From their website ( https://bitfi.com/how-it-works): If you can memorize your secret phrase, you can now store unlimited amounts of wealth in your brain.
[..] your private keys are NEVER stored anywhere except your own brain, and this is precisely why the Bitfi wallet is unhackable.
That's friggin hilarious. Looks like after shitty alts, questionable investment schemes / securities / ICOs and insecure exchanges / smart contracts we've finally reached the age of shitty, questionable and insecure hardware wallets. |
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Member phaneriks padding their post counts by copy/pasting within megathreads: Copy: Hahh, nice performance considering the mining market downturn. Well done!
Original: Nice performance considering the mining market downturn. Well done!
Copy: Picked up some shares below 0.40 Grin
Original: Picked up some shares below 0.40  Copy: Guys, does nobody wonder what happened to the balances in their AMHash account? I didn't have much but it wasn't ZERO. So they are stealing that too?
Original: So does nobody wonder what happened to the balances in their AMHash account? I didn't have much but it wasn't ZERO. So they are stealing that too?
And there I was, wondering why someone would be happy about Bitfunder's performance or picking up Nastyfans shares at "only" 0.40 BTC  |
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But above MAX_MONEY value's sanity check, how it work?
For instance by declining any transaction including an amount larger than MAX_MONEY if (txout.nValue > MAX_MONEY)
return state.DoS(100, false, REJECT_INVALID, "bad-txns-vout-toolarge"); Follow bob123's advice from above and do a simple text search on Bitcoin's repo. And what happen pre-mine 100% of coin and still mining reward is not 0?
...then you probably didn't set the mining reward / block subsidy to 0? |
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Unfortunately, they told me to write down my seed on a piece of paper that any house maid can copy with their phone camera ... didn't want to do it. And with at least 20 different people monitoring my computer (10 of which probably spy on my webcam and get the tingles), I didn't want to save it on my computer either. Also, it was not clear to me how the whole security thing would differentiate from any other paper wallet (in terms of [in]security). Anyway, I have learned my lesson" i'll just stick to good ol' brain wallets in the future. Haven't lost any of those in the past.
Fair enough. I personally don't trust myself enough to create a secure brain wallet, but part of the beauty of crypto is a lot of options and self-reliance. About your backup concerns, for future reference: 1) Good call on not storing your backup digitally, after all this would have made the whole point of a hardware wallet moot -- and I'm still baffled by how some people seem to seriously consider this approach. 2) Be aware that Trezor and Ledger Nano S allow for passphrases of 50 characters [1] and 100 characters [2] respectively, without which the wallet seed accounts for nothing. Not as secure as the full power of the seed phrase + passphrase, but still fairly secure when choosing a strong passphrase. [1] https://blog.trezor.io/hide-your-trezor-wallets-with-multiple-passphrases-f2e0834026eb[2] https://support.ledgerwallet.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005214529-Advanced-Passphrase-options |
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Pretty cool, these enclaves! And pretty fancy lingo!
And yet I have recently driven my office chair over my hardware wallet and lost 5BTC!
From my point of view, there is nothing as secure as a brain wallet! I would rather trust a brain wallet than any other wallet that relies on storing stuff on some device that may die anytime!
5 BTC is quite a hefty sum for learning about the importance of backups. Usually you get this lesson for free by following your hardware wallet's quickstart instructions. |
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If running a full node yourself is beyond your capabilities, Blockchain.info / Blockchain.com offers an API that may help you with what you are trying to achieve: https://www.blockchain.com/en/apiI wouldn't use them beyond tracking the balance of pre-specified cold storage addresses though. Using a web wallet is never a good idea. Not for consumers, let alone commercial projects. |
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I personally prefer a smaller amount of people actually making sense over an army of shitposters. So if the majority of traffic that we lost is due to fewer bounty hunters... good riddance. Also I'm not too sure whether advertisers are really all too keen on spam traffic anyway. Nonetheless I concur with OgNasty and Don Pedro Dinero that the recent bear market -- affecting both BTC and alts -- is probably the major cause of the recent traffic decline over anything else. Do you even know how a website traffic is rated? If you're not aware google keeps on having updates which sometimes makes your rankings up and for others it goes down, the serps never stay in a same position you need to constantly look for the updates, do seo and be in check so your statement that theymos has not commented due to traffic is baseless and is not supportive cause for traffic he needs to focus on seo, serps and the latest updates.
