FTX and luna were both rumoured to collapse/face issues before they did. Aside from rumours it's been historically impossible to prove without potentially causing a collapse before the company - which remains one of the main proven ways to do this.

Generally large acquisitions by regulated companies have to be reported and this is one clear way to know if a company is overleveraged or not.

There are sites that let you see the positions institutions have open but I think they're all aggregated into one or two as apposed to listing individual companies - but I might be wrong on this one.

Also if the company is publicly traded, you should be able to access information on what they own and how they run (but be careful if they're not publicly traded or you're not checking their parent company - coinbase uk always functions at a loss and doesn't have many assets iirc likely for tax purposes or other reasons).

Edit: don't interpret this as me saying that coinbase is a safe place to store funds.

You might want to update your op with new information you've written below but just to clarify the things you know:
1. Addresses (I'm assuming it's not just txids and you know the addresses that belong to your wallet - or at least one).
2. Nmemonic
3. Pin

Do you also know what sort of password you've picked? As long as it's not a 13+ string of random alphanumeric characters, it might be crack able (even if it's the full 35 characters but made up of words). A lot of wallets do the generation stages slowly for randomness, the algorithms used to derive addresses are very fast in comparison.

Have you tried using the start of your nmemonic as the passphrase in case you were looking for something to test out the feature? Or a password you use in a lot of places.

Also did you generate the wallet with trezor software? Wallets like electrum didnt ask you to confirm your password in the past so there's a chance there could be a simple spelling mistake you've overlooked (even if you made it on trezor suite, you might be less likely to spot caps lock if it was enabled for both password inputs).

In the case of centralised systems, taking your funds off the service is the best way to do it. Most of the systems that failed were centralised or backed by centralised funds.

For "decentralised" mechanisms like luna, high growth generally stems from high risk. The stablecoin was backed by the depth and the order book of luna. The mechanism was still safe for a few days after it was broken so vigilance would've stopped you from making a loss greater than ~5-30% as.i remember it.

They seem to have a wishlist import feature too? I thought you could make a wishlist with amazon and import that (they'll probably only then see your profile name and your wishlisted items)?


Thanks! I've seen a lot of examples of posts of this but a lot are on reddit and I'm.barely over there (also those were quite old).

The mturk link looked interesting too. I saw the thing about amazon.com cards too being offered as rewards too for things like credit cards which would also make sense (gift vouchers can probably be bought even more cheaply by those firms - like.flight miles and other things normally offered as rewards).

Have you got a link?

A merkle root tree is a data structure. It contains checksums but isn't proof or anything except the data transfer itself being transferred without corruption.

Can you buy things anywhere in fiat without someone somewhere comparing it to the Euro, Krona, Pound, Dollar, yen, yuan or all six before they've set the price? Does this mean anything?

If fiat disappeared, bitcoin would organically be able to take over much like anything else people chose as currency/being valuable.

If you buy something made in China and you're not buying it in yuan, someone's done a conversion somewhere. If you're buying something in an airport in currency not accepted in that country it wouldn't be possible under your own aspects. Most companies that handle crypto conversions at the moment deal in fiat because it's what they want to collect or to remain competitive.

Most things are priced arbitrarily, it generally doesn't matter what units they're priced in as long as a company can make a profit overall.

I reworked it because your solution wouldn't work on my version of python... I just got type errors for it which might mean there's something causing yours to do that considering I had to explicitly move things to different lines (and rework a bit of it) to get it to actually run.

ALL the errors were to do with converting hex types to integers and strings to hex so if you don't find the error, it's because it's in the python library.

(transcribed from my computer because the captcha wouldn't load)

I can't reproduce your error running:


Ran for 3 iterations I get:
499866
500134

499625
500375

500135
499065

Not sure if there's been a discussion on this before but I'm not sure how trusted the funds credited to this exchange are (particularly with savings above 16%).

There's obviously a chance a lot of these savings are made via various prizes that can be won in the general computing sense (such as hackathons) where people are fine trading in vouchers below their value and cases where amazon marks up things especially high that there are some places that sell them for a lot cheaper (particularly if a company chooses to sell something at cost because it encourages people to buy more from them or if a company has an exclusive agreement - a catalog company in the UK sold a lot of electronic products at a 25% drawdown from most places at one time: I think they worked out how to do efficient tests to check the devices worked or had some arrangement to be a logistics facilitator for everyone else or something).

Anyway, I know amazon offers a 17% discount on vouchers if you buy more than £/$50 worth so perhaps there's a chance they give higher discounts for other things too and that means a 15% saving is just using someone else to facilitate that deal (ie if you buy something for $160, you're not left with $20 to waste on something you might not use).

But considering voucher balance lasts 10 years, are you safer converting crypto to cash and buying things yourself or is there no additional safety about it considering you're using an imported wishlist and the site is probably known to amazon anyway?

I looked at this again and are you going from 0 to 268435455 (0 to 0xFFFFFFF) with your range? Half way is, as you say, 7FFFFFF or 134 217 727.

Have you tested this with a lot of numbers to come to this conclusion (10000 can normally be processed fairly quickly and you can plot a graph if you don't want to read the data) or have you only done it in sets of 10 if it's done it continuously with a lot of tries then it might be an issue with the number generator? What module are you using for random numbers?

