Regulate altcoins and stablecoins all you want. Hell, ban them outright, since >99% of them are either useless, vaporware, or outright scams. But bitcoin does not need governments trying to stick their noses where they don't belong and dictate how it is allowed to function.

Sure, but there are regulations like "We'll apply capital gains for bitcoin except for transactions less than $1000" which encourage its usage as a currency, and then there are regulations like "You are only allowed to hold bitcoin on wallets which collect your KYC data and report it to the government", which do the exact opposite.

Bitcoin is inevitable because of how horrendously governments around the world have mismanaged their fiat currencies. We don't need those same governments trying to influence bitcoin.

Now this seems interesting. The underlying method of Lehmer code certainly looks preferable to Ian Coleman's implementation, although it requires using a third party's code. Although the code is simple, the whole point of using a physical method of entropy generation is to avoid doing this, and if someone doesn't trust /dev/urandom to securely generate entropy, then relying on code written by one person and (as far as I can tell from a web search) not reviewed or even discussed by anyone else ever is a bad idea. I suppose it would be possible to calculate your code manually using an airgapped computer and a simple calculator package, but the chances of making a mistake with this process are very high.

And as I said earlier in the thread, given that I have no formal training in cryptography, I cannot rule out that there is some glaring vulnerability of which I am unaware. I am not willing to risk the safety of my coins by using something which I cannot verify. I'll stick to my simple, secure, quick, and easy coin flips.

Maybe. But the whole point of the argument I'm making here is that I'm not a cryptographer, so I can't say for sure. And neither is anyone else in this thread, by the looks of things.

People without extensive medical knowledge don't tend to attempt surgery (unless they are very stupid), and so we shouldn't be attempting to create our own ad hoc cryptography, especially when there already exists better tried, tested, and verified methods.

Also, a slight niggle: You do lose a small amount of entropy (<1 bit) when you hash a string for a brain wallet.

That's a neat idea which hasn't occurred to me before. As you say, you can immediately check the legitimacy of the bills, there are plenty of people around, and there are plenty of cameras around as well as security. That's a pretty safe way to do it. Usually if I am trading with a brand new person or someone I don't have that much rapport with I suggest we meet at an ATM or a bank, and either withdraw the cash immediately prior to the trade, or deposit it immediately after. Again you can immediately check the bills, and if you meet during the day then again you get the benefits of people and cameras for security.

Another suggestion would be that if there are people on LocalCryptos you have traded with several times before and have some trust with, then contact them now and ask if they are planning to set up on another platform (if they aren't already using one), or even to suggest that you can arrange private trades after the site goes offline.

But if that's the case, then a hard reset in which all the data is encrypted and then deleted would achieve the exact same amount of security without requiring the user to purchase a new device.

Any time someone tells me their device or their wallet forgot their password or their PIN (and not just in bitcoin), then I am of the opinion that by far the most likely explanation is human error. Sure, he may have a faulty device, but far more likely he is simply entering the wrong PIN (especially if he hasn't entered it for a few months). Prime example is Peter Schiff, who claimed his wallet forgot his password, before admitting that actually he was entering the wrong information.

The fact that we don't have a good method makes it a problem. The only implementation of cards to seed phrase I am aware of is Ian Coleman's, which as we have already discussed here is not great. I am not aware of any other implementation, and I'm certainly not going to propose one. They obviously can't be used "as is" since a seed phrase or a private key needs to be presented in bits, and a string of cards is not in bits nor directly convertible to bits without applying some kind of transformation.

This gets us back to the original discussion regarding converting a string of dice rolls in to a string of bits, which as I argued before, should not just be a case of applying a hash function and assuming you now have a cryptographically secure random number and you are perfectly safe.

So again, I would say that if you don't trust /dev/urandom for some reason, then stick to flipping a coin to produce a string of bits directly. Anything else is more complicated, more time consuming, and potentially less secure.

Sure, but the issue is that the chains might have diverged so much that to abandon the chain with less proof of work would mean reversing weeks or months or payments, wiping thousands of bitcoin completely out of existence due to lost block rewards, and completely invalidating every transaction which has one of these lost block rewards anywhere in its history. The combined chaos of all that happening might mean that the people using the minority chain deliberately make changes to their protocol to prevent their nodes from abandoning their chain in the event of communications being reestablished, leaving us with two networks running side by side.

