Data from Coin.dance - corroborated by other sources The news story here is that they use bad metrics to estimate hash rate. That data doesn't jive with the last 2016 blocks. Could it that a big group of miners agreed to each to suddenly stop their operations in unison so that they can create a market scare? That doesn't sound like rational behavior to me. |
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I don't get it. People keep asking for legislation, licenses, and other legal frameworks and now they complain about the results. I definitely wasn't asking for it. I don't think anyone was asking for something so severe as the BitLicense. Four years later, less than 20 cryptocurrency services in the world can operate in New York. That alone indicates what a massive barrier to market entry it is. Using centralized services has a cost, your privacy, if people want to use them, in this case, they're not eligible to say it is 'too intrusive'.
For the sake of the crypto ideology?. Oh yeah, with a centralized service... Start to follow the decentralized model so. It doesn't have to be so black and white. We can support more sensible and less burdensome regulations. There was at least one bill submitted in the New York Assembly that would repeal the BitLicense regulations in favor of a less burdensome state audit system. If the NYDFS is not entitled 'to invent' regulation, then what? A law won't be much different if they think a statute will be less intrusive...  Legislators have had four years to watch the BitLicense cripple the industry in New York. At this point, if it were repealed on constitutional grounds, we might find the legislature more receptive to better policy standards. |
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Bakkt has quite a stash of Bitcoin gathered in the last months. So Bakkt can only "sell the news" indeed. They only opened deposits a few weeks ago, so I'm not sure how stocked their warehouse is. Is there data available somewhere? To be clear, Bakkt doesn't own these bitcoins. They are custodian and central counterparty. It's institutional traders who are selling on Bakkt, not Bakkt themselves. And considering the low volumes so far, it wasn't Bakkt traders who were driving the market down, but regular spot traders. |
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Beware of malicious USB cables. They can come with hidden software/hardware built in that can download and execute malicious software once plugged into your device. Read more about the threats here and here. Best to avoid buying cheap knockoff cables or using public charging kiosks, which are prone to juice jacking attacks. |
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That is one tradeoff of using a VPN instead of using a VPS as a 'private' VPN. You can't really know for sure if a VPN provider is keeping logs. In some cases, you can be reasonably sure. Twice now, Private Internet Access has been subpoenaed for subscriber information in major criminal cases. In both cases, they were unable to provide any data that could link online crimes with a user's identity. That's why when someone asks for a VPN recommendation, I always recommend PIA. |
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The SEC is not creating new regulations. They are only applying existing laws like the Securities Act and Securities Exchange Act. These laws were loosely written such that cryptocurrency-based securities still fall under SEC jurisdiction. The same goes for the CFTC, IRS, FinCEN -- they issue guidance regarding existing laws but they don't write new laws.
The New York state governor can make executive orders, but the DFS cannot. I am no expert on New York constitutional law, but I see no obvious reason why Chino and his lawyers are wrong.
Agencies, like the FDA, EPA, OSHA and at least 50 others, are called "regulatory" agencies because they are empowered to create and enforce rules -- regulations -- that carry the full force of law. Individuals, businesses, and private and public organizations can be fined, sanctioned, forced to close, and even jailed for violating federal regulations. The oldest Federal regulatory agency still in existence is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, established in 1863 to charter and regulate national banks. Just a quick search just confirms on what I am saying that agencies part of the executive department can not only enforce regulation but create them as well it is call "rulemaking" under the Code of Federal Regulations they can create their own regulation as long as it abides the current and existing laws of the USA or in a particular state.Emphasis mine. I'm aware that regulatory agencies promulgate regulations -- but they cannot be created out of thin air. At the federal level: The regulation must lie within a grant of power from Congress, and that delegation must in turn be constitutional (courts almost never invalidate a regulation on this ground). The power must be granted in the agency's organic statute, and extends so far as fairly inferrable from the statutory language. In other words, a federal regulator needs statutory authority from Congress to promulgate regulations. They can't simply grant themselves new powers, which is what the DFS did. If you read the administrative rules, there is not a single reference to existing statutory law. What law is it based on? Regulators passing new laws without statutory authority is a clear constitutional issue. This is like a police department rewriting the laws they are tasked with enforcing. You can check out different answers in Google but you will see mostly the same answer that they are in fact rulemakers.
