Yes, but exchanges have a different risk profile to an average user. If someone deposits $50,000 to Coinbase and then successfully double spends it, it would barely even make a dent on their daily profits, let alone their annual profits. If someone sends $50,000 to OP and then successfully double spends it, it could be life changing for OP to lose that amount of money.

Just as the "safe" number of confirmations for each individual should change depending on the value of the transaction, the "safe" number of confirmations for one person is not necessarily the same for another person, given the same value of transaction.

Having said all that, for a transaction of $1,000, I'd be happy with 3 confirmations, with the proviso that pooya87 has highlighted above - not your keys, not your bitcoin.

No. It isn't 100% yours.

Can you give the buyer the goods? That depends on how much money is involved and what you see as an acceptable risk. What's the chance of a transaction with 3 confirmations being overturned? Very, very small, but not 0%. Someone with 36% of the hashpower has a 50% chance of being able to reverse 3 confirmations. Someone with 9% of the hashpower has a 1% chance.

Operating this amount of hashpower is very expensive. Is it worth the cost to a potential attacker to try to double spend their transaction? For $100, definitely not. For $1,000,000, maybe.

3 confirmations is fine for smaller amounts. For larger amounts, I would be waiting for at least 6, but the more the safer.

Oh my god, how frustrating.

I'm not sure there is going to be much you can do to fix that. I'd report it as a bug on their website, but I suspect it's going to a fix for the app form their side. As far as I can tell, you have three options. Either look in to using OpenVPN as I mentioned above, put the VPN on your router as Welsh mentioned, or swap to a different VPN provider.

What if that baby was going to be a school shooter? Or serial killer? Or the next Hitler?

Or what if the mom was going to discover the cure for cancer, but she ended up in poverty trying to pay for a child she didn't want and couldn't afford?

These "What if" arguments are meaningless.

A fetus is not a person.

It would be possible to combine this idea with merit decay. Remove all the airdropped merit, let everyone who was grandfathered in to a rank keep their rank, but remove signature privileges from ranks and instead link it to earned merit.

Satoshi is the 8th highest merit earner on the forum, with 2145 earned merit.

The issue is not their income; I couldn't care less if these altcoins all turn out to be worthless (and most do). The issue is the spam they create in pursuit of said income.

I appreciate you didn't mean both those suggestions at once, but I was talking about all forum users, not just those who hadn't earned merit. I don't think we should be decaying airdropped merit (either completely or as a percentage) for users who haven't earned a single merit, while leaving the airdropped merit intact for those who had earned some merit. It would just lead to even more confusion.

If we are going to decay airdropped merit, I would propose we should decay it uniformly for everyone, regardless of how much (if any) earned merit they have.

All major exchanges take much longer to accept altcoins than bitcoin. So although altcoins are "faster" due to their shorter block times, it takes far longer for them to "confirmed" and available on your account due to them requiring far more confirmations to be secure.

Coinbase - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593836-why-is-my-transaction-pending-
BTC 3 confirmations, BCH 12 confirmations.

Kraken - https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/203325283-Cryptocurrency-deposit-processing-times
BTC 6 confirmations, BCH 15 confirmations.

Gemini - https://gemini24.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205424836-How-long-until-deposited-funds-hit-my-account-
BTC 3 confirmations, BCH 15 confirmations.

Even waiting hours to reach these numbers for BCH, it still isn't as secure as a single bitcoin confirmation. The numbers are even worse for smaller alts.

This has been discussed periodically in the past, and I generally agree with your views.

At the very least, I would like to easily be able to differentiate between airdropped and earned merits. Changing the text under everyone's avatar to something like "Merit: xxx/yyy" or "Merit: yyy (xxx)" where yyy is total merit and xxx is earned merit would be a good first step.