Google Page Rank != Alexa traffic statistics. OP is referring to Alexa traffic statistics which reflect page visits, not how well a website fares for certain key words and search phrases. |
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I trade neither, but hold index funds to hedge my crypto holdings (or the other way round, depending on how you look at it).
Trying to play either market is not really my cup of tea since I feel that the risk / reward ratio is stacked against me (ie. by definition you won't be able to outperform either market unless you are either exceptionally skilled or exceptionally lucky) so I just try to position myself in a way that is profitable in the long term while exposing myself to what I deem reasonable risk; shifting my holdings only during larger market movements.
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So can you explain why during June 20-24 when BTC was at 6600-6000, the fee was on average 2.50$ while now, with BTC over 7500$ the fee is on average 0.70$  Price has nothing to do with the fee, stop saying that... That's what happens when people still think in fiat terms  While I wouldn't say that the price has nothing to do with the fee (ie. everything else being equal, BTC @ USD 300,- was cheaper to send in fiat terms than BTC @ USD 6,000,-) it definitely is one of the lesser factors as seen during the December 2017 mempool congestion. |
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In my experience bitcoin cash is a fork of bitcoin even BCH is faster and cheaper to use due to larger blocks but still it'a seen that most of the people are using BTC than BCH so why is bitcoin doing better than bitcoin cash?
BCH is currently cheaper to use due to it handling only a fraction of Bitcoin's transactions (and being only a fraction worth per coin in fiat terms). If either of those were to change significantly, you'd quickly see a difference in terms of transaction fees. Larger blocks does not equal better. If it were that easy we wouldn't have had a blocksize debate in the first place. Other scaling solutions exists that stand to increase transaction throughput far more effectively than a mere blocksize increase. |
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Deleting old unnecessary transaction requires deleting old "unnecessary" blocks It permits blocks to be deleted, it doesn't require it. Same difference. You can't delete a transaction without deleting its block and vice versa. a shorter blockchain is significantly easier to attack than a full blockchain. Length only matters when resolving branches. The main chain is secured, not by it's length but, by the total hash rate of the network. A blockchain is secured by both its length and the total hash rate of the network. Otherwise you wouldn't have a difference in security between 1 confirmation and 100 confirmations. you can't delete singular transactions from a block without invalidating the whole block You can when the block is already on the blockchain. The only reason to retain old transaction data is to be able to reproduce the Merkle root but there's no reason to reproduce the Merkle root. I might be wrong, but if I recall correctly you need to reproduce the Merkle root when validating a block. Problem being, when a block is invalid, each subsequent block in the blockchain is invalid as well. [...]
However, like you pointed out, a lot of old unspent transactions will never be spent. In order to keep the blockchain size small and portable, it's necessary to limit it's length and that means blocks have to be deleted after a certain period of time- i.e they have to expire. Of course that puts the oldest unspent transactions at risk but, knowing this, every user will have to make it a top priority to recycle their coins before they expire and wallet apps will do this automatically as long as they're running and connected to the network. That encourages users to stay connected which helps keep the network strong.
At this point you only know some idiots are going to lose their coins despite all warnings and advice. That's deflationary so, in order to maintain a target supply of coins, the block reward should increase to compensate. This creates a more useful and sustainable coin, don't you think?
