they are not "totally against bitcoin." they are just worried about capital flight and by the rate at which investors are pouring money into cryptocurrencies and ICOs. in fact, i've heard rumors for years now that the chinese government (or at least local governments) have been subsidizing mining farms with excess hydroelectric power. 


china has been "banning" BTC since 2013. i think the government understands by now that they cannot stop it. what's the next best thing? controlling the populations' interaction with BTC and maximizing tax revenue. to do that, they need stronger KYC and capital control compliance from exchanges, hence the shutdown. i think we'll see licensed exchanges reopen on the mainland again.

no, and i don't think that exchanges will ever allow custom fees. that wouldn't make any sense because required fee rate (for network confirmation) is tied to the transaction size. exchanges need to batch customer transactions to save on fees, so you can't just think of it like "one input, two outputs." exchanges have many more inputs on average than typical bitcoin users because of the magnitude of deposits received.

custom fees would end with lots of stuck transactions, and exchanges would have to create a new infrastructure for RBF or CPFP transactions instead of simply guaranteeing that withdrawals arrive for customers.


GDAX/coinbase does have transaction fees. you're probably thinking about transfers between coinbase customers. those are free because there is no blockchain transaction required. third party services generally won't offer custom fees for the reason i mentioned above--too much complexity around transaction size and likelihood of lots of stuck transactions.

they are becoming increasingly scarce, but there are still several available. binance and hitBTC are the no-KYC altcoin exchanges (with USDT markets) that i would suggest. just keep in mind that if you decide to hold USDT that these are not real fiat liabilities of the exchange you are on, but rather bitfinex/tether.to liabilities.

bitfinex and WEX.nz both allow trading and cryptocurrency withdrawal without KYC. i'm a bit paranoid to leave too much money on either exchange because of the FUD surrounding them. WEX is the reincarnation of BTC-e, who got indicted and shut down earlier this year. bitfinex owns tether and both got blacklisted by the banking system --- one has to wonder why.

if you are an experienced trader, i would suggest bitmex. they have no KYC and they only deal with bitcoin collateral via swap and futures contracts. fyi, bitmex, bitfinex and WEX all prohibit US customers (although VPNs seem to be working fine)...

it's a relief, but it's also a wake-up call. i think this whole IRS/coinbase fiasco was about shaking cryptocurrency traders into tax compliance. it was less about pursuing actual cases against traders. 2013-2015 at that threshold won't net that much tax revenue. this is about establishing precedent now and forcing today's traders in 2017/2018 into paying their taxes. if you're trading on coinbase in 2018 and not paying your taxes, you're in for a rude awakening a few years down the road.

that said, coinbase has been complying with IRS requests for years. you certainly can't trust them with your privacy, regardless of this case.

more than that, the writing was on the wall when the IRS made the original request. it was a very obvious fishing expedition. legal experts from e.g. coincenter were speculating immediately afterwards that the request would be denied, but that a second "reasonably narrowed" request would likely be approved. in other words, the initial IRS request was just a bargaining chip to net as many accounts as possible in the subsequent court order.


not gonna happen. coinbase is an MSB under tight AML/KYC regulations, and they are under the jurisdiction of the IRS regardless of where their customers reside.

regulated brokers are usually required to send their clients 1099s (which are also sent to the IRS). i think it's pretty likely that exchanges like coinbase will need to comply with these requirements in the future.

$10,000 was a milestone, but as i suspected, we went significantly past it before a correction. gotta margin call them bottom shorts first! but yeah, definitely a big profit-taking level. but i think it's just that: profit-taking, not "the top."

we're now forming an epic spinning top doji on the daily chart (2 hours away from the candle close). if bulls can close the day like that (or push even higher), i'm confident that $9000 was the low and we are going higher.

remember, as long as the parabolic trend is in effect, all you get is one dump. no retests, no double bottoms. then consolidate or V bottom to new highs. this will crash hard eventually, but there was still less volume on this dump than on november 7th. i don't think people are ready to sell off yet.

we still need to break the $10,000 level convincingly.

it's tough to say what happens from here. price is grinding sideways just below $10,000. this type of formation is pretty unpredictable -- i've seen it break both upwards and downwards from these. in any case, it's consolidating at the top. if it drops, i expect one sharp drop followed by a higher low and a resumption of the upwards trend.

