There is no HASH160 of a transaction. RIPEMD160(SHA256(publickey)) gives a pubkeyhash, which is then used to encode a P2PKH address.

Your private key is not generated using elliptic curve multiplication. Your private key is simply a random number, generated using a good source of entropy or derived from your seed phrase (which is in turn generated using a good source of entropy).

See this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193489.msg52782685#msg52782685. He has a pathological inability to stay on topic, and derails every thread in to an argument about his pet peeves - Lightning, Core, block sizes, etc.

I agree with this completely, but he wasn't banned for having a different opinion - he was banned for constantly derailing threads.

Yup, but without it, we will end up with two tiers of bitcoin. "Clean, government approved bitcoin", which are accepted anywhere and trade for a premium, and "tainted, government condemned bitcoin" which are refused by most businesses and users and are worth less. Yes, bitcoin itself will still be decentralized and censorship resistant, but if the only thing I can do with my "tainted" bitcoin is trade it back and forth for other "tainted" bitcoin with other "tainted" users, then it will have failed as a currency. Allow me to quote myself:


Yeah, fair points. It would just be nice to be able to get a bit of a feel for a new merchant I've never used before first, rather than having to make a small test purchase first to see if they are going to take issue with my coinjoined/mixed bitcoin. Although simply avoiding any merchant which uses BitPay already gets you a good chunk of the way there.

I've always assumed anonymous prepaid cards are mostly scams using other people's stolen information, as I didn't think any business would get a license to issue these cards without collecting KYC. Have you tried CoinDebit personally and can vouch for it? Does it have a forum thread or similar public discussion with decent reviews anywhere? I'd be very interested in acquiring some anonymous prepaid cards so I can spend bitcoin in businesses which don't accept it directly without sacrificing privacy and risking identity theft via KYC.

Yeah, I'm always wary of using gift cards online for this reason. At least if you do it in person then you don't have an account to ban. Partly why as I said above I'd always stick to a reputable seller for gift cards and never trade them peer to peer unless I trust the other party already.

True, but I would argue that if the only place you have backed up your seed phrase is in the same location (your house) that your wallet itself is stored (be that a software wallet on a computer, a hardware wallet, a paper wallet, whatever) then you don't really have a back up at all. The only thing you are protected against is failure of the wallet itself (via direct damage to the computer or hardware wallet, electronic shelf life, and so on). You have absolutely no protection whatsoever against fire, flood, explosion, tornado, landslide, or any other natural disaster, and limited protection against robbery or theft.

If you do not have a completely secure external location to store a back up, then your options include renting one (such as a safe deposit box) or using a system which requires compromise of more than one back up to steal your coins (either multi-sig or additional passphrase(s)).

Careful now, citizen! You've just expressed an opinion which is out of line with the Official Acceptable Opinions Manual^TM of the Central Chain Analysis Database. All your addresses will be blacklisted for 7 days in order to give you time to thoroughly reread the manual and reeducate yourself as to what is acceptable public speech. We trust this won't happen again!

But there is no incentive for an exchange to do so. Each exchange knows they can ask ridiculous KYC and that they can arbitrarily freeze or steal some users' coins, because every other centralized exchange is doing it too. They'll only start paying attention when they start losing business to DEXs or peer to peer trading. But with the general growth of bitcoin, for ever users which leaves a centralized exchange to use non-KYC trading methods instead, two more newbies come along and sign up without realizing they are sacrificing everything that bitcoin stands for.

There are indeed exchanges which rightly completely ignore any taint nonsense, such as Bisq and LocalCryptos, and coinjoin implementations such as JoinMarket. Perhaps we could also start a whitelist of online businesses such as gift card sellers which are known to pay no attention to taint and freely accept mixed or coinjoined coins, etc.

Which would be a massive attack on bitcoin. A single centralized register controlled by whom? And if that single entity decides an address is blacklisted, then that address can't transact with any registered business in the country/world? Completely centralized nonsense. Thankfully it is unlikely to come to this since blockchain analysis companies have little incentive to work together to create such a database while they can continue to convince governments and exchanges they provide useful information rather than just pure guesswork, and that they should be paid for this guesswork.

Pointing it out to these services achieves nothing. Even when individual users try to explain to them the basic concept of how bitcoin works (i.e. coins which 10 transactions ago came from a casino are not still "tainted"), they don't care. Easier for them to just steal the user's coins and close their account. The only thing which will work is mass action. If everyone stopped using Coinbase today because of their support of taint, you can guarantee they would abandon it by tomorrow and be lobbying the government to change the rules.