They are rulemakers, not lawmakers. |
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1. The vulnerable addresses are the ones reused, from where people have sent out Bitcoin and they keep receiving coins there. Satoshi's untouched coins are safer than you'd think. The Satoshi addresses are just as vulnerable as reused addresses. The early versions of the Bitcoin software mined blocks to pay-to-pubkey outputs, so their public keys are already exposed. 2. Quantum supremacy is a commercial bulls**t. Quantum computers are too expensive to run and noone will run for such problems, at least now in the experimental phase. And noone will "buy one for himself" just to see if he's lucky and can "hack" those addresses.
I tend to agree. However, we should keep in mind that government researchers may be years or decades ahead of the private sector. |
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Seeing that bitcoin has long been impossible to mine on a regular computer began to ponder the question of why the development team does not seek to switch to another algorithm to stop the mining of coins by large corporations and return to the canons that bequeathed Satoshi. Any POW algorithm will eventually follow the same path towards ASIC production and mining concentration because of the massive economic incentives involved. It's comparable to a heated arms race. You could hard fork to new algorithms often -- bricking existing ASIC miners each time -- but this has security implications. Industrial miners won't be willing to risk securing a network where their operation could be rendered worthless overnight. The network would be limited to much lower hash rates, exposing it to 51% attack risks. It may be worth switching to the pos algorithm, you will not need to spend a huge amount of electricity and investors will be able to receive passive income for storing coins.
The double spending problem hasn't been adequately solved in POS. There is no perfect solution to the problems you're bringing up. Every approach to decentralized consensus has trade-offs. |
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Indeed, I didn't learn about the new FinCEN guidance until a week or two ago. For some reason, there was zero coverage about it in the crypto media. Which is odd considering all the coverage of the FATF, whose rules aren't even binding on anyone. FinCEN's interpretation is pretty far reaching -- perhaps a stretch too far. Why have US lawmakers repeatedly tried to pass bills imposing BSA reporting requirements on cryptocurrency services, if it was already the letter of the law? Something doesn't add up. |
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If you can take measures now, you should.
What on Earth could little old me do? If I pop into the bank and shriek that I'm not leaving until I receive quantum resistance they'll have me carted away. The entire matter is completely and totally out of my hands beyond retreating to a primitive existence in the woods. The one thing you can currently do is consolidate all outputs into unused P2PKH addresses. Any bitcoins held in spent addresses are theoretically vulnerable. A Lamport signature scheme -- the primary candidate for a successor to ECDSA -- would operate the same way, with one-time signatures. Once a private key has been used, it's considered unsafe. |
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This is generally true -- regulators are part of the executive branch. They have authority to interpret and enforce the law, not to write it. I never paid much attention to the procedural details of the BitLicense implementation. I always assumed it was championed by the DFS but ultimately passed by the legislature. Is that really not the case?  According to Wikipedia, the DFS -- a non-elected body -- just created new law. That doesn't seem legitimate I don't think that its true. Even if I do disagree with the whole BitLicense requirement thing a regulation is way different compared to a law created by their lawmakers. Regulations can be quickly imposed by any department part of the government as long as it involved them in fact regulations don't even exist if they don't create one. If the executive branch (the president) can create executive order (EOs) then also regulators can create regulations. It's the same thing what the US SEC is doing imposing and creating regulations involved in the crypto industry, Chino's argument is really wrong given on this situation. The better approach would be targeting the regulation itself on how it is unjust for the New York citizens involved or want to be involve in the industry. The SEC is not creating new regulations. They are only applying existing laws like the Securities Act and Securities Exchange Act. These laws were loosely written such that cryptocurrency-based securities still fall under SEC jurisdiction. The same goes for the CFTC, IRS, FinCEN -- they issue guidance regarding existing laws but they don't write new laws. The New York state governor can make executive orders, but the DFS cannot. I am no expert on New York constitutional law, but I see no obvious reason why Chino and his lawyers are wrong. |
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First, there's no real quantum supremacy right now, Google didn't develop a quantum computer that can crack modern crypto today, they have just (supposedly) developer a quantum computer that is better than normal computers in solving some specific small problem. In fact, the problem was specifically designed to be difficult for classical computers -- bit of a hollow victory if you ask me! It’s a hotly anticipated goal, and one intended to mark the beginning of a new era of quantum computation (SN: 6/29/17). But it’s also largely symbolic: The calculation in question serves no practical purpose and is designed to be difficult for classical computers, standard computers that are not rooted in quantum physics. Next, Bitcoin protects public keys with hashing, and they are only revealed when an address is used - since Satoshi didn't send his coins to a reaused address, quantum computer wouldn't be able to easily steal the coins even if it is capable of breaking ECDSA.
