i think he was implying that yobit's infrastructure is out of reach of the russian authorities, which is probably true. BTC-E structured themselves the same way.

as the WEX case showed, the russian police could just $5 wrench attack the admins---if they are in russia. however, the arrest of pavel krymov (alleged yobit founder) 2 years ago in moscow appears to have accomplished nothing as far as yobit's operations go.

the mystery continues.

don't use your coinbase account to participate in controversial (or certainly illegal) activities---that's the long and short of it. coinbase and other exchanges are essentially banks. that was actually part of the basis for this ruling. the 4th amendment does not protect banking records.

this ruling doesn't apply to your personal bitcoin transactions, and unless the government has cause to bring litigation against you (for example, the nonprofits you are donating to are classified as terrorist organizations) facts like that wouldn't come out in open court anyway.


gemini, kraken, bitflyer, etc would do exactly the same thing if subpoenaed in this case. no USA-based exchange executives are going to risk being held in contempt of court (read: go to jail) just to save their customers' privacy.

did you really expect coinbase to defy court orders to turn over data to the IRS? i'm just being realistic here.....

fair enough.

you shipped it 2 weeks in a row, nicely done.


you were crushing everyone else but i doubled up twice on you. that A8 vs JT hand would have been the 3rd double up if not for @imaginethat. i was your kryptonite!

anyway, nice job today. good odds you got the mystery bounty too. not a bad way to end that streak of no cashes!

good game all, see everyone next week!

the internet made radical politics more accessible but i suspect wage stagnation, falling living standards, and the general realization that ordinary people growing up today will never own a home, has more to do with it. we've been on a grim trajectory for many years now---long before the coronavirus pandemic, which is just an accelerant.

my read on generation z is they are much closer to political radicalization than millennials, who are still clinging to their tiny house dreams and robinhood accounts. they more so see the writing on the wall, and they lack the political idealism that rallied millennials behind politicians like obama. i see them becoming increasingly leftist (whereas obama-ites were very centrist) and apolitical in the mainstream sense of electoral politics.


people are also becoming less and less fooled by the conflation of "socialism" or "communism" with the USSR. marxism-leninism and certainly stalinism and maoism are widely viewed on the left as extreme perversions of marxism. and marxism is certainly not the totality of socialist thought either, even if its economic theories have been influential.

i don't see the connection to free markets. bitcoin's economic policy may be static and non-interventionist but it's just an asset or commodity. its economic policy has no bearing on whether markets are free. that is determined by market interventions, regulations and other barriers to entry, welfare entitlements, subsidies, cronyism......


if you prescribe to a capitalist paradigm, then yes. the austrian school isn't just an economic theory but also a political philosophy that embraces private property, the subjective theory of value, and political individualism.

often forgotten in this conversation are left libertarians---like mutualists and other anarchists---who embrace political individualism and free markets but reject private property and the subjective theory of value. most anarchists would assert that capitalistic markets are not "free markets" at all because they are hierarchical. this is the gist of it:

i hung in there for a while but ended up bubbling. 5th place.

i was short-stacked on the BB, @webtricks limps, @imaginethat limps, i shove 5x to isolate @webtricks (big stack), @webtricks calls......then @imaginethat (small stack) calls with KT.



i am slightly tilted by @imaginethat's preflop call since he would only have 5bbs left behind after the flop---seemed kinda marginal given ICM considerations. KT would be an underdog against my range heads up, let alone in a 3-way pot. oh well, can't count on fold equity every time.....

18 players---2 full tables. still missing a few of our regulars, but it's good to see @Iv4n back.

at least you'll still be in decent position after last week's finish.

i'm not running so hot today myself. i never capitalized when i had monsters and chipped down on a couple dumb hands, one of which i was only in because i misclicked. i'm in 11/12 at second break. blinds are about to increase and i'm getting pretty short stacked with 9bbs left. i'm gonna have to make my stand pretty soon.....

they just periodically block commercially advertised HUDs, which in turn deters some of them from being produced at all. i don't think it takes much work to do that. it's part of the whole branding of their poker room---fun and casual, no boring games full of rakeback grinders like pokerstars.

i'm obviously talking about what happens if they don't flop, so that's not the most interesting objection.

a half dozen european countries, china, japan, and the USA are all looking into CBDCs. there is clearly a lot of momentum behind the idea, partly because the coronavirus pandemic has revealed weaknesses in the banking system re the ability of banks and bureaucracies to meet immediate liquidity needs. sure the idea might flop, but there are good reasons to believe it won't.


compatibility isn't required for what silbert is talking about. it would just be the ultimate ideal, so that CBDCs could eventually be traded against cryptocurrencies using decentralized protocols.

CBDCs are not like banking networks since they allow users to sidestep banks entirely. for example, it should be much easier to find p2p bitcoin liquidity if everyone has fed accounts instead of dozens of different banks and e-money services.


doesn't that apply today? what does that have to do with CBDCs?

on the other hand if CBDCs do catch on then banks, merchants, brokers, etc will need to support them. that will in turn create new incentives to support cryptocurrencies, as stated above. will every company in the world integrate crypto? of course not, but that's not the point.

thanks for confirming. so the rumors are true.


not exactly. all we know for sure is they reserve the right to charge you cash advance fees and interest if you use your credit card to buy cryptocurrency.

bank of america currently blocks credit card transactions at known cryptocurrency exchanges. this change might indicate they plan to lift that ban, but we don't really know. this is what they said in 2018:


i don't see what has fundamentally changed since that time. they may just be asserting their rights to charge higher fees/interest where they identify settled crypto-related transactions.

