Yeah, I don't understand this at all. The balance shown on customers' accounts is obviously just pulled from an internal database like every other centralized exchange or platform. There is no reason that everyone's balance should suddenly start displaying zero, I would have thought?

This is why they are asking for loans or mergers. They know as soon as they re-enable withdrawals (if they ever do), they will experience a huge volume of withdrawals and end up experiencing a bank run. Without a loan, they will have to shut everything down again plus declare insolvency. They know they messed up bad and are trying to preempt the fall out. Co-mingling funds like this is unforgivable.

I suppose it depends on how much blockchain analysis Kraken is doing, or how much data they are sharing with blockchain analysis firms.

If you withdraw via Lightning and then simply close your channel to get those funds back on to mainnet, then Kraken will obviously be able to see the final destination of your Lightning payment and the channel close transaction, and could link all that together. If you withdraw via Lightning and then send those Lightning funds to some other exchange service in order to receive mainnet bitcoin back on a completely separate and unlinked address, then they will have a far harder time tracking that, although not impossible with enough data and resources.

This could all be improved by the implementation of something like rendezvous routing, so Kraken doesn't know the final destination of your Lightning withdrawal.

Same. I'm a big proponent of avoiding privacy leaks from change addresses by simply not creating any change. Choose your outputs wisely, and buy a little more or a little less than you intended to match an output almost exactly to the payment amount, with any extra left over on the fees.

I think we all know the answer to that one. Greed.

You can compare them to baseball cards, but is there any reason we can't compare them to something like beanie babies instead? A short lived fad, which people will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on now, in 5 years will be worth nothing, and in 20 years we will look back on it and shake our heads at how people could be so stupid as to spend all that money on a stuffed toy/some MS paint drawing?

Exactly my point. There are some legitimate uses for NFTs, and I would have no problem with these legitimate uses being based on Bitcoin, but I see no reason to attract what are 99% scams to migrate from Ethereum to Bitcoin. But if other people do, then go ahead. I can't stop you.

Bisq, LocalCryptos, HodlHodl, RoboSats. See more: https://kycnot.me/

Yeah, fair point. I've mentioned before about implementing script-path only taproot addresses. In that linked thread it was in relation to concerns that P2TR addresses were more vulnerable to quantum attacks then P2WPKH addresses. But at some point in the future we will probably have to phase out all addresses which reveal the public key, if not all addresses based on ECDSA altogether.

Sure, but there is still a risk that someone generates unlimited ZEC within the Sapling pool and simply keeps it all within the Sapling pool. Turnstiles only prevent that ZEC from leaving the Sapling pool. With unlimited ZEC inside the Sapling pool, the attacker could still use it to trade, sell for other cryptocurrencies or for fiat, to buy goods and services, etc., and it could be an arbitrarily long period of time before such an attack was discovered.

I disagree with this. If it became clear that the attack I outlined above had happened, and that there were millions more ZEC in the Sapling pool than expected, then the value of ZCash would tank, regardless of what pool your money is in. The coins of the users in the new Orchard pools would be protected from the rampant inflation by the turnstile, sure, but they wouldn't be protected from the general loss of confidence in the asset as a whole.

Only for people creating and using the new Halo 2 Orchard addresses though, unless I'm mistaken? Since the old Groth16 addresses are still in use and can still be created, funded, etc., then the risk of someone compromising the entire set up and printing unlimited ZEC in secret remains. Doesn't really make a difference if the addresses I am using are trustless, when the majority of the network are still using addresses based on the old system.

Zcash need to phase out all old addresses before this upgrade means anything.

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On a slight tangent, how feasible do people think it would be to do something like this for bitcoin? If we phased out all addresses except taproot (for example), then there is a privacy increase there not just from the inherent properties of taproot but also by putting everyone in to the same anonymity set and breaking some forms of blockchain analysis, such as change address identification based on matching input/output script types.

I asked. She said it's fine.

I'm obviously talking about the extension and not the website.

.xpi files are Firefox extension files. When you install the BPIP extension, its data is stored in a .xpi file on your computer. We aren't downloading and editing anything, but rather opening the extension's source code to examine it.

