What's not correct when talking about 0.01 BTC? You mean USD 2.50,- are worth complaining about when sending 0.01 BTC? Depends on your use case, I guess. If you're just trying to send some money to one of your buddies across the street, sure. If you're talking about international remittance it's still a good deal unfortunately. PayPal, banks, Western Union, etc all take a bigger cut in that case.

Aw geez. Thank you for correcting me! I had a feeling that my memory was off but couldn't quite put my finger on it.

I doubt there would be enough liquidity for most ICO tokens. As CodyAlfaridzi already pointed out, shorting an ICO token would also require someone else providing the long position for you.

Even when it's rather obvious that an ICO will go down the drain eventually, remember the old saying: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

If I recall correctly a patch for this backdoor / vulnerability was released as soon as it was made public. That was more than a year ago and as far as I'm aware of that was pretty much it, with no further reports of underhanded code changes or suspicious network traffic after that.

Looking at the Antbleed website subverting this backdoor / vulnerability has been as simple as adding a loopback entry to the /etc/hosts file [1], making blocking it a fairly easy affair.

[1] https://www.antbleed.com/



...and there are only two big manufacturers of which only one creates GPUs that are really worthwhile for mining.



There were other ASIC manufacturers before Bitmain and there will be other ASIC manufacturers after Bitmain. Current market dominance does not necessarily mean that they will retain it, especially as the market grows and becomes interesting for hardware manufacturers outside of crypto, many of which are far larger than Bitmain.

Bitmain's dominance is a problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the problem lies with ASIC mining itself.

I was in touch with TF a couple weeks back and can confirm that they are indeed issuing partial reimbursements.

Your mileage may vary, but at least in my case the process was pretty straightforward. No payment request or anything else that could be used as part of a scam -- just a signed message with one of my older Bitcoin addresses to confirm ownership. I'm not saying that I'd entrust TF with funds in the future (no hard feelings) but this reimbursement process is definitely the real thing.

Oh wow. At first I assumed that we are talking about some guy spreading mining malware. But getting a jail sentence for merely for running a JavaScript miner... that's pretty tough.


Monetization via mining scripts is pretty much the only way to monetize a website without charging subscription fees or selling your users' data. Compared to other means it's preserving your users' privacy. I'm not saying that I support websites running mining scripts, it's just that I don't see the alternatives as much more enticing.



It's a question of quantity and likely a lack of alternatives.

A handful of visitors will only give you a fraction of a cent, regardless of whether you monetize via advertising or via a mining script. Once you start looking at tens or even hundreds of thousands of daily visitors though, these fractions start to accumulate. I have no idea how profitable running a mining script is compared to running ads, but I presume that most websites that run mining scripts are not able to run high paying ads an alternative (eg. advertisers pay more for a blog about financial consulting than your friendly neighbourhood torrent site).

You mean someone opened the box or someone opened / broke apart the hardware wallet itself?

The latter should be fairly obvious and I wouldn't be using the Trezor anymore at that point. If someone simply opened the box, you should be fairly safe assuming you don't use the Trezor's default seed phrase and create one yourself by selecting words from the BIP-0039 word list: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

Make sure to select words from the BIP-0039 word list randomly, not by selecting lucky numbers or words you more easily remember. Using dice may help as well during the selection process. Use a strong passphrase on top just to be sure (ie. when setting up your wallet you not only enter the seed phrase, but optionally can also add passphrases for multiple accounts in addition to your PIN). Make sure to back up your seed phrase.

The wallets hardware and firmware itself is fairly tamper-proof, so if someone tried to update your Trezor with malicious code you'd get a warning whenever you try to access your wallet. The physical hardware itself is rather unlikely to be opened up and tampered with without any obvious signs.

SatoshiLabs has a nice overview of possible (known) attack vectors btw:
https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/threats.html


Edit: I was utterly mistaken regarding the BIP-0039 mnemonic. Please refer to HCP's post below.

Does no one write down backups on pieces of paper anymore? Might be just me, but I'm too paranoid to store 2FA backups on an online service.

If your network is ASIC resistant you need to worry about being prone to GPU miners that have huge hash rates. If you are GPU mined like the majority of at least the minor alts you have a much larger pool of potential adversaries. That's the point I'm trying to make.

It is also worth noting that one tends to underestimate the scale of GPU mining operations. Those are commercial operations buying GPUs wholesale. Mining has become an uphill battle for the hobbyist ever since it turned into an industry, no matter if we're talking about GPU or ASIC mining.

