This brings to attention an interesting fact - in Russia a lot of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency sites have already been banned and their censorship organ Roskomnadzor have successfully enforced this ban for years. Some people here are very optimistic about Russian government's adoption of cryptocurrencies when their officials were making related statements, but in reality the government has been already fightning them for years.
Interestingly, the Prosecutor General actually declared the use of Bitcoin illegal under existing Russian laws in 2014: "Systems for anonymous payments and cyber currencies that have gained considerable circulation - including the most well-known, Bitcoin - are money substitutes and cannot be used by individuals or legal entities," the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office said on February 6.
It added that Russian law stipulates that the rouble is the sole official currency and that introducing any other monetary units or substitutes was illegal. But I don't think there's ever been much enforcement. Similar to China, Russia seems more interested in restricting information about and access to cryptocurrencies. It's possible that the censorship has been done because of how the executive interprets existing law. Maybe the upcoming legislation will change that? The Supreme Court of Russia has taken upon itself the responsibility to decide a case that may become a precedent for the crypto sector. The highest judicial authority in the country has accepted an appeal against the blocking of a popular Russian analytical portal – Bitcoininfo.ru. Its decision will affect dozens of crypto websites with restricted access, including foreign platforms like Localbitcoins.com.
I'm not sure how much bearing this would have on exchange sites. There's a big difference between a news/forum site (informational) and a business that deals with "monetary substitutes." Anyway, it's interesting to see the Court will hear the case. How independent is the judiciary in Russia? Is it just a kangaroo court? |
|
|
|
That's right. With over $6 billion daily trading volume this sale will make a minor impact on Bitcoin price, if any. On the other hand, seeing today's red market I think maybe it is making an impact already. The thing is many people are either not aware of the daily trading volume or are not getting along with math very well. Those people start panic selling right after reading the news thinking that Bitcoin can crash a lot when the selling begins.
Balls. The one and only time these auctions had an impact was the very first Silk Road one in 2014 when uncertainty reigned before. All the morons were convinced someone would buy them all and dump them. Amazingly enough that did not happen. There are other examples where USMS auctions lined up with price volatility matching this narrative, though. The auction for the last of the Silk Road coins ended the first week of November, 2015 -- same exact story as the Draper auction. The auction end marked the top of a major rally from the historic bottom in the $100s. Price immediately dropped by 40% in less than two weeks. I'm hoping the narrative plays out again and we rally into the March 19th sale. |
|
|
|
Indeed, it's very obvious that ICO administrators fit the definition of "administrator" in FinCEN's 2013 guidance. They are in the business of issuing virtual currency and have the authority to redeem it. This is clear because ICOs and the associated tokens are completely centralized. Ripple is similarly centralized. It had a closed-source centralized repository. It was open-sourced well after the network was live. Even thereafter, all Ripple clients were set to trust Ripple Labs' validation nodes by default -- fully centralized. FinCEN addressed this specifically in 2013: The second type of activity involves a convertible virtual currency that has a centralized repository. The administrator of that repository will be a money transmitter to the extent that it allows transfers of value between persons or from one location to another.
This conclusion applies, whether the value is denominated in a real currency or a convertible virtual currency. But these examples don't lead me to the same conclusion as you -- that the BSA applies to pre-mines, founders rewards, etc. As you point out -- A handful of coins are not impacted, Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero come to mind. These are coins where all the new money supply is generated by persons own "computing or manufacturing effort" and have no "central depository and no single administrator".
FinCEN made a clear distinction between those who create virtual currency and use it to purchase goods and services (users) vs. those who create virtual currency and sells those units for real currency (money transmitters). Pre-mining or insta-mining does not require a central repository or single administrator, and early miners are still obtaining coins by computing/manufacturing effort. Similarly, a founders' reward is literally part of the decentralized protocol. No central repository or single administrator required, and (in Zcash, for example) miners still obtain most of the block rewards through computing effort. |
|
|
|
Nice, I haven't heard anything about Kazakhstan since Borat.  The article makes it seem like interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is skyrocketing in 2018. Weird, right? Because everywhere I look, the hype has totally died down. That's why I think Kazakhstan might be an outlier. Compare to global Google trends for "bitcoin" --  |
|
|
|
People seem bothered that bitcoin mining in Iceland uses as much electricity as household use, but why don't they mind that aluminum smelting in Iceland uses 15 times as much electricity as household use.
