Has there ever been any enforcement with this stuff? Take this, for example: If you are running a campaign and it becomes blatantly obvious to Staff that you are doing little to nothing to stop spam on your campaign you will be issued a PM warning by a Global Moderator that you need to make immediate improvements to curb low-quality posts. You will have 7 days to remove low-quality posters and respond to the message detailing what you are going to do to make changes to your campaign to reduce the amount of spam. If improvements are not noticeable within 21 days of that and Staff do not believe you are doing enough to prevent low quality posts your signatures will be blacklisted from the forum by an Admin and you will no longer be permitted to advertise here in such a way. I'm not sure it would be effective anyway. The problem with blacklisting is that ICO fundraising is short term. By the time a month has passed by, a lot of campaigns would be done or nearly done. Dodgy bounty managers can just reappear with alt accounts. The only other suggestion I can think of, is something I've suggested before: only allow signature campaigns that pay in Bitcoin. The ones paying in made-up tokens have no real cost for the ICO, and thus don't mind "paying" for spam. If the campaign pays in Bitcoin, at least they have something to lose.
Good point. There's a world of difference between tokens printed out of thin air and bitcoins, in terms of advertising costs. It's really apparent when you compare token-paid bounties to BTC-paid campaigns. |
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Since I've been under the weather and didn't feel like an hours motorcycle ride back and forth to the bitcoin atm, I tried to buy some online. Big mistake! After a selfie with an explanation of the purchase while holding my ID which was difficult to hold up living alone- although I did manage a clear pictures, then two pictures of my id with my payment card, the purchase was rejected by the exchange and I was told to use another card.
I told them to forget it, and I would like a selfie from the exchange's CEO holding a signed note wherein he promised to destroy all pictures and information I had provide them with.
Who wants to put up with such nonsense? The only reason I deal with the ATM is for online gambling, which our countries cause us to lose more money on since we have to pay extra USD to buy the bitcoin, and then lose a couple of points when it is deposited.
It's because of money transmitter laws. I'm not sure about other countries, but in the US people have been getting arrested for trading large volumes without asking for ID. Professional traders and exchanges have been tightening up a lot. It should be possible to trade small amounts P2P without ID -- right on this forum or on Paxful, if not Localbitcoins. If you only need to move a few hundred dollars, I would find a trusted trader on this forum. |
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So i have been working with bitcoin since it started, i sold off all my holdings at 6k before the rise to the moon, but recently ive came back to buy some and all of the otc markets are gone, local traders require ID, the big exchanges either dont accept fiat or require your soul and mothers baby pictures.
So can somebody help me understand what happened? did the 2017 bubble kill off the anonymity or am i missing something? It's been gradually getting worse for the last year or two. The price rise and increasing size of the market had a lot to do with it, I'm sure. FINCEN is watching... a bunch of Localbitcoins traders have been arrested on money laundering related charges. BTC-e, who allowed anonymous trading since 2011, got shut down by the US government and fined $110M for AML violations. Exchanges started either mandating KYC or prohibiting US customers. Localbitcoins started mandating KYC for "significant" trade volumes last April. I understand the importance of a trust-circle but i am asking solely on the basis of send payment, get bitcoin using WU, cash deposit, Moneypak, etc.. without an in-group. It seems there isnt even a way anymore to find private sellers efficiently, just oceans full of buyers trying to pawn off paypal and itunes giftcards, OTC sellers requiring ID, and corporate exchanges that are even worse than mtgox. Options are getting slimmer and slimmer. Paxful and Bisq are options, but they're both disappointing in terms of both volume and interface. There are traders on this forum as well -- try the Currency Exchange board. So what actually caused this? Regulations shouldnt have effected the OTC market IMO.
I guess it's related to money transmission laws that were already on the books. |
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Bittrex, Poloniex, BitFinex, are all widely used by people and all users had to do KYC to even trade on the exchange.
Even Poloniex removed legacy accounts ( I have one ) but it has a 0$ limit now due to KYC. These are all exchanges I would never trust with my data. I pulled all my funds out of Poloniex as soon as they announced mandatory KYC. I'd be especially wary of Bitfinex -- they operate out of the British Virgin Islands and they prohibit US customers, so there's not much legal pressure on them to protect your data. When you look at the way Coinbase and Gemini approach legal compliance and security, I have considerably more faith in them. They could have their databases hacked too, but I think the chances are much lower. If you need to do KYC to cash in or out, choose one reputable place like that and stick with it. The more places you verify with, the higher the chances of identity theft. |
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I've always wondered if the funds that frequently get stolen from exchanges have a higher propensity to end up being used on the darkweb. Has there been any research into that? Wouldn't surprise me if there was a link.
