Justin Sun is a marketer, nothing more. Tron is complete trash, with large parts of the code plagiarized from other projects and poorly mashed together, and it does nothing that Bitcoin or Ethereum already do far better. His acquisition of BitTorrent Inc has completely ruined the company and screwed up development of the BitTorrent protocol. He knows how to get newbies interested in his pump and dump scams, but that's all. Someone who thinks he can get away with stealing code from others and passing it off on his own is not the kind of person to sit down and make sure he is meticulously complying with rules and regulations.

Still, $10 million is but a slap on the wrist for Poloniex. With daily volumes of $150-200 million and trading fees up to 0.15%, this is like a month's profits for them.

Not only cheaper, but also far more secure and better for my privacy than using the aforementioned unnamed payment processor, not to mention that by refusing to use them you aren't supporting their anti-bitcoin ethos, their attacks on privacy, their cooperation with blockchain analysis, their decision to freeze or reject some payments, and so on. I'd much rather use a reputable non-privacy invading coupon or gift card seller as the middle-man than use a bitcoin payment processor which actively works against everything bitcoin stands for. In fact, I flat out won't use this payment processor at all, meaning it's either gift card or I take my business elsewhere.

I completely agree. However, it usually works like this: I pay with BTC, a payment processor middleman accepts BTC on your behalf, you receive fiat. I'd love more merchants to start accepting bitcoin directly or with self hosted payment solutions such as BTCPay.

Huge tax revenue? Hardly. This bill would raise an estimated $28 billion in taxes from cryptocurrencies. Compare that to the $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill and the $2.3 trillion omnibus spending bill last year. Compare to the $1.2 trillion spending in this very infrastructure bill, and another $3.5 trillion in the next budget bill. And we now have a Fed balance sheet rapidly heading for $9 trillion. $28 billion in taxes is absolutely minuscule in comparison. You could gain multitudes higher than that by simply closing some (not even all!) tax loopholes that multi-national corporations use to avoid taxes. You could gain multitudes higher than that by removing the tax exempt status of religious organizations.

Absolutely. The statement "Land of the Free" is little more than propaganda at this point.

If you look at statistics from various developed nations around the world, you'll find that of the elderly population around half don't own a smartphone and up to a third have never directly used the internet. Think about how completely ubiquitous the internet is in your life today - communication, social media, news, banking, shopping, working, education, gaming, gambling, etc. And yet millions of older people live just fine without ever touching the internet.

This number will obviously drastically decrease as time goes on, not because more older people will start using the internet (if they haven't used it in the last 20 years, they are pretty unlikely to start now), but because the demographics of older people will change to become that of people who started using the internet in their 30s and 40s, and then to become that of people who grew up with the internet from childhood. New technologies don't become widespread through universal adoption of the current population, but rather through widespread adoption of the younger generation.

Yes, the elderly population right now might struggle to use bitcoin, but in several decades' time when the elderly population is compromised of people who have grown up using bitcoin, then it will be second nature to them.

As to saying that "blind people pay with paper money", that is just plain false. What do you think is easier for a blind person - using an ATM, navigating the screen, withdrawing cash, and then feeling for the size of bills to know which ones to hand over, or just paying via contactless credit card? Do you think it is easier grocery shopping in person in your standard supermarket, or using online shopping with screen readers and saved favorites? There might not be any good bitcoin wallets for visually impaired users at the moment (and I would imagine double checking addresses without sight will be particularly difficult), but they will come with time and demand.

I also don't plan on buying one for $300, but I did see this video a couple weeks back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2zWGCCF8mo

It's a bit drawn out and could use some much better editing, but it gives you a good idea of how the device works. I quite like the validation process of scanning a QR code from their website with the device and then entering validation words, but I'm not sure how easy something like that would be to spoof or bypass. It has a boot counter, which is cool.

However, I really don't like that its standard back up is to a SD card, with the advice to store the decryption key for this back up in a password manager, all the while saying that writing down your seed phrase is only for "experienced users".

And how do you choose who gets to use the free transactions? There is no way to set up a system where "everybody gets one" or something similar without some ridiculous KYC requirements. If you allow something like "10 per block", then you guarantee that the mempool would be permanently filled with a huge backlog of free transactions, and you can also guarantee some people would set up bots to auto-rebroadcast their own free transactions, and so the average user would be no better off. And what would be the incentive for miners to pick up a few free transactions over paying ones?

Most small exchanges are scams anyway. If you are going to use a centralized exchange along with all the disadvantages it brings, complete KYC, give up your privacy, risk the security of your coins, risk having your account locked, and so on, then you might as well stick to a big name exchange who (you would hope) will have somewhat better security procedures and customer support than some tiny no-name exchange.

I'm more interested to see how they are going to apply this legislation to decentralized exchanges, specifically fiat/bitcoin DEXs. At its simplest, a decentralized exchange simply connects two parties. If you want to argue that putting a buyer and seller in contact with each other constitutes "effectuating a transfer", then you also make platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and this forum in to brokers. Even if the DEX in question provides an escrow, what if they have no part in the escrow address, such as Bisq's 2-of-2 multisig escrow between buyer and seller? Regardless, Bisq will not comply with this ridiculous legislation and good luck blocking it since it runs locally over Tor.

I doubt it. The bill reads entirely like it was written by people with almost zero understanding of bitcoin or cryptocurrency. It seems they are genuinely surprised there has been such a backlash. They thought crypto would be an easy target for some extra tax revenue, copied some legislation which applies to stocks and bonds and slapped it on to crypto, and are now having to backpedal and actually educate themselves about the thing they are proposing and the entire sector they were so close to destroying. With continued pressure we can maybe get enough Senators to support the far better Lummis-Toomey-Wyden amendment, but I doubt many (or indeed any) of them will really understand what they are voting on or why it is important.

