It flopped, signaling that retail investors might not be too interested in Bitcoin after all, contrary to past reports. Binance and JPMorgan both think that the flop was a contributing factor towards the price drop.

Both Bakkt and the market got rekkt, and I doubt either party wanted this outcome.

Do you mean you want to know if the one you downloaded is legit or not? If this is the same one you downloaded, it's legit:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycelium.wallet

We can't really tell by the info you provided, so you have to check by yourself by opening that link on your phone.

Are you referring to a specific figure? Would you mind sharing it? Local unrest does seem to affect volumes positively, but not in any significant degrees from what I've seen, even in these extreme cases.


They can prove that Bitcoin can help with anonymity for matters involving the protests, but affecting global prices is a long shot considering their currency isn't really at risk:


Getting rid of their HKD isn't a pressing matter at the moment.

Ignoring the half-truth tidbit used by the article as clickbait, I would actually argue that Tether isn't all that important for the crypto ecosystem. It's true that the role it plays is vital to crypto trading, but it's also disposable in that there are a lot of other stablecoins that can take its place should it collapse. Sure Tether collapsing would be a big deal, but Bitcoin collapsing would mean the end of crypto as we know it; which is the most important coin in the crypto ecosystem now?

Update: the alleged owner of the burnt mining farm just spoke out:


So either it didn't happen at all, or it was misidentified. It's looking to me like the original source of the video just wants attention, considering he didn't even say where he got it in the first place.

There were plenty of threads about it in r/btc the past few days, and the Bitcoin.com article reporting it actually claims that the bug was exploited at least once, but without evidence:


So yeah, they probably did try to make it a bigger deal than it is.

It's not actually a mistake in calculation, but the actual calculation itself being imperfect in the first place:


I'm not sure if the fire actually happened due to the lack of sources, but since blocks are being found normally again, I'd say it's far more likely that the 2-hour wait was simply an aberration.

Yep, it seems to have been patched relatively quickly, and they held out the public announcement to give people time to upgrade to newer versions.


There doesn't seem to be verified losses. There are a lot of people who are rooting for Bitcoin to fail, and I wouldn't put it past them to lie about losing money.


Suprisingly, that doesn't seem to be the case. Headlines in Google only talk about the vulnerability itself. Bugs are expected out of any beta software, so detractors (same people who wouldn't want to touch it in the first place lol) are really the only ones making a big deal out of this.

Would you mind shedding some light on this service? I've never heard of such a thing, and I imagine it would be a big deal if it actually worked as you described.


While this is true, it should also be noted that phones could actually be protected against thieves by a strong PIN, and that even biometric security measures aren't trivial to crack (except most Androids' facial recognition, don't use that lol). If you're not being personally targeted (which is incredibly unlikely for us regular folk), keeping a wallet in your phone shouldn't be too much of a security issue. That being said, you shouldn't be keeping large amounts of coins outside cold wallets anyway, regardless of whether it's in your phone or PC.

You can't actually break iOS' facial recognition with just photos because it uses 3d recognition. It has been broken with masks, but it's not exactly straightforward.


I can tell you right now that Apple doesn't like this exploit at all. It's a jailbreak exploit, something some iOS users actively look for to have more freedom with their devices. It's also worth noting that it hasn't been exploited as of now, and it would be very difficult in practice to use it to steal crypto from someone else -- they would still need to unlock the phone, for one.

I would just like to point out that the cut in interest rate is, in part, to reduce the risks of recession thanks to trade crises. Just because it was done in the 2008 financial crisis doesn't mean they're expecting one this time around -- the US economy is actually having a solid performance by most indicators. I don't know where you heard what you did, but people have been predicting the start of the next financial crisis since the last one ended, and some of them have the tendency to exaggerate.

As for crypto on financial crises, the answer is that no one knows for sure, because it hasn't been tested yet. It could easily go both ways, but I personally lean on believing it won't do too well, because people would normally be averse to making any risks during that period.

Gold is often perceived as a great hedge against inflation, but there's actually data suggesting that that's only true when inflation is in significant levels. ^[1][2]

Bitcoin shares a few properties with gold so it may act the same way, but being relatively young, we don't really know yet. I don't think we've even seen price growths that could be attributed to inflation -- that might be because like gold, Bitcoin does not react to "normal" levels.