Can't find anything like this on chainalysis and they are the only ones that actually do a few types of research. But I don't think it's like that, hacks involve large sums of money, to deal with it over DM would mean to involve more and more people, a shady exchange would work far better. Agreed there, but what options are there now that BTC-e is gone? To hear the US government tell it, BTC-e was literally operated to facilitate money laundering for cybercriminals and other darknet market participants. It's amazing to look back at how prominent that exchange was given everything in the indictment -- including laundering the Mt. Gox hack coins. I had used BTC-e myself for years ever since 2013 or so. I figured that must have been a big blow to the darknet economy. AlphaBay and Hansa were taken down at the same time. What do people use these days? |
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Just one of the many reasons why I don't do KYC verifications. I don't expect people to learn anything from this though because It seem like people don't care about their privacy as long as they don't have to put extra efforts to use the forums or P2P platfroms to trade instead.
I have often expressed this concern with bounty and signature campaign managers who expose the email addresses of their participants too. At a time I had to take it up seriously with one of the top managers here before he then had to hide that column. Honestly, that's indicative of the original problem: Users need to take more care regarding who they share personal information with. Bounty participants shouldn't be sharing their real personal email addresses with managers, who are just anonymous people on the internet -- and they certainly shouldn't be sharing their KYC documents with them either. The same goes for dodgy exchanges, and there are an abundance of those. Even if an exchange isn't intent on selling your documents, they may be overly lax about protecting your data. Even if they are extremely careful and take the necessary precautions, your info could still be compromised by a determined attacker. For that reason, it's important to minimize the number of exchanges you KYC with. |
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Just one of the many reasons why I don't do KYC verifications. I don't expect people to learn anything from this though because It seem like people don't care about their privacy as long as they don't have to put extra efforts to use the forums or P2P platfroms to trade instead.
I'm of a similar mindset. I did do KYC at one exchange -- Coinbase. That's because sometimes I need to buy or liquidate fast, for amounts larger than I'm comfortable with doing P2P, especially considering the fraud risks. I think they're one of the most likely to properly comply with data protection laws. I definitely wouldn't multiply my identity theft risk by doing KYC anywhere else, though. |
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I think no one could deny the fact that Binance is taking over the crypto market, they managed to do that in a very short period of time.
They've started by Binance.com (crypto to crypto) and a few days ago, they released Binance jersey which is supposed to be for the UK & Europe (fiat trading).
They are also developing a decentralized exchange which you could find a sneak peek preview of it on YouTube. I'm not sure how decentralized this is going to be and whether It's going to be open source or not but it seems like they're controlling almost everything.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that Binance is a very reputable service and worth using, and after all, they're just a business trying to make money but do you think that this control could affect us (the community) badly in the future?
Their altcoin trading service puts others (like Poloniex and Bittrex) to shame, not to mention the ability to trade without KYC. Their dominance is going to be hard to overcome. I'm a bit more skeptical about their entry into fiat trading. Their fees seem ridiculous compared to competitors. Binance.je is charging 7 GBP/8 EUR for deposits, 20 GBP/20 EUR for withdrawals and 0.1% trading commissions -- no maker/taker. Coinbase Pro charges 0 GBP/0.15 EUR for deposits, 1 GBP/0.15 EUR for withdrawals, 0% trading commission on maker orders and 0.1-0.3% on taker orders. It seems like a no-brainer, especially when you consider the size of the order books. |
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so lets just set this scenario, not that its me but just so I can understand peoples view on long term bitcoin, this scenario might be true with many people, as I keep hearing of people selling their house for bitcoin, then price plummets even further, So let say someone is in real world debt for 100k say mortgage and credit card, but also holds just over that in bitcoin, who here would just sell out and become "debt free" if there were such a thing lol, or those that would keep the bitcoin as it can become of much more value in the near future compared to the debt build up of interest and such? baring in mind that clearing the debt means a steady buy back of bitcoin over the following months?
Living debt-free is incredibly liberating. Everyone's situation is different, but I'd sell out and pay everything off. You could drastically increase your discretionary budget after cutting out loan payments and then get right back to re-accumulating Bitcoin. |
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A currency for the future does not mean that it has to replace the paper currency or a national currency as such, it will be an alternative for international trade and is the cheapest form of transaction even if you are dealing with millions of dollars worth of trade or be it a billion.
Indeed, I don't expect Bitcoin to replace national currencies. As long as states exist, they'll continue using currency as a means for economic stability and control. I do expect central banks to eventually start holding Bitcoin reserves as a hedge against currency risks, though. |
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People all over the world are flocking into bitcoin regardless of their race, culture, and believes.
Bitcoin is for everyone no matter where you are around the world, no matter the race or skin color.
In fact, the bitcoin is more transparent than any government or company yet more decentralized than both.
Is bitcoin going to be the biggest economy in the future?
