I wouldn't have an issue mixing for pure privacy purposes but if I had a ton of smoking hot BTC I would not be comfortable sending it to an anonymous stranger to give it a rinse. They could be anyone and they're going to be able to follow me from then on. There's a freakish amount of trust involved in a transaction that needs the absolute minimum of it.

If I were serious about my crypto crime I'd be shopping elsewhere.

Interested to see whether this leads to anything. I presume not much.

As for whether Craigy is ballsy, I presume when he embarked on this bilge he imagined it would be a breeze. He forgot there are millions of people brighter and more invested in reality than him.

Classic narcissistic overestimation.

It'll take over a century to mine the final 0.9% or whatever. By 2032 over 99% will be mined. That makes it pretty academic overall. By that point there'll have had to have been a healthy fee market for decades for it to survive. If there isn't within 10-20 years it's not going to have a future. The final bit of mining will have ceremonial value only. It would be fun to read the news that day.

Let's all say hello to the future historians reading this. We spent enough to buy continents on Steam games back in the day.

People should also have currencies in mind as well as stock markets. Lots of currency ratios are looking seriously skewed and perilous. That's potentially a bigger deal for BTC than stocks.

All the same if everything crashes I really cannot see crypto doing well. Ten or more years down the line there would be a greater chance of it but for now it's still a weird little plaything that'll be the first thing people drop if they start hurting properly.

Crowd funding proper journalism would be interesting, though I've no idea how you'd do it safely or recruit competent writers.

If there's one thing this space needs more than anything it's informative objectivity. There's money on the line and thousands of pricks who want to con you out of it, including most of the 'news' sites one reads.

https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/hdr-global-trading-ltd.html

The Advertising Standards Authority have upheld complaints about Bitmex's 'Thanks Satoshi' 10th anniversary Times ad for using a logarithmic scale price chart to 'fool' people into believing Bitcoin's rise has been steady.

They're not allowed to use that ad again. Since there won't be another 10th anniversary, unless Arthur funds space/time meddling, I guess there's no need to worry about the public's funds.

I remember one site attempting this, I think it might have been called Coinfire, and the geezer running it was doing crazy shit like actual research and questioning the stuff he'd been fed which didn't make him popular. He was moaning about not being able to make it pay and threw in the towel.

Let's face it, most people involved in cryptoland are stupid and greedy. There's little room for interest in intellectual rigour or truth.

Follow people you respect on Twitter. Anything beyond that is likely to be crap no matter what.

Because stock markets are taking a poo?

Many of the same people are involved in them. If your main game starts to wobble then you're not going to stick around with your wild bet.

This 'uncorrelated' stuff doesn't ring true to me. It may ignore the occasional day here and there. It won't shake off a decline in everything.

Litecoin is designed to be faster. It processes transactions every 2.5 minutes. It has more capacity but more importantly in terms of fees its chain has zero pressure on it. Not enough people are using it.

Bitcoin is used by more people and it has less room. Why do more people use and want it? Because it has earned the most trust and that's why it's the most valuable and in demand coin of the lot. It's the oldest, most battered, most tested and most decentralised.  

A cryptocurrency without trust is worthless. That's the only basis for the value of any of them. None of them are anything more than a few bits of code flying around the internet. What gives any of them value is the belief enough people have that they're worth something. That can't be programmed, faked, bought or summoned from thin air. It takes years and years of grind.

If it was purely down to speed and fees then almost every other coin is faster and less costly to transact. That doesn't mean they have any future.

If I produced a coin today that could do instant and free transactions it would be roundly ignored. No one would want it because it hasn't earned their trust.

Bitcoin's prime reason for existence is to be free from the meddling of middlemen. It's open to all and verifiable to all. That means millions of people and machines are working to keep it that way. That inevitably has a cost in terms of wieldiness compared to one company operating off its own database permitting you to access it on their terms.

Maybe you should add metric equivalents for each item as the rest of the world won't have a clue what a pound or gallon is.

Where I'm at 4 litres of milk in a major supermarket in the UK, 3.7 litres is a US gallon, is $1.31 but we have decided to destroy our exchange rates.

12 medium free range eggs are $2.03.

