I would recommend against CoinPayments.

I know it's tempting because it's half the price of BitPay and supports a wide selection of altcoins, but the customer experience is horrible. Every time I've ever paid a CoinPayments invoice, it's timed out on me, no matter how long before expiration the transaction was seen or confirmed on the blockchain. Their customer service is a nightmare to deal with too. Honestly, I avoid merchants who use them.

There is all sorts of red tape before the SEC will let you do business:


Then there's all the record keeping and periodic disclosure requirements. There are also fees to consider too. Then you need to pay lawyers who can see that everything gets done properly.

I can see why brokers -- especially small ones -- would want to avoid this entirely.

Coinmixer.es is a longstanding scam site. It's a fake clone of Coinmixer.se, which shut down almost two years ago.

See here:


It would be impossible to recover the money, sorry.

Next time, do some research before putting your money at risk. This is a good starting point: 2020 List Bitcoin Mixers Bitcoin Tumblers Websites

Yes. The operator of a similar platform was subject to an SEC enforcement action because he failed to register with the SEC as a securities dealer.

If you don't want to register, you need to prohibit US customers, and you should probably implement some basic measures like IP geolocation bans to cover yourself legally.


It won't make a difference whether you use bitcoins, USDT, euros, or whatever. These requirements pertain to the service itself, not the type of collateral customers use.

Ultimately, Lightning can provide instant transactions for low value, frequent purchases at brick-and-mortar stores. The costs of merchant integration aren't justified yet until LN adoption is much more widespread. The same was true of credit cards at one point too.

In the meantime, there are apps like SPEDN that merchants can integrate with existing POS terminals. SPEDN uses Gemini to custody cryptocurrency so that merchants can accept it without requiring confirmations.

Real test of what? What does an epidemic have to do with the price of bitcoins?

I see consistently growing activity on the network, more than 300,000 transactions per day at the moment. I also see increasing consumer usage, as well as consistently climbing mining difficulty.

Not to mention that Bitcoin has been running with virtually zero downtime for more than a decade. Failed experiment? I think not!

I often see CoinGecko recommended as an alternative. Their coin ranking methodology doesn't seem to differ much from CMC, but their exchange rankings look much better:



This is CMC's top 10 by adjusted volume:



There isn't a single legitimate exchange in the bunch. The thing that bothers me most about CMC is it drives new users towards scam exchanges. I know which site of the two I'll be recommending from now on.

Nobody should be logging into their accounts and generating OTP codes from the same device. That would render your device a single point of failure, which defeats the purpose of 2FA. Doing so from an Android device -- which are known to be highly vulnerable -- increases the risks all the more.


Password, 2FA, and email verification should be enough to authorize irreversible withdrawals. That's 3 different systems that need to be compromised. If users employed proper isolation, such a compromise would be incredibly unlikely.

People should take this opportunity to improve their 2FA protocol -- isolate your device usage. Also, stop using Androids for anything security sensitive at all.

The mere act of mixing your outputs (decentralized or not) isn't money laundering because there is no proof of unlawful intent. This is true of cash, bitcoins or anything else. The issue isn't that output mixing is illegal. On its own, it is not.

Regarding money transmission law, US regulators have drawn a clear distinction between decentralized mixing protocols like CoinJoin and centralized mixing services. That issue is about who is a money transmitter and therefore is supposed to comply with MSB regulations, and who is not:

vs.

From the security researchers who disclosed the exploit:


Is the attack only effective against targets who are running Authenticator and inputting passwords on the same [Android] device? See here:


If you isolate the device you use to access an exchange from the device providing OTP codes, you should be in the clear, right?

It just adds a new feature (usernames) to the existing internal transfer system:



It's still a real transaction, just not a Bitcoin transaction.

If both users already (or plan to) trust Coinbase with their funds, then it makes perfect sense to keep the transaction off-chain.

Cash is private, banks are not. That applies even to Swiss banks: Era of bank secrecy ends as Swiss start sharing account data



Granted, but if Bitcoin were just as widely used as fiat currencies, you wouldn't need to risk all that. Why engage in identity fraud, and take the risk that banks and police will freeze your accounts if you didn't have to?

Any licensing scheme will create new barriers to entry and new capital requirements for start-ups. The more restrictive the scheme, the less options consumers will have, and the more costly they will be. BitLicense is just the extreme example.


They don't have the resources to fight crime, generally. The overwhelming majority of property crimes already go unsolved. When you add in the pseudonymity of cryptocurrency and the multi-country jurisdiction of the platforms we use, I become really skeptical that "cyber protection laws" are going to do much.

It only took them 2.5 years after Segwit activation to do it.


Gemini, Bitfinex, and some others have been supporting bech32 address generation since last year. It's certainly a welcome sight. Since exchanges are a huge part of the economic majority, we need them to actually use Segwit in order for the network to take full advantage of Segwit's block size increase.

When Coinbase, Binance and BitMEX finally join the party with full Segwit support, things should get pretty interesting.

Couldn't you say that about any off-chain protocol -- even Lightning -- since they aren't Bitcoin, and don't improve its on-chain throughput?

If Liquid is cheap, fast, decently secure and interoperable with Bitcoin, that seems like a good thing for Bitcoin and its users.

There's a simpler explanation. Look at what Buffett says about gold:


Then compare that to what he says about cryptocurrencies:


There's no need for a conspiracy theory involving banks. He doesn't see value in speculative store-of-value assets like Bitcoin and gold. He's primarily a stock investor looking for predictable returns on investment.

He's an old man, stuck in his ways. Let him be.

It's not that hard. Most attack vectors are defeated by offline key storage.

You can use a watching-only wallet on your online computer and sign your transactions offline. You could also use a hardware wallet -- the Ledger Nano S is under $60 now.

This sort of thing belongs on the Reputation forum, not Beginners & Help.

A single merit doesn't mean much. Like DdmrDdmr said, it isn't much to go on. I've seen worthless posts get 50 merits from a single person, and it's usually not seen as "abuse." I wouldn't worry about it.

I would agree with those suggesting Bisq. It's probably the closest you'll find to decentralized P2P+OTC trading. LocalCryptos is another non-custodial and non-KYC solution worth looking into.

If you want to buy large amounts of bitcoins or trade very regularly, you may need to use multiple P2P exchanges. See here:

The quantum computing threat adds a new angle to this discussion too. If Bitcoin's signature scheme is broken, lost bitcoins (which weren't moved to quantum-safe addresses) could be stolen and reclaimed. Then the whole narrative that "4 million bitcoins have been lost forever" could get turned on its head.