The jury's out on that. The chances are definitely higher than 5 or 10 years ago, but we've got a long way to go before achieving mass adoption, a global unit of account and/or reserve currency, a self-sufficient economy. Bitcoin is still a relatively small niche and it's still fairly experimental. The prospects are good, but we should keep our expectations in check. |
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The FSA has now denied its interest in ETFs, for the time being, suggests the news reported at Bloomberg may have been fed by someone with an interest in reviving interest in crypto trading in Japan.
A spokesperson for the agency clarified on Friday:
There is no such fact that we are considering approving ETFs which track crypto-assets at present … we are not currently considering approving them. That sounds about right. I always thought the story sounded fishy. Not long ago, the FSA was really negative about allowing Bitcoin futures. Moving to approve an ETF shortly after wouldn't make any sense. I get the feeling the FSA wants to dampen Bitcoin speculation, not add to it. |
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I think that chain-splits are not the most important things, instead the separation or un-consensus of core team's members or communities are.
Splits should be focused on splits inside the core team or communities. It is likely that we all focus on wrong point, simply focus on the effects, not causes of those effects. Forget about developers and vague terms like "community" for a moment. The problem here is confusion about what "consensus" means. It refers to network consensus, i.e. unanimous agreement among nodes about what the protocol rules are. Let's not get bogged down with abstract notions about governance. It's more useful to begin from a point of accurate descriptions about how nodes actually interact with each other. When it comes to a hard (backwards incompatible) fork, the idea of consensus is impossible to apply to a "community," particularly one as large as Bitcoin's. The idea that every single Bitcoin user is going to unanimously and consensually agree to a backward incompatible fork is completely insane. The only narrow case where every single users' incentives align to fork is where a protocol failure would render Bitcoin valueless. Otherwise, it's insulting to assume that every other user agrees to consensus-breaking changes. Outside of the narrow case mentioned -- or the case of a protocol with only a few users -- there is no such thing as "consensus to fork." That's just a rhetorical idea used to pressure other people into forking their software. A hard fork or incompatible soft fork always means "chain split." A chain split means forking nodes have broken the consensus and opted out of the previous network. It already means splitting from developers or part of the community, by definition. It doesn't help to introduce notions of Core developers -- that's just an appeal to authority. If decentralization matters at all, we should be focused on what the network does, not what Core developers want. If you really wanted to use the term upgrade, you might be able to use it only for soft forks. Unless a chain is completely centralized, a hard fork is always going to cause a chain split (read that again, always). That's why we call it a hard fork.
I like that, but at the same time, how do we deal with incompatible soft forks? Like a UASF that splits from the majority hash rate chain. In a technical sense, even a MASF with extremely high threshold for activation could still eventually cause a chain split. I guess I don't really like "upgrade" being applied to protocol changes at all. It can be too loaded and political. The network is an organism -- it will do what it will. It doesn't bow to these sort of abstract terms. I implicitly assume that node operators are rationally motivated to maintain consensus and upgrade the protocol. But I don't think it's my place to say what those upgrades should be or whether they're upgrades at all. That's for nodes to decide. Everything else is just talk. |
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It was strange enough that online gambling losses weren't reported for deductions (now that US seems to want to ban it entirely), maybe people in general just don't realise losses are deductible?
It's different for gambling. Professional (self-employed) gamblers can deduct losses as a business expense, so they only pay taxes on their net gains. Casual gamblers aren't allowed to deduct losses if they take the standard deduction, so those people pay taxes on all of their wins and can't deduct any of the losses. Professional traders can similarly deduct capital losses as a business expense, limiting taxable income to net gains. Non-professionals have to cap those deducted losses at $3K which is much worse. One might ask, why doesn't everyone just report as self-employed? The answer is that self-employed people pay an additional 15.3% tax on top of the personal income tax. The IRS screws you no matter what!  |
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that is a very strange move by the hacker! there are already many ways to exchange coins with each other and there is also mixing techniques that could be used to make it harder and even impossible to trace the coins! I read that most of the assets were ERC-20 tokens -- probably very hard to mix due to lack of market liquidity. I imagine the hacker was hoping to quickly wash the coins, withdrawing fresh coins from Binance that they could easily sell elsewhere. With everyone bound to be watching Cryptopia's wallets sooner than later, I'm sure they wanted to wash them quickly. |
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I bought bitcoin some time ago as an investment and am wondering if there's anything I need to do in regard to keeping my investment secure and/or up to date and what should I do in regard to the various forks that have happened over the past few years? Your top priority is storing funds in properly generated cold storage wallets, in unused addresses. Read about some different methods here. It's really important to keep your keys offline in case your online PC or phone gets compromised by malware. Regarding forks, I wouldn't bother with anything besides the most valuable forks (like Bitcoin Cash/SV) since those wallets are relatively easy to verify as safe. Always sweep your BTC into new addresses (preferably in cold storage) before attempting to recover forked coins. If a fork wallet ends being up coin-stealing malware, you don't want to give it access to your precious bitcoins! |
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This is showing how stupid the system is and how it is unable to understand the Internet. An Internet business is available to anyone. If a country has a problem with it it should block the website or make their citizens aware that it's against the law to use that service. We're stuck with it. The US government in particular acts like the world police, shutting down businesses that don't comply. The SEC mandates exchange registration under certain conditions: A crypto asset trading platform may be subject to the US exchange registration requirements (unless an exemption is available) if the platform allows US persons or persons located in the US to access the platform and participate in trading digital assets that are viewed as securities by the SEC. To date, the SEC seems to have gone only after services that specifically allowed access from the US -- no geo-blocking of US IP ranges, no KYC, no attempts to block US residents. They haven't gone after services like BitMex or Bitfinex, where users must go a step further and use a foreign VPN to access from the US, but that may change. |
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What makes you say that? The CFTC approved LedgerX's physically settled markets in 2017. That those markets have been live and running smoothly for 1.5 years now only makes approval of Bakkt more likely.