The cheese would be $3.37 for a similar weight.

The UK has the cheapest food in Europe by quite a way. I noticed in the US you'd often have to pay way more for quality stuff, but the shit can be cheaper. A lot of the shit is unobtainable in Britain.

Coindesk are owned by Digital Currency Group. Cointelegraph is supposedly owned by the people behind Bytecoin/Freewallet/Changelly and others.

That means neither are our buddies and they're not going to publish anything that goes against their interests.

I know for me at least this is the first time I'm deeply versed in a subject that's regularly reported by the media so I know most of the stuff they spout is vapid junk and sometimes outright misleading. I hope it's better on other subjects but I'm not holding me breath.

As the article points out Barclays started off with a wee burst of enthusiasm that's slowly dwindled to this. Let's see if Coinbase's new bank can cut it but I think it's going to be just as much of a beggar as Coinbase overall.

Elsewhere I've read that LHV Bank in Estonia, who Coinbase have worked with for years, are looking at full access to the UK market including faster payments but I don't see why a bunch of foreign nobodies would get it first.

That knee jerk phase is largely played out. Only complete know nothings wheel that out now.

The next phase is the sanitisation and relative integration into the existing order and that's where mixers are going to get a kicking. No regulator is going to say they're a good thing and money in general is getting ever more tightly controlled.

If someone today proposed a publicly accessible system that guaranteed the questionable dollars you put in would emerge sparkling clean no questions asked, about 1000 ICBMs would rain down on it within an hour of opening.

What was acceptable in Bitcoinland when not enough other people gave a shit suddenly hits the wall when the rest of the world looks closer.

I'd be truly amazed if 1-5% of the people on here who claimed they were becoming full time traders had anything more than a pot to piss in after a handful of months. Those who are on here boasting about their prowess are likely posting from a public library before going back to their sewer for the night.

The average human simply does not have the wiring to make a success of it. At least shitposting doesn't require risk management or analysis.

Aye. I remember the same. I'd hope that most are clueless and didn't care or understand what they were involved in and so they insta dumped. It's the ones who hung on hoping for a payday that never comes who'll be up shit creek.

Even if you had insta dumped pickings would now be extremely slim to non existent.

If they'd put effort into building a non zombie account they could've ridden it out in a decent campaign. In some places $50 a week gets the job done. I doubt most could be bothered to think that far ahead though.

Piece of what pie? Their job is to keep markets orderly. They have the power to approve market products provided they can ensure they operate in a manner they can oversee and enforce.

Nothing has happened since the idea of the first Bitcoin ETF emerged to point to that being any more achievable.

I still don't believe we'll see an ETF for many more years, if ever. And if one ever did emerge it'll have been long since surpassed by products that routed around the necessity of SEC approval.

It's easy to forget that many people on here are in countries with either no jobs or pitifully paid jobs. If I were rotting in some backwater the opportunities available here would look extremely compelling. There are no barriers to entry. You can operate from anywhere in your own time.

I don''t blame such people at all. I'd do the same. I do wish they spouted less shite. If you do decide to go all in then you're a fool if you don't plan for whatever you're milking to come to an abrupt halt, or in the case of 'bounties' the whole lot turns out to be worthless.

If I were in such a position I would work on becoming a worthwhile and valued member first and then opportunities may arrive. Hammering it from the off is probably going to lead to oblivion.

That's bleedin' outrageous. I'd like to know what one's position is if you simply can't supply the info they're demanding. There are tons of dead exchanges and pools with no way of retrieving the information.

https://www.coindesk.com/barclays-is-no-longer-banking-coinbase

Well, there's your confirmation. How very impressive I am.

It says they're now with summat named Clearbank who are indeed the drivers of them dropping Zcash. The problem with these 'challenger banks' is that they usually operate on the grace and favour of real banks. If their daddy don't want to play crypto I don't see how they'll be able to persuade them otherwise.

We've no way of knowing how good or bad most mixing service methods are, or how good the people are who are trying to crack them. And what's a wonderful technique today may be compromised tomorrow or has been compromised for many months already.

The future of it is surely open source P2P type stuff like plenty of other areas too. Third parties are the eternal weak point of this whole scene but they were needed to get rolling.