You didn't mention the most important preventive measure - isolating your private keys from potentially unsecure environments. You mentioned hardware wallets, but they are just one to achieve it. Another method is creating your own cold storage with an old PC or laptop that is disconnected from the Internet and with freshly installed or live Linux OS. And if you can't afford neither of these options, you can at least access your Bitcoin wallet from a live OS on a USB stick, instead of the system that you use on a daily basis.

Justin Sun is still making his publicity stunts. And with this bounty being much bigger than the sum that was stolen, perhaps he is thinking that no one will come to claim it? After all, if there were multiple hackers, only one of them can snitch on the others to claim the bounty, and then it might still mean jail time for them. Plus there's a risk that Justin Sun won't uphold his word.

But I wonder if some chainanalysis company will somehow manage to track down the hackers, would Justin pay the bounty to them?

Actually, wearing masks became "the new normal" in Asian countries because of the Spanish Flu, and you could see a lot of people wearing them even before this pandemic. Eventually other reasons added up - air pollution, fashion, social meaning. And because of that, nearly everyone wear masks now over there, and their death rates are substantially lower.

But the same won't happen in the West, especially not in the US, where people make everything into a political issue.

Ofc I don't think that there will be much action from governments, or that the public perception will suddenly shift, but it was a small drop in the bucket of negative view, and if this bucket will get full one day, we'll see some action. It might never happen, for example I believe that Bitcoin's volatility and big market movements distract the people from viewing it as criminal's tool and make them view it as just a market asset. It may be not precisely what we want (a store of value or revolutionary currency), but at least it's not negative. And maybe governments would be less likely to ban Bitcoin if institutional investors will be sufficiently exposed to it.

Even today we have a lot of countries that have a fraction of the population of, let's say Russia, while having a much bigger economy than them. Demographics are interesting on their own, but they are just one detail of an economic analysis, and it would be wrong to rely solely on it.

I honestly think that making projections into a such far future isn't really useful, way too many things can change.


This will be a huge factor, if life will become unbearable in certain regions, it will have a huge demographic impact, that might be even felt in other regions due to huge immigration.


Agree completely, we live in some of the most peaceful and prosperous times, it's just that the social and mainstream media dramatize things too much. People need to learn to value what they have.

Unfortunately, most of the mainstream media used a similar title, so this incident is a net negative to Bitcoin. Some influencers are already saying that all crypto should be banned. This is worrying, because public perception is the only thing that stops governments from banning Bitcoin tomorrow. If majority of the population will be signalling that they will not use Bitcoin, and they don't like Bitcoin, it would be a no-brainer to ban it, because this move would be popular and will protect the establishment.

Even the big coins never looked good from the fundamental point of view, and things are much worse with the smaller coins. They often have inherently flawed design choices, like for example IOTA's DAG; they can be a useless knock-off of a more succesfull coin - for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum "killers"; they can have unrealistic and ridiculous premise, like a coin based around cannabis or farming. These altcoin markets have very low liquidity, so it's very easy to manipulate them. Chatboxes, telegram channels and crypto blogs or news are full of shills that will hype an altcoin for money. Lastly, altcoins sometimes get hacked or even 51% attacked. And of course there's always a risk of scam with the newest coins, like a premine dump or an ICO/IEO.

People could say that with some sort of knowledge you can avoid the scams, but it would require years of experience to develop the intuition for it. To a newbie, a whitepaper full of technobabble looks like good fundamentals, and retweets from bounty hunters look like an active community.

actmyname covered the problem of bet verification, but it's only one of the many things that you have to worry about. There can be phishing sites that copy the existing legit sites, there can be entirely fake sites that allow you deposit and play, but don't allow you to withdraw, a legit site can one day commit an exit scam and so on.

Try using some crypto gambling review sites or doing your own research on this forum's Gambling section, look at the sites with the longest history and best reputation. And generally, avoid storing too much coins in your casino accounts.

What breakthrough are you talking about? Cryptocurrencies, decentralized platforms, smart contracts have existed for many years already, and their adoption rate is tremendously slow. So, why exactly millions of people are going to wake up one day and think "this is it, I'm starting to use decentralized crypto stuff right now!" ?

Not to mention that there's a lot of fundamental problems with smart contracts and decentralized platforms, that prevent them to be a real and effective replacement for all the uses cases of their centralizd counterparts.

