I think Bitpay is still pathetically trying to leverage their position to push protocol development in a direction that suits them. They should have gotten the message a year ago, but I'm guessing some of their shareholders have that agenda.

I think Coinbase has put payment processing on the back burner if it's not bowing out of the sector entirely. They obviously want to shift resources elsewhere and put the brunt of integration on merchants. I think their exchange and custody products are their priorities now, probably rightly so.

This article left out the most interesting piece of all. Look at the top investors:


EDBI is backed/controlled by the Singaporean government. The chairman of EDBI's board is also chairman of Singapore's state Economic Development Board, a government agency. The Economic Development Board is tasked with "planning and executing strategies to sustain Singapore as a leading global hub for business and investment." EDBI is known as one of the venture capital arms of the Singapore Government.

Very interesting to see a nation-state investing in a Bitcoin mining company! Bitcoin bears, watch out...

At the end of the day, it comes back to what Satoshi said years ago:

And he was right. For something to be money, it doesn't need to be useful or have an actual purpose. It just needs to be scarce and transferable. Markets have never supported this idea that money must be "backed." That's easily disproven propaganda.


But that's the beauty (and hassle) of replacing central authorities: anyone can create their own money/token and there's no one to stop them. It just takes time (and fear/greed) for the market to figure out what's really valuable.

It reminds me of the dot-com boom. When money is being thrown around left and right, you've got to expect that greed.

People in the states have been getting arrested for years for trading P2P via Localbitcoins without MSB licenses or implementing KYC.

And decentralized exchanges simply can't have fiat money exchange -- it's impossible. Maybe stablecoins, but those just outsource third party trust to a different party. And that third party will be subject to all the compliance and banking woes that plague current exchanges (see Tether).

Centralized exchanges aren't going anywhere.

No major news site except Bitcoin.com covered the retail launch of the B3 miner, so it appears to be the only legitimate source. Roger's a dick, but I don't see the big deal.

In all honesty, the news section of Bitcoin.com seems no worse than Coindesk, and it's better than all the click-bait sites (Cryptocoins News and CoinTelegraph come to mind).

It depends on your jurisdiction, your filing status, the amounts in question and other details. You might have more success asking on the Legal board. That's where most tax discussion takes place.

In most jurisdictions, you'll owe capital gains taxes on any trading/investment profits. For example: If you buy 1BTC at $1,000 and sell at $10,000 that's $9,000 in capital gains. That gets multiplied by your capital gains tax rate to determine your tax liability.

So, that's a 37.5% increase in hashing power -- 33TH/s for $1,999 -- but power consumption has also increased to 103W per TH/s.

Let's see how it compares to Bitmain.


Looks like Bitmain still edges out GMO in terms of both output and power consumption. But it's close -- less than a $1 per TH/s and ~ 10W per TH/s. Seems like good progress in the battle to chip away at Bitmain's market share.

You're making a big assumption with that condition (highlighted in bold). Sure, you could do that, if you can afford to trade CME contracts, and if you want a super inefficient way to accumulate bitcoins -- which still doesn't solve the spot market counterparty risk problem. The primary motive to trade regulated cash-settled futures is lack of counterparty exposure to unregulated spot exchanges. But that fundamentally means you're trying to profit from spot market moves (in cash), not move the spot market. CME traders aren't turning around and wiring their profits to Bitfinex, etc. That would be an outlandish assumption.

This doesn't apply to cash-settled futures markets. Cash-settled = real arbitrage is impossible. You can set up hedge trades to profit from the price gap between markets, but there's no way to withdraw BTC from the futures side. So, there's no additional supply being dumped on the spot markets.

If contracts require delivery in BTC (supposedly this is how the ICE contracts will work), then I could see them affecting spot markets because it will be a legitimate avenue for investors/traders to buy actual bitcoins. That means real demand meeting real supply, and real arbitrage.

I recognize that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have significant influence over consensus forks, but that doesn't equate to a "single point of failure." I also recognize that ETH pool mining is highly centralized, but given the state of Bitmain and its proxies, I'm not sure I can agree regarding mining centralization in Bitcoin.

In any case, the Ethereum protocol is properly described as decentralized. It's just a description of how validation works in the protocol. I have no interest in engaging in a pissing contest between BTC and ETH with regard to "degree of centralization." I don't care about that.


As a starting point, we should assume that consensus never exists beyond the protocol one has opted into (by running a node).

Actual consensus to incompatibly fork is logically impossible; that requires 100% of users to not only upgrade, but to agree absent coercion. That's why I oppose any miner-backed hard fork "upgrades" in Bitcoin: if backed by hashpower, they are coercive and therefore unethical.

As such, I'm not of the belief that a "successful" hard fork requires 100% of users to upgrade. There's nothing wrong with communities splitting, and that's exactly what should happen sometimes. The fact that some level of hash power and user base remained on the Classic chain casts doubt on your idea that Vitalik Buterin is the ultimate arbiter as well.


Okay. I guess Ethereum really gets your goat, huh?

Anyway, I don't have a dog in this race. I have no reason to have strong opinions or argue about this crap. If Ethereum only exists as an example of what not to do with Bitcoin, then perhaps it even provides some value to Bitcoin development...