In terms of decaying merit, I think the idea has some merit (heh), but I'm also not sure I'm comfortable with stripping older members of their ranks. It seems a bit too much like ex post facto to me, punishing them for not earning enough merit in the past when merit didn't even exist. I think some sort of compromise would be best - decay airdropped merit over time, allow users to keep their ranks, but also introduce some new requirement to keep their signature privileges, such as earning at least 10% of the merit usually required to reach that rank.

If we are going to decay airdropped merit, it should decay for everyone in a uniform fashion. Decaying at different rates for different people will just add more confusion to the system, not less.

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To everyone: Please don't engage TOAA and derail yet another thread. Everyone in the world is acutely aware of his opinions on the merit system at this point. It does not need discussed further.

Oh absolutely. I think the Google and Apple app stores give people a lot of false security, not just in terms of apps matching their open source code, but also apps not spying on them, being outright malicious or malware, invasive permission, faulty, and so on. The criteria for being published on the stores is very minimal, and no one should assume something that has been published has been vetted or that automatically makes it safe or trustworthy.

Sure, but how can you prove the closed source wallet has 2 levels of review on a secure PC if not without trust?

I don't, and I don't think anyone should. I don't feel comfortable giving any app, program, or software the ability to automatically download and execute code on my devices.

Something similar happened last year with the Copay wallet: https://www.coindesk.com/fake-developer-sneaks-malicious-code-into-bitpays-copay-wallet. Copay is open source, but a malicious third party obtained control over a JavaScript library dependency and it was pulled in to Copay updates without anyone realizing.

I never said open source was automatically better, but it is better than closed source if you evaluate and verify the code before installing or updating. If you do this, then your point about it being edited from a coffee shop is moot. It doesn't really matter where the code was edited or who edited it if you are going to check it all first.

Agree with this.

Yeah, this is the best way to do it. I've pretty much never used "Show new replies to your posts", as it very rapidly turned in to a mess, even within a few weeks of signing up to the forum. Pretty much any thread on boards such as Bitcoin Discussion will turn in to a spam megathread given enough time, and I definitely don't want to be alerted to every piece of one line nonsense for the rest of time.

Just set it up to automatically add all posted-in threads to your watchlist, and then unwatch the ones you don't want to follow anymore.

Although Advcash is listed, they don't actually accept it. This is what I got when I tried to select Advcash:



Further to that, their Terms of Use page is entirely plagiarized from a couple of sources, such as https://www.rbitt.co.uk/terms-conditions/ and https://bigai.io/en/terms-conditions/.

I would agree that this is almost certainly a scam.

I agree. I also like to think of being open-source as decentralizing trust. If you don't have the ability or time as DaveF points out to review the code yourself, at least if it is open source then other people can and will flag up any issues. With a closed source wallet I have to trust the developer(s). With an open source wallet I can decentralize that trust from a single person or small team to an entire community.

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Don't want to go too far off topic here, but it's entire possible not to go through it. I've never completed KYC for any bitcoin or crypto exchange, service, third party, what have you, and I have absolutely no trouble interacting with the bitcoin ecosystem. In fact, I would wager that I use bitcoin more often than the average person, spending it both online and in person on actual goods or services several times each week.

Wait, so the app launches instantly but is just slow to connect? Your initial post made it sound like the app was taking a long time to launch.

If it's failing to connect or slow to connect, then there are a couple of other things you can try. Try different servers and different protocols (UDP/TCP) and ports. Make sure you are not logged in on more than the max number of supported devices. Check NordVPN isn't being blocked by your antivirus or firewall. Since you said you are on Windows, ensure Windows is up to date and double check the TAP drivers are installed correctly.

There are a couple of help pages here with other potential solutions you could try: https://support.nordvpn.com/Connectivity/Windows/1107843562/Troubleshooting-connectivity-on-Windows.htm

This is a completely over-engineered solution to what is a very simply problem to solve.

Double check the address. It's literally that simply. Look at the address you are about to send to. Check it against the address you want to send to, direct from source (be that website, email, PM, wallet, whatever). You are introducing unnecessary trust for a third party as well as another attack vector for attackers because you are too lazy to double check an address?

