they dont mark cold storage as a red flag.. you have just heard that from your cult brethren who have their own motives. rather than reading actual regulations

as for people not paying tax, many do have ways to pay less tax, if you learn how
did you know in america you get tax breaks and rebates for many things even at poverty levels of income.. the sooner you learn the better your tax filings will result in paying less tax. but first you should learn them

When we were audited, the IRS crypto committee told our accountant that cold storage was a "huge red flag", https://twitter.com/bitcoinmom/status/1783616508310237525

I have long wanted to discuss the following topic with users and participants in gambling discussions. Do you think Nassim Teleb's philosophy can be of any use in gambling? His various ideas and theories? Let me just list some of his ideas and you can comment on how, if any, benefits can be gained from this:

1. Ideas from the book “Fooled by Randomness.” There are many ideas that boil down to the fact that we often mistake randomness for a pattern.

2. Ideas from the book “Black Swan”. Strategies based on anticipation of the Black Swan.

if you are just cashing out small amounts like $10-$500 per time, then you just use the other exemptions like 'gifts'
if you are moving large amounts then you set up structures or use financial services set up

imagine CEX services but not set up as markets facilitating bids. but instead 'loan services' matching 'borrowers'(sellers) to 'loaners'(buyers)
same end result, different wording
just be sure to do your research to learn the exemptions.. then use them. there are many. but first you need to learn them so go research

Social media giveaway is always a hard pass for due to heavy number of participants while most of them can’t be verified if using multiple account for the entry. The giveaway post also received bunch of replies that makes it very hard to win.

I once very active on this social media giveaway but never won a single giveaway. I only focus on tournaments using wager or challenge that give guaranteed rewards once you secure place or the requirements. Keep us updated if you manage to be lucky on this kind of giveaway mate.

if you use the exemptions in the tax law.. via researching and learning the tax law. even if the taxman is always looking. he cant do anything if your using their laws against them

tax avoidance(legal) is using their law exemptions(such as loans are non taxible)
tax evasion(illegal) is trying to play dumb, ignore laws and hide which is where you will get caught and cant escape

learn/research the difference

So what happens when you earn some Bitcoin online without buying it and then cash out?

I damn bet he knew. His departure announcement on Medium was suspiciously timed. I guess he didn't want to be part of the reputation smear that evidently the rest of Wasabi has been hit by, so who can blame him.

The fee is currently at 2$ (31sat/vB). I notice that the fee usually go low on this level at night on my time zone for a consecutive days already. Probably there’s only few user inscribing on the blocks during this time slowly surge up again in the morning.


I think Rune is worst since the price of Bitcoin is already high while the value of fee in sat is the same. I remember I can still send some transactions back then since the fee is just around 5$ to 10$ range during the ordinals which is bearable compared to the current fee on Rune which is insanely high.

Effective immediately and until further notice, zkSNACKs is now blocking U.S. citizens and residents from visiting its websites, downloading and using Wasabi Wallet and any related products and services, including APIs and RPC interfaces.

In light of recent announcements by U.S. authorities, zkSNACKs is now strictly prohibiting U.S. users from using its services. An IP address blocking for U.S. residents is effective on wasabiwallet.io, api.wasabiwallet.io and zksnacks.com.

“U.S.” refers to “United States” and includes the several states of the United States and related territories. If you are a United States Citizen or United States Resident, you are not allowed to visit any sites aforementioned, download Wasabi Wallet or use the Wasabi Wallet coinjoin feature. This includes if you are a U.S. permanent resident or if you are an individual that holds a U.S. passport.

https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/zksnacks-now-blocking-u-s-residents-and-citizens/

moving any asset/commodity/security to fiat is a taxable event
but now CEX's have to report events, means the taxman has proof of events which you then hav to declare in your own filings

the only options are to know enough taxlaw to know the loopholes to avoid tax in such events(legal).. or find ways to swap to fiat outside of reporting services to evade tax(illegal)

main tricks are what the elites do
dont 'spend' value(buy/sell), personally lend value as loans are not taxable
its literally a process similar to fiat exchanging, but word it right and create your own paperwork to show it worded as such, it suddenly becomes a double sided personal loan to each other which cancels each other out the same day(paid in full)

speak to an accountant/tax specialist

When we were audited, the IRS crypto committee told our accountant that cold storage was a "huge red flag", https://twitter.com/bitcoinmom/status/1783616508310237525

I think they are not. But if people say that coins in sidechains are, then coins in LN should also be called in the same way, if we follow the same logic.


You have IOUs only in centralized sidechains. For example: if you have a sidechain, where you have some large multisig, and you cannot be a miner, if you are not a part of some closed group, then those coins are IOUs. However, if you have decentralized sidechain, then you can use any scripts you want, because every block is covered only by hashrate, and not by some centrally-selected signature, like in signet.

1. If you have to provide a valid signature for a given coin, to transfer it from mainchain into sidechain, then it is based on real coins, and not some "coins created out of thin air".

2. If you have to move a given coin on the mainchain, to bring it back from the sidechain to the mainchain, then it is the same situation as with LN: you can always peg-out, without asking for anyone's permission.

