In general, all derivatives of Dogecoin as well as anything that runs on their chain is useless for all practical purposes. I hold this to be true for 99% of altcoins. I have never made any secret of the fact that Monero is the only altcoin I use, exactly because it achieves a solution to a real world problem which bitcoin does not, that being completely private transactions. If anyone can show me a token which achieves a solution to a real world problem, then there is a discussion there to be had about whether or not that would be a viable or useful addition to bitcoin. I am not aware of any such token. Conversely, we can look through the history of this forum, of Reddit, of Twitter, and see literally thousands of different altcoins and tokens which have been launched or promoted for various reasons, which have all either faded away in to complete obscurity over the span of a couple of years, or exit scammed/been hacked and resulted in all the regular users/foolish greedy people losing everything. The point is that most run to some other shitcoin to do these things instead of using Bitcoin.. Because that's where the foolish greedy people are. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. These token creators don't want to launch their no-real-world-use trash on bitcoin because launching on some useless altcoin means there are more gullible people to scam. And anyone who is actually using bitcoin as intended is quite happy for all this scam activity to take place elsewhere. As above, what useful things are you envisaging which should be conducted on bitcoin instead of some shitcoin? |
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The current thoughts with bitcoin is that quantum technology will only be able to affect bitcoin stored in keys that have already been signed or used for a transaction (I wonder if there's a figure for this)? There are currently around 4 million coins between P2PK addresses and reused addresses with known public keys which would be vulnerable to quantum computers, according to this article: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/innovatie/artikelen/quantum-computers-and-the-bitcoin-blockchain.html. As a viable quantum computer become closer to being a reality, though, then a number of these coins would be moved to new unused addresses, so the number of coins which could be stolen will be much less than this. Choosing a quantum resistant algorithm now would be a huge mistake. Bitcoin has to consider more than just security - it has to consider size and speed as well. Given how young the field is, then any algorithm we settle on now will be outdated and potentially insecure by the time it is necessary, and would need to be replaced again, perhaps by something which doesn't even exist yet. There was some discussion on the mailing list about this a few months ago: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020209.html |
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True, but that's a whole lot of guesswork. Pretty much all of blockchain analysis is guesswork. If they are looking at a transaction they are interested in and cannot figure out which output is change and which isn't, then they will absolutely be using every technique they can think of to try to shed some light on the situation. But maybe that $/€/£43.28 equals exactly 1000 units in my local fiat currency and blockchain analysis got it all wrong. If you are the focus of some blockchain analysis investigation, then they probably already know which fiat currency or currencies you are likely to be transacting in. |
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and one question i keep asking myself each time issues like this come up is "why always the users/investors who have to suffer the most loss in situations like this, even when the issue has nothing to do with the users/investors?" Because those are the terms you agree to when you use these custodial platforms. Every single one of them will have a clause or clauses hidden somewhere in the terms of use or service which states that any and all coins you deposit to their platform cease to be yours, you give up all ownership rights to these coins and transfer full ownership to the platform, and the platform can do pretty much anything they like with those coins and you have absolutely no legal recourse whatsoever. And in the event of bankruptcy or similar, then you will be treated as an "unsecured creditor", which means you are literally the last person on the list to get back anything at all and that all the coins you deposited to the platform will preferentially be used to pay off the "secured creditors", which are usually banks and other large financial institutions. The fact that 99% of people do not bother to read or understand these terms prior to signing up does not make them any less legally binding. If you don't want to lose your coins to these platforms, then the answer is very simply - stop using them. |
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I looked at CZ's twitter and there are no posts in the last 10-15 days regarding the specific case As usual from the big exchanges - all talk, no action, and nothing which might mean they have to spend some of their precious profits. Very disappointing all round. My guess would be thar "misrepresenting bitcoin" is vague enough and can be twisted around so nobody loses, while the whitepaper case is clearly a losing scenario, since Coinbase will defend themselves if they have to. I really don't think they would, in terms of the whitepaper case. When faced with the choice of paying expensive legal fees versus simply taking down the .pdf of the whitepaper they host, I would fully expect them to choose the latter without any fight whatsoever. Coinbase supported every major attack on bitcoin, from Bitcoin XT to Bitcoin Unlimited to Segwit2x. They won't spend money to defend bitcoin - they will only spend money to defend themselves and their own profits. |
