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.

Why this should be surprising? Fiat is used for everything thousands times more than Bitcoin. Even us, Bitcoiners, overwhelmingly use fiat more than BTC, with maybe some few exceptions. What you should compare is share of legal use vs illegal, for both Bitcoin and fiat.

But Bitcoin isn't a good tool for money laundering, all transactions are public and permanently recorded, if you try to use mixing, it would only bring more suspicion.

If you are spending the whole UTXO, a chainanalysis algorithm might assume that the coin didn't change owner.

As an example, if you have an output with 0.24235958 BTC, it would be strange if this amount minus the fee was moved to another address - either it's a deposit to some service, which is easy to check because of how hot wallets operate, or you're sending to your own new address. A natural transaction would look like 0.24 BTC + change + fee.

When you trade on an exchange, the orders might be placed long before they get executed, so in your scenario of bot malfunction, it's more like you are mistakenly fulfilling someone's orders, rather than the vice versa, so it's not a scam.

As for exploiting and scamming, strictly speaking, scamming is using persuasion to trick humans, while exploiting is using flaws of the software to steal something. They are both bad, obviously. Sometimes people passively benefit from software flaws, like receiving double orders for the price of one - in that case a honest person should notify their counterparty about their mistake.

We already have DEXs and DeFis with centralized switches for letting intervene if something bad happens, and it's only a matter of time until these mechanisms are used for some exit scam or when a government tells to do so. And this whole blockchain technology thing has always been about looking cool to investors rather than actually making something that would benefit companies or users.

More like "if" we have decentralized identities, because there's still nothing even close to them. When it's trivial to obtain KYC documents and other personal data, or use neural networks to create fake one, you can't make a system that verifies identities without third parties. Plus this DeFi acts on a global scale, so a person from Canada can get scammed by someone from Bangladesh and have zero chance of prosecuting them.

None taken.

When a thing is truly groundbreaking, people quickly adopt it on their own - in the last decade no one asked people to adopt smartphones and social media, everyone did it because they clearly saw the benefits. It didn't happen with Bitcoin, because it has some big downsides, and the benefits aren't clear to average people. Therefore, evangelism can only marginally improve adoption, just like the actual evangelic christians can't convert the rest of the world, no matter how hard they go from door to door.

I even experienced some regression, as Bitcoin services that I used got closed down and no suitable alternative emerged.

Even now the criminal use if the third or the second thing that comes to minds of regular people when they hear about Bitcoin. Right now it's the most strongly being associated with volatility, and general population views it more as a risky investment rather than a currency that they would use for their day-to-day transactions because of that. Something needs to change with either the users or Bitcoin in order to see a larger adoption - maybe people have to rethink their values and the relationship they have with banks, or maybe Bitcoin has to be more stable and convenient. At this rate adoption rate is just too slow. I joined this community 4 years ago, and I don't see more merchants and services accepting Bitcoin, both locally and on the Internet.

I wouldn't rely on TA too much these days, Bitcoin is influenced by the global economic trends right now, and we are living at very unstable times due to the pandemic. The Bitcoin market reached record correlation with stocks, so these days it might be better to watch news than draw lines on charts.

This is absolutely misleading, DeFi isn't a competitor of traditional finance, all it does is that it allows you to take collaterized loans or flash loans (loans that are instantly returned back). You can't take a loan to start a business, you can't take mortgage, you can't take a student loan, you can't even ask for a small emergency loan. In traditional finance, you can even just show you id and get a small personal loan from your bank, which will never be possible with Ethereum, because it's trivial to show fake KYC documents.

You can't stop progress just because criminals might benefit from it, with that thinking we would still live in caves and use stone tools. Historically, crime levels are going down across the world, and the invention of crypto didn't make any global impact on it, so even if darknet markets exist and use Bitcoin, they aren't some huge social problem. There's a lot more things that need to be done in terms of crime fighting, before you can start looking at Bitcoin.

How exactly does it negatively impact adoption though? If merchants and users were such puritans to refuse to use Bitcoin because criminals use, they also wouldn't use cash and some of the biggest banks too. The real problems that stop adoption are giant price volatility, lack of scalability, lack of regulation, complex user experience. Besides, darknet criminals have been switching to Monero for a long time already.

And they also can sell your data to other parties secretly, so even if the judge ruled otherwise, there would still be no good reason to trust exchanges and other centralized companies with your personal data.

Maybe someone views this as negative news, but it should really be something that we knew all along - there's no privacy where there's centralization.

It's irrelevant, because Dogecoin will crash either way, this artificially influenced boom isn't sustainable, there's only so much gullible people to milk, and those who entered early will be dumping while they can. Since Dogecoin's fundamentals didn't change, there's no good reason for it to have this price.

Maybe the ban wave against TikTok will accelerate the crash, so if you're hodling Doge, it's time to sell now while it's still above the previous level.

Small local delivery services saw tremendous profits as the result of quarantine measures. Companies that are focused on online, entertainment, shopping, services also quite naturally experienced higher profits. Zoom might easily be the biggest gainer, since the quarantine made this app truly mainstream.

It's like ETFbitcoin said - Bitcoin is not affect by markets, it's affected by large events. So far the coronavirus outbreak is the only event large enough to shake Bitcoin. But there can be and will be more in the future.


50% drop in a day is not common, it usually only happened when the big bubbles were popped, and while it was partially a correction from the small rally that happened at that time, the drop was still too sharp and too deep to be brushed off as a normal case of volatility. And Bitcoin didn't really outperform everything else, it's still on the level it was before the crisis, while gold is 20% up since the beginning of the year.

Also, this year's halvening might have contributed to the quick recovery, and you can't rely on that every time.

And what makes you think that smart contracts can be enforced? Just because they have the word "contracts", it doesn't mean that they can replace legal contracts. A party can easily choose to ignore a smart contract if they want to, and many of the smart contract setups have some trusted third party that makes decisions, and all the setups that deal with physical world must have one, because there's no other way to link physical things with blockchain.

Sorry, but the revolution isn't coming, smart contracts won't get much traction because they aren't universally useful.

Why do you think that the confidence is high and that they trust in long term trend? Maybe they will dump the moment it will turn bearish, and they will sell when they will reach modest profit, instead of waiting for the moon. Frankly, we have no idea what their strategy is, so I wouldn't make any hopes that institutional investors are going to help create bull market or something.

For years people in this community were telling that Bitcoin is new gold, that it's a hedge against wars, economic crashes and all the other disasters, and people really liked to post negative world news, implying that it's bullish for Bitcoin. Covid-19 crisis was the first real test for Bitcoin, and by some marks Bitcoin failed it - it crashed together with stocks and other markets, showing that it doesn't have these hedge properties. This is the real problem here, at least to people who justified their hodling with those ideas.