I heard about samsung trying to get into the mining world a few months ago. it is quite surprising even on some media to say that their smartphone gadgets can be used for mining. if indeed they seriously want to get into the miner's machine world I think samsung should make a different innovation in order not only to be a substitute
When Samsung is involved in the production of mining equipment, it is likely to be beneficial for miners. Because there will be strong competition between Bitman and Samsung that will cause the price of the equipment to fall and the beneficiary will be a miner. I think Samsung entering this market is very good because it will take away the dominance of Bitman. I am afraid that is only part of the equation. The benfit of mining under competitive conditions is very low and only based on the coin rising in value. Normally, mining is not profitable for the home miner. by now, that should just be assumed. to treat bitcoin mining as a business, you need industrial scale. home mining can usually only ROI based on speculation gains (i.e. holding the coins and selling them for a profit). but i'd agree with Lock00Live that increased competition in ASIC manufacturing can only benefit miners---as long as they aren't ASIC manufacturers who could lose market share, like bitmain. everyone else, whether they mine professionally or casually, should benefit from competitively lower costs at retail. after all, bitmain has basically been the only game in town for years now. |
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As with many things in Bitcoin, we will have to wait and see. If DragonMint, Samsung, GMO etc can deliver a good package and a competitive edge against Bitmain, then we may be up for a new golden era of mining, but if they fail and the cheap production and electricity costs of Bitmain surpasses any attempts of competition we may have problems and the idea of a PoW change may start gaining traction. i agree.....time will tell. one thing working in our favor is that cheap subsidized electricity for bitcoin mining in china is being phased out, and the regulatory atmosphere has jihan wu setting up farms around the world. bitmain is competing at the same rates as everyone else. it's more a matter of undercutting their edge in chip fabrication. samsung is working with an undisclosed chinese manufacturer. i'm excited to see what comes out of their launch. I think by around 2020 we should have a clear scenario of how things are going to be in the mining field, since all these competitors should have their machines ready and fighting against Bitmain's monopoly.
indeed. aside from difficulties with consensus, that's why it seems like a POW hard fork is really premature. |
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It could also help decentralizing the hashing power that is currently concentrated heavily in China. The miners could be used to do some nefarious activities if the owners so do wish, see some Chinese mining farms rejecting transactions during the ATH rise.
i think the fear mongering around chinese hash power is misplaced. sure, chinese pools control a lot of hashpower, but if chinese government crackdown or censorship were a real issue at the pool level, that hashpower can just be pointed elsewhere. the hashpower distribution among pools =/= actual geographic distribution of hashpower. for example, i heard that a lot of chinese miners moved their farms outside the country after the rumors of government bans last year. but that hashpower is still probably pointed at chinese pools right now. the real issue for me isn't geographic concentration of hashpower. it's bitmain, who backs several pools and has farms all around the world. the kind of monopolistic stranglehold they have over the market is hard to overcome. so i'm certainly glad to see samsung, GMO, halong and others entering the space. but it'll take some time to see if they can compete with bitmain. |
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I feel like this is the beginning of the most pitiful waste of human resources since WW2.
in some sense, you're right, but let's keep things in perspective. money flowing into BTC represents money flowing out of other assets like fiat money and precious metals. brick-and-mortar banking and coin minting are extremely energy intensive, far more so than bitcoin mining. there's also a question of what is "wasteful." a few months ago, there was a study that claimed the energy consumption of bitcoin mining was less than that of christmas lights in the US. which is more wasteful---bitcoin proof-of-work, or decorative christmas lights? |
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It appears that the SEC will come after past exchanges if they gather enough evidence that fraud was committed in the past, no matter if an exchange has already closed.
This might be the beginning of a hunt or maybe even a persecution of any exchange they decide to judge of wrongdoing. we should clarify that this is not a "bitcoin exchange" in the traditional sense. bitfunder used BTC as a funding mechanism, but they were a securities exchange (dealing in stocks and such), not a bitcoin exchange. that's why the SEC got involved. in contrast, the SEC and CFTC have both suggested that they don't have jurisdiction over spot exchanges under current laws. The SEC seems to be taking its own sweet time to act against fraudulent exchanges. Montroll closed its shutters in 2013. The SEC has filed charges in 2018. In an age where money and criminals disappear in days after swindling investors, such delayed investigations and actions will hardly put fear in their hearts.
i'm pretty sure this is about scaring the current generation of exchanges into compliance. the SEC chairman and others have repeatedly suggested that the vast majority of ICOs are unregistered security offerings. that means that bitfunder in 2013 = poloniex, bittrex, etc in 2018. it's a big word of warning to the current generation of token exchanges not to defraud their customers. |
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I knew it was coming, and it's finally here. SegWit.