I also went to their website and clicked on "Get Started", just out of curiosity. The only way to proceed is by logging in with either a Facebook or a Google account. What a huge invasion of privacy.

Absolutely avoid.

I'd ask you to read my third paragraph in this post again. This scrutiny has happened many times before, involving a variety of individuals and groups, and will happen many times again. It is not unique to the current drama involving Turkish members, nor is it a personal vendetta against Turkish members. The fact that it is being painted as such is a deflection from addressing the issues at hand, namely why DT1 members are including known scammers on their trust lists.

There is no direct link between ChipMixer and DT1. There is an overlap, sure, because both attract established and trustworthy users, but there is no direct correlation. I obviously don't speak for DarkStar_, but if you have concerns about the behavior of anyone wearing the signature, I'm sure he would be receptive to hearing them.

If you are going to make claims like this, then the least you can do is have the decency to name who you are accusing and what you are accusing them of? Who is stealing from the forum, and what are they stealing? Specifics, please.

This forum probably has the laxest rules regarding free speech of any online community I know, even letting scams shill their Ponzi schemes and letting users troll multiple threads with utter nonsense. If that's not impartial, then I don't know what is. There is a very easy to follow list of rules available here, and it is entirely fair that everyone is required to follow them equally.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm almost certain that my earlier post in this thread was the first time I have weighed in on this drama whatsoever, and I didn't even address the drama or you directly but instead responded to a couple of points made by another user. I'm therefore not sure with what evidence you suggest I'm making fun of you, making you a slave, demanding power, or any of the other claims you have made.

eddie13's post above which I have merited is bang on the money. If you are voted on to DT1, for good or bad then you are going to be subjected to scrutiny. The same is true in public life with politicians, CEOs, royalty, etc. With a position on DT1 then your trust list no longer only makes a difference to you, but now makes a difference to the 2 million or so accounts using default trust. You will be held to higher standard. No one cares if a newbie trusts a bunch of scammers and rule breakers, because only that newbie will see their ratings. If you, as a DT1 member, trust a bunch of scammers and rule breakers, suddenly their ratings become "trusted" for 2 million other accounts.

This scrutiny has happened many times before. A few months ago there was a similar drama with another local section that I am hesitant to mention so it doesn't get brought up again. There has been similar scrutiny of various very established accounts (again, I won't name names), but including very trusted users and staff members. The expectation on the forum generally seems to be that as a DT1 member, you will be mature enough to consider the evidence presented and remove any proven scammers from your trust list. Failure to do so will generally result in you being removed from DT1.

I've essentially stayed out of this drama thus far, because honestly, I'm getting a little tired of all the different but endless drama that goes on in the forum, but in this case I'll agree with the posters above that your current behavior is not winning you any friends.

I can't keep track of all the attacks, hacks, and scams that take place on altcoins. A combination of me not caring about most altcoins and these kind of things happening so frequently, I suppose. That's ringing same vague bells now that you mention it, though. Maybe I did read about it at the time.

Unfortunately true. As this site shows, most altcoins could be 51% attacked by a fraction of bitcoin's hashpower, certainly far less than some of the biggest mining operations possess. These coins are perpetually insecure, which is why it takes days or even weeks to achieve what bitcoin can in under an hour. And yet still people trust them.

Thanks for the answers.

Last question: Where are your operating costs and profits coming from? I can see from your screenshots you sell ad slots. Although I appreciate you might not have nailed down exact numbers yet, what kind of fees are you expecting to be charging for currency exchange and withdrawals? What kind of house edge will there be on your casino games?

It certainly looks like an interesting platform. I might not be your target market, since I wouldn't be using the mixing service for the reasons I stated above, and I don't have much interest in buying/exchanging most altcoins. I'd certainly be interested in having a go on your casino games when you launch though. Best of luck to you.

Well, looks like I've got egg on my face.