I don't use Deribit (or trade premined coins like Ethereum...) but I do use LedgerX and ITM options can be a bit illiquid there too.

One thing you should do is put in an order on the books--  just because volume isn't on the books doesn't mean that it isn't around and won't take a good deal if you put one out there.  If you're super eager to be out of the position, you'll probably have to take a bit of a haircut:  no one wants to take much risk for only a really tiny profit. (keep in mind, because deribit is cash settled the buyer also takes on risk related to the integrity of the index price)

Does deribit have a chat?  If so, you can nag to see if anyone will take your trade.

Is your intention to roll the proceeds into a different contract?   If so someone who otherwise might not be too eager to by those ITM contracts might be interested in selling a later date or higher strike that you want to buy and might be willing to buy the ITM contracts if it means they can sell a different contract.

Alternatively,  is there some other more liquid position you could trade which would substantially hedge your position achieve your goal?

Finally, if you're talking about a considerable amount of money-- you could try contacting their support.  They might be willing to contact other customers to help you arrange a deal.  (Or, if they have their own trading desk, they may be willing to take the position off your hands).

Because contributors are focused on debating which month to drop support for no longer supported mac os versions rather than sticking their neck out working on features which actually do something, and therefore might have bugs that get them blasted by internet assholes.

They wouldn't open a direct channel because they can pay via existing channels... but it should be emphasized that funds in a channel aren't "paid".  If they create a channel to the coffee shop with 100 cups of coffee worth of funds, they can use those funds for whatever still.  They can close the channel to move the funds offline or they can pay payments to other people using those funds, routing across the coffee shop.

What the heck are you talking about?

Users don't need to learn anything to use segwit... they just install a modern wallet and use it.

Empty doesn't necessarily mean the ancestor was not-validated.

It takes a lot more time typically to generate a template than to accept and validate a block-- so it would be completely reasonable to accept a block validate it, and then issue an empty template before revising with a complete one.

Moreover, it's perfectly possible to include transactions while not having validated the prior block though no one has bothered to implement that because that would be hard and would require enough competence that you'd also realize that not validating is a really bad idea.

So while I do agree that it's indicative, it isn't conclusive.

Short of mining an invalid block and seeing if they attempt to extend it I don't believe there is a way to tell for sure.

Sadly, there is no way to prevent miners from doing this.  The amount of time they do it can just be minimized by making block propagation and processing as fast as possible. However, if you run and maintain a full node you'll be protected from ever seeing those junk blocks and if you don't mine at a pool that engages in this stuff then you won't lose mined bitcoin due to it.

See also: https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=607  [pardon the double post but its been a couple days since the last].

Your incentive is that you are more secure and private if you do so.

If there were some other kind of incentive it would just by sybil attacked:  people would spin up thousands of "nodes", which would contribute nothing the network needs-- and would probably not actually be nodes in any case, just to collect the incentive.

BIP340 isn't itself something that gets activated.

BIP-341 is, which incorporates BIP-340 and BIP-342 by reference.

Though there is no activation defined for BIP-341 yet.  I believe the effort neutraLTC is discussing is in part intended to help gain information that will help the community decide on activation details.

No one will do that unless they've disabled/bypassed transaction validation on the transactions they accept as BIP341 uses a not-yet-defined output version.  If they've disabled/bypassed validation then they will potentially produce invalid blocks even completely absent BIP341-- the problem there is extending a chain without validating it.  There is little need for miners to do this anymore due to optimizations, but bad habits die hard I guess.

Exchanges make a lot of money by adding new scamcoins, scam-c-os, and scam-fi to pickup all the gamblers that bleed fees on rapid trading as well as gaining the astronomical listing fees they're able to collect from the creators of the many massively pre-mined coins.

Bitcoin generates a lot of money for exchanges too-- but it'll still generate just about as much money for them if they leave their Bitcoin support to rot, fall years out of date, and if they don't keep up with the latest technical improvements or best security practices.

Worse, many altcoins are constantly on fire with frequent (sometimes unexpected) hardforks, serious bugs, node software by sketchy anonymous authors, reorg attacks and often have gaps in basic functionality like usable multisig... so it's easy for those things to sop up what time they've budgeted for maintenance.

And it's not like they start with a lot of time/resources to spare: Handling fraud, KYC, legal requests, lost accounts, banking stupidity --- etc. It's a difficult business.  So it isn't a shock that they spend a lot of what they have left on whatever is most urgent and brings in the most money.  Because the Bitcoin ecosystem is in it for the long run and isn't a bunch of crazed mad people the urgency is usually kept to a minimum.