Firefox extensions are installed as .xpi files, which can be opened with any archive manager. The BPIP source code is entirely open source and viewable within this archive.

For Firefox or Tor, just enter about:support in your URL bar in your browser.

Scroll down to the section titled "Add-ons", and grab the ID for BPIP.

Then scroll back to the top section titled "Application Basics" and click the "Open Folder" button beside where it says "Profile Folder". The extensions folder is in there. The BPIP XPI file will have the same name as the ID from the previous step.

Looks like he has pledged to buy a NFT for 50 ETH, but won't just donate the money directly. So essentially using Hodlonaut's legal situation to shill his NFT project? Ugh.

As much as I despite all CEXs, I've had a lot of respect for Jesse Powell over the years as he is always open and honest that people should get their coins off of exchanges as soon as possible, and that any coin left on any exchange, including his, is at constant risk. But this Twitter exchange is in incredibly poor taste. Would have been better to say nothing at all rather than say you'll only donate if it's via some NFT scam.

Still, if you want NFTs, then there are some on bitcoin right here: https://xchain.io/tx/755e758e74f7c95f049deb5106fc9315234bc7ccce0817a8e34d16b089d7593f. He can convert his 50 ETH to ~3.7 BTC using Kraken and buy 740 of these for the same result.

Literally thousands of regular people donating whatever bitcoin and fiat they can afford, but this guy worth $500 million will only donate if he gets to shill some NFT while doing it.

Absolutely. If your only option is to pay with your biometrics, then whoever is control of that biometric database and servers (i.e. the government) can prevent you from paying for anything at any time. Did you publish something online critical of the regime? Not being able to buy any food or drink for a week should teach you to be more careful in the future.

Although the same could be said of the direction we are heading with CBDCs.

I guess the way around it would be that when you first register your biometrics, the server applies some function which involves your biometric and a random number, and stores the random number and the output of the function without ever actually storing your biometric, just like storing a password hash but not the password. In the event you need to replace your biometric, then the server simply wipes your random number and output, generates a new random number, and then applies that random number with you biometric again in the same function to generate a new output to match against in the future.

But exchanges can afford to do that because Zcash and all its pairs make up a tiny amount of their volume. If all bitcoin transactions suddenly became 100% private tomorrow, the vast majority of centralized exchanges would either have to accept that or shut down since they would not be able to survive without the volume of bitcoin and its trading pairs.

Not to get too off topic here, but I agree. There is no doubt that Monero (or BitMonero as it was called at the time) had shady beginnings, but the fact remains that Monero as it exists today is open source, verifiable, and importantly trustless, which cannot be said for Zcash. To use Zcash, you must trust completely in the set up process and the six individuals involved in that process. This is a complete non-starter as far as I am concerned for any currency, least of all a currency which styles itself as a privacy currency.

Are there any payment processors which watch for exact values and would take issue/not correctly identify your payment if you pay extra? There are obviously plenty that completely mess up if you transfer less than the invoice, but what about if you transfer more than the invoice?

Depends what you are buying I guess. A grocery shop or something similar in which you've got multiple smaller items in your basket is very unlikely to end up at a nice round price. Buying a single expensive item though, such as a phone, laptop, large appliance, is far more likely to be priced at a nice round $399 rather than $394.61, or 0.02 BTC rather than 0.019847539 BTC.

Here's the full announcement: https://hotbit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8477769193239

A different part of that caught my interest:

So the coins you were depositing to Hotbit were then being deposited at other exchanges, not under Hotbit's account or control, but under the name, account and control of a single private individual. At best, that is completely amateurish business practices, and at worst pretty much an outright scam.

The part about mergers and acquisitions seems like they setting up the scenario in which current users will only receive back some small proportion of their funds, all while clearing Hotbit to continue to operate and make profits of other unsuspecting users. Very suspect all round.