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The vast majority of NFTs, tolken issuances, and smart contracts are being done on altcoins Because the vast majority of these things have no real world use. Bitcoin has a very clear and defined real world use - as a currency - with millions of people using it for this exact reason. What's the point of 99% NFTs other than to make profits for their creators? What's the point of 99% of tokens other than to make profits for their creators? I don't want them anywhere near bitcoin. Leaving out stablecoins, then the token with the largest marketcap is Shiba Inu. Knowing absolutely nothing about this token, I decided to read the text about it on Coinmarketcap: Once upon a time, there was a very special dog. That dog was a Shiba Inu, and this dog inspired millions of people around the world to invest money into tokens with the dog's image on it. Yeah, I don't want my global peer to peer currency, which is securing and transferring billions of dollars worth of value every day for people around the world, encumbered with this sort of trash, thanks. Shiba's success sparked an avalanche of copycats, such as BitShiba, Shiba Fantom, Shibalana, King Shiba, SHIBAVAX, Captain Shibarrow, SHIBA2K22, SpookyShiba and countless others. In total, there may be well over 100 Shiba Inu copies, and the number keeps rising constantly. Over 100 clones of a completely pointless memecoin. I'm more than happy for Ethereum to bog down their whole project by catering to this sort of nonsense. Tell me what problem Shiba Inu is addressing? What question can be asked in which Shiba Inu is a solution (other than how do we part fools from their money)? Next up is wrapped bitcoin, which would obviously be pointless on the bitcoin network. Next up is UNUS SED LEO. The only reason it exists is to bail out Bitfinex after they lost a whole bunch of users' funds. If you can present a token which actually solves a real world issue, and isn't either some part of a get rich quick scam or otherwise built simply to make the creators profit, then it could be a potential addition to bitcoin. Otherwise, I'm more than happy that 99% of tokens, NFTs, and so on are issued on altcoins. The only bitcoin "token" I use is BSQ colored bitcoins. I would be curious to hear if other people are regularly using other such projects? |
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-snip-
If you are trusting encryption to keep your cloud back up safe from attack, then why would you not trust encryption to keep a back up stored with a friend or family member safe from attack? Offline back ups have the advantage that they can't be potentially attacked by anyone in the world at any time without your knowledge. And as you say, with everything under your name being a target for a government, that includes any online storage or online accounts. Just never decrypt the file in a computer that isn't your offline airgap one.
That's one of the main reasons why online storage is not safe - the vast majority of people don't do this. I've lost count of the number of people I've seen who add a text file with their seed phrase to a .zip container with a password, all from their main computer which is not clean and with constant internet access, and then upload that to their email account. |
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From my experience these exchanges are now worse than banks. Absolutely they are. Your standard fiat bank asks for far less KYC than most centralized crypto exchanges, freezes coins and accounts far less often, and has actual channels people can go down to have their accounts unfrozen if it does happen, rather then being left endlessly spamming Reddit and Twitter and getting nowhere. Not to mention that they don't perform "taint analysis" on all the cash you deposit or even track your withdrawals to see how you are spending your money, like centralized exchanges do. CEXs are antithetical to the whole concept of bitcoin. They all started out singing the tune of crypto and btc decentralised and private. But now its just crazy. As with many companies and entities in this space - started out with great intentions, but as soon as some nice profits came along, morals and ideals were discarded in favor of greed. If you want convert to USD now and again we unfortunately tied to exchanges. DEXs are the way forward. Using something like Bisq, LocalCryptos, or RoboSats to trade bitcoin to fiat and vice versa, all without having to complete KYC or even registering an account. |
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Would it really matter which chain analysis provider was used? Do any of them have any legitimate way of insuring their results are accurate? What level of accuracy is expected? Not at all. What's more, is that none of them have any real way of knowing that their results are even consistent with other entities in the field. What one provider deems tainted another might think is clean, and vice versa. This very quick test I performed a few months ago shows one provider who thinks Binance's hot wallet contains approximately 25% blacklisted coins, whereas whatever blockchain analysis firm Binance are using will obviously think their hot wallet is nice and clean. And what's the criteria for determining what's tainted and what isn't? Only Wasabi know this. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner, but the laws are all secret and you don't know if you've broken one until it's too late. How decentralized!  I'm of the opinion that if you're using bitcoin, you have something to hide. I'm of the opinion that everyone has something to hide. If you wear clothes, if your house has curtains, if you use a password on your email account, if you close the door in a public restroom when you take a dump, then you are hiding something. You wouldn't let an anonymous stranger in to your house to have a look through your possessions and confiscate anything they think you don't deserve. Why would you let an anonymous stranger look through your transaction history and decide if your coins are "good enough" for them? |
