You can read their terms regarding this here (emphasis added):


Being abroad does not mean you are no longer resident in the US, unless you predominantly live abroad and take up residence in the country you are residing. If you haven't done this, then you are still a US resident and are banned from using their service, regardless of your physical location at the time.

Their terms are also quite clear that if you breach these rules, they can close your account and may not return any coins they are holding for you at the time.

What country are you looking for?

You can use bitcoin to buy gift cards for a number of pharmacies. Sites like Bitrefill have gift cards for CVS and Walmart, and Coinsbee have cards for Target, if you live in the US. I don't know of any offering cards for for Walgreens though. Otherwise, you can check out other countries or other gift card providers as needed: Gift cards providers

If you are looking for some unlicensed/illegal pharmacy, then as stated in the link that Loyce shared, then you are risking your coins and your health.

"To support the ongoing security of all Binance users"? Please. Why can exchanges not for once just be honest with their users? Literally no one thinks this is driven by "security concerns". Just come out and say "Due to our desire to continue making as much profit as possible, and various governments threatening to limit our activities if we don't do as we are told..." I'd have far more respect for you if you were just honest instead of coming out with some flimsy excuse about users' security.

A temporary workaround. Full KYC requirements will come to all exchanges sooner or later, and all non-verified accounts will cease to exist completely before long. If you want to trade without the snooping eyes of exchanges and governments monitoring your every move, then you need to start using a decentralized exchange.

Not sure what you are talking about here. It's definitely received merit.

Edit: Oh, I see you are still on the 2021 timeline. My bad. Here's how the thread looks in 2024 -

Like most things healthcare and medical related, you have a deep misunderstanding of how hospitals work.

It sounds like you could achieve the kind of set up you are looking for with a 2FA wallet. It's not exactly the same as freezing an address, but it would achieve a very similar outcome:

With your credit card, someone can steal your credit card or steal your credit card number, and not be able to spend your money unless they can also break in to your credit card account and hit the "unfreeze" button.

With a 2FA account, someone can steal your wallet file or steal your private key, and not be able to spend your coins unless they can also break in to your phone and access the 2FA code.

The downsides to this approach are that Electrum's 2FA charges an additional fee, but you could get around this by using a manual multi-sig set up. You also need your wallet and 2FA app (or both wallets if doing it yourself) to be on different devices, so the compromise of one device doesn't lead to the compromise of both factors/private keys needed to sign a transaction.

Both Calyx and Graphene mostly only support Pixel phones. There is also LineageOS - https://www.lineageos.org/ - which supports a much wider range of devices, including most phones from LG, Sony, Samsung, Motorola, and many others. You can see their full list of devices here - https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/.

I think you are doing a bit of a disservice to some of these open source alternative OSs. Lineage, for example, has been around for years, has hundreds of contributors, and has a community of hundreds of thousands of users. They have a very active GitHub and Gerrit, a busy subreddit, and an extensive wiki. It is a far cry from a one-man-project by some random internet denizen.

Good idea. Natural News is a pseudoscientific quackery site run by conspiracy nutjobs. The entire article is utter nonsense.

The hospital directory they refer to hasn't been updated since 2016, which you can see if you follow their link and download the PDF. She didn't start working there until 2018-2019. If you really believe she is some fictitious character, you can check her licenses here:
https://abme.igovsolution.net/online/Lookups/Individual_Lookup.aspx
https://www.abim.org/verify-physician

Grandview does not have any pediatric inpatient beds. What a shocker they have not admitted any pediatric patients!

The data actually show that for the last week of reported data (16th July), there were 127 patients with confirmed COVID in the hospital and 10 in ICU. Feel free to look up the data yourself here: https://healthdata.gov/Hospital/COVID-19-Reported-Patient-Impact-and-Hospital-Capa/anag-cw7u

Wrong, as the data show.

Ahh yes, the writer of a blog who has no medical knowledge has never met any of these patients knows they can all make a quick and speedy recover. Come on. This is beyond stupid.

Oh no! The humanity! Imagine a hospital with no pediatric beds not admitting pediatric patients! Next you'll be telling me my local drug store hasn't admitted any pediatric patients either!

