Almost all centralized exchanges employ third parties to do their KYC checking for them, and as with most things, they will employ the service which costs them the least amount of money. As a result, you have the worst and least reliable companies processing KYC documents, leading to documents being rejected for completely arbitrary or unknown reasons, and also leading to frequent hacks and leaks due to these cheap companies and their poor security. You can always try complaining to the exchange, but given most exchanges take the same approach of spending as little as possible on their customer service, then you will be unlikely to make much headway. Given that the average exchange user probably only buys or sells a few hundred dollars worth of crypto, then an exchange might only make a dollar or two from that user's exchange fees. That probably isn't worth the cost of them getting someone to manually review the required documents.

The easy solution, not to mention far better since it means you don't have to compromise your privacy and risk your identity, is simply to use a good DEX such as Bisq or LocalCryptos.

Without downloading an extension, you can simply hit the "quote" button on any post in any other open thread (such as this one), and then on the new page that loads change the post number in the URL (quote=XXXXXXXX) from the post number you hit "quote" on to the post number you actually want to quote (in this case, 56601548), and reload the URL. You can then copy the bits of the BB code that you need. If you are going to actually quote the post (rather than just use the BB code), then you also need to change the topic number in the reply, or it will still try to link back to the thread you are in instead of the original locked thread.


Having said all that, the BPIP extension works perfectly for this and gives you a bunch of other great stuff too.

I'd be open to considering a reduction in block time should a good argument be put forward for it, but it does not solve the issue we are discussing here. No block time will ever be fast enough for reliable point of sale transactions. You will either be waiting at least a minute or two with the risk of it being 10 minutes or more for your first transaction, which is completely useless for someone paying for a coffee or a fast food, or you will get a confirmation in seconds but that confirmation will have too high a chance of being reversed to be sufficient, so you will be stuck waiting for more anyway.

Sure, propagation and block validation is faster than it was 10 years ago, but that increase has slowed and will hit a limit. We still see empty blocks being mined (because of how long it takes every miner to receive and validate each block) and stale blocks fairly regularly, so propagation and validation are obviously still not fast enough to completely remove these issues even at a 10 minute limit.

I have zero interest in any of those altcoins so I couldn't really tell you, but I know that Ethereum uses different methods for dealing with such blocks (which they call Uncle blocks) and pays miners for them, and a quick glance at a Dogecoin explorer shows that they have mined over 200 completely empty blocks in the last 24 hours alone.

My point was that if you are laundering money, you can do so at rates far below 20%.

Because if I'm not running my own Lightning node, then I'm relying on someone else to open my channels, generate and broadcast my payments, generate invoices for any incoming payments, monitor and close my channels. An individual Lightning node in the route my payment takes might not be able to see the final destination, sure, but the person or service hosting my wallet for me will.

You have introduced a huge number of unnecessary points of failure, as well as complete trust in a number of third parties.

• Google must still be operational
• Google must still be offering the "send in the future" service, which they could discontinue at any time
• Google must decide not to close your account for inactivity
• Google servers must not be damaged and result in data loss
• Google servers must not be hacked and result in theft of your wallet (and a huge amount of time for an attacker to bruteforce your BIP38 password, and nothing you can do in the meantime to stop them or secure the coins)
• Google employees must all be honest and also not try to bruteforce your BIP38 password
• The receiving email provider must still be operational
• You must still have access to the receiving email provider account
• They also must not have decided to close your account for any reason

If you are happy to lock up coins with absolutely no way to retrieve them prior to the date you set, then simply sign and back up a transaction to another wallet you control which cannot be broadcast before a set block or date, and then destroy the original wallet. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it achieves the exact same outcome far more securely and without any trust.

Yeah, that's exactly what they do. CipherTrace have also been working with various branches of the US government for years. You can take a look at all their taxpayer funded contracts here - https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22CIPHERTRACE%2C+INC.%22. You'll see contracts from the FBI, IRS, SEC, CFTC, and others.

The acquisition is another sign that legacy financial institutions are realizing that bitcoin is here to stay and they need to get involved, which is arguably a good thing in terms of adoption, but in terms of privacy this is another disappointing development, although not really surprising at all. Centralized exchanges have been either employing such companies, buying them out altogether, or even setting up their own (e.g. Coinbase and Coinbase Analytics) for many years now. It was to be expected that any fiat banks or payment providers who wanted to get some skin in the crypto game would also start doing the same thing in the name of "protecting their customers" or some other such nonsense. And, as usual, since the vast majority of bitcoin users only care about profits, they'll roll over and accept any and all invasion in to their privacy if it means they can earn 1% cashback on their centralized, fully KYCed, 100% monitored, reported to your government, able to be frozen at any time, Mastercard Crypto Card.

Any option that does not involve connecting your device running Tails to the internet or to any other computer or network.

Snap a picture of the address itself or its QR code with your phone camera or a camera on another computer and send it to the other party (be careful not to include any privacy breaking information in the picture).
Transfer the address to a clean and formatted USB drive or other removable media and physically give it to the other party or us the USB drive to transfer the address to an internet connected computer and send it to the other party.
Print out the address or its QR code.
Read it out over the phone or write it down manually (more prone to errors).

Oh, this is cool. As someone who occasionally generates seed phrases by flipping a coin, this would take all the work out of the manual conversion I've been doing to turn each 11 bits in to a word. Are you planning to implement a function to automatically calculate the checksum and the correct word final word once you've entered the last 3 or 7 bits of entropy?