I made a transaction earlier today, it took about 20 minutes to be confirmed, and the fee was a ridiculous (compared to what they were a few weeks ago) 0.000012 BTC. Just a little more than a dime.
I'm really happy to share such good news. Enjoy!
FYI there's no point in blacking out the transaction hash because you showed the inputs and outputs (along with fee, size and locktime when the transaction was created). i'd remove the screenshot if i were you, but to each his own.  the core fee estimator is good enough proof for me. i've been getting transactions confirmed at 1 satoshi/byte---cheaper than default fees were before all this block size drama set off. if anyone is still using earn.com, use this instead: https://twitter.com/corefeehelper?lang=enSegwit usage is still low. It is more likely that transaction volume has dropped because the crash scared a lot of people away.
yeah, i don't think this has to do with segwit. there's probably drastically lower activity from exchanges now. ETH fees have dropped to 1 gwei (40-50x decrease from the peak), so it's not just BTC. and google trends seems to agree. |
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There are no customers like before and I am getting worried. I tried google to figure out what is going on; and there are some new services but I don't think they absorbed all of that volume specially that this happened very very quickly I would say it started slowly last September and became very bad by the end of December.
I had a theory that people will need BTC in their daily lives soon and with that for the next 2 to 5 years there will be a high demand on buying BTC using online wallets and not enough services facilitating this, for so many different reasons but now it doesn't look like that at all.
Anybody has any idea what is going on?
i'm not sure where you're writing from. in the USA, warnings from regulators and some arrests of localbitcoins traders for unlicensed money transmission has put a big damper on the P2P market. where i live, it's gotten much more difficult to trade for cash over the past year. and most localbitcoins traders are now asking for ID before engaging in trades. i think that's discouraged a lot of P2P market activity here. |
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Zilch of course.
I could conceive of it hitting $3-4000 sometime this year. Beyond that it's either going to continue growing or fail.
that's my thinking as well. i'm not planning on it---i think the lows might be in at $6000. but i could see $3000-5000 as the final bottom, based on the historic trend and the proportions. it would make a pretty sweet measured move into big support levels from last year. at the rate of adoption in this space, zero seems less likely every day. i think even a major protocol failure can be overcome, since the network will be so incentivized to adopt a fork that fixes it. we're seeing a technology adoption s-curve right before our eyes with BTC.....i really think this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. |
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I believe if you are posting in a self-moderated thread and your post is deleted by OP/self-moderator then you will not be notified and your post will disappear in the wind. Sometimes there is no reason, other than the OP not liking what you have to say.
did this change at some point? i've had posts deleted in self-moderated threads and received this PM afterwards: A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by the starter of a self-moderated topic. There are no rules of self-moderation, so this deletion cannot be appealed. Do not continue posting in this topic if the topic-starter has requested that you leave.
You can create a new topic if you are unsatisfied with this one. If the topic-starter is scamming, post about it in Scam Accusations. Yesterday I posted some responses to the topics but today I found that number of posts I did yesterday were reduced. It looks like some of the posts were deleted. How can I know which of my posts got deleted and why?
a few months back, moderators were deleting lots of threads. that seems to have calmed down recently, but when that happens, the threads just disappear and so do all of your posts. you won't receive a PM like above. |
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What happened with airdrop by distribution? Why I ceased to receive bitsend? And why the last 2 distributions were with break in 5, instead of in 7 days?
Me too, I still have not received airdrop. I think it will happen, don't worry! Sometimes the airdrop arrives early, sometimes it's a little later....  If you haven't been active on this thread for about 6 weeks you have been removed from list... I think this is the most likely explanation. you're required to post on bitcointalk at least every 6 weeks (otherwise you might be removed). they recommend posting on the ANN thread, but they can't require people to bump it. that would be against forum rules. |
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Today I´d like to debunk the argument that "anyone can make their own crypto" or its variations
like "anyone can print as many as they want".
yeah, i don't buy those arguments because you can't replace dedicated developers and a robust, active network of users. so i agree with you there. but i don't think we should write off altcoins entirely. from the perspective of both scalability and governance, it seems impossible that BTC can fulfill all possible use cases for crypto-economic activity. and as satoshi said, bitcoin's core design is set in stone. even if we believe that bitcoin can port any and all features from altcoins (on what timeline---decades?), its fundamental economic system (POS vs. POW) and consensus mechanism (blockchain vs. hashgraph or DAG) will never change. and i don't think we'll ever see default private transactions on the mainchain, just sidechains, which are essentially altcoins themselves. and with the advent of decentralized exchange, sidechains become less attractive from a bootstrapping perspective. so while you're correct regarding BTC's use case (and the altcoins that try to replicate it), there is inevitably lots of room for novel, private and experimental altcoins to grow alongside BTC. |
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Hah thats funny, I for some stupid reason thought Bitgrail would be responsible for the money I put there.
