It seems as if this was a joke. As of now, not giving this information does not prevent you from posting or reporting a post.

My selfie

I am being asked to submit my KYC information to continue using the forum.

Obviously I am not going to give this information.

edit: This is an April fools joke, and any information submitted will not go to this site's owner:

Would you consider paying via the blockchain instead of via the LN? There isn't very much that I can use with a LN balance ATM, and it is somewhat expensive to settle a LN channel if I wanted to use what you pay me via a blockchain transaction.

I think this person was probably on the list by mistake, OR it is a mistake that he is not banned.

He has zero posts ATM. I presume it is the later.

Also helpful would be links to all of these people's threads, so that readers can see examples of what constitutes a scam attempt in Digital Goods.

I have looked at the Digital Goods section multiple times recently, and nearly every thread on the first several pages was a clear scam attempt, or a clear attempt to launder money, or both.

Some of these brainwallets had coin sent to them in the early days of bitcoin when maybe not many people, if anyone was actively trying to find brainwallets with coin they could steal. For example, passphrase "bitcoin is awesome" had 500 btc sent in November 2012, and a minute later, the coin was sent back to the same address that sent the 500 btc.

Forum user Taras was one of the early people to use passphrase "" (i.e blank - literally no passphrase), but it is unclear to me if he was using it on his own account, or was stealing others' money from that address.

The other two examples you gave, passphrase "the" and passphrase "wallet" appear to be part of the 2015 stress test "attacks". Both of these addresses had many transactions of small financial value sent to them, starting near the time the stress tests started. After one of the "stress tests" they published the private keys associated with many of the addresses with unspent outputs, and maybe they were using weak brainwallet addresses as well so those "hunting" for brainwallets would try to spend those unspent outputs.


Correct. There was some research done in 2015 that highlighted the risks of using a brainwallet, that were severe enough that "brainwallet.org", a then-popular website used to create brainwallets, decided to shut down.

Out of all the exchanges operating in the Eastern part of the world (operating out of Asia), I am most comfortable with Binance. The primary reason behind this revolves around the lack of fake trading volume on their exchange, and the prevalence of fake trading volume around other exchanges.

Even though the New York State AG sent an inquiry to Binance, I do not believe the NYAG has jurisdiction over them.

Allowing customers to withdraw any amount without being subject to KYC can theoretically allow someone to launder an unlimited amount of money if they create multiple accounts. They may do blockchain analysis to somewhat prevent this if someone is clearly depositing coin owned by the same entity via multiple anon accounts.

Your screenshot is not for an AWS account. It claims to be giving some kind of credit for a "Google Cloud Startup" account.

OP - a big of unsolicited advice to you:
Instead of attacking the person who took action against you, it would be better to attack the action taken against you.
Instead of challenging the mod, you should dispute the fact your post was deleted.

I have no idea what your deal is, or if it was right to delete your post or not. I have no interest in investigating if your post was deleted wrongly, and will not take a position for or against deleting your post.

From what I can see, you are involved in creating a lot of drama, and should cut back some.

A vanity address generator is bruteforcing private key --> address combinations, but instead of looking for addresses with unspent outputs, they are looking for an address that starts with, or contains a specific critera.

There are many possible addresses that start with 1b0ne for example, far more addresses than have ever been used in the history of bitcoin. Using the same example, it is exponentially more difficult to find an address that starts with 1b0nes than 1b0ne -- with each additional criteria, it becomes exponentially more difficult to "find" a private key associated with the address that matches your criteria.

Unless your computer is using a broken RNG, it should not generate the same vanity address twice using a vanity generator.

According to lingolics analysis, there are 3,000 words that make up 95% of literature, even though there are over 170,000 english words.

If you use a 5 word brain wallet out of a 3,000 word vocabulary, using words picked at random, you brain wallet will be one of 3000^5 combinations, or ~2^58 combinations. This is much smaller than the 2^160 possible private keys, or is (1.97 * 10^-29)% of total possible private keys. This is assuming the brain wallet is chosen at random, and most are not.

I would refer you to the below picture to help you understand the probability of finding a "random" private key with coin in it:


There are 2^160 possible private keys. For comparison, there are currently approximately 2^26 unspent outputs, however some addresses have multiple unspent outputs.

If a private key was generated randomly, for all intents and purposes, it is not going to be found out via a brute force attack.

In 2018, and late 2017, there were billions of dollars worth of crypto stolen from major exchanges, that mostly covered the losses out of operating profits. Some may have been operating with fractional reserves, it is hard to know for sure. In comparison, this hack is nothing.

Many exchange operators do not  have sufficient risk management experience to keep themselves safe from theft. High profit margins and trading volumes have previously kept exchanges solvent after hacks. A good rule of thumb for exchanges is to keep no more than one month's profit worth of crypto in hot wallets, so the exchange could "earn" their way out of a hack within a month, but I cannot imagine Bithumb making more than $30 million/month in the current downturn. Bithumb is also most probability faking most of their volume, but that is another story....

A bit of unsolicited advice: no one is going to bid on this unless and until you provide evidence of the legitimacy of what you are selling. This is true even if you have lots of reputation, which you do not.

I cannot imagine anyone ever loading a hundred grand onto any kind of account with the intention of selling the balance unless the money is stolen, laundered, or otherwise illegitimate. This of course assumes you are not entirely entirely lying about the existence of what you are selling, which may be the case.

There is no way this is anything except legitimate /s

I am just saying that ~99% of the threads in Digital goods are illegitimate in one way or another.

Keeping the status quo will only attract scammers and other people with bad intentions.

You can review my post, directly above yours for an additional option:

Stores can also utilize CPFP transactions as explained in this post.

Someone is claiming you scammed them as reflected on your trust page:
There is no reference link, but I would ask if this is true. If so, I don't think anyone should do business with you until it is resolved.

I have not looked around in Invites & Accounts very much, but have reviewed Digital goods a couple times over the past few weeks. Each time I visited, the first three or so pages were full of transparent scams and likely money laundering schemes. Oh, and CSW is apparently trying to buy some old wallets, but some people consider him to be a scammer.

I don't think it would be a crazy idea to close or somehow restrict Digital goods to solve this problem.

Yes, Target can protect itself by using a CPFP transaction. This is not unlike how merchants pay credit card processors a fee to process credit card transactions, and (somewhat/minimally) protect the merchants from fraud, only a CPFP transaction will generally cost pennies verses several percent of the value of a transaction for credit card processors.

In addition to using a CPFP transaction, a merchant can choose to only accept unconfirmed transactions that meet certain criteria, and tell their nodes to ignore unconfirmed transactions that does not meet their criteria. The merchant may choose to ignore transactions that pay a fee under a threshold that is likely to quickly confirm, and transactions whose inputs are also unconfirmed. In your example, Target may choose to ignore the zero fee transaction entirely and tell the customer he needs to wait until it is confirmed.

Full nodes do not always relay, or always receive transactions if they have this setting turned off. The operator of a node can use the "blocks only" setting to only receive new blocks, and is a way to reduce bandwidth. There can also be instances when a miner will receive transactions to consider including in their blocks from not-full nodes, such as their websites, or from SPV clients (light nodes) if the miner's node is an electrum server for example.

A full node is one that validates each block in full, including that transactions included in said block contain valid signatures and have not previously been spent (are not double spends).

The decision between running a full node and a SPV client (a "light node") depends on the end user's value of security and privacy. A full node will use more resources, such as bandwidth, computing power, memory and hard drive space, and a SPV client will have incrementally lower security and privacy, but I am not aware of any thefts of coin that were stolen/lost because the end-user was using a SPV client.