hackers selling hacker tools.

hmm

sales pitch
Q: how do they make themselves look good and worthy of such a price.
A: say they got the tools from the NSA and use that publicity to cause drama and get some free advertising.

if xapo would cover losses of a hack with their own reserve. then i have 2 questions

1. why are they not securing customers funds in the same manner as their own reserves, for them to think customers funds could be lost but their reserves could not be

2. why if customers funds are just as secure as their reserves, would xapo think that their reserves would not also be taken, ni which case there are no funds left to cover customer losses.

in my eyes its either customer funds are not as secured... which needs to be fixed
or
xapos own funds are highly secure just like customer funds.. which case xapo needs another layer of security incase both pots are raided


anyone can say that customer funds are secure.
bitfinex said customer funds are secure by 3 methods
1. multisig with keys on different businesses/services (hot or cold more secure than standard transaction keys in single location)
2. cold store of 99%
3. insured by bitgo

but on the day of the "hack" all three failed
so nothing offers me any comfort that xapo in a scenario of a hack would not have their own funds at risk. or if their own funds are more secure than customer funds. you have to ask WHY!!.

"will be"
"hope to"
"will develop"
"faster then speed of light"

seems alot of money has been spend on something that is not even created yet.
and faster then speed of light made me laugh

does mainstream media talk about every US tax evasion/FIAT money launder court case.. nope
does mainstream media talk about every fed reserve audit.. nope
does mainstream media talk about many things about the truth of fiat.. nope
does mainstream media explain the bait and switch tactics of the fed that have screwed everyone.. nope

most of the time it ends up in a private documentary that may be interesting and insightful enough to appear on a documentary channel some day

legit employers are not "tax free" no matter what currency is sent by them or received to you.

in some countries the employer handles the tax BEFORE handing the employee the remainder..
so dont ever think that you should ever tell your employer to break the laws of most countries by suggesting they should pay you in bitcoin to evade tax.
in other countries the employee receives the full funds and its the employee that has to handle their own income tax payments.
so dont ever think that you should break the laws of most countries by thinking that being paid in bitcoin will obsolve you of tax implications

it does not matter what form of currency it is. there are income tax implecations to every country.
in short income tax is treated as if you received foreign currency. like an american does "remote" work for a european country and gets paid euros, as a easy comparison. to scenarios you should used to seek the correct tax implications.

tax evasion is a crime. so if you live in a country where incometax is a requirement, then paying it is a requirement no matter what type of currency was used.

tax avoidance can be done. this is not simply by accepting a different currency. this is about forming things like trusts or changing your nationality or you physically not living in a certain country for more than a few months at a time.
again its not simply accepting a different form of currency.
its mainly about who/where you are and who/where the business is, that concerns taxes. not the form/currency of the payment

if you live in america working for a legitimate company anywhere in the world, by u living in america most of your life you will end up needing to pay dollars to the IRS for your income you receive no matter the currency or method was

in short.
orphans occur. meaning if an exchange accepted a 'payment' with one confirmation (you called it a validation).. then if that transaction was on a block that initially confirmed. an exchange would treat it as payment accepted. give balance to a customer and then the customer would sell the coin and withdraw it. but imagine then, that block is orphaned..
the transaction is then added to a different block and confirms so some exchanges would give customers new balance again.

most of this is just bad coding of the exchange. but the simple solution for exchanges is to just request X confirmations that are above the chances of orphans. thus avoiding exchange balance double spending

orphans happen. and the average is 1%-2% chance per day.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks
so accepting zero or 1 confirm has upto 2% chance of being double spent by badly/lazy coded exchanges.

orphans can also happen for other reasons so some exchanges dont want to run the risk of the other reasons.
its also worth noting that orphans can also happen on differing algo's too. so dont be so sure that swapping to POS will solve the confirmation waiting time of exchanges, as exchanges would in some cases still prefer some time limit to reduce risk.

however its much easier to get exchanges to refine their code to add more checks and techniques to limit their double spend risks to make it easier to offer deposits with less confirmations needed.
however just for safety i still think upto 6 confirms can be deemed safe for a majority of transactions of large value, due to some of the risks of orphans in the past. (5 block orphan on october nineth 2015). though things like this are a rare occurance so some leanience is given depending on value being handled vs risk

yet some dev's want the opposite.. they want you to deposit bitcoins into exchanges. and instead of withdrawing funds to arbitrage, they want to give you some sidechain or altcoin that represents your balance to internally move between exchanges.
research : Liquid sidechain