When they do make plans to upgrade their Bitcoin support they usually bake those plans into some grand rewrite-- their Bitcoin support was written first and is usually the most crufty-- which inevitably they never finish or finish so late that even the upgraded support is already out of date by the time they deploy it.

These moves build up technical and goodwill debt.  They may not feel the pain today, but when they're massively hacked because they didn't keep up with best practices, or when customers flock to a smaller competitor once it crosses a threshold size because they're tired of the family they recommend looking into Bitcoin getting sold scam ICOs when they log in and get tired of not even being able to use a default address from a two year old wallet--- their staff might be surprised.

But I won't be.


Many exchange business seems to have become focused on catering to cryptocurrecy-as-gambling: and I don't mean using gambling sites, I mean day trading among cryptocurrences itself as a form of gambling.  They're likely by far the most profitable customers.   These services now seem to take two main forms:  Ones which either list a multitude of ever more sketchy altcoins and ICOs,  or ones that list a few and avoid most of the most scummy stuff but offer various kinds of extremely leveraged margin or derivative product.  Both represent distinct ways of separating gullible customers from their money.  But I don't think business models that are mostly predicated on customers getting wrecked will do that well in the long run.  I think they've only gotten as far as they've gotten because the overall price increases have covered up a lot of the losses.

Diversity is key to managing the human side of investing as well.

The joke of a bad trader is that they buy high and sell low.  Who does that?  Someone who is over invested and ends up trading emotionally.

When you have a collection of investments and some of them go down-- you just go "oh well", maybe you even buy the dip, if that's what you're planned to do.

If you are diversified and things crash -- you may find yourself in a panic worried about losing even more. You can't buy the dip because you have nothing else.

Diversification might lower your gains in the theoretical future where every single choice you made was not only a good one but an amazing rocketship that vastly outperforms your other investments.  But what you get from being diversified is tremendous protection from getting wrecked that allows you to stay the course and make decisions which are more intentional and less likely to leave you with regret.  If you pick a real rocketship you'll be happy with your gains even if you only got half as much of it.

Lets consider two fictional investors: Bob and Arnold.

The year is 2011 and Bob is an American.

Bob comes from a family that didn't have a lot of money, so Bob never got into traditional investments because he didn't really understand them.  But Bob was still prudent with money: He's saved up some $35,000 in a savings account after his living expenses with income from a number of years supporting computers at a local business.  Bob hears about Bitcoin on slashdot and initially dismisses it but after an article about Silk Road is published he starts reading -- he's hooked. He knows that this is going to be BIG.  So Bob does something unboblike: In June 2011 he takes his entire savings plus takes on a bit of debt too and sinks it into Bitcoin:  He purchases 2000 BTC at $20/coin and stashes it safely in his wallet.

Within a week the price has rocketed up to $30.  Bob's $40k investment is now worth $60k. Bob feels like a god.

Then the first Mtgox event happens.  The price drops. A little a first. Then more. $15.  A stream of negative news is published. $10 in August. $7 in September. Bob is making credit card payments and worrying about paying his electric bills. $4.50 in October. Bob can't see where he went wrong, the negative news continues, the the value of his investment keeps going down. Before the end of October the price breaks $3. Bob's investment is now worth $6000 and he's afraid. If it goes down much more he won't be able to pay off the credit card, he'll be wreaked-- if his car fails he won't be able to afford to fix it and he'll lose his job. He's already lost savings he worked for years to save.  Bob sells his Bitcoin at $3.54 netting $7k after fees.

He's devastated to lose almost all his savings, but relieved and he feels at least a little smart to have caught the spike back up to $3.54 as the price continues to slump through November, eventually hitting $2.15.

Bob tries to do everything he can to forget about this idiot investment.

Today, Bob's original position would be worth about $32 million dollars if he'd been able to hold onto it.  Bob's decision wasn't bad-- but he overextended himself and was ruined by volatility.

Now lets consider Arnold.

Like Bob Arnold also worked in IT support, same age, same pay, same expenses.  Arnold's family was decidedly upper middle class and although he's an American, his family talked about investments and personal finance around the dinner table as wealthier families are more likely to do. As a young adult he studied personal finance resources online once he had a bit of money to spare at his first job.

