True, but taproot would keep the multisig transactions as small as possible, and if he does pay attention to his UTXOs then he could potentially save money over "unfreezing" unnecessary UTXOs only to have to "freeze" them again. Seems like the simplest solution to what he wants to achieve.

A very poor headline.

The representative from a bitcoin mining operator has approached Saudi Aramco and said "We'll pay you to let us use your flared gas that is otherwise going to waste". Of course they are going to say yes to free money, but that doesn't mean they are "interested in mining bitcoin". If Saudi Aramco start buying miners and building their own mining operations, then sure, but for the time being a third party company is simply asking to use some of their excess resources to power their miners.

Since flared gas is simply wasted and burned in to the atmosphere, it is quite interesting that the article states that the amount of gas that Saudi Aramco wastes in this manner could power half of the global bitcoin hashrate. Half the network from the wastage of a single company! Perhaps next time someone complains about the environmental impact of bitcoin we could invite them to turn their attention to Saudi Aramco instead.

It isn't a mystery, like, at all. Around 97% of COVID hospital admissions in the US are in the unvaccinated, and around 99% of COVID deaths in the US are in the unvaccinated. There is no doubt whatsoever that the vaccine is safe and effective.

For future reference, the way around this is to insert your own wallet in between the bitcoin exchange (Shakepay in this case) and your Forex broker.

If you set up your own wallet in which you own the private keys, such as by using a piece of software like Bitcoin Core or Electrum, or by buying a hardware wallet such as a Trezor or Ledger for added security, then you can guarantee that you will always have access to the same addresses and they will never expire or be unlinked from your account or anything else that an exchange might do. You can withdraw from the exchange to your own wallet, and then from your own wallet deposit to the Forex broker (or whomever else you are sending bitcoin to). If they insist on only sending bitcoin back to the same address it came from, then that does not pose any issue at all, since you are the sole owner of that address and you can use it as many times as you like (although reusing the same address endlessly is bad for your privacy).

From the article you linked to:

This is another very good point. If you want to use bitcoin, then everyone you interact with, from wallet developers to nodes to miners to exchanges could be required to collect your KYC. How long do you think it will be before a massive hack or leak of this information? The Ledger database hack, for example, has led to large number of successful scams and an absolutely massive number of attempted scams, including some fairly sophisticated attacks and threats of physical violence. And that's just based on the knowledge that people own a hardware wallet, with no knowledge about how much bitcoin they own. Do you really want your KYC details attached to the fact that you just moved a significant amount of bitcoin, or attached to your cold storage wallet addresses? Say goodbye to plausible deniability or any sort of privacy.

Thing is, this doesn't just affect US citizens, but will affect everyone who interacts with any US based service, company, entity, or individual. I can't verify that you are not a US citizen and don't require me to send you a 1099 unless you complete KYC to prove it.

I usually don't care about regulations being passed forcing centralized exchanges to do certain things, because if you value your privacy or security at all then you are already steering well clear of centralized exchanges. But this bill is an absolute mess and will affect the entire bitcoin ecosystem. Contact your representatives and tell them to stop this now.

I appreciate all that. What I'm saying is that I don't care enough to either check the exchange rate or not buy the product or service. If I'm going to use bitcoin as a currency (which I am), then I'm going to use it as a currency, and that means spending it when I need to spend it without thinking "Maybe if I wait till tomorrow I'll get a better rate on this product/service". Just like with DCA for holding, if you just spend it when you want to spend it then it all averages out over time. Sure, sometimes I'll pay a bit more and sometimes I'll pay a bit less, but that's a price (pun intended ) I'm willing to pay for using bitcoin as a currency.

Only if there is an item being sold for USD, and I want to sell the necessary amount of BTC to have enough USD to buy that item, which I never do. Anything I can buy with BTC, I buy with BTC. Anything I can't, I buy with USD. I couldn't tell you the last time I actually just sold some BTC for USD in a straight exchange.

But I don't see it change every single moment. I see a price displayed when I place my order on a website or when I take my goods to the cashier to be rung up. I don't ask for their conversion rate to USD to see if I'm getting a good deal in USD, and very rarely do I look up the going rate on a web browser myself (usually only if I think something seems expensive in terms of BTC, I'll check if there has been a big price swing since the last time I looked at the price, which could have been weeks ago). Why, when everything else about the transaction is measured in BTC, does it make sense to single out the fee for consideration in USD, especially when the fee is almost always a couple of hundred sats, or in the case of a Lightning payment, completely negligible.

As I said, it is none of my business what the merchant does with the BTC once he has received them.

That's the point I'm making. I generally don't think of the price of the product in USD.

