Oh yeah, I forgot about their illegal market manipulation and insider trading around their launching of support for BCash. Don't worry though, they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. How lucky!

I must have missed this. Who are you referring to here? Armstrong?

As I pointed out at the time, Coinbase had a Digital Asset Framework which clearly spelled out the criteria they would use when listing new coins (which has conveniently now disappeared entirely from their website but is still archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20181209130406/https://listing.coinbase.com/policy). They completely and utterly ignored it in favor of launching support for a bunch of coins their big investors were bag holding and could then be dumped on Coinbase users.

Yet another option is to use general delivery or poste restante, where your package is simply delivered to a post office and you later go pick it up. You will still have to reveal your name, but not your address, and you can always use a post office in a completely different city/county/state to obfuscate things further.

This, and the mail carrier they use. Note the disclaimer given on the BitBox link that Pmalek has included in his first post:

Not exclusively, not by a long shot. It certainly can use power which would otherwise be wasted, and its ability to quickly ramp up and down to utilize this excess power is vital for a working renewable grid, but it is nowhere near running on 100% wasted power.

New renewable energy is not only already cheaper than new fossil fuel plants (and has been for some years), but it is also starting to become cheaper to build new renewables from scratch than it is to even simply continue to operate currently existing fossil fuel plants.

There already exist several companies which you can use to receive mail or packages and then forward to another address without opening, such as iPostal1, Traveling Mailbox, or Anytime Mailbox. It would be preferable to use a general company which forwards any package as opposed to one which only forwards hardware wallets, for the exact reason that if the forwarding company leaks user data, then if they only deal with hardware wallets then you are back at square one.

BitPay are the worst possible payment provider in existence. While I'm not crazy about any custodial payment process, I just tried to place some test orders via Crypto.com and Coinbase Commerce out of interest. Crypto.com just ask for an email address, which can obviously be a burner, and Coinbase Commerce don't ask for anything at all. BitPay, on the other hand, require a fully KYCed account in order to place an order. which is just ridiculous, especially for a hardware wallet manufacturer.

This is certainly the first I've heard of Ledger using BitPay, but it could have been that way for years and I would have never known.

Agreed. If the only way of buying a Ledger online is either through a KYCed fiat method or a KYC enforcing bitcoin processor such as BitPay, then you should simply never buy a Ledger online. With all the time Ledger can spend integrating debit cards and instant exchangers and other privacy invading trash in to Ledger Live, you would think they could just set up their own instance of BTCPay or similar.

Here is a link to the most recent court documents: https://cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11749/PLEADINGS/1174909072280000000015.pdf

I would draw attention to Paragraph 10. A. a. and b. (emphasis mine throughtout):

Paragraph 12:

And also Paragraph 16:

This is bad for Celsius. Outright lying to their users, in the red for three years before declaring insolvency, actively running a Ponzi scheme. Mashinsky should go to jail for this.

In other news, Mashinsky's wife has started selling these T-shirts on her business's web shop: https://usastrong.io/products/unbankrupt-yourself-t-shirt-black.

If they are using the grid then they have no special access to such data, but equally are no more responsible for the environmental effects than anyone else is, and any legislation should be targeted at all electricity users, and not singling out a specific electricity user which uses less than 1% of electricity. If they have their own solar or other renewable source in addition to using the grid, then sure they can provide such data, but then they are already better than the majority of other users so there is still no point targeting miners specifically.

Why haven't we banned dryers yet? They achieve literally nothing which can't be achieved by just hanging up your laundry, and use far more electricity than bitcoin does. Ban dryers!

Hahaha thanks for the laughs. Man, fuck Coinbase.

And that's why we ask the most ridiculously invasive KYC questions, share all your data with our in-house blockchain analysis firm, and sell your data to third parties.

Except whenever any of our customers use privacy tools. Then we'll freeze your account, seize your coins, and demand even more KYC from you.

I'd have far more respect if Coinbase just came out and said the truth - this will affect our profits - instead of dressing themselves up as some shining savior of privacy when they've done nothing but invade users' privacy since their inception.

There are some interesting snippets in the report which show that the government does at least recognize that bitcoin can help in the transition to 100% renewable energy. For example:

This is vital to a 100% renewable energy infrastructure. You can choose how much coal or gas to burn to meet response, but you can't choose how much sunlight there is how much wind there is. When there is an excess of energy being produced, bitcoin miners can utilize this and therefore the energy company makes money on electricity which would otherwise be completely wasted, and when there is an excess in demand bitcoin miners can temporarily scale back to allow supply and demand to balance. This mining usage will also subsidize the development of new renewable infrastructure which would otherwise be unprofitable due to a significant proportion of its production being wasted.

Methane is often vented to the atmosphere because the cost of doing something useful with it, such as building a huge pipeline to transport it, is too high. Methane is 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Bitcoin miners, by virtue of being completely mobile, can utilize this methane at source and reduce its emission in to the atmosphere.

I don't see this report as bad for bitcoin. They are simply saying that it is going to have to play by the same rules as every other industry in the country and start moving towards net zero emissions, and even pointing out areas where bitcoin mining will accelerate that movement.

It's already in their legal documentation, so you can only assume it is already happening:


To effectively run a blacklist, you must first check every input to decide which ones you are going to censor. This invades everyone's privacy. The presence of a blacklist will discourage anyone who is serious about privacy from using the service, not just scammers.

Ledger use BitPay? Ugh. Imagine completing BitPay's KYC requirements to buy a hardware wallet. What a ridiculous security risk.

It doesn't just support it; the company which manufactures BitBox - Shift Crypto - created AOPP. I definitely don't want my hardware wallet manufacturer creating protocols which make it easier for the government to stick their noses in to my hardware wallet.