Arnold took his excess money but instead of a savings account he piled it into a diverse collection of traditional investments-- stock index funds and bond funds, mostly.  When the 2008 crash happened Arnold was shaken a bit, but he'd planned for that-- he exchanged some of his bonds for stocks, just like his investment plan said, and he continued buying stocks with the money left over after covering his bills every month.

By the time Arnold heard about Bitcoin in 2011, the stock market had recovered pretty much completely, increasing 1.829x from the January 2009 low.  Even though he saved the same amounts as Bob, because of his earlier investments, rebalancing, and continued investment during the slump when June 2011 came around Arnold had a bit over $50,000 in investments after taxes.  He boldly decided to set aside 20% of his investments -- $10,000 -- to invest in Bitcoin.   Why so much less?  He wasn't less excited than Bob but he understood risk management better.

He didn't want to miss out but was a little worried about buying into a rapid rise-- he's seen hype before with his other investments. But still, he found Hal's early speculation about the future price and couldn't argue with the logic-- he sunk $5000 in at $27.93 and got 179 Bitcoin.  He wasn't too shocked at the crash.  When the price hit $15 he re-evaluated his decision, Bitcoin still looked awesome to him: MTGOX's hack was an indictment of MTGox, not Bitcoin.  Around $10 he figured if Bitcoin was a good deal at $30 it was a good deal at $10, he was still under 20% in Bitcoin and bought $2500 worth-- 250 Bitcoins. In October the price dropped further then ticked up a bit. When Bob sold at $3.54 Arnold was one of his counter-parties-- and he bought another 706 BTC for $2500.

In December Bob has no Bitcoin and Arnold has 1135 at an average cost of $8.81/BTC, worth about $3400 at the market price of $3.   The price continues to sink and Arnold is sad and a bit embarrassed. He feels a bit foolish or at least wishes he'd held off buying a bit longer.  But he isn't worried or panicked.  He knew this was possible and he continues to expect the price to go back up, he thinks his prospects are still good for eventually coming out ahead.  All the reasons he was interested were still true, and hell-- all else fails it'll be an interesting story to tell his kids some day.

Arnold's position is still at a loss all through the first half of 2012. Arnold keeps on investing in his regular investments and spreads the word about Bitcoin. In July at a price of $9 he's finally back above break even and really starts spreading the word.  Bitcoin hits $13.31 and then bitcoinica is hacked and the price is $9 overnight. Arnold has seen an exchange hack before and isn't worried. The price continues to be depressed and floats around $10 until December 2012. By the end of January 2013 the price is $18 and Arnold has doubled his investment! Bitcoin is all over the news.  He only planned on keeping 20% of his investments in in Bitcoin but he's really excited and sees nothing but increases in the future... still his plan said to sell, so he reluctantly at least sells enough to cover his initial investment and he sells 400 (@25) for $10,000 leaving him with 735 BTC (worth $18375).

With the continued media coverage the price continues to increase and after the cypruss banking issues the price skyrockets.  By the beginning of April the price had shot up to $158.80 in just a few days.  Arnold's position was worth $112380, vastly beyond his investment plan of 20%-- and way more than he needed for substantial down payment for a house.  So he sold about half his position: 500 BTC, netting $76400 which he stashed in his ordinary investments, and left him with 235 BTC.

His timing was fortunate, although the price briefly reached $213 MTGox crashes under the load and the BTC price crashes along with it.  By mid month the price is $66-- about where it was before the cypruss news.  With his initial investment recovered plus a healthy return he decides to be a little crazy: he takes half the 76400 he just took out and buys 578 Bitcoin leaving him with 813 BTC and still enough returns for a down payment.

Over the following years Arnold trades a number of additional times, about once or twice a year-- selling when the Bitcoin starts to dominate his assets, and using a bit of the proceeds to buy back during crashes leaving too small of his portfolio as Bitcoin.  His sells aren't all at the peaks and his buys aren't aren't especially close the the bottoms but he does alright: A little better than someone who just held the whole way through, but the reasons he buys and sells isn't to try to make a lot of money, it's to manage risk.

Last week Arnold retired from his job: His boring investments boosted by infusions from Bitcoin sales are enough to support him and his family without him working. He owns his home. He has no debt. His kids college is already paid for. A few years ago got married and his wife just left a higher paying job for a lower paying one she liked more-- they don't need the extra money. He still owns 100 BTC which he hopes to pass onto his kids or at least will come in handy when there is a major meltdown. He spends his time raising his kids and windboarding. When covid came he felt ready: Heck, if he wanted to buy a clandestine respirator he knew he could pull it off with Bitcoin, even if banks would try to block that kind of transaction. Arnold has won the game.