The Satoshi outputs are mostly (or completely) pay-to-pubkey, so they actually are vulnerable to a theoretical quantum computing breakthrough: However these early versions of Bitcoin also supported a Pay to IP address feature where your wallet would contact the wallet at a given IP address and request a scriptPubKey to send to. The response would be a P2PK scriptPubKey and thus you would create P2PK outputs.
Blocks too were mined to P2PK outputs, and in fact, Bitcoin Core still does this. Bitcoin Core's internal miner (which is only used for regtest and testnet now), still creates P2PK outputs instead of P2PKH outputs. |
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One of Theo Chino’s attorney main arguments is that NYDFS, as a regulator, can only regulate. The NYDFS is not entitled to “invent” regulation. “[Regulators] can only act within the framework of a statute, law, that has been passed by a legislature,” says Ciric. This is generally true -- regulators are part of the executive branch. They have authority to interpret and enforce the law, not to write it. I never paid much attention to the procedural details of the BitLicense implementation. I always assumed it was championed by the DFS but ultimately passed by the legislature. Is that really not the case? According to Wikipedia, the DFS -- a non-elected body -- just created new law. That doesn't seem legitimate: On July 17, 2014, the department released details on a proposed "BitLicense", which places regulations on any company or person that uses cryptocurrencies residing in New York.[7] The proposed regulations were officially published in the New York State Register on July 23, beginning a 45-day comment period.[8][7] On February 25, 2015, a revised proposal notice was published, beginning another 30-day comment period.[9]
It came into effect on August 8, 2015. |
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Again, it is more than possible. These are the big ones in the USA that are immigrant-friendly:
Chicago, Illinois
New York City, New York
San Jose, California
San Francisco, California
Washington, D.C.
Sanctuary cities just limit cooperation with the federal government [in immigration enforcement], meaning local police don't get involved. The cities have no power to stop state/federal agencies from enforcing the law, though. The parallel here is that cities have no power to stop state/federal financial regulators either. It doesn't matter how much Manhattanites love Binance if the NYSDFS is waiting to pounce on them! |
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Is Bitfinex started to do KYC slowly for all accounts?
Looking at their Reddit it seems that more and more people are getting hit with KYC when they attempt a withdraw. There's been discussion about this going back a few months. Bitfinex has obviously ramped up their triggers for KYC -- possibly in response to the scathing evidence in the New York case, or possibly in response to meddling from the CFTC who are currently probing BitMEX for allowing US residents. There are hundreds of these frozen account cases now. I wouldn't recommend that anyone trade on Bitfinex if they aren't comfortable completing KYC. |
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i like this.
but how "baked in" to the protocol is locktime? ie it will forever be compatible with whatever official client is in use in 15 or 20 years time? a tx created with locktime today will always work in the future? I don't think you have to worry about that too much. Height-based nLockTime was included in the original Bitcoin implementation and time-based nLockTime was implemented in version 0.1.6. Time-locked bitcoins are one consideration in any fork that limits transaction size -- like the sigops limit Gavin Andresen wanted to introduce. Time-locked transactions that are too large would be invalidated. I doubt such a fork would gain wide consensus, though. |
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I'm pretty sure a good part of the mixers are run by the governmental agencies
this way it is easier to monitor potential criminal transactions and if they missed an opportunity to set up or at least sponsor several mixers
means they are doing a bad job
I kinda get the idea behind that thinking, but has there been any evidence that lead you to being so sure that governments are running mixing services? I'm not sure how they can pull something off like that, because that would mean they are financing the activities they are trying to combat, and that's an illegal act by itself. I wouldn't be surprised if there were honeypots out there. Let's not forget that Bestmixer.io was shut down by the FIOD (Dutch police) and run from Europe -- much like Hansa. Remember what they did?On June 20, 2017, German police arrested the administrators (two German men) and the Dutch police were able to take complete control of the site and to impersonate the administrators. Their plan, in coordination with the FBI, was to absorb users coming over from the upcoming AlphaBay shutdown. The following changes were made to the Hansa website to learn about careless users: - All user passwords were recorded in plaintext (allowing police to log into other markets if users had re-used passwords).
- Vendors and buyers would communicate via PGP-encrypted messages. However, the website provided a PGP encryption convenience feature which the police modified to record a plaintext copy.
- The website's automatic photo metadata removal tool was modified to record metadata (such as geolocation) before being stripped off by the website.
- Police wiped the photo database, which enticed vendors to re-upload photos (now capturing metadata).
- Multisignature bitcoin transactions were sabotaged, which at shutdown would allow police to confiscate a larger amount of illicit funds.
- Police enticed users to download a Microsoft Excel file (disguised as a text file) that, when opened, would attempt to ping back to a police webserver and unmask the user's IP address.
is what a Dutch police said about the operation: 'We thought maybe we could really damage the trust in this whole system.' -Marinus Boekelo, NHTCU ... Which I was eerily reminded of when I saw "YOU ARE NOT ANONYMOUS" courtesy of the Dutch police, plastered on the Bestmixer seizure notice. I really wouldn't put it past those sneaky bastards to run a honeypot. For another thing, it's hard to ignore the sheer stupidity of the Bestmixer admin. Operating servers from Netherlands and Luxembourg in the year 2019? It really makes one wonder. |
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I don't see the point in having an offline system when basically everything today is online. What are we going back to the stone age? This attitude will not end well for you.  The minimum bid to send data is 50 mSat/byte. It's pretty gimmicky since no one is really sending data to the satellite. You upload or type the message/transaction here using a regular internet browser. Once you pay, Blockstream adds your transaction to the satellite queue to be broadcasted. No wonder it's not popular at all, especially bid system where it could get expensive quickly. If there was real demand for it maybe, but I think it's pretty easy to pay the minimum bid. You could broadcast a 250 byte transaction for 0.000000125 BTC = 0.05 satoshi/byte. It's sort of cool, especially because it's payable with Lightning. But it doesn't add any real resiliency to the network. There are already lots of places you can broadcast transactions for free if you have internet access, so it's just an empty gimmick. |
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I not a resident in the United States, but I have a bank account in a support state ( https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360033405572-What-are-the-supported-States-Jurisdictions) My question in. Will Binance.US verify my account? I would like to be able to deposit/withdrawal via ACH (which they support) without being a resident. However I would not like to send all my documents, make KYC and etc and be rejected (it happened before). Have anyone verified an account there or found any useful information regarding this on their website? My interpretation of their terms is that you are not eligible for an account, unless you are a US citizen: 1. BAM SERVICES
1.1. Eligibility.
(b) unless otherwise agreed in writing, you are a U.S. Person but not be a resident of one of the Restricted States. US person means citizen or resident. You might open a support ticket and confirm, but that seems pretty clear to me. |
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Exactly and doesn't the block stream (core?) Team have a satellite literally already in space to be able to transmit without data? I could have sworn this happened over a year ago.
True, you can check it at https://blockstream.com/satellite/. AFAIK there's no cost to use their satellite to broadcast bitcoin transaction, even though you might need few hardware so you can connect to the satellite. The minimum bid to send data is 50 mSat/byte. It's pretty gimmicky since no one is really sending data to the satellite. You upload or type the message/transaction here using a regular internet browser. Once you pay, Blockstream adds your transaction to the satellite queue to be broadcasted. |
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