That being said, I'm fully with you that the large upside of GPUs is that they are easier acquired by regular people. I honestly wish that ASICs would also be as accessible.

Oh wow... checking out my hometown of Vienna I see that we apparently got 76 ATMs in the city. I wonder how current / reliable this map is though. I remember seeing a similar website in the past indicating Bitcoin ATM locations where none existed anymore. However I'm pretty sure that this map is actually missing some of the Vienna Bitcoin ATMs, but maybe those already got removed and I'm out of the loop myself.

Still I wonder how much use these ATMs see, given how the usually have quite steep fees compared to using exchanges.

There are some upsides to relying on ASICs as well though.

If you're one of many GPU mined coins, chances are that there is already enough hashpower out there to easily attack you. So while for the moment being this hashpower may be used for mining other coins, any larger GPU miner (or group of GPU miners) could easily hit you with the majority hashrate just for lulz and profits. Presumably that's what happened with BTG just a few weeks ago [1]. If your network relies on dedicated ASICs, you're not as prone to this sort of attacks -- assuming you're the largest coin relying on these ASICs.

In short: Relying on GPU mining leads to another set of security and stability challenges, due to your coin sharing mining hardware with other coins. Therefore the decision between accepting ASICs and trying to be ASIC resistant is not quite as clear-cut as one may believe.

[1] https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/07/bitcoin-gold-btg-about-to-hard-fork-to-prevent-further-51-attacks/

Only a handful of countries straight out ban Bitcoin, mostly under the guise of preventing money laundering.

Here is a good overview of the current legal status of Bitcoin worldwide, including some of the rationales:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory

Thank you as usual, DarkStar_ and ChipMixer! Happy Canada day, DarkStar_, and good luck to all applicants

Note that decentralization isn't a concept exclusive to crypto.

All free markets act decentralized. This includes traditional stocks, bonds, certificates, etc. Exceptions include communistic regimes based on centrally controlled economies (eg. USSR and friends) and to some extent central banks trying to steer the bonds market. Centralized market places such as stock or crypto-exchanges, not even centrally issued assets such as ICOs or stocks make for a centralized market, as long as market participants can freely trade amongst each other.

Don't mistake market capitilization for value I mean you probably don't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question.

But yes, it's a great example of why market capitalization alone is a worthless metric when deciding upon the "worth" of a company / asset / whatever, be it crypto or be it the traditional stock market. Hence volume (eg. selling 1,000,000 coins at USD 10,- is likely a more reliable indicator of a stable price than selling a single coin at USD 10,-) is often taken into account as well; alas volume too is a rather flawed metric in that it can get easily manipulated by wash trades and the like. Still, a market with a daily volume of USD 1,000,000,- is likely harder to manipulate than a market with a daily volume of USD 1,000,-. Or, depending on your point of view, such a market merely invites a different class of manipulators.

So anyway, where do I get this coin of yours, I've heard it's bigger than Exxon?

Gold Member... Diamond Member... Lambo Member... Private Jet Member... wouldn't this ultimately lead to Bitcoin Member anyway? ;P

Keep in mind though that with acquisitions such as these it's rarely only about buying a platform or product, but also about buying knowledge and experience.

Say what you will about Coinbase, but being one of the first exchanges they likely have some of the most experienced devs in the field.

1. Be wary of greed and how it clouds your decision making.

2. Be more selective when investing and more conservative when evaluating the risk / reward factors. The risk is usually much higher and the rewards are usually much lower.

3. Diversification accounts for nothing when the whole market turns to shit (ie. alts are a bad bad hedge against Bitcoin crashes despite the tendency to outperform Bitcoin during bull runs).

I seriously hope they won't. While Facebook has an incredibly wide reach it's one of the last companies that I'd like to see getting involved in crypto.

The most common supply line attack vector is a third party reseller making a copy of the original seed of your hardware wallet. This is easily thwarted by reinitializing your freshly received hardware wallet with a mnemonic of your own choosing, using the BIP-0039 wordlist.

Hardware wallet firmware is cryptographically signed and can not be overridden with malicious firmware without the hardware wallet alerting its owner -- at least that's the case with the Trezor, I assume it's the same with Ledger but I'm unfamiliar with their hardware.

Of course there's no such thing as 100% security, but I'd still argue that most hardware wallets are reasonably tamper-proof. (note: The hard- and software part, that is. As mentioned above, the original seed phrase cards are fairly easy to tamper with, I assume)