People are talking about Bakkt like it's an ETF, but I don't see any indication that commodity futures markets are so difficult to launch. The recent delays probably have more to do with the US government shutdown than anything else. The entire process has grinded to a halt.
LedgerX has little mass appeal, while Bakkt has so much more to offer, and at the same time is planning to build further on Bitcoin to expand that what governments don't want to see gain ground. What are you talking about, specifically? Why do you think Bakkt has so much more appeal? LedgerX has daily physical settlement, options and swaps, volatility and other derivative contracts and they're coming out with Ethereum derivatives as well. What is so groundbreaking about Bakkt? I don't think that many of you guys take it serious enough. The US doesn't want to pump your bags, it wants more cash settled products to have big money buy into that instead of the asset itself. Who's expecting the US to pump anyone's bags? I've actually seen convincing arguments that deep physically-settled futures markets are likely to keep prices down. I also just think the LedgerX case contradicts what you're saying. When LedgerX launched, people thought it was going to be huge too, the way people view the SolidX ETF today. The truth is, there wasn't much institutional interest. The same could easily happen with Bakkt. |
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Likewise, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had also issued previous statements explaining that the services offered by BitMEX imply mandatory registration, something that the company owned by Mr. Arthur Hayes clearly evaded. This is something I haven't heard before. Registration as what, a national securities exchange? I thought BitMEX only offered commodity futures contracts, which seem to fall under CFTC jurisdiction and not SEC jurisdiction. It may be splitting hairs, but the SEC seems to have sharper teeth. They've been behind harsher and more notable enforcement actions. For instance, the SEC shut down 1Broker last year. By comparison, the CFTC fined Bitfinex $75,000 a few years ago for margin violations. BitMEX, the second largest Cryptocurrency Exchange by Reported Trading Volume and the most important exchange of Bitcoin Futures in the world, has had a tough start to the year after constant pressures from the regulatory bodies of the United States and Canada forced its team to close the accounts of a significant number of clients.
Although there are no official figures from the team behind the exchange, the South China Morning Post mentions that anonymous sources close to the company indicated that accounts registered in BitMEX from the United States alone represent approximately one-seventh or near 10% of the total number of registered users. I wonder how many accounts are being closed over this, and whether users consistently connecting through VPN are facing account closure. Are there any other reports about this? |
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Hello, everyone! Sadly, I’ve returned this week with no update on my account. As many will remember, my account that had a significant amount of money in it on Binance was blocked months ago and still hasn’t been reactivated. I tried to get my account unblocked by giving Binance all the information that they requested. Throughout the whole process I’ve been informed of different reasons for why it was blocked in the first place, and the last reason was “it’s an internal investigation” and I should contact local authorities (unfortunately I’ve received the same answer from them every time).
I only used the account for arbitrage, in the same way that I do on other big exchanges where I haven’t had any problems with my accounts.
Why I’m coming to the public with this is that I’m asking for more assistance from Binance because I’ve already given them all necessary information that proves my identity and proves the credibility of my money. I’m open to any communication and assistance and I’m willing to provide any extra information they need from me to resolve the problem and move forward.
I don't know much about Maltese law, or whatever other jurisdiction Binance might fall under. It sounds like you're under investigation. They likely have some legal obligation to freeze your account if you or the account are under official (government) investigation. If your account wasn't ordered frozen by authorities, chances of recovery are better with some legal pressure. I would consider the following steps: - Consult with a lawyer. You may be in a position to begin civil proceedings against Binance at this point. There are lawyers who specialize in recovering frozen bank accounts for foreign account holders. This seems similar.
- Contact the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority and the European Commission, file complaints against Binance and ask for advice on how to proceed.
- You could try filing police reports against Binance, both local and in Malta.
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