Latest posts of: Itskok

Hey,
Itsik from whitestream here,
Maybe we can help by take a look at your transactions, you can contact me at: contact at whitestream io

Thanks.

Here is our update about the QuadrigaCX case, also published on our twitter account:
https://twitter.com/whitestream5/status/1103091778100576256

Since EY lately discovered some of QuadrigaCX cold wallet addresses, we managed to analyze some of them.
Together with insights that we already extract from QuadrigaCX hot wallets, we can shed some light on QuadrigaCX Bitcoin transactions from the last six month.

The time period we checked was since July 2018 to February 2019, the average Bitcoin price at this time frame is around $5,700.
We saw that both QuadrigaCX cold and hot wallets sent around 5,571 BTC to a suspicious intermediary wallet at this time period.
We suspect that this wallet belongs to QuadrigaCX too.

QuadrigaCX hot wallet sent to the suspicious intermediary wallet 3,432 BTC, which is around $19,500,000 US.
QuadrigaCX hot wallet:
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/000009200775868e/addresses

QuadrigaCX cold wallet sent to the suspicious intermediary wallet 2,139 BTC, which is around $12,200,000 US.
QuadrigaCX cold wallet:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1JZJaDDC44DCKLnezDsbW43Zf8LspCKBYP

The suspicious intermediary wallet:
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/006daa655b240256/addresses

The suspicious wallet has interactions with more Bitcoin exchanges and not just from QuadrigaCX, but most of his incomes are from QuadrigaCX.
The suspicious wallet sent most of his funds to two Chinese exchanges, Huobi and Binance.

Around 1,176 BTC were sent to Binance, which is $6,700,000 US.
Around 5,263 BTC were sent to Huobi, which is $30,000,000 US.

Huobi wallet:
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/Huobi.com-2

Binance wallet:
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/0000011bd9c73aab/addresses

Thank you.
whitestream - Blockchain Intelligence
https://whitestream.io

Hi everyone,
I wanted to share with you our new API (alpha version) for Bitcoin addresses/wallets scoring,
One year ago I launched the first prototype version of the Bitcoin scoring system -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381832.msg14053745#msg14053745
Since then a lot have changed and we had some great feedback from the early users, we are pushing foreword for the real thing.

https://whitestream.io

So what is it?
We are building a "rating" system for the Bitcoin users in order to prevent fraud and allow faster transactions on the Blockchain,
We are analyzing the Blockchain history and trying to find the most known and reliable entities that exist.

How we are calculating our score?
We are checking multiple parameters about the Bitcoin address/cluster, some of them are:
Times
Consistency
Amounts of money
Amounts of transactions
Connections with other entities

The most interesting thing here is - how we can reflect credibility and honesty in the Bitcoin world?
Is anonymous entities can still have high score? (yes..)
We are trying to answer on that questions with our service, It's a very interesting research, and we believe that in a couple of years Banks and Financial Institution will use such a rating solutions.

We are looking for early users to have some feedback about our new API, It's free for new users.
We already have couple of companies that using our API, wallet providers and Bitcoin exchanges.
If you have a Bitcoin businesses that deal with big mass of users/transactions please contact us - Itsik@whitestream.io, Contact@whitestream.io

How our rating system can help you?
Better and Faster KYC processes (Know Your Customer).
You can pre-credit your customers.
"Zero time" transactions due to high rating of the entities.

I'll be happy to answer on your questions.
Thanks.

Accurate rating should be based on much more data and not just on addresses history, icorating.io is just a prototype that we will improve in the future.
If someone want to raise some funds, he must prove that he owned the address/account, this is on of the most strongest way to avoid fishing/fraud.
Maybe all of these ICO companies should use a middle man or third party to raise their funds, someone with a proven records that can save the money until the ICO process is over.
Because right now, people are losing tens of millions of dollars and we cannot trust the ICO's companies.

