I appreciate what you are saying, but the way you've worded it could be a bit misleading to a newbie.

Putting in a higher fee will get your transaction confirmed faster (usually), but that doesn't mean that lower fees have a less than 100% chance to be confirmed.* Using the lower fee as suggested by https://www.coinb.in/#fees will still get your transaction confirmed, it's that it might take longer than it would with a higher fee.


*Outside of the crazy situation we saw at the height of the bull run when anything below 30 sats/byte wasn't being touched.

The links posted above given two very different fees for different situations.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ gives the minimum fee to try to confirm in the next block with a >90% chance. In real terms, this means your transaction is likely to confirm within 10 minutes (on average). If you need a transaction to confirm this quickly, then choose that fee. At time of posting, that fee is 18 sats/byte.

https://coinb.in/#fees gives a fee for your transaction to be included "within the next few blocks". This can sometimes mean waiting a couple of hours or more, but works out much cheaper. At time of posting, their recommended fee is 2 sats/byte, or only 10% of the previous fee. If you are not in a hurry, you can safely choose this fee and just be patient.

Another useful site is this one https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h which will give you a visual representation of how full the mempool is, and may help you to choose a fee somewhere between the two suggested fees given above.

If I make a payment with a credit card, that payment reaches my credit card company within seconds, much like a bitcoin transaction is broadcast to the network within seconds. However, it will take several days before my credit card company actually transfers any money to the payee's account, whereas a bitcoin transaction will be confirmed within 10 minutes (on average), and have 6 confirmations within an hour (again, on average). In the days before my credit card transaction is paid, and indeed, for a many months after it is paid, I can reverse that transaction by claiming my card was stolen, or lost, or cloned, or I was phished, or hacked, or defrauded, etc. And yet, fraud rates are low enough that pretty much everywhere will accept credit card payments.

The situation is not that dissimilar to accepting zero confirmation transactions, where the security of these zero confirmation transactions (and credit card payments) relies on external factors such as customer honesty and a large company being able to accept small amounts of fraud in exchange for convenience. Obviously if you are dealing with large amounts of money, or you are unwilling to accept that risk, then you stipulate that you require 1/3/6/however many you want confirmations on each transaction.

There is a good summary here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/faq/optin_rbf/#why-arent-unconfirmed-transactions-safe

Absolutely correct. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not isolated to the world of crypto. "If it's free, you are the product", as the saying goes. Every company or business has to make money somewhere, or else they will cease to exist. Anything that gives you something for free (short of sites like Wikipedia which are run on charity/donations), be that a service such as Google or Facebook, or a product such as YouTube or ICOs, is making their money from you. Simple things like your browsing history, which is easily trackable unless you take steps to prevent it from being so, can be sold to third parties and used to target advertisements. When you willingly part with even more data like you do when telling Facebook your life story or sending your KYC documents to an ICO, your data becomes ever more valuable, and the risk you expose yourself to becomes ever higher.

If you are happy having no privacy, having your data sold to unknown third parties and used against you, making yourself a target for hackers and identity theft, etc, in return for a few worthless tokens or seeing photos of friends' latest meals on Instagram, then as far as I am concerned, you are crazy.

I mean, this is what happens on hardware wallets such as the Ledger, for example. When you try to make any transaction, the entire address scrolls across the screen and requires manual confirmation before it will send. The same thing then happens for the desired amount. It takes all of 10 seconds to hold your device up to your computer screen beside the address in question and read them both off at the same time. It amazes me that people don't even bother to do these simplest of checks and continue to be scammed in this way.


Just one more reason why no one should ever use a web wallet.

Shock! Institution which relies entirely on fiat being the dominant form of currency to make all their profits slanders alternate form of currency which threatens fiat. Next you'll be telling me that oil companies oppose environmental laws and protections!

This isn't news at all, and as others have pointed out, fiat plays a much larger and more widespread role in all kinds of shady activities (from tax evasion and money laundering to drugs and weapon trading) than cryptocurrencies do.

I was just discussing this in another thread a few days ago. Studies estimate that around 70% of people only read the headlines, which means only 30% of people are even reading the article, and an even smaller number are reading the actual study or report that the article is based on. They'll see a snappy headline about 10% of GDP and jump all over it without reading about what it means.

As you say, Cisco are talking specifically about corporate blockchains. The report specifically mentions things like supply chain tracking, identity management, and smart cities. All great uses of blockchain technology, but all without any direct impact on cryptocurrencies.

It's worth making absolutely clear that you should double check the address after you have copy pasted it. There is plenty of malware out there that can change what is stored on your clipboard, so you can copy the correct address but end up pasting the wrong one.

Also, using a hardware wallet with a screen such as Ledger or Trezor helps to protect against this, as you have to manually confirm the transaction address on the screen of your wallet before it will send.

