I think it's mentioned somewhere during the mixing progress? Either way that's just general advice for enhancing your privacy when using any sort of mixing service (ie. waiting a week before moving coins will make blockchain analysis harder than waiting an hour) and should usually have no effect on your experience with ChipMixer (which will greatly improve your privacy regardless of how long you let coins lie).

As a general rule any changes that require a fork will most likely be largely announced and thus hard to miss. No mentions regarding a fork means no change in the transaction and block format.

Check the changelog for anything that may cause troubles if you rely on specifics regarding the implementation rather than the protocol:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.18.0.md#0180-change-log

Luckily iasenko took care of this lapse of mine in his post

But is it just me or has the alt coin section become less spammy again? I just checked some random samples and there seem to be less shit posts than I remember. Or maybe I just checked the wrong threads.

Many coins that are hardly used. It's nice to argue about scalability and security when no one uses a coin, in practice the reality usually looks quite different. So far the only "consensus" algorithms that seem to be both scalable and secure without relying on PoW are permissioned ones at which point we're back at square one.

That being said, which of the "many coins that use hardly any energy but are still secure" are you referring to precisely?

I largely agree with you, but Bitcoin always seems just one good or bad day away from switching into crazy gear. Admittedly crazy gear has a slight upwards bias though




It seems almost within reach, doesn't it? USD 9000,- appears to be a tough one to crack first though.

Well there's still 16 days to go guys While it would make absolutely no sense for Bitcoin to break below USD 6000,- until then, Bitcoin's market behaviour rarely ever makes sense.

There's also these webshop plugins by blockonomics:

https://www.blockonomics.co/merchants#/page1

I haven't used them myself so far, but this approach seems to be the middle ground between writing your own implementation and relying on a third party exchange. You'll have to look into the details yourself, but from what I've gathered you have full control over your own keys with them earning money via prepaid payment fees.

Only if you ignore that the drop in hashrate was preceded by almost a year of bear market. That the hashrate would plateau and then drop until the market recovers is hardly a surprise.

I'm not saying that your theory doesn't have its merit, but it also doesn't quite hold when looking at the surrounding factors.



Power consumption of non-mining full node should be negligible as the computational requirement of full nodes does not exceed most consumer PCs [1] and there are currently only about 10,000 public nodes [2] on the network.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#minimum-requirements
[2] https://bitnodes.earn.com/



Oh definitely. But which consensus algorithm would that be, that's the Gretchenfrage, isn't it? So far attempts at answering this question have been less than impressive.



Definitely not easy, but necessary. I'm a bit surprised though about the deforestation issue, most windmills I saw in Germany are in open fields (ie. crop areas).

In general most of Europe appears to be doing well on the renewable energy front anyway, unlike some of the other major economic forces out there (I'm looking at you U S of A, you guys would have a lot of space for photovoltaics and wind power; just sayin').

More efficient miners only lead to an increase in hashrate, not to a decrease in power consumption. That is, if for example the cost of running mining hardware just got cut in half, a mining operation will simply double their hardware in an attempt to double their profits.

Not really.

Mining uses the same amount of energy regardless of there being 10 transactions or 10 million transactions per block. Miners spend as much on electricity as they can while still turning a profit. Accordingly the amount of money miners can spend on electricity mostly depends on the block reward, transaction fees and crypto-to-fiat exchange rate (other factors being infrastructure and hardware acquisition costs).

So one way to lessen the CO2 footprint of a PoW-based cryptocurrency is to shorten its currency emission timeframe, similar to Monero's. Making larger blocks unfortunately is not.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is not a working payment system at the moment, because it is, despite it's scaling probles. I'm saying Bitcoin is not yet able to fully replace existing payment systems -- assuming you want to reduce Bitcoin to a mere payment system (ie. there's also the matter of store of value, financial sovereignty and maybe at one point a useful token / smart contract economy).

In the end it breaks to whether we deem 1) cryptocurrencies a worthy endeavour and 2) PoS and other PoW-free consensus algorithms viable security models.

Regarding the first point, reclaiming individual financial sovereignity and possibly replacing existing, more energy and especially labour intensive financial infrastructure seem worth it. Just imagine the amount of human resources one could free up by automating a large part of the financial industry. At least financial service workers will have a better chance at finding new jobs than most of the manual workers one can expect to be automated away in the coming decades.

