Mancrush, indeed.


I especially liked the part where his Twitter got hacked and used to pump various coins. How seriously can you take the guy? He started doing a "coin-of-the-day" pump and started with Electroneum. Seriously?! I saw screenshots of DMs where he was offering to pump coins for payouts. Not sure if they were doctored.


No thanks. The guy is a clown. He's also in bed with Jihan Wu.

It might be more complicated than that. Some have pointed out that Coinbase has an incredibly fragmented UTXO set due to years of wallet mismanagement. The current fees on the network might make migration to Segwit prohibitive for them. When 1 satoshi per byte transactions were available a couple months ago, maybe not. But hindsight is a bitch, ain't it?


Well, yeah. They're a company that answers to shareholders to customers, not the Bitcoin community. It's obvious after their foray into ETH and LTC that more markets = extremely profitable and important for growth. It's also obvious from trading on GDAX that their infrastructure is terrible amidst their massive growth in volume. They're supposed to be an exchange, but they are riddled with downtime. Dealing with their back-end trading engine, API and scalability issues = a lot more important than adding Segwit. I say that as their customer, and also putting my feet in the shoes of their investors.

I think it goes further than that. Bitcoin Cash is a special case. In hindsight, I believe that Bitmain created it primarily to exploit covert ASICBOOST. They spent years developing it and Segwit ruled out its use in Bitcoin.

Regarding the other forks, I think the "free money" explanation is a lot more compelling than the mining hardware explanation. Lightning-ASIC (Jack Liao) produces miners compatible with many hashing algorithms; they didn't need Bitcoin Gold for mining. What they saw was that Bitcoin Cash created a massive market cap out of thin air (without taking it from Bitcoin's market). Free money. Hence the pre-mines in a lot of these coins.


I wouldn't dump them ASAP. I would time your sells. Why sell Bitcoin Cash at 0.06 when you could sell it at 0.5?

You can read the press release here. Legacy accounts were accounts created sometime before this year. They signed up under different AML/KYC terms and thus had different KYC and withdrawal tiers. Legacy account holders have a $2,000 daily withdrawal limit -- low, but they don't need to provide any personal information or documents. Just a name and email address. I have a legacy account, so I'm sort of bummed to hear this.

Basically, your account would be in "wind-down" mode. Withdrawal limits don't change, but deposits and trading are disabled, and positions can only be diminished or closed.


The fact is that legacy account holders agreed to very different terms. It is customary (and ethically right) to offer legacy account holders ample notice before those terms change. I appreciate that Poloniex has done that. Bittrex could learn a thing or two in that department.

There was a recent thread with a lot of good information about US taxes as they relate to fork coins (like Bitcoin Cash).

For tax purposes, is there any difference between the Bitcoin Cash "airdrop" and an airdrop of native coins? For example, BitSend has a weekly airdrop to forum posters of 10 BSD. Are we supposed to use the USD cost basis of that 10 BSD each week (last week = $13.50) and call it "other income" on our tax return? That means that even if we opt to hodl the coins long term, we have to pay taxes on receipt, right?

The forks feel more like "stock splits." This feels more like a giveaway or something. Is there any way that these could be deemed "gifts" under the tax code?

Sure, people miss the boat, then they hope for Bitcoin to crash in order to console themselves. But that's not everyone. Bitcoin has significant scalability and privacy issues that are worth criticizing and improving upon. But more than that, I think that speculative greed has driven the hubris and toxicity that is now so characteristic of the Bitcoin community.

As an anarchist, I had a lot of dreams for Bitcoin when I first got involved almost five years ago. I really didn't think it would look like this. For a moment, I thought we were building a revolution. People mostly only care about getting rich now. And now I'm left wondering, if Bitcoin is mainly good for redistributing wealth (from holders of weak money to holders of sound money), is that wealth transfer even a net good for the world? Or just those of us who are rich now? I don't have an answer. But in reality, the higher the price rises, the less interesting Bitcoin becomes to me.

To put a finer point on it, I don't think that Amir Taaki was "just mad" when he said this yesterday:

Centralized, how? I haven't seen any compelling evidence that the Lightning Network would devolve into a hub-and-spoke model. Even if it did, that would just indicate that several large entities process the majority of transactions. How is that fundamentally different than a handful of mining pools processing the majority of on-chain transactions?

In both cases, the centralized entities (Lightning "hubs" or mining pools) could play a role in censoring transactions. But they are unlikely to be able censor all transactions for a significant period of time. In both cases, users don't trust funds to third parties and still rely on decentralized consensus.

I get the point, but that's not the fairest representation of the situation. The trend in electricity input has largely been driven by speculation. Once some long term market equilibrium is reached (perhaps years out), the pendulum should swing the other direction. And then FUD will probably be more focused on the down-trending hash rate than electricity input.


That seems unlikely. I'll be curious to see where we are in a few years, in comparison to the gold minting and banking industries. Both require huge amounts of energy.


That problem has less to do with electricity costs than ASIC production costs. There are many geographic locations that are comparable in electricity costs to China, and some percentage of people always have subsidization/free electricity.

After successful interoperability tests earlier this month, Lightning developers officially released the 1.0 version of the protocol. LN transactions can be made right now on the Bitcoin mainnet.

But there is no official ETA for the release of Lightning wallet software that end users like us will use. That's the next major hurdle on the roadmap. Developers of the various implementations have made it clear that concerns over code reliability are paramount to getting wallets out the door. Personally, I've got my fingers crossed for Q2-Q3 of next year.

I'd recommend against 2FA that can be socially engineered through call porting. SMS/cell phone for 2FA is a big no-no these days. Porting attacks are massively on the rise. If a hacker knows your login information, then he'll just need to socially engineer your cell carrier into porting the number.