Why would I flip a coin 256 times if I can roll a 16-sided die 64 times instead? Or at least I can roll a 8 sided one 128 times. But frankly, if you don't trust your RNG, you should probably not use Bitcoin and all other things, like even browsing the Internet, because a backdoored RNG opens countless possibilities for the atackers. For example, random numbers are used in the ecdsa signing process, and if they are not random, then it's possible to retrieve a private key. So, good luck flipping a coin 256 times every time you're making a transaction.

Except exchanges have KYC and could have very quickly reacted to it, like temporarily freezing withdrawals until they find the culprit's accounts. Plus there's no guarantee that the price would be crashed so hard, it's pretty obvious to most people that such strange tweets are fake. Owners of twitter accounts could react in minutes, deleting the tweets and making a statement.

The hackers could have gotten more money if they sold this attack to governments, I'm sure China and Russia would pay millions for a chance to stir more conflict in the West, especially in the US. And it could have been done in a way to make hacking less obvious, and people would immediately start making conspiracy theories that there was no hacking, and the tweets were real.

First, you're forgetting that the block reward also includes transaction fees. At some point tx fees will become bigger than the coinbase reward. Second, miners don't instantly claim their share, they wait for some time and then ask the pool operator to send them whatever they have mined so far. And third, in such far future miners could be paid with LN transactions, which solves both the problem of fees and the amounts being to small for withdrawal.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1283843495354970114


Currently everything and everyone suggests that some employees were hacked or went rogue, which granted hackers access to the internal tools which grant permission to tweet on behalf of any user. If plaintext passwords were stolen, the attack would still go on, because there was no mass password reset.

What you are describing isn't a collateral, it's debt collection. A collateral is something that you put before taking a loan, a debt is what happens when you default on a loan. There's a huge difference here, because collateral can very easily be seized in most cases, while debt collection needs to go through the court, and the creditor might never fully recover it.

From a practical point of view, DeFi is useless for a person that needs to borrow some money to pay their last bill a few days before they payday. If they had crypto to put as collateral, they could just sell it instead.

If it's so hard to enforce the contracts, they won't be popular. And the interest rates might be huge as the result.


This is just an implementation detail of a database, but how would the ID itself work? How can you trust it, when it's possible and even easy to obtain biometric data and document scans. Maybe it could be solved with a web of trust, but that still means relying on third parties, it's just that you'll have a bigger choice of them. As the result, identity frauds will still occur.

It's true that the size of mistake plays a large role, and people know that often times when a mistake is small, the company might not even respond to them, so it's not worth the effort to notify them. But with smaller business, it can be really important to disclose such incidents, because these mistakes might be vulnerabilities that can cause serious damage to them. And in our case, I think all crypto casinos are still rather small, and since some of them have public bankrolls, it's better to not ignore such things if you encounter them.

Hilarious to read this in the light of the recent DeFi hacks. Plus we all know how common are the various crypto hacks, malware and scams. And victims have literally zero chance of seeing their money again. With centralized systems, the breach can be quickly reacted to and stopped, funds can be returned in some cases, as transactions are mutable and non-permanent.


People take loans because they don't have money, and in traditional finance loans without a collateral is the most common type of loan. DeFi fails to provide this crucial part of finance.

These things, among many others mean that DeFi is as overhyped as blockchain. Newbies should really be careful before they put their money in it.

Those aren't vanity addresses, they're way too long to be such, instead they are "bitcoin eater" addresses - it's just a text with a valid checksum, there's no known public and private key for it. The message is pretty clear - whomever sent it encourages scammers to use Monero because Bitcoin is traceable. I personally doubt that the scammers will be traced, with enough mixing it would be impossible, unless the scammers will make some mistake.

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/15/kerlissions-trivial-collisions-in-iotas-hash-function-kerl/



TL;DR - IOTA's previous hash function was backdoored, and after some controversy they changed it to their own version of SHA-3, but it's vulnerable to hash collisions because of their strange choice of encoding.


I don't track what's going on with IOTA too much, but they have a strong tendency of doing these huge security mistakes and introducing critical design flaws, and people who get caught in their hype need to be aware of it.

Title makes it sound like he lawfully obtained the funds, but teh evil guvernment punished him for buying crypto. But what actually happened is that he stole money from government/taxpayers by claiming that he'll use them to pay salaries to employees, while not actually having any employees - this a fraud, cut and dried. And he didn't invest in crypto for long term, he was merely using it as transport for his  stolen money.