Hi everyone.
We are the developers of https://whitestream.io
It's a Blockchain rating technology designed to reduce transactions time and allow reliable interactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

We are trying to help the public invest their money wisely in the Initial Coin Offerings, because something really fucked up in this Eco-system.
Companies that want to interact with their investors/customers must do it with creditable addresses with proven history on the Blockchain.
The ICO rating tool will rank Ethereum accounts to help you better understand the potential for fraud, It's a simple tool that based on one of our Bitcoin rating prototypes.

https://icorating.io

Our rating is based on a very simple parameters -

* For how long the account exist?
* How many outgoing transactions he has?
* What is the current balance of the account?

Its extremely simple to use, and it can protect you in real time, but still, it's just a recommendation.

The scores -

0 -2 - New account on the Blockchain, check it very carefully before sending your money
2 -4 - New account on the Blockchain, check it very carefully before sending your money
4 - 6 - This account have some basic reputation, looks OK but still require your extra check
6 - 8 - Looks like a good account with a decent amount of reputation
8 - 10 - We are not there yet, lets hope we will!

We will add more logic and extra features according to your suggestions and feedback.
Follow for more updates - https://twitter.com/icoratingio

Donations -
ETH - 0x98D55c4c11065e65fb35130A44c8b7Ad1E6F45A9
BTC - 1WhiteNuYaMWezMYW6iATdgEzebvH6dp5

Thanks.

Thanks for the answers.
I know that Bitcoin by his nature is completely the opposite from what the Banks represents, and still, as Bitcoin getting stronger over the years and Banks beginning to understand his open source technology, I believe that they will use Bitcoin , maybe 5 + years from now or even tomorrow, to reduce costs and transfer big amounts of currencies between different countries, its an easy/pseudonymous/fast/cheap way to transfer any amount of money, I believe that any Institution that holds Capital in any form or way, will use Bitcoin in the future...

Its a great course, you can also watch here the lectures is was based on :

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNcSSleedtfyDuhBvOQzFzQ

I am wondering if there is any dedicated solution for integrating Bitcoin with "real" banks?
Some special "wallet"? Or any other infrastructure products/companies that should helps banks implement Bitcoin in an easy and secure way?
I am not talking about all the "Block-Chain" companies out there who trying to build their "shared" database with banks, I am talking about Bitcoin as we know it.
I believe that some of the banks are already works on such an integration, I just wanted to learn about the market in that area.

Thanks.

After strong market research I can say that Bitcoin rating system has high demand, especially from the new Bitcoin users, not early adopters Bitcointallk like or some Exchanges that afraid form tax payments..
In the future, when Bitcoin will be more popular, Banks and governments who going to deal with Crypto's will probably have some "trust" mechanism or API for secure transactions, people in the Bitcoin community living in caves and think that Bitcoin gonna stay in the dark forever, you don't understand that rating system or other reputation system don't gonna hurt the decentralization or what Bitcoin achieved so far, you will always be able to use Bitcoin anonymously, but other organization just proffer to work in a more secure ways, that's all..

I am working on something very similar in the last year :
https://riders.io/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381832.0
http://themerkle.com/riders-uses-blockchain-analysis-to-issue-bitcoin-address-ratings/

In Riders, entities with "strong" history on the Blockchain get an High score, that doesn't mean that entities with hard-to-trace history are not reliable, it just says that clarity can reflect reliability on the Blockchain.
The reactions for my product were very interesting, some like it, some hate it.. but tracing the Blockchain and create a reliable scores is very difficult.
Now I am focusing my project on something much more useful, taking the "high" scores and merge them to an API that will help reduce transactions time between entities, also preventing double spends probability.

I call it w h i t e s t r e a m Wink

Its still far from being ready, lots of research needed for that, but I am on it..

http://site9209116.92.webydo.com/whitestream.html

This is very interesting, someone know for sure if Bitpay/Coinbase is taking responsibility on Double spend transactions and compensate the businesses on loses or fraud?

http://themerkle.com/steam-switched-back-to-zero-confirmation-bitcoin-transactions/
http://themerkle.com/vendor-using-bitpay-becomes-victim-of-five-bitcoin-double-spend-attacks/

Quote from: DannyHamilton on October 07, 2016, 06:00:41 PM

Quote from: Itskok on October 07, 2016, 05:09:28 PM

Then they don't understand it, and you've done a poor job of educating them.

