Considering that FTX employees were able to simple help themselves to customers' funds in order by themselves houses and other personal items, you can only assume that their security surrounding KYC documents was similarly lax. As I pointed out above, it seems that "sensitive data" was being held in a "unsecured group email account". Given that, then anyone who completed KYC on FTX should assume that all their personal data and whatever documents they uploaded are at the very least in the hands of some of their scamming employees, if not out in the wild altogether.

If you have completed KYC on any exchange ever then (given the number of database hacks/leaks) you should, at the very least, regularly check your credit report to make sure that no scammer is using your identity to open fraudulent accounts or take out loans. But in the case of a proven scam like this one, I would suggest that you both place a credit freeze on yourself so no one can open new accounts with additional checks and authorizations, and also log the issue with your local law enforcement so you have some recourse if you do suddenly end up on the hook for $100,000 in debt you didn't take out.

Usually yes, but it also depends on your wallet software/implementation.

Most good wallets use RFC 6979 to generate a k value for signing. This means k is produced deterministically, using a combination of your private key, the message you are signing, and a hash function. So the same message signed from the same private key will always generate the same k value and therefore the same signature. RFC 6979 is used to ensure that k is always unique and stop k accidentally being reused across different transactions, which would leak your private key.

However, if you are using a wallet implementation (I don't know of any that still do this) which just randomly generates k, then every time you sign the same message from the same private key it will use a different value for k, resulting in a different signature.

Yeah, this is fraud. The errors covered by the linked regulations are for unauthorized transfers, incorrect transfer to the wrong entity or of the wrong amount, a bank teller or ATM handing over the wrong amount of money, that kind of thing. It does not cover you being stupid enough to send your money to a scammer/centralized exchange (those terms are pretty much synonymous at this point).

Although it does reveal something about the financial literacy of people who leave funds on centralized exchanges that they would misunderstand legal documents and be suggesting that people commit fraud to try to get their money back. Perhaps if they had bothered to read the exchange's legal documents which says they will give your money to anyone who asks for it, they wouldn't have used the exchange in the first place. Also somewhat ironic that they harp on about dEfI but then try to use the centralized banking sector to fix their own stupidity.

Actually, I misspoke. Since there is only going to be a single winner in each category, you don't need to use single transferable vote. Instant runoff voting is easier. The process from the voters' point of view is actually the same in each system.

Everyone could still be allowed three votes in each category, or could be allowed as many votes are they like, but instead of just picking x number of users you would rank them first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. This is the limit of what individual users need to do.

To calculate the winner, you simply tally all the votes by their first choice. Then, look for the user or users with the fewest number of first choice votes, and they are eliminated. All their ballots are then redistributed to the next highest choice candidate. Repeat this process over and over until only one candidate remains, and they are the winner.

It is a much more fair system than simply using first past the post. Let's say, for example, theymos got 20 votes, you got 18, and I got 16. With first past the post, theymos wins. With first past the past, theymos wins with 20 votes, but 34 votes end up getting a choice they didn't want at all. But what if of the 16 people who voted for me, 14 wouldn't want theymos to win at all and would prefer you to win? With instant run off voting, you would win with 32 people getting either their first or second choice, and only 22 people getting a choice they didn't want at all.

But as I said, I can guarantee the majority of users would not read the instructions or would misunderstand them, so although it is an all round better system, probably best not to use it.

All the personal rumors aside, every new piece of information which comes out shows that FTX was possibly the most amateurish company which ever existed.

Their accounts show they were only holding $659,000, rather than the $5.5 billion SBF claimed. That's 0.01%. That has to be the smallest fractional reserve ever seen.

John Ray, the person who was appointed oversee the bankruptcy proceedings, filed a statement with the court on Thursday. Let's take a look at some of the best quotes: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23310507-ftx-bankruptcy-filing-john-j-ray-iii

The worst run company in history. Incredible.

Not only did FTX not know how much cash it had, but it didn't even know which bank accounts it had, who opened those accounts, or who those accounts were with.

So not only did they have no idea about what money they actually had, they didn't even know who worked for them?

Amazing. Your coins were literally being spent by individual employees on any old shit they liked. This is outright theft.

This is wild. For everyone who thinks that leaving coins on an exchange is more secure than in your own wallet, or completing KYC at an exchange is safe because they surely must have good security practices, read this sentence again. Then one more time. All your coins and data were protected by an unsecured group email account.

Absolutely incredible. This is a company which was reportedly the second biggest crypto exchange in the world. I would expect better management from a group of elementary school kids. If this is what is going on behind the scenes at FTX, then there is no telling what manner of things are going on behind that scenes are every other centralized exchange or platform out there.

