I'm pretty sure there's plenty of sectors where economics of scale have greater importance than favourable regulation, though admittedly that might only apply to sectors that are too small for corporate lobbyists to bother.

That being said, I agree with your assessment in principle, but I don't see how this would apply to LN in practice.

While it's relatively easy to regulate exchanges; tricky, but still possible to regulate mining to a degree, it would be imho impossible to regulate LN nodes in a meaningful way. They're just too easy to spin up and keep running in a nearly untraceable manner. And the capital requirements are close to zero since the main asset required -- ie. Bitcoin -- can be easily redeployed without deprecation. Transaction fees for opening and closing channels notwithstanding. The same can't be said for mining hardware or even the code that exchanges are running on.

The way I see it LN nodes are simply decoupled enough from the classical economy as to be impacted by regulation (short of shutting down the internet). They are decoupled from the fiat system and have only negligible infrastructure requirements causing them to be effectively decoupled from physical locations as well. The first mainly affects exchanges, the latter miners. Both apply to pretty much every traditional business venture. One outlier I can think of are online Casinos that only run on cryptocurrencies. But while these are similarily decoupled from the fiat system and physical requirements, they require much more effort to run smoothly and more importantly they require trust, which for routing payments via the Lightning Network is irrelevant.

I might be missing something but the way I see it Lightning Node operators are in a unique position. Except, of course, there's only limited money to be made.

I generally agree, but in the case of Lightning Network the question is what vector they'd have to attempt (2)? Given the low entry barrier and open nature of the protocol it seems to be close to impossible for major operators to create any sort of moat. There is an advantage to size as this makes a node both more attractive for routing payments and to open a channel to (given the node properly manages channel liquidity) but it's not something that would prevent a hobbyist node operator from growing themselves.

The only thing I could think of would be an attempt to lobby for legal regulation of Lightning Nodes, but that would hurt large operators more than small ones, as the first would only increase their overhead while trying to prosecute the latter would prove pretty much futile.

2nd prediction:

EUR 35200,-

Username: heretik2

It doesn't seem like he had to gain much in terms of money so it seems a bit like a case of misled idealism. Especially since he was fully aware of the the legal implications of his actions and that the FBI had already gained interest in his person. But who knows? Maybe he expected to get away with a mere slap on the wrist but that seems rather naive.

Bitcoin korreliert gerade wieder stark mit dem Aktienmarkt, auch wenn er ein Eck extremer ausschlägt. Derzeit schaut es meiner Meinung nach so aus als ob er die inflationsbedingte Entkoppelung nicht ganz schafft und weiterhin Opfer der allgemeinen Bärenstimmung bleibt.

Anekdotisch kenne ich zwar tatsächlich Fälle wo die Judikatur innerhalb gewisser Branchen von größeren Playern mutmaßlich missbraucht wurde um kleinere Mitbewerber aus dem Markt zu drängen (sprich: Verfahren an den Hals schaffen, nach 2-3 Jahren Rechtsstreit stellt sich raus das die Anklage haltlos war aber der Mitbewerb ist bankrott und somit das Ziel erreicht) aber im Falle von OP würde ich schon davon ausgehen das im Hintergrund ein "richtiges" Strafverfahren am Laufen war. Die Funktionsweise von Bitcoin.de ist im Gegensatz zu anderen Exchanges für genau solchen Mißbrauch nämlich relativ anfällig was das von der Kripo beschriebene Szenario leider doch plausibel und eine entsprechende Stellungnahme zur eigenen Unschuld notwendig macht.

Was den Ärger und die Verursachung von Angst betrifft hat der Gesetzgeber außerdem sowieso einen viel effektiveren Weg gefunden -- einfach die Geldwäscherichtlinien so verschärfen das die Banken noch weniger Bock auf Transaktionen mit Krypto-Bezug haben und ihren Kunden das Leben schwer machen. Selbes Ergebnis bei weniger Arbeit.

EUR 39300,-

Username: heretik2

Interessant wird hier dann die Frage ab wann 1000,- Euro als zusammenhängend zählen. 10x100,- Euro innerhalb weniger Minuten? Klar. 900,- Euro einmal im Monat? Wohl weniger. Und dazwischen ist viel Spielraum.

In der Praxis werden die Grenzfälle dann wahrscheinlich im Ermessen der Exchanges sein. Ist ja bei Banken bis auf jene Fälle wo wirklich konkrete Werte festgelegt sind ähnlich. Oder bei der Mittelherkunft, wenn wir gleich bei Exchanges bleiben. Da sind ja auch manche vorsichtiger als andere.

Ach, ich glaub das ist einfach nur ein ganz normaler Pullback weil die 50k so bedrohlich dreinschauen. Bin gerade leicht optimistisch das die 45k tatsächlich zum Support geworden sind was imho relativ bullish wäre.

Hab mich wohl ein bisschen vom FUD mitreissen lassen, du hast natürlich vollkommen recht. Insofern die legale Definition von Crypto-asset Service Providern (CASP) nicht erweitert worden ist sollten Merchants die Bitcoin direkt annehmen nicht betroffen sein.