It's a disgrace that our entire country continues to be ruled by a bunch of Luddite boomers who are bought and sold by the banks and media barons.

Not yet.

Here is a section of what Portman said on the floor (emphasis added):


A solution is being worked out (he says), but until it is introduced, voted on, and passed, then nothing is final. It also sounds now like everyone who wrote this bill had no idea what they were proposing, basing the entire bill on what happens for stocks, and are only now starting to realize that there is a lot more to bitcoin, due mostly to the huge numbers of calls and emails they have reportedly been receiving.

So keep up the pressure! Also, here's a site which will clearly show if your Senator is an enemy of bitcoin: https://didtheyvoteagainst.me/

No, of course not. They have been evading regulations and governments since their inception, moving their headquarters God knows how many times (China, Japan, Taiwan, Malta, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Seychelles, Jersey...) to try to avoid various rules and requirements. Obviously, things have finally caught up with them, with multiple jurisdictions restricting some aspects of their business or banning them altogether. So know they are trying to be seen as being "proactive" and complying with everything left, right, and center, in an effort to retain their customers and maintain their profits.

My guess is that Brooks came in with a view to try to sort things out and comply with regulations, has realized with a complete shitshow Binance actually is, and has decided to get out before he gets too involved and becomes liable for any of the mess he inherited or left behind. Not a great look for Binance.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Saudi Amarco did buy out Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan, and a bunch of other ASIC producers, stopped selling ASICs, and just produced a bunch of ASICs for themselves. Even then, as you say, they would still need a significant period of time to build enough ASICs and get them all up and running before they could come close to anything even approaching a majority of the hash rate. In the meantime, you now have a massive unmet market for ASICs. There is absolutely zero chance that no one would step up and meet the global demand for more ASICs during that time, continuing to push the total hashrate higher and further out of reach of any one company or entity to reach a majority.

By market cap: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
They are third behind Apple and Microsoft.

Because every new update carries a risk of introducing some new bug, some new vulnerability, breaking some feature or process, and so on, even if it has been extensively tested. If the update is not going to be fixing any serious issue, and is only introducing new features you aren't going to use or support for new coins you don't care about, then there is no real reason to update immediately.

You can find the changelog for Safepal firmware and software here: https://safepalsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047721832-Changelog

The last time a firmware fixed any issues or bugs was v1.0.24 which was released on February 16th. The version that was released a few weeks ago as you state simply adds support for some altcoins.

You sound confused.

You cannot generate "new sendable addresses" for coins that are being sent in a transaction. Inputs to transactions in the form of UTXOs can only come from the address they were previously sent to. You should generate and use a new address for each time you receive bitcoin from someone else and each time you return bitcoin to yourself as change. But once you have received bitcoin, you can only spend it from the same address which received it. This is the reason you need to be careful about combining different inputs in to the same transaction, because it links those addresses together with common ownership.

Maybe. Maybe not.

There is nothing at a blockchain level which can identify different addresses as belonging to the same wallet. If I create a new Electrum wallet today with 100 addresses in it, the only person who knows those 100 addresses are linked in the same wallet is me.

For these addresses to be linked in the publicly viewable blockchain, then you need to make transactions which link them together. For example, if you use Address A and Address B together in the same transaction, then those addresses can be linked. If you send coins from Address A to someone else and receive some change to Address B, then it might be possible to link those addresses as belonging to the same wallet.

There are other ways that transactions can link addresses together, and you can also leak information about your addresses in other ways, such as by querying them all through an Electrum server.

I don't think it would be such a bad thing. They already have far too much power in the cryptocurrency sphere, from the exchange, to Brave browser, to Coinmarketcap, to their own shitcoins, and so on. One company having so much power over users, what they buy, what they see online, even how coins and exchanges are "ranked", is not a good thing. Having them broken up a bit would be a good thing, in my view. Not to mention that having so many users' data and so many funds being stored by one exchange is a huge target for hackers and a huge security risk.

Not necessarily. It's been obvious to everyone for quite a while that unverified non-KYC accounts will not last, and will eventually be clamped down on entirely. We don't need to wait on Congress passing laws to that effect to know that it is coming. We know that crazy leverage will be clamped down on. We know that these ridiculous interest and lending accounts will be clamped down on.

This statement from CZ should be taken as a warning to all Binance users. Expect more restrictions, more KYC requirements, more privacy invasion.

Lowest common denominator. People who are interested in the tech, development, use cases, etc., are discussing bitcoin in this forum or github or similar, and are not reading click bait news articles. The people who are reading these trash articles are the same people who are commenting "When moon?" and cashing pump and dump shitcoins.

The more ridiculous the price prediction, the more clicks you get. No one cares if you predict the price will move by 1-2%.

So just as I suspected in my first post, a pure click bait headline based on absolutely nothing concrete from the first article. Why is it so hard to get some decent journalism regarding bitcoin and cryptocurrency? It seems every news site is filled with half truths and outright falsehoods and only care about clicks.

If you read my last post higher up in this thread, I explain why that isn't going to happen. You can't just instantly create an enormous mining operation consisting of 51% of the hash rate out of nothing.

Please actually read the thread before replying. Rengga Jati has already answered this with a link to an official statement.

No, it cannot be extracted using Ledger Live, Electrum, or any other wallet app or software. Being able to extract private keys from a hardware wallet would defeat the purpose of the hardware wallet.

Yes, you need to work from the seed phrase, using Ian Coleman or any other open source software which lets you do this. As you say though, this is a significant risk if you don't know what you are doing and should only be done on an airgapped computer in an emergency situation.