The other issue I could see cropping up is as it becomes more popular is targeted attacks. Someone posting davef@bitc0intalk.org and things like that.

I am still thinking there has to be a way for me to offer up a service that does this that does not allow me to run with your funds. I'm not going to mind you, just more worried about the potential of other people doing it.


There are 2 things, 1 is the BGP as discussed before and also there are ways to attack DNS ( dns-poisoning )also:
https://www.okta.com/identity-101/dns-poisoning/

So it's all anarchy out there :-)

-Dave

Depends on the use case. An S3 is totally pointless to mine with, but is just about bulletproof, will run off an old 500 watt power supply and with the fans set to low speed makes a just about silent space heater.
Yes you CAN do the same thing with a 1 board S9 BUT even the stock S9 fans at low speed make more noise then the S3 ones and it's still not as reliable. It's not about making money, it's about generating heat at not a total loss.

You can drop an S7 in the trunk of your car and keep it there bouncing around for months and then take it out to demo mining to people and it will work. Put it back in your trunk and bounce it around some more.
If I sneeze too loud near an S9 a heatsink falls off......

So not 100% junk if you have a use for them.

Scrap heatsink aluminum is going for around $0.50 / lb here and the the circuit boards are at $1.00 / lb

-Dave

No they do not.
There have been dozens (hundreds?) of times when exchanges got hacked and people lost their coins and got nothing back.
There are countless times when people got their user info hacked and lost their coins and got nothing back.
There are dozens (hundreds?) of times when exchanges just closed their doors and took everyone's coins and they got nothing back.

And so on. Get a hardware wallet, learn how to use it and keep your coins in your control.
Anything else is just asking to loose them.

-Dave

Some thoughts

1) You should move this post to here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0 or start new one.

2) Tell people where you are in the post. Some people will ask in case you are close, others will not even bother.

3) As others have said shipping is the killer. So there is also craigslist / facebook marketplace / and so on for selling locally.

4) --> Make sure they work before selling them <--

5) Be realistic in pricing, an S7 will probably loose MORE then the $1.50 a day that ETF posted once you factor in everything, these will be for people to play with so you are probably looking at just about scrap metal / e-waste recycling prices.

-Dave

100000% yes.

And that is always going to be part of the problem. I never thought USDT would work, yet people love it. I thought once the lack of valid audits happened with USDT it would implode, but no it kept going. I thought once USDC was released and showed how to have public information and real shown audits and everything else USDT would start to die, but no it kept going. With the TERRA / Luna disaster I thought finally this will cause people to shy away from USDT....but nope.

Looking away from stablecoins there are 1000s of other shitcoins and tokens that people rode to the bottom. There are stocks that people do the same with.

Such is life, at least now we can get some cheaper BTC.

-Dave

No problem with keysend, but with more and more wallets and services allowing you to send / receive lightning payments with email I was just thinking if anyone else saw the security risk.
For small amounts it probably does not matter one way or another, but as a service or once larger amounts of money are involved I can see it being an issue.

"just send it to my email" works with PayPal, Zelle, and tons of other services. Having it for lightning is good, but having someplace go evil and steal funds is bad.....

-Dave

Since it was brought up in another post.

For those of you that don't know lightning address is a protocol that sits on top of the lightning network /  LNURL and allows people to send lightning funds to you using just and email address:

From here: https://github.com/andrerfneves/lightning-address/blob/master/README.md



The issue is that if you do not control the DNS and web server that the domain is connected to the person who does can put whatever they want in the lnurl and take your money.
There are a lot of hosted wallets that allow you to have their address as a way to accept funds. mrdave@bitrefill.me will put money into my bitrefill balance luridbank39@walletofsatoshi.com would put funds in my phone wallet, and so on.

BUT, if you don't tell me you sent the funds and they take the money unless you tell me I'll never know you sent them.

