Wait, so they're saying they can stop the bombings from happening if you send them Bitcoin, but actually aren't the ones who would conduct the explosions? Lmao this sounds like the work of some random idiot. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets tracked down in the next few days.

I hope whoever are responsible for this get tracked down soon. I mean, the NSA is constantly infringing on everyone's privacy anyway, they might as well make the best use out of it. Terror threats like this is one of their primary motivations after all.


It's bad press for sure, but I don't think it'll affect the market too much. I don't think there are many speculators left that will dump just because of this.

The problem with this theory is that things unfolded the other way around. Cryptographers came together and contributed to the project way before it was big enough to be usable by drug cartels. I wouldn't use the term hijack for this either, as it was designed to be free-for-all. So yeah, your conspiracy theory may not be as reliable as mine lmao.

The evidence behind it is extremely circumstantial. Bitcoin's drop in value slightly coincided with the Bitcoin Cash fork, which also coincided with a mining crackdown in China that made several mining farms unprofitable. No one really knows if these are just coincidences or if one directly affected the others, so everyone's entitled to their own (however educated) conclusions.

One thing's for sure though, they're not helping each other lol. The two communities are largely hostile.

You actually can create your own by installing an OS to a flash drive and booting from it. Tails has Electrum built in IIRC. You can also try a persistent Linux flavor of your choice. You need to make sure it stays offline to use it as a de facto hardware wallet though, which means you'll be transferring files back and forth to an online computer. That's not dangerous in itself, but you'd have to take extra precautions, and it's obviously a lot less convenient than actual hardware wallets.

Well not everyone subscribes to this line of thinking, for one. But yeah, the rationale behind this mentality is that Bitcoin is still in its infancy stage. It doesn't matter if you bought at $19k or $4k; you're still considered an early adopter when mass adoption could easily push up its market value to 6-digit figures.

It all boils down to whether or not you believe crypto can reach that mass adoption stage.

If it's for private use then it's better for it to be private, as transparency isn't necessary. Heck, a good old database may even be better than any blockchain in the case you're describing.

If it's for a partnership of several stores to track inventory, etc., a public blockchain may work.

This is pretty typical of any market. Drops are being propped up as an opportunity to increase holdings for less money than normal. This isn't unique to crypto, and neither is it unique to whales. Everyone can accumulate.

But yeah, everyone keeps complaining about whales manipulating the market, but when they apparently manipulate it in their favor, it's fine lmao.

Lol these people don't get it. Mining efficiency doesn't address this problem at all. It's only unprofitable until it isn't, which makes death by this avenue unlikely. I'm not counting on recovery anytime soon, but it's always funny watching people trying to trigger panic.

They are impossible to prevent. It's one of the reasons why Bitcoin is being described as uncensorable. It can't be stopped unless you bring the entire network down, which is virtually impossible. They can be penalized after the fact though, which this case clearly demonstrates. But we'll see, I suppose. Sanctioning a Bitcoin address is unprecedented so we don't know its exact effects yet.

Only the address sending the transaction matters for this case right? The fact that they're using legacy should be irrelevant.


Maybe they're using an outdated wallet that doesn't recognize Segwit addresses?

Nothing's stopping governments from doing this, but this should be fairly easy to bypass for the people involved as they can always generate new addresses. A marked address is essentially useless though, as authorities are likely willing to burn through resources to trace transactions with blockchain analysis.


It has always been bad practice to reuse addresses, so if you have reason to worry about this, you can simply use a different address for each transaction. It's very unlikely for them to tag addresses with very few transactions.

This is probably going to be moved to the Exchanges subforum. It's probably fine here though, as more visibility for these kinds of cases is better.

I know it's fairly obvious, but I believe posts like these are productive anyway just because they highlight the need to be very wary about giveaways.

There's a lot to be gained by claiming to be Satoshi. His influence over crypto development would be no joke to say the least.

The only reason he'd come back now is if he starts being interested in the project again, which I doubt given all the time that has passed. This is also why it's very unlikely he'd be driven by financial reasons. Also worth noting that he probably can't stop market manipulation from happening even if he wanted to lol.

That's probably because they use multiple accounts and therefore have little time to read much of anything lol. But yeah, this isn't going to stop until bounty managers stop accepting project tokens as payment. Projects literally create those out of thin air so they can spam bounties as many times as they want. This also results in subpar bounty manager performance, with neither parties having anything to lose. No one involved is incentivized to push for quality content at all.

You should never do that lmao that's just bad practice nowadays.

If people must insist on doing something of the sort, Duckduckgo is a lot cleaner and advertised sites at the top seem to be easier to distinguish than Google's. I wouldn't recommend using it for obscure services though, or even at all. The safest way is still to type the URL out on your own. Even bookmarks, however unlikely, could theoretically be compromised by malware.

I wouldn't read too much into it as he's obviously playing both sides of the fence. It's pretty good for Bitcoin when all the criticisms leveled against it is about its market value though, because that'll obviously recover with time. It's literally a non-issue.

It's interesting how they're looking into crypto to try to escape sanctions though. The timing is perfect for them.

I don't think it's possible unless someone somehow reworks the blockchain in a way that it keeps all of the advantages of the current system, except scalable, energy efficient, immune to 51% attacks, and completely incompatible with the current Bitcoin. There's also development stalling, but I find that unlikely.

But yeah, as antiquated as Bitcoin may seem, there's really nothing out there that's objectively leaps better. Being a work in progress, it can also always bridge gaps with further development.

I don't see anything wrong with the reasoning presented. Yes, everything can and likely is manipulated, but it's not as black and white as that. There are varying degrees to this, and as things currently are, Bitcoin is more vulnerable to it than other traditional assets. Think about it: a large chunk of the community still believes that a single person could move the market on a whim. You can't really say that about other established assets.

At the end of the day, ETFs are completely under the SEC's prerogative so we can't really do anything to influence it either way. It doesn't have any fundamental effects on Bitcoin either, so it's not like the absence of an approval is a con for the community.

What you're really trying to say is "Let's make Bitcoin expensive again (and profit while doing so)". I have nothing against that sort of mentality, but it's one of the largest contributing factors to Bitcoin's erroneous reputation as a ponzi. It's also true that it's very likely a ridiculous bargain at the moment.

But yeah, again, I'm not against this at all, I just want to point out that Bitcoin is still Bitcoin. There's no greatness to be talking about -- its market value dipped is all.