Corruption is universal. Thinking it's worse in less developed countries is a myth.
But it's obvious they will never get them all. Even with the total ban on mining in China you can still see a fair amount of hash coming from there.
It just becomes better hidden as they figure out what caused them to be found.

-Dave

Yes power on.
From the initial windows load till the password entry is about 45 seconds. Then close to another 4 minutes to finish up the rest of the loading.
Now the wallets are still doing their thing in the background at the 4 1/2 minute time. But you can see they are up and thinking.

-Dave

Just saw that. A bit less efficient then the S19j XP BUT if they are true to the marketing and the chips and miner are 1/2 the price then who cares.
And it's Intel. Might not be the best at all times, but their chips and miners are probably a lot better then everyone else.
Lets see how long till they come to market and we can actually buy them.

-Dave

Never had an issue with start with logon. Even now I have a VERY under powered laptop (3rd gen i5) with 8GB RAM and a 2TB SATA 7200RPM
At startup it loads.
Win 10 Home
McAfee
Bitcoin Core
Litecoin Core
NDL ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396227.0 )
DEFCoin ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396227.0 )

Startup to usable GUI is about 4 1/2 minutes.
All the coins are loading their full GUI wallets.

Also have Microsoft Office 2010 while running slow is usable.
Firefox. Browses most sites fine (if slow) more then 1 video and it does go to shit.

I just keep it at the data center as an offsite machine to do stuff with if I don't have my regular laptop with me.

-Dave

I have them more for people who don't have phone wallets or don't want to have that much BTC in their hot phone wallet.
If you don't have the ability or the desire for me to send it to you right then and there you take what I give you :-)
Somewhat of a hardass attitude I know, but I think you get the idea.

Not to mention opendimes and the like have a significant cost to them.

If I have to give you BTC0.0051 ($200) at the current price and you don't want it on your phone for whatever reason, do I give you $180 and you eat the cost of the opendime or do I give you the full $200 and a tip of a $20 piece of equipment.

-Dave

Saw this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/kazakh-ministry-halts-illegal-crypto-mining-operations


Actually posted a bit about it in the press section.

I wonder over time as more and more miners like this are shut down how, will it really make a noticeable change in the diff. I am guessing that since they were doing this the wrong way they were not using the newest and fastest and most efficient miners. So, it will probably not cause a drop just a slower growth.

Although not a lot of equipment based on the power draw and it probably was not only BTC miners it does bring up the interesting thought (at least interesting to me) is that if we just use straight math 202MW / 13 operations gets you about 15 MW per site. That is a lot of power but not a totally crazy amount of power for some businesses. I think I have a customer in the 15MW range just doing some light manufacturing. So I could see people thinking they could hide it.

-Dave

https://cointelegraph.com/news/kazakh-ministry-halts-illegal-crypto-mining-operations

Several other articles out there about it. I really see it as a giant game of whack-a-mole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole) as big miners just shuffle equipment around. Also, I always wonder if it's all just BTC or a mix of other algos and GPUs.

It makes you wonder how much more it would cost to do it legitimately vs. hoping not to get caught. Do they do any risk / reward calculation based on anything or just start plugging things in and hope for the best. In addition to the miners themselves there is a lot of other manpower and such involved.

-Dave

Obligatory comments:

1) So long as you know what you are doing. If you don't have experience running a secure anonymous server then having different address for each donation is pointless.

2) If you can't host your own wallet then find a trustworthy individual to do it for you.

3) After getting the donations not having good OpSec for the coins will remove any anonymization in about 1/2 a second. If you don't understand why or how this is: STOP NOW and read up on how coins can be tracked.


-Dave

The question, which should be discussed with both topics is which is more important?
@o_e_l_e_o has made his views 100% known that privacy and anonymity are a tiny bit more important then security and ease of use.^{1 & 2 & 3}
I have never hidden the fact that I think security is a bit more important, because I feel once security is violated in any small way, even where a lot of people don't understand how or why the rest does not matter. They have you and possibly your coins.

^1: o_e_l_e_o I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I really feel that is your view.

^2: Really, really, really hiding yourself & your coins from the Govt & authorities is a lot harder then most people think. It's just that for the most part they are not looking real hard for you & your coins. But with a bit of effort and time it's not that hard for them to track.

^3: The more steps you add to hide you & your coins makes it more difficult to track you BUT the more steps you have to take, does make it more likely you will mess up one of them somewhere sometime.

-Dave

You left out the point of "So long as you know what you are doing and practice good security"

I work in IT, the security I see SOOOO many intelligent people implement is a joke no matter how hard I try.

Is it better to have your coins frozen by Coinbase because the government told them too or have them stolen by a hacker because you went to a phishing site and got some clipboard malware?