I could keep going, but the rest of the article is similarly misreporting the data (I suspect intentionally), or just flat out stupid.

But of course, BADecker won't care that that entire article is utter bullshit, because it backs up his baseless opinions. So he'll ignore this post, and continue to fire out bullshit articles from bullshit conspiracy nuts and their bullshit blogs in to every thread on this board.

That might be what the word "theory" means in layman's terms, but it is not what it means in scientific terms. A scientific theory is established knowledge which is supported by all the facts, observations, and evidence available.

The germ theory of disease describes how microorganisms cause diseases, but no one, not even crazy anti-vaxxers, argue that the existence of germs is "just a theory" or a best guess.

This is all correct. Quantum computers, if and when they reach such a stage, will be able to exponentially speed up solving the discrete logarithm problem, which means they can calculate a private key from a public key. They will only be able to linearly speed up the process of reversing a hash function, meaning that it will still be impossible to calculate a public key from an address.

If you store coins on a brand new address, which only you know the private and public key for, then they will remain safe against quantum computers, since quantum computers cannot reverse the hash processes used to create the address. If, however, you store coins on a reused address, then they will no longer be safe against quantum computers, since the public key of the address is revealed in the blockchain whenever that address makes a transaction, and quantum computers can use that publicly revealed public key to calculate the private key.

It is also better to rely on seed phrases or private keys as opposed to individual wallet files, since that guarantees compatibility in the future.

If by "votes" we are talking about hash power, then that's exactly what it means. If someone consistently controls 51% of the hash power, they become a centralized third party which can censor any and all transactions they do not like. At that point bitcoin is no longer trustless, decentralized, or censorship resistant. That's incredibly unlikely, yes, but never impossible.

The idea of bitcoin might survive such an attack, but bitcoin itself would only survive with a hard fork to brick the attacker's (and everyone else's) ASICs, or something similar.

As much as I think almost all altcoins are either trash or scams, bitcoin is not the only possible incarnation of a decentralized peer to peer currency. The idea might never die, but that does not mean that bitcoin is invulnerable to attack.

There is no requirement to own bitcoin to attack it. A government which sees it as a threat to their fiat monetary system could be attempting to preserve their wealth by attacking bitcoin.

No idea. I don't really follow altcoins very much. The only altcoin I hold is Monero, for obvious reasons given my feelings regarding privacy.

Ethereum Classic was made because a majority of Ethereum developers decided they wanted to reverse some transactions which had taken place on the Ethereum network, not unlike a 51% attack. Those who decided that developers shouldn't be allowed to reverse transactions they don't like forked the network to create Ethereum Classic.

I agree with OgNasty in that I think bitcoin would probably survive a short and specific 51% attack. By that I mean a 51% attack which double spends a handful of specific transactions, as opposed to a prolonged and sustained attack just mining empty blocks to censor the entire network, or something similar.

There are too many people involved in bitcoin who either don't care or don't understand the importance of a 51% attack, blocks being orphaned, or transactions being reversed or censored. Look at some of the "top" altcoins. Ethereum - not a classic 51% attack but effectively the same result (majority of hash rate reversed some transactions), creating Ethereum Classic in the process, which itself has been 51% attacked several times. XRP, USDT, BNB - completely centralized, can have transactions reversed or censored at any time by their owners. BCash - successfully 51% attacked. And yet all these coins continue to have volumes of billions of dollars and attract new users.

Provided that the 51% attack was short lived, and bitcoin continued to function normally afterwards, then there might be a hit to the price, but I don't think it would be the end of bitcoin.

I would assume that you would be periodically updating your instructions, say every 6 months or so, so they are not being used 10 years after you wrote them. Even if Electrum (for example) stopped being developed today, in 6 months' time there would almost certainly still be Electrum servers running and easily sourced copies of the latest version to download. Even if I stopped using the forum today, it would be unlikely for 3 other senior members who have all been around for many years to all stop using the forum within the next 6 months too.

Maybe some advice along the lines of "Only listen to people with positive trust and 1000+ merit" might be better? Not foolproof for receiving good advice, but better than listening to any old user if you know absolutely nothing about bitcoin.

