I've got mixed feelings about Gresham's law -- this idea that people will always prefer to spend weak money (like fiat) while hoarding hard money like bitcoins. I believe the dynamic is more complex than that.

I frequently spend bitcoins. This is partly because I have some income/capital gains from it, partly for the privacy/tax implications similar to cash, partly because I simply have some. And there's probably more to it than that. I just don't feel particularly affected by the economic forces that Gresham's law is supposed to imply.

Not me. I don't do much evangelizing these days. I applaud people who are willing to do that, though. Usually it's cashiers who are asking me why I'm always paying with gift cards. (Answer: I'm buying them with bitcoins.)

Come to think of it, I've been pestering my weed dealer to start taking bitcoins for years. He seems to be coming around to the idea. Last time I saw him, he said he was going to set up a wallet. Progress!

In my view, the best hope for merchant adoption in the intermediate term is through apps like SPEDN. It's easy for merchants because it can be implemented in any standard POS terminal (no added costs), it's intuitive with scanner/QR code, and Gemini handles the conversion on the back end. It's pretty revolutionary compared to things like Bitpay invoices and time-consuming on-chain transactions, or a costly Lightning node setup when hardly any customers are asking for it.

I've never heard of him before, but apparently he's well known in the computer programming world. He's had a Wikipedia for years.

The DOJ press release makes it sound like he was directly advising the North Korean government or something, but the charges apparently stem from his attendance at a blockchain conference in Pyongyang this past April. I'm curious what he presented exactly. I wonder if there are any videos floating around online...

If you look closer, the transactions to Huobi (and also Binance) were just dust transactions. The hacker was probably just testing to see if/when the exchanges froze the accounts.

So far, PeckShield has identified 5 ETH that flowed into a "smaller exchange platform." That's it.

In the US, financial institutions file Suspicious Activity Reports above a $5,000 threshold. Many other countries have similar conditions required by AML statutes.

Sadly, there is now a renewed push from the powers that be towards lower reporting thresholds. For example, the FATF travel rule -- which isn't actually law yet anywhere -- requires customer due diligence above $1,000.

Plus, compliance-minded exchanges like Coinbase will be erring on the side of caution and may implement lower internal thresholds than the law actually requires.

It's possible the attacker had previously compromised the hot wallets and was just waiting to maximize the booty. Upbit making cold storage transfers would have forced him to act.

Young is arguing an employee took advantage of the timing, but I really don't understand how it would have helped.

There are two gaps to consider.

Bitcoin is widely treated as an investment asset, and women generally invest in financial markets much less than men:
Why women invest 40 percent less than men
Why fewer women invest in the financial market

Secondly, there's the technology aspect. There is a pronounced gender gap in computing and STEM fields in general, partly due to differing levels of interest:

Apparently, those were just small test transactions. The hacker sent some tiny deposits to both Huobi Global and Binance but as of a few hours ago:


I'd assume in many cases that the money is never returned. A lot probably depends on how quickly the attacker moves, since exchanges don't have the right to indefinitely freeze customer assets. That's why Binance says they'll only freeze funds for up to 24 hours -- by which time there must be a filed police report and law enforcement officials working with the exchange. After that, they release the funds.

Smart hackers will immediately be moving the funds through false verified accounts to quickly wash the proceeds. The hack outputs will be publicly tagged, but any outputs laundered through other exchanges won't be. I think this is pretty tough to stop in real time, but the longer the hacker waits around and lets the money sit, the more worthless it becomes.

Paying nearly 10% sales tax on every purchase in the states already seems oppressive. Of course, we're expected to pay capital gains taxes up to 37% on top of sales tax. And if you trade or invest as a business, you owe an additional 15% in FICA taxes on your Bitcoin gains. It's just jaw-dropping when you think about it!

So, I don't blame anyone for spending their bitcoins to avoid taxes. Especially in the US, where most of our taxes are paying for really horrible wars and military expenditures from decades past anyway. The notion that our tax dollars are mostly funding vital services is a fallacy. It's highway robbery, that's all.

They're shutting down tiny exchanges like BISS with its 10 employees. Considering they are targeting such little fish, the numbers don't surprise me. All the big exchanges voluntarily obeyed the ban and left the country in 2017. Now the government appears to be enforcing the ban against all the little guys.

Supposedly, the exact number was 173.

Sure, but that's not the popular perception. People don't associate rising cost of living with cash vs. plastic/mobile. They may bitch about the price of rent and food increasing but they certainly aren't complaining about going cashless. They want to go cashless. Merchants and black marketers love cash but mainstream consumers have us all by the balls in that regard.

I don't foresee anyone putting up much of a fight against the incoming cash restrictions we're seeing around the world.

It seems like Coinbase wants to establish your status as a foreign person, to determine whether withholding is necessary. This is from the instructions for Form W-8BEN:


This situation is perplexing, though, since the forms of income subject to withholding don't apply to capital gains. It's even more strange since you don't even have any net capital gains, only losses.

It may just be that they want to confirm your residency and tax filing status because you crossed some activity threshold. It doesn't seem like there is any basis for them to withhold anything.

The energy used in Bitcoin mining is largely renewable and green -- solar, hydro, wind. Solar and wind are becoming the cheapest forms of electricity, so this trend will only continue. See here: Bitcoin mining is greener than most large-scale industries: report

Regarding coal-fired and other fossil fuel electricity, Bitcoin miners also utilize already-generated electricity that would otherwise be wasted by grid inefficiencies. In other words, a non-zero portion of the hash rate isn't really adding to electricity consumption. It's taking excess electricity that's already been generated. This is called "load balancing." Some people predict that large-scale Bitcoin miners will increasingly strike up load balancing agreements with power generators because it's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Of course, but we're talking about two different things now. I was speaking to the bit about cash controls and moving towards cashlessness. People don't seem too worried about that.

Inflation and low interest rates are a whole other can of worms.

Exactly -- I can't think of any other reason why GBTC trades with a 30% premium to NAV. I imagine that premium will decline significantly once more accessible bitcoin derivative securities are available on the market.


Jay Clayton seems perpetually unimpressed by these ETF applications. And fundamentally, the SEC's concerns re: manipulation and unregulated markets haven't been -- or perhaps can't be -- addressed.

If the regulated futures markets start controlling spot market pricing -- similar to London and COMEX in the gold market -- I could see the SEC being more easily persuaded.

People seem pretty comfortable with their online banking apps, Zelle, Venmo, Cash App... even my mother, who's in her 60s. Everyone is willingly going cashless, particularly young people. I'm not sure they're going to question anything until fiat currencies start imploding.

"Local" as in "small" and based mainly out of Shenzhen, Shanghai or Beijing from the look of things. Operations like BISS, run by a dozen people in Beijing. The big boys like Huobi immediately left the mainland in 2017, but these smaller operations apparently flew under the radar because there was no enforcement.

These are probably just small, local exchanges. The big ones like Huobi and OKcoin left China long ago. BTCChina shut down. After the ban came into effect in 2017, most exchanges followed suit and traders went to the P2P and offshore markets.

Identifying the attacker should be trivially easy. Just look at who published the attack chain. Like the OP suggested, the attack would probably entail collusion among multiple pools since sourcing the hardware to independently attack the network would be nearly impossible.

Identifying and organizing a cohesive class of victims under a single legal jurisdiction sounds extremely challenging, though. The CFAA is an American law as well -- it's unlikely that Chinese pool admins, for example, could be successfully brought to justice under it.