There goes 90% of my crypto money. =/
and yep the million useless typical responses of you should of. Thanks in advance, no need to post em.
been there. i got crushed by bitfinex in 2016 and btc-e in 2017. i had to rebuild from nearly nothing last year. it took a lot for me to learn that it's worth missing trading opportunities to have your coins off-exchange. it sucks but you'll bounce back. just don't make the same mistake twice like i did. What is the solution to these exchanges getting hacked again and again? decentralized exchanges where you don't keep coins in their custody. otherwise, just learn to hold through the dips if you're bullish longer term. they'll keep getting hacked and exit scamming. the target on their backs grows bigger everyday. in this case, it looks more like a fractional reserve gone bad. it sounds like bitgrail was only using client-side javascript as a check for withdrawals, so people were able to double-withdraw and steal funds. i'm guessing a few big fish loaded XRB into their accounts and then cleaned out their reserves. i heard similar glitch reports about mt gox long before they went down in 2014. Whose fault was this? Bitgrail or the Nano team?
bitgrail. they coded the wallet infrastructure incompetently, allowing people to withdraw funds they didn't own. the nano devs couldn't roll back the transactions if they wanted to. and it sounds like bitgrail has been insolvent for a while. they were just covering it up. |
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Bitcoin will not be banned, any country doing so would be essentially banning freedom of choice, I doubt that would sit well with the general public. authoritarian governments don't particularly care unless they think there will be a popular uprising, which is why some of them are still banning it. the truth is that most of these governments (algeria, morocco, bolivia, kyrgyzstan, and so on) aren't in a position to effectively enforce a ban anyway. the bans are just a deterrent. still, legislators in major countries can make things a real hassle for us. SB1241 (a bill that keeps getting revived in the US) threatens to define most custodial bitcoin businesses, payment processors and mixers as financial institutions. that will introduce huge compliance and licensing overheads, which will discourage a lot of companies from doing business with americans. the bill would also make it illegal to misrepresent your identity to financial institutions, apparently deterring us from avoiding taxes by using offshore exchanges via VPN. major global powers keep saying that regulations are coming......i'm not looking forward to it.  |
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There are three ways that I can think off to store your private keys safely (offline)
1) Having a hardware wallet (Trezor, Ledger, and so on). The problem: Having to trust their custom RNG, their while hardware, that there will be no surprises (see trezord.exe phoning home)
2) Having a paper wallet (encrypted with BIP38). The problem: You can easily lose a piece of paper. The paper can also degrade over time. You would be also stuck with a single public key to get payments, so you would need one piece of paper per address... not good if you need to create new addresses constantly to relieve payments. Controlling coin inputs and outputs it's also harder without software involved.
3) Having an offline airgapped computer with Linux: This looks like the safest option to me. The problem: You need to pre-sign the transactions and Bitcoin Core does not have good support to do this so you are stuck with making raw transactions by hand which is a bit of a mess, then you need to pass this raw transaction into your online node. Armory has a nice GUI to do this but I wouldn't trust it too much. Electrum.. wouldn't trust my main stack to be held by an Electrum wallet (too paranoid about the seed being derived somehow)
So how do you personally manage your private keys in cold storage in order to make your transactions?
i have most of my coins stored in cold storage, both paper wallets and encrypted .dat files on thumb drives and CDs. moving my real cold storage (and restoring it to new cold wallets) is inconvenient and difficult by design. an air-gapped electrum wallet is definitely necessary for my day-to-day transactions. there's no way around that for me. i only keep < 10% of my coins in air-gapped spending wallets.......but i'm still at a loss for how core's HD wallet seed is so much more secure than electrum's. my paranoia (which is pretty high level as it is!) is more about malware that makes its way onto the thumb drive i use to transfer/broadcast transactions. |
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Hmm, what was this guy doing with that amount of money? CSD investigators have claimed that Mr. Medvedev was trading illegal products online in exchange for bitcoin. You don't make 800 millions selling "products", only if those products are credits cards but even so...probably most of those bitcoins where acquired when BTC was below 1000, and even in this case...80 millions? The entire SR bust was 10 times below that. well, the darknet markets eclipse SR in size now. alphabay alone was 10 times the size of silk road, and that was last year. in spite of the continued heat, the darknet markets still seem to be booming. i think XMR has picked up a lot of traffic as well, making it tough to gauge the overall size of the markets. but still, it's true. 100,000 bitcoins seized....that's crazy. i wonder if this syndicate was involved in some exchange hacks.  i wonder how much of this the american government can get their hands on, given the FBI involvement in the case. i'm also starting to wonder if the US marshall auctions like we've seen in the past will still continue. at some point, governments will want to keep some BTC in reserve. |
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yes. you can use exchanges as a way to mix your coins, although it depends on the exchange and how they are doing things, when you send your coins to an exchange that is very active the coins will be moved and when you withdraw you will be paid from a different address down the line which will make it impossible for the average Joe to trace where your funds went. but the authorities will be able to trace it so easily. that depends on a few factors. for instance, there are exchanges and brokers that don't enforce KYC. you can connect to them through a no-log VPN and in some cases through TOR. 1broker is one example; withdrawals are automatic, don't come from your deposit address and there is no KYC nor IP restricting. WEX (formerly BTC-E) is another example. when withdrawing, time delay and incremental withdraws can help to disassociate coins from your deposit. on top of that, there are legal issues regarding jurisdiction and cause that may prevent subpoenas from being effective. I notice when sending coins for a currency such as ETH from an exchange such as Binance, Bittrex, Bitfinex etc that the coins are sent from the exchanges wallet and not your personal receiving wallet on the site. Does this mean you can send coins from the exchange as a way to protect your anonymity from simple transaction tracing? I'm not talking about anything illegal where the exchange would rightfully be subpoened and your details revealed, but just simple trading transactions where you'd rather remain anonymous to other traders?