Well, too be fair, there are not many options when it comes to smelting metals. If there were a more energy efficient way to do it, industry would adapt. With ASIC mining, and the race to higher difficulty, we are using an insanely energy inefficient process to accomplish the same thing that could be accomplished with a couple of raspberry pi’s. How is ASIC mining "energy inefficient?" Miners secure the network, preventing double spending and censorship. How can that be accomplished with a couple of Raspberry Pis? Then a botnet could be used to easily 51% attack the network. I mean, the primary purpose of mining is push along the BlockChain and process transactions. It’s doesn’t have to require so much energy.
The purpose of mining is to prevent double spending and make third party trust unnecessary. The reason it works is incentivized competition to mine the block reward. That incentivizes a mining hardware arms race as long as would-be miners are speculatively bullish on BTC. The only alternative I see is scrapping PoW entirely.  |
|
|
|
There's more to it than just batching and Segwit, though they play a part. I see it as short term (sometimes anomalous) vs. long term demand. Spam attacks and heightened short term exchange activity can drastically overstate things. When mempool size rises and falls by 50x over relatively short periods of time, these cases are pretty anomalous. We shouldn't treat them as "normal." So, demand has drastically fallen from the peaks in May and December 2017, but this is totally normal. |
|
|
|
15 quality posts is most definitely obtainable and a lot of users are already doing this and more. In fact I'm quite surprised that they don't require more posts. At what point does it become unreasonable? Requiring 30 per week? 50? More? I do think these posting requirements fundamentally change the idea of "getting paid to post stuff you would have anyway." These posting quotas remind me of the ticket quotas that American police have. At the end of the month, it's very easy to get a traffic ticket because the police are required to issue a certain number of tickets regardless of actual infractions. The parallel here is that posters spam at the end of the week because they are required to... 1. Only allow trusted and pre-approved campaign managers - who won't tolerate spam - to manage bounties/campaigns. There are way too many managers who don't give a shit about what their users are posting and will pay them anyway.
2. Only allow pre-approved campaigns.
Whitelisting is a huge time suck for everyone involved and introduces all sorts of centralized trust. I think Default Trust is a horrible system already, riddled with conflicts of interest. Establishing "trusted" managers and "trusted" campaigns would just expand on that. Free markets and forum guidelines/moderation that actually address spam: yes. Centralized trust and gatekeeping in the marketplace: no. |
|
|
|
Perhaps you need to create a bitcoin Bank that will combine the functions of a wallet and audit. The functionality should be similar to the stock exchange. Inside the Bank bitcoin can be moved instantly and for a small fee. Coins at the time of the transaction should be frozen and the transaction can be closed only after confirmation by both parties. To manage such a Bank should only core developers to whom you have confidence. Miners will process payments to external wallets. The rate of such payments will not make much difference. Do you think such a system has the right to life?
So rather that solving problems we concede defeat and we transform bitcoin into digital fiat, and be done with it. I wouldn't call it "transforming bitcoin into digital fiat." The existence of Bitcoin banks doesn't fundamentally change what Bitcoin (the base layer) is. They're just applications built on top of Bitcoin. This is something that Hal Finney understood well: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases.
Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others.
George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self-regulating.
I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.
I think there will be many applications with different risk profiles that Bitcoin users will have access to. Some will be fully decentralized, some less so, and some fully centralized. For example, the security guarantees of the Lightning Network are quite different than with Bitcoin. Same with sidechains. Same with Bitcoin banks. All can co-exist with different trade-offs and benefits. |
|
|
|
With China announcing their intention to cap electricity usage of BTC miners last year, many saw that as a great news as large mining farms declared their interest in moving to other countries (namely Bitmain exploring their chances in Canada).
