To everyone replying, if you look at the majority of their other posts it is clear that brainactive is anti-bitcoin. Could be they are supporting another coin or just enjoys posting FUD. Not sure why.

But anyway to the point:

No *thing* can really fight wealth inequality inequality. And no *thing* can really cause more wealth inequality. Government and financial policies can do it, a major change in a majority of the financial markets can too. But a thing, be it BTC or gold or whatever can make some changes to it, but to move the scales to a large degree no it's just about impossible without external influence from policy changes.

-Dave

How about because you don't need to.
There are tons of alt-coins out there with different options and coin amounts and features.

But think about this as of now BTC is #1 in market cap.
Adding the market cap of #s 2 through 20 you still don't get to the BTC market cap.

So keeping it the way it is really seems to work better then mucking about. You want more coins / more decimals / something else go to the altcoin section.

-Dave

The biggest gains for a bull market that you will see IMO is from the older collectables. Say 2011 - 2014. Not as many coins, many of the makers are gone. Many of the coins are long lost / destroyed.

Compared to what we have now, where people who want to collect grab the coins as they come out and then hold them. As new people come in they get the newer ones and then slowly collect the older ones as they become available. BUT the older coins that are just not coming around as much are going to get very bullish as they come up less and less are more and more people want them.

-Dave

I *think* part of it is we are both correct AND we are both wrong.
IF chipmixer or any mixer is compromised any funds you put in and take out of are traceable.
However, you are correct as they have smaller fees and are quick and simple to use and do provide a high level of anonymity.

I do realize that my method of jumping though many steps with different private email address services and non KYC exchanges and going from BTC to XMR (or any other privacy coin) and back to BTC is both time consuming and expensive. Along with a lot more risk of loosing your coins along the way. BUT there is just about no way to know that the BTC you end up with had anything to do with the BTC you started with.
Unless both exchanges and email providers were compromised along with breaking XMR privacy.

-Dave

Why do you think it's grim? There has been no privacy since the beginning and it does not really seem to bother most people.
There are multiple threads around about using Coinbase / Bitpay and other debit cards. Both of which are just about as non private as you can get.

Heck more then 1/2 the people who replied to this post are wearing paid signatures with their payment address being posted in a public spreadsheet.

If any of us was to just go out and buy something with the BTC earned without moving it a few times it would be a trivial matter for the company getting it to figure out who they are.

Using your initial Starbucks example, if you used your Starbucks loyalty card they know who you are or at least what name and address you gave when you signed up.

There are more then enough simple ways to give yourself more privacy if you want. You don't need atomic swaps, just an email address and some time to put funds through a non KYC exchange.

-Dave

As of now 11AM EST on 14-Aug-2021 the mempool is empty.
Unless something changes with the usual weekend coin movement it should be mostly empty for the next 40 hours or so.

As for the difficulty, it's at the same level it was in June of last year with the next change coming in about 12 days.

Most people expect a slow climb back to where we were. But it's all a guess, depending on when and when the miners find new homes.
And what they actually are mining, there seem to be miners slowing being shipped to end users and while we ASSUME most of them are going to be mining BTC there are a bunch of other SHA coins out there that they may wind up being pointed to. But the difficulty discussion is really for another thread unless it starts to cause enough of a slowdown to effect the mempool again.

-Dave

Have you been able to get this compiled on  / for any modern linux system?

I just tried on Ubuntu 20.04 lts and 18.04 lts and both failed due to dependency messes. But, since I have compiled newer coins with them I don't know if it's the OS or other newer things I have installed. I thought I had a copy of the binary saved someplace but I can't find it.

Side thought, makes you wonder how much stuff like this kills older coins, I want to run it but there is an issue getting it compiled and there are no official linux binaries and for a bit of fun / playing around mining it's not worth putting in the extra time needed to do it so we go play with another coin.

-Dave

Are things like this considered plagiarism: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5354346.0

It's a copy paste from the link at the bottom. Doing the tl;dr thing for this 115 page thread since I figure it's been discussed before.
I feel it is, but will go the the consensus of what everyone else is doing.

-Dave

So my $1.00 in rewards is now worth $1.42 thanks to the 40% bump in XLM price since I got it.
This does in a way make the card more attractive. The downside is as we discussed, if XLM drops then you could have much lower then the 4% reward.

Like most things like the on the financial side of life YMMV and do what works for you.