Regarding the second point I have simply yet to see a consensus algorithm other than PoW work in practice. Crypto's history is full of failed PoS attempts and most other consensus algorithms are either permissioned or require trust.

That's just my 2 sats though.



Thanks for doing the math

I think people tend to underestimate the amount of energy required for water to reach boiling point.

Disclaimer: I'm a PoW hardliner who's not convinced of PoS and its derivatives (at least those that I'm aware of)

I'm under the impression that whenever the power consumption of PoW gets brought up that one factor is largely ignored: Grid energy storage.

Maybe the hard facts will betray me once a comprehensive studies comes out (so far most studies I found regarding the power usage of PoW were on shaky grounds at best, link me up if you have something interesting), however so far I'm under the impression that economic forces lead to PoW mining using energy that mostly goes beyond what can be stored in the power grid and would therefore get wasted for the most part.

That is, based on the assumptions that
1) miners are driven towards places with the lowest energy cost,
2) energy is the cheapest where there's a surplus of electricity and
3) current energy storage capabilities are very much lacking
we can come to the conclusion that the additional power consumed by miners is energy that is otherwise wasted. Unlike consumers and most industries that have other economic factors at play (eg. you can only drill for oil where there is oil, you can only produce commodities where resources are either nearby or cheaply delivered) electricity is almost the sole concern for mining operations.

But like I said, the hard facts may betray me, so hopefully at one point a proper study will take place proving the above either false or correct. Also I'm neither an economist nor a grid engineer, so for all I know my assumptions could be utterly void.

That being said, I would very much love to see an increase of Bitcoin's transaction throughput as to make it actually feasible to phase out some of the legacy banking system in favor of cryptocurrencies (ie. IMHO Bitcoin's PoW wouldn't feel like that much of a waste if it were to successfully supersede parts of the existing system rather than running redundantly alongside it).

I think it's been mentioned by other people in this thread, but so far it seems like the only ones filling the hot wallet are other players depositing coins. So the last ones do deposit will end up with their coins stuck.

And that's just BTC. XMR and BCH withdrawals haven't been working since their respective hard forks, so unless admin returns those funds are stuck for good.

I'm slowly getting tired of hearing from those two. But good for us, I guess. The more time they waste squabbling, the less time they have for interfering with Bitcoin. They can have their coins, we have ours, everybody wins.

It seems like their in-built wallet makes use of a system they call Samsung Knox [1], which secures private keys by managing application privileges [2] and ensuring the integrity of said application privileges by verifying the boot process on the hardware level [3]. So to my understanding while private keys are probably encrypted they are not stored in a secure hardware element as is the case with common hardware wallets such as the Trezor or Ledger. Samsung Knox's track record is not exactly splendid [4][5] but I guess we'll see in the next few months whether they have brought their shit together.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-includes-private-crypto-key-storage
[2] https://developer.samsung.com/tech-insights/pay/device-side-security
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox
[4] https://blog.securegroup.com/why-samsung-knox-hardly-has-anything-to-do-with-security
[5] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/samsung-knox-lock-hack,news-30062.html

According to bitblender.io's Tor website they are shutting down as well. Looks like we have another wave of closures at our hands. A sad day for privacy.

"Just asking for a friend"

On a more serious note, if more than USD 70MM worth of cryptocurrency just lying around the blockchain unguarded isn't proof of Bitcoin's security model than I don't know what is.



To you and any other newcomer reading this:

Do not share your wallet file with strangers. That's how you get your coins stolen.

@OP: If you have found a way to retrieve lost coins that may be helpful to others, please post it publicly so that other users can be helped as well.

The size of the block reward is irrelevant when the coin itself is worth nothing in fiat terms ie. purchasing power. Miners can't pay their running costs and hardware based on the arbitrary number that is the size of the block reward.

The only reason why the upcoming difference in block reward between BTC and BCH / BSV is relevant at all is because we're looking at running systems sharing the same mining resources with a somewhat stable equilibrium that will soon be broken. For all we know BCH / BSV might as well manage to offset their premature halvening by doubling their value relative to BTC.

Regardless of that I'm looking forward to see the first coin apply sharding to cryptocurrencies. Be it Ethereum, be it a Bitcoin fork or be it something else entirely. I personally doubt that blockchain sharding is the scaling solution that some people make it out to be, but the worst case that can happen is a learning experience for all.