I have been using it on and off for years with no issues.
From my understanding, and it could be very wrong, a lot of the users are using gift cards that they got for doing things that they cannot cash because they are out of the region and Amzaon does not allow you to use a US gift card in India, and things like that.

Also, once again I heard do not know, a lot do come from people that are a lot come from the Amazon Mechanical Turk program. https://www.mturk.com/

Either way it purse.io has been fine for me and a bunch of people I know.

-Dave

Some places try to get 'cute' with a QR code:
Both of these point to 38s7D6x3hQP9uoYTEKJydwwxHnH7MgyRaq

The 1st one is the standard one we all know and love:


This is what (as an example) bitrefill gives you:


Close, but not great. Other places get worse with cute non standard QR codes. I was thinking that was the problem.


I'll see if I can get a picture of my friends phone, that I was trying to scan that started this thread, just after the bitrefill invoice I was trying to pay gave me grief. As I said some apps would flat out not scan it but WoS did in under a second.

Earlier in the week I was trying to pay a regular BTCPay invoice but no matter what I did my phone would not scan it on my daily use laptop. I took a screenshot and emailed it to myself and opened it on my home desktop and it worked. And my laptop screen is a newer and better then these ancient monitors I have here.

A couple of hours later I loaned someone here some BTC, he posted an address I copied it to mempool.space so I could get a QR code. And on that very same laptop with that very same phone that would not scan the other QR it worked. But, using a different app. Going back to blue wallet it would not scan. Went back to the 1st app and it worked. Tried to scan a different address in blue wallet and it worked??

So, we have 3 votes it's me / my phone. And 1 vote of yeah it happens to me too.
Lets see what others say.

The phone is a OnePlus Nord N10 5G about 15 months old. Not the best, not the worst.

-Dave

The thing I am looking for about the outflows is, is it 500 individuals pulling out their 0.5BTC or 1 major institution puling out 250BTC?
Same result for the amount moving out, but the way it happens matters.
Also, allowing for shipping and delivery and setup and everything else, how many of those sold hardware wallets are in use?

Individually here we are a small microcosm of the BTC world. I would also like to think that overall as a group we do know more and we try to convince our friends to know more. But, once we get away from that I just can't get a feel for who is doing what.

-Dave

So, here we are 3 months later and a really good implosion later. Anybody have any other views?

I still don't have any real funds that I need / count on stored in any exchanges.

At the moment I do have 1.5ETH sitting in coinbase that was paid to me as part of a debt, that I never thought I was getting paid back on so if it goes away I am no worse off then a month ago, I'm waiting for an increase in price have a sell in at $1515 before trading it to BTC and puling it out. But if it was sent to me in some sketchy (IMO) exchange I would have pulled it out in a minute.

But beyond that, probably under $50 total.*

Anybody else seeing anything else. You HEAR about the people pulling funds out, you HEAR about the spike in hardware wallet sales. Is anyone seeing people actually doing it?

-Dave

*Also, I do have a bunch in Gemini from their credit card rewards, but it's not being pulled out for tax reasons will fix that Jan 2nd....

Side note, but depending on your install / configuration people running with 500GB drives are now starting to hit the storage wall.

I had 2 machines run out of storage overnight. I knew it was coming with the 500GB drives they had and the LVM default layout. Base OS install, some swap space, a few small utilities they are now full.

Was hoping for another week or 2 since I figure 1TB SSDs will be under $50 for Black Friday, but so be it. I moved some files around and got enough empty space to keep them up for at least another month.

-Dave

For the hardware wallet side:

Assuming you are good with component level soldering you can build your own coldcard:
https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/tree/master/hardware

If you want something easier, you can use a RPi and the trezor firmware more or less:
https://www.pitrezor.com/2018/02/pitrezor-homemade-trezor-bitcoin-wallet.html


For the OS / side all you need to do is follow any one of the guides that is out there to install everything.
You can as others have said use one of the prebuilt images, but if you want to be sure you can do it yourself.

Which ones you use is more of your personal preference. C-Lightning vs LND or one of a few electrum server options and so on.
Everyone has a preference but it's better to find what you want / need / like rather then listen to others. A lot can get lost in the signal to noise ratio of people talking about C-Lightning vs LND instead of us saying try both, play with both, and use the one that works for you.

-Dave

Probably all the big ones. Don't see that it that bad as long as it's the pools giving the geo data and not the actual IP information.