of note, several altcoin charts look like they are coiling for a move upwards and/or already breaking out. this is usually a sign of imminent BTC correction (but not a crash). XRP/BTC, LTC/BTC and DOGE/BTC all look poised for a move upwards.

there are always dips; they're getting more and more difficult to predict because of the parabolic trend. i've noticed a lot of traders saying they have taken profit in the $9000s, or plan to sell $10,000. as a contrarian trader, my thinking is that this probably means we are going to blow past $10,000. the biggest question for me is what structure the chart takes here. if we continue with this sideways/grinding top in the $10,000 area, that could set up ripe conditions for alts to rally while bitcoin goes sideways.

after a few days of that, bitcoin should be primed to push into the $12,000s. i'm approaching this like 2013. back then, $1000 was nothing. but then we topped in the $1200s....

in this scenario, i'd be more concerned about device/hard drive failure than anything else. you would definitely want to back up your seed on multiple devices, then encrypt them. and then you would probably want to keep them in different physical locations -- places where you are sure they won't be stolen and picked over. e.g. your house, your mom's house, your work desk, locked in a drawer.

there are password-protected USBs and hard drives but they generally use pretty weak encryption. there are no great answers here. paper copy in a fire-proof safe with two encrypted copies of the wallet on USB, etc. stored in two different trusted physical places is how I roll.

this sucks, but your issue is with multibit, not BTC. lots of people have issues trying to recover BTC from multibit wallets, particularly because there is no continued support for their wallet anymore. if the transaction is still showing as stuck in multibit, you should probably focus on extracting your keys from multibit and importing them into another wallet.

is this an HD wallet or classic wallet? it makes a difference. if you have an HD wallet, this is a very useful thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1938149.0

and FYI, you'll probably get more help in the multibit subforum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=99.0

of course. for example, vietnam's central bank announced last month that cryptocurrencies are not a "lawful means of payment." they also said that the "issuance, supply, use of bitcoin and other similar virtual currency as a means of payment is prohibited."

it sounds like they've made it a criminal offence. i expect to see similar actions taken elsewhere, particularly by smaller and/or more autocratic governments. i heard rumors recently that morocco's government is planning a similar ban.


how so? the CFTC just formally allowed ledgerX to register as a BTC swap execution facility. and fully regulated CME futures markets are expected to open next month.

if the US government were moving against bitcoin, why would they be approving new, regulated markets for bitcoin speculation?

to be fair, there is always some fluctuation on the open markets. we should only expect that 1 USD = 1 USDT exactly when redemption by tether.to is taking place.

otherwise there are traders hedging the risk of tether failure vs. traders who need USDT to move money to other exchanges to buy altcoins. when the market starts pricing in tether possibly imploding, then it’s time to worry. anything in the 0.9 - 1.05 range is normal for the past 6+ months, though.

it's been "temporarily broken" for about a year now. i left kraken a long time ago. the "victim of our own success" line is bullshit. they got complacent, knowing full well that their trade engine/API was one of the worst in the industry. they decided to add more and more shitcoins instead of dealing with it, putting further strain on their half-dead, constantly-mismatching engine infrastructure.

now the shadiest exchange of all, bitfinex, is adding BTCEUR markets, kicking kraken while they're down.

USDT does appear to be a derivative with USD as the underlying. i believe such instruments require formal registration with the CFTC. and they've been serving US customers for years, so that'll probably amount to a stiff civil penalty when all of this finally explodes.

the way i see it, the tether debacle is only one of multiple big problems that bitfinex has:

1) no banking
2) BFX tokens = unregistered securities issued to/traded by US customers
3) USDT = unregistered derivatives issued to/traded by US customers
4) bitfinex operated as an unlicensed money transmitter in the US since 2013

i see very bad things coming for bitfinex. three letter agencies will be involved IMO. i really don't think btc-e was the last unlicensed exchange that will be brought down.

and why not? they can hand the exchange/broker industry to big wall street players and auction off the seized BTC to rich banksters. everything happens for a reason.....

i don't believe any of the exchanges send 1099s to traders at this time. i believe that USD-facing exchanges and especially brokers will need to provide 1099s in years to come, but nobody is doing it yet.