But now, when Canadians (and others) are starting to frown upon taking on miners, how big of a problem can this become?
In terms of real consumption, this is still a bunch of hand-waving, probably based on speculation that hash rate will always just increase exponentially. I think miners will continue to flow into jurisdictions where they can soak up excess capacity. And where governments perceive a problem, it's reasonable to expect some backlash, additional taxation, and so on. On the other hand, we might see partnerships where governments tolerate or subsidize mining to build their own cryptocurrency reserves. Anyway, for miners, that's the cost of doing business. The beauty of proof-of-work is that the network adjusts difficulty to marginal miners shutting down due to increasing overheads. Is it time we have a serious discussion about energy consumption issues and possibility of changing PoW algo? Already proposed by Cøbra (Co-owner of bitcoin.org & bitcointalk.org), but for a different reasons. How does this actually solve anything? Changing the PoW algo would guarantee a network split and would unfairly punish a lot of good actors in the space who are heavily invested in SHA256 mining. And over time, new ASICs would be developed and we would be back to square one. What's the point? If you want decentralized consensus without the energy costs, you need to look elsewhere than Bitcoin. Proof-of-stake and proof-of-time are two interesting areas of study, but good luck convincing people that they measure up to proof-of-work. |
|
|
|
A drop in demand for graphics cards (GPUs) by the world's cryptocurrency miners could 'materially' impact AMD's chip business, the company disclosed this week.
Understatement of the century. Look at an AMD price chart for the past few years. Better yet, look at NVDA! Obviously, cryptocurrency mining materially impacted the sector on the way up -- sales growth has been phenomenal, with resellers consistently cleaning out GPU manufacturers as soon as cards hit the market. If the market takes a dive, we should expect to see that demand dry up. NVDA looks like a bubble chart, much like BTC in 2013. Investors should be careful not to get too complacent with their paper profits. |
|
|
|
Weren't most of those microtransactions in bitcoin really all spam made by the supporters or the people behind of bitcoin cash? Maybe. I suspect so, but I don't think there is conclusive proof. LaurentMT did some interesting analysis that suggested that the spam attacks were a coordinated effort by several mining pools. The temporal coincidence in this last observation is rather surprising. One may be tempted to interpret it as a collective answer to a sudden attack but we know that fan-in transactions processed during the 8th wave were flowing on the bitcoin network since late 2015 (see reddit comment quoted below). So, that leaves us with the hypothesis of a coordinated operation decided by a group of mining pools. Remains the question: why did these pools suddenly decide to mine transactions which they were previously ignoring? The desired effect is obvious enough: In my humble opinion, a more likely hypothesis is that the goal of this operation was first and foremost social and psychological. Fact is that the perception of 5 full blocks in a row is very different from 2 full blocks separated by an empty block and 2 half-full blocks. By consistently stuffing blocks with “junk” transactions for months, one can subtly reinforce the belief that Bitcoin requires an urgent upgrade increasing its capacity. I reckon we really do have to question if bitcoin really does need a block size increase today.
It's pretty clear we don't need one right now. We've seen that the fee market model is very robust. Another size/weight increase is probably an eventuality, though, as long as the network keeps growing. |
|
|
|
It is almost a month the new system of merit has been implement to the forum. What is your opinion? It is really working as it was expected? What is you opinion?
I've noticed a marked improvement. But the system doesn't fully address spam, so I think expectations are misplaced. It only partially addresses signature campaign spam by making it difficult to attain rank by shitposting. I still feel merit is more weighted towards popularity and social standing than post quality. And that's doubly true when quality posts express unpopular opinions. But I don't think there's any way to fix that. The spam megathread problem is an interesting one. Many of them are started and consistently bumped by newbies/lower-ranked members without signature ads -- they're just being newbs. There's a feedback loop where bounty spammers and these newbs mutually perpetuate the problem. I have definitely noticed that a lot of users are trying harder, so that in itself is a major improvement that I'm glad for. It is working--slowly and with medium-sized results, but it is certainly working.
