glassdoor and then presumably raise legal action against the employees themselves, all because the employees said some things that Kraken didn't like, imagine what lengths they might go to against any customer whom they deem to be misusing their service.

EFF address your concerns pretty thoroughly in their Motion to Quash. It is viewable here: https://www.eff.org/document/motion-quash-2. The relevant section is "III. Argument" at the bottom of page 10. I'll paste a few relevant quotes below.

Take a look at this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/12/kracken_cryptocurrency_eff_glassdoor/

Basically Kraken fired a bunch of their employees around a year ago. Some of those employees used well known site Glassdoor to leave anonymous reviews of what it was like working at Kraken. Kraken are now subpoenaing Glassdoor for the details of their ex-employees in question, presumably so they can raise some kind of legal action them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have stepped in to defend Glassdoor and the ex-employees in question: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-fights-protect-anonymity-glassdoor-commenter

You can read the reviews which were left in Kraken's court filings here (Exhibit B): https://www.eff.org/document/payward-inc-kraken-v-does-1-10-complaint. They are all very similarly disparaging of the leadership.

We all know centralized exchanges are terrible for invading privacy, but this is a whole different level. Using legal action to discover the names of ex-employees who have essentially revealed how poor your leadership is just adds weight to all the accusations of bullying and intimidation which have been raised.

I know you say the list isn't in any particular order, but it is absolutely right to put blockchair.com at the top since it is easily one of the best block explorers, and to put Roger Ver's scam site bitcoin.com at the bottom (although I would be tempted to remove any mention of that site altogether, since its prime function is to trick beginners and newbies in to buying a trash altcoin masquerading as BTC).

The other metric I would be tempted to include on your list is whether or not they show fees per virtual byte, rather than just per byte. Some explorers such as blockchain.com still only show fees per byte, which since the implementation of SegWit, is both outdated and inaccurate, and can lead to people overpaying in fees because they think their transaction is larger than it actually is. Fee per virtual byte (sometimes vbyte, VB, kVB) is a much better metric to use.

I agree with Upgrade00's points above. We already have some users who open multiple new threads whenever some of their posts are deleted and target the moderators they think are responsible with abuse. This would only be magnified several times over if every deleted post stated which moderator had acted upon it. Moderators would end up receiving endless PMs, and I can even envisage reports against some users not being acted upon due to the backlash the moderator anticipates facing in return.

A link to thread in question is reasonable, and should be fairly straightforward to implement.

Reasons for some posts being deleted would be nice, but it certainly shouldn't be mandatory for all posts being deleted. As you say, 99% of posts being trashed are simply zero quality nonsense or spam. Forcing moderators to give reasons for all these would massively slow down how quickly they can work, for little benefit. In cases such as yours, however, when the posts clearly aren't just spam, then reasoning would be good. This doesn't necessarily need to be built in to the system - a PM from the mod in question with a brief explanation would also work.

This also isn't the first time I've seen complaints about over-moderation in the Mining Board. It is not a board I frequent, and so I would be keen to hear the feelings of users who do.

Done.

My issue is not with running out of merit, but with there not being that many meritorious posts from newbies.

I almost always spend all my source sMerits within 24 hours of them being replenished, and often even sooner than that. I always make sure I have a small handful of my own sMerits on hand specifically to award good newbies. While 1 or 2 merits might not make much difference to a Senior Member (for example), they can make a big difference to a newbie. I also have a custom patrol page set up which shows me recent newbie posts in only non-spammy boards - it pretty much excludes all altcoin boards and local boards which I can't read - which I view several times a day. I keep a close eye on Loyce's Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source thread, and I also look at all the merit giveaway threads I see.

I have a much lower threshold for meriting newbies. I'm happy to rank up any newbie who is here for the right reasons - to learn and discuss, and not just spam - even if their posts aren't that good.

Despite all this, I usually only find less than 10 newbies per month to send merit to.

Whenever a good newbie shows up, they have no problem rapidly acquiring merit and ranking up. I don't think the issues is the lack of merits for newbies, but rather the lack of newbies making good posts.

The board description for Meta is "Discussion about the Bitcoin Forum", so I think this board is just fine for any proposals people may have. I don't think there are enough ideas like this one to warrant an entire board for them. Such a board would be next to deserted. I also don't think there is an issue with proposals per se that they specifically need to be collected in a single place to be discussed. Lots of users have lots of good ideas about how to improve the forum - the problem is with any of these proposals or ideas actually seeing the light of day. Even good ideas like the courses thread, which generate plenty of discussion and have a lot of agreement and support, very rarely develop in to anything useful or meaningful.

Don't waste your time. You can achieve the exact same experience by going to BuzzFeed and taking their "Which Harry Potter character are you?" quiz, going to Google Image Search and looking at pictures of Starbucks drinks, and emailing all your personal details to zuck@fb.com.

Please read the replies above.

A watch only wallet will always be a watch only wallet. You will never be able to spend funds from a watch only wallet.

If you have found the private key, then you need to create a new wallet, import your private key, and then spend the funds from that new wallet.

Open Electrum, type a new wallet name in the box and click next, select "Import Bitcoin address or private keys", paste your private key in the box, and click next.

Your private key will need to be in WIF format (starting with a 5), and this is assuming your address is in legacy format (starting with a 1). If this isn't the case, let me know and I can talk you through those steps too.

If you are going to keep on arguing against a point that I am not making and have never made, there is no point trying to help you understand. My statement does not in any way imply that flipping 5 heads somehow facilitates flipping 5 more heads, and if you still think it does despite me explaining this several times then that's an issue with your English skills, not my logic skills.

I am going to make 10 flips.
Each flip has a probability of 0.5 to be heads.
Before I start, I have a 0.5¹⁰ (1 in 1024) probability of my next 10 flips being heads.
After I've made 1 flip, I have a 0.5⁹ (1 in 512) probability of my next 9 flips being heads.
After I've made 2 flips, I have a 0.5⁸ (1 in 256) probability of my next 8 flips being heads.
After I've made 3 flips, I have a 0.5⁷ (1 in 128) probability of my next 7 flips being heads.
After I've made 4 flips, I have a 0.5⁶ (1 in 64) probability of my next 6 flips being heads.
After I've made 5 flips, I have a 0.5⁵ (1 in 32) probability of my next 5 flips being heads.
After I've made 6 flips, I have a 0.5⁴ (1 in 16) probability of my next 4 flips being heads.
After I've made 7 flips, I have a 0.5³ (1 in 8) probability of my next 3 flips being heads.
After I've made 8 flips, I have a 0.5² (1 in 4) probability of my next 2 flips being heads.
After I've made 9 flips, I have a 0.5¹ (1 in 2) probability of my last flip being heads.

Now, if all my flips do end up as heads, then as I progress along my run of heads from having made 0 flips to having made 10 flips, the probability of my reaching 10 heads in a row becomes more likely.

This is going to be my last post on the subject, since I am running out of ways and examples to explain this very basic concept.