lol.

they implemented new chat rules instead---no abusing other players, no racial/sexual slurs etc. the moderator will mute you for the first 2 violations and perma ban you the third time. you'd think this would mean removing the 500 krill requirement, but no.

it's a bitch to quickly earn that much krill playing tournaments. and i'm not grinding cash games just to pay for the privilege of chatting at a table i'm sitting. frankly i'd rather just go back to ACR Poker.

you can tell from the 2+2 thread that other people are complaining about the chat policy too: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/swcpoker-bitcoin-poker-1756316/index74.html

that gives me a little hope that the policy will be fixed. to hear some of the regs tell it, the problem all revolves around "higherhighs" and the recent chat moderation has a lot to do with the dropping on-site traffic.

it's kinda strange that they have a trollbox at all, and it's pretty ridiculous that they apply this policy at tables just because people have been trolling in the trollbox.

it's not enough to make me stop playing the series of course, but it does make me shake my head at SwC.

nope, but coindesk reported on this a week ago: https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchange-group-eyes-bulletin-board-system-for-fatf-compliance-coinbase-exec

some of the more notable tidbits:


when you dig into the requirements of the rule, the privacy implications seem rather alarming. it sounds like exchanges will be openly sharing customer AML/KYC data with each other without informing customers. maybe this isn't a major issue within the "working group" since they are all exchanges that mandate KYC anyway. if they were to share KYC data in this manner with services where customers haven't verified identity (bitmex, kucoin, binance etc) it would be rather disturbing.

unfortunately, the exchanges are just gonna roll out new privacy policies and no one is gonna bother reading them anyway.

cash games are faster, for sure. tournaments can be quite time consuming, as we know. it will take a long time to earn it at the micro stakes tables though.

you get paid krill based on the total rake paid at the table, not rake you've personally paid. so you can sit several full ring tables, play very tight like rakeback pros on pokerstars/full tilt if you want, and just collect the krill.

you can't buy it AFAIK.


wouldn't that be nice? lol. i don't see it happening. based on their rewards structure, gifting 500 krill would give each of us 8% rakeback. so it's not just a write-off to them. https://swcpoker.eu/post/krill-rewards-program

tbh i am just hoping they quietly ease back the requirement (maybe to 100 krill or something) after the chat abuse fiasco blows over. that should be attainable for most people here.

out on the bubble yet again.

the last few orbits were really tough. i was totally card dead. @tyKiwanuka was short-stacked to my left but @Hhampuz and @Trofo were bullying preflop so i could never steal from him.

i finally came into ATo w/ ~6bbs left and naturally shoved. @Hhampuz called w/ QJo and rivered a straight.

good game.....


their policy of no chat moderation and no KYC makes that complicated i guess. the abusers just spin up new accounts.

i don't see the market hitting $12k+ only to go straight back to the $6000s. bull markets are not ordinarily so forgiving to sellers.

maybe you'll get a retest of $10k---that would be logical. the market will want to see it confirmed as support on the way up. i'm pretty confident that's the lowest you'll see after a move like that though.

outdated compared to what? speed (in the sense of instantly settled transactions) was never bitcoin's strength. it's the most secure network in the world, bar none. even if you account for bitcoin's first mover advantage, that's what users are paying for.


it's not either/or. we will continue to see both IMO.

you have the long term market cycles like 2013 and 2017 that mimic bitcoin---where altcoins outperform bitcoin at the peak. then within the altcoin market, there will always be some emerging hype like ICOs or DEFI.

they first raised it to 50, then 500 a couple weeks later. i really wonder who was abusing the chat so much that they had to resort to this. it'd be nice if they could implement a whitelisting system---for private games like ours if not for specific players. i doubt that's too likely though.

that was fun, lol. nice spot to pick up KK.


those big OOP overbets, double barrel bluffing.....it's a dangerous way to play for sure.

@BitcoinGirl.Club we're all silent at the table because you now need 500 krill to chat. you and @iv4n are the only ones at our table with enough krill. i'm hoping they bring the requirement back down---haven't had much time to play lately and am still a couple hundred short. it kinda kills the atmosphere!

it's not great news. it just means unlicensed bitcoin exchanges can be prosecuted under existing money transmission law.

i wouldn't read much into it either. it's considered "money" in relation to money transmission law---not necessarily in terms of securities, commodities, tax, or other laws.

this is also just a district court ruling---the defendant will probably appeal.

here is a better approach---learn to compartmentalize your activities.

what most people do is consolidate all their coins from different sources into a single wallet and then blindly spend them, exposing all of their funds and blockchain history to adversaries like coinbase. these people do nothing to hide their activities from third parties, making themselves low hanging fruit for AML algorithms and probing exchanges.

this leads to 2 polarized conclusions: 1. "play by the rules" or 2. "coinbase is the devil!!!1!1 #deletecoinbase!!!11!1!"

neither of which is correct IMO.

keep in mind that virtually all exchanges are deeply analyzing all of your blockchain activities. yes, binance and bitmex and bittrex and gemini are doing it too, not just coinbase. your funds are always at risk. fixating on coinbase only serves to lead noobs astray, making them think that other exchanges are safe from these things when they simply aren't at all.