Just to recap - they didn't keep track of any assets, they didn't even keep track of who worked for them, and anything you deposited was simply being spent by employees on personal items. This isn't a failed exchange - this is an outright scam.

If you keep anything on any centralized exchange after these revelations, then sorry, but you are a moron.

I would advocate for using single transferable vote instead, although I know that ~90% of the forum users wouldn't read the instructions and would end up spoiling their vote.

There is clearly precedence in Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings for non-crypto financial entities. As far as I am aware, Celsius will be the first time such a law has been tested for crypto.

This raises some very interesting points. Given that FTX is now insolvent, you can prove you do not have access to the funds. Or what if someone withdrew from Celsius, deposited to FTX, and then withdrew the same capital from FTX? There would now be two different entities both trying to clawback the same funds. Very messy situation indeed.

Given that you are a non-US citizen, Celsius would likely have to pursue you through the legal system of whatever country you reside in. This would be both a lengthy and costly process for them. Unless you withdrew crypto worth millions of dollars, it probably isn't going to be worth their time to come after you.

There is always the possibility of a group of individuals coming together to pool resources and set up a "community node". Not as perfect as running your own node, but still better to have a node ran by you and a few friends or your local village over having no node at all. There is also the possibility of receiving data for free via blockstream satellite, and you can repurpose old TV satellite dishes or similar to keep costs to a minimum.

No idea. I was taking simply about Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the US. It is unlikely that clawbacks for regular users are going to cross international borders, because as I said above, the time/effort/money required to do so will likely far outweigh anything that can be recovered (unless you happened to recently withdraw tens of millions of dollars worth of crypto from FTX).

However, bear in mind that as I said above, as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy we are likely to see a full list of names and addresses of all of FTX's users, which will include any who have signed up from countries where bitcoin is banned.

It is always a liability to use these entities. Anything you deposit on their platform, from 0.0001 BTC to 1000 BTC, immediately ceases to be owned by you and is used in a variety of shady and often illegal trading/lending/investment vehicles to make profit for the exchange, frequently with disastrous results for the user.

I don't disagree. That is a moronic portfolio, and anyone holding it is likely to lose a large amount of their initial investment. But it is still their right to do so, if they want. The whole point of bitcoin is to let you do whatever you want with your own money, without third parties dictating what you can and cannot do. If someone wants to hold all their money in shitcoins, then that is their right, regardless of how stupid that decision may be. An exchange shouldn't be gambling with customers' deposits.

I'm well aware of that, but what I'm saying is that if exchanges simply kept whatever was deposited to them (instead of all this shady lending/leverage/trading/staking/other DeFi bullshit), regardless of how stupid those deposits are, then they wouldn't all currently be insolvent.

Their official announcements, where they said they hire a blockchain analysis company or companies, share data with them, spy on their users, and censor/blacklist users when they don't like what they find.

JoinMarket would be my first choice. You must run your own node for this. I would consider using Samourai/Whirlpool, but again, only via my own node. Alternatively, use ChipMixer.

The same as you would use for on-chain privacy. Buy coins anonymously, mix/coinjoin them for good measure, and then uses these anonymous coins to open a Lightning channel via my own node.

It is only possible to use via Tor. If you are on a clearnet ChipMixer site, you are being scammed.

In the first versions of Electrum - no. The seed phrases were fixed at 12 words from a wordlist of 1626 words, encoding 128 bits of data. They later switched to phrases of up to 13 words so they could also include version data, before then switching back to 12 word phrases but using the BIP39 wordlist of 2048 words.

The first appearance of the make_seed command in Electrum, which allows the easy creation of seed phrases with user chosen lengths, was on August 28, 2014: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/4dcdcbc068d0d42ac7edc27c7d618b53cb6f706d

And as discussed before, for BIP39, both 12 and 24 word seed phrases were defined in the same document, so were essentially released simultaneously.

No, these are all internal consolidation transactions from Binance. And don't use Trust wallet - it is closed source and owned by Binance. A terrible choice.

Not infrequently, but this is by far the most they've ever done at once. There is no good reason they could have done this gradually over several weeks or months and saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees without backing up the mempool for everyone else, but this is obviously in response to the current market climate surrounding FTX and the fact they are scrambling to make sure they are actually solvent.

All Binance's transactions have now been included in a block, so the mempool is back down to around 50 vMB of unconfirmed transactions with peak fees of around 7 sats/vbyte. I would expect it to be largely cleared out by Monday.