As you say, the distinction here is that they are discriminating against the entity, not against the coins.

I don't ever want anything to do with Coinbase. I'll never sign up for their exchange, and I'll never do business with them under any circumstances, since they are pretty much antithetical to bitcoin in my mind. But I would obviously be insane to say I never wany anything to do with any coin which has passed through Coinbase. Since I'm not an idiot, I recognize that it is impossible to accurately identity which outputs contain coins which were once held by Coinbase, and that any transaction can be (and often is) coins changing hands.

Saying you don't want to deal with a casino is fine. Refusing certain coins from me because those coins were once withdrawn from a casino by someone else* is entirely unacceptable.

Education. Remind everyone that blockchain analysis and taint is fancy guesswork which frequently gets thing wildly wrong. Remind everyone that as soon as bitcoin is involved in any transaction, it is impossible to say which bitcoin has ended up where. Remind everyone that taint isn't a real thing, and it only exists to allow blockchain analysis companies to make profit and to allow exchanges and governments to steal your coins. Remind everyone to stop using any exchange or service which is attacking and undermining bitcoin by enforcing such absolute nonsense.

*Based on guesswork and provably false assumptions.

I am (at least for seed phrases) - plain old boring paper and ink.

I don't quite buy in to all the hype surrounding metal back ups. There is no denying that stainless steel is more durable the paper. In a house fire, your paper back up will be destroyed but your steel back up will survive. But now think of this practically. Are you going to spend days searching through the rubble of your house, through bricks and nails and dust and ash, to try to find your steel back up, or are you just going to go and retrieve one of your other back ups in probably under an hour? Are you even going to be allowed to search through the rubble, or will it be closed off by police or the fire service while they ensure it is safe or check for any suspicious circumstances? You'll just wait patiently for a few days and hope none of the workers on site stumble across your back up in the meantime?

Consider other disasters such as a flood, tornado, or landslide. Stainless steel will survive that just fine. Will you be able to find it? What good is a steel back up if it is buried under 50 feet of rocks and earth, or if it's been washed down river, and you will never find it again? In such a scenario, your only option is to go retrieve one of your other back ups.

Paper and ink stored properly will survive hundreds of years. Proper redundancy and off site back ups should be the most important thing that people focus on. Two pieces of paper in separate physical locations is far more resistant to disaster than a single piece of metal.

Yes, when you create a bitcoin transaction the inputs to the transaction are referenced based on the parent transaction's hash. Usually the parent comes from an earlier block, but it can also come from the same block, provided that the parent transaction appears before the child transaction in the transaction list in that block. When other nodes verify that block, they will verify the parent transaction first, and so have the relevant transaction ID to reference when they come to validating the child transaction.

If the transactions were included in the block in reverse, then the block would be rejected as invalid.

Invisible inks generally have quite a limited lifespan. Most UV pens will last somewhere around 3-5 years, but it will depend on the type of ink, the type of paper, the conditions of storage (temperature, humidity, etc.), and so on. You might find that the lifespan of UV ink is significantly less than this, and you would have no way of knowing unless you tested it first and waited several years to assess for fade, which obviously no one is going to do. The last thing you want is to come back to seed phrase in a couple of years to recover your coins and find that the ink has degraded so much that you now can't make out all the words.

Aluminum is a poor choice for engraving a seed phrase. It has low durability, low strength, low melting point, high malleability, and high reactivity. Probably the best metal to use would be titanium, but the best balance between cost/ease of access and durability is stainless steel.

The users. Users post buy or sell offers for bitcoin against whatever pair they are interested in. Other users come along and accept those offers. Whoever is selling the bitcoin then sends it to a (preferably) non-custodial escrow, while whoever is buying the bitcoin makes the payment in fiat, altcoin, gift card, whatever. Once the payment is received, the bitcoin is released from escrow.

In a real DEX then at no point does the DEX have control over your coins.

No, but as I said above, a $1.2 billion deficit doesn't happen overnight. It is safe to assume there were problems behind the scenes for several weeks.

Terra collapsed on May 10th, while Celsius suspended all withdrawals on June 13th. That's a full month they continued to advertise to new customers, including specifically denying rumors they were insolvent.

Not just that, but making several public statements on their website, social media, videos with the CEO, etc., specifically stating that the insolvency rumors were FUD. I can't imagine that's legal.

