That was precisely my point. The overwhelming majority of people don't look at one line of code. It'd be better to say that they do trust, just not blindly. There's always a degree of trust, even the programmers need to trust their coding skills for proper verification.

The good thing with writing open-source software is that you're broadcasting your statement in public, and everyone is able to join, read your work and extend it. Add to the equation that there's competition among privacy services, therefore incentive for your competitors to find exploits in your code, and you have another game theory; you cannot afford to write bad software in public.

But that's under normal circumstances. When there's cooperation with the enemy, childish responses from developers for our concerns, the head of Wasabi doxxing his competitors and examples of Wasabi coinjoins reusing addresses (were accessible from KYCP.org, but it's taken down), then I don't care about the software. I've simply lost trust.

He handled it terribly. Avoiding the questions, mocking users with a mixer signature, being pro-censorship, and as the icing to the cake, wished death to another fellow user he disagreed with.

Red flags for a privacy service.

Morals talking time.

Surely a matter of topic that has concerned many philosophers and intellectuals. I imagine most of (genuine) Bitcoiners be like "back-to-the-landers", libertarians, with desire to be self-sufficient. However, objectively speaking, taxation is theft. It's taking someone's property without their consent, and it is compulsory. It very much fits the definition of theft, even though you can find it slightly altered in other sources, like the Cambridge dictionary ("the crime of illegally taking something that belongs to someone else")

(That's right dear reader, that was a clickbait!)

The question is rather: Is taxation justifiable theft? A necessary evil? Libertarians tend to argue that it's wrong regardless the intentions. Taking someone's property without their permission is unethical, no matter how good you want to do with it. Others, who support social contract theory, argue that it's necessary and should be seen as "voluntary obligation".

There is no right or wrong answer (un)fortunately. Feel free to speak out loud.

---

My stance on this is that both "groups" bring some compelling arguments on the table, in favor of their ideology. I don't know. I think there's a place where we draw the line. For example, nowadays, I think we've crossed that line (towards more government of course). I don't think we need that much government into the markets.

I also feel really stupid when I see politicians talking about taxing gains from cryptocurrencies, with phrases like "unhosted wallets", or by attacking privacy services. They talk as if privacy invasion is a requirement, or "obligation" as per the social contract theory. I think this really crosses the line.

Oh, alright. It all makes sense now. 

I know you'll deliberately ignore this, but: There is practically nothing preventing me from forging a receipt. I can even buy iamsatoshinakamoto.com, and when asked for a receipt, tell them to write that it belongs to "Satoshi Nakamoto". Here you go, proof that he bought a domain name in 2024.

What I cannot forge is public key signatures. And you know that already. You just want to trick gullible newbies into believing you've got something there. What a scum.

I hit exch.cx on Tor Browser, get redirected to - hszyoqwrcp7cxlxnqmovp6vjvmnwj33g4wviuxqzq47emieaxjaperyd.onion - and the connection times out. Is there a problem?

WabiSabi, as a protocol, is pretty decent. Maybe even better than Samourai. (And I apologize if I have ever argued the opposite.) The problem comes when the development team starts messing with their credibility.

It's been repeated constantly to not trust but verify, and this is the right direction, I agree. But, what people miss in here is that privacy services are reputation based, aka trust based. You do not sell your service with the "don't trust, verify" motto, if your reputation is going downhills. And let's face it, this was Wasabi's reputation for the past two years. They funded blockchain analysis and introduced blacklist filter in the main coordinator, or as I call it, sold out their users and turned pro-censorship. How do you expect the user to feel confident of his privacy if he knows he's funding the enemy?

Maybe the protocol is completely trustless as Kruw argues (even though I still have my doubts in some areas), but the reason people might not be using it, is because of bad reputation.

Wasabi has become more decentralized, which is beneficial for a privacy protocol. This shift eliminates the drawbacks of having a central entity exerting significant influence over the software's reputation. However, I believe people still remain skeptical due to the developers' immature and hypocritical behavior revealed in those last few years.

Buying vistomail, a "receipt from bitcoin.org", signing that you're Satoshi from a random public key, and I don't know what else you might figure out, DOES NOT prove you are or have talked with Satoshi.

You know what still counts as evidence? Signing a message from:

Or from: https://bitcointalk.org/Satoshi_Nakamoto.asc / https://bitcoin.org/satoshinakamoto.asc.

To whoever is dropping the price: ignore the early adopters of this thread and keep dropping for the rest of us.

That's what I'd call an "improper use" of the trust system. Shilling a shitcoin does not make you a scammer. A "shitcoin" is not an objective criterion. Some may call Bitcoin "shitcoin", according to their priorities.