If you're not anticipating Venezuela levels of inflation, it should be safe to keep a portion of your wealth in fiat. You don't have to go all-in on gold and Bitcoin, as they're more for long-term protection anyway.

The OP clarified their post, saying the $1.2B transaction was within a one-hour period, not a single transaction:


As for the source of the screenshot, it's their website:

https://bytetree.com/bitcoin

They claim that the coins were transferred from several wallets and sold to exchanges. There's obviously no way to verify this, but it just seems like people are seeing reasons for the price drop everywhere that it almost seems orchestrated.

What people use to mine won't actually matter because of difficulty adjustments.


I have never understood this reasoning. People with more resources will be able to do whatever they're doing right now no matter what miners are in use. Miners running ASIC farms would just run PC/GPU farms instead. You could also just as easily buy an ASIC miner like you would have a mining PC, so it's not like there's an insurmountable barrier to mining.

It's also worth noting that it would be theoretically cheaper to attack Bitcoin if non-specialized hardware were viable. ASICs turn into bricks after being used in a successful attack (assuming Bitcoin dies), whereas PCs/GPUs would retain their value. Either way, it's best to simply leave things alone, especially because there are no problems to address in the first place.

I think they probably sold the news, but for profit and not much else. Bakkt fell flat amidst all the high expectations, so it's likely that traders foresaw this and sold. I don't really believe there are larger forces at play here.


Everyone reads the same news though, so it's not like Bakkt's speculative effect would be confined to the North American market. I'm sure traders all over the world made some moves relative to this.

Our disagreement only really hinges on the fact that you believe that we have no idea what quantum computers can do because they don't exist (or practical ones at least) yet, whereas I believe that current projections of their capabilities would be close to what they can actually do. If we have to insist on guarantees against something that doesn't exist yet (and thus couldn't be tested), then there's literally nothing we can do to prepare at the moment. If that's your line of thinking, then I suppose your belief on its effect on prices is justified.


True, but it could also be explained by Bakkt being announced one day prior to that post.

The current drop also coincided with Bakkt starting slow, so I believe it's more likely that traders are more interested in watching Bakkt than Google's paper. I could be wrong, of course. Pointing to what caused price movements is difficult even in hindsight, but I think it's reasonable at this point to assume that the hype (and that hype being shot down) behind Bakkt can move the market.

I was referring to quantum proof public keys, which are already ready today but have a few issues:



Again, there's a study saying that current ASICs are faster than theoretical quantum computers when it comes to mining because they're specialized:


So if this is accurate, Bitcoin doesn't really have to worry too much about getting 51%'d by quantum computers, or at least  not in the near future.


Yeah, all I was saying is that I don't think a lot mainstream readers would be able to draw that connection, which is why I believe that it's unlikely for the price slide to be attributable to the news piece.

As an addendum, here's a guide on how to set that up:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4573616.0

If you don't have an extra computer that you can use for this, you can very easily use any extra flash drives you have lying around -- you only have to install a persistent copy of Linux that you can safely boot on any computer, or even persistent Tails. Just make sure you verify your initial download using the guide in electrum.org, and that you keep your seed in a safe place.

Not really. A new public key algorithm could be introduced with a simple soft fork, and current ASICs are faster than projected quantum computer clock speeds. The problem is that old and some lost coins can't be protected, since they can't be moved to post-fork addresses.


I believe they're inevitable, but I don't think they'll be available for commercial use anytime soon. Entities who would have access to ones strong enough to threaten Bitcoin probably won't be interested in it in the first place.

As for the actual topic, I also believe the price movement had something to do with the brief hashrate crash. I'm not sure mainstream readers would actually know that there could be a connection between quantum computers and Bitcoin unless it's explicitly mentioned in the article (and articles I've seen don't).

He probably only said that because it's easier to lose coins in your phone than in your PC, but if you know what you're doing, phones should be perfectly viable for storage. This attack, for one, is practically limited to tracking victims, so there shouldn't be any risk of crypto loss. Just make sure you don't keep large amounts anywhere that's not cold storage.