It's also at this point just about meaningless. With the IPv4 exhaustion and the sale and leasing of IP space and the general fact that a lot of geo data is just flat out wrong. The best you are going to get is an approximation, and even then sometimes it's not even close. In the end most of the large mining operations are in known locations anyway. As for the smaller ones it should not be difficult to find a legitimate registered business. For the home / hobby miners it is what it is. If you want to talk to another service they are going to know your IP and I am sure their ToS says they can sell any of your info they want to.

-Dave

People have been putting up with crap exchanges since exchanges existed. But, so long as people use them they will keep doing what they do.
Really starting to wonder how much of why people think BTC is a scam / ponzi / whatever is because people like us give them a decent understanding of it, how it works and so on. And then they see something like Binance and wonder what the f--k is really going on.

Pick your saying, "there is a sucker born every minute", "there is an ass for every seat" whatever.

Either way, the mempool is empty now so outside of a few days where it cost a few cents more to move money it's all over, for now, until they again do something stupid.

-Dave

As of now 3:45 PM EST on 19-Nov-2022 1 and 2 sat TXs are confirming and there are about 30 blocks till the mempool is empty.


No they ran a 0 reserve. Fractional implies there was SOME money there :-)

As for the Binance TXs. I am starting to really think their coding is just really broken. I just did a withdraw from another exchange and it came from what was a deposit from someone else. Only had 2 confirms before it was sent to me. How much back end coding does that really take.

User 1 sends 0.1 to exchnage

User 2 does a withdraw for 0.025
User 3 does a withdraw for 0.025
User 4 does a withdraw for 0.010

Send users 2 3 and 4 coins out from the 1st users deposit. Send the rest (minus fees) to the storage wallet.
Coin control it's a thing. Accurate accounting so you know what addresses you control have how much BTC in them with a quick database is also a thing.

-Dave

With NFC (or anything that can transmit) there is some form or greater risk according to some people. But, it's a hot wallet on a phone so there is that too.

What I just can't fathom the fact that when I wanted to pay someone for 1/2 of breakfast, blue wallet would not scan the QR, Zeus would not scan it, but Wallet Of Satoshi and poof done. But, at other times WoS won't scan but blue wallet will. And so on. Just trying to figure out if it's my phone, or if other people see it too. I can't see me be the only one. I know other people who only have 1 wallet on their phone have said that at times they can't scan some QR codes.

But was looking to see if anyone like me with multiple wallets find some work and some don't.

-Dave

Subject covers it.
Over the years I have had many issues scanning QR codes, but recently (say 4 years) it seems to have gotten better.

Now, it seems to be getting worse again for certain wallets.

I have a few wallets on my phone, I use different ones for different reasons. But at times, with the same QR code on the same screen one wallet will scan it with no problems and another will not unless I crank the brightness to 11 and get it at the perfect angle.

Just wondering if after a year it's time to buy my next phone or are there other people seeing this issue too?

-Dave

There was an article about what would be worth 'money' after 'the end of the world' and it did have some interesting conclusions.

Gold, silver and a bunch of 'precious' metals would become just about worthless.

Copper would be worth a lot since if anyone could get some form of power generation working copper wire works best and lasts a really long time.

Iron and Steel would be worth something for shelter construction, but since there is so much of it not a lot

Rhodium, titanium and such would skyrocket in value for a bit. But once all the tech needed to work it died it would drop off.

Bitcoin, credit cards, anything that needs tech to work becomes worthless.

Flammable gasses are valuable. As in some of the most valuable after the end of the world.

Gasoline / Petrol in general becomes worth a lot quickly, but unlike 'Mad Max World' falls in value just as quickly.

Clean water would be valuable for a while, but as people migrated to where it's sources are it drops.

-Dave

Could be worse, could be Ken Griffin / Citadel LLC who have donated $67 billion to Republicans. You remember them, they are the ones that kept trying to naked short sell GameStop and AMC after they became meme stock and then who lost most of their clients money.

Or the Yasses and Susquehanna International and their $47 billion donation to the Republicans and their massive losses.

Although to be fair Susquehanna also donated to a massive crypto PAC that donated to both sides
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/26/billionaire-quant-trader-donates-a-record-19m-of-bitcoin-to-a-super-pac/

Stones...glass houses.

Personally I would like to eliminate all political donations. But that's a topic for P&S not here.

-Dave

And don't get me stated on Uline and their mislabeled boxes rant

We have had smart meters here for years.

I guess a lot depends on how much you electric really use vs other people.

Around here, you have some people [That would be me and Julie] in a small condo using more power then 4 people in a midsize house.
Admittedly we are energy hogs. But, our gas use is very very low. So overall it kind of balances out.