So how can you be like Arnold? (1) Be born to a family that discusses investing so you have a head start there. (2) Invest prudently so you don't have to panic sell. (3) Don't be afraid to harvest gains. And most importantly, (4) find out about Bitcoin back in 2011, believe in it, and have extra money to invest.

But the thing is, -- Bob also found out about Bitcoin in 2011 and believed in it just as much as Arnold and had money to invest. But Bob didn't really understand investing, he wasn't diversified, and he over invested.

Bob didn't do anything particularly stupid, his ideas about Bitcoin would have paid off-- and he initially invested four times what Arnold invested!  But the investment wasn't financially prudent considering his overall conditions and he was much worse off for it.

Bob couldn't control the family he was born into, but there is a ton of good personal finance information available online, but he didn't find it and learn about it and that's what distinguished the two.

If Arnold's timing had been less fortunate he might have done a lot less well: But you can bet he wouldn't have anywhere near the regrets that Bob has. Every decision Arnold made would have been made using the best data he had at the time and none of them would have been forced by his situation.  Rich or Poor Arnold would sleep well. Even if Arnold lost his entire original investment he still would have been better off than Bob was even before Bob lost his savings on Bitcoin.  Arnold didn't make as much as the 32 million if Bob has successfully held through the whole way, but he made more than enough and unlike Bob, he didn't get wiped out.

If you invested like Bob but didn't have his bad luck and are much wealthier now-- great for you.  But just because a bad process worked once doesn't mean that it's a good process.  Plenty of people get lucky in investing and then lose everything because their results depended too much on their luck.

No one knows what the future will be for Bitcoin -- or other investments, for that matter--  but prudent practices were what distinguished Arnold and Bob not finding Bitcoin at the right time: they both did that.  Diversification and risk management are important for all conditions and all times.

Perhaps Bob never had anyone expose him to these ideas so he had no idea that he was missing something.  After reading this post, you don't have that excuse. Be like Arnold.  

I recommend checking out non-bitcoin centric personal finance venues. Bogleheads is good.  A lot of these people are sceptical of Bitcoin:  They don't want people becoming Bob (or worse).  You can get enough Bitcoin koolaid here, good decision making requires balance.  You own Bitcoin because you think it will be useful and profitable for you, perhaps because you feel it hedges against particular risks to the economy-- but you own other things because that isn't guaranteed and so you want advice that will apply to futures where Bitcoin doesn't do well, so its fine to get it from people who think it won't.  If you're not an American the resources are a little less readily available, unfortunately I can't provide good advice there.  My favourite stock brokerage is Interactive Brokers, and they do have a lot of non-US customers.

As an aside-- Buying into in other cryptocurrency things is not diversification.  Altcoins are highly correlated with Bitcoin, and to the extent that they aren't perfectly correlated it's mostly in the form of increased downside risk.  When Bitcoin drops they often drop harder and recover slower. You might own them, but don't think they're diversifying your holdings.  It's also easy to suffer from outright scams--- ICOs, Defi, "guaranteed" returns in HYIPs, or whatever.  Bob's story wasn't happy but people sometimes do a lot worse. I could go into the story of Chuck who lost it all mutiple times over trying to replicate Bitcoin's 2013 rise with altcoins then again and again attempting to recover his losses, or Dana who's first exposure to investing was /r/wallstreetbets and is currently in jail after embezzling her employers funds in a crazy options trade---- but those are stories for another time.

I once sold 50 BTC for ~$7.50-- though mostly I was seeing if withdraw from mtgox actually worked, and it did-- and was extremely pleased with myself because it was within a penny of the ATH for a month or more.  -- Why 50 BTC?  well that was a block reward back then, just a small amount of Bitcoins, wouldn't want to test with a really serious amount...

I later bought back that amount and more at $3.something.  Would happily do again.  

I think it can be easy to not regret selling:  Just don't be over-invested to the point where you feel forced to make sales you don't want to make.  Any sale you made of your own free will is a good one, even if you don't double what you sold buying back a few months later.

I could have sworn I saw a "Kidnap and Covid missed connections" listed under the special boards.

People monetizing testnet already have made it far less useful.  All those who've engaged in that are anti-social dickwads: This is why we can't have nice things, and instead resources have to be diverted into setting up additional shit for testing that are harder to abuse.

Bitcoin seems mostly along the path to migrating to non-mined testnets that won't be open to this kind of abuse.