From a Reddit thread:


They have since changed the default settings so that multi-device is off by default. But it sounds like a hacker still only needs 24 hours and access to your email and SMS to take over your accounts.


Just put the 2FA token on multiple devices and keep a manual copy of the token written down. Problem solved.

I'm not aware of a way to do it without manually adding the token to another authenticator. Just to be clear, you set up all your 2FAs on one phone only, and you have no backups?


Yeah, this won't help unless you have a backup of your 2FA token. If you could somehow get Google to do this, this would be a big security hole in your 2-factor security.


Unless somebody chimes in with a way to extract data from Google Authenticator (and I really hope there's no way to do this for the sake of people's security), then you should probably get your screen repaired. I had my Iphone screen repaired a while back for $80-90. That's nothing compared with the headache of verifying at all those exchanges.


Interesting idea.

It's sad to see old hands feeling this way. I don't believe anyone thinks the current situation is ideal. But there are two things to note. First, I think if you study a longer term chart of fees paid vs. number of confirmed transactions, this congestion doesn't look like a natural trend, but rather a spike from out of nowhere. It was perfectly-timed with the difficulty adjustment to make the problem even worse:


Second, there are solutions being built. We've now seen Lightning transactions on the network. Isn't that exciting? Yeah, it can't be rolled out overnight. But we're getting there. Lightning would probably be here already if not for multiple years of infighting about how to scale and fix transaction malleability all at once.

I don't think that competition from altcoins is a legitimate reason to rush the development process. Most altcoins don't scale well, either. Nobody has solved the linear scaling problem that Lightning attempts to solve. The reason transactions are fast and cheap on other blockchains is because they are either small/unused networks or they are highly centralized (like Ripple).

Bitcoin is a much more valuable network than any other, and I think a massive amount of coins will move into the Lightning Network after it launches. That entails quite a lot of risk when LN launches. I commend the "slow and steady" approach in this context. Now that the network parameters are established and test transactions have been successful, I bet we're less than a year away.

That's frustrating. I've never heard of an exchange leaving withdrawal transactions unconfirmed this long. They should be using replace-by-fee transactions in case this happens.

There's one way that you can get it confirmed yourself: child-pays-for-parent. You would need to use the unconfirmed output you received as an input in another transaction, then pay high fees to ensure a miner will confirm both transactions. From the look of that transaction, it's not worth it.

The only other thing I can suggest is to submit the transaction to this site near the top of every hour until they accept it: https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

I suspect he didn't properly clear DNS resolver cache or was otherwise compromised. Many people have been using Etherdelta without issues since the announcement was made. If you're using a site like this, you should be protecting yourself with something like MetaMask (which would have prevented this).


The safest route was to use MEW to remove all ETH and tokens from the contract while the site was compromised. The reason you can do that is because the contract doesn't give them control of your coins. Everyone trading on Etherdelta controls their keys; the question is who is getting phished and who isn't?

The DNS compromise is plausible if we assume that these guys are amateurs. Everything about the site suggests they are. The contract is/was secure, though. I got all my funds out without issue.

Coinbase is better for holding USD. They're licensed and compliance-minded, and USD is kept in FDIC-insured bank accounts. If they get hacked, the vast majority of their holdings are apparently in cold storage, so I think they would be unlikely to go under.

Tether is a different story. I would be careful holding USDT for long, if ever. The legal status of USDT is unprecedented, and they've been pretty opaque about their banking operations. In fact, I don't think they've been redeeming USDT for USD for a long time. I'd stick with a licensed exchange for holding fiat and having low buy orders set.

I'm pretty disappointed with CNBC's recent coverage. In line with their recent coverage of Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash (including giving Roger Ver multiple interviews to promote his agenda), they are blurring the line between cryptocurrencies and stock scams associated with them. Everything the former chairman referred to pertained to initial coin offerings (ICOs) and stocks of companies that are exploiting the current market hype. I don't see anything here about legitimate mined or minted cryptocurrencies.

This reminds me a lot of the April 2013 top when I first got involved with Bitcoin. It was a painful crash followed by a period of sideways. During this time, bitcoin services grew and proliferated, and many new altcoins were launched. It was only a few months later that we had an even bigger bubble (November 2013). Maybe that's what is happening here.

Regardless, this is a good reminder: don't get involved with bitcoin to get rich quick. The volatility can leave you gaining or losing half your dollar value overnight.

Systematically prohibiting/blacklisting transactions is censorship, and that would be particularly problematic at the protocol level. Miners are free to reject transactions that appear to be spam. Priority calculations were historically used to identify spam, and now the fee market deters it.

The problem is that an attacker with significant hash power can do the following: significantly drop the hash rate after difficulty adjusts upwards, spam the blockchain at different fee levels, and collect the block rewards (including his own spam). Part of the genius of Bitmain setting up several different pools is that it's very difficult to definitively prove this activity is occurring.

I sort of hate this phrase, but it applies here: It's a feature, not a bug. Developers of other protocols are free to explore governance structures, but I don't see a problem with Bitcoin's. It has always adhered to traditional open source ethos and development structure. That has always produced top-notch software with perpetual uptime.

The real downside of decentralization is its inefficiency and redundancy. Every node uploading/downloading every transaction and every block? It doesn't scale. That's why Lightning is such a big deal; it addresses the linear scaling problem. And it might have been ready already if not for 3 years of infighting about how to scale.


In a word: yes. I think the market demand speaks for itself. As usual, speculators usually front-run actual utility. But I'm very impressed with Core and all the work that has gone into the Lightning Network.