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Me too. I put the guy back on ignore, but he's posted here 39 times and people keep entertaining him (I'm guilty of that a few times too) while he just repeats the same thing over and over again. My bad. It is still important to occasionally debunk his nonsense, else we get in to a CSWesque situation where everyone who knows better just ignores him and then swarms of newbies read his unchallenged posts and think the best way to live their life is with zero privacy and the best way to use bitcoin is to leave it on a centralized exchange and never dare to withdraw it or spend it peer to peer else they end up on some watchlist. -snip- Point A is a strawman. He loves those. Point B is simping for the government, as he's being doing all thread. Point C will invite a text wall of ramblings about how he alone has interpreted the law correctly and we are all wrong. |
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You don't need to download Bitcoin Core just to decode a raw transaction. Plenty of tools to do it online, such as: https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/decodetx/and what values would change for the next block ? I think what OP is asking is what would change between this transaction and the coinbase transaction on the next block. Well, let's take a look. Here is the transaction OP has shared (coinbase transaction from block 1) with the coinbase transaction from block 2 directly below it: 01000000010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ffffffff0704ffff001d0104ffffffff0100f2052a0100000043410496b538e853519c726a2c91e61ec11600ae1390813a627c66fb8be7947be63c52da7589379515d4e0a604f8141781e62294721166bf621e73a82cbf2342c858eeac00000000
01000000010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ffffffff0704ffff001d010bffffffff0100f2052a010000004341047211a824f55b505228e4c3d5194c1fcfaa15a456abdf37f9b9d97a4040afc073dee6c89064984f03385237d92167c13e236446b417ab79a0fcae412ae3316b77ac00000000
And let's break it down. | 01000000 | Version | | 01 | Number of inputs | | 000...000 (32 bytes) | TXID of the first input (in this case null data since it is a coinbase transaction) | | ffffffff | Output index number (again irrelevant here due to being a coinbase transaction) | | 07 | Size of ScriptSig - 7 bytes | | 04ffff001d0104 | ScriptSig - could be any arbitrary data between 2 and 100 bytes | | ffffffff | nSequence | | 01 | Number of outputs | | 00f2052a01000000 | Value of first output (this is 5000000000 sats (50 BTC) encoded in reverse byte order) | | 43 | Size of script (67 bytes) | | 410...eeac | Script | | 00000000 | nLocktime |
So the only things which change are the input script (which doesn't matter since we are not unlocking any outputs in a coinbase transaction) and the output script, which changes the destination the coins are sent to. |
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The thing is, im just talking about some extreme scenario, in which they get ahold of your wallet.dat somehow. The protection from this is not to store you wallet.dat somewhere (such as the cloud) that leaves it open to attack or compromise. They should only be decrypted temporarily on the ram when needed. But this means decrypting your private keys every time you want to check your balance, which is a security risk. Core would also have to rescan every block since the last time you unlocked your wallet if it didn't know which addresses it was watching. |
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Ok, let's say a non-technical person (like the vast majority of people) wants to buy $25k in Bitcoin and hold it for 5 years.
What would be your recommendation to this person?
1) Install a mobile app on his phone, generate a seed, back up the seed, receive the bitcoin and then uninstall the app. Absolutely not. Most mobile wallets are either closed source or non reproducible, which is a complete non-starter. Even if you choose and open source one and verify it or even better build it yourself, you are still installing it and generating your seed phrase on an insecure device with internet access. Such a set up should be used for a few hundred bucks worth of bitcoin at most, and certainly not $25k. 2) Learn how to install Linux and a wallet like Electrum or Sparrow and use that to generate the seed and receiving address. This is a good option. You should ideally use an old computer or laptop for this that you can dedicate for this purpose only and never again use for anything else. It should remain permanently airgapped and should be completely formatted before you start. 3) Other (specify) 1 - A good hardware wallet. 2 - A paper wallet, although you still need the same steps of a completely formatted and permanently airgapped device as above to generate the paper wallet safely. |
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There are no guarantees, yes, but it doesn't change the whole point that there are more risks that WasabiWallet is merely trying to avoid by accepting the trade off by having their coordinator block outputs used in "illegal transactions". The risks that you claim Wasabi are trying to avoid only exist because companies like Wasabi are enforcing them in the first place. Wasabi is part of the problem here, not part of the solution. There's some probability that it might be connected to your real identity, right? I believe for ordinary users, just avoid taking actions that would put him/her at risk. And how do we know what actions "put someone at risk" considering Wasabi have not revealed which blockchain analysis company they are paying to spy on you or what their criteria are? It sounds very much like you are saying "Well, just make sure you have nothing to hide, and then you'll have nothing to worry about." |