I respectfully disagree -- I personally definitely would neither like to see (1) bitcoins with expiration dates and (2) a change of the coin supply. In my opinion both would be a violation of what everyone signed up for when buying into Bitcoin. To add to that, expiration dates would hinder people and exchanges to store their coins safely (ie. in cold storage) and add unnecessary network load by forcing people to send their coins to new addresses on a regular basis. Especially the latter would get worse over time as the userbase holding "old" coins increases and more users have to "recycle" their coins. Sooner or later you'd reach a point where the recycling transactions alone would already fill up block after block, as all of these transaction would have to take place on-chain. So no, I don't think so. I guess it would make for an interesting alt though -- at least for an observer, without any actual skin in the game. |
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1) Nodes only know in hindsight that there were competing branches. Miners are aware of all competing branches because they sometimes have to stop mining on one and start mining on another when it becomes the longest branch. Nodes (usually) don't keep copies of multiple, ie. competing blockchain states. If that were the case every single node would also propagate multiple competing blockchain states. This means that in case of an impending chain split (or orphaned branch) each different node stores a different blockchain state. It is only after one chain has become longer than the other that the nodes that used to follow the now orphaned branch are acknowledging the differing version of history and reorganize their blockchain state accordingly. And that's ignoring cases where competing branches may be intentionally withheld (ie. selfish mining). 2) Your whole security scheme would now hinge on a single block (ie. the one containing the most recent transaction of a particular set of coins). Deleting old unnecessary transactions doesn't change the security scheme. It's the blockchain that secures transactions, not the other way around. Deleting old unnecessary transaction requires deleting old "unnecessary" blocks leading to a shorter blockchain that is significantly easier to attack than a full blockchain. Additionally, and more importantly, you have the problem of old coins that haven't been moved since the early days. Since you can't delete singular transactions from a block without invalidating the whole block, even following the proposal of keeping only the latest movement of a coin you still have to keep every block until the youngest block with the oldest unspent transaction -- which happens to be the Genesis block, I'm afraid. |
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Lightning Network uses HTLCs as fundamental building blocks, so maybe this accounts for some of the HTLCs you are seeing that do not correlate to atomic cross-chain swaps? The first known mainnet LN transaction took place some time in late December 2017 [1] so that should be the first time that a LN related HTLC hit the blockchain. However there are currently more than 6000 LN channels open [2] so maybe LN opening / closing transaction don't satisfy your search criteria and thus don't show up in the first place. [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/first-real-bitcoin-lightning-network-payment-completed-via-bitrefill/[2] https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ |
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Pretending to be a newbie asking questions about hardware wallets only to then link to your own online shop selling a previously unheard of product smells pretty scammy. I'm not saying that it's a scam, I'm just saying that at least in my opinion that's not exactly a way to gain the trust of people.
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That's the thing though, except for encrypted paper wallets all other cold storage solutions also break with physical access. Compared to dedicated mobile devices or airgapped PCs a hardware wallet arguably still offers a higher level of both physical and software security.
What about an air-gapped hardware wallet? Would you trust that? Airgapping serves as a security measure to prevent unwanted online / network access by an adversary. That bit is covered by hardware wallets just as well as by airgapped mobile devices / PCs. As mentioned by others, all security flaws that had to be fixed so far required physical access, something against which airgapping doesn't help. Point being, if your main fear is people gaining physical access to your cold storage device / hardware wallet, you're probably better off with a hardware wallet, since unlike regular hardware they are at least reasonably secured against physical attack vectors. |
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But the Nano S sold about 1 mil units. I'm assuming anyone buying does hodl quite a bit and would therefore be quite clued up... so why trust in this?
Trezor have also suffered firmware hacks... KeepKey hasn't really had any major issues yet, but have a tiny market share.
Trezor has an excellent track record of fixing security flaws in a timely manner. I presume this is true for Ledger as well. KeepKey still has to prove itself in this regard. Problem being -- just because no major flaws have been found with KeepKey wallets yet, doesn't mean there are none. Especially given the fact that they likely have far fewer watchful eyes on them than the Ledger or Trezor wallets, due to the significantly larger userbase of the latter -- including many inquisitive minds hacking and probing about just for the fun of it. In other words, smaller market share means fewer people looking for security issues leading to fewer security issues being found. That being said, KeepKey could very well be more secure than Ledger or Trezor wallets. But we won't know until more people have given it a go. Ledger is based on a Secure Element which at every boot checks if the device is compromised. That's why they don't use seals, there should be a leaflet in every package mentioning that. Some people prefer this solution over Trezor's open-source code and hardware. It is worth noting that Trezors also ensure firmware integrity on the hardware level: https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/threats.html#reflashing-the-trezor-with-evil-firmwareEvery discovered security flaw in both Ledger and TREZOR needed a physical access to the device.