SHA2 was the standard recommended 256-bit hash function at the time Bitcoin was created (and still pretty much is). There was essentially no realistic alternative at the time.

There isn't a connection here.

You can also see this theory speculated on this forum years ago and roundly and promptly debunked.

I'm getting really tired of the forum being flooded by idiots attempting to crack wallets.

AFAICT whats going on right now is that scammers are selling fake wallets which are just encrypted wallets with other people's addresses listed in them for people to crack if only they can guess the password, but they don't actually contain the private keys so cracking the password would accomplish nothing (and the password is probably just some huge random string so it can never be cracked in any case).  If a fake wallet is well constructed it is impossible to distinguish it from a real encrypted wallet.

This isn't new, but at least one of them has put up a highly polished website now.  They're also going around and claiming that whenever coins were moved that they connected to these wallets (which happens from time to time because they're someone elses coins) that this was a successful hack by one of their customers.

I don't really have a problem with the meta-scammers ripping people off who are stupid enough to pay for other people's wallets to crack--  back when wallet encryption was new I, myself, put up a bunch of fake wallets on edonkey to look like they were accidentally shared so that malicious pieces of shit would waste their time on impossible to crack wallets.  Presumably charging for them makes the crooks all the more convinced that they are real ... but unfortunately this is creating a constant stream of querulous idiots making uninteresting posts, because the people ignorant enough to fall for this stuff also don't actually have anything interesting to say about wallet security.

Maybe try following the link in his post?

Is this entire thread written by GPT3?  It sounds like spambot content rather than a discussion.

I disagree that "blockchain" is a good career.  It's a heavily hype fulled fad that is mostly in the business of shoving absolute scams down the throats of the gullible.  Anyone who does try to do anything actually worthwhile is continually flooded out by the impossible claims of breathless promoters and shills.  There is a constant pressure to treat literal scammers as if they were serious respect worthy professionals rather than crooks that should be locked in a cage.

Plus, it attracts breathless, brainless, sycophants, who are indistinguishable from spambots-- which you see all over this thread.

Now, if you wanted to ask if financial software, cryptography, or bitcoin asset management were good domains my answer would be pretty different, though unfortunately all of these are also currently being crapped up by garbage blockchain hype.

Voting needs a blockchain like fish need a bicycle.

There are plenty of challenges for voting,  and not only do blockchains not solve *any* of them, they actively undermine the parts that have been solved like making it hard to coerce someone or making it hard for people to sell their votes.

Blockchain voting is a fine litmus test for careful thinking vs getting caught up in blockchain hype.

Please don't give TNBTC to people who are just hoovering it up to paid by defi scams based on it.

Real testing just needs tiny amount, the people who "need" large amounts are selling it.  (technically trading it for defi testnet defi tokens which they expect to get converted into real value once that scams they are participating in go live).

This abusive and anti-social behaviour has made it hard for people to get testnet for actual bitcoin testing because they've drained all the faucets and conned the people that have historically given it out out of theirs.

It's also forcing bitcoin development to abandon testnet for testing.

It is fairly rare for tax fraud to result in criminal charges at all. In 2016 there were 584 people in the US that received criminal tax fraud charges. For people who are sent to jail at all (about 64% of those charged) the average duration is 15 months.

584 people out of hundreds of millions of taxpayers is a pretty small number, and a fair number of these were charged with tax fraud along with other crimes (e.g. embezzling a bunch of money from the government and not paying taxes on it).

Mcafee's colourful history and promotion of ultra-scammy ICOs probably don't do him any favours here.

But generally the IRS's goal is to generate revenue.  Usually when they find a problem with someone's taxes, even if it looks pretty-freeking-intentional they just demand payment for the missing money, penalties, and interest.

I forgot to file a return in ~2006 because I was hospitalized during the whole time leading up to the tax due date and a bit after and I completely forgot about it.   Two years later I got a giant envelope from the IRS where they calculated my taxes for me and demanded I pay -- and attached a million dollar tax bill!  The ludicrous tax bill was because I had a lot of securities trades which had been reported by my broker but the IRS didn't know the cost basis and treated it as zero.  I quickly figured out the correct taxes and sent the IRS a payment for them + penalties + interest (none of which were all that substantial)... and that was it, and the matter was resolved. I don't think they ever even asked me why I hadn't paid or filed.

My failure to file was an innocent and understandable mistake, but they didn't know that or even try to determine it-- their primary objective was just getting the taxes paid.