That's how it would be done by criminal in a good movie, but reality is much simpler than screenwriters make it. Ross Ulbricht when looking for "the best and brightest IT pro in the bitcoin community to be the lead developer in a venture backed bitcoin startup company.", here on bitcointalk btw, was asking to send applications to rossulbricht@gmail.com. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg568744All of us can do mistakes, we are not perfect, and neither the criminals are. If FBI will launch an investigation I'm almost sure they will find the hacker in a month or two. That's possible, but I think it's a weak assumption. The Ross Ulbricht anecdote doesn't really apply, since he wasn't sending KYC documents to multiple companies he was planning to commit crimes through. The darknet markets are rife with full ID packages that include everything you need to pass KYC on these exchanges. And they're cheap too. If you were trying to make millions of dollars in a scheme like this, most people would take this basic step as an insurance policy against being caught. |
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Now that the lawsuit is on file, one assumes that Bitmain’s next step will be to issue subpoenas to Binance and other service providers, allowing it to identify the defendant. If exchanges will be cooperating there will be little difficulty in identifying the hacker. But even with all the personal details known it would be hard to actually jail them because, as @darkangel11 pointed out, there are places where the police can't reach you. ... Only those places are too boring to stay for the rest of your life, especially if you have millions of USD to spend. So it turns out that people like the hacker in question set themselves up for living in a luxury prison in constant fear of being transported to a not luxury one. I’m guessing the exchange accounts will lead to a dead end — the KYC was probably done with documents acquired on the dark net market. Good luck to Bitmain recovering anything here. The money was wash traded and withdrawn. It’s gone... |
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I honestly don't think such a scenario would be that big of a boon for crypto. We've already seen it in the small scale (Venezuela, Turkey, etc.) and crypto hasn't been a very popular choice for diversification. A USD devaluation would affect everyone's economies, and it's very likely that there will be no escaping it.
I think Bitcoin was still too young and experimental for fiat instability to drive adoption in those cases. When you're worried about putting food on the table tomorrow and next week, it's a lot smarter to put your money into dollars than something so risky and volatile as Bitcoin. That's what Voorhees is overlooking -- there's no guarantee if/when the US Dollar collapses that Bitcoin will be an established, trusted asset yet. Whether Bitcoin could serve as the "escape route" really depends on how far along we are with adoption and legitimacy. |
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(facepalm)
not fully verifying..
dont directly participate
full nodes doesnt mean just verify transactions aimed at you. it means fully validate all data to ensure NETWORK security.
come on. imagine if all nodes didnt fully verify.
the whole point of full nodes is that the whole block should be verified. The point of running a full node is to validate payments received. That's what "being your own bank" means -- validating payments you receive against the protocol instead of trusting a centralized authority. If a legacy node forwards valid transactions it doesn't fully understand, how does that jeopardize network security? Can you explain how Segwit jeopardizes network security and why we haven't seen the "ANYONECANSPEND attack" come to fruition? short answer to that debate was that full nodes should validate everything. not just its own personal needs but validate the networks data. Why? Explain how legacy nodes are endangered, and why the network is now insecure. |
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No poll. I believe this would be a very good topic wherein everyone can discuss, learn, and express their own opinions.  Are non-Segwit nodes, full nodes? Why or why not? Yes. They validate transactions and blocks against the consensus rules, as always. They process Segwit transactions because they're fully compatible with the protocol. They just don't directly participate in them. That's why the "legacy nodes don't fully verify" argument is weak. If you run a legacy node, you don't directly participate in Segwit transactions -- you aren't accepting payments where you don't verify signatures. |
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ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees has said that the growing debt of the US, which hovers at around $21.7 trillion as of November, will inevitably cause a big spike in crypto.