It splits it by /16 for IPv4 and /32 for IPv6, and will try not to pick nodes from the same bucket. But as I said above, IP addresses aren't a super reliable indicator of geography, and even if they were, it would still be easily possible to pick 10 nodes from 10 different buckets all within the same country.

On AgoraDesk the option is listed under "Cash (locally)". Obviously it depends on your location, but if you search for New York for example, then there are hundreds of open offers. Bisq also offers face-to-face as a payment method.

Bear in mind as well that all the traders on LocalCryptos will have to find new homes if they want to continue trading, so hopefully you will see the face-to-face markets on these platforms grow in size over the coming weeks as people make the transition.

Not how it works. If mining becomes less profitable then some miners drop out, meaning mining becomes easier, meaning more profit for existing miners. It's a self correcting system which ensures that mining will always remain profitable at some level.

I'm not sure the links you shared are particularly good news for the UK. While it does make it seem pretty unlikely that lawmakers there would pursue an outright ban on bitcoin, talks of more and more regulations are unwanted. Bitcoin does not need regulated. Reading between the lines, it sounds like this is them paving the way for a CBDC.

Then when communication is reestablished, the chain with less proof of work (which would almost certainly be the "1" chain in 2:1 split) would simply be abandoned as all their nodes reorg to accept the chain with more work. There will not be enough time in 1-2 hours to do anything else.

With such a short split, there might not be that much disruption. Assuming that no one has access to both chains (otherwise there wouldn't be a split at all), then every transaction on the minority chain will still be valid and could then be mined on the main chain after the reorg. There would be no transactions invalidated due to block rewards being invalidated, since we would be well below the 100 block lock up period.

If the split was very one sided, e.g. 95%/5%, the chain with 5% of the hashrate would be facing block times of 3 hours or more and up to 9 months before the next retargeting. In such a case, their chain would become completely unusable unless they quickly implemented some new retargeting mechanism. Worth noting that in such a case it would be the chain with the most proof of work which would win in the case of a reconnection, which is not necessarily the longest chain. If the chain with 95% continued to mine at the current difficulty, but the chain with 5% forked to drop the difficulty drastically, then the 5% chain could end up being longer, but the 95% chain would win due to having accumulated more work in the production of its chain.

I may stand corrected Dave - I'm reading unconfirmed chatterings that both Bittrex and Robinhood depend on Blockchair, and so may be delisting BSV when Blockchair does. I checked the Bittrex site here (https://global.bittrex.com/status) and they currently list their BSV wallets as "inactive". Perhaps the dominoes are starting to fall...

No no no. They might have enough hashrate, but they don't have the password to the right Twitter accounts to use the Proof of Tweet algorithm.

If the network was split fairly evenly, both sides would immediate notice block times roughly doubling due to hashrate halving until we hit the next retarget. Outside of this, though, I'm certain that everyone would immediately notice the internet splitting in two, since you would not be able to communicate with many of your contacts and you would lose access to huge chunks of content.

Provided neither chain rolled out any update or fork which would make it incompatible with the other chain, then when the connection was reestablished whichever chain had the most proof of work would win and the other chain would simply be abandoned. I would assume in such a doomsday event though that at least one side would deliberately take steps to prevent this from happening so as not to risk a massive reorg and loss of hundreds or even thousands of blocks worth of block rewards.

In terms of geography then no, not as far as I am aware, and with nodes being run over Tor/VPN/VPS then IP addresses are not reliable indicators anyway.

I would say its an education and lobbying issue more than anything else. The average age of our Senate is mid-60s, with some Senators well in to their 80s. I think our oldest at the moment is 88. We have Senators who say they only communicate with their staff via hand written messages because they don't like technology, and seem proud of the fact they have never sent an email. And we expect such people to pass sensible laws regarding bitcoin and blockchain technology?

On top of that, most of our Senators on both sides receive campaign funding and donations from large banks and other financial institutions who have a vested interest in seeing that bitcoin does not succeed. Take a look at this data for example: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=F. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And so they vote in the way that banks or other lobbyists want them to, so as not to bite the hand that feeds them.

I would say the biggest proponent of bitcoin in the Senate is Cynthia Lummis, who has tried on multiple occasions to advance sensible amendments or legislation, such as exempting all bitcoin transactions under $200 from capital gains tax. Not much progress has been made, though, given the majority of our Senators are as I have described above. I'm hopeful that as bitcoin continues to grow and develop, a steady trickle of Senators might actually take it upon themselves to learn a little bit about what they are trying to regulate.