It doesn't mean that USD will suddenly start becoming more valuable. Rather it will just devalue less rapidly, with the goal to get back to a few percent a year rather than pushing ten percent a year as we are now. Holding fiat and hoping it becomes more valuable in the future is a fool's game, as history shows it only ever goes down long term. Unless you are earning more interest than the rate of inflation, which is near impossible in the current climate without taking significant risks, then you will lose money by waiting.

Some will, but the majority won't. This is proven by the very fact that platforms like Nexo and BlockFi continue to operate and attract new users while Celsius and Voyager are going through bankruptcy proceedings. There is no shortage of examples of people losing money from centralized exchanges in a variety of ways, and yet millions of users still store millions of bitcoin with such exchanges.

Would it? We've just seen many examples over the last month of platforms who were unable to satisfy all withdrawals, and yet managed to continue to operate to the point of declaring bankruptcy.

Again, doesn't seem to be any shortage of entities willing to hand out risky loans.

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see what comes of it all. But I don't see what they have to lose from coming out now and saying "zkSNACKs is moving jurisdiction and will not be implementing blacklisting once the move is complete". If that is indeed their intention, then they will be announcing that eventually, so why not now? Gibraltar will somehow prevent them from leaving?

And even if for some reason they can't be that specific, then why not say "It is under review/consideration" or "We are exploring other options" rather than doubling down on it and trying to defend censorship as if it's a good thing, and calling the community a bunch of "whiners" for being outraged about it? As I said above, if this was their plan all along then they've gone about it in the stupidest way possible.

But this is now getting off topic here, so I'll end it there.

What reason do they have to change it? They know fine well that 99% of their users don't even know what that means, and of the few who do, the majority of them simply don't care because they think Coinbase are too big to fail. You've said yourself it won't be trivial to come up with a new framework to change this, and will be a lengthy and costly process. They have proven repeatedly that they don't give a damn about what happens to their users, so why would they waste their time, efforts, and money, when it will make absolutely zero difference to their profits?

Yet, it might still be beneficial to keep standard users as unsecured creditors, as they can use that as a safety net selling point to attract investment from corporations and institutions. "Hey, if it all goes to shit, we have $x billion of unsecured assets we will use to pay back this secured loan/investment you are going to offer us."

Ok. So you have Electrum installed on both your internet enabled computer, and your airgapped computer. You have two separate USB drives. The first USB drive holds a watch only wallet which you only connect to your internet enabled computer. The second USB drive holds a full wallet (including private keys) which you only connect to your airgapped computer. Is this correct?

If so, then it should be fairly easy to update your Electrum installations. On the internet enabled computer, simply download, verify, and install the latest version. For the airgapped computer, download and verify the latest version on your internet enabled computer, then use a third USB drive which is recently formatted and contains no other data to move the necessary files over to your airgapped computer and install.

Such gaslighting is a recurring theme:


How convenient that the docs for 2.0 have been under construction this whole time! The one thing which will apparently make it clear that they are blacklisting, anti-privacy, and pro-censorship, but it just happens to not be finished yet. Plenty of time to write nonsense blog posts like the one I linked to earlier or launch their own spyware TikTok channel, but no time to write their official documentation. Oh well. But let's have a quick look at what is included so far. Specifically, this page: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WasabiDoc/blob/docs-2.0/docs/why-wasabi/TransactionSurveillanceCompanies.md

Wow. They make some very good arguments about why taint is complete nonsense and blockchain analysis companies are not to be trusted. Still no mention anywhere of the fact that they do the exact opposite of all of this and use your coinjoin fees to pay for blockchain analysis firms to spy on you. The bottom of the page even includes a list of blockchain analysis companies. Perhaps we could open a GitHub issue and ask them to put an asterisk next to the ones they work with.

Absolutely. Remember when Brave started and was being hailed as the next big privacy browser. Then ad companies paid them to whitelist their ads, so they did. Then Facebook paid them to let all their trackers through, so they did. Then Binance paid them to inject their code in to the browser, so they did. As soon as most people get offered money, then morals and principles quickly go out the window.

Absolutely. They make deliberately misleading statements on their documentation which suggests that they are still anti-censorship, while making absolutely no mention whatsoever of their blacklists. They outright lie, such as the statement that they have "solved fungibility". Their website makes absolutely no mention anywhere of censorship, blacklists, blockchain analysis, etc. It is a deliberate campaign of misinformation to keep their users in the dark about what they are actually doing.