There are some ISPs that do block traffic traveling through port 8333 (the port that bitcoin software uses by default). This is mostly schools, libraries, and employers wanting bitcoin traffic not to take up their limited resources.

ISPs can also see where your internet traffic is going unless you are using tor or a VPN, in which case, your ISP would be able to see the VPN or tor server your traffic is going.

Altcoins are vulnerable to 51% attacks because they share mining algos with other altcoins (or with bitcoin), and the hashrate being utilized towards the altcoin is less than a majority of the hashrate for that algo.

In order to perform a 51% attack on bitcoin, an attacker would need to invest in mining equipment with mining capacity equal to >50% of the network hashrate. Once a 51% attacker executes his attack against bitcoin, the value of his mining equipment would decline substantially. This is not true for most altcoins.

While this is often true for altcoins, this has nothing to do with their vulnerability to a 51% attack.

No. There are no limits to the pardon power, except that only the President can issue a pardon for crimes against the United States (Federal crimes). After the Civil War was over, President Johnson pardoned all the confederate soldiers in order to heal the country.

Trump and his associates will likely be prosecuted for political reasons by the next administration, especially those associated with Harris. A pardon would preempt those political prosecutions.

I suspect this is part of Trump's long-term strategy in the event that he decides to run again in 2024. Trump can be seen as sticking up for Americans in trying to get them a bigger stimulus check and trying to get the pork that will go to special interests removed. My guess is this will result in a higher price tag, which goes against conservative principles, but this should expand Trump's overall support.

The threshold for being eligible for PPP loans was very low. Part of this was so the money could get out the door to businesses as quickly as possible. The program itself was also negotiated quickly, which added to the mess. I suspect the panic in our country (and the world) in March/April was the result of Chinese propaganda and the amplification of fear-based social media posts via the Chinese government. IMO if the stimulus in the spring, along with the early response was thought-out much more methodically, we would be in a much better position today.

Putting all the money towards direct stimulus payments will result in many people receiving money they have nothing to do with, and some people not receiving enough money to make ends meet while spending on only the basic necessities. There should be some amount of targeted stimulus for the needy, such as modest unemployment insurance payments (UI should never exceed the amounts an employee received while working, except in extreme edge cases).

I am glad that 2020 is finally over. This has been the worst year in a generation, if not longer for many if not most people throughout the world.

There has been a lot of pain and suffering this year, and I can only pray that the end of 2020 will bring the end to that.

There could be reasons other than arbitrage that exchange customers will want to move their coin between exchanges. For example, one exchange might offer particular trading pairs that another exchange does not, one exchange may have different lending markets, or betting lending terms than another, one exchange may allow for fiat withdrawals under better terms, among other reasons.

Exchanges charge for withdrawal fees today, and they may charge transfer fees when transferring via LN that are in line with what the exchange will anticipate paying for closing tx fees divided by the number of transactions the LN expects to be able to make before having to close the channel.

Exchanges should keep most of their coin in cold storage, and you are correct coin in an open LN channel is part of a hot wallet. They could have the closing transactions go to their cold storage wallet, even if this will add minimal additional security. Having open LN channels will be something exchanges would have to manage.

Exchanges are generally profitable, and should have assets in excess of their customer deposits if their business is run well. If an exchange has 10,000BTC in their various wallets, but their customers have a total of 9,500BTC on deposit, would you be concerned if the exchange accepted up to, say 400BTC from another exchange that was not actually received until the end of the day? The exchange would be able to process all customer withdrawals if everyone withdrew all of their bitcoin.

I would be more concerned if exchanges did what you describe and it resulted in fractional reserves.

IMO, exchanges should use large LN channels amongst each other to facilitate transfers between exchanges. Exchange A could allow their customers to send coin to their accounts at Exchange B instantly, and the two exchanges could instantly settle the transaction via their open LN channel. There would be no need for the customer to generate/provide a LN invoice, only their account details of their other exchange account.

I don't think the WH was part of the recent negotiations (he has limited ability to negotiate considering he is leaving office in a month). After the details of the bill were made public, there was backlash to some of the provisions in the bill, and there appears to be bi-partisan support for the changes Trump is asking for, including in Democrat leadership. I would expect Trump to get what he wants without giving major concessions.

I have mixed feelings about the PPP loans. They were intended to keep employees on the payroll who otherwise would have been laid off. This meant that employers would not have to layoff, and subsequently rehire many of the same workers once the economy opened back up. It was intended to be a form of unemployment payments to workers via their employers. Unfortunately, many PPP loans were abused, and many businesses got them that didn't need them. It also gave political cover to local officials to impose lockdowns when they were really not necessary that early in the pandemic.

That is a very reasonable expectation, and I expect the same. My point is that if your information is leaked via the Ledger database hack, it will not be the end of the world.
Walking through a tough neighborhood with money sticking out of your pockets would probably result in you getting robbed.

It sounds like they were using a 3rd party service to help them with sending marketing emails, and they gave the 3rd party service access to the database via an API key.