I see Lauda had left several such red tags on people who supported Bitcoin Cash. I wasn't around when Lauda was active, but I know she (or he?) was somewhat established and respected. I didn't understand this line of thinking, to be honest. If someone is a scammer, it is better to describe the specific actions that make them a scammer, rather than labeling them based on ideological differences. (Unless it is clearly evident that the project is a scam)

I was going to comment about the insufficient block subsidies, but then I hit mempool.space, and I saw 262 - 4,020 sat/vb in testnet3: https://mempool.space/testnet/mempool-block/0, so mining them still counts! Lol. 

I don't think so. How much will it cost to rent that hashrate, and for how much hashrate are we talking about? Testnet3 difficulty is really high right now, unless you wait difficulty to drop to 1. Maybe that's how? Even then, you need to have a clogged mempool, otherwise block subsidies are insufficient nowadays.

Too late for Haiku
But freedom declines in price
Buy the fucking dip

I don't remember ever reading that having red tags directly means that the user is a scammer. They are simply interpreted as high-risk from the specific user. It's just that most of the times, when a user is a scammer, DT1 and DT2 will post a negative feedback and add a flag.

All types of tags? Maybe, but I rarely notice a negative feedback from DT1 or DT2 that has to do with politics. Negative feedback is almost always based on objective criteria, like fraud or lies. In fact, I'd like you to direct me to such examples, as you claim that you're noticing.

Trustless fiat on and off ramps are by definition infeasible. Fiat is trust-requiring, at least when transferred over the Internet. When trading crypto for fiat, if not done by cash, you need to trust an institution to serve the payments for you. And when trading with cash, you need to trust the person you're transacting with.

I think there's a bad usage of the term "trustless". We use that term when writing scripts, often for Bitcoin, but it completely loses its meaning outside Bitcoin. An activity is trustless if the Bitcoin protocol allows it. For example, lightning channels, atomic swaps, etc. Cash is not understandable by the Bitcoin protocol, and therefore there cannot exist a completely trustless mechanism when trading it for Bitcoin. Escrow service is your best course.

We've already had a global pandemic. Bitcoin, not only continued working, but became stronger than ever, against all odds. And that's because in times like these, when faith in the government starts to decline, it makes sense to become interested in Bitcoin.

So, the only way to regulate cryptocurrency is by banning the entities which are not supposed to exist in the first place. Such sense, wow! 

I believe it wanted to mean "privacy" there. Theoretically, it's easier to break Tor->clearnet than Tor->hidden service. It'd be better to configure your node connect only with hidden services:

From the other person's Bitcoin node to your exit node? Yes, but from your node to the exit node the connection is encrypted.

It only takes a single Google search to figure out there exist such markets. Even though, I'd be discouraged from buying from any of those, but there exist. I do have a bunch of tBTC, but not 10. Why do you need so many? Can't you complete your tests with just 0.1?

What are you talking about? This tBTC has nothing to do with testnet. It's just another made-up ERC20 token that is supposedly backed by bitcoin.

That's exactly what I mean by "attack".

Not near a small startup. Not even in table for discussion. Running web server in a Raspberry Pi makes sense only if you'll be its only user. For example, if you're running a smart home, or connecting to a Bitcoin or Lightning node when you're not in home. And even then, when you're the only user, it might still have connectivity issues due to insufficient resources.

If you're a beginner, just rent a VPS or shared web hosting.

You shouldn't rely on ngrok for anything important. Maybe make a fun page for you and your colleges, but for production, this would be a nightmare.

Forget about security. It's problematic in terms of performance. If a few dozens of clients start connecting with your machine, it will quickly become slower and might even stop operating. You'll have to upgrade to a paid plan. So why not paying for shared or dedicated hosting instead?

I will never understand why a billionaire raises donations for his campaign. It simply makes no fucking sense to me why people would donate to a billionaire.

Don't American representatives / politicians have asylum if they become elected?

If it is true that these twins own more than 70,000 bitcoin, then that donation wasn't even 0.05% of their net worth. It's like having $70,000 in your savings account and giving $15 to a kid. Considering that kid can be elected as the US president next year, I think bribing donating to it wouldn't be irrational.

It's extremely unlikely that all countries will ban all centralized exchanges, but if it were to ever happen, I believe it'd just make a lot of noise at first. People with genuine interest in cryptocurrencies wouldn't bait. There are decentralized exchanges like Bisq, which cannot be shutdown.

You cannot stop people from trading their currencies. The price would tank, though. Rest assured.