Link: https://vintage.myetherwallet.com/

I've not used it myself, but the Blockonomics Wallet Watcher should achieve what you are looking for, but for bitcoin only. Link: https://www.blockonomics.co/views/wallet-watcher.html?next=%2Fblockonomics#/

It's web based rather than an app, but you can sign up for a free account with just an email address, and watch up to 50 bitcoin addresses. You will receive an email notification with any deposit or withdrawal from any of your watched addresses. If you want to watch more than 50 addresses, you can pay a monthly fee (or just open a second free account under a different email I suppose).

This is at least the 4th thread this week about this site. See below for instructions on how to protect yourself.

All the more reason to not give out dangerous advice, since newbies and beginners are unlikely to understand just how bad an idea it is to store your private key or mnemonic phrase on an electronic device. It only takes 10 minutes to install and learn how to use MetaMask or MEWconnect (or Electrum, or Wasabi, or learning about hardware wallets, etc) - this is absolutely the bare minimum of diligence a newbie should be doing before purchasing coins. If someone doesn't understand, then the advice should be to take time to learn, not to expose themselves to losing all their coins though terrible security practices.

No. Don't do this. It even says in a big red box on half of your pictures that this is bad advice. Saving your private key in plaintext on your computer and then copy-pasting it in to a live webpage is a sure fire way to have all your coins stolen. The same goes for your mnemonic seed. A password protect keystore file is marginally better, but not by much, and is still very poor in terms of security.

There is no excuse for not installing and using MetaMask or their app MEWconnect since both are free, but preferably you should be using a hardware wallet.

The report itself makes for much more interesting reading than this article, particularly since the article didn't actually bother to link to the report.

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/digital-transformation/blockchain-whitepaper.pdf

It's also worth point out the report is talking about blockchain, and not about cryptocurrency. In fact, it doesn't mention cryptocurrencies at all, outside of a single brief mention of bitcoin:

There are many blockchain based projects and businesses which don't rely on a cryptocurrency or token at all. The report specifically mentions the Trusted IoT Alliance and Hyperledger. Certainly blockchain technology is growing, and is the future of many sectors, but don't be fooled in to thinking 10% of GDP in blockchain is the same as having 10% of GDP as a marketcap.

This is it exactly, and the comparison is spot on.

Trash coins are created and fake traded between the creator and his friend to create absurd marketcaps to attract newbies who don't know any better in an attempt to scam them. Trash exchanges are created and fake trades are used to create absurd volumes to attract newbies who don't know any better in an attempt to scam them. The advice in both cases are the same - stay away from unheard of and unknown coins/exchanges, and stick to the ones everyone knows and trusts. Stop risking everything on the promise of some get rich quick scam.

Coinbase have always been about pure profit. Everything from insider trading, violating their own policies to list shitcoins that their shareholders told them to list, selling client data without telling anyone, etc.

I'm not in the USA so I'm afraid I can't offer you suggestions of alternatives, but I would see this as a good opportunity to move away from Coinbase altogether.

I completely agree with you, but I just can't see it happening unfortunately.

If we were able to rank coins by some less tangible quality such as "working product", "real world use", "future potential", etc, then we all know that bitcoin would come first by a long, long way. But it is human nature to try to find order, even where none exists, and people like making lists with easy to understand metrics and numbers (such as marketcap), regardless of how useful or not those lists may be.


Yup, but as soon as we hit the next bull run, there will be a new influx of get rich quickers ready to throw their money away on any and every new useless token.

Slightly off topic, but for anyone else thinking of buying - Ledger devices will work just fine with any USB cable. You don't have to buy the official Ledger OTG cable pack. Any old USB cable of the right size that you have lying around or came with your phone will work, or if not, you can pick up the cable you need for a couple of bucks at most at an electronics store or on Amazon. You certainly don't need to be paying 15 bucks.

Many of the exchanges are reporting fake volumes exactly because they are actively trying to scam you. Exchanges that no one has heard of with ludicrous volume, like CoinBene, Coineal, EXX, OEX, and all the others listed in the report - I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they all turned out to be exit scams.

Stick with the well known exchanges, and only expose your coins or fiat to the exchange for the minimum amount of time needed to do the trade(s) you want to do.

I found and read the study by Bitwise. You can see it here: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca201901-5164833-183434.pdf

It's very well done and much more impressive than the study linked to in OP. As you say, they come up with a number of metrics to "measure" which exchanges are largely made up of fake volume, and present those data in a very visually appealing and convincing way. The issue again, however, is with their methodology. There is an obvious conflict of interest with why they have written the study - they want to prove regulation is good so they can get more involved in regulations for their own profit. It would be the same as if a drug company was to fund a study in to how good their new drug is.

The metrics that they have chosen suffer from the flaws as you point out above - they arbitrarily write off a lot of volume because it doesn't follow their predetermined decision of what the volume "should" look like. They don't reveal at all how they reached those predetermined conclusions. They also don't reveal how many different metrics they investigated or looked at before settling on the two or three that perfectly fit the message they are trying to get across.

Their final conclusions do seem fairly accurate, however, and tie in exactly with what mindrust has said in the previous comment. CMC is nonsense, and the top 20-25ish exchanges they list are equally nonsense.