Same here. A lot of people are clearly putting more thought into their posts. Not enough to drown out the spam, but like I said, I wouldn't expect that to happen entirely. Or in just a month or two. |
|
|
|
As I've said elsewhere, there are several reasons why transaction volume dropped. In truth, transaction volume can be a misleading indicator for adoption: The overall trends should agree, but very large divergences (spam attacks, periods of temporarily high activity, anomalies) can occur. I have no doubt the network has grown in the last several months, but if you look at the last 6 months, mempool size has increased as much as 50-100x over some periods. That can't possibly represent legitimate organic growth, especially when you consider how empty mempools are today. It seems pretty clear that a significant ongoing spam attack was in effect before the recent drop in transaction volume. The transaction volume statistics might be a bit deceiving. You have to remember that only a month or two ago, Bitcoin had
a lot of problems with high fees and a lot of people shifted their micro payments onto other Alt coins, like Bitcoin Cash
and Ethereum, because they had lower fees. Since then, most of the spamming has stopped and a lot of people kept on
using these Alt coins out of convenience. I'm not so sure about that. Bcash network activity has always been incredible low. Ethereum fees are 25-50x lower than they were a couple months ago during the Crypto Kitties craze.
|
|
|
|
Please suggest me some way to recover my wallet if Electrum is eventually not available in the future. Electrum is a deterministic (HD) wallet, and has been for several years now. When you create a new wallet, you are provided a 12-word seed. Write it down and keep it safe. If you ever need to, you can recover the wallet from the seed. An Electrum seed won't be compatible with all wallets, but you should be able to derive your keypairs using Ian Coleman's open source tool. Even if they stop developing Electrum, old versions will still exist, so you can import your wallet and dump your keys. More on HD wallets here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_walletImagine what would you do if you had a million USD in your wallet...  Do you think it would be a good idea to store the public and private keys into some USB drive (or print them with their QR codes) and store it somewhere safe? Yes, it's prudent to make multiple back-ups. I use several mediums as well: -Encrypted wallet, backed up on PC, USB or other media -Paper wallet -HD wallet seed |
|
|
|
It isn't so much the members who are at risk - I use ignore more and more frequently these days. It's the lurkers and other visitors who don't have any control over viewing. Bad or scammy links give a very bad image to the forum, and this is reflected in the comments on some other forums. FYI, this is the disclaimer below every paid forum ad: Advertised sites are not endorsed by the Bitcoin Forum. They may be unsafe, untrustworthy, or illegal in your jurisdiction. Advertise here.So, it doesn't seem like admins and staff are overly concerned with policing paid forum ads, let alone user signatures. - A domain that is owned and hosted by the poster, and proof of ownership should be provided if requested.
Ask user to embed their BTC address on the their webiste metadata, therefore we know he owns the website if it match with the BTC address mention on their profile. Requires too much manual work -- the same goes for any curated whitelist. Any policy should be automatic. Any manual whitelisting, etc. takes too much time. I also don't like the privacy implications of such a policy. Members can disable signatures. Higher-ranked members can disable forum ads. I'm not overly concerned with lurkers who can't be bothered to create a throwaway account for tailored viewing. |
|
|
|
Wyoming House Unanimously Approves Two Pro-Blockchain Billshttps://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/wyoming-house-unanimously-approves-two-pro-blockchain-bills/The article posted above describes what lawmakers are currently doing regarding cryptocurrency and blockchain technology legislation, which is currently setting the framework for other states. Laws have been passed in other states such as Arizona regarding making tax payments in the form of cryptocurrency, but Wyoming seems to be the first one tackling some major areas that the SEC has stated needs to be addressed. Legislature in Wyoming was looking to pass two blockchain bills (HB 70 the “utility token bill”, and HB 19 the “bitcoin bill”) before sending them to the State Senate for consideration. HB 70 defines utility tokens as neither traditional money nor securities; HB 19 exempts cryptocurrency from the 2003 Wyoming Money Transmitter Act (which was passed in the state before Bitcoin’s invention in 2008)." Too bad the first bill is just a dog-and-pony show. It really doesn't matter how Wyoming defines "utility tokens." The enforcement actions that matter come from the SEC, not the Wyoming Secretary of State. That's right, Wyoming doesn't even have a dedicated securities enforcement agency. Exempting cryptocurrency from state money transmitter law is encouraging, though. If this happens in more populous states, there will be tangibly lower compliance costs for companies doing business in the US, since they won't need MSB licenses in every state. |
|
|
|
Dear Experts, kindly inform:
Shall an company registered in Hong Kong make KYC and ALM for its Utility token sale (ICO) and at the same time prevent US, China, etc. citizens from doing contributions?
