In crypto for 5 years and keeps all his coins on a non-trustworthy exchange. Mistake one.
Reads constant stories about people having their accounts locked and funds seized and thinks "It won't happen to me." Mistake two.
Does nothing but buy coins on his account for 5 years, and never once tests withdrawing coins. Mistake three.
After 5 years of only buying, suddenly moves almost all of his coins off the exchange to "other places". Mistake four.

I would attribute equal amounts of blame to Coinbase and the user in question here. Obviously Coinbase is a terrible exchange with non-existent customer support and you should never keep your coins on it, but even if you had a fiat bank account that you did nothing but deposit to for 5 years and then suddenly tried to empty, they would probably block your withdrawal until they investigate it a bit more.

I did all that for months. Reported thousands of spam posts, reported hundreds of threads to be locked due to them being spam megathreads, reported hundreds of threads to be trashed entirely because they were low quality or a duplicate of an already existing thread. Even after my busiest days of many hundred reports, only the first page would be cleaned up, and by the time I woke up in the morning, it was complete mess again. We can report individual posts and threads until hell freezes over, but without either real action taken against the spammers and the campaigns which pay them, or maybe a couple of dedicated sub-board mods who can monitor the board near-constantly and delete/lock spam threads before they even get started, then nothing will change.

This is the crux of the matter. The spammers spam because they get paid for it. They get paid for it because of shitty campaign managers who don't care about the quality of their participants, and it is the rest of the forum which has to deal with the consequences. I've caught a couple of signature spammers who delete their own posts and then repost the exact same posts the following week to get paid, and the manager did not pick up on it. This is not an isolated incident, and is proof that many managers do not even read the posts of their campaign participants.

Why should the managers get paid for doing nothing, while it is the forum users who have to sacrifice their own time (with no reward) to clean up the mess? We need to start banning managers who don't manage their campaigns properly, or even better, banning the campaigns altogether to incentivize future campaigns to choose reliable managers.

Sure, but there is no way to, calculate, assign or verify such a value based on your rules without requiring each node to look back and analyze multiple transaction chains for every new unconfirmed transaction it receives.

So instead of the person making a transaction paying a fee, every bitcoin user has to pay the fee with the cost of the slight devaluation of their coins since you are introducing excess new coins in to circulation.

And how many casual bitcoin users would understand your multiple rules and how they function? It's far easier to download and use a Lightning wallet which will deal with all the channel open and closing for you.

Too late for that - it's already through the Senate. And sure, politicians might not be completely dumb, but they are bought and paid for by banks and Wall Street, which, is has emerged, was likely the reason behind Senator Shelby objecting to every cryptocurrency amendment proposed in the Senate.

It has passed the Senate, and now it is headed to the House of Representatives. "Congress" refers to the entire legislature, both the Senate and the House together.

There are already some Representatives in the House talking about proposing new amendments to the cryptocurrency provisions. The House won't be back in session until the 23rd August, so you've got a little bit of time to contact your Representative and express you concerns: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Here's what I said about Bitcoin Discussion three years ago:


Nothing has changed. More and more senior members either don't post in it or ignore it entirely. 90% of the replies in any thread over about 3 pages are just repeating what has already been said. Trying to have a good discussion is near impossible - you can maybe get 4 or 5 good posts in an actual discussion before the spam starts rolling in and drowns it out.

Locking spam megathreads is one thing, but as I've said elsewhere, it does nothing to address the underlying issue. Given that there are tens of thousands other threads, and anyone can open as many threads as they want, the spam will continue until we either starting actually punishing spammers and their signature campaigns, or we absolutely blitz the section and spammers learn not to post in it anymore, such as you get in Mining or Technical Discussion. The second option will just lead to the spammers spilling over in to other boards, though, since they have to hit their quotas and we don't punish campaigns which pay for such trash posts.

Then just keep an eye on the mempool and make your transaction when it is empty. Or just pay 1 sat/vbyte and be patient - over the last month it has never taken more than a day for a 1 sat/vbyte confirmation to confirm, but the majority of the time it confirms within the hour.

For transactions which fit all of your rules - especially not having a large number of inputs or outputs - then you are looking at somewhere in the region of 200 - 500 vbytes, meaning 1 sat/vbyte works out at around 10 to 20 cents at current prices. Is that really too much to pay for a transaction? It's probably less than the electricity cost would be for the proof of work you want people to do to earn a free transaction. If that is still too much for you, then open a Lightning channel for 10 cents and make as many transactions as you like essentially for free.

