Ach Schade! Hab zwar schon seit langem nicht mehr auf Localbitcoins gehandelt aber die Platform war Teil meines Einstiegs in die Bitcoin-Welt.


Die zunehmende Regulierung wird die Sache sicher nicht leichter gemacht haben. Kann auch sein, dass sich das Publikum einfach zu sehr verändert hat. Teil des Grundes warum ich damals aufgehört habe auf Localbitcoins zu handeln ist, dass die Tradingpartner mit der Zeit immer unzuverlässiger wurden (kurzfristige Absagen, etc). Aber vielleicht gings auch nur mir so.

Prediction 1: $21,769,-
bech32 address: bc1qwvnm4g4jfjg5nr0pzu9mxdyu865f24nc0dckhv

Ein Rücksetzer ist meiner Meinung nach nicht unwahrscheinlich, aber mit einem tieferen Boden würd ich nicht mehr rechnen.

The required customs declaration discussed in this thread only refers to cash and cash equivalents. A Rolex (or similar luxury product) does not fall under cash equivalents.

I don't think there's any other rules under which you'd have to declare it at all (being an item intended for personal use), though depending on the item more specific restrictions may apply. Unless of course you're wearing multiple Rolex watches, at which point customs will presume that you're importing them and certain taxes apply. But that's still unrelated to the declaration requirements for cash and cash equivalents.

Apart from things like 2FA codes or private keys, I would only scan a QR code on a website if I'm on desktop and would like to open a link specifically on mobile for some reason (e.g. for downloading an App).

It's at everyone's personal discretion after how many confirmations they deem a Bitcoin transaction as settled. A small online shop will have a different risk profile than a large online exchange. I think most exchanges still require 6 confirmations before allowing trading and withdrawal, while casinos tend to allow gambling after 1 confirmation but require a few more confirmations for withdrawal.

The deepest re-orgs were 53 blocks in 2010 and 24 blocks in 2013: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/92974/what-is-the-length-of-largest-known-reorganization-in-bitcoin

I'm not aware of any other major re-orgs happening since then, but back in 2017 during the fork wars, most exchanges highly increased confirmation requirements for the minority forks like Bitcoin Cash. IIRC it was in the order of 24, maybe even as high as 100 confirmations on some exchanges. This was due to high hashrate fluctuations and a subsequent lack of reliability in transaction finality.

I also lean towards the "keep it payment-related" side, but the way I see it, if NFTs become commonly used on the Bitcoin blockchain -- and I mean long-term, not just as a fad -- that, to me, is a completely valid use case, even if I personally don't see much in it.

Maybe it's my rose colored glasses, but I still believe that colored coins / NFTs will eventually find meaningful use cases -- arguably colored coins already have, in the form of stablecoins and even ICOs, if they weren't so scam-ridden. And while NFTs are in my opinion currently little more than a philosophical exercise, exploring the ownership of intangibles, I do think they might become the building blocks of something bigger once the hype around digital collectibles has subsided. That doesn't mean that the Bitcoin blockchain is the right place for this, but if a few rich kids are willing to pay premium for the clout of owning an NFT on the OG Blockchain, so be it. Might be annoying in the short term, but like I said, I have doubts that it will stick. In the end there's only money in NFTs as long as someone else is willing to pay for it.

When it comes to blockchain bloat this is mostly a rehash of the OP_Return discussion we had in 2013/14. The projects back then did bring something new to the table by enabling things like Tether and early proto-NFTs. Their impact can't be understated, regardless of whether one likes these projects or not.

Either way, my worry is limited. On-chain minting of oversized NFTs isn't really sustainable given a strict enough blocksize limit.



Yes, it's going to be interesting to see whether there will be a "fix" for this, assuming it becomes necessary. If this becomes a problem it will not be easy to get the miners on board though, as it is in their interest to have the blocks as full as possible, regardless of whether they are filled with monetary transactions or other data.

Oof. Imagine we'd get rid of blocksize restrictions like some folks would have us had a couple years ago. Someone would have probably added the Lord of the Rings extended edition by now. If not via Taproot, then by using some other means.

Either way, nice stunt, I guess? Just goes to show the importance of a healthy fee market though.

64 - HeRetiK

Thank you!

Note that digital currency may not necessarily mean cryptocurrency.

Either way this probably won't get properly defined until there is precedent. After all there's a huge spectrum of "physical transfer". Physical coins? Paper wallets? Hardware wallets? Software wallets? Your brain storing memorized passphrases? In practice the ability to effectively execute regulations stops at physical coins and paper wallets. No way for them to know how much a hardware or software wallet really contains. Or your brain. Or the book that you're carrying with you that has seemingly random words highlighted with marker.

Still a pity that they thought of vouchers. There goes my plan trafficking McDonalds coupons for fast food arbitrage.



Depends. The EU delegates the practical implementations of these rules to the local governments. What you then would have to do is prove in court that the state laws are breaking EU law which may not always be that easy but could be a fun exercise. Though I doubt that any of the local customs law are in conflict with EU law, as otherwise someone would have already sued. Someone always does.

I've got bad news for you, I'm sorry


No talk of cryptocurrencies or other intagible assets though.