-Dave

Looks interesting, wish I had to time get my lightning nodes back up to see how well it works with a self hosted solution.

Will be interesting to see if it takes off. Since it's open source I don't see it being centralized, there will always be people running it especially businesses, if it never gets popular I can see it having only one or 2 providers.

Unlike a lot of things that have cropped up this one looks like it does have good potential.

-Dave

I actually started a thread about people paying high fees when not needed. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5346270.0

Many of them were from exchanges that pay a flat amount per withdraw.
Others looked like they were just poorly programmed fee estimators.

The other side of it is that if the exchange addresses are known, the people looking for "taint" should know what they are.
But, since most of those services are probably going to be crap, the info they give will be crap too.

-Dave

Wonder if they are going to take it themselves or though BitPay / Coinbase Commerce / something like that or through their own payment gateway.

The quote is a little vague. It can mean they are doing it or they are putting in terminals that run it though someone else.

Going to be interesting to see how it plays out and if anyone else follows.

-Dave

The other issue is that a lot of the smaller businesses that want cybersecurity pay poorly. So there is a lot of movement between jobs. Some people who can't find a better job in the field leave, and as the need grows it becomes harder to find them. I have seen too many places that want a good but not great cybersecurity person but are only willing to pay $65,000 in a major city. Sorry, not going to happen.

So the jobs go unfilled. Then someone else sees that Business "X" is looking for someone and only paying $65,000 so they advertise their position at the same rate...and wonder why they can't find someone.

Not you can't afford to live on wages, but far enough below where they should be that it's not worth it for a lot of people to even bother looking at the position.

-Dave

Could be talking out my ass here, but IIRC there are a lot of things / db calls in core that are done sequentially.
So if you are running multiple RPC servers things could get messy since you could in theory try to do things that may step on each other.

There might be another reason but that jumps out at me. Could be 100% wrong....

-Dave

As others have said yes you only need the 1st 4 letters.
And yes, it's not a good way of doing it due to the fact that you can mess it up or have some sloppy / ambiguous letter.

However, if you do make more then 1 copy you do mitigate that risk somewhat, as you can have 1 copy in a vault someplace and another stuck to the back of your refrigerator so if you mess one up you still can look at the other one.

In theory you should do this anyway. Even if you write dome all the words. Never rely on just one copy of there are life altering funds stored.

-Dave

Looks interesting if I ever get my lightning nodes back up I will have to take a look at it.

EXCEPT, cloudflare? Why?
It should be P2P not P2 -> some big corporate entity -> 2P
Granted I didn't read why they are doing it or much else since I am mobile so it could be in 24 point bold text as the reasons, but to me that in general would be a show stopper.

-Dave

If you are willing to use escrow I'll take it.

-Dave

Coinex still allows for deposits & trades.
20 confirms for deposit, 200 confirms needed to withdraw them or to withdraw any coins you traded it for.
So you are probably looking at about 3 to 4 hours for your deposit to clear and a bit less then 2 days to be able to withdraw whatever you traded them for.

No KYC for small - medium amounts.
If you don't have an account you can PM me for a referral link because I'm greedy like that :-)


-Dave

Yes, but at that point 1 sat/b would have made it into the next block.
AS OF THIS POST 1 sat/b will make it into the next block.
They have the USD rates as slow $0.13 and fast $0.20
So neither is a big deal, but who knows what happens when the blockchain gets filled again.

Depending on my mood, and free time, and where I am in relation to one of their ATMs I may or may not do a test when fees are a bit higher to see where they wind up.


Yes, but they have a NY BitLicense and have done all the financial / legal / reporting things that a financial business has to do, so they are a bit more structured.
No idea if it's all necessary but it probably makes the lawyers happy.

-Dave

It's 8% at the local ATMs
There are some that are farther away that were less, but for a test to throw $50 in a machine it was not worth the gas & time.

They give you a choice of 2 fees fast or slow that YOU pay.
There is no medium option or showing of fees just the USD amount. Slow was the 5 sat/b but did not know that till I looked at the TX after the fact. All I saw was the USD amount.

It's a 2 hour hold on the BTC / amount and not 1 second more.
There is no cancel option. Just start another buy.
AND
You have to go to the ATM you picked out from the app.
That screwed me up as I had to go to a customer in the other direction the 1st time I tried so I went to a different ATM.

-Dave