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Me neither. Seems more like a feature. For any true, trustless privacy, running your own node is a must. It might be seen as a drawback, but it is also a necessity. "This type of sanction is still relatively unlikely given the structure of CoinJoins and because of a statement by Europol saying that Anti Money Laundering rules don’t apply to these tools." Meh. They'll change their statements and their rules whenever they like to suit their ulterior motives of neutering bitcoin and controlling their populations. We shouldn't rest on our laurels and assume that we will never need anything beyond coinjoins for maintaining privacy and censorship resistance. Coinjoins remain very open to attack, not least of all from the centralized coordinators themselves, as we've seen with Wasabi. |
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God, what kind of dystopian nightmare is this? Put a chip in yourself to avoid the enormous hassle of having to spend 5 whole seconds taking out your wallet or phone to pay for something! The only downsides are we have to cut you open, risk of scarring and infection, and we'll need to cut you open more times in the future to replace it. Oh, and you now have a permanent tracking device physically inside you at all times which you cannot remove or turn off. But still! Save 5 seconds! I'll pass, thanks. |
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1. Send the whole Bitcoin balance to one address. Well, this depends. If you are consolidating multiple outputs in to one, then yes, this is bad for your privacy. But if you are sending the entirety of a single output from one address to another, this can be very good for your privacy since you avoid creating any change at all. An outside observer can't tell if you've paid someone or just moved all the coins to another address you own. That's a good one to manually adjust too, but you'll risk paying more in fees later. Luckily, most services nowadays use native Segwit so all inputs and outputs can have that format. If paying from a native segwit address to a legacy address, then you've got the option of sending the change to either a nested segwit or now a taproot address instead, which will achieve the same result of confusing any blockchain analysis while only incurring a very minor future fee increase. Probably, a loosely implemented feature without any meaningful criteria. The criteria they use are actually very well defined: https://blockchair.com/api/docs#link_M6. Knowing what they are makes it very easy to figure out how to fool them, although there is of course no guarantee that blockchain analysis companies are using similar criteria. |
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I've been wondering what Craig Wright intends to prove He can't prove anything. His goal is to harass. if he can't sign a message from the vintage wallet that holds the >1 million BTC. There is no wallet which holds >1 million BTC. There are thousands of early coinbase addresses all holding 50 BTC. We do not know for sure which belong to Satoshi and which do not, as CSW discovered himself when he claimed that he owned a bunch of them which he thought were linked to Satoshi and therefore had a very low chance of being proved wrong, and the real owner immediately signed a message from them calling him a fraud. As far as I saw, CZ showed support for the @Hodlonaut, and even mentioned some kind of fund that could be established for cases like this, of course under the auspices of his company. Yeah, I saw McCormack retweeting a tweet from CZ back in 2019 talking about helping with legal fees: https://nitter.it/PeterMcCormack/status/1562362012017074176I've not seen CZ mention Hodlonaut recently or donate anything though. Correct me if I'm wrong? Speaking of, remember back in January when Jack Dorsey said he was setting up a fund for this reason too: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-January/019741.htmlAny word from him about a donation to Hodlonaut? |
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HE WAS NOT ARRESTED FOR "JUST" WRITING CODE
HE WAS ARRESTED FOR... "involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering" And you are just going to repeat the government line without any independent thought? I guess I shouldn't have expected anything less. Please show me the "criminal financial flows" he personally concealed. Please show the money he personally laundered. Links to specific transactions please. You can't, because there are none. Tornado Cash is a smart contract. He might have helped write the smart contract, but he did not run it, he did not handle any transactions, he did not take custody of any funds, and he is not responsible for how other people used it. He wrote code. That's it. If they can arrest him because his code was used for illegal purposes, then they can arrest pretty much any developer for the same reason. This is exactly what everyone except you was warning about last year, and which you ranted repeatedly that everyone except you was wrong. your quotes were snipped where you had not understood the full context.
take the one where you thought it meant that vasps sending or receiving where kyc was weak or non existing should be suspect.. (how you perceived it) Maybe you should write to the FATF and tell them that when they define P2P transactions as transactions which are "conducted without the use or involvement of a VASP", and that these transactions pose "specific risks" and "should be monitored", that they don't mean that at all and that you have figured out what they really mean after all. ha ha ha.. you are so delusional that you got your wires mixed up and forgot who said what about which
it was YOU that has been saying that due to the snippet you think meant something else that all transactions are sent as a SAR..
YOU kept saying the authorities are getting huge amount of SAR I've literally never mentioned SARs once, but nice strawman. learn and then you may realise what is a risk and not a risk for you to learn how to work around them So enlighten us then. In your fantasy world, what is your non-private privacy tool which definitely isn't related to privacy while letting you keep your privacy, that the average user will be able to easily use to improve their privacy while simultaneously completely fooling blockchain analysis and the FATF in to thinking it is not improving privacy? |
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