(also no problem with gold in the form of powder, foil, coins with a gold content of more than 90% and gold bullion with a gold content of more than 99.5% :p)

I don't think you have to declare the contents of your Bitcoin wallet. After all it's not different from having access to a bank account with a balance in excess of EUR 10,000,-.

It is also worth noting that when shares and securities are mentioned as "cash or equivalent assets" that have to be declared, they are referring to the physical certificates. Otherwise folks would have to declare their investment bank accounts.

I think they might be able to make a case if you were to carry physical bitcoins or paper wallets. But arguably even that would be on shaky grounds unless the material value exceeds the 10k. (ie. you can sell a physical security only once. You can cash out a cheque only once. But if you're kind of a dick you could sell the same paper wallet to multiple, unsuspecting buyers and even empty it out afterwards)

From what I've heard anecdotally, if you are or ever have been a US tax payer, the IRS will continue to hound you for a looong time, even if you change residence and become tax liable in another country.

That being said, if you're serious about tax optimization I'd recommend getting in touch with a professional tax advisor. As pointed out by FatFork, taxes, especially international taxes, can be very complicated, will vary from case by case and can come with a bunch of pitfalls that you don't want to fall into.



I'm pretty sure that the tax games and money laundering (the real kind, not the kind of "money laundering" that Bitcoin has been accused of in the early days) that NFTs enable are an open secret at this point; with people just keeping their mouth shut about it for fear of normies and governments catching wind of the effectiveness and trying to combat it.

You can use most hardware wallets (at least Trezor and Ledger, not sure about the others) with Electrum as user interface, so you can already store transactions locally without broadcasting them, even with a hardware wallet.



That, you can't. Not in a trustless manner. Though you could, for example, prove that you have the required amount by signing a message with an address that has sufficient coins. Alternatively you could go through an escrow, though that of course requires trusting a third party.

Quite interesting, I'll have to read up on it a bit.

From the get-go there's two things that bother me though:

(1) Blockchain bloat, since the non-transactional data payload is now only limited by blocksize, rather than OP_RETURN

(2) It would be seriously detrimental to privacy and fungibility


(1) is a discussion that has been around ever since OP_RETURN has been used to store non-transactional data on the Bitcoin blockchain and since this case is no different I'm going to skip over that one.

(2) is in my opinion a bit more serious. While it is addressed in the BIP I'm not quite sure it's quite that simple. For reference:


I disagree that this objection can be that easily dismissed. Right now, each satoshi is the same. Sure, blockchain analysis exists, but there's nothing to distinguish one satoshi from another on a technical level. Some addresses may be more suspicious to exchanges than others, but in the end a satoshi is a satoshi. Even governments and their regulatory apparatuses know that, so while they try their best to work around these limitations they still accept it. Have to accept it.

They won't once we provide tools to assign every single satoshi a unique identifier.

Though it's pointed out in the BIP that Ordinals are "opt-in", this optionality is unlikely to prevail once governments catch wind of this and start making it a requirement. First for exchanges, then for businesses and eventually for consumers. And while "any reasonable person will assume that a new owner of a particular sat cannot be understood to be the old owner" it won't prevent the average Bitcoiner from entering a world of bureaucratic pain whenever a satoshi non grata ends up in their wallet. If you think it's frustrating to be immediately suspect by taking care of your privacy by using a coin mixer, just wait until Ordinals become commonplace.

Min HTLC can be used to prevent that and I've seen it set to >= 1 sat for almost every channel these days; presumably in part for this very reason. While this limits the routing of millisatoshis, allowing for even smaller amounts to be kept as transactions fees should be comparably easy to solve by the time that denomination becomes of practical relevance.

The problem with that is that it would be disproportionally more expensive for smaller transactions, which arguably are the main selling point for LN. That is, while e.g. a base fee of 10 sats would only be 0.01% for a transaction of 1 mBTC it would be a fee of 10% for a transaction of 100 sats. Large transactions are also harder on a channel's liquidity so undercharging large transactions relative to small transactions is not in a node operator's interest. Accordingly if the choice is between setting the percentual fee rate or the base fee to zero, setting the latter to zero is much more viable.

Username : HeRetiK
BTC addy : bc1qwvnm4g4jfjg5nr0pzu9mxdyu865f24nc0dckhv

Thanks for the raffle and good luck everyone!

These days two-factor is usually referring to the usage of a separate device in addition to a password, with "something you have" being e.g. a mobile phone with an app or a dedicated hardware dongle and "something you know" being the password. The reason I'm pointing this out is because there is (was?) a way to set up two-factor (2FA) wallets with Electrum, but this requires the involvement of a third party which I wouldn't recommend. Just a heads up so you don't mix these things up.



Trezor used to mainly advertise this feature as a way to hide wallets. They actually still mention it as a security feature on their homepage too. Not sure why Ledger doesn't seem to advertise it as much.



I just looked this up because I found it interesting. The word "mnemonic" is prepended regardless of whether an additional passphrase is defined, so if you use the passphrase "satoshi" a strictly BIP39 compliant wallet will use the phrase "mnemonicsatoshi".