coinbase provides a "cost basis for taxes" report which summarizes your USD net profit/loss. this will assist in preparing your taxes, but it's not an official form and they do not report to the IRS. that's one of the reasons why the IRS is hounding them so hard; there is little to no reporting from coinbase at all:


i'm not familiar with gemini (they wouldn't accept my ID so i can't trade there), but i believe they deal with this similarly. bittrex definitely doesn't report to the IRS, either.

i've come across a couple people who have used bitcoinira.com to convert some of their retirement funds into BTC/ETH funds. i haven't looked into the details myself, but they both said to consider other options because the fees were quite high.

one of the problems with cryptocurrency retirement accounts that are administered by a fund is that they charge management/administration fees which are often quite high. this is one of the biggest complaints about GBTC, which trades at a significant premium to bitcoin because people don't need to worry about securing the coins themselves and because it is accessible via interfaces like E-trade (mainstream/average investors).

i've been told that there are ways to structure bitcoin holds yourself into retirement accounts. that way you'll save significant fees on administration. i don't know the details, though. but i think you should consider talking to one or more tax attorneys about it. you might save yourself a bundle by having a lawyer/CPA structure it for you so you can handle the security/administration yourself.

usually the key pair has already been "generated" because most wallets use hierarchical deterministic seeds now. but the wallet UI won't necessarily show a new address until you request it.

the new address is not linked to any previously generated private key. with HD wallets, all key pairs are derived from a single seed, though. sometimes people confuse the "seed" (which all key pairs are derived from) with "private keys" (from each key pair).


addresses/public keys do not matter at all in this respect. every output you receive is an output, no matter what address it is sent to. sending outputs to the same address doesn't change anything. 3 outputs in 1 address is no different from 3 outputs in 3 addresses, from a transaction fee standpoint.


electrum lets you choose fees manually..... that's my preference. i generally check https://bitcoinfees.earn.com and then construct my transaction based on that.

good luck!

there have been ongoing spam attacks on the network, probably carried out by bitmain to fit the bcash narrative. here's a couple things to consider:

1) stop counting fees in dollars. fees are part of the protocol, meaning they are calculated in BTC. dollar value is irrelevant. the price of bitcoin has risen 40x over the last couple years, so of course the dollar value of fees will be much higher now.

2) with these levels of congestion, proper fee estimation and fee priority becomes very important. do you need your transaction confirmed by the next block, or by the next day? it makes a huge difference. i never aim for confirmation in the next block. usually i go for 3-10 blocks, and sometimes extremely low fee transactions are fine if i am just consolidating outputs into my own addresses.

on my last transaction, i paid 0.0003503 btc in fees ($2.697 at the time). that was a for a standard non-segwit transaction (1 input, 2 outputs). with segwit, it would have been even cheaper. and if i were willing to wait 24 hours for a confirmation, i could probably have paid 10x less. when in doubt, use https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to properly estimate fees, and stop overpaying!

personally, i'm terrified to leave any funds on either exchange anymore. i am adamantly opposed to giving these unlicensed exchanges scans of my passport and utility bills, social security number, etc. i think anyone who is willing to do so is either crazy or is becoming too filthy rich trading altcoins to care about the safety of their identity and credit report.

since a couple months ago, i've left my bittrex and poloniex accounts empty. i use shapeshift and changelly for coins, and etherdelta for ERC20 tokens. that means that for smaller coins, i'm shit out of luck right now.

i can't wait until the decentralized exchange (DEX) coins take off. bridgecoin and komodo both have promising technology and awesome UX for a beta product. but we are a long ways away from sufficient liquidity to compete with the centralized exchanges.

my point was not that the support backlog has gotten worse. if anything, it has marginally improved as traders moved to bittrex en masse.

my point is that previously anyone undergoing verification still had a $2000/day withdrawal limit. this limit is seemingly being revoked in some cases, and for all we know, this could be rolled out as a matter of policy.

it looks to me like they might remove tier 1 verification ($2000/day limit). or maybe they are insolvent, as they seem to be targeting high value accounts now. either way, stay away from poloniex.


fair enough, but remember, BTC is up 10x in price over the last year. and many of the altcoins on poloniex had much bigger gains than that. a $5000 account a year ago could have six figures trapped in it now, even if the account holder was withdrawing the max every day.