Don't get me wrong I use it, I have 1 address that I run myself in addition to those 2. BUT, if say someone sent me a tip and didn't tell me and walletofsatoshi.com was taking it [NOTE I DON'T THINK THEY WOULD JUST USING THEM AS AN EXAMPLE] they could skim a lot and get away with it. And if someone does say something, 'oops it's in beta our bad, here is your money'

I was going to offer one of my lightning domains for people to use but then I thought of this and am now thinking about the pitfalls of it.

-Dave

As has been said, this is not just a crypto thing. Don't let people know how much liquid / easily available funds you have in general.
It's not just the criminals who are going to rob you, or kidnap you and hold for ransom. It's the conmen, the relatives who need money, the tax people.

No, I'm not saying you should tell nobody. But, keeping your finances private and only let some people know is always a good thing.

-Dave

You don't say where you are and how much you want to trade, that matters a lot.

Picking on myself, for small and medium trades, living in the USA / NY area there are a few casinos a quick drive (under an hour) and Atlantic City and a couple in nearby states that are under a couple of hours (depending on traffic). For trades going either way if possible I try to meet there for a F2F. Good cell service so for the trade and lots of machines to pick some random bills from the stack to put in to verify they are good.

For larger trades, where I am buying if I REALLY want to avoid KYC there are plenty of people on the services listed here that have a good reputation: https://kycnot.me/
Could any of them go evil and start taking your money yes.

For larger trades where I am selling, it depends. Over the years I have built up a list of phone numbers of local people I trust, and there are some people here I trust too.

-Dave

Because....wait for it....they don't give a shit.
And they may be insolvent.
And if not and on the off chance what I posted is accurate or close to accurate, they don't want to tell people how they do things.
And....wait for it....they don't give a shit.  
And, if they have other controls in place like I said before only X coins in the hot wallet then they need to refill before sending and they will get to it when they get to it.
And they may be hoping that if people are forced to wait they cancel their withdraw and keep the coins on the exchange.
And....wait for it....they don't give a shit.

Could be 1000s of reasons some good, some bad. Could also be deliberate, i.e. they are close to but not insolvent. They CAN ride this out, but with the rumors swirling once they are on the other side they can come out and say, yes we had controls to make sure nothing bad happened, and look we are still here and functioning with no issues. All is good. And we have a lot of funds left for us to keep running. [So long as $85 is a lot of funds]

However, now and forever.....not your keys....not your coins.

-Dave

So I was both right and wrong. A bit of insolvency and a bit of they don't give a shit. At a guess this was going on for a while, CZ wanted control they would not give it so he forced the issue.

*Not* defending them, but yes I can see they have some configuration settings in their node to prevent overrun.
The back end of their service talks to the node and they have a hard limit of how many pending TX it can have before the back end pauses, waits for a block and sends the next batch.

Once again, I could see someone pushing this in terms of security. YES, you can move everything in 1TX if you get access, but if you set a limit of 2 BTCthat you can send per TX now you have to create 50 of them to move 100BTC and add if the device that talks to the node only allows a certain number. It could in have prevented what has happened to services that have been compromised.

NOT saying that this is what is happening here, but looking at it from the oddball security point of view it's not that bad an idea. Not great mind you, just not bad.
And if the worst they ever had before was a few hours backlog sitting in the server nobody would have even noticed.

Never underestimate programmers doing odd things to see if they can get it done with less work.....

-Dave

Are you sure it was an internet fault due to your ISP and not a power issue in the area?


In our old location we had times where the power was on but WAY undervoltage and it was causing all kinds of issues for equipment, some printers were even destroyed.
I would think the power supplies and miners would be tolerant but if the power supplies were trying to keep the voltage steady and the actual line voltage was bouncing as they were trying to fix something I could see something bad happening.

The issue we had was it was just over the cutoff for the generator and UPS units and only 1 leg so it turned into a real disaster.

-Dave

Yes but you see the same fake wallet.dat files coming up for sale over and over, and these are more or less the same thing.

Anyone with 5 minutes or so of time can create a fake paper wallet or wallet.dat or whatever, but that's work. Easier to scam the next bunch of newbies that come in with the same old thing.