If it's decentralized, there can be no enforceable terms. So, the only thing we have is the code itself. I don't see how the DAO hack could be illegal on that basis according to most common law systems.


I'm on your side regarding the ethics of bailouts. However, I think it's really interesting that such bailouts require a hard fork and therefore a high level of community support. If such a hard fork succeeds, that suggests to me: 1) incentives were aligned to fork, 2) users were coerced by miners backing the fork, or 3) some combination. The ethics of any hard fork (aside from one where 100% of users are incentivized to fork, such as to address an existential protocol failure) are complex. Any given user may disagree, but they may feel forced economically to follow the herd.

Well, the ROI is much faster. That's for sure. And we can see that wages, benefits, pensions and social services are in decline as inflation eats our savings. So making capital work for us is increasingly important.

"27% of Male Millennials" -- fairly limited group. Good; still lots of room to grow. When "27% of retirees" agree, I'll probably be selling.


Millennials go back as far as the early 80s -- we're all part of the workplace already. The survey = 21 to 35-year-olds.

Actually, only a soft fork is required, since lowering the block size limit doesn't remove or relax consensus rules. All that would be required is 51% hash power support, and then users would follow the forked chain by default.

The problem is more philosophical: big blocks = BCH's raison d'être. If it turns out big blocks are unsafe, and block size must be lowered to just 2x that of Bitcoin, why does it even exist? What's the point?


BitPico also backed Segwit2x and tried to carry it out even after everyone else had abandoned it. I wouldn't assume anything about their motives here.

This could certainly be a ploy to execute a "failed" attack against BCH. If such a highly publicized "attack" were to fail, BCH might come out looking good, yeah?

Do you mean to link addresses/wallets together? Taint analysis?

Blockchain.info used to have a taint analysis tool, but it seems to have been removed. It wasn't very easy to use anyway.

Walletexplorer.com groups addresses together into wallets based on public transaction history, allowing some level of blockchain analysis. It seems to support bech32 addresses as well. According to the blurb at the bottom, the site developer works at Chainalysis now...

Whether or not "BCH is Bitcoin" isn't the issue here. This isn't a philosophical argument about bigger blocks.

BitPico is claiming the network is extremely easy to attack, and is supposedly mounting such an attack to destroy public trust in the coin. I'm not convinced their attack model is viable, and this feels like a publicity stunt. But I'm watching to see what they produce.

That's cute, but it's probably not going to work. The article's author is confused about how a 51% attack works. What BitPico seems to be planning is a "stress test" of extremely large transactions. They believe the following will result:


They plan to release a hard fork and they believe this will cause a multi-chain fork. In reality, the 5000 "attack nodes" are irrelevant in a hard fork because legacy nodes won't communicate with them.

And something tells me Bitmain won't let their baby be attacked so easily. If the majority of Bcash's hash rate is controlled by Bitmain or its proxies (and I believe that's true), they may be able to sidestep the attack very easily by censoring the attack transactions. The attack transactions will apparently be extremely large (their example is an average transaction size of 0.6 MB). BitPico assumes that only rational mining incentive dictates which transactions are mined:


That's pretty absurd when a well-capitalized company like Bitmain is extremely invested in Bcash's success. I would also be very curious to see what funds BitPico has set aside to pay transaction fees. Attacks like this are not free, and their model depends on driving transaction fees up.

What country?

It sounds like you're not planning to report the mining income as a business. As such, I'm not sure I understand the need for this.

If the coins were mined by you, that's still considered income. You're just calling it mining (hobby?) income instead of wage income, but there are still generally taxes due on both. So you have two separate tax liability issues: 1) the income and 2) capital gains.

Depending on your jurisdiction and the amounts involved, there may be no tax liability if the coins were gifted to you. Then you might just have capital gains taxes due when you sell.

You don't need to run an archival node in order to have full node security:


With features like blocksonly mode and pruning, bandwidth and disk space limitations aren't as problematic now. So bootstrap time is indeed one of the biggest disincentives, but even that has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years.

Nope, not really. It's true that for an asset to retain value, there must exist transaction liquidity and volume -- people need to use it. But beyond some basic threshold of network liquidity (which is surely less than 1 billion people), that's a tertiary concern.

The primary factors are supply and demand -- there are two sides to that equation. We don't need 1 billion people demanding cryptocurrency for basic spending; we just need demand that overtakes supply. And demand is measured in $$, not people. If BTC owners stop selling, price will rise. If BTC becomes increasingly accepted by the mainstream as a store-of-value asset, institutional demand may skyrocket as BTC owners restrict their coins from market. You might be surprised at how fast price can rise under these conditions.

Friedman LLP did a similar "balance check" last year before their relationship with Tether was dissolved. Since no real audit is taking place, one major problem with these statements is that the firms have no way to verify outstanding claims or liabilities on the deposited money. They can only verify that assets and liabilities roughly matched at one time, based on the information Tether provides them. That should give discerning people little comfort.

Anyway, I'm not too concerned. This whole spectacle is no different than any exchange being accused of insolvency. Other exchanges just don't announce publicly when bank wires are received...