And those two things alone: sign things to peg them in, and move them to peg them out, is sufficient to make a test network for decentralized sidechains. However, if you want to get the main network, then it is all about creating rules for the scripts, used to lock your coins. Which means, that if you have a single-key address, then you can test it alone, but no sane person will accept some coins, if the sender can always take them back, without losing anything. For that reason, the basic building block for decentralized sidechains is N-of-N multisig, where you can have a lot of people behind a single UTXO. And then, all kinds of improvements are focused on making "emergency scripts", to for example not require all N participants to be online, to change the state of the sidechain.

Because if you would have for example non-interactive transaction joining, then a single Taproot UTXO is all you need, to handle a single decentralized sidechain. And then, it is all about combining all signatures from that sidechain, and finalizing it as a simple commitment on-chain, which would have a constant size, regardless of how many people will use a given sidechain.

there are so small  chance that the fee will reduce anytime soon because it has been running now for almost a week now and yeah i even stopped withdrawing or transacting into the bitcoin network.

and indeed that I don't wanted to gamble nowadays as my reserved altcoins to gamble have been loss yesterday lol.

Why do you think it's too early to say "I told you so"? Samourai deliberately designed their wallet to collect user data by default and lied about it: https://twitter.com/SamouraiWallet/status/1576923638846005248

I opened an issue to have a warning displayed to users about the data they are leaking, Samourai closed it and later deleted it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417145554/https://code.samourai.io/wallet/samourai-wallet-android/-/issues/458

I've spent an enormous amount of time warning people about the risks involved with this exact outcome. Now whatever data Samourai had is within arms reach of the Feds.

Yes this happens due to a big traffic of transactions that makes a market congested in the process. However, this won’t be any longer and we will eventually see fees going down, and right now the price is quite reasonable again.

But most likely for an addicted gambler, this may frustrate them but they’ll still find a way to gamble just to satisfy their urge in gambling. Only to find out they only lose in the end, and paying those high fees is already a loss itself. But what do you expect from a highly addicted one, of course they will never mind all those fees as long as they can continue to bet for more. Not actually a problem for big time gamblers, but for small gamblers, I guess this will really drive them crazy.

By using the same words, you could also say that about Lightning Network: "on-chain Bitcoins are locked" (behind 2-of-2 multisig), and also "then an equivalent amount of tokens are minted" (but here, it may be even worse, because of conversions between satoshis and millisatoshis, so you can "create millisatoshis out of thin air", because you cannot finalize them on-chain in the current version).

So, if you would have 2-of-2 multisig addresses on the sidechain, then what would be the difference? Because obviously, if you would have single-key addresses on the sidechain, then coins could be easily turned into IOU. However, if you would use exactly the same bytes as in LN, then where is the moment, when it is "not Bitcoin"?

It only depends on your spending conditions. If you have single-key address, then it can be turned into IOU, but it also has some use cases (for example as a test network). However, if you use the same scripts, as in LN, then where is that IOU?

If you think "Bitcoin DeFi" includes everything involving the currency "Bitcoin", then I can agree. So if you include tools like RGB/Taproot Assets, where some of the operations are taken off-chain, then I see a bright future for "Bitcoin DeFi".

But on-chain Bitcoin DeFi should be quite difficult, because Bitcoin's blocks are much more limited than Ethereum's, and thus the high fee problem will make many typical DeFi operations unfeasible. Some years ago, the Counterparty project intended to bring a extensive DeFi suite to Bitcoin but even the fees in 2016 (much lower than those today) were too high for an ecosystem to evolve, while Ethereum thrived. They had even planned Turing complete smart contracts (see here) but development stalled for a long time; more recently it seems to have made progress in this field again.

A "good" outcome could be that Runes people could develop a technology similar to OmniBolt using LN for Runes Transactions. But being aware that the Runes community is very much a spinoff of the Ordinals community and they were quite eager to put everything onchain, I doubt that.

From the standpoint of an user spending fees to "etch" or "mint" a rune which will never see a buyer, the money is wasted.

I still am unsure if it's positive or negative that Runes fees are delaying the effects of halving to miners. I tend towards the latter: the miner income drop will come eventually, so it's currently only delaying it, with the cost of people leaving Bitcoin (delaying adoption "as a currency") because the network is more expensive to use.

Actually, you're right, but then aren't they shitcoins though? I made a list of the 'top' shitcoins behind Bitcoin. Not implying that market cap is what makes a coin shitty, but there's that though, to some extent.

In the end, they're all shitcoins, regardless of your definition of the term, Reason being that all and every coin besides Bitcoin is shitty, given that there doesn't exist any coin now that's a btc alternative.

It depends on your implementation. If you have some data, which can be turned into valid Bitcoin transaction, and broadcasted into Bitcoin network, then it is technically Bitcoin.

I wonder, why some people think, that transactions, which they create on LN, and are saved only on their local nodes, are Bitcoin, but if you put exactly the same transactions on the sidechain, then they suddenly are not. You can use exactly the same bytes, and just put them on sidechain, so the only difference is that instead of keeping things locally, you will share more of them with other nodes. But the data behind all of that, could contain exactly the same bytes. And if something is secret (for example some penalty transactions), then it could be encrypted, and shared, so if some node will see some old channel state, then that node will decrypt it, and act as a watchtower, by sharing the penalty transaction with everyone else.

So, your argument is that "the transactions in those channels would not be Bitcoin", and your solution is to specifically use some altcoin, which definitely "would not be Bitcoin"?