My only comment would be to maybe change the background color of entered squares when compared to the ? squares, just to make it easier to keep track of where in the grid you are or if you have accidentally missed a square.

How is it decentralized when you demand KYC and store those details on a centralized server which has been hacked in the past?
How is it decentralized when you require customers to deposit their coins to your centralized wallets which have also been hacked in the past?
How is it decentralized when you have complete control over the two chains you mentioned and their respective tokens?
How is it decentralized when users have to trust you completely the convert your centralized chain tokens back to the real coins they are pegged to?

Binance DEX is a marketing scam, nothing more. It is not decentralized in the slightest.

I have never understood people's faith in tamper-proof sticks, seals, bags, boxes, or whatever. These are incredibly easy to fake. Hell, I can go on Amazon and buy 500 generic tamper proof stickers for 20 bucks. There are hundreds of companies which will create custom designs for you for not that much more. And if an attacker is sophisticated enough to either replace a chip inside a hardware wallet or build a fake replica from scratch, why would they not be sophisticated enough to fake a tiny sticker?

Unless you have a build-it-yourself hardware wallet with open source hardware and open source firmware running open source software on your attached computer, then the risk will never be zero, regardless of how many checks and verifications the wallet goes through. It's part of the reason I'm moving more and more towards encrypted cold storage devices instead as time goes on.

And with a 1 minute block time you can still pay 1 BTC/vbyte and be waiting upwards of 10 minutes for your first confirmation. Decreasing the block time will never be sufficient for a point of sale transaction, as by the time you decrease it enough to mean you'll never wait more than 30 seconds for a block, then it is so fast that stale blocks and double spends would be so common place that you'd have to wait 10+ minutes to have enough confirmations that you are sure they wouldn't suddenly all be overturned.

No, but they are rare enough that they aren't a major issue, and a chain of more than 1 is exceedingly rare. Drop the block time to 1 minute and you'll regularly see chains of 3 or 4 being overturned. Monero initially had a block time of 1 minute and had to increase it due to the excessive number of stale blocks they were experiencing.

Which is part of the reason why you should only ever use addresses once and be very careful about creating and consolidating change inputs, as I've discussed above.

Lightning can be better, but if you are not running your own Lightning node over Tor (which I would guess the majority of people are not doing), then you are either broadcasting your IP or you are revealing everything to your third party node provider.

Sure, but that is also a very ineffective way for a criminal to launder money due to taxation. If I buy 20 bitcoin at $50k each and sell them tomorrow at $50k each, I have realized no capitals gains and therefore owe no tax. If I claim that I mined my 20 bitcoin ten years ago, then I have now realized $1 million in capitals gains and owe whatever the tax rate set by jurisdiction, usually somewhere around 20%.

It's probably worth putting a scam warning if you are going to link to those sites. Anyone who types their private key in to one of those sites to "see which page it is on" or to "see if it is in their database" or to "sign up for monitoring/alerts" or whatever other nonsense they try to sell you will have all their coins stolen. Many newbies will not understand this.

Ok, so either tell us what the vulnerability is so we can patch it, or go off and make yourself a millionaire. We know you won't do either.

Called it. Your bullshit is so predictable.

I brought up Dunning-Kruger earlier in this thread, and tvbcof's response was that he is SO much more intelligent than everyone else that it doesn't apply to him. Yes, really: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5294239.msg55785175#msg55785175

Edit: Lol he's doubling down on it. Incredible.

I predict an incoming post about how everyone who studied medicine is just paid for by BiG pHaRmA and how conspiracy sites which only exist to sell overpriced snake oil to gullible morons are actually the only reliable source of facts.

If by "studied" you mean read Facebook memes which tell them to take horse pills.

Please link to the peer reviewed randomized control trial or meta-analysis performed by all these studious anti-vaxxers which show vaccines don't work. I'll wait.

Electrum does not create nested segwit addresses. Your options with seed_type are either "standard" or "segwit", for P2PKH or P2WPKH addresses respectively.

Alternatively, you can use the following command:


This will create a legacy wallet and display the associated seed phrase all at once. You can also add the following additional options to that command:

This is not a weakness and you have not found some big security flaw. This is exactly how bitcoin is supposed to work.

Anyone in the world can generate thousands of even millions of valid private keys if they want. It's as simple as starting at 1 and counting up. Pick any number between the two numbers in BlackHatCoiner's reply, and you have found a valid private key. The reason you can't find anyone else's coins is because of the sheer size of that second number. Even if every computer on the planet did nothing but grind private keys for the rest of time, the sun would die and humans would be extinct before you found a collision.

Cutting the block time doesn't solve this, though. Even with block times of one minute it is easily possible to underestimate a fee, the mempool to fill up, and your transaction to be delayed. The solution to this is enabling RBF so you can bump your fee, not shorter block times.

The reason not to do so is the big increase in stale blocks you would get with a one minute block time, which would result in more potential double spends and therefore mean you would be waiting for more than a couple of confirmations anyway. Not to mention all the increase in wasted work.

I suppose it depends in your jurisdiction. If you have been evading a wealth tax, then of course you will have to face the consequences as and when your tax authority finds out. But if your jurisdiction only requires tax to be paid when you cash out, such as with capital gains tax in the US, then I'm not sure what else you should do. The IRS have specifically said that if you have only bought bitcoin, and not sold/spent/traded it, then you do not need to declare it. I struggle to see how they could prosecute you for not declaring your holdings when they have specifically said you don't need to (although that's not to say they wouldn't try).