You would think so, but that's not how the world works. What you are basically suggesting is that no fraud whatsoever can occur in the banking system because of how regulated it is because regulatory agencies can just reverse transactions. Take a look at history. It is ripe with thousands of cases of banking scams and fraud that were never recovered from. Especially when you are involving foreign banks, with foreign laws and regulations. There is so much red tape involved in getting such large wires reversed. Once the money is sent overseas, it's basically gone. Foreign banks will always put their account holders first, instead of taking orders from another banking institution outside of their country.

The only way such foreign banks would reverse transactions would be through a court order, from their country of residence. Wire Transfers may be traceable to account holders, but when you start involving multiple foreign countries and multiple unassociated accounts, the money is as good as gone. It can take YEARS to get effective court to get any kind of action, and by then the money is long gone, and likely is any evidence. Not to mention building a case and presenting evidence to the notion that there was fraud/scam involved, IN (possible multiple) foreign countries.

After you exceed more than 2 or 3 bank transfers beyond the initial fraud, that money will likely never be recovered. You'd be dealing with multiple parties/shell bank accounts. The party that is at the end, has nothing to do with the past 2 owners of the money. Can you imagine if someone spent a couple millions of dollars to your company, you gave them the product, they disappear with it, and then agencies try to take your money saying the 3rd to last owner stole it? There's no way on earth in any court system would get behind that.

In the grand scheme of things, this had little to do with bitcoin itself. Just another case of cyber and social security breached by combining social engineering with hacking. This could have just as easily been some wall street firm, or perhaps some precious metal company. It's a classic security breach. Bitpay is at fault for being hacked. Someone dealing with millions of dollars in cryptocurrency should have a little sense when visiting opening random documents/pages, even if from a trusted source. Quite a foolish move on bitpay's part.

Scratch it. Delete this. Now they all are loading. After literally syncing for the last hour straight. Just endlessly syncing with no status update. Two of my wallets are custom built and the other is simply Electrum. Whatever was causing the delay was definitely related to the network.
Not every post is FUD, give me a break.

Trust me if you are having wallets holding as much as I have, you would be pretty alarmed too! So forgive me if I am a little paranoid to give out any sort of wallet details.

3 different wallets, 2 different devices, 2 different internet connections tested. I have never had a problem with my wallets like this before. I just think it's a little fishy that all these things would coincidentally happen at the same time.

I'm assuming this is because of the stress test, but I can't get any of my wallets to load right now, and without that I can't get any transactions sent.

I need to send coins urgently right now. Is this hopeless? Why does everyone on the forum seem so nonchalant about this?

It depends on the bank, but most banks aren't going to close your account with the first mention of bitcoin. All my money in my bank account right now is from bitcoin and my banker is well aware. Never had any issues.

Banks will not close someones account if a foreign exchange not registered in some state sends money to a user. There's no way. They may close the account for some other suspect reason, but they wouldn't do it for reasons of liscense. The only people who care about the exchanges being liscened are the states themselves, and the government. The Federal Government really only wants these companies do report, there is no liscencing requirement on the federal level.

This is honestly really grey area stuff. Even in legal code, bitcoin is hardly mentioned with respect to money transmitters.

I would love it if someone who knows tax-legal code could comment. Because right now we are both sort of speculating for the most part. The truth is banks can close peoples account for whatever reason they please. I'm just speaking of what would likely happen. I know one bitcoin trader that had his bank accounts closed over 6 times in a single year, but that was probably due to withdrawing cash all the time.

I highly doubt US clients would get in any legal trouble from receiving money from an overseas exchange. Think about it: A Bank sees a large transaction coming in from Europe. Maybe they ask the client about it. The client talks about bitcoins or whatever. I seriously seriously doubt any bank would go through the effort, or let alone have the means to verify whether or not some foreign company has lisecense here in the US. Even typing that out it sounds rediculous.

We can take Mt Gox for instance. Their Dwolla accounts were seized for not following US compliance. US customers would not get in trouble. The unliscensed exchange just could not operate in the US using US services, in the case of Gox, having accounts with a US company like Dwolla for instance.

So, is the restriction just for exchanges who want to work with other US companies? I assume there is nothing to stop an exchange from wiring money to US clients.

In many cases, when exchanges ask all these invasive questions, they are not doing it to interrogate you. I have found the same for banks in many cases. They usually don't *really* care what you put down as long as it's not "illegal activity". They have to ask all these questions for regulatory/KYC reasons. Just so they can say that they asked, in case shit ever hits the fan for them. They're just trying to protect themselves.

