So mic and JJG are 2 wonder-boys. [ ]

Anyways India won the Test game against SouthAfrica.

... overconfidence is the biggest mistake you can make on anything. We're not living in a storybook, and we are not destined to win.

In the US I think it's very likely that someday soon a little provision will be tucked into a must-pass bill at the last minute requiring reporting all BTC holdings via FBAR. After that, while there's currently no momentum whatsoever for it, it'd be a fairly simple matter to someday say "turn over your bitcoins, which we know you have, or go to jail" (or "we can prove you have bitcoins, but you didn't report it, so you go to jail").

The push for regulation increases constantly, worldwide. Each regulation is a reduction in freedom and a weight around the BTC economy's neck. In the end, it's not unimaginable that someday BTC will technically not be restricted for end-users, but all legally-operating on-ramps and off-ramps will be forbidden from transferring BTC to/from non-KYC wallets, not even trustless wallets. People who stay within this legally-acceptable area would be using something no better than (and with no competitive advantage over) fiat in bank accounts.

It's not unimaginable that LN nodes, even though trustless and not holding any user BTC, will be harmfully regulated. And the same could be true of other methods of scaling, most of which have centralization trade-offs. (Including on-chain scaling, where the centralization trade-off is the reduction in the distribution and economic power of full nodes.)

If one of the biggest governments really wanted to destroy Bitcoin's value as a free economy at any cost (which seems very unlikely, but isn't impossible), they'd offer billions of dollars in subsidies to domestic miners, but also legally require that these domestic miners only mine transactions that have been approved by some government entity. Then when they had enough such miners, they'd also require that the miners only extend chains which fall under this regime, essentially doing a (illegitimate) softfork into a centralized coin. Bitcoin is not ruled by miners, so this wouldn't be the end of BTC, but it'd be extremely problematic, and perhaps the end of mainstream BTC.

Satoshi said, "Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years." He didn't say that BTC can endure direct assault by major governments and come away completely unscathed; it can't. We should try to prevent the nightmare scenarios I mentioned (and others), hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. It's true that governments will never be able to completely stamp out cryptocurrency, but at some point oppression could reach levels where all BTC usage and development would have to move deeply into the shadows, which would greatly reduce Bitcoin's ability to impact the world. (At that point, BTC would hopefully become a small part of a wider revolution, and not just a fading remnant of freedom.)

~Andrew Miller tweet about trilemmas snipped~

Dear sirs,
It has come to my attention that two individuals claiming association with the institution you represent, specifically one Elaine Shi and one Andrew Miller are advertising a "CMSC 818I: Science of Crypto-Currency, Spring 2015" course. ...
This notwithstanding, the two in question exhibit the unmitigated audacity to propose that 20% of the mark will be based on (unpaid) contribution to a so called "Ethereum project", which other than being a private concern is a widely known scam, ...
The exact equivalent would be a situation in which an assistant professor and a PhD student in the Mathematics department start a "Science of A Certain Herbal Extract Supplements" course, whereby a fifth of the mark depends on your students doing unpaid work for a commercial multi-level marketing scam known as "Forever Living". That they would have the cheek to actually discuss "Academic Integrity" on the same page, in terms that readily reduce to "you must provide us with something of actual value we can pawn off to our private concern" is mere icing on the cake.
Leaving aside the ample legal liability this episode has created for your institution - no, students are not actually slave labour, no it's not actually legal to whore them out in this manner just yet, etc - the intellectual respectability of the University of Maryland has received a significant blow from which it conceivably may never recover.
Please kindly let me know as to the results of your investigation into the matter, and as to the measures that have been taken against the two fraudsters involved.
All the best,
Mircea Popescu

Ten people have been arrested in south London on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

Extinction rebellion said police had seized tents, toilets and disabled access equipment, claiming they were "the very things that would make the international rebellion in London safe, clean and accessible to all".

It came after the European Court of Human Rights ruled police could preventatively detain people, even if they have no specific intelligence linking the individual to the crime.

Tether is aware of an unpublished and non-peer reviewed paper falsely positing that Tether issuances are responsible for manipulating the cryptocurrency market. Tether vigorously disputes the findings and conclusions claimed by that source, which rely on flawed assumptions, incomplete and cherry-picked data, and faulty methodology.

Poor mixer design leads to unpredictable privacy leaks and self-shuffling.

7 March 2012 Tradehill, at the time the second largest Bitcoin exchange closes down, claiming Dwolla stole its customer funds and threatens to sue. Dwolla demures, suit goes nowhere. Jared Kenna makes secret payments to select users. Partners with Jonathan Ryan Owens (see above) creating 20 Moves, which somehow magically has the capital to start real estate development in San Francisco.

Total loss : 200k BTC (estimate viii)