Exactly this. Yes, we had a time before the internet where the world functioned, but now that everything requires the internet it would be impossible to go back to the old systems smoothly. If the global internet went down suddenly then everything would stop. Let's just look at food. Supermarkets wouldn't be able to sell anything since none of their registers would work. It wouldn't matter though cause nobody could pay since none of the card machines or ATMs would work either. So they would all get looted. But no more goods would arrive because supply chains would all be down and all transport routes and borders backed up for days, not to mention that most workers aren't going to work if they can't get paid. It would only take a few days before riots started over the rapidly dwindling food supply. And then consider things like electricity, gas, even clean water, all of which would face similar scenarios. Worrying about spending bitcoin in such a scenario is pointless - no one would be accepting it anyway. Things which would have value would be food, water, gas, weapons, and medicine. Bitcoin, fiat, and gold would be worthless, at least in the short term until either everyone figured out how to make everything work again or the internet came back online.

You either need a way to communicate with Florida to ensure you are indeed on the same chain (which could be via the mesh network if it were large enough), or you need both use an external reference point such as Blockstream Satellite.

Maybe. In such a case where either or both of the Washington or Florida mesh networks was running their own chain, then their hashpower would be reduced to that of whichever miners were on their mesh network, meaning incredibly long block times and an incredibly long time until the next difficulty adjustment, rendering bitcoin more-or-less useless. It would be far more viable for them to stay synced with the global network via satellite, and use mesh networks to send transactions through until they found someone with an internet connection (perhaps close to the Canadian border, for example) who can broadcast their transaction.

Great that you are now going to secure your seed phrases properly, but simply deleting everything from the cloud storage is not sufficient. Again, think of cloud storage as someone else's computer. If you say to them "Delete this file" and they say "Ok, I've deleted it", you have absolutely no proof whatsoever that the data is actually deleted. And even if it is deleted, it probably isn't properly shredded and could be recovered. And even if it is shredded, it is probably backed up on more than one other server somewhere and could still be accessed.

Instead, you should consider whatever seed phrases or private keys you had stored online permanently compromised. Create some brand new wallets with the seed phrases backed up only via non-electronic means (i.e. pen and paper), and then transfer all your coins out of your old wallets in to these new ones.

I would suggest using this tool to search instead: Ninjastic.space - BitcoinTalk Post/Address archive + API

There was some other discussion about Taleb appearing at CoinGeek in the main BSV scamcoin thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216304.msg57105940#msg57105940

I looked in to it a bit at the time, but did not find any satisfactory answers beyond that CoinGeek would obviously have paid him handsomely to appear at their conference. As far as I am concerned (and indeed, as far as Taleb himself is concerned), he is a fraud for appearing alongside CSW and not calling out his lies, and so I didn't waste much more time on it.

The speech which accompanies that slide is no better. He essentially says "I've been trading for 37 years and never had a problem with a centralized custodian, therefore, centralization is fine."

These platforms make their profits by taking your coins which you deposit and lending them out to other entities, and charging interest on those loans, exactly the same as fiat banks do. What is different from fiat banks, is that there are absolutely no rules or regulations governing what loans they can make, and there is absolutely no insurance either. While the platforms all claimed that they did due diligence, only made safe loans, all the loans were covered in excess by collateral, and so on, it's now becoming clear that absolutely none of that was true, and these platforms loaned out your money to pretty much anyone who asked for it without checking their ability to repay the loan and with little to no collateral in return. When one big loanee collapsed (Three Arrows Capital), there was a massive knock on effect on a bunch of these lending platforms which left them all insolvent.

I've discussed all this at length in my thread here: Recent events should make you withdraw all your coins to your own wallet: Part 2

These ongoing collapse of multiple such platforms does not affect the fundamentals of bitcoin whatsoever. Hopefully, however, it will result in people losing faith in these centralized lending platforms and exchanges and instead choosing to keep their money in the only place it is actually safe - their own wallets.

I have read about more than one instance of a user storing a seed phrase or private key in the drafts of some email provider, who have shut down without warning. Amazon might have given a warning, but many won't.

This isn't the most likely attack either. Even if I used a truly random password of 500+ characters along with a hardware key 2FA, I would still never store anything valuable on the cloud (i.e. someone else's computer). You have absolutely no idea how good their security is, if your data is transferred securely, stored securely, how many times it is copied, in how many servers all around the world it is stored, where these servers are, who can access these servers digitally, who can access these servers physically, and so on. Even if your account is not hacked there are a million ways that your data could be stolen or lost.

It's easy to massively overpay the fee when it isn't your money that is paying for it. Binance have been ripping off their users daily since their foundation, but for some reason people turn a blind eye. As Charles-Tim says, at the height of it they were charging 50,000 sats per withdrawal when bitcoin was $60k. Imagine paying $30 just to be allowed to access your own money. If a fiat bank tried to do that there would be uproar.

Wow. Literal theft. Again, imagine if a fiat bank said "Well, we accidentally sent a million buck to someone you sent money to a year and a half ago, so we are going to take everything you own as compensation for our own mistake."

