How do you intend on creating the first 15 words? If it's by using the old brainwallet concept:


Then the source also points out that humans are not a good source of entropy, and nearly everything you can come up with is likely insecure.

If you plan on generating the first seed words by something like Electrum (12 seeds, derived from the master private key, not the other way around), and extend it with extra words, it theoretically should be fine. Since you can add just about any character or word to the pool of seeds, it would probably be nearly impossible to brute force it. I would still be very wary about keeping partial copies online though.

He can pay the USD equivalent via other sources. Civil suit awards aren't always paid upfront, so he doesn't necessarily need to hand over the BTC as per the exact wording of the ruling. I seriously doubt CSW has $5 billion to his name, so Kleiman's estate could strip him of everything he owns, and hound him endlessly afterwards.


He probably thought he could get away with it lol. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Do you have a source that says authorities are trying to close down mixers?

Anyway, the source itself doesn't say that their Bitcoin transactions led to their arrests, so I feel like this article is just making assumptions here. All that has been mentioned is that the suspects are known to use Bitcoin for laundering money, among many other methods. Certain addresses have been blacklisted too, though I have no idea what implications that brings.

Um, who's asking for the latter option? That's a feature, not an oversight. If you own Bitcoin, you have to assume full responsibility of what happens to your holdings. If you want to retrieve your stolen coins, you look for other avenues to do so (law enforcement, etc.), and not a change in the roadmap.

Having an option for anonymity is always better than not having it, and anyone who tells you otherwise a) doesn't use Bitcoin or b) is shooting themselves in the foot.

Bolded part is entirely dependent on the exchange in question. How many exchanges would have the capability and budget to secure their servers more than a giant like Amazon, which actually specializes and pours resources in it? Most of them can't even keep their wallets safe (a core part of their business, unlike server maintenance), so I'm sure the number would be quite disappointing. It might suck, but there's a reason it's the norm.

Either way, I don't think there's really any harm done in this case. I'm pretty sure there aren't any exchanges out there which has a fully automated withdrawal process, so it's just going to be a short downtime and some rollbacks in affected accounts. "Not your keys, not your Bitcoin" also aptly applies here lol.

Is that really what that means? I read the article and thought that the base salary had to be pegged to a fiat value, not the crypto itself. This would make sense as it protects employees from downswings. It's a ridiculous ruling otherwise.

Bolded the part that highlights the difference between Bestmixer and Chipmixer. I'm very interested as to what will come out of this, but if past precedent were to be followed, authorities won't have grounds to shut down Chipmixer regardless of their capability to do so.


If everything is as it should be, they would respond by saying they don't have the logs. When a mixing session ends, all data associated with it is deleted.

This claim is substantiated by Bestmixer's page where it lists reasons why people should be using mixers in the first place. They basically advertised their service as a way to evade KYC and AML procedures with crypto, and the authorities justified their attack based on that fact.

Mixers are otherwise perfectly legal (which was acknowledged by a blog of McAfee, a firm instrumental in the takedown) and I don't see that changing in the near future. Lawmakers don't ever talk about mixers and I would be surprised if majority of them knew mixers even existed. I could see mixers getting on their crosshairs if a single provider gets big and popular enough, but the service itself is so niche that even the most well known ones remain obscure to the general public.

I completely agree. I mean, it's the same thing anyway -- your salary becomes Bitcoin at the end of the day and you can do whatever you want with it afterwards.

Either way, I don't see anything wrong with buying. People buy USD for whatever reasons and it's seen as natural. Why should the standards be any different with Bitcoin if we're treating it as a full blown currency? It's indeed better for the ecosystem if people stopped treating Bitcoin as an investment, but the act of buying itself isn't necessarily rooted to just the act of investing.


That's exactly the problem, they would have to spend real money on their campaigns lol. Why would they when people eat up whatever they make out of thin air anyway? Nothing short of an actual forum policy will stop this practice, and theymos isn't the type to enforce something this draconian.

I'm sure it would be controversial, but I'm not so sure as to the degree. From what I can see, Bitcoin is still dominated by people who want to make money first and foremost, so I could see a move like this, which preserves their coins' value, garner a lot of support. There will be some pushback among purists, but how many really are there? Either way, I agree that the community should start drawing up some concrete solutions.

I'm personally in the camp who would prefer that lost coins be left where they are whether they're vulnerable or not, but I won't really mind if they get destroyed either, considering the scale of damage their theft may cause.

I lol'd at plunging. That Cointelegraph article doesn't paint the entire picture though. This Coindesk article also noted a steep drop, but it was actually able to document a $1k-ish drop within a short period. It's not much in the grand scheme of things, but that's the kind of movement that would leave newbies shaking in their boots.

I am by no means saying that Coindesk is the paragon of crypto reporting, but what the hell is Cointelegraph doing? You can't say a drop is a plunge in your headline and clarify that it's a 0.67% drop on the day in your second sentence lmao.

One important distinction to be made from this is that our Bitcoin is not taxed per se. Our earnings from Bitcoin (and from whatever other source) however, is taxable under income tax laws. No one is taxed for simply owning or trading Bitcoin; there's always going to be profit involved somewhere.

It's completely up to the individual whatever they might think of taxes, but just because it's a different currency doesn't necessarily mean earnings derived from it shouldn't be taxable.

It probably has nothing to do with inherent security features, but the average person uses their phone far more than their PC, so missteps (like connecting to random wifi spots, random people spying on your screen, etc.) are more probable. It's also more vulnerable to physical attacks like theft.

That is not to say that they're vulnerable, of course, just that users need to take extra precautions when using them.

There's really no need to scan if you're aware of what to avoid, since you can't get it through random usage:


If you're installing random apps on your android phone, you'd probably have a lot more threats to worry about than just this considering the state of the Play Store. You should be taking care of your phone like your PC, where you avoid installing unnecessary apps and verify all your downloads.

So how exactly is this a "blow" then? It sounds like the author admitted that not many people are using (or expecting to use) credit cards to buy crypto in the first place. Also, if we are being specific, it should also be a blow to the following:


So yeah, this dude just wanted something to write about, feigning public expectations (there was no swerve) that it could be used to buy crypto, and people took it hook, line, and sinker. "Blow to the Lottery as iPhone-Maker Apple Reveals Sudden Swerve" doesn't sound as catchy.

It will be at some point. It's also entirely possible for this to happen even before quantum computers are commercially available.


"Recovering" someone else's coins is a very slipper slope. What essentially happens is that you steal them in place of another thief.

I don't think it has anything to do with something being physical. He's clearly alluding to things whose value are backed by something. What he doesn't grasp is how Bitcoin has value despite being decentralized, and I think that's perfectly fine for someone who has built his wealth the way he did using the regular system.

Either way, his dislike of Bitcoin isn't really news to anyone at this point, so there's probably no use dissecting it. He's worth more than a lot of us ever will be, so he's at least entitled to his own opinion about finance.

Wow, I always assumed it would protect past addresses, but now that I think about it, no fork can really change those. So I looked into the issue and it seems the community doesn't have a solution for this yet? That is a pretty concerning issue.

There's actually a proper paper out there that details quantum computing threats to Bitcoin, and details ways on how to circumvent them.

For a tldr, ASICs generate more hashpower than quantum computers are estimated to be able to, and there are several quantum-proof signature schemes (available now) that Bitcoin could adapt.

This means that the threat of quantum computing could be solved by a hard fork anytime. Hard forks should only be executed when absolutely necessary though, and we're several years away from that.

I completely agree that using exchanges as your wallet is an improper way to use Bitcoin, but using them to buy or sell is perfectly acceptable. Peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading is preferable for sure, but even then, most trades between strangers still go through escrows of some sort. I'd also like to note that he doesn't attack financial institutions anywhere on the whitepaper; he only said that it could be time consuming and expensive to go through middlemen, most of which happen to be financial institutions in online commerce scenarios.

It's just money at the end of the day, and spending it on whatever, even other kinds of money, is completely up to the users' prerogative. I don't think Satoshi would see it as pissing on his grave or anywhere near that drastic.