Even if you tell people it's a scam they still think they know better and will find a way to get the BTC.
No different then the posts that still come up that they found a way to get private keys because they know math better then anyone and no matter what every cryptologist has said they are all wrong.....

Since here in the US we had a drawing for a $1.9 billion dollar lottery yesterday, my business today.....



-Dave

Small home miner they don't know and probably can't find out.
Larger home miner, they probably will not know what you are doing but if everyone else in your area uses X power and you use 2X power they know you are doing something.
If they care it's another matter.

It's the big data centers that are using megawatts of power, those are the targets, but as I said it's just because for the most part it's a easy target.
Can't go after Netflix / Amazon / Apple and so on for running older more power hungry equipment. Miners well they are simple to go after.

-Dave

Or miner manufacturers go back to making miners that don't look like miners:



Looks like a normal 2U server to me :-)

But on a serious note, it's easy to target miners. But looking at what I see in data centers here in the US, you could probably make more of an electrical impact by forcing all business over a certain size or or with more then a certain amount of server / router equipment to upgrade to newer more efficient servers / routers / whatever.

But, since that would cost mainstream businesses money we all know that is not going to happen. At least not in our lifetime.
Lets just pick on these newfangled miner people with their oddball internet money stuff.

-Dave

The wheels of justice move slowly but they will eventually run you over.
Always wondered what would happen in a case like this, if the total opposite happened. If instead of BTC it was some token that became worthless but before everything else came crashing down.
Would governments and enforcement spend the time and effort going after someone who stole $500000 that is now worth $1 or would they just let it slide.

Due to the Silk Road relationship I can see them going after it no matter what, but who knows.

-Dave

Thinking about it more, here in the US, banks have been doing charging inactive fees forever.
Makes you wonder if either the exchanges saw that and decided to make some money following their lead OR if there are people from the banking industry controlling some of these exchanges and just want to move them more in line with what they know / how they do business.

If they don't want people who are not actively trading as customers, they only have a couple of options.

They can just close their accounts, which will generate who knows how much grief of people complaining that their account with BTC0.00000001 that has been inactive for 6 years was closed for no reason.

They can change account levels and costs to make it pointless for small people to stay if they are not trading, but that may stop new people from coming in.

Or they just charge fees till the people they don't want leave on their own.

-Dave

Start rumor that bank is insolvent.
People run to withdraw funds.
Bank becomes less stable as they move funds to cover withdraws.
People see withdrawal delays.
More people panic and try to withdraw funds.

Not quite the same here, but that is kind of the point.

I don't trust centralized exchanges and neither should you, but because a competitor (with their own centralized token) is just not good business.

Are they going to implode, don't know and don't care. Neither should you, since you should not have any funds there or on any exchnage.

As for the delays, could be lack of funds, could be they don't have enough in their hot wallet and they have enough security in place that they need X number of people to move funds from cold storage and then they can only move X at a time. That's just good security.

-Dave

Solo mining to pools that have a low fee is better then running your own node and dealing with all the other things needed to do it, like setting up a stratum / pool server and everything else.

As for solo mining in general, there are arguments for solo vs PPLNS vs PPS mining. Each has different benefits and costs.

Solo tends to have the best fees BUT it can take years to find a block depending on the speed of your miners all the while you are making no BTC
PPS has the highest fees but you get paid consistently even if the pool has an unlucky time and finds no blocks.
PPLNS (and it's variants) on LARGE pools is the best compromise. Usually lower fees then straight PPS, and so long as the pool is large enough consistent payments.

You can use a site like https://www.asicminervalue.com/ to figure out about how much you will generate with each miner.

Don't forget to keep in mind difficulty increases, and everything else that may change.

-Dave

I'll also say (again) that a large amount of the fees are paid on the BTC network are not needed since you can send for less but for some reason some people are paying a lot more then needed.
For the last 8 blocks a 1 sat/vB fee would get you in.
None of them were filled.
On the block that is being worked on now there are pending tx with a fee of 201 sat/vB

That is just throwing BTC away.

-Dave