That does not help with the other manufacturers that don't have lists like Lealana or Ravenbit edit: Ravenbit did supply a list.
So if you are making a coin today by default you have to have a lot of the address visible AND have a public address list for people to verify.
Good for collectors, probably looses some security but if you are putting a funded BTC coin in your display cabinet in your den then security has left the building.

Not 100% OT for this post, but since we are discussing funded collectables: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5326757

-Dave

Starting with most DMN use XMR now.
Most business either do their own hosting or use payment gateways / processors to do it.

If you take a look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5364113 or here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5364742 you can get your own node with your own BTCPay server running for not that much money. The upside is that it's yours. The downside is that it's yours an you have to take responsibility for it and know what you are doing. A 1TB drive for the blockchain and LN if you want to use it will last you a long time. A 2TB drive will probably die of age before you fill it.

As for the generating of the invoices and everything else there is a lot of code out there for integration into storefronts and such. You can use that as a base or write your own, depending on how you want tot do it.

-Dave

It has been discussed in the collectables, not sure where. But yes, IMO it's going to be a problem.
I have a bunch of coins from 2014/15 that I have the full address for but, on the back only shows the 1st 8 (including the 1)
So if I wanted to do a fake Lealana based on these I could probably blow out about 1 address every day with the hardware I could get my hands on.
They are all BTC0.1 so that's $6000 a coin. Not an small amount. When BTC was $400 and it would take months and months to get those firstbits it was a different story.

Probably worth a new thread. But as I said say 9 or 10 firstbits and then 7 or 8 'lastbits'.
I think you can get 18 characters across a coin in a readable font. Not 100% sure.

-Dave

As could I. Good advice on the restart, I didn't even think of it. Sometimes the simple things work best.
@BlackHatCoiner di you want me (or any of us) to open a channels or are you still working on it? If you do any preference on amount?

-Dave

Firstbits are NOT secure unless you use a lot of them.
In the old days, you could give an address of 1a2b3c4d5e and really not worry about someone generating an address that starts with that.
With Vanitysearch https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5112311.0 it's now possible. So you wind up having to give a very large portion of the address anyway.
Otherwise I can give you a token with 1a2b3c4d5e as the firstbits. The rest is xxxxxxxxxxxx but I tell you the rest is zzzzzzzzzzzzz so you fund my address and till you peel it you will never know.

-Dave

Odd. Do you have the TXID of the closing transaction? The mempool has cleared but it would be good to see if it's there.

You will probably get more eyeballs on this if you post in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0
There are a lot of lightning users there.

Also, if you contact 1ML at https://1ml.com/feedback they can probably take a look to see if they signed it, and if not why not.

-Dave

Much worse.
And starting next year, you get a 1099-K at a much lower reporting point.
https://taxmedics.net/the-paypal-1099-k-reporting-loophole-gone-baby/

Not that I feel it's bad, it just sucks that individuals are now stuck in the loop of having to file more paperwork for things because some people abused other things.
I get about $300 a month from people in reimbursement for stuff through PayPal. Next year I have to either file more tax paperwork or have them give me cash.

-Dave

What did you use to open & close the channel the umbrel GUI itself or did you install RTL or Thunderhub?

If you look at the 1ML (or other) explorer what does it show about the channel?

Do you see your node in the 1ML (or other) explorer?

-Dave

It was just on a list of German energy suppliers profit from low to high.
They are all for profit companies, most of which have net profit % that other businesses can only hope for.
Don't care if it's green energy or the worst dirty coal out there, for the most part there is more money going to profit then to green.

Not saying that it does not suck. Just that green is only part of the suck. Blaming green for the entire suck is just not a good argument. You could say if the green was removed it would suck less. But you can't say if the green was removed it would not suck.


Possibly, the 500 per citizen assumes that everyone uses the same amount. I can't speak for Germany, and for some reason can't find the numbers, but I would *think* (note think, don't know, can't find) that Germany like most industrialized countries heavy industry and commercial industry in general uses more energy then homes. At a guess, VW, Daimler, BMW, Airbus probably are using more energy then most towns. Could be wrong on that, just going by what I know in the US.

The cost does get passed along, but it's not a 1:1 ratio.

Opinion: This is why the there is so much arguing going on. It's not black and white. It's one big pool of grey. Kind of like the title of this post itself. Would it have the same impact if instead of 'Fuel prices hitting an eight year high' is was 'Fuel prices close to 70% of what they were in summer 2008'

If we could all move a bit, more might be accomplished.

-Dave

Started another post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366008.new#new to discuss BitPay in general and other options.
Please keep post / discussion here about the Wix partnership stuff.

Not to mention the other post will probably get more eyeballs on it since a lot of people do not look at the Press section. Or even know it exists.

-Dave

So the other day I posted this about Wix & BitPay partnering to allow Wix customers to take BTC / crypto payments.
As we know, BitPay is not that great a company when it comes to BTC in general.
As a general feeing some people here like them, some hate them.
When someone who does not like them @o_e_l_e_o stated they would not use any merchant that uses BitPay I asked what they told the merchant.