“When the next global financial crisis occurs, and the world realizes organizations with $20 trillion in debt can’t possibly ever pay it back and thus must print it instead, and thus fiat is doomed. Watch what happens to crypto.” Voorhees suggested that to repay the national debt, the government and the federal reserve will be forced to print more fiat money, leading to inflation and a decline in the purchasing power of the US dollar.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $6.317 trillion in assets under management, is the latest major financial institution to express concerns regarding the rapidly increasing national debt of the US. The conglomerate’s CEO, Larry Fink, stated that the US government is heading towards a supply problem due to the country’s increasing budget deficit. Beginning next year, Fink noted that the US could be forced to borrow $1 trillion a year. The rising inflation rate of the US dollar, as shown by the growing interest rates of the Federal Reserve, has become too high to sustain the economy. “That could be the real issue related to everything: where we have interest rates becoming too high to sustain the economy with its growth rates,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said.
It's interesting to see Fink compared to Voorhees here. I'm guessing Fink doesn't agree that the looming national debt will cause a cryptocurrency boom. It wasn't long ago that he said BlackRock's clients have zero interest in it. I think it's pretty unpredictable what would happen in a real financial crisis. I don't share Voorhees's optimism. |
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Not who you're asking, but Bisq seems like the closest thing to a truly decentralized exchange right now: How Bisq resists censorship
Bisq’s network is a fully distributed P2P network, and thus difficult to shut down
Bisq’s network is built on top of Tor, and thus inherits Tor’s own censorship resistance
Bisq is code, not a company; it is not incorporated, and it cannot be disincorporated If nothing else, like Bitcoin, it has no single point of failure unlike EtherDelta. I think Bisq is great, but it's never going to overtake traditional exchanges. It's strictly P2P -- no automatic orders, no order books. It's really inefficient for price discovery. It's basically a distributed LocalBitcoins. What we need are decentralized websites, file storage and communications protocols for everything currently run on local servers. I wonder how feasible that is... |
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Do you guys really think sec has any case against EtherDelta founder?
Does it matter at this point? Coburn already settled. This sets a dangerous precedent for decentralized exchanges though. The SEC has been very busy with crypto. We're still waiting for a precedent to be set by the courts. Coburn didn't admit or deny the findings. He agreed to pay because the SEC offered him a slap on the wrist. It'll be interesting if any DEX owners try to fight these kinds of charges in court. Etherdelta was one of the first of these kinds of exchanges. I doubt they'll be the last to be charged. |
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Normally, yes. That's why OTC services exist -- to broker deals between whales. OTC trades are for really large orders. We're talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. You can't find that kind of liquidity on P2P markets, and you should be using a reliable escrow (like a reputable OTC service) for deals that large anyway.
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Does this mean the idea of a decentralised exchange is toast or that they're not doing it right? I'm going for the latter. I don't see how anything hosted on a website will qualify. Until these things are entirely on chain themselves they're neither one nor t'other.
The idea isn't toast, but it seems like we're pretty far from the end goal, especially for anything not operable with Ethereum. There are definitely technologies in the works that could do it. I think the website part is possible now -- Swarm, InterPlanetary File System, Safenet/Maidsafe or some combination of them should be able to create a redundant, decentralized website. Whether a complex smart contract like a DEX will work with those platforms yet is another question. In the case of Maidsafe, I think not. The biggest problem is figuring out real-time order books and order matching. All the current exchanges use local servers and off-chain order books. |
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Wow, this is pretty big. Many members of crypto community are waiting for decentralized exchanges to replace centralized exchanges, because the later have many flaws like security issues, potential for manipulation, privacy and so on. But this SEC decision shows that it won't be so easy and that want it or not, but crypto space attracts more and more attention from regulators.
It's sad, but I'm not surprised. After I saw news that IDEX was planning mandatory KYC, I figured that regulators must be closing in on the DEX platforms. This order against EtherDelta makes sense when you consider how the current generation of DEXs all work: IDEX is not a “DEX” in its current state. At this point the best way to describe IDEX is as a “non-custodial” or “hybrid-decentralized” exchange.