I had assumed we were talking about wallets and collections of addresses rather than individual addresses. It is reasonable (even if not practical/possible) to want to freeze an address which is storing your life savings on it (or a portion thereof, since it is good practice to split large holdings across multiple different wallets), unfreeeze it to spend some portion of the coins on it, and then send the remainder to a different but also frozen change address. Alternatively to have some system which allows you to generate and freeze say 20 addresses at once, so you always have pre-frozen receiving and change addresses.

Incidentally, this all happens automatically when you use a multi-sig wallet, with every new receiving and new change address that you generated automatically protected by at least 2 different private keys.

I often reported users with a comment along the lines of "I have x number of good reports against this user for spam in the last 30 days, please consider a ban", which was easy to do by simply visiting my reporter stats page and searching for their username. Even when I the number of reports I (never mind anyone else!) had against that user was in the order of 50+ or even 100+, they did not get banned.

Because when it comes to reporting spam, there is no point. I don't care about gamification, or rewards, or badges, or anything else. All I care about is being able to have an intelligent discussion without spammers. But as I said in an earlier post, I could spend nearly every waking hour doing nothing but reporting posts (and indeed, it felt like I did do this in the past) and see next to no difference. If you delete a bounty hunter or sig spammer's post, they are simply incentivized to make 3 more to make sure they definitely hit their quota even if other posts get deleted too. If we aren't going to take any real action against the spammers, then you might as well be asking users to use a cup to empty a bath, while refusing to turn off the faucets.

If I though my thousands of reports would actually lead to change, rather than only cleaning things up for a matter of hours, I would be back at it in a heartbeat.

So then you would be well within your right to report it. If I had my image deleted, I would know the community thought it was spam. If I posted it again and it was deleted again, then there would be no doubt in my mind. If I did it another 8 times, then I can't really complain about a temp ban. If that's still too lenient, then increase it to 20 posts or 50 posts in 30 days. Even then we would find no shortage of accounts hitting the threshold.

As I said above, the 96 bits aren't lost or unused. But even if you assumed they were, these bits being lost or unused would not change the fact that bitcoin has 2¹²⁸ bits of security.

You need to decide whether you are trying to protect against someone brute forcing your private key (which will never happen) or discovering a back up of your private key.

It does practically provide more security, but this only really becomes relevant when considering quantum computers in the relatively distant future.

Not necessarily. Most decentralized exchanges charge lower fees, and if you don't find an offer with a spread you like you can simply create your own.

All the biggest centralized exchanges have been hacked in the past. You absolutely cannot trust them.

That's some DeFi scam nonsense. Truly decentralized exchanges cannot really be hacked because they are not holding any coins or any personal information.

Having your identity stolen can lead to tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and damage. KYC is never worth it for some bounty nonsense which will be worth a few bucks at most.

Average fees include all the transactions made by exchanges and other big services with grossly overestimated fees. They are not indicative of what you actually need to pay. If you look at the mempool for June and July, more often than not you could pay 1 sat/vbyte and still get a fast confirmation.

I'm not sure this would work either. Either you allow the person broadcasting the transaction to set the flag and nodes don't check it, in which case everyone can flag every output as "allowed to be spent for free", or you make nodes check or assign the flag themselves, in which case they need to perform a deep dive in to the history of every transaction they receive, which is a huge amount of additional work. And every node needs to repeat this work on every broadcast transaction.

I have literally never paid that much to transfer bitcoin ever. If that is the average amount you are paying to transfer bitcoin, then you either need to educate yourself about fees, use a better wallet which lets you set your own fee, or both.

Simple! You charge a fee.

And how do you stop them from abusing it, short of charging a fee? As soon as you do it on an "honor" system or something similar, then it will be abused almost immediately.

Wyden's amendment was the same one as discussed earlier in this thread - the Wyden/Lummis/Toomey amendment. It was blocked by Senator Shelby. It was then absorbed in to the combined Toomy/Warner/Lummis/Sinema/Portman amendment which was also blocked by Shelby. The bill has now passed the Senate with the original terrible wording.

The next step is that the bill will go to the House of Representatives to be debated and potentially amended there. The House is supposed to be on recess until September 20, but Steny Hoyer has said they will likely return much earlier, as early as August 23, to consider this bill. So everyone's got another 10 days to start contacting your Representative.

There is certainly some movement in the House regarding amending this bill. There was the tweet from Tom Emmer (co-chair of the Blockchain Caucus) which I linked to above, and earlier today there was this tweet from Anna Eshoo, who apparently is a close friend of Pelosi: https://twitter.com/RepAnnaEshoo/status/1425854869122998273

The CEO of BitTorrent working for the Chinese Government. How far has that company fallen!