I am only touching on the custodial / hosted ones for now because I am assuming merchants using BitPay just want fiat.

The problem is IMO that *some* of those vendors listed on their BEST day are WORSE then BitPay on their WORST day.
It's not just the customer facing crap. It's the not just the back end and the pricing. It's not the fact that I can get BitPay up and running on a clients site faster then I can get though most others signup since the signup process on BitPay is quick & simple. It's not that the conversion to fiat and deposit is faster on then most others. It's all of that combined.
And lets talk about the conversion rate.
I spent the last hour (before starting this post) looking around for different merchants taking BTC and faking a sale to get to the payment screen see what the BTC -> fiat price was. I prepped everything and then went back till all were ready and then went to the payment screen.
As of then:

BTC pricing:
Preev = $61,130
Coinbase  = $61,148

BitPay = $61,115
Coinpayments.net = $61,001
CoinGate = $61,055
globee = $61,109 (FYI the gitbub link page is wrong their fee is 1.96%)
nowpayments = $60,505 (WTF?)

How many of us look at preev and then at the payment gateway and whip out our credit card instead of taking that small pricing hit.

Some of them I could not find merchants that use them.
Others seem to be out of business or the links on the page are dead (strike).

Others are just well, scummy confirmo is hiding fees upon fees. getting paid has a fee of .8 to accept a payment BUT when they send it there is a 14EUR fee and another 1/2 a percent. Kind of fucks up that $99 sale. (https://confirmo.net/pricing and then click payout pricing)

So that is IMO a tough sell for people. When I saw the nowpayments price I thought something was wrong and tried again. Nope, same price.
With the fees that globee charges it's tough to justify to someone who needs / wants to convert to fiat to use them instead of BitPay

So lets move to the hosted ones.
Blockonomics no longer converts to fiat, Payscrypt never converted to fiat, Bittery.io deos have working send to an exchange but that's it you have to do it yourself or hope for the best.
OOPS, guess you really can't get fiat that easily.

Remember, we are not talking about tech businesses here. Just general online ones that want to accept BTC / crypto.
Even if they have more control doing it themselves takes some time and effort and knowledge. That they may not have. If they hire people there is another expense.
 
Now, lets move onto some other BitPay news I posted about a while ago:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210928005348/en/BitPay-and-Verifone-Partner-to[%E2%80%A6]rrency-Acceptance-on-Payment-Terminals-and-In-
AppeCommerce

So now at the RETAIL POS side you are going to have merchants having the ability to just show you a QR code and you pay with crypto.
BUT, comes the argument BitPay is bad. Once again, yes it is. Followed by, and what are the odds of a NON TECH merchant adding a 2nd payment platform  with a separate back end and more accounting work to be done to reconcile payments from another source? I'm going with 0.

Now it comes back to customers.
What works best for us. I have a bunch of domains at namesilo
They take BTC though themselves they also take BTC and other cryptos through BitPay and take credit cards.
My credit card that I use there gives me 3.1% cash back on internet purchases.
Quiz: Does Dave use BTC or a credit card there?

I will not use any store that charges a credit card fee. You can get me once if I missed seeing it on the door, but I am never coming back. *Unless the CC that I am going to use is giving a larger % back then their fee. But the cost of taking credit cards is part of the cost of doing business.  Do you really think that these places that charge to use a CC are going to take your BTC for free?

So, I just presented this mess of what the situation is IMO. For now, merchants want / need fiat and are going to do whatever it takes to get as much of it as easily and as cost effectively as possible. Complaining about BitPay is great, but what are we doing to provide a REAL solution for it.

because tl;dr
1) Most merchants want fiat.
2) Most merchants don't want to deal with getting crypto and taking the time and expense of converting it to fiat.
3) Most of the other crypto -> fiat gateways suck (IMO)

Do we as a group go after the better platforms and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and give better rates and easier signups?
Do we pick on the lesser of 2 evils and promote another big player?
Something else?

Note: I did not touch on BitPay evil /KYC thing because I am a realist and know that some of their larger investors are major public companies who would rather pull their funding then worry about some government agency crawling up BiyPay's ass because they ran $58 of through their gateway that came from some ransomeware scam.

As for the rest of the https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/ links, there are some things that are true others that are just BS. If you want to discuss it, ping out or open another thread I will discuss. I just think at times it's easy to complain about them and not have a good replacement.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

-Dave

If you look here https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gasoline-prices and click on the 25 year chart
or here https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_nus_m.htm you can see that we are nowhere near the high price mark of fuel.
And those charts are in unadjusted $ so the price in todays money would be higher.

Now that the worlds economies are recovering from the pandemic prices are going to go up.
Transport and logistics are a mess at the moment so prices are going to go up.