But this semantics issue is by no means unique to IDEX. We believe that no DEX is decentralized. As long as a project has a website, off-chain orderbook, or known team, they are not “fully decentralized.” The whole thing really puts a damper on the excitement around DEX platforms. Who's going to want to run the centralized aspects of these exchanges when it puts them in the crosshairs of the US government? |
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I've never heard of a credit card account being closed due to crypto activity. Loads of bank accounts have. My own credit card account is completely separate from any banking I have. It's a bill that arrives. But I would never buy with one. The fees are too high. It's especially bad for buying cryptocurrency because it's treated as a cash advance. Cash advances come with high fees, high rates, and they charge interest from the date of the purchase. I haven't heard of any banks specifically closing credit cards over this, but I wouldn't be surprised either. It's irresponsible to speculatively invest on credit -- that's really high risk activity in the eyes of lenders. Chase, Bank of America, Citi and Capital One all block credit card usage on Coinbase, and they're smart to do so. |
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Well... looks like I'm not going to use it that much.
I just tried it out with one of my old addresses and that's what it shows up: "Sorry! Addresses with large number of transactions aren't currently supported."
Like, are you serious?
BitFast(Lawrence Nahum, Blockstream dev) said " it's not a feature, indeed it is a temporary limitation. we are working on supporting all." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9usmjn/blockstreaminfo_block_explorer_is_now_live_and/e98be4g/?context=3So yeah, looks like a temporary restriction. Wish they released the complete working product instead though, or at least announce it as a beta release first. I'm thinking when they launched Liquid last month, they didn't consider that no block explorers were ready or planning to support it. It's probably tough to publicly hype or demonstrate their product when it's blockchain-based but people can't even see it on block explorers. So they spun this up in a couple weeks, without all the bells and whistles. |
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The problems at Bitstamp seem really bad. I had no idea since I don't look at Reddit these days. Thanks for posting this, tvbcof. There's many dozens of complaints about missing bank wires and SEPA transfers, and they go back to at least July. At first, I thought the issues had to do with a sloppy transition given the recent acquisition. But then I realized how far the complaints go back. It's getting to Gox-level delays now. I'm surprised there's no disparity developing between Stamp and the other exchanges. When this kind of FUD happens to Bitfinex -- well, just look at what happened on October 14th when they disabled fiat deposits. USDT hit 85 cents that day on Kraken. It may not at all apply to Bitstamp, but to me these cases reek of insolvency.
I remember that Coinbase at some point went through very similar delays, where they came up with all sorts of excuses to justify why it took so long. When was that? I've never heard of delays like this at Coinbase. If the delay was a matter of days or even a few weeks, particularly during high volume times like the second half of last year, there could be legitimate reasons for it. At first, I took the comparisons to Mt. Gox as hyperbole. After looking into this, I would immediately buy BTC and withdraw all funds, if I had funds at Bitstamp right now. |
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The same applies to Arthur Hayes who constantly comes up with new price forecasts.
But does the same actually apply to Arthur Hayes though? I might be wrong but we mustn't forget that Hayes is running one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world right now. Therefore he could potentially be pushing his agenda and specifically for Bitmex that would be attracting high volume.I suppose on some level, everyone is pushing their own agenda, even if it's unintentional. Novogratz' fund has huge cryptocurrency holdings, so I'm sure he's biased in favor of his investments just like Hayes. Everyone is biased. Interestingly, Hayes actually said recently that he expects trading volumes to continue declining: Cryptocurrency trading volumes recently plunged to a new year low following the summer slump.