Bitcoin will always be safe against the regulation of centralized exchanges. The worse things become for centralized exchanges, and the more they have to invade the privacy of their users (not to mention freezing coins and accounts), then more and more users should start moving away to decentralized exchanges and peer to peer trading. This is only a good thing for bitcoin, and further bolsters its decentralized and censorship-resistant nature.

In your theoretical set up, you still need two pieces of information - your private key and your "unfreezing" key, code, password, or whatever it is. What difference does it make if you swap that second piece of information for a second private key? In both set ups you need to back up and use two pieces of information to spend your coins.

The other 96 bits are still used, despite the address space being smaller. You can't cut the last 96 bits off of a private key and still derive the same addresses.

Which is why I suggested escalating levels of temp bans first. If you've been temp banned four times already for spamming, and are still continuing to spam, then you are never going to change and banning you permanently is a suitable "last resort". Exceptions can be made as they are with the plagiarism rule for less black-and-white cases.

I don't disagree that spam/repetitive/redundant threads need locked, but this does not address the underlying cause of the problem. There are always more threads to post in and spammers can also open new threads faster than they can be reported and locked. Spammers chasing a paycheck will always find a way to reach their quota, whether or not 90% of threads are locked. It will just make the unlocked threads even more unbearable. The only solution is to starting handing out real punishments to the spammers and the campaigns which encourage them.

Pretty much. I was doing 100+ good reports a day pretty consistently for months. Now I only report the most grievous of rule breakers - malware, phishing, selling stolen credit cards, that kind of thing. After I've reported the same spammer 50+ times and they are still getting paid to churn out more one liners as fast as I can report them, then what's the point?

I get that, and you'll know from previous discussions that I'm as staunch a defender of free speech as you are, regardless of how much I disagree with that speech. But your right to free speech doesn't also give you a right to destroy the possibility of having an intelligent discussion on Bitcoin Discussion because there are 10 nonsense replies for everyone 1 meaningful one.

Another opinion I share, and upon searching, discovered I said pretty much exactly that to you in another conversation 3 years ago. We are sounding a lot like broken records here.

Completely agree. The worst part is that we already have very clear rules regarding signature campaigns and spamming, but they have gone completely unenforced for years.

I think what we actually need are some hard rules for how much you can spam before you are banned.

I have dozens, even hundreds, of good reports against some users. I've reported users stating as such and pleading for a ban. I've opened threads in Meta about obvious bot accounts from crypto news site which spam the Press board constantly, pleading for a ban. I've opened threads in Meta about accounts which post literally the same posts every week, deleting them and reposting them each week to max out bounty/sig rewards with zero effort, pleading for a ban. It never happens. I recently discovered one of these accounts which was kicked from its sig campaign for this behavior had happily enrolled in a new one.

Why should I continue to waste hours of my time, which is far more valuable than that of a chronic spammer's, continuing to report these users, when they receive literally zero punishment?

I would propose that if in the space of 30 days (rolling) you have more than 10 posts deleted for spam, then you automatically receive a one week ban. This increases to 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, permaban, on subsequent offenses. (Replace numbers as you see fit.) Every signature campaign that has a member banned for spamming receives a negative point, and after x number of negative points that signature campaign is booted from the forum.

How many senior members even venture in to Bitcoin Discussion anymore? I know several that have that entire board on ignore it is such a spamfest. I could sit on that board 18 hours a day doing nothing but reporting spam and not even make a dent, because we take literally zero action against the spammers or the campaigns which pay them.

I really don't want to hash this out with you for a second time. I would suggest you go and watch any of the recordings of the Senate proceedings from the last couple of days (they are all freely available on YouTube), where you can see them discussing exactly this issue. When the people whose jobs it is to interpret the bill think that the wording includes miners, nodes, and devs, then that's what is going to happen. When the people who actually wrote the cryptocurrency provision in the bill (Senators Portman and Sinema) then file an amendment to correct it because they agree the wording is too broad, then it doesn't matter what you or anybody else thinks - the government thinks that miners can now be classed as brokers, and so they will do that as and when it suits their purposes.

If you think you understand the bill better than the entirety of the US Congress, then great for you. But as far as they are concerned, this wording allows miners, nodes, and devs to be classified as brokers. It doesn't matter how stupid you think that is - that is the conclusion they have reached, and so that is the conclusion that the government and IRS will work on unless we get the bill amended.

If a user is only sending bitcoin once a month, then what is the issue with paying a few cents equivalent in a fee?

Further, how do you plan to differentiate a casual user from a power user without KYC, given that any user can generate as many different addresses as they want? An exchange could just keep user deposits on individual addresses and not consolidate them since they know they can then process withdrawals for free.