This could have been that the API key was somehow leaked, or it could mean the 3rd party service had something misconfigured on their end that allowed their service to leak information it had access to.

I think based on the timing, for those who have $600 in the bank, most of this stimulus money will be spent by consumers. Based on the savings rate earlier this year, most of the $1200 stimulus money was put into savings and paid down debt.

Consumer spending was down in November, which may signal a slow Christmas shopping season this year. If there is too much inventory left over after Christmas, production of goods would have to go way down to avoid inventory glut, triggering a recession.

They obviously have the txids of all the payments they have received, as they know the private keys of all the addresses they have received payment to. I don't think it would be a major breach of trust for a company to keep track of how each of their customers paid. They obviously need to keep track of if each customer paid or not.

The only real additional information leaked is the fact that each person at one point likely owned some amount of crypto at one point. Everything else is already public for many people.

I don't think many people want to harm a person solely because they have a lot of money. It is probably more common for a criminal to threaten to harm someone unless they pay a ransom. If a criminal were to do this to someone without the means to pay, they would be risking years/decades in jail for nothing.

In your bitcoin.config file, you can adjust some settings. You can set the minrelaytxfee to a higher fee rate.

Also, if you are not performing analysis frequently, you can set persistmempool=0, and restart your node immediately after completing your analysis. This will result in your mempool being wiped each time you stop your bitcoin node. If you stop and quickly restart your node with this setting, you will miss some number of transactions that would have been relayed during the brief period your node was not running.

You could run the getrawmempool RPC command, add those txids to a list of txids you have analyzed that remain on the list for x days. When you run your analysis, you can compare the txids to what is in the mempool to the txids on your list. You can also review each confirmed block, and any transaction that has been confirmed can also be removed from your list.

There are a lot of people who purchased a ledger to store nominal or modest amounts of coin. There are probably many more people who have purchased a ledger who no longer have coin for one reason or another.

There are no txid's disclosed in the databreach, so it will be difficult to conclude how much coin anyone who purchased a ledger had or has.

A person's address is generally public information, at least most of the time. I would not be terribly worried about my address being in this breach.

If the transaction is associated with your wallet, you can do one of two things:
*restart bitcoin with the -zapwallettxes option. This will cause bitcoin core to 'forget' all transactions associated with your wallet, and rescan the blockchain for transactions associated with addresses in your wallet.
*use the RPC command removeprunedfunds, which will remove the transaction from your wallet.

Please note that removing a transaction from your mempool will not affect any other node's mempool, and your transaction can still confirm in the future as long as it is valid.

I am not sure what level of access you have to the AWS account sponsoring your site. However, it is possible to setup a storage bucket so that anyone can access it, but that the requestors IP address is among the IP addresses of the same region the files are stored in. See this stack overflow discussion. You can also setup the storage bucket such that the requestor pays for egress traffic.


Using a database will not solve this problem. There are some things a DB can do to make sorting go from O^² to O^²/n, but this is still exponential growth.

You make the argument that your input size is sufficiently small such that having exponential complexity is okay, and you may have a point.



AWS is very reliable. I would not expect much downtime when using AWS or other major cloud providers. Egress traffic is very expensive though.

This works out to approximately a 24-minute download. I measured a download speed of ~125 Mbps using a colab instance.

Not necessarily forks. If it takes a long time to download (and verify) a block, it becomes more difficult to quickly determine if a transaction is valid or not. This would make it difficult to even evaluate the risk of accepting an unconfirmed transaction.

The cost of purchasing two IP addresses from different subnets would be the same as purchasing two IP addresses on the same subnet. This might be slightly more complex from a technical perspective if the same VPS is going to be associated with both IP addresses.

Banning an entire subnet would potentially also ban some legitimate users.

Banning an entire subnet would probably be something most node operators would want to do manually. Until the node operator discovers the high number of IP addresses acting maliciously, the attacker would be able to execute a DOS attack. If the banning of a subnet would be done via automation, an attacker could potentially buy rent IP addresses from many subnets that are sufficient to get nodes to ban the subnet, and cause the nodes to be more vulnerable to sybil attacks.

All exchanges have struggled with support in recent years as they have experienced growth their support teams cannot keep up with.

Raising the issue on social media is a good way to get the attention of support, and may elicit a quicker response. I don't think opening multiple tickets will be helpful.

If it takes too long to download a block, you could potentially be accepting a transaction that relies on inputs that have already been spent. In other words, it opens you up to double spend attacks.

The UTXO set and number of on-chain users is constrained by the maximum block size. You could also say that the UTXO set is a factor of actual book sizes.

It is trivial to gain access to IP addresses. An attacker could use a single server that controls many IP addresses.

Having a bank account is not the same as receiving what amounts to bribes from the government/government-related entities. I also understand that Trump had attempted, unsuccessfully to do business in China and ended up not being able to make any money out of China, with all this being before Trump ran for President in 2015.

I know that China invests heavily in technology, and also has a habit of stealing IP. China also tends to use Americans to betray their country and spy on America, and steal American technology.