Running around looking to blame green energy or the evil oil producing countries is not giving the full answer.
I asked about costs a few posts up and stompix posted a link about Germany spending $38 billion on green energy
Which looks like a big number.

But the Renewable energy surcharge for Germany went from 23% in 2018 to 21% in 2019 and is 20% in 2021
The grid cost was about the same (my question) however the cost of acquisition for the power has gone up from 21% to 24% of the bill.

Part of that cost is the profit for the suppliers. Anyone want to check on their profit margins?  No, OK I'll save you the effort.
Although 2021 numbers are not out yet:

https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/pressreleases/2021/vattenfall--year-end-report-2020
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RWEOY/rwe-ag/profit-margins
and so on.

Germans (and others) are paying for corporate profits. Green energy is just a scapegoat.

-Dave

1) Because there are so many people try so scam here it just makes everyone twitchy.
2) In the beginning you do have to admit someone giving a quick read it did look a bit off for a new user to come in asking to trade BTC695 not $695
edit to add
3) Since it is PayPal you are asking someone here to expose their email address to a newbie. That may make some people a bit more paranoid.

Side note(s): You did not say where you are. Since you are asking for USD and your wallet shows USD I would assume you have a US PayPal account but you did not specify that
Do you want F&F or would you accept G&S?
What rate would you do 1:1 or do you want an extra %?
Would you be willing to split it? There are probably more people here who can do $200 then $695.

Outside of sending your email address to someone I would not use PMs for anything. Buyer posts their BTC address, you post the txid. They send you the funds.

Just some thoughts.

-Dave

Exactly, the sooner people realize that if the business is not doing it themselves and dealing with a 3rd party, be in BitPay, Coinbase Commerce, they have to play by the same rules as anyone else who moves money for someone else.


They did over $1 Billion in revenue last year so they are not small.


After you told them they would not get your business, did you offer the help them take BTC as payment and then help get it converted to fiat so they could pay their rent & employees & other vendors? Although we are getting close to the point where a PERSON can live on BTC / crypto for a business with employees and other bills it's much more difficult. People can also, in general, accept the fact that by using crypto we are paying more for things and loosing the benefits of cash / credit cards. Many businesses would not want to or have the ability to.

I build setups for people to take BTC for their websites all the time. Some people like to do it that way. Others just want another form of getting paid.

They do not, it's just another option on the accept payment screen from what I saw. You have to fill out some information but I don't know if it goes user -> Wix -> BitPay or just user -> Wix or user -> BitPay

edit: I don't have a wix account that accepts payments but one of my clients does where I saw the demo and then found the link that I posted, I am not going to mess around with their payment back end to find out more.

No, they always sucked. Now they just suck more publicly.

-Dave

No, you must plug the miners into the network directly.
Also, USB -> network adapters are designed to be used on machines that have USB to give them network, not to convert network to USB.

What are you attempting to do / why do you want to do it this way?

-Dave

Looking up the IP points to 2 IPs that both belong to Cloudflare.
bitwhisk.io.
    172.67.135.29
bitwhisk.io.
    104.21.26.9

The Whois lookup is showing as private.
So I doubt it's been seized as *usually* when that happens they drop all privacy and point the domain to government IPs / servers.
Not always but usually.

Just my view.

-Dave

Been there, done that: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5246078.0
Really is kind of interesting how some conversations keep coming around and around.

And, yes I know I never finished the testing in the other thread, as the hardware was needed elsewhere and it was the middle of the pandemic and getting stuff was hard.
I didn't go back since it would have to be started from scratch for a new baseline.

-Dave

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211012005376/en/BitPay-Partners-with-Wix-Enabling-Wix-Merchants-to-Accept-Crypto-Payments

Now I know everyone here loves to hate BitPay, but at least they are promoting BTC and crypto use.
We all sit around here and talk about BTC,and help others with BTC and all that good stuff.

For all the other crap they do, BitPay is at least out there getting crypto into places for people to use it.

-Dave

Actually if you have it installed you can go to settings --> about --> logs (last thing on the bottom) and see such things as:


and

No Wi-Fi issues on the phone, every other wallet works fine.
Mycelium has just no longer as good and reliable as it used to be, due to back end stuff.
And with the fact that you have to recompile it yourself to change the back end node you talk to, it's just going to get worse.

I could spend a long time screaming about it, and all the crappy things that the developers have done, but it's not worth the time, I think Mycelium is just going to fade away as people keep having more and more issues with it and people stop recommending it.

-Dave

When I try to connect I get:


Also on 1ML when I search for your URI all I see are a few old nodes that have been offline for a long time.


For some reason it's trying to connect to a clearnet IP not an onion one. But in the log that you posted that I did not quote here there is a line
 "Proxying all network traffic via Tor (stream_isolation=true)! NOTE: Ensure the backend node is proxying over Tor as well"
so *I think* there is something misconfigured someplace. No idea what or how but with it trying to talk to a public IP when everything should be on TOR looks to me to be config issue.
Which I could help more, but I have no idea.

-Dave