exchange rate ends up the same

eg
10x 1btc = 0.02btc total in combined fee's
1x 10btc = 0.02btc single fee

but here is where things change.
if you are only depositing 1btc at a time. there is a bitcoin network transaction fee to deposit it. (roughly 11cents on average per tx)
meaning depositing 10 amounts costs you about $1.10.. but depositing it as one amount would only cost you just 1 cents

if you then withdraw funds. there is a bitcoin network transaction fee to withdraw(move funds out). again 1cents-$1.10 depending on single or split transactions

so instead of moving 10btc in one transaction=1 transaction fee to deposit. your paying 10 transaction fee's
so instead of removing 10btc in one transaction=1 transaction fee to withdraw. your paying 10 transaction fee's

not only have i mentioned the bitcoin network tx fee's make a difference but also the exchanges own withdrawals fee's
some exchanges dont do percentages as thier withdrawal fee. its sometimes a fixed amount.

in short "exchanging" doesnt matter much when or how much you do in one go. but putting the funds in and taking the funds out can make a difference

firstly
smart phones get handled.
so if you steal a smart phone then with a bit of dustpowder and some tape you can literally get the fingerprint from the screen of the same device you want to raid.

secondly
finger prints are not exact.
there are hundreds of 'indicators' on a finger, but get a papercut a few of them change/disapear, get old or fat and it changes. get calluses from hard labour work, a few of them change/disapear. use chemicals as a janitor on your hands in an accident, a few of them change/disapear
this is why the threshold for 'comparison' in criminal evidence is so low at a 6-12 indicator points because getting ALL indicators will never be possible.
meaning you cannot rely on hand picking just 6-12 indicators last year, hoping they will still be there in a few years. criminal finger print comparison looks at MANY indicators (above threshold) from an old sample and hope to find just 6-12 indicators on a newer sample

thirdly
retina scans are not perfect either.. diabetes, catacts, blindness, and other conditions can 'blur' the image obtained from a retina scan..

fourthly
identifyers in your head (password) is much safer than identifyers on your finger. imagine it this way. having fingerprint ID is like shouting out your email password every time you touch a light switch, cutlery, a bottle, even the tv remote.

in short trying to solve a security issue by making is stupidly easy for others to get hold of with some tools, or worse case eventually lose you access to due to nature purely based on laziness of someone clicking a few buttons and thinking about safe storage(using their brain).. is ultimately not a solution to security

it made the title laughable.. brain wallet without the brain....
you may like my next pun..

ill give this idea my middle finger

i think the OP is a beginner. i was thinking more of a task to help him learn more about bitcoin such as pools, hashrate, difficulty, price and return of investment that way he gets aquented with bitcoin while learning c++ and then can start to offer services later

well you can just search manually how many hashs a latest ASIC can do https://enshop.bitmain.com/product.htm
well you can just search manually how much the latest ASIC costs https://enshop.bitmain.com/product.htm
well you can just search manually how much hashpower a pool has https://www.antpool.com/
well you can just search manually how many blocks a pool solves. https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hours
well you can just search manually how much bitcoin is worth

set up the maths. and then at a later date work on how to automate it and grab long term data once your happy with the math,

anyway is was just a suggestion to expand your learning

X * Y

good start as a lesson one for c++
but maths gets more fun when you start grabbing real bitcoin data(live and historic) to find patterns

like:
part 1
getting the hashpower of mining pools and calculating how many mining ASICs total that hashpower.
then getting the number of blocks that pool solved to get a income amount.
then doing the maths to work out profitability and ROI just based on the known retail prices of ASICs vs income of those ASICs

then getting the same data each day over a certain period, or finding historic data to save you having to wait around to accumilate data, to account for the variation of ROI depending on difficulty changes and competition

part 2
after getting a long term list of results to show the variations of income / ROI projections.
putting those numbers against bitcoins price history to then see a rough guide to the speculative difference over that time

that kind of information is something people like to see

not only would the above help you learn more math. but also how to API call data or scrape data from other sources

firstly bitfinex only has human identifying logs on their own deposit users/addresses. it would require OTHER exchanges to look at the taint of their future depositors to see where funds came from. this is because im pretty sure the "hacker" wont put funds back into bitfinex after that.

ok. so again,
let the hacker pay you a small amount and you then deposit funds into an exchange whether it be coinbase, bitinstant etc.
now the exchange reports it to the authorities that they have a user that has funds from the bitfinex 'hack'
the authorities request a warrant to enter the your home, using local authorities in the your area to search and seize all of the your computers to find evidence of a connection..
arrest you and question you for upto 48 hours.

i forgot to add in last post
freezing all of your assets, where you need to higher a lawyer and spend months and many thousands trying to claim your innocence in a hope to get funds released.