Only if you select a fiat option in the preferences. If you don't select a fiat, then no fiat rate shows.

That's also true, and even if you ignore the fact that Tether only hold about ~5% of the total USDT in cash (yes, 5%, you read that right: https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/tether-march-31-2021-reserves-breakdown.pdf), then holding USDT is even worse than holding fiat in terms of security and gradually but steadily losing money.

It's a token. It was initially launched on Bitcoin's Omni layer, and then spread to an Ethereum ERC20 token as well as a token on a number of other altcoin platforms. Because it is run from a smart contract, Tether have the ability to blacklist coins, freeze transactions, and issue new coins, all from any address, at any time. It matters not if you've moved your USDT on to an Ethereum address generated from an airgapped machine. Do something Tether don't like, and your coins are worthless. Not to mention at any point they could just give themselves a few billion tokens and dump them on the market. (Although if you look at the exponential rise in their marketcap - from $20 billion to $60 billion in the last 6 months - some might argue they are already doing exactly that.)

The merchant can price things in a fluctuating amount of BTC, pegged to a certain amount of USD or other fiat, if they choose. Of course. No problems there. But I have no knowledge of what they are doing with the BTC I send them, nor do I care to know. They could immediately convert it to USD, they could hold it forever, they could pay their staff or suppliers with it, they could buy some shitcoin. Their choice, and none of my concern. All I know is there is something I want to buy for x amount of BTC, I will send the merchant x amount of BTC to purchase that item, and I will pay the fees for this transaction in BTC.

Honestly, I do this multiple times a week. Usually the only reason I know that the bitcoin price has swung significantly is because of posts on this forum. I pretty much never check the price in terms of USD before I spend or use BTC, and I never think of the fee I pay in terms of USD.

And the things I cannot buy with bitcoin I buy with USD. And when spending my USD I think in terms of USD, and any credit card fees or other such fees I calculate and consider in USD. Just as when being charged sales tax on an item I'm buying in USD I don't think of the additional charge in BTC, then when buying an item with BTC I'm not going to think of the fee in USD.

There is a great Twitter thread about this here: https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1421150344051048451

Essentially, the definition they are applying is so broad as to encompass pretty much anyone they want it to encompass:


It could be argued that everyone from node operators and miners to software developers are providing a service which effectuates transfers of bitcoin. This bill would require them all to collect KYC from all their users so they could issue them all with a Form 1099. This isn't just a huge threat to your privacy, but to bitcoin itself. If they get what they want, then best case scenario we have nodes KYCing users before accepting their transactions to be relayed and refusing transactions from nodes which don't enforce KYC. Worst case scenario they simply ban bitcoin since it is completely impossible for miners to collect KYC for every transaction they mine or wallet devs to collect KYC for everyone who downloads their wallet.

Call your member of the House and Senate directly. Or use the phone number and advice here: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stop-the-senate-from-sneaking-through-total-surveillance-of-the-crypto-economy-call-517-200-9518/

If you don't want to call, then email them. You can also contact senators Kyrsten Sinema and Rob Portman directly at the following links:
https://www.sinema.senate.gov/contact-kyrsten
https://www.portman.senate.gov/meet/contact?office=37

Just to expand on this point which hasn't been mentioned in the answers above:

Exchange have lots of other transaction which happen "behind the scenes" which you don't see, but they need to pay for. It's not as simple as just paying for a single transaction when you want to withdraw. Any coins you deposit are consolidated with coins from lots of other users in to a central hot wallet. Coins from this hot wallet will be moved back and forth to cold storage as necessary, or moved to separate hot wallets, or further consolidated, and so on. Then, when you want to withdraw, coins will be taken from this central hot wallet in a batched transaction to many users. So for each withdrawal transaction you make, there may be 3 or 4 (or perhaps many more than that) other transactions which have had to take place first. Most exchanges price this in to their withdrawal fees.

Having said all that, the withdrawal fees for almost all centralized exchanges are ridiculous and are pure profiteering. Most exchanges vastly overpay their transaction fees to keep their users happy, but even then, probably about 80-90% of the withdrawal fee you pay is just profit going in to their pockets.

It certainly seems that way from what OP is saying, but that is not how they work. They work like every other centralized exchange, and batch customers' funds together for storage and withdrawals. See their post here - https://blog.shakepay.com/bitcoin-transaction-batching/. And you can also see plenty of posts on their subreddit confirming that withdrawals are indeed batched.

It sounds like Shakepay generates a new address for each deposit, and the Forex broker is sending coins to an old deposit address which is still valid for OP's account, even if he can't see it on his Shakepay account. I'm not sure about the whole "must send to the same address which deposited" thing though, which does not make sense given we know that Shakepay batch their withdrawals.