yeah, but in the interest of avoiding third party trust, i don't keep funds in their custody. i just use them to get untainted outputs for my personal wallets. |
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You misunderstand, I don't want to continue to use the fake name, I want to switch to my real name.
You are not allowed to change your main details yourself, which is why Poloniex urges you to use your legal name, etc. If you want to change your name, where I am not sure if that is even possible with a fake name since that is considered to be a serious offence, you need to email Poloniex and explain them the situation. serious offense? maybe a breach of terms with poloniex, but pretty standard in the crypto world. thousands of people (including myself) have set up poloniex accounts with fake names. i hope someone who has attempted to change their name replies to the thread....i'm legit interested to hear the answer. I'm wondering if anyone has been able to verify their poloniex account when they had initially used a made up name?
i'd avoid it unless you have no choice because of disabled withdrawals. per their press release in december, accounts that are locked can still withdraw at their previous daily limits. i'd drain the account and start a new account with all my real details if i were you. |
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I'm gonna call it, they stole it, they weren't hacked.
I got very bad vibes from these people during any interactions. They are very rude and had no respect for their customers or Nano, exactly the type of people who would help themselves to other people's money.
after the XRB snafu in january, i was already half expecting an exit scam. adding mandatory KYC (to withdraw anything) with no notice a couple weeks ago smelled fishy as hell too. i wish i could say i'm surprised. i missed out on a lot of XRB action because i was unwilling to touch bitgrail or mercatox. they are both incompetent at best, scammers at worst. Bitgrail owner's signature on bitcointalk:
You either die a developer, or live long enough to see yourself become the scammer.
interesting...  |
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Why would the US government restrict crypto when they’re absorbing it as fast as they can. I think Wall Street believes they invented bitcoin now.
Besides, the Fascist States of America already has so many restrictive laws governing money flow that they don’t need new ones to control crypto. You can’t win money at a race track and deposit it into your bank account without your bank secretly sending a report on you to the federal government. And, when the government finds out about your winnings they have their hand out waiting for their cut of the money. The US is running the largest “protection racket” in the entire world.
Cryptocurrency only involves government when you exchange it for fiat. They don’t care if you trade pogs or Pokémon cards which is all cryptocurrency is before you exchange it.
not sure about that. congress has officially squashed any hopes that "like-kind exchanges" apply to cryptocurrency when they passed the new tax overhaul. so, the official IRS position is that they do care about all of our crypto-to-crypto trades before exchanging it for fiat money. each trade has a gain/loss that goes towards your net. in fact, i'm pretty sure that trading pogs or Pokémon cards is covered too. but how can they really enforce this? |
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3 months ago, one of the biggest Turkish exchange owner had kidnapped and forced to give private key of the cold wallet. Kidnappers stole 150 BTC. So this news is not the first physically stolen Bitcoins via force. I am sure there were some other robberies too.
i hadn't heard about that one. but 2 months ago, a director at EXMO (exchange set up in the UK that caters to people in russia/former CIS countries) was kidnapped and held for a $1 million ransom. the ransom was paid in bitcoins and he was released. the scary thing about all these cases? they all involve victims who were targets just because of their involvement with cryptocurrency. because of their jobs. a reminder: don't announce your holdings to anyone except your closest loved ones and trusted friends. and if you want to get involved in the industry as someone with custodial access to lots of crypto......think again. it's obviously a dangerous occupation. |
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