Even better than this is to make your change a round number and your payment not a round number. If you are buying goods, can you throw a couple of extra small things in to your (physical or electronic) basket to make the final amount a non-round number? If you are paying for a service, can you buy some extra add-on or pay for a few extra days to make the final amount a non-round number? If you are paying a friend, family member, donating to a cause, etc., then you can always just throw in an odd number of spare sats. Rather than just make everything a round number, you can actively send blockchain analysis down the wrong path if you are smart about it.

This provides no privacy at all. Any blockchain analysis company will obviously trace funds backwards, and if they only have to go back a single transaction to see all your 0.2 BTC inputs being created from the same output, then it is trivial to link them all together.

CSW has already filed a claim against Coinbase. It will be Coinbase who are spending their money to defend themselves against that claim, not DCG. DCG, being an investment and venture capital company, will have no interest in spending their money to fight a lawsuit against any of the companies they are invested in.

If we want big entities to get involved here, it will be the exchanges that CSW is already targeting. It would be in their own interests to donate to Hodlonaut, as a decisive Hodlonaut victory will only help their own cause when they end up in court themselves.

By refusing to coinjoin your "tainted" coins. There's no way to use their centralized coordinator if they don't want you to, because they are enforcing a blacklist.

And if every service or platform refused to enforce taint, what then? The government regulations only work because of companies like Wasabi which implement them on behalf of governments instead of fighting against them like real privacy projects do.

I mean, none of my outputs are connect to my real identity, but this is still a separate issue to Wasabi.

Sorry, I missed your edit when I posted my previous reply.

I'm not sure I do, because I don't see it as a thriving economy. I see it as a short lived scam.

$30 billion on pictures of apes and other utterly stupid NFTs is not a sustainable economy. I'm sure there are some legitimate uses of NFTs, but such uses are dwarfed by the (as you point out) billions of dollars being traded on absolutely worthless crap. I'm of the opinion that this will go the same way of all the altcoins of the 2017 boom, all the ICOs/IEOs/ITOs and other three letter acronyms, all the lending platforms tokens which are now collapsing, and so on. Yes, we there will be a very small minority of the NFT sector which will survive to longevity, but that vast majority will disappear to nothing or exit scam.

Would having all this activity on bitcoin bring a short term benefit in terms of price and volume? Most probably. Would having bitcoin forever associated with millions of people losing billions of dollars in a huge scam be worth it? I don't think so.

The difference here is the nocoiners have been nocoiners on the same asset for over a decade, and that same asset continues not just to survive, but to grow and develop. People like me who have little time for the vast majority of altcoins have seen literally thousands of different altcoins over dozens of different "sectors" (ICOs, NFTs, DeFi, etc.) completely disappear over half that time.

There is a difference between owning a company and investing in a company. DCG invest in dozens of bitcoin related companies. They also invested in Ripple and ZCash. That doesn't mean that Ripple "is" DCG, nor does it mean that Blockstream "is" DCG.

Regardless, such discussion is off topic here. If you want to discuss this, please take it somewhere else or open a new thread. I'd like to keep this thread about Hodlonaut.

I agree with this, which is highly disappointing as I said above. The exchanges which made their millions billions because of bitcoin, which profited handsomely from Satoshi's creation and all the work of all the devs who have come since, won't put up a fight or even donate some money to those who are, and are quite happy to let CSW run rampant with his frivolous lawsuits. Meanwhile the individuals with nothing to personally gain but everything to lose are the ones left fighting CSW, with support from the community, while these exchanges continue to turn a blind eye.

I actually want CSW to start suing some big exchanges and force them to get involved, rather than letting other people fight their fights for them.

A quantum computer will have no effect on mining, at least not in the short to medium term.

The risk of quantum computers over traditional computers when it comes to bitcoin is that they are significantly faster at reversing the ECDLP, which allows them to calculate a private key from knowledge of the corresponding public key. They do not provide a significant speed up against traditional computers when it comes to mining, and certainly not when it comes to considering mining as performed by ASICs, which are already orders of magnitude faster than CPUs or GPUs. Quantum computing would not affect the infrastructure of the network or mining until decades after they were mainstream and were able to challenge ASICs. And even then, all that would happen is that the difficulty would adjust to compensate for this increased hashrate.