I know that hindsight is 20/20, but it seems like this hedge fund has seriously FOMO'ed at the peak of the bull run, and I didn't expect this kind of behavior from professional traders. The last bull run had a huge growth - from $200 to $20,000, and expecting it to go to 6 figures in short period was very unrealistic. I guess investors thought that everyone was adopting Bitcoin for long term, but in reality it was just a speculative bubble.

So, apparently there's an event called Proof of Keys, it happens on Bitcoin's birthday (Jan 3rd) and participants simply move any coins that they hold on any wallets they don't control (like exchanges, online wallets, etc) to their own Bitcoin wallets. Read more here: https://wr.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/abzrzf/the_monetary_sovereignty_warcry_proof_of_keys_jan3/

I personally didn't do it, because I'm super lazy, and also I use a cold storage setup, so it would be slightly  inconvenient for me to move my coins back to online sites tomorrow (I'm investing a little bit in crypto casinos and sometimes trade on exchanges).

So, tell me if you have participated or not and explain why.

I think it's time for us as a community to stop caring about criminals using Bitcoin, even in cases that gather mass attention.

I've seen a title of a report about the same events as this article, except it didn't mention Bitcoin - which is a sign that the rest of the world have stopped caring a long time ago that criminals demand ransoms in Bitcoin.

I don't think our history has any precedents when something that existed for thousands of years was quickly replaced by a new thing. It would take Bitcoin a few hundreds of years to replace gold, and who knows what will happen with BTC in that time?

Besides, Bitcoin and gold are different, one is physical, the other is digital, which makes them both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Both will be used as store of value, that's for certain.

They are not a safe haven because they are still too volatile and their cycles have much higher magnitudes. 80% drop seems to be pretty normal for a Bitcoin bear market as it happened many times already, but with traditional markets it would be an apocalypse.

However, Bitcoin tends to increase in its value over the long run, so it might be a good safe haven on a scale of 5-10 years. But in this case investors should avoid altcoins, because most of them don't live that long, and they usually perform worse than Bitcoin.

Historically altcoins have performed like leveraged Bitcoin, so they could have been used to generate massive profits. The key is to not become a fanboy and only view them as tools.

This pattern still hold today, but it can't hold forever - there's no place in this world for thousands of coins, and altcoins keep failing to find users who'd adopt them for their unique features like, for example, smart contracts. So, now might be a good time to start seriously thinking about dumping alts.

LiveOverflow - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClcE-kVhqyiHCcjYwcpfj9w
It's not a channel about cryptocurrencies, but it has some very good videos about cryptocurrency-related cybersecurity as well as cryptography. I highly recommend it to those who want to learn more about security, which is in my opinion a very important topic for anyone involved with cryptocurrencies.

"TIME has also not always treated crypto so favorably. As recently as October, it claimed Bitcoin was “only making it worse” specifically for women to access banking services. It has also delivered controversial statements about the sector, including describing blockchain as crypto’s “more respectable cousin.”"

The article they referenced: http://time.com/5431809/blockchain-financial-inclusion-gender-gap/

Pretty much the general nocoiner FUD about expensive transactions, lack of scalability, and then they also argue that Bitcoin is not inclusive because transactions are irreversible, so the new users will be losing their money when they will make some mistakes.

I remember well how at the beggining of 2018 people were saying that at the end of the year we'll have a new ATH, and there was a lot of support for this prediction amongst newbies on this forum. But as Bitcoin kept falling, people realized that there's no chance of any bullishness in this year, so the general opinion grew negative towards those perma-bulls who continued promising us quick recovery. The lesson here is that even if you are a strong believer in BTC, you shouldn't be scared to make negative price predictions, it's not the same as FUD, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin is dying, it's simply a natural part of the market.

There's nothing revolutionary about streaming the flight data, this idea isn't new and it in fact has been implemented a long time ago - read more details here: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/egyptair-crash/some-airlines-stream-black-box-data-cost-keeps-others-offline-n580966

The coinidol article and their source both do poor job describing how blockchain is better than traditional communication.

This is why we are likely to see Bitcoin banks. People can teach their grandmas to use Bitcoin wallets, but it's impossible to teach their grandmas enough cybersecurity to prevent them from losing their coins. And things will get harder in the future because as adoption growth, hackers will spend more effort on finding ways to steal cryptocurrencies.

No, they shouldn't, things like that can also be a security risk, and it also gives more power to developers, which isn't a good thing. This would require all Electrum clients to connect to some trusted server that can relay messages, and this would be against Electrum's philosophy of decentralization.


