Thanks. I guess since this threat is sort of existential to the protocol that the fork would be non-contentious. Is there any consensus about what algorithm might be chosen?


I assume we can add new rules requiring signatures to conform to a new signature algorithm. But without a hard fork, wouldn't we also still need to enforce use of ECDSA?

I came across an interesting article by nopara73 (who works on HiddenWallet and TumbleBit stuff). He discusses when quantum computing will break elliptic curves:



He concludes that since we don't expose Bitcoin public keys when transacting (only hashes of public keys), that our bitcoins are safe. That is:

So, I have two questions.

1) Aside from the specific case of Pay-to-IP in earlier versions, is the above correct?
2) What is the general plan when ECDSA is broken? Hard fork to a new signature algorithm? Simply never reuse addresses?

Accepting payment doesn't necessitate hodling. Maybe they could hook up with a licensed payment processor like Coinbase.

Eventually, BTC might be held in government reserves just like other hedging assets -- gold, etc. It's rational to be skeptical now, but don't ignore the trends. Gold also rallied over 600% in a decade (early 2000s). It's volatile but is still considered a value hedge.


Yes. It's also a privacy hole. Payments provably linked to a taxpayer ID can have implications for de-anonymizing your wallets.

Sure, it's a good thing for establishing legitimacy. What better endorsement could there be than government acceptance? It would mean that mainstream acceptance is inevitable. That's a giant leap from 5 years ago when mainstream opinion said that BTC was only for drug dealers and criminals.


It's definitely a way for governments to take our coins. I would never pay my taxes in BTC, just like I would never sell after a prolonged downtrend. Both Wall Street and governments want your coins cheap. Don't give it to them.

VPN privacy is overrated. You're tunneling your private data over an insecure medium. And then you're trusting the VPN not to snoop on your data (or to keep IP logs on you). Most of your holdings should be in cold storage (VPN should be irrelevant). Even your spending wallet can be on an air-gapped computer, where you push only signed transactions from an online machine. You can use TOR to do so for privacy purposes.


Only for an online wallet or third party signing setup (as the title implies). In practice, I recommend against both. I much prefer an offline signing environment. Multisig can be used for additional security.

Not necessarily. My impression is that exchanges (as well as ICO operators) are mainly concerned about major world superpowers like the US and China -- emphasis on the US. Who else has actually shut down exchanges for noncompliance, or come after ICOs for securities violations? The EU is all bark and no bite.

As expected, over the last couple years, several exchanges have started either barring US residents entirely or otherwise requiring strict KYC. This is the new dichotomy. On one side, KYC is not enforced and VPN/TOR can be used to circumvent prohibitions. On the other side, KYC is mandatory (e.g. where US residents are explicitly allowed).


I'm extremely paranoid about my documents getting into the wrong hands. As a general rule, I avoid ICOs that require KYC (but I generally avoid ICOs anyway and focus on trading after launch). You can always use decentralized exchanges to trade tokens without KYC.

Eventually, trusted identity services (maybe Civic and others) will emerge and will act like credit reporting agencies for identity verification. This is better than every ICO doing their own KYC, but it still requires centralized PII storage, which is fundamentally dangerous for us.

EXMO should provide a transaction hash in your history. If not, there may be an error or delay on their end.

Check your withdrawal address on a block explorer and make sure your wallet is synced. If you still haven't received it within a couple hours, I would definitely open a support ticket and explain the situation:

https://exmo.com/en/support
support@exmo.com

Fair enough, I agree we don't have all the information here. The report isn't explicit at all. I guess I just assumed that if he were selling OTC that he wouldn't mention exchanges. The blockchain movements and Jesse Powell phrasing it literally as dumping on exchanges isn't enough to jump to conclusions. Maybe we're jumping the gun.

About the average price -- looks like the biggest tranche sold (by far) was moved near the very bottom at $6,000.

I'll say this. From reading the report and Q&A, I get the feeling this guy gets a kick out of dumping on us.

He probably doesn't have to consider that in a vacuum, no.

But it was irrational to dump high volume tranches into spot markets -- especially all at once, like he did -- since he obviously planned to sell additional tranches in the future. That's economic suicide in such a low liquidity environment as BTC markets. Even if selling on exchange markets was rational, he should have used iceberg orders over much longer periods of time. Dumping on spot markets at these volumes = significant slippage, which certainly wouldn't net the best possible price for creditors. He failed the creditors in both logic and practice.

The trustee obviously doesn't have experience as a fund manager, so I'm bewildered as to why he explicitly ignored the advice of multiple interested parties (Jesse Powell and Mark Karpeles to name a couple).

That's why I don't think it's going to fade away. I think older members have had their fill -- there's nothing left to say on the topic. That's true.