I would never hold my bitcoin with a third party in the first place, but if I were holding it on BlockFi, I'd definitely be trying to withdraw it now.

BlockFi are a fractional reserve system. The money you deposit to BlockFi is invested elsewhere or handed out as loans. I know they are fighting against these rulings and their official stance is that BlockFi products remain fully operational, but the courts could turn round tomorrow and shut them down or freeze certain accounts and assets. You could end up with your coins locked up in limbo for an undetermined amount of time, or if there is a major ruling against them causes lots of users to start to panic withdraw their coins, you could end up with a bank run and no coins at all.

Is the risk of losing everything really worth it for ~1% a year? You will see plenty of gains just by holding bitcoin in your own wallet, without the additional huge risk that these custodial services bring.

The block explorer will be correct. If they are showing the transactions as completed, then they are completed, but for some reason they are not showing up in your Electrum wallet.

The first thing to do is double check the addresses you sent coins to and looked up on the block explorer match exactly the address in your Electrum wallet. If they do match, then it is most likely a sync issue as has been discussed in the posts above. If they do not match, then you need to figure out where those address came from. Did you generate them from a different wallet, Electrum or otherwise?

Addresses do not have a "created" date. What you created in Electrum was a request invoice for that address. Again, double check that the address you looked up on the block explorer matches exactly the address in your Electrum wallet. If they do match, then I suspect you have already used that address to receive coins, but since your Electrum is not syncing properly, when you created a new request invoice Electrum selected that address as it mistakenly thought it is unused.

Just because you have nothing to hide, doesn't mean you have anything you want to share. You don't need to be hiding something incriminating to want privacy; privacy is a fundamental human right. The loss of privacy leads to the loss of freedom. With zero privacy, would you behave the same way in public as you do around friends? What about when in your own house, alone? Would you feel comfortable publicly declaring every thought you think, regardless of how ashamed it makes you feel? Of course not. With zero privacy, you would quickly be reduced to the lowest common denominator, too afraid to say anything slightly out of the ordinary and too afraid to be your true self.

Everyone values privacy. Otherwise why do you have curtains on your windows? Why do you wear clothes? Why do you post on this forum from a pseudonym, rather than from your real name with your physical address in your profile?

Those laws are still being debated, as far as I can tell. No (reasonable) country can punish you for holding bitcoin you didn't declare for 10 years when they are only just making it mandatory to declare it now.

Still, I assume they will want a simple statement of "I own 1 BTC", as opposed to wanting you to report individual wallets or addresses, given that lots of people holding their coins on custodial exchanges and wallets and so wouldn't be able to provide such information. So there is a still a significant privacy improvement from government surveillance (not to mention surveillance by third parties) by using non-KYC peer to peer trading over centralized exchanges.

So how does that work in practice? You take the average value of bitcoin over the year? Or you take the spot value of bitcoin at the end of year?

Well, the CDC have only just been discussing the potential of boosters shots this week, so no, no dates yet. Although it may be that it is only the immunocompromised who require a booster.

There is a famous quote from a famous professor of computer science which goes like this:


The point he is making is that no can every possibly be 100% secure. There is always a chance that someone who isn't meant to be able to access it can, or that someone who is meant to be able to access it "goes rogue" and steals/sells the information on it. Any exchange which is "guaranteeing" the safety of your data either don't understand this basic fact, or understand it fine but are deliberately lying to their users to instill false confidence in newbies. Either way, I wouldn't trust anyone who makes such a claim.

Binance have been hacked for thousands of users' worth of KYC data in the past, so they absolutely can't guarantee anything: https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/binance-kyc-data-leak.html

Which jurisdictions require you to pay tax simply upon on acquiring bitcoin? Most that I see discussed on these forums only require tax to be paid when gains are realized, so when your bitcoin is sold, exchanged, spent, etc. Certainly that is the case in the US. Even if I bought 10,000 BTC 10+ years ago for a dollar, I owe no tax on my now ~$400 million stack (nor do I even need to declare it) until I start to offload that bitcoin.