The energy isn't wasted - it is being used to secure the network, which is a very useful application. I could just as equally argue that the energy used to allow people to watch reality TV is completely wasted, not to mention being a net negative for society, but I don't get to dictate how other people use energy that they are purchasing on a free and open market. Energy has a price. If you are willing to pay that price, you get to use that energy. Simple.

I don't disagree, but bitcoin mining is hardly on the same scale as open war with Russia. I'm sure I read in the last few months that some UK politicians were talking about making the UK attractive for cryptocurrency businesses, which is in stark contrast to the horrendous bitcoin related bills and laws currently making their way through the US government.

And yet Ian Coleman's method generates a string of 32*5 + 16*4 + 4*2 = 232 bits if you draw the entire deck once, which is above this upper limit of entropy.

But still, how are you going to convert a string of cards to bits? Are you going to use Ian Coleman's method, which as discussed I don't like. Or do you just write your cards out as a string of 7h9sKdAc and so on and hash it? Some other method? How has your method been analyzed and tested? As I said, it is not a trivial problem.

I don't think they are actually any more secure, hence why I put "more secure" in quotation marks. But if I can draw 4 cards and up with 8 bits of "entropy" or 20 bits of "entropy" depending on the cards, then that's a problem. If I shuffle a deck randomly, then the top card has a set amount of entropy. That amount of entropy doesn't change when I turn the card over and see what it is.

Rounding errors aside, there are 2³¹ more private keys than card orders, so by doing this you are excluding 99.99999995% of all possible private keys.

Blockchair's BSV explorer has already had times where it has shown no new blocks for several days, while other block explorers have been dozens or even hundreds of blocks ahead (albeit with every block explorer you check either at different heights, or at the same height but showing different forks). Although it seems to have caught up now, any exchange which was solely relying on Blockchair would have had to suspend their BSV deposits and withdrawals for over a week now.

Here is what the lead developer of Blockchair had to say a few months ago:
Junk data that nobody cares about and nobody is interested in using. Sounds about right.

It's true that the Ledger Donjon review linked to above was from the old Ellipal wallet, but I think it's worth taking a closer look at what they found. The Ellipal wallet was just the board from an Android mobile phone with a new case on it. It still had all the same capabilities as an Android phone, including WiFi and booting to a factory testing mode, that were simply soft locked by the software and trivially re-enabled. Ledger were able to connect up a USB port without issue, access the bootloader, and dump the private keys, which is a very basic attack.

They were essentially marketing a mobile phone on flight mode as a hardware wallet. This is incredible amateurish, if not borderline scammy, and is enough to mean I will never touch one of their devices, even if they say they have improved on all these things. Also, it is closed source.

There is already a discussion about this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5418010.0. The general feeling there is that it is likely regulatory pressures which have forced them to close.

This is not the case at all. The biggest selling point of LocalCryptos was that they did not require KYC, and were a true peer to peer exchange. Binance P2P is not peer to peer at all. It calls itself P2P as a marketing gimmick, but you are trading through a centralized third party (Binance), who collect your info, monitor your activities, and spy on your transactions.

I've never understood why anyone would ever use Binance P2P. It takes all the disadvantages of a centralized exchange (zero privacy, zero security, zero custody of your coins, constantly being monitored, can have your coins seized at any time, etc.) but with none of the advantages of instant orders or trades.

There is an ever growing market for real peer to peer trading, without Binance or Big Brother holding your coins for you and telling you what you can and cannot do. Bisq is the best platform to use.

Anyone got a link to this nChain patent which predates BIP 324? Is it just a plagiarized copy of BIP 324 with the name and date changed via a hex editor?

Surely it should be easy enough to confirm with any of these universities if he is actually enrolled with them? Not sure what any of this proves, though - anyone can enroll in as many courses as they like. But when it comes to actually completing the work? Well... https://medium.com/@paintedfrog/craig-wright-plagiarized-significant-portions-of-his-phd-thesis-and-tried-to-hide-it-80cd8f01459

Not an exchange, but it looks like Blockchair will stop supporting BSV (and EOS) in about 2 weeks. You are shown a banner at the top of the page whenever you try to use the BSV explorer with the following text:

Can't say I blame them when on any given day there are about 5 different chain tips to try to pick from until Proof of Tweet kicks back in and the BSV gods dictate which chain is the One True Chain^TM.

Also, looks like CoinGeek might know something we don't and are running preemptive damage control. https://coingeek.com/bsv-doesnt-need-exchanges/
Next up: BSV doesn't need a blockchain.