Taking away the converted S9 space heaters I was using, I still have a bunch of PCs, a file server, enough wireless equipment to talk to aliens from another galaxy, use the electric kettle and coffee maker a lot, still have not gotten around to replacing the old non efficient refrigerator and so on.

The family of 4 has 2 kids in school all day who then have after school activities and 2 parents that work. So they don't use a lot of power during the day and are using gas to heat the whole house when they get home. Once again, I was using an S9 to heat the back room and another one in the front room. So no gas there. We eat out a lot / get takeout so no cooking gas use, but microwave those leftovers......

If you are declaring the BTC mining income then it's another story.

Also, if you are running 3 S19 Pro units it's going to be a different then 1 underclocked miner pulling 2000w
At 2000W it's impossible to say you are running a miner vs. leaving on the TV all day with a 750 watt space heater and have not replaced old bulbs with LEDs At 10kW yeah, something is up.

At least around here, most home miners are small 1 possibly 2 miner setups. So could probably fly well under the view of most utilities.

-Dave

Could you? Yes.
Will the bank agree / try? Who knows.
Does it open you up to liability? Possibly.

This is assuming you had funds pulled from a checking / savings account.

If you put in money via credit card, then it's a different thing. You probably could open up a dispute. You 'bought' BTC or whatever and it was never delivered.

With that being said, I am not a lawyer so you might be opening yourself up for some form of claw-back later along with other things.

-Dave

The issue with Gemini going offline was related to AMZ, and places that rely on those kinds of hosted back ends, be it Microsoft, Amazon, Google, whatever. Will continue to see issues during spikes. Not because of anything evil, but due to the nature of their services.

Something like this happens.
The 'cloud based' back end should be able to ramp up to accommodate all the extra traffic.
BUT....
Every other crypto service that is also hosted in the 'cloud' that uses the same provider is also getting hit.
So, now everything is getting slow. Said provider is bringing things up and online as quick as can be done.
While other people are seeing the other serveries slow down and go offline they go and check on their accounts which adds more strain.
Service falls over....

And just to be clear, there is no such thing as the cloud, it's just hosting on someone else's servers.

-Dave

Agreeing with NeuroticFish that this has been talked about and talked about over and over.

But, I was discussing this the other day with some other people and one of them pointed out that there is no answer to this question other then:

'It depends where you are' Most of the places listed in the OP are smaller nations. If say picking on a random country on the map...Argentina....did it that would have a different impact then if say Canada did it then if the Philippines did it.

So, thinking about it the answer is, there is no answer.....

-Dave

I think the numbers are a *bit* misleading.

The mortgage numbers are interesting but for a lot of people it became an investment. Remember these numbers are this year vs last year.

How many people went out and took out as much money as they could borrow against their homes at 4% thinking that within a year to 18 months they could be getting 5%+ in the short term and even longer in the long term?

How many people were waiting for the current housing shrink / price drop to happen to buy?

Same with credit cards. If you have good credit just about every bank is still throwing 0% for 9+ months or longer offers around.
If I could leave those funds in a savings or checking account or put it in a CD at the 1.5% +/- rates that were around a year ago I *might* do it. It's a tough call. At the 3% (savings) to 4.5% or better (CD) rates that are around now, it's a no brainier. You want to give me money at 0% that I can invest no risk and get 3%+ on give it to me. So credit card debt goes up.

So taken in a bubble the numbers look like one thing, looking at all the external factors makes them look different.

-Dave

Well the coins in the 1st address you have posted have not moved. https://mempool.space/testnet/address/tb1qjvntwgt3snue53m0qg4my8elyk4lm7zz6zyehk
Since I do care about BTC and keeping the ecosystem moving.

I am sending some tbtc to: tb1qt0lenzqp8ay0ryehj7m3wwuds240mzhgdhqp4c
From: tb1q3k9azsgu6f048z7qgsj2w9rs6ggh05dcxyf3gm

https://mempool.emzy.de/testnet/address/tb1qt0lenzqp8ay0ryehj7m3wwuds240mzhgdhqp4c


Sig:
-Dave

The other take on this is that the larger multinational shipping companies tend to have the newer more efficient ships . The smaller ones tend to be using older ones that the bigger companies sold off so they could sail the newer ones. So now the smaller companies can't sail, but the larger ones having the newer more efficient ships can take on the older more polluting ones since on average at that point their fleet meets the required goals.

Same way you can sell some big gas guzzling monster cars but so long as you have a bunch of econo boxes also your 'manufacturer fleet average' is good.

Just my view....

-Dave