-Dave

MSFT doing stuff like that goes back to the beginning of time. Or at least PCs From: https://raywoodcockslatest.wordpress.com/2021/06/09/dos-lotus/

As for:

I'll let Homer Simpson sum that up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVd0-ka1Brk

But seriously, Star Wars / Marvel / etc. with Disney all comes down to money, I don't think anyone thinks any differently. They go with what is going to generate the largest profit and if it changes the core story a bit or a lot so be it.

I actually see both sides of it. Part of me really does not like the way some things have been changed, another part of me knows that some other projects would not get made if they could not get enough money out of them.

Back to BTC & crypto. Apple & Google are all about making the money. If they have to do things in their stores to help that along it's going to happen. If Coinbase has to adapt they will. People have been complaining about that for years.
But, I always find it funny when you see these people running around saying that they can't get the app they just wrote in the the Apple app store, and they are going to call their lawyer on their iPhone while writing a letter on their MacBook and listening to music on the AirPods. Yeah, Apple is going to take you seriously....

-Dave

The only thing I can really come up with is "and so what?"
Apple / Google have always controlled what is in their stores. (Although with Google you could for the most part always install anything you want)

Just because it's virtual does not make it any different then shopping at WalMart.
If WalMart says to be sold in our stores you must follow those rules you have to follow them. Same with Amazon.

Articles like this are really nothing but clickbait at it's worst. Rambling shit that talks about nothing.

-Dave

It was mentioned somewhere (reddit? github? blog somple? don't remember)  that it's on the to-list but it does require a lot of work AND very few people use it so it's not high up on the priority list.

Honestly except for the few people who did discuss it on github and the one thread on reddit, and you  there has been very few complaints so I do see their point.

-Dave
 

Hmmm a new user comes in and bashes Lightning Labs because of some shit on Twitter and a fight between some developers.

I use both LND and C-lightning. I can say from what I have seen LND has a larger community of users and developers. C-lightning is very tied to Blockstream, yes it's open source but, at least for me, LND seems to have more people working and developing and supporting us dumbasses when we screw something up.

Just my view, take it as you will. Also, keep in mind it's a bit of a loop in the fact that as of now LND has more wallets supporting it, so if you want to promote C-lightning instead of promoting it by itself getting some of the wallet people behind it may help.

-Dave

You can always switch to linux for crypto related activity.

If you are going to be using Windows, installing GOOD AV software is a must *and* having something like Malwarebytes as a 2nd layer does help. The security part of Malwarebytes is meh at best but it does do a good job of blocking a lot of malware hosting sites. On top of that, if you don't mind giving up some privacy / anonymity installing MetaMask might help too. It's crap software for holding crypto, but it also does aggressively block a lot of crypto fraud sites too. Not going to those type of sites will really cut down on the chance of crypto clipboard malware.

If money is no object installing real front end security is also a good thing. But getting a SonicWall and the security subscription and a Barracuda Web Security Gateway and it's subscription will run into the $1000s and $1000s to start and the annual subscriptions are not cheap either.

-Dave

A QR code is nice. But without having the address shown too I have always thought it's pointless.
If I say send coins here and just give you a QR code then you have no way of knowing if the code I generated is correct, or if the site displaying it is not altering it in some way, or if there is any malware on the device that is changing what is being passed to the app.

In general they are secure, but more and more you are not getting any other information with them, so at that point they are still secure but you have no way of knowing.....

-Dave

I know you have the custom text for you avatar but doing something like I have may help too.
I can actually say that even if DarkStar_ / ChipMixer requested the text below the avatar be changed to something else to stay in the campaign I would have to think long and hard about it before doing it.

-Dave






<---I think this does help.

For the initial download setting dbcache to 2048 to 4096 if you have enough RAM will speed up the initial download while putting LESS stress on your system.
There are a few discussions about it around about doing that. Using an SSD does help too.

-Dave

You have to use an older version of the software, this has been a known issue for a while:
https://github.com/LedgerHQ/ledger-live-desktop/issues/4473

There are some discussions out there about other issues about connecting it to your own node it's not always painless.

-Dave

I think they are promoting BTC so that the average Russian citizen can have that feeling that even if their banking is cut off from the rest of the world they can still move money. Big business has plans in place, as do the oligarchs. The average person does not. This allows them to still function with the outside world.

Side thought, and a sad bit of humor. 1st America did Vietnam and it did not go so well, then Russia did Afghanistan and that did not go so well, then the US did Afghanistan and it did not go well either, now Russia is doing Ukraine. Guess they wanted a new long drawn out conflict that will look like they are winning at 1st and then slowly get eroded away.

-Dave