....Often, what is best for the consumer alligns with what will make a company the most money. The reason for this is because consumers will ultimatly act rationally and in their own best interest, and if a company is offering a product that is not in line with what is best for their customers, their customers will not buy said product....

Is this better, though? Putting aside my well known feelings regarding centralized exchanges and KYC for a minute...

At the moment, as you say, KYC/AML and centralized exchanges is all over the place. Some do it one way, some do it another way. Some are very strict, some are not so strict. What one exchange accepts, another might refuse, and vice versa, not just in terms of KYC and personal information but also in terms of so called "tainted" coins. Does putting in place some sort of framework to make every exchange work to the same level actually benefit the average user? You already have absolutely no privacy and no security if you are using a centralized exchange, so that can't exactly get any worse. But at least you might end up with fewer cases of accounts being arbitrarily locked because one exchange's requirements were different to another, or one exchange was utilizing some blacklist that another one wasn't?

I don't know. I agree that this makes things easier for institutions. I'm not going to lie and say that I don't care if some massive asset management firms come in and drop a few hundred billion dollars in to the market - obviously I'd like the price to go up and the increased legitimacy and adoption that such a move would bring. But at the same time, I'm not going to let this kind of regulation touch me. As much as I like higher prices, I like the fundamentals of bitcoin more.

TLDR; privacy is a bad thing.
....
Pretty disappointing that mixing coins is "officially" an illicit activity now. Doesn't it sound oxymoron, though, to exchange centrally and use a mixer? Pick a side; you can't protect your privacy if you don't have any.

I really doubt this data point, because this data would only be formed using the bank transactions of Many Russians which have added their money into the exchanges or wallets like coinbase for purchasing bitcoin, it will largely exclude information of those who have held it on a private key wallet and have received the bitcoins from some other method. Because it's impossible for Russian authorities to differentiate which wallets belong to Russians. and to be honest the private key holders must be the ones having the major chunk. As per an estimate done a few months back only 6% of total bitcoins are there on exchanges so calculating it that way $130B might just be 5-10% of the total Iceberg.

I'd never considered that before when suggesting that people should use the "Detect existing accounts" button. I went to check the code, and you are absolutely right: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/586d3a4361f5dbb9ce9ffdfdfeb276664b5bbfaa/electrum/bip39_recovery.py#L18-L62
As you can see from lines 47 and 51, it checks the first 20 receiving addresses, but does not check any change addresses.

I'm sure there are other wallets, which like BRD, send change from one account to the change address in another account, which could result in the same situation here of "Detect existing accounts" missing an active account. Worth raising an issue on GitHub?

It's nothing new, really. The document essentially boils down to: "Collect KYC data, use blockchain analysis to monitor all deposits and withdrawals, figure out where all coins are coming from and going to, and cross check all that against blacklists and other databases". This is what pretty much every centralized exchange already does. I think the only thing that's new is the explicit recommendation that exchanges should directly partner with blockchain analysis companies.

As much as I hate such incredibly intrusive privacy invasion, as long as it is isolated to centralized third parties then it doesn't affect me. Whenever you use a financial third party - in fiat or in bitcoin - then you are subjected to their rules and regulations, and by extension the rules and regulations of your government. This has always and will always be the case, and bitcoin won't change this. Conversely, it is trivial for me to avoid all this nonsense by continuing to refuse to use such centralized third parties and instead use bitcoin as it was intended. Institutions can buy their carefully selected coins from their carefully selected platforms, with no privacy, no security, no ownership, complete centralization, while fully trusting a variety of third parties, if that's what they want. I'll continue to use bitcoin as it was designed instead - trustless, self-ownership, censorship resistant.

Can somebody tell me why the forum accepts that there is signature advertisement for a clear scamming service? Why is there all this effort in tagging people etc. if you could just remove the whole campaign?

....

I can assure you they need to mine on Soloblocks.io soloblocks.io

It is profitable (highly).

I finished building it and we have already 2 phs.

That is a little crazy. I’m surprised to read it actually passed. As a fan of true crime documentaries though I am familiar with the amount of strange disappearances and unsolved murders in the Houston area. They definitely have a problem. I’m not one to force business owners to do anything, but maybe for the businesses that are having multiple murders or disappearances on their doorstep, something should be done. Perhaps it should be the city’s responsibility and not the business owner, but I suspect some of these businesses are at least considered to be at fault of some kind to push an ordinance this far.

Someone's experience while using such unrecommendable wallet should be cool because sacrificing privacy will be cool and an easy way to go. Also backup on online clouds would be cool until hackers use someone as a scapegoat just like Metamask iCloud attack.

Hackers steal $655K after picking MetaMask seed from iCloud backup

If you enable fingerprint for unlocking your device, it would also be cool to use fingerprint to unlock a wallet as Coinbase recommended fingerprint for the wallet access. It would definitely be easy for an attacker to compromise your device and your Coinbase wallet either using your finger while sleeping, or cutting off the device owner's finger, or using modern means of taking fingerprint to unlock the device and the wallet.

1/ On April 15th, @revive_dom received multiple text messages asking to reset his Apple ID password and at 6:32 PM he received a call from "Apple Inc." which was a spoofed caller ID.
2/ verification code to prove the owner of the Apple ID account. After giving the 6 digit verification code, the scammers hung up and his MetaMask wallet was wiped, with over $650,000 stolen.

At least it's not London - the most heavily surveilled city outside of China, with a quite absurd 73.3 cameras per 1,000 people (as of May 2021). For interest, New York (7.1 ) and Los Angeles (8.8 ) are an order of magnitude lower. And Texas would need around 400,000 cameras to match London (if my maths is correct).

The purpose of the proposed amendment to Chapter 28, Miscellaneous Offenses and Provisions, is to establish a requirement for bars, nightclubs, sexually oriented businesses, convenience stores, and game rooms to install exterior security cameras providing video coverage from the exterior of the building to the property line.

Additionally, the ordinance requires that a camera owner or operator store video footage for no less than 30 days, and provide HPD with the footage within 72 hours of a request.