[...]
Cold storage might be a better solution for you. It's less convenient but you can also use, for example, Samourai on your Android device which offers high privacy and security. Cold storage for savings, Android wallet for shopping and F2F transactions.
That's the thing though, except for encrypted paper wallets all other cold storage solutions also break with physical access. Compared to dedicated mobile devices or airgapped PCs a hardware wallet arguably still offers a higher level of both physical and software security. |
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When a new transaction is being verified, is it sufficient to only check the transactions referenced by the inputs or is it necessary to check the entire chain of transaction going all the way back to the genesis block?
[...]
The utx is only referencing the previous tx. The tx referenced by that tx is just old data that nobody really needs, especially if it's contained in a block on the main chain, i.e. there are no competing branches.
Looking at the way Bitcoin transactions work this approach comes with the following problems: 1) Nodes only know in hindsight that there were competing branches. 2) Your whole security scheme would now hinge on a single block (ie. the one containing the most recent transaction of a particular set of coins). If you can't trace a coin back to its coinbase transaction you can't verify whether it has been mined or falsely conjured out of thin air. In other words, applying this concept on Bitcoin would result in a loss of both security and reliability. You may be interested in MimbleWimble's Cut-throughs [1], however. MimbleWimble has supposedly found a way to securely get rid of intermediate, historic transactions that are no longer needed. This is enabled however by a transaction concept that is vastly different from Bitcoin -- and any other alt, for that matter (at least as far as I'm aware of, if there are other alts applying this method I'd love to hear about them). [1] https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md |
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Every post from @anunymint apparently was deleted. The thread is now very difficult to understand because a significant portion of the discussion is missing. Some of this thread was archived here and here. I understand that they banned his account for circumventing a previous ban -- honestly I wondered why the banhammer didn't strike sooner -- but I also find it problematic that all his posts got deleted. Sure, there were a lot of dubious claims in his writings and at times things got a bit out of hand but it's not like he was spamming the boards like some of the n00b and bounty hunter accounts out there. Aw well. I just hope this case won't get instrumentalized as an example of "censorship on Bitcointalk". |
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3c) Experts in the field, e.g., computer vision, after looking at the dataset, will know how difficult the problem is.
Experts = Miners.
They will look at the current elected problem (equivalent to hash problem), and decide on whether to participate in the mining (training of the neural network). They do not rate a dataset per se.
So... human experts in the field will manually monitor their GPU clusters at all times to determine the difficulty of a problem? ಠ_ಠ Yes, so I guess the solution is to somehow automatically select the next block of POW problem, and let miners just work on it.
That's merely a vague way to describe one of the many problems of this approach, not the solution.
How to stop rogue clients from DDoSing the network by flooding it with wrong timestamps and turning 2 minute block intervals into 2 days or weeks or years?
By attaching a cost/fee to each broadcasted result? So miners are paying to mine blocks? Why would anyone pay to mine a block? How would currency be issued in a system where miners pay for mining blocks but don't receive any block rewards? Or does the fee simply get substracted from the block reward? In which case, how is it a fee if miners simply receive reduced block rewards to begin with? We will just follow how bitcoin does for handling DDOS. if bitcoin sucks at it, we will have to think of a way of facing DDOS attacks. Bitcoin handles the problem of timestamping by using a PoW scheme with an objectively determinable difficulty allowing for striving towards predetermined block intervals. It's why Bitcoin and other alts use cryptographic hashes as part of their PoW scheme and not a problem that can't be quantified without human intervention. I'd recommend taking a closer look at how and why PoW works and what problems it solves. |
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I'm no patriot, but I think Austria has gotten it quite right. Taxed like gold when used as an investment vehicle, taxed like a currency when used as a currency. And unlike Germany we still have LocalBitcoins, which is nice. Not sure how long Austria will keep these rather liberal laws up though, as the government tends to fuck up when the wrong interests are conflicted with. Also I'm not quite sure why there aren't any Austrian crypto-exchanges yet, seeing how there are at least 2 brokers with a very large distribution network within Austria.
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