As you say,they didn't estimated yet the risks well enough because lack of knowledge, for big organizations adopting new "open source" technology that no one is responsible for Its a process of years.

There is no "Bitcoin Company" in charge of bitcoin. Who would you ask for the information? I'm not aware of anyone making any attempts to record all the fraudulent double-spend attempts or how many of them were successful. You'll probably need to hire a polling company to do a scientific poll for you. You could try contacting Coinbase or BitPay and see if they have any internal records they'd be willing to share with you.

There are a lot of analysis tool around the web , like :
https://blockchain.info/double-spends
So maybe there are more specific ones that I am not aware of.

What? Why would you be any more sure with 4 confirmations than 2? What's so magical about the number 4?

Maybe I am wrong, but there is a (small) probability that a possible attacker would "hire" couple of miners to "mine" the double spent transaction before the "real" transaction will broadcast to all the network , having 4+ miners who collect that transaction is less likely.(its not must be 4..)
Its a theory, very hard to apply it.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248.pdf

You aren't very good at maths, are you? If the average time between blocks is 10 minutes, and you want to wait for 4 blocks, it's going to take a LOT more than 6 minutes (on average). Fortunately, you don't need to wait that long in most cases.

From the 100+ transactions I did, I never wait more then 10-15 minutes for 4+ confirmations, only when I add very low fee, or even without fee at all..
(I was wrong, its maybe not 5-6 minutes..)

Not sure what you're trying to say there.

That having a bigger block will reduce the wait time because there is more "space" for new transactions,
Its also depends on how the new block size will be synchronized with the miners interactions.

Thank you.

Quote from: achow101 on October 05, 2016, 12:25:47 PM

The solution is to analyze the transaction and determine how likely the transaction is going to confirm in the a few blocks. Generally you should look at the size of the transaction (a large transaction may be less likely to get into a block), the transaction fee per byte, the outputs (for dust outputs), whether the inputs are confirmed, and whether it signals Opt-in RBF. By examining these, you should be able to decide whether you think that transaction will confirm and whether you should accept it. If it opts-into RBF or spends unconfirmed inputs, you should wait for at least 1 confirmation as that transaction could be replaced.

This is exactly what I am trying to do, not just analyzing the Nodes in real time, also analyzing the input's "history",
But it seems that not too much change from this days :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3441.msg48365#msg48365
Maybe its too complicated, or maybe there is not enough double spend transaction out there? what is sure is that the "Double spend" issue is one of the biggest barriers for Bitcoin to be adopted by "regular" payments companies/Financial institutions, Its 10 minutes Bitcoin against 0.08 mil second Visa.. they are really afraid from it as far as I spoke with some of them.
Someone know where I can find "All time" statistics about double spend transactions?

Quote from: X7 on October 07, 2016, 04:16:01 AM

Quote from: Itskok on October 05, 2016, 05:47:54 AM

Simple solution would be to wait for confirmations (at least 2)

I afraid this is not enough, we need to wait for 4-5 to be sure, and that's gonna take 5-6 minutes at least, that's a lot of time for a digital money,
Maybe some Block-scale will solve that during the years too.

Hi.
I was wondering what is the most up to date solution for the famous "Double spend" problem?
Is there any solution (commercial company development even..) that reduce the transaction waiting approval time?

I read lot of paper's and suggestions during the years about that but it seems that most of them was just nice academic theories , I think that each industry (Exchanges/Gambling/Miners..) adopt here own and personal solution, the most relevant thing I found for now is the Blockcypher Confidence Factor API:
https://www.blockcypher.com/dev/bitcoin/#confidence-factor

I am working on something of my own for this :
https://riders.io/

Although that as a "personal" Bitcoin user this problem has never bothered me at all, I really trust the network, even with a low fees,
But as a business I believe its a total different story.

Thank you.

That's great.
I am looking for Bitcoin books all the time, the data is concentrated and you don't need to travel hours on the web.
Thank you!

Update
New - Riders Manual, It will help you understand the ranks in a better way:
https://riders.io/project/manual/

Interesting research about The Evolution of the Bitcoin Economy:
Extracting and Analyzing the Blockchain:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2808762