But so many newbies on this site only arrived here because of bounty campaigns. Newbies and bounty spammers aren't going to stop making threads about it, and either lobbying for changes or fishing for merit in their OPs. And they treat the existing threads like any other spam megathreads. It's an eyesore and they're incentivized to keep posting about it because they got penalized by the system.

I just hope they manage to hold onto some, rather than immediately spending it all.


It's becoming more and more common in the US, and probably elsewhere too. Just do a Google image search for "homeless bitcoin." I even saw a homeless guy with a QR code for ETH in my hometown the other day.

Low-income and homeless people can get free smartphones very easily here. Sometimes free data as well, but if not, free WI-FI access is everywhere -- cafes, stores, restaurants.

Do you think laypeople understand this? I don't.

There's been a lot of conflation among "digital currencies", "virtual currencies" and "cryptocurrencies." Most dumbed-down explanations and media coverage emphasize the intangible and virtual nature of coins and their lack of backing, rather than conveying why the technology works and why it has economic value.


I agree with that. But I also think most people are plebs who don't know what decentralization is or why a deflationary supply matters.

To address the OP: States will issue digital currencies to take the luster away from real cryptocurrencies. They'll exploit ignorance about the technology to get people to ignore decentralized coins. To some extent, they will succeed, but there's no way they can actually stop the Bitcoin train. Legit cryptocurrencies will continue to flourish.

I agree. I too thought this would pass but 6 weeks from inception? If anything, it's getting worse. Make a child board already so we can banish all the merit threads there. At this point, everything that could be said already has been.

Sweep the private key from the receipt into a wallet (like Electrum). Then send BTC as needed.

Some ATMs require you to set up a wallet before buying. In that case, you scan the QR code of your wallet at the ATM and the coins are deposited directly into your wallet.


Sure you can. You'll pay a hefty premium -- usually upwards of 8% -- but you can do it with cash.

I wouldn't consider a hardware wallet completely safe. For example, Ledger device pairing practices are less secure than credit cards. You are also highly vulnerable to theft via physical access -- encrypted wallets on unmarked USBs or PCs are safer for this reason.

I think they are great for day-to-day spending, but nobody should be plugging all of their private keys into an online computer, and that's what people are doing with hardware wallets. I think exploits may surface at some point that can overcome the key shielding mechanisms.

The two most likely outcomes are that he loses everything, or loses nothing. Either the wallet.dat is corrupted or it isn't. At this point -- in a landfill environment exposed to the elements -- that hard drive is probably extremely degraded. It would be a miracle if the wallet were recoverable.

The guy is still holding out hope that an excavation will be allowed even though it would be an ecological hazard. Sort of a wingnut. The city knows the bitcoins are probably lost.

Arrested but not convicted? That's not much to go on. I certainly wouldn't distrust someone over it. If the case wasn't prosecuted, we have to assume the charges were bogus.


Irrelevant. Cops are miserable pieces of shit. I've seen good people railroaded before -- doesn't take much. Try being on the wrong side of someone who is close to a police. Prosecutors tend to be more reasonable; they don't prosecute cases they can't prove. This is why juries exist. Pointing to an arrest record is just an appeal to authority. We don't know what really happened.

Yup, that's how the cookie crumbles. If everyone thinks the market will rally into the auction, the opposite should happen. The market usually likes to screw over as many people as possible.


Why is most of it fake? That was true in the heyday of the Chinese exchanges who had no-fee trading -- they had millions of BTC traded in daily volume. There is no comparison today. The highest volume exchanges (Bitfinex, Okex, Binance, GDAX, Upbit, Bitflyer) all charge fees now.

Leveraged orders = liquidity that all of us can buy and sell into. So it's just as "real" as spot trading volumes.

This. Cobra has never been a significant contributor to Bitcoin.org. He's just leveraging his reputation as "co-owner" to make himself seem important. As David Harding points out:


I believe Cobra has been using Jihan Wu and the issue of mining centralization as red herrings. The intent is to divide the Bitcoin community against itself. Inevitably, a hard fork change to the proof-of-work algorithm (with significant support) will cause a permanent, sustained network split. Who benefits? Jihan Wu, Bitmain and Bcash.

As you point out, Congress must establish new authority to regulate cryptocurrency outside of the narrow scope (money transmission, securities, futures markets and taxes) federal agencies have jurisdiction over. Do they really have the mandate (regarding the electorate) to do what you're saying? 5% or more of Americans already own BTC. By 2025, how large do you think that number will grow?

Do you foresee another Executive Order 6102 coming? I suppose we know how that played out.


Wickard v. Filburn -- the "growing food for your own consumption" case -- established that the Commerce Clause applied where an activity "exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce." What is the parallel argument for Bitcoin?

We should also note that the post-New Deal decisions you're referring to took place in a different judicial context: