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

The issue is that not all of them are newbies, the account I mentioned in the 1st post was a full member from 2013 with 290 posts. If the account WAS compromised, which it probably was and all the person did was one post with a malware link then fine, it was deleted and gone and the account was banned. But, if there was a post from 5 years ago all you need to do was edit / add a link. Then have another account necro-bump the post and you have an old post, from an old member on the 1st page with a malware link in it.

Seems like a lot of work, but I'm sure someone could program a bot to do that somewhat easily.

Like I said, we are not your mom, but if the bpip extension can add a ban tag then the forum could probably do it too.
Or, when banning in general give more info.

-Dave

I can also see it happening more on larger / regulated / insured exchanges.

If they have some form of insurance I can see there being a charge to them by the insurance company for the number of accounts not just active ones along with the amount covered. Along with the possibility of other fees. Same if they have their customer service as an external company that charges per number of customers. They don't just care about the number of people who DO call but the amount that CAN call.

Kind of like the FAA requires 1 flight attendant per 50 SEATS on an aircraft, not per 50 passengers. Have 210 seats, you need 5 flight attendants, does not matter if you only sold 9 tickets for the flight and only 8 of them showed up you have 5 attendants working.

So if other places are billing the exchange like that then they are just passing the costs along, and probably adding a lot for even more profit.

-Dave

Just a random thought, but do people care why other users were banned?
Was reading a post and noticed the OP was banned, didn't really dig though their posts but did wonder what happened.

Does anyone think that the reasons for banning should be made public and shown on every post they made?

The reason behind it is users like this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=199736

Their account was most likely compromised and posting links to malware:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=199736


However, in many sections of the forum trust is not shown. You are just seeing activity / merit / posts.
So if instead of just posting 1 malware link and getting banned for it, the person who compromised that account could go back through the older posts and change / add links to malware or whatever. Yes the reported posts are removed, but what about the ones made a while ago.

Yes, it's a forum we are not you mom, people should know better then to just blindly click on links. But, still if you see an old post that is still up from a long term member you are more likely to click on it.

Just a thought.

-Dave

It's a cycle and it always has been for other things but casinos are always here.The altcoin and token and defi and dozens of small exchanges have come and gone.
So when the next big thing shows up the casinos will still be here, but there will be a lot of other campaigns for whatever that big thing is.
When that slows down / stops the casinos will still be here. Not worth reading more into it then that.

In the end it probably does not matter. If casinos went away something else would take their place. Looking here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=615953.msg61245149#msg61245149
Although there are a lot, most are not paying that much so at least for now, if you wanted to run a campaign for something and wanted to outbid the casinos it's not that expensive.

-Dave

Cool thing to see. I am starting to think more and more things like this will push BTC acceptance faster then some other methods.
People coming in for vacations and seeing that some smallish place can do it then why can't some larger ones.
This would make more people look into BTC as a viable option for their business and so on. Don't know if it will really happen that way but it's a thought.

Side note, is that you in the pictures?

-Dave

Places that use shopping cart software that is hosted / run by someone else.

A store can run WooCommerce or PrestaShop or Open Cart or Zen Cart or many others and the cart information never leaves their server. Name / address and what I bought stays local to them. Picking on Keystone since they are the ones we have been talking about they send all that info to a 3rd party to handle the cart.

Coinbase Commerce is a payment processor. Some want more info then others. But keeping it internal by running something like BTCPay is still better.

Just thinking that since this is about privacy and data leaks it is worth a mention.


The counterpoint is that if Shopify does get hacked (again) it makes the news, due to the size and nature of who they are and what they do. If some business is hosting it themselves and there is a data breach, if they don't find out about it or tell people about it we may never know that our info is out there.

-Dave

NYDFS:

What really is kind of funny is that they are a Texas based company as far as I can tell:
https://www.zoominfo.com/c/coinsource-inc/371531436

But according to their own site, if you follow that link I posed earlier with their licenses, they are not licensed in Texas.
Guess Texas people don't like following laws or something, since you are supposed to be licensed there.
That or they don't have any BATMs there, just corporate offices.

-Dave