it goes a bit deeper than this. the support ticket backlog going back to ~ may of this year is nothing new. but this new rash of users having their accounts dropped to $0 daily withdrawal limit is a new complaint that has emerged over the last couple weeks. i really wish we had some idea of how many accounts are affected.

what scares me the most about this is that the people complaining have VERY LARGE accounts. i'm not going to come out and say that poloniex is insolvent. but as an outsider, the situation seems to be getting worse.

anyone who can still get their money off the site should do so now.

the highest volume day ever for bcash was that ugly shooting star doji at the very top. that means that it was heavily sold into at the top, so there are lots of new bagholders. even if it were to follow bitcoin's path over the years, that kind of distribution marks the beginning of a bearish phase.

i think roger ver and jihan wu will probably fight the downtrend; their story reminds me of the hunt brothers. in the end, i think, manipulators like them usually lose. but there could be a lot of turbulence between now and then.

bitmain is the biggest manufacturer of ASIC miners. they've dominated the market for years now, and this is only increasingly true over time. it's well known that they are the primary backers of bitcoin cash (BCH).

as of 1-2 months ago, bitmain stopped accepting BTC or USD payments for new orders of mining hardware. instead, customers can only pay in BCH.

given the total and circulating supply of BTC and BCH, how much can this affect the price of both? what effect would you expect this activity to have on the larger mining economy?

cobra is the co-owner of bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org. i don't believe that he is a bitcoin developer, but someone can correct me if i'm wrong. anyway, he has gained somewhat of a following over the past year or so and obviously holds some influence due to his ownership in bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.

yesterday, he said this on twitter:


thoughts? how does the bitcoin community feel about this?

roger's publicly identified coins weren't moving at BCH's lows (per greg maxwell). i'd love to see an update now. he wasn't willing to sell his BTC for BCH when it was bearish, so i wonder if a 4x from the lows is really good enough for him. if you follow the mystery BCH miner's coinbase transactions, they haven't moved anything either.

for both roger ver and jihan wu, this is looking like a long term play. i'm guessing both of them are smart enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. they are both sitting on massive amounts of both BTC and BCH. they don't need to take risks like that.


there was sort of a blow off top after the segwit2x cancellation news. that usually leads to a sell off. a lot of good analysts were expecting a drop to $5k before the news even came out. the BCH rush may have added to it (people selling BTC to buy BCH) but i think it was mostly just typical supply and demand and TA at play.

fun fact: the original bitcoin software was not only meant for transactions. there was actually a poker client built into the software that was later removed.

i actually think the functionality of the blockchain conflicts with this idea that bitcoin is only for transactions. the transactions themselves are data propagated and stored on the most secure network in the world. that's perpetual storage for hashed/encrypted/compressed data, and it's still pretty cheap considering how low fees still are.

bitcoin will eventually allow more complex transactions like smart contracts. "simplicity" the smart contract coding language has been released, and rootstock (RSK) doesn't even require a fork to go into production. things just take a lot longer with bitcoin, because we don't "move fast and break things." that's what the ethereum guys do.

does it really matter, though? if bitcoin has made one thing clear, it's that governments cannot stop it. 10 or 20 years from now, i think the "greens" will look to us just like the altcoiners pushing proof-of-stake do now. they make the same exact arguments.

i'm partial to the idea proof-of-work mining is wasteful if there is no better alternative. to date, there is no proven method for byzantine fault tolerance that can compare to bitcoin. proof-of-stake is on shaky footing conceptually as it is; it will be many years before we have a working test case (like bitcoin is for proof-of-work).

generally, you should never trade fundamental news. you haven't "lost" anything unless you've closed positions or sold your bitcoins. and i hate to say it, but anyone trading B2X futures or trading BTC on high leverage during this period of uncertainty and high volatility probably deserves to lose money. high risk, high reward = sometimes you lose your shirt.

if you held onto your bitcoins, they're worth as much as they were two days ago. and there's a good chance that the uptrend will continue now that the FUD is subsiding.

generally, yes. you should make backups of your wallet before funding them in general in case of situations like this. wallets are generally recoverable, but the type of wallet and version you have will affect the recovery process. the easiest types of wallets to recover are hierarchical deterministic wallets, as they provide a recovery seed (string of words) which can be used to recover all addresses in the wallet. electrum and trezor are couple examples.


nothing is guaranteed. there could be bugs/exploits which have not been found yet. this is why HD wallets are so great..... if anything ever happens, you have your recovery seed.


as OmegaStarScream said, trezor or ledger are highly reputable hardware wallets. regarding whether they are safe....... to some extent, you are trusting that the hardware/firmware is not compromised and has not been tampered with. if you are not auditing it yourself, there is always a small chance of compromise. but these are very reputable companies. i would advise only buying directly from the manufacturer. don't mess with third parties who might send you a wallet that has been tampered with.

i appreciate this, thanks.... i'll look into getting an offline copy of Coinb.in to try this myself later, as i was also unable to figure out how to use the locktime feature in electrum from the documentation.

i hate to ask, but when you say "manually calculate" the change address and payout, what do you mean exactly? you just mean we need to manually do the arithmetic (inputs - output - fees = change), right? i guess if we're wrong, the transaction would return invalid anyway...

it's just a scare tactic. most people can be scared into compliance, and i'm sure that's the intention here. the u.s. government is definitely smart enough to realize that they can't realistically control cross-border payments with cryptocurrencies.