The random number generator in python is also not truly random which might be contributing to your problem (os.urandom apparently is - though it needs you to import os): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22891583/can-i-generate-authentic-random-number-with-python

In your function you set low to 0x000000 6 0s and high to 0xFFFFFFF 7 Fs. I think this is where your "issue" is caused but it does expand your range if those are submitted to the random function.

This probably depends on how long ago it was too.

If you bought something online and walked over the parcel for 60 days on your doorstep, you're probably less likely to get a refund - I think the same would probably be the case here.

If there's a genuine reason though that you couldn't send funds from the exchange (such as buying funds before work the day ftx blocked withdrawals and coming home to realise they were blocked) then I think that'd amount to a reasonable case for claiming the chargeback.

Internationally this changes too, in the UK debit cards have the same 120-360 day payment reversal proceedings - a bank could and might hold onto your funds for those entire 360 days too and I think it's likely they would to confirm ftx is definitely bankrupt and definitely in breach of contract.

How much do the terms of service come into play here? I'm not sure the "we accept no liability for your funds going astray" is actually a legally accepted clause (UK/EU specific - in the US it probably is) or something that can be relied upon (especially given how far down it is in agreements normally).

Tldr: if it's brightness or "eye comfort" features causing the issue, I doubt they'll go by changing device. Check if your phone has an option to adjust brightness to a setting though - mine did without me knowing it would so I don't know if it's standard now or not.

I find it strange that a lot of exchanges crank up your brightness for you but wallet apps don't - it might be something to suggest to them as an improvement for the apps you use.

I normally assume it's the thing scanning the qr code that's the problem rather than the thing displaying it. If you're using a scanner that's meaning your phone is facing a screen then it's going to have glare issues from that - and that's not an issue with your phone unless your brightness is too low.

I'm kinda surprised nfc or other sharing tools aren't in higher demand than qr codes now - they're already quite an old technology imo. It's generally easier to scan a qr code on your phone and input something on a website than it is to try to get something to scan your phone.

Are lottery tickets in Australia bought in the same place as other things in stores? I know for the UK that would be less of a problem (if credit card users get points from spending in a grocery store) as lottery tickets are generally sold at a different desk (along with cigarettes and other age restricted products - excluding alcohol). So I don't really see how it might be a problem, except for smaller shops.

I think gambling with credit cards was quite a big thing to stop and it's good there's legislation for it.
Data sharing between gambling providers would probably also help for determining if someone is gambling much more than normal and should take a break/be moved to a slower interface - if only one provider has that, there's nothing stopping someone addicted to gambling to just change sites unless they're already using most of them and all have the same features.

Yes and it probably already exists. The only issue I could see from building one would be who is paying the fees when channels close as that'd have to be covered in transaction fees (on the exchange) - just in case there's a forced channel closure.

Purse.io has lightning payment acceptance (the place where you can buy things from amazon with crypto at a discount) but I don't know if this is the exact way it's done there. Also lightning payments still mean the exchange is the custodian if the funds while they're there unless they're doing an atomic swap (I don't know if that would disincentivise users taking funds out of the platform if they know they can withdraw from it within a few seconds).

None of your examples hide the public key and there's no way of doing that without using a different coin.


It seems they make up the redeem script and can be unscramble that way..

From https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0067#Specification:

You get (after sorting)


Which is a redeem script

For what purpose, with what coins and with what capital?

I think the best way to start doing something like this is by using a peer to peer exchange to start with and accrue an investment. If you already have investment funds big enough, get legal advice on making one, you'll likely get the initial consultations of whether a solicitor/attorney's office is hapoy to deal with sorting the paperwork - you could also check if you're able to do this yourself or if your government offers funding/free advice on how to do it.

Also learn how to code if you're going to make a website, if you're using code you can't verify yourself you're probably going to end up getting scammed and getting your customers scammed too.

If someone tried to buy bitcointalk, they'd probably be rejected so that's the first hurdle a perspective buyer would have to deal with on their reputation.

The second and probably more important issue is that this forum is being tested to run in a more open source way receiving a lot of collaborations from volunteers, if there was a for profit motive of the forum, you're going to be a lot less likely to keep those volunteers working here and stopping them from making a rival.

Also, advertisers on Bitcointalk had to jump through a lot of hoops to do it and were still doing that while advertisers on twitter didn't and many left very early on when it changed owners.

There's enough members here with bad histories that having some posts you don't like is probably nothing to react to.

Sure you can delete all posts that aren't topic starters and edit topic starters to "edited" but is it worth it to make your account seem less authentic and more like there's something to hide? A delete all button would be problematic for the forum to have imo too - like if an account gets hacked, a hacker could sabotage it by just pressing a button or two.

I think this was mentioned a few years back as being something that looked like an account had been sold if someone wiped a lot of the old posts - might be something to consider as well as the impossibility of deleting posts here as there are archives of them on other sites.

Do you have funds you want to use or is this just for when you do?

Electrum has an option to withdraw lightning bitcoins back to a wallet address without closing a channel which might be one way you could do this. (I think they just charged transaction fees but I'm not sure if there was anything extra I've missed).