i'm pretty happy as long as we can get 2 full tables going.

i wonder where @Iv4n has been. he was all hyped up to play last week then he never showed up. @1r0n1c, @CCwatcher420, @CoinEraser and @cygan were missing too. i hope to see all you guys on the felt tomorrow! we need our regulars!

i'll admit, when i first read about this stuff, that's what came to mind---repetitive/boring effects like playstation and dreamcast era madden and nba 2k. but it's not 1999 anymore. CGI and sound effects have come a long way. the scope of spectator activity will be exponentially bigger now.

just watch this reel and tell me you aren't impressed: https://www.themill.com/stories/our-cg-crowds-reel-is-here/

barry silbert (of grayscale/GBTC) disagrees. https://cointelegraph.com/news/central-bank-digital-currencies-are-good-for-bitcoin-barry-silbert-says


he has a point. CBDCs require infrastructure that could be extended to cryptocurrency. it would therefore be attractive for banks and brokers to begin offering cryptocurrency services to generate commissions, interest, etc.

i also see CBDCs---especially if blockchain-based---as having better potential for frictionless interaction between fiat and cryptocurrencies than current online banking systems.

that's easy. FOMO---fear of missing out. people don't care about 5% cash advance fees and 29% interest if they think bitcoin is gonna make them a millionaire inside of a year. that was the psychology in late 2017.

i don't blame the banks in cases like this. customers are borrowing cash (leveraging) to buy risky investments. it's the banks' prerogative to charge them for the privilege, and to hedge against the increases risk of default.

if customers don't like it, they can avoid those fees and interest charges by investing the responsible way like the rest of us---with their own cash.

biden is more electable than hillary was. people still underestimate how hated she was, and not only among republicans. the democrats are much better positioned with a political dud like biden than her.  

but yeah, i still think it's not far from a coin flip, which is why these are decent odds to bet trump. i'm still hoping for one more dip, but waiting for 3.33+ might turn out to be greedy.


The coronavirus may have mutated to become more infectious, Dr. Anthony Fauci says

that's the last thing trump needs, indeed! if reopenings get rolled back and especially if states go into full lockdown again, his eternal coronavirus optimism will backfire and the markets will take a big shit. if trump can't even pump the stock market, then what the hell is he good for?

i haven't seen it confirmed by any reputable news outlets yet. the rumors are based on this letter supposedly received by customers:



either way, this is nothing to get excited about. they are just saying explicitly that cryptocurrency purchases will be treated as cash advances---subject to fees and higher interest rates.

if true, it's probably a preemptive reaction to the recent jpmorgan settlement. the bank agreed to pay out $2.5 million for charging cash advance fees/interest to coinbase buyers without providing them adequate notice. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/67184/jpmorgan-chase-agrees-to-2-5-million-settlement-in-legal-fight-over-crypto-purchase-transaction-fees

a few specific wallets have questionable UI that makes unconfirmed low fee transactions (including RBF) appear to have been "received". that's all. the "vulnerability" is purely a wallet UI issue, and it actually pertains to all unconfirmed transactions.

it's rather dubious that the researchers are framing this as if RBF is the issue at all.

whether or not they use a blockchain, it's no different than the current fiat system. a CBDC just allows the central bank to remove banks as middlemen by giving people direct accounts with the central bank. this gives the central bank much better economic data and control over the currency, and in cases of economic stimulus and entitlements (like direct stimulus payments and unemployment benefits) money could be transmitted much more efficiently than through traditional bureaucratic methods.

a slew of european central banks are now experimenting with their own CBDC too. i think the pandemic and subsequent inability to effectively get cash to the population was a wake up call for them. they don't want the kinds of economic shocks we saw in march/april again. they want better control over the flow of money.

they would need to go outside of their established security protocols and dump private keys from their bitcoin hot wallet. that's rather risky, which is the more important factor for me.

i'm fairly sure coinbase (and most exchanges) structure their key architecture in a way that would make it costly in terms of man hours vs the financial benefit customers receive. it sucks, but customers really ought to heed the warning virtually every altcoin-supporting exchange posts on the deposit page---that deposits on the wrong chain will not be credited.

for example, this is what kraken has told customers in the same exact situation:


bittrex takes another approach. although they refuse to recover coins in a bunch of different scenarios and will deny any request at their discretion, they will usually recover coins in this case if your deposit is big enough and they are informed immediately. they will charge a sizeable fee:


that fee rises to 0.25 BTC in cases of removed wallet support or unsupported ERC-20 tokens. if the lost deposit is big enough, i reckon coinbase might be willing to recover it too.

anyway, there are lots of good reasons to shit on exchanges, especially coinbase. this is not one of them IMO. i don't mean to be insensitive, but if you send cryptocurrency to the wrong address, you should be prepared to lose it.


they can't just "sweep" the addresses though. they have to dump and import them into a different wallet on a different blockchain. that carries very, very serious security implications for their bitcoin hot wallet.

tbh, i wouldn't like the idea of customers fucking up and exchanges constantly manually dumping private keys to bail them out. it puts the security of all user deposits at risk.

who registers to bitrefill?

lol at that douchey support response. based on my experiences, that guy must have started working there in the last few months. it sounds like they're gonna keep misinforming customers, not realizing how alienating this is. they should at least learn how to word their prompt in proper english and stop accusing customers of spending unconfirmed inputs when they haven't.

bitrefill should seriously consider having at least one person in the company who is well versed in communications and marketing. it's consistently obvious they don't.