i'm really curious to see how courts would interpret "possession" in this context. merely possessing a private key is not physical possession of funds. the fact that many people could have access to a single private key seems problematic. if five people have access to a key with $10k on it, are they all required to declare? if so, the law is illogical. what about multi-signature wallets?

anyway, in this context, cryptography will become increasingly important. i'm going to get in the habit of "encoding" an HD wallet seed (12 words) manually throughout handwritten notes/schedules/calendars. only a trained eye who is familiar with the seed should be able to recognize it. brain wallets for the win!

the problem is that if we consider how little of the BTC supply is traded, there is likely to be even less B2X supply on the market. many full node operators will simply ignore the chain and have their transactions replayed on the 2x chain.

yes, there will be an initial rush by the ideological legacy chain supporters to dump the 2x chain, but this will test my theory regarding how large this group really is. i believe that the majority of BTC users does not know or care about the fork. blockchain.info, xapo, coinbase, shapeshift, etc. may co-opt their users depending on what miners do. that leaves only a small minority left to dump 2x specifically. and even among that small minority, i think some may hold their 2x to sell into a pump rather than try to dump to zero. people are rational and want to maximize their gains (or minimize their risk of losing coins).

not so sure about that analysis. the "may" relates to whether the asset being promoted is a security or not. nobody is coming after mike tyson for his promotion of bitcoin ATMs -- those aren't securities. the company facilitating money transfers with the ATMS are probably considered MSBs and therefore need licenses and to register with FINCEN. but that has nothing to do with the SEC or with mike tyson.

they can definitely do something about it. i think this is a warning to people like floyd mayweather before they really start coming after people. if celebrities are flouting the law this carelessly in 2-3 years, the hammer will be coming down on them. for now, i don't think anything will happen.

it's odd that the article seems to use the term "cryptocurrencies" where they should be using "ICO tokens." ERC20 tokens may exist on a decentralized blockchain, but their issuance is completely centralized. they aren't cryptocurrencies. further, the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction over cryptocurrencies, so this article's title is really off base.

the crucial part of the statement i see here is "virtual token or coin that is a security." proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are not securities. in fact, not all ICO tokens are securities either (see the Howey test).

i'm surprised that these celebrities like paris hilton pumped these ICOs. she must have done it without talking to her lawyer first. her and mayweather looked like idiots. again, the author is dumb for comparing them to mike tyson for his promotion of bitcoin ATMs. those aren't securities....


nobody has gotten in trouble for endorsing bitcoin, and no regulator has suggested that endorsing bitcoin is wrong. what they are talking about is endorsing token sales, which are basically IPOs that flout securities laws.

in all fairness, the actual code changes from core 0.14 to btc1 are minimal. there's been ample time for auditing/testing. the problem with the timeline was always that 3 months is too short for compatibility breaking forks in bitcoin. and of course, the fact that there is not widespread agreement among the community to hard fork.

at the end of the day, all we can do is wait and see. there's not much point speculating about what miners may or may not do. and if we're being honest, bitmain alone can determine whether a major split occurs or not. and they are holding their cards close. we know that BCH is their baby. what we don't know is their long term plan here.

the good news is that we are going mainstream. comments from CME on the CNBC closing bell program cited pent-up commercial/client demand to add BTC markets.

interestingly, in their tweet announcement, they spoke of the bitcoin futures market in the context of a larger "digital asset" market, which suggests to me that there is more to come than just bitcoin markets.

i think you're right to worry, though. if anyone thought manipulation by the chinese exchanges over the past few years was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. the big boys are here to fuck you now! be careful not to sell the bottom...

i've got an eye on this project being developed by core developer eric lombrozo: https://twitter.com/eric_lombrozo/status/925056653401214978

it will be a noncustodial (no trust) service that automatically splits utxos for hard forks with no replay protection. the developers are aiming for it to be ready for the segwit2x fork, but no idea if it will happen or not. given the last difficulty jump, i wouldn't be surprised if bitmain continues to bring more hardware online as we approach the fork, to worsen the "stuck chain" effect on the legacy chain post-fork. that would mean the fork will occur even sooner than currently expected.

in any case, i likely won't move any coins for a couple days after the fork.

i think most people who have been in the bitcoin scene for a couple years have come to this conclusion. he's right that the supply-demand equation is mind-boggling, which leads one to ask: how the hell does he come up with "$50,000 per token?" with the kind of demand he's referring to, we could be looking at six or even seven figures per BTC.

but nobody really knows. it's impossible to predict future demand. for all we know (as unlikely as it might be), some altcoin might emerge and overtake BTC in global demand. or basic protocol flaws being exposed could make its value plummet. who knows?

i used to say that a fundamental flaw at the protocol level (broken POW, or broken signature curve) could send the markets to $0. but even if that happened (say, on the day the news came out) i think that the core developers would develop and release a hard fork version that carried forward the chainstate/UTXO state to a new blockchain.

it might be a rocky road, but i suspect that the market would eventually react quite bullishly to the notion that a fundamental flaw were found, a fix was released, and the ecosystem adopted the fix. we could then cross it off the all-time list of fears (which includes contentious hard forks, among other things)...

i can sympathize with that sentiment, but it's important to recognize that the bitcoin ecosystem is extremely diverse now. there is a massive global user base. people depend on bitcoin for their livelihoods, and businesses depend on bitcoin running reliably with 100% uptime. that's who core has to think about.

they are trying to minimize network disruptions and keep bitcoin scaling and functioning while continuing to see massive growth. that's no small task. they can't be expected to integrate changes to consensus rules (on short timelines, no less) when there is no widespread support from the community for any one proposal.