Centralized exchanges really are the worst of both worlds. All the downsides of complete centralization with none of the insurance or protections that fiat banks provide.

It is worth pointing out that the physical distance involved is absolutely irrelevant. What is required is that the receiving party has a connection to the internet so can broadcast the transaction to the rest of the network. If neither party has an internet connection, then you cannot broadcast the transaction and so you have zero protection against a double spend.

If the US shut off the internet, then anyone in the US who wanted to send bitcoin would have to deliver their transaction data by some method (radio, phone, physically handing over a SD card, mesh network, carrier pigeon, whatever) to someone who did have an internet connection so they could broadcast it for them. For the people in the US to remain synced with the network and see the latest blocks, they would either need to use something like a mesh network or Blockstream Satellite.

Do you know what cloud storage actually is? Someone else's computer. Why would you store your seed phrase on someone else's computer? Do you know who can access that computer? Do you know how good that computer's security is? What if that person stops letting you access their computer? An incredibly stupid thing to do.

In this case, maybe. But there have been plenty of cloud providers in the past who have provided little to no notice, and there will be plenty more in the future.

Partly the two reasons outlined above (force you to keep your coins on the exchange, and trick newbies in to using a centralized scamcoin instead), and partly pure profiteering. Last time I looked at it, the number of batched outputs in each of Binance's withdrawals transactions meant that each output averages out as only around 45-50 vbytes. Here's a recent withdrawal transaction from Binance now they have moved over to segwit (it only took them 5 years!) - https://mempool.space/tx/0136bd7279781b272d78691ab41947dd3b50481427e79644257f41198570a8f8. 29 outputs, paying a total fee of 17,160 sats, meaning each output contributed ~592 sats to the transaction. (Ignoring that they overpaid by 17x and could have broadcast at 1 sat/vbyte). So if current withdrawal fees are 20,000, then that's 19,408 sats per withdrawal going in to Binance's pocket. They also have to consolidate deposits of course, which they do again in massive batched transactions with a much lower fee rate to minimize costs, but even knocking off another ~1,500 sats for that, then they are making a nice 18,000 sats in profit per withdrawal.

Multiply that by thousands of withdrawals a day, and it is tens of thousands of dollars in value that Binance users are losing every day for absolutely no reason.

You are correct. zkSNACKs pays for Wasabi development through fees it collects from the coordinator (well, whatever is left over after they fund blockchain analysis companies, of course).

It is quite clear from their blog posts, interviews, social media, etc., that they see themselves as second only to Satoshi in importance when it comes to bitcoin. Without them, bitcoin would fail.

You obviously aren't, but mixers are one of the things franky1 hates, along with Lightning, Core, segwit, privacy in general, and a bunch of other stuff, so no amount of logical arguments will change his mind. Everyone arguing with him here is wasting their time and helping him achieve his goal of derailing this thread in to another one filled with his excessive rants.

Let's try to stay on topic here guys.

I would note that there have been (so far) unsuccessful efforts to try. For example, AOPP was proposed as a solution for centralized exchanges to whitelist users' addresses (i.e. apply KYC to external wallets), and only allow deposits or withdrawals to or from these addresses. It was supported by a bunch of projects and wallets, some of which I really hoped would know better. It was only after community backlash that they all dropped their support and AOPP seems to have a hit a dead end. So while I agree that educating the bulk of users will not and can not solve many issues, if there had been no education on the AOPP issue then it would have proceeded unopposed and would end up in widespread use.

Quick update on this: https://nitter.it/bisq_network/status/1552708493877989377. Kudos to Bisq for jumping on this so quickly. And some of the reactions from the Samourai guys over a single tweet are pretty childish and pathetic.

You don't need an IP address to spy on someone. And Wasabi have already clearly stated that they are/will be paying blockchain analysis companies to analyze your UTXOs and tell them the history of each and every one of them. If that's not spying then I don't know what is.

It certainly seems like this is the narrative they are trying to push; that they are the sole arbitrators of what is and is not fungible. As I said previously, as far as I am concerned this viewpoint is actively malicious.

It uses something known as a Chaumian coordinator (as does Wasabi). Each participant in the coinjoin connects to the coordinator via Tor, and supplies the coordinator with their inputs as well as their blinded outputs. The coordinator signs these blinded outputs and returns them to the participants. The participants then unblind their outputs and reconnect to the coordinator via a new identity, and then send back the now unblinded outputs. The coordinator can verify these unblinded outputs are correct since they still carry the correct signature the coordinator gave them earlier. The coordinator now has all the inputs and all the outputs, but cannot match them up.

It would obviously be possible to introduce a vulnerability in this process, but given that both wallets are open source, any vulnerability should get picked up and revealed.

Call me crazy, but here's an idea to promote bitcoin fungibility: Don't use coinjoin fees to directly fund blockchain analysis firms.