I read something about this, but it seems pretty unenforceable. I understand US-exchanges need to be liscened as money transmitters in every state, but how can US states fine a foreign entity for making transfers to US accounts, since the transfered are not taking place in the state? What kind of laws are being broken?

As far as I understand, the exchange is only bound by the laws in the country which it does business and transfering money to US bank-accounts isn't exactly breaking any sort of laws. The US customers would still be coming onto the website, presumably hosted in the foreign country, so the business would still only be considered taking place in that foreign country.

I'm no expert on the legality here of foreign entities. Can anyone offer some advice.

Has there ever been any law suites, of states going after exchanges not liscened with them? I almost suspect its just propaganda so states can get some more money. I'd be interested to see how such cases would play out in court.

Rights against self incrimination? What does self-incrimination have to do with anything? I don't mind paying the full tax rate on my coins. I was planning to treat them as all being obtained at $0.00, because they were. What is the issue here? As long as I pay taxes, that's all they care about, right?

I understand that, they have an onsite non-bitcoin ledger to keep track of the account balances, but I don't see how that escapes the fees.

If 1 million people send bitcoins to the sites pooled addresses in a single site-owned wallet, all of their accounts will be credited with what they sent. Then, those 1 million people send their coins to a business that also has an account on that site. The coins inside the sites wallet never move, but are still in 1 million different wallets. The business then tries to withdrawal their total received coins to their own private offsite wallet.

How does this save on transaction fees? It takes 1 million transactions to send to the site, and then it takes another million to send to the business offsite address. If anything, the total transactions are doubled, thus doubling the fees. The only advantage to this would be that the business could trust the site and know that the customers instantly has the correct amount of coins.


Where is the savings taking place? Is it merely just a matter of "batching" payments together for the chain? That is, bundling 1 million payments into a single 'transaction'? I didn't think the savings in doing this were too significant.

I was under the impression that they some how modify the chain with respect to the addresses they have, in bulk, for free in their own network, and then later broadcast it all at once as an updated part of the chain. Granted, I am not an expert, hence why I am asking.

In your explanation, I still don't see how they can negate the overall transaction fees. You are talking about their database being managed outside of the bitcoin framework, but at the end of the day the same net total of transactions are occuring.

It's kind of old, but I was reading about it here:
https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-implements-zero-fee-microtransactions-off-the-block-chain/


I understand how the transactions can be sent within an isolated network without fees, in the above case of coinbase, but don't all these transactions still have to be published to the block chain at the end of the day? Would not all transactions still have to be published with their corresponding byte-size? If say 1000 micropayments are conducted off-chain, and then later transfered to the chain, how is the fee calculated to enable these transactions to be close to free? Or rather how are all these transactions sent to the blockchain in a way that negates fees?

I understand the concept of masspaying/masssending, packing multiple payments into a single transaction, but it was my understand that even this does not significnatly reduce transaction fees all too much.

There's so many bitcoin exchanges that have been open for months, if not years, that make so little in fees that they could barely afford to pay a single employee for a month.

What am I missing here? A lot of exchanges charge around 0.2-0.5% per trade, which, to even make $50k off of in a year, the exchange would need to do 10 million in trade volume. This instantly excludes all but the top exchanges. What about the majority of the other exchanges? I could see one computer software engineer alone setting up his/her own exchange with some hard work, but managing one with all the needed security, customer support requests, just seems implausible to do alone. I must be missing something.

I have a ton of bitcoins from about '09 that I've decided I want to start selling them off. The problem is, over the years, they have been moved around a lot. Different exchanges, back and forth between exchange-money and bitcoins, many times, but I've never put them into my own bank account. I mean maybe a few here and there, but whose counting. The problem is this, most if not all of the exchanges I ever used are gone. Shut down. Inaccessible. It also goes without saying that these are certainly not the same coins I had years ago.

I was thinking of just selling them off over time, declaring that transaction that makes it to my bank as capital gains, paying the tax, and being done with it. I don't see any way I can get history of all those micro transfers over the years. I've talked to tax lawyers, they haven't a clue on anything about bitcoin. They told me to just treat it as the single sale of a commodity (each bank withdrawal), pay tax on the capital gain, and be done with it.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I want to reiterate the sheer amount of bitcoins I have. Selling them all at once would absolutely crash the market, which I do not want, and the amount is certainly high enough to potentially warrant an audit, so I want to prepare for that. I don't plan to take any deductions so I don't think the audit risk is too high. I have no objections to paying taxes and want to make sure I do it correctly.