back to my initial point. users need to approach third party services with all of this in mind, knowing any outputs deposited or withdrawn will be analyzed several hops out. coinbase is perfectly usable as an exchange---they have awesome liquidity, good UI, free USDC/USD conversion, lightning fast bank withdrawals---but you need to be very aware of their legal/tax obligations and their AML policies.

this is where compartmentalization comes in. if you know how to separate your coins based on source, you do not need to "play by the rules" with all of your bitcoins---only the ones that can be linked to your identity. pay your taxes on coins you sell on coinbase, surely, but your off the book activities where there is no KYC and no tax reporting? paying taxes on that is for suckers! so is getting your accounts closed for withdrawing from casinos and sportsbooks and things like that.

if you're gonna be lazy and reckless about your privacy, stay away from coinbase---you will fall into the typical AML/KYC pitfalls. on the other hand, if you are smart about how you use your bitcoins and interface with coinbase, there is no problem at all with using them.

i've just registered. see everyone at the tables tomorrow!


if i'm not mistaken, nobody claimed this free entry yet. if any new players wanna play with us tomorrow, that's a free 0.0014 BTC buy-in for you, courtesy of tyKiwanuka!

all you gotta do is post your SwC handle here and show up to play.

it's pretty good value all said, but it's a lottery---a real long shot.

the last time they ran it, entries were capped at 100k. playing against 100k other players gives an expected value of $10, and given the size of the field it is incredibly high variance.

do you have any idea how many coin flips you need to win to run deep in a field like that?

this is actually the purpose of leverage for me. i keep a small fraction of my coins split between bitmex and kucoin futures. i always keep enough coins on deposit that i can hedge 100% of my stash in a "shit hits the fan" type scenario, like this past march.

a savings & loan would usually be organized like a credit union, where the institution is mutually held by the depositors and borrowers, who have voting rights re how it is run. i think that's much more attractive in terms of liquidity vs p2p lending, since depositors pool their money together in a joint venture. creditworthiness would probably be handled similarly to financial institutions today.


it comes down to a question of free markets. the wildcat banking era (also known as the free banking era) came to be because of a lack of regulation or enforcement mechanisms around banking. what was the ultimate solution? creating the fed!

pick your poison, i guess.


the problem is it's not just fiat money that is the intermediary glue, but robust systems of credit. interbank lending, collateralized lending, central bank QE, fractional reserve based retail lending etc etc. i dunno how robust these systems would be in a bitcoin-based economy.

that hard cap on the bitcoin supply really lends itself to hoarding.

meh, that's the free market for you. caveat emptor. you don't wanna lose money on a risky investment? don't invest. i prefer that to a nanny state that places excessive burdens on startup companies. i want more anonymity and less red tape in crypto.

what you're talking about isn't particular to crypto either. it's just the natural cycle of technology-based startups.

i've scaled back my hopes for bitcoin as some sort of global currency for this reason. i don't think we were being realistic in the early days about the security trade-offs of high transaction throughput.

my biggest concern is actually not the decline of full nodes, but that the hard cap on money supply combined with insufficient mining fees will break bitcoin's security model. miners are in an arms race to accumulate the mining subsidy. that subsidy is quickly dropping. without a block size limit to drive fee revenue up (to replace the mining subsidy) i don't understand how the incentives prevent massive future declines in hash rate. this exposes the network to attack by previous generations of mining hardware, not to mention the chaos it could cause due to congestion and delayed difficulty adjustments alone.

the emergence of CBDCs is interesting to me because it would do the same thing---people have their own wallets so they can cut out the banks.

bitcoin holders do love to see a return on their holdings though---as a group, they love to invest. maybe we'll see the emergence of savings & loan type institutions, which bring together lenders who want a return and borrowers who need loans. maybe we'll return to the days of wildcat banking, where bank notes are inherently risky.


you can't have your cake and eat it too. austrian economists say perpetual growth as a goal is ridiculous, and that we should get used to economic stagnation as the normal course of things.

if you want to build a global economy on a currency with a completely inelastic money supply, you better prepare for a big slowdown in growth. austrians welcome that. if you want bitcoin to replace fiat money, then you should too.

only the dumbest of the dumb ever believed that. bookies had odds ~75% in favor of hillary, with polls tending towards the 80% mark---some higher, some lower.

for all we know, 75-80% chances was correct. that means trump would have won 1 out of every 4-5 times. and maybe that's exactly what happened.

keep in mind that biden only has a 6-10 point lead in the polls. there is no comparison to 98-2 in 2016.

classic russia---"nope, we're not gonna ban bitcoin, but we might ban it in a few months!"

when crypto legislation is finally passed, i think it'll be relatively tame, like it was in china in 2017 after years of prohibition threats from the PBOC. they'll probably just codify the existing implicit ban on exchanges. maybe they'll whitelist some, or start regulating miners. there is lots of opposition in the government from multiple ministries towards criminalization, and frankly putin doesn't seem too concerned either way.