A distinct possibility. As I mentioned, perhaps their attempted proof of reserves (which doesn't actually prove anything) has exposed a hole in their finances, and now they are scrambling to figure out if they are actually solvent or not.

Let's just point out again that such a ridiculous withdrawal fee is completely artificial; an arbitrary number picked by Binance which could be 99% lower and still cover the network fees.

Which is exactly the point of these fees. They don't want everyone withdrawing because they can make more money if you don't, and they might run in to a liquidity crisis if you do. So set astronomically high fees and know that the majority will just leave their coins on the platform.

You are all mixing up your numbers here.

The 300MB limit is the RAM usage of the deserialized data for all the transactions in the mempool. This is not the same as the space that these transaction will take up in a block (either in terms of virtual bytes or raw bytes). Of course every node has its own mempool, but even identical mempools would result in different RAM usage between nodes due to different hardware, node software, OS, and so on.

Although we currently have around 120 vMB of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, when deserialized these transactions are using around 300 MB of memory.

Here is a good site to visualize this: https://statoshi.info/d/000000020/memory-pool?orgId=1&from=now-2d&to=now
The green line in the top graph shows the total transaction size, while the white line in the middle graph shows the memory usage of those transactions.

Potentially, yes.

As part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, funds which were withdrawn in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing can be clawed back and added to the pot of assets to be distributed. There are suggestions that Celsius are planning to do this during their bankruptcy proceedings, but the process will take many months, if not years, to be finalized.

If you withdrew coins within 90 days of the bankruptcy, then yes, you could see letters in the future demanding you return those funds. This will also be largely dependent on the size your withdrawal, as for small withdrawals it probably isn't worth the time or money to pursue.

There is no good reason to use a centralized exchange. People finally seem to be waking up to the fact. Bear in mind that not only is there this clawback issue with your coins, but as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy your real name, address, deposits, and transactions are likely to be published in court documents which will be publicly viewable to anyone, just as also happened with Celsius.

The small amount of convenience that a centralized exchange brings over a decentralized exchange is absolutely not worth the massive risk to your coins, your data, your privacy, and your security.

First of all, a public key is not the same as a public key hash. You can find out the public key hash, which is simply RIPEMD160(SHA256(pubkey)), for any address simply by decoding the address from Base58 back in to hex and stripping off the network byte and checksum. The public key hash for 16jYMfASQ4ngejMcVUoAjEBvq9HKnc6UX2 is 3EE4462D45A65A3CBE9E3DD19780C0A29C4E39D3.

In terms of getting the public key of 16jYMfASQ4ngejMcVUoAjEBvq9HKnc6UX2, the answer is you can't right now. That address has only received coins - it has not spent them. You need a transaction where coins are spent from an address for that address's public key to be part of the signature. Until that happens (or a message is signed from that address) then its public key remains unknown.

Just want to point out I'm not paranoid about anything, because I don't store a single satoshi of my money on a centralized exchange. Every exchange in the world can go bankrupt if they want - my bitcoin will be just fine.

I don't think it is. Binance started to publish their "proof of assets" bullshit last week. Then it all went silent. Perhaps they are scrambling to consolidate everything they can because right now they don't actually have proof of reserves. Or perhaps they are also having a liquidity crisis due to mass withdrawals, and are rushing to refill their withdrawal wallets. They could have done this gradually over the last several months and paid 1 sat/vbyte for it all, but instead they choose to do it all right now to do it and spend a huge amount on unnecessary fees to get it done? Not a coincidence.

That's all well and good, but does absolutely nothing to address the fact that a brand new account with no reputation is asking people to download and install closed source software. (And also appears to have registered a second newbie account to "vouch" for himself.) Sorry, but that's a scam in my books until proven otherwise.

Electrum's seed system is not proprietary. It is free and open source. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Electrum seed phrases, and indeed, their system has some advantages over BIP39 seed phrases.

This is awful advice. Manually picking a seed phrase is a recipe for disaster. Instead, use open source software (such as Bitcoin Core or Electrum) which you can personally verify to be securely generating entropy.

Any time you come to paywall, try prefixing the URL with the following:
Usually this will bypass it. For example: 12ft.io/https://www.ft.com/content/726277bb-35a1-4d35-9df9-3e1cca587b77

And if that doesn't work, just archive the page and it bypasses the paywall. Here you go: https://archive.ph/oJ6ip

Looks like this hedge fund had $100 million in assets on FTX. I'm sure there will be plenty of other hedge funds and other financial companies in the coming days admitting that they have lost large amounts of money via FTX.