I guess you don't understand how Electrum works. There are no official servers, anyone can run a server. The hacker has spawned many servers to make as many people as possible to connect to them. The problem here is that malicious servers could display a popup when people sent transactions. This was a flaw in the software, it wasn't clear that that was just an error message that came from a server, and attackers had the ability to write arbitrary text there.

2019 is too soon, we (probably) haven't even passed the bottom yet, and after the bottom there's usually a long period of stagnation and very slow recovery. Then there's a bull market which lasts a year or two, and only at the end of there's a new ATH. Although after the price has surpassed the ATH of the previous bull run, almost every day becomes a new ATH during a bull run.

This is why it's wrong to blame the victims. People here so often say "it's your own fault for downloading fake wallet", but it only means that Bitcoin's user experience is not yet ready for mass adoption. I can easily imagine my friends or relatives losing their coins to this attack or some of the previous attacks.



Perhaps other wallets have many vulnerabilities too, and Electrum gets attacked more frequently because it's very popular. But I'm going to stop using Electrum if the next vulnerability will be critical or if Core will get a decent GUI.

From the article in the original post:

" A litany of concerned users are reporting their wallets have suddenly been drained out – without any notification or action on their side."

This is bullshit, people who lost their coins were tricked into downloading and running malicious client.

"When ‎entering a login and password, the site steals funds from user ‎accounts.‎"

The site is github, it doesn't steal anything. The theft occurs after victims open their Bitcoin wallet files with their new malicious wallets.

What we can learn from this attack to avoid something similar in the future:

1. Read everything very-very carefully, especially things like links to websites, repositories, etc. Always verify the signatures of the developers.

2. Don't panic, don't immediately rush to follow some instructions. Instead, check the official website, official repository, this forum for more details regarding the issue.

3. If you are simply holding coins in cold storage (as opposed to running a business, for example), you'll be safe from majority of potential attacks. This means you have more time to wait for more details regarding the issue.

4. Be slightly suspicious of all patches and hotfixes, there's always some risk that developers or their accounts and private keys were compromised. Again, carefully study the issue before acting.

There's no arguing that Core is better than any other wallet, but it's wrong to dismiss other wallets. Electrum has been around for years, it was reviewed by many people, it's one of the most popular wallets, and for a reason.
Almost every software has some bugs, this is a reality. When a serious bug was discovered in Core client earlier this year, people didn't say that it's insane to use Bitcoin, we just accepted that software is not perfect.
The recent Electrum vulnerability didn't render it broken in a sense that attackers could easily steal private keys, it abused error massages from servers to execute a social engineering attack. If you are using it as cold storage, you would be unlikely to get affected because you'd need to get through many steps - first you'd need to broadcast a transaction on your watch-only Electrum wallet that is connected to a malicious server, than you'd need to download a malicious client and install it on your air-gapped machine, and only then your coins would get stolen if you sent some coins again.

Bitcoin ecosystem remains a harsh place for unexperienced people, and for anyone involved it's important to develop a deeper understanding of cybersecurity.

Being up to date doesn't make you immune and it's obviously is not the reason of infection. I've turned off updates on my windows 10 a year ago and to this day I haven't got a single case of malware. You just need to be very careful about what you install on your machine, regardless of the platform. Also, use the admin account if you don't need to, because it makes very easy for malware to do anything it wants.

There's nothing bullish in ransomware, people who buy BTC to pay up their ransoms are nothing compared to daily volumes. Then, there's no guarantee that criminals don't sell BTC asap. Also it tarnishes Bitcoin's reputation.

Chaotic and random are very different things. Randomness means that a result can not be predicted with certainty, chaotic means that the result is very hard to predict because of very complex relations.

Markets are obviously not random because humans are not random. But they exhibit chaotic behavior, especially on small scale, because there's a big number of people involved and it's impossible to predict their decisions at one given moment.

But in the long run markets are driven by fundamental factors, like in your example the American economy growth throughout the decades, so naturally the DJIA is growing too. Bitcoin is a new and successful technology, so it grew a lot since its inception. No need to seek some conspiracies to explain their price.

Well, that quote, that gets attributed to Churchill without much evidence of him ever saying that, shouldn't be taken literally, it just means that some people who claim to fight fascism exhibit authoritarian features of their opponents. But you're right, considering how people tend to take things literally, it's better to avoid such charged words.