Hayes said volume could drop more in the coming months. “We think trading volumes could fall further from where they are now,” he said. |
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A few hours ago, Blockstream announced that their new blockexplorer is live. For now, it doesn't have as many features as the other explorers out there but It's definitely looking good. What are your thoughts? Thanks for the info. I assume this is the only block explorer with support for Liquid. I'm not sure how informative that'll be to outsiders since Liquid participants can use Confidential transactions to obscure amounts from public view. But I'm curious nonetheless. Bech32 support and no user tracking sounds good to me! Blockchain.com still hasn't added full support for Bech32, and I just don't like using Blocktrail being that it's owned by Bitmain. It's nice to have a solid new block explorer to bookmark. |
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Only speculation on both S15 and T15 till now, and the hashing rate are just too far away in each rumor.
I doubt they would be able to pull 35TH at 1400W as some claim, but...who knows
Indeed, I just noticed those claims while reading through the Mining speculation subforum and was about to repost them here. Experienced miners say "too good to be true" -- sounds like it just based on the stated chip efficiency. I guess we'll find out in a couple days when they officially release the specs. I suppose we should expect some steep increases in difficulty when these start hitting the market. |
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Any word on the specs? There's nothing on Bitmain's site that I can find, and the articles just cite the chip efficiency that Jihan claimed a couple months ago. Crypto’s mining titans have been hot on each other’s heels to compete for the edge in advanced mining hardware;
i wish there was more competition in the mining hardware scene. i feel like there still is a dire need for more companies in other countries that get into ASIC production. last year when price was rising fast i heard a lot of news about many different companies (like in Japan and Russia,...) were getting in. but i never found out what happened to them. did they eventually start their production or did it die there? Halong Mining went silent several months ago. They sold out their first batch or two and that was it. Various companies like Obelisk believe that Bitmain is "playing dirty" and convincing Chinese manufacturers to cut off other ASIC producers like Obelisk and Halong. GMO released a 7nm miner earlier this year. I think it's been sold out for a while. As mentioned in the article, Bitfury recently launched a new 14nm miner. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. It seems like Bitmain has definitely got other companies out-scaled. I think all the hype last year really underestimated their capital, scale and ruthlessness.  |
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Is there no reputation system? How do you determine who is trustworthy when dealing with fiat payments? Even bank wires are reversible. Also, general question about the feasibility of KYC. IDEX is enforcing mandatory KYC, which shows that it's not truly decentralized. Is there any way this could happen on Bisq? Almost 6000 SEPA Euro trades have happened on Bisq so far. Approximately 1% of those have gone to arbitration. 0 of them have been due to chargebacks. Okay, that sounds promising. Any statistics for US bank wires? I'm looking for an alternative to Localbitcoins. High premiums with no KYC was justifiable. Less so now... |
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Ostensibly most topics/threads on this section have actually been discussed multiple times and hence a sequel of the last discussion,so I thought it wise to come up with something novel.. You might consider changing the thread title to the actual topic to avoid confusion. There happens to be plethora of problems the bitcoin solves in its own way, but I think myself and 85% other bitcoiners would agree that the major issue the bitcoin puts a halt to is poverty(as it provides financial freedom)...uhm,...thats not to say that many bitcoiners weren't rich or more so comfortable before the inception of the bitcoin,but it sure does contribute it's own fair share of financial freedom and makes the rich richer and the poor,rich
Now the point of our discussion
I'm going to provide three groups
1)3rd world countries/underdeveloped countries
2)Developed countries
3)Developing countries
Each and everyone of us happens to live in one of the aforementioned groups,so with reasons let us know in your opinion which of this groups(countries)the bitcoin has had more of an impact on and why you think so(outlining at least one problem it solves for the individuals in such groups/countries)
If Bitcoin catches on globally, then those in unbanked countries outside the legacy banking system will benefit the most on a fundamental, use-case level. Censorship at the banking level affects entire countries -- Syria, Nigeria, Iran and others. Residents of these countries are unable to remit money internationally, cannot collect payment for online work, etc. In these cases, cryptocurrency can be quite empowering because they're permissionless and censorship-resistant. If we're talking strictly about profit from price growth, then developed countries will generally profit the most, because that's where more wealth and more robust investor classes are concentrated. |
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