have a nice day

watch peoples addresses?
you mean people who publicly advertise their addresses so that there is some kind of pseudonym/human link to an address?

ok, sounds like a plan...
i ask the hacker to send a few satoshi's to:
3KfPAawFK8qG8KmRBHfkyNtvJwSLwHDJam
(the OP's address found in his profile)

then let the whole community harrass the OP to ask what his connection to the hacker is. maybe start doxxing him
let interpol request a warrant to enter the OP's home, using local authorities in the OP's area to search and seize all of the OP's computers to find evidence of a connection..
arrest the OP and question him for upto 48 hours.

have a nice day

zebpay?

never heard of it.
and by the sounds of their shoddy error correction and lack of notifications.. i think no one should use it.. you never know what other basic checks they are missing.

might be best to try some of the better known mobile wallets,
https://www.bitcoin.com/choose-your-wallet?category=mobile
just stay away from
Money controlled by a third party
and look for
Control over your money
that way you have access to the private keys as this is the main important thing.

and there is the problem
people want their own local store to accept bitcoin but are too scared to stand with their own local store and help them set it up. they think "someone else should do it" (quoting many other people from the past)
you do realise that although bitpay and coinbase are a 'someone else', but training a retailer about bitcoin, satisfying their questions and aversion to try something new that has negative press isnt going to magic itself away simply because your sitting in your house wishing your local corner store would take bitcoin. if you want your local store to accept bitcoin, you need to be involved with helping them out. not crying from a sofa.

as for needing to be a business. my idea is not a permanent solution and not a solution for national chains. its just a few week introduction which due to not every customer being a bitcoin holder, wont involve much cashflow. and because of this. that small amount of support you offer to introduce them to bitcoin, wont meet the financial thresholds to consider you as a business, nor a MSB in most countries(pretty much all, but i havnt checked them all)

like i said its just a bar tab.
just like prepaying anything.. drinks in a pub, wedding planning, cinema bookings, pre-release video games,
your just prepaying for future customer and accepting bitcoin as a 'ticket' that the business has processed a cash transaction.

if you think a local store is going to do over a few thousand $$ in bitcoin transaction in just a few weeks, then you are mistaken.
in most cases the money you will use as a bar tab is no different then buying a round of drinks for a group of 6 people.

this topic is about local stores.. not international corporations afterall.

the way i see it is this
if you live in a small town in england. and you know a shop in YOUR town that YOU wish would accept bitcoin. dont sit on your sofa crying about how some corporation in america hasnt spent thousands of dollars to travel to your small town to train the small shop about bitcoin, offering their services as a middleman. do what i did and help the shop understand what bitcoin is and how easy it is to accept bitcoin just using basically a calculator and a piece of paper with a QR code on it. once they are happy then they can decide how popular it is to go it alone, or not bother after a while.

Mr C Wright would pay you in dog biscuits for one of satoshi's private key's
after all he is in debt so cant pay you anything else,

the australian gov are after him and the only way to avoid jail time is to have the private key to use as evidence for a reasonable doubt defense that the pile of PUBLIC keys he fraudulently used as a trust collateral was his, so having atleast 1 key that he would then own would free him of the fear of arrest... for now

he is so eager to show the world he actually has a private key that he would obviously pay you in dog food for that privilege

the best success for local stores is easy
set up a prepaid bar tab.
EG hand the business upfront enough fiat to cover them for a couple weeks(think bar tab) and tell them if ask to pay by bitcoin, just check the app (your website) to inform the customer how much bitcoin the total is. display the QR code (your bitcoin address) and when it says payment received let the customer leave with the 'cash' receipt, and take the fiat funds out of the "bar tab".
and you just refill the bar tab if it gets low.
no risk to the retailer as they already have the cash
later on they can set up professional services(bitpay/coinbase) and/or go solo after your introductory period.

no risk to retailer, no weird accounting process needed. not even needing to change anything on the cashier register, the cashier just rings it up as a cash transaction because the cash is already in the retailers safe.

but as i said trying to get an employer to mess around with business accounts, obtaining bitcoin and dealing with taxes.. well thats alot of work

from real life experience. its actually quite easy to get retailers onboard. you just have to know who your talking to and what your trying to say to them. after all the very next day/week the retailer has fiat, so to them its no difference than accepting visa, mastercard, cheques or paypal.


but as for employers, due to taxes and accounting, trying to get a fiat business to hand its own staff bitcoin is a bigger headache and not worth changing their payment, tax and accounting routines just for one employee

time for another "bank run"