Ich frag mich allerdings ein bisschen was das in der Praxis für DEXes bedeuten wird. Insofern diese dezentralisiert genug sind sollte es da ja keinen Service Provider im eigentlichen Sinn geben? Wobei ich zugegebenerweise an dieser Front nicht am neuesten Stand der Dinge bin und keine Ahnung hab welche dieser Projekte dezentral und welche "dezentral" sind.

Für Exchanges wird es in der Praxis glaub ich maximal darauf hinauslaufen das in Zukunft Ein- und Ausgehende Adressen per Message-Signatur verifiziert werden müssen. Die persönlichen Daten haben sie ja schon.

Die EUR 1000,- Meldepflicht wird genauer definiert werden müssen, ansonsten ist diese spätestens mit LN hinfällig.

Die größten Probleme wirds im Ecommerce Bereich geben. Zumindest für EU-basierte Händler würde Bitcoin als Zahlungsmittel hiermit vollständig rausfallen.

Unterm Strich mach ich mir wenig Sorgen um Bitcoin aber sehr viel um die EU. Kann mir nicht vorstellen das diese Regularien irgendwas positives bewirken werden außer das die EU als moderner Wirtschaftsstandort noch unattraktiver wird als sie es eh schon ist. Tja, ich frag mich auch wieso wir in der EU im Digitalbereich so hinten nach hängen?

Source? I'm genuinely curious and I'm finding nothing on that matter.



Got any more details? Google yields nothing and it must have been a different version than 0.13 since no such version exists in Ledger's release history.

To store several copies of the wallet.dat you'll need several airgapped devices. If you store them all on the same device it's as good as having no backup at all.



Given a strong enough passphrase even a fully known seed is useless to an attacker.

Given full physical access and sufficient expertise the seed can be extracted from certain Trezor models, but AFAIK no such attacks have been successfully mounted on Ledger devices. Feel free to bring me up to date in case there's been any successful seed extractions from Ledger devices recently.



I guess you're referring to paper wallets? Since hardware wallets are commonly deterministic it's technically not possible to lose funds to unknown change addresses (though if you have any more info on that I'd love to hear it).



Seeds are also used by Bitcoin Core and other software wallets so that doesn't make a difference. Except, a lot of phishing sites ask for private keys directly rather than the seed, which for a regular user is impossible to obtain from the hardware wallet directly.


Don't get me wrong, if you know what you're doing setting up cold storage using an airgapped device is fine, in some cases maybe even preferable. Just be aware of what the actual up and downsides are.

There's just a world of difference when it comes to ease of use.

I tend to recommend people hardware wallets for securing their coins because there's simply a lot less that can go wrong during the setup process and while doing transactions. Sure, setting up an airgapped system is relatively straightforward if you're somewhat tech savvy, but a lot of folks aren't and I rather have a hardware wallet with nice instructions holding their hands than trying to pilot them through properly setting up cold storage. I also personally switched to a hardware wallet eventually because it's just much less of a hassle, especially when transacting somewhat regularly.



You'd be mistaken to believe that no one is reviewing the source code and components of hardware wallets just because those were developed by a private company. Security researchers love hacking away at hardware wallets. Especially the hardware parts of it. You'll find plenty of security research papers on Ledger, Trezor and some of the other common hardware wallets.

While the foreign reserve sanctions have brought to light the risks of holding reserves in foreign fiat currencies I don't think Bitcoin would necessarily benefit from Russian influence at this point. Bitcoin is more tolerated than welcomed as is, a close association to the Russian economy would probably make Bitcoin a currency non grata for good.

Either way it seems unlikely to happen as the Russian government has more interest in trying to restabilize the Ruble by increasing demand for it. Things would maybe look differently if Russia had more vested interest in Bitcoin but given their rather hostile stance in the past they are unlikely to benefit from rising Bitcoin prices; hence they are more likely to focus on the Ruble instead. Especially since denominating export prices in Ruble would enable them to nudge the exchange rate towards a more favourable direction.

How do you come to this conclusion?

While rate hikes will make it less attractive to buy assets on leverage (ie. credit) it doesn't mean that "80% of the money supply" will be gone. It just means that the money supply will increase at a slightly slower pace, or at least that's what the Fed is hoping for.

While stock market prices will fall eventually the way they always do, it does seem that in a weird twist of fate both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine cooled the markets down a bit before they could get too far ahead of themselves.

Interesting necro

I guess Gödel's incompleteness theorem being applicable to algorithms is more or less reflected in the halting problem? Doesn't seem to be really relevant for PoW though. Both Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the halting problem require a minimum of complexity to be present which you don't have in Bitcoin's PoW algorithm (or even Bitcoin script).

23 - HeRetiK

Thank you!

Good point about wallets automatically rebroadcasting transactions, potentially causing the transaction to stick around the mempools for longer.

IIRC Electrum "gives up" at one point and let's you manually decide whether to try again or to remove the unconfirmed transaction from your history for good. Not sure how Bitcoin Core and other wallet implementations handle it though.

Der genaue Wortlaut war folgendermaßen:


Dementsprechend hätte ich die Situation ähnlich verstanden, allerdings weniger im Bezug auf Standards für Mining Hardware sondern mehr im Bezug auf Standards für Konsensalgorithmen -- was auch immer das bedeutet hätte. (Absoluter Stromverbrauch? Stromverbrauch per Transaktion?)