Not so much failed as never really existed in the first place. You created it but then saved it locally (indicated by the blue computer icon), and never broadcast it to the network. No one else in the world ever knew anything about that transaction. The bitcoin it tried to spend have not moved and will still be in your wallet available for you to spend in a new transaction.

With any new transaction you need to make sure to sign and broadcast it using the relevant buttons, and not just save it locally.

Tracing and deanonymizing are not the same thing. With some educated guesswork you can maybe trace coins across a few transactions, but it is very easy to get it completely wrong and still doesn't tell you anything about who is making those transactions. Deanonymizing a single address is different. This can be done if funds from that address move to a KYCed account on a centralized exchange or other service, if the wallet software being used is custodial, if the wallet software being used leaks information such as IP addresses, if the address is posted on social media or a forum, and so on.

Coins being moved between personal wallets become increasingly difficult to accurately trace or to deanonymize, if the users in question know what they are doing. It also remains impossible for any "bitcoin recovery service" or similar to infiltrate such a wallet and recover any stolen coins. Anyone advertising such a service is almost certainly trying to scam you.

Your transaction has not been broadcast to the network. First check that Electrum has a green circle at the bottom right to show that it is connected. Then try double clicking on your transaction to open the transaction window, and first Sign then Broadcast the transaction using the buttons at the bottom right of this new window.

It does not need an internet connection to create or sign the transaction, but it obviously needs an internet connection to be able to broadcast it to the network.

I don't take it as an endorsement of Wasabi, rather just a shot at Samourai. There has never been any love lost between Samourai and Bisq. For example, here's Samourai taking shots at Bisq a year ago: https://nitter.it/samouraiwallet/status/1388095210912092160

Samourai are maybe spying on you, but you can still achieve privacy by running your own server. Wasabi are provably spying on you, and there is nothing you can do about it. I wouldn't use either.

Meanwhile, here is nopara73 claiming responsibility for the fact that coin control is in use today, while also saying that you are all too stupid to use it and therefore shouldn't have it: https://teddit.net/r/WasabiWallet/comments/w8r7pw/why_i_wont_be_using_v2_of_wasabi_after_having_it/ihtvm0p/. He also slips in a quick reminder that they are only bastion of hope for bitcoin fungibility, despite actively treating bitcoin as non-fungible. Excuse me while I roll my eyes so hard I have to go lie down.

Yeah, true. And even if they did position themselves explicitly as ignoring taint and respecting privacy, there is nothing stopping them from suddenly changing everything one day and instead becoming pro-taint, pro-surveillance, and pro-censorship. *cough* Wasabi *cough*

Although whenever I see a merchant or business using a self-hosted payment processor such as BTCPay, I immediately feel much more comfortable using them then I do with third party centralized payment processor.

Absolutely, but herein lies the problem. Even if someone is able to argue against franky1's opinions, franky1 ignores those arguments and continues to spam his off-topic opinions across multiple threads. It is this repeated spamming which lead to his ban from Dev & Tech, not his opinions. Loyce even created an entire thread dedicated to him to disprove his opinions in one place, but that doesn't stop him derailing threads all over the place.

I feel we are largely in agreement. I have never and would never advocate banning someone for their opinions, regardless of how ridiculous or provably incorrect those opinions are, but when your constant spamming prevents other users from having a sensible discussion then I draw the line. Everyone has the inalienable right to free speech, but everyone also has the right to actually be able to use the forum for discussion without constant spam and/or derailment.

That's the thing - ignoring made up taint is the default position. All you have to do to ignore taint is set up bitcoin wallet and give your address to customers. Let's encourage more of that.

BitPay does a whole lot of shady stuff, including demanding KYC not just from merchants who use it but also the customers who shop at those merchants via BitPay, and freezing any payments they don't like. I find that they are predominantly used by businesses who are quite happy to comply with taint nonsense, and so are quite happy for BitPay to demand KYC from all their customers and do all their dirty work for them.

Note there is a difference between the BitPay payment processor and the BitPay wallet, but given how utterly horrendous the former is I would never touch the latter (or indeed anything from the same company).

Here's an interesting take: https://archive.ph/y56hb (Financial Times article, archived to bypass paywall).

I'd recommend reading the whole article, but here are a few relevant snippets:

So, within the 90 days before Celsius declared bankruptcy, Tether liquidated bitcoin from Celsius to the tune of $840 million that they were holding as collateral to a USDT loan they had given Celsius. Because this was within 90 days, it falls under the "preference" clause of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy, meaning this value can potentially be recovered. Tether's argument will obviously be that the loan was secured, but the counter argument here is that simply handing over collateral does not mean a loan is secured and it is unclear whether all the necessary paperwork was properly filed. If it wasn't, then Celsius could potentially recover the value of this loan to be added to their pot of assets to be redistributed, and Tether would be left with a $840 million hole in their finances as well as being relegated to the bottom of the pile of "unsecured creditors" who will receive pennies on their dollar when Celsius' assets are divided up.

The outcome here will be extremely interesting, as it would almost certainly apply to all the other platforms who have been handing out loans that they are calling "secured", when in actual fact they may not be at all.