Further to nc50lc's answer, the public key which is revealed when you spend from an address also cannot be used to generate new child keys, as this process requires something known as the chain code. The chain code is something which is generated from the parent keys, but it is not stored anywhere on the blockchain and is not revealed when you make a transaction; it is only generated and used locally by your wallet software.

They won't list any privacy coins, though. They will continue to enforce ridiculous KYC requirements. They will continue to run a blockchain analysis subsidiary to spy on all their users. They will continue to discriminate against certain coins, treat bitcoin as non-fungible, and arbitrarily freeze accounts. This has nothing to do with them standing for bitcoin, protecting their users, or fighting for privacy. This is self-preservation.

Brain Armstrong has already said that Coinbase could be forced to shut down all staking protocols if this kind of behavior from the government continues: https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-would-rather-shut-down-staking-than-enable-on-chain-censorship-brian-armstrong. The money that Coinbase would lose from the millions of Ethereum and other coins/tokens users are staking with them far outweighs whatever they will spend on this lawsuit.

I won't deny it's a good thing the government are being challenged in this way, but don't think that Coinbase are doing it for any reason other than self interest.

I do, not just for things I order, but for any site which requires me to make an account or sign up, although I appreciate I am very much on the extreme end of the spectrum here. It's why I don't have a single social media profile, why I use alternative or burner emails for almost everything, and why I buy as much stuff in person as I can.

Privacy policies for companies which delivery goods are pretty much universally awful, exactly because they must collect a name and address for shipping purposes, and they almost always retain that information and share it with third parties. This maybe isn't such a privacy or security issue for you that data brokers know you have bought a new bed, say, but it is certainly a major issue if they know you have bought a hardware wallet or other bitcoin related products, which is why bitcoin related companies need to be held to higher standard than the likes of Home Depot.

And of course I would advocate ordering to a PO Box or other location which is not directly linked to your real name and address whenever possible.

I don't think this is true at all. If you simply buy and hold, then the reporting requirements are not onerous at all (or indeed, non-existent until you sell or trade your bitcoin), and you will make a much better profit buying and holding bitcoin for 10 years than you will holding rapidly inflationary USD. There is also a bill kicking around Congress which would exempt all bitcoin transactions under $200 from tax, which would mean bitcoin can be used as a daily currency for the majority of people without having to worry about tax reporting.

There are many scenarios in which someone is not a prisoner but still has their assets frozen by the government. Recent examples include loads of private Russian citizens around the world, and a bunch of Canadian and US citizens who donated to the Canadian trucker protest. Bitcoin solves this.

Right. I'm certain that there are thousands of users who have lost thousands of BTC or more on ChipMixer and said nothing, but you donating 40,000 sats because you didn't read the instructions is what exposes them.

It is made abundantly clear with the text I quoted above appearing immediately below the deposit address. It's also spelled out clearly in their FAQ. Something isn't a scam because you failed to read the instructions.

There it is. The ulterior motive I was talking about above. This user didn't read the instructions on the Step 1 page which quite clearly states the following:


He deposited 0.002427 BTC, which resulted in him being credited with a 0.002 BTC chip exactly as expected, and then opened a thread to say that everyone who wants privacy must be a criminal.

I'll protect any privacy service from idiotic statements which claim that only criminals care about privacy.

Their funding and donation structure is clearly spelled out on their website. You could have deposited $50 and paid nothing had you bothered to read it.

It gets pretty boring addressing this same old nonsense over and over, especially when it is on a forum which was founded on the principle of financial sovereignty and not allowing third parties to hold complete power and jurisdiction over your finances.

The "Nothing to hide" argument has been so utterly debunked so many times that I am of the opinion that anyone who still repeats it is either a moron or is actively malicious and has an ulterior motive they are trying to push. Further, the evidence shows that only ~8% of mixer use is tied to illegal activities, and that by far the largest input to mixers is coins coming directly from centralized exchanges, i.e. average citizens who are doing nothing illegal and simply trying to reclaim some privacy against the global surveillance programs we are all subjected to.

I went digging on their Twitter profile based on your comment here, and I found some conflicting information:

So they seem to delete your data from online servers after either 30 or 60 days, but they keep it offline indefinitely? It would be good to get some clarification on this. It would also be good for them to update their privacy policy to reflect all this, so it is in official writing rather than just a Twitter post.

Yeah, as I said above, not great. Sharing with law enforcement on production of a valid subpoena or similar, while I don't like it, is absolutely necessary for a company which operates within the US, so there is nothing they can do about that. Sharing with "private parties as they believe appropriate" is not, and shouldn't be there.

You mean anonymized, or de-identified. Still, anonymized data is a marketing trick, with one study showing that a staggering 99.98% of anonymized data could still be used to re-identify specific individuals. I don't want my data anonymized - I want it wiped.

Not at all. I'm very pro-coinjoin. The only thing I'm anti here is wallets which style themselves as a privacy tool while spying on their users.

They have announced they are going to and have said they will partner with a blockchain analysis firm (the latter part may already have happened and your Wasabi inputs may already be being sent for analysis, we can't tell).

If I was an escrow on this forum, and announced that occasionally and without warning I would choose to renege on a deal and not release the escrow funds to the other party when I should, would it be logical for everyone to keep using me until I actually did what I said, or would it be logical for everyone to simply use another escrow which has not announced such a thing? If Wasabi announce that they are going to blacklist, then it is only logical that people will stop using Wasabi and warn others not to as well, even if they have not yet started actively blacklisting.

Still, given that most privacy conscious users have stopped using Wasabi, and someone is unlikely to broadcast the fact that a specific address/output they own which they were trying to coinjoin was refused, we probably wouldn't know for a while once they do start blacklisting (if they haven't already).