There are a whole lot of unknowns packed into your question. The reality is that we are waiting for precedent from the SEC and its Chinese counterpart. I don't know much about Chinese regulations, but I would urge caution regarding US investors. You mention that the ICO is for a "utility token." Merely calling it a "utility token" (especially if you market it as an investment) does not mean the token is not a security. If it turns out your token is an unregistered security, you may have a lot of headaches and legal worries in your future. If your token is a security, you need to register it with the SEC and go through all the associated red tape. Otherwise, you risk SEC enforcement actions. Otherwise, it's commonplace to prohibit US investors entirely (and at least enforce some sort of IP ban along with disclaimers). From their December statement: Merely calling a token a “utility” token or structuring it to provide some utility does not prevent the token from being a security. Tokens and offerings that incorporate features and marketing efforts that emphasize the potential for profits based on the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others continue to contain the hallmarks of a security under U.S. law. |
|
|
|
Poloniex will undoubtedly surpass Binance and Bitfinex as the largest exchange if they allow U.S. residents to register and buy crypto on the site again. I don't think Poloniex ever shut down registrations like Binance or Bittrex did. They did institute a pretty invasive KYC process for new customers last year, and they made KYC mandatory this year, but they never shut down registrations. That said, I don't know how long it takes to get verified before you can start trading. Now the only thing for them to do is to accept and adopt SegWit-enabled wallets, deposits and withdrawals.
Poloniex has been batching transactions for years, and they've always offered significantly lower fees than virtually all other exchanges, so this isn't a big deal to me. When you get down to it, the real issue for Coinbase wasn't Segwit, but inefficient wallet infrastructure and no batching. |
|
|
|
Suppose you bought and sold Bitcoin and a number of other cryptocurrencies and moved coins around between several wallets. If you’re American, what on earth do you do? Does H&R Block know bitcoins?
I wouldn't trust H&R Block with my taxes regardless of cryptocurrency. I hear they screw up all the time. In a nutshell: You need to export your trading histories from all exchanges, then calculate the basis and adjusted basis of your investments. When you use USD to buy BTC, that forms the basis of your BTC investment. Let's say you bought at $1000 -- that's your basis. Now let's say you used that BTC to buy an altcoin. The altcoin price was 0.002 BTC and the BTC price at the time was $1500. That means that your adjusted basis on your original BTC buy is $1500. So, you had a taxable gain of $500/BTC. In this example, your new altcoin investment has a basis of $3/coin. And so on..... If you just mix all your coins together and don't keep separate, identifiable lots, then you need to calculate using FIFO or LIFO. More on that here. Good luck! |
|
|
|
I hope for the girls that the private keys connected to these QR codes will never be compromised, lol. It's more like a publicity stunt overall, but it definitely helps them attract customers paying with Bitcoin, as the girl said.
I hope those tattoos are not permanent, because reusing addresses is a very bad practice, it enormously hurts privacy for all parties involved. I was about to say the same. Beyond address reuse, it's also bad practice to publicly associate addresses with people. It makes it really easy to engage in privacy attacks (such as clustering) against them, which can reveal their blockchain activities and Bitcoin holdings. Tattoos like this are also a terrible idea because they announce, "I have BTC! Rob me, please!" People have also been studying biometric implants (Bitcoin wallets implanted under the skin). Really stupid at a time when people are getting kidnapped and maimed just because organized criminals know they have coins. Beware the $5 wrench attack! |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