Then just use a multi-sig cold storage set up combined with a standard single-sig wallet. The single-sig wallet can be a hot wallet for portability and convenience, or can be a hardware wallet or cold storage itself for added security.

Think of your coins in the multi-sig as "frozen". No one can access them without gaining access to 2 (or more) private keys, just like someone wanting to use your credit card needs to gain access to 2 factors - your credit card itself and your online account. When you want to "unfreeze" the coins, send them from this multi-sig address to your single-sig address and make as many transaction from this single-sig as you like. When you want to "freeze" them again, send them back to the multi-sig cold storage.

The bonus of this set up is you do not need to "unfreeze" your entire stack, and can choose to only "unfreeze" as many coins as you want to at the time.

There are double the amount of counterparty risks. Obviously there is all the risk from depositing your coins with a third party lending platform, and there is also all the risk from holding a centralized coin which is owned, operated, and controlled by a single entity and is not backed up 1-to-1 with USD as has been claimed. You are at double the risk of default, double the risk of bank runs, and double the risk of losing everything. All for what? 0.5% a year? No thanks.

You can still move USDT to a hardware wallet, for example, but as you rightly point out, it remains entirely centralized meaning Tether can choose to freeze your coins and addresses and render your USDT worthless, even if it is in cold storage.

A 50% drop from current prices is only back to $20k. That is absolutely within the realms of possibility. We may well never see that price again, but what a great time to buy the dip if we do.

I don't actually use Ledger Live beyond using it to update firmware, and it has none of my coins or accounts visible on it, but does the password not at least encrypt the data? Is it completely bypassable for someone with physical access to your computer? Pretty major security flaw especially when it comes to passphrases and hidden wallets if someone can just bypass your Ledger Live password and see all your accounts and the balances on them.

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Ahaha. My phone's autocorrect has a tendency to replace things with medical words I commonly use. My favorite one ever was "I've brought the new intern" to "I've bronched the new intern" (a procedure where we put a long camera down your throat and in to your lungs). Cue several concerned replies from the rest of the team.

Except it would be rejected by the network since the mempool already contains a transaction spending those inputs, and RBF cannot be used since the fee on the new transaction would be lower, not higher.

You are still paying for it, just in terms of electricity and hardware degradation rather than in bitcoin. Nothing stopping you from mining some useless altcoin, dumping it for a few hundred sats, and using that to pay your bitcoin fees.

I disagree. If a merchant is selling something for bitcoin, I am paying them in bitcoin, and we are making a transaction between our bitcoin wallets, then why would we be calculating the fees in USD? It makes no sense.

His last thread has to be some kind of record. "Will not stay above $30k for 10 consecutive days ever again." It then immediately goes above $30k, and 10 days later it is still there. His prediction literally couldn't have been proved wrong any faster than it was. At least when most people make super bearish price predictions it takes a few months to rally and prove them wrong, and not literally as soon as physically possible.

Maybe we can add him to the list of bitcoin obituaries. As an aside, I really like the new timeline layout they have on their site: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

I'll check back in for the thread at $50k.

Given that BlockFi are currently caught up in a bunch of legal battles and are facing having some of their activities and products limited or even shutdown altogether, I think that would be a wise move. I doubt they would actively try to keep your coins from you, but since they are a fractional reserve system and loan out all the coins which are deposited to their platform (how else would they generate their profits), then if lots of people try to withdraw their coins in the face of regulations or legal troubles you could end up with effectively a bank run.

It won't reach the world's GBP in 8 years obviously, but it could very well be worth $4.4 million when the Fed casually prints a few more trillion and USD devalues by another >90%.

The only difference is that the Wallet Import Format key must be compressed for segwit addresses,* whereas it can be either compressed or uncompressed for legacy inputs (although all good wallets now use compressed keys because they create smaller, and therefore cheaper, transactions). There is no difference in the base hexadecimal key, and as above, every private key can generate both types of addresses.

*Note that it is possible to create segwit addresses using uncompressed keys, but these will create non-standard (although still valid) transactions which will not be relayed by nodes.

Correct. Although I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "legacy" and "new keys". Private keys do not differ between the different types of addresses they generate (with the exception of segwit addresses only being created from compressed keys and not their uncompressed equivalent.) Indeed, the same 32 byte private key can be used to generate a P2PKH, a P2SH, and a P2WPKH address.

For example, I can take the following private key (a brain wallet generated from the string correct horse battery staple):


And from it, generate all of the following addresses:


Private and public keys are big endian.