He's actually making an even crazier comparison. He's saying that since this Bulgarian cigar company was named "BT" -- and this shares two letters from BTC's acronym -- both are bad:


This is clearly irrational on its face. No need to refute it...

Tether's value is only from backing in an abstract sense. What keeps it actually pegged to the dollar is the ability -- at least for some entities -- to redeem for USD at 1:1. If USDT goes much below that value, it makes sense for these entities to arbitrage.

Exchanges are just listing USDT like any other altcoin because there is demand for it.

This is possible when a cryptocurrency has a tiny number of users -- not with an ecosystem of Bitcoin's size. There are too many stakeholders now. The consensus is extremely hard to change.


Miners can fork off, but I think the Bitcoin Cash saga shows what will happen. It'll be even less popular actually, because this fork will dilute everyone's holdings by 10-fold.

This would be a removal of consensus rules -- a hard fork. All existing nodes would ignore the fork. There would definitely be a network split because very few users would "upgrade" to the new version with unlimited supply. The 21 million limit is widely viewed as sacrosanct, so chances are the hard fork chain would just be abandoned.

The Core developers would never attempt this anyway.

They are obviously good at hiding behind lots of shell companies. Their CFO once called it "banking like criminals." Their money isn't easily found and seized, and US regulators work very slowly, making cases over the course of years. They often like to make a big seizure when they drop indictments.

Nope. Peter is one of the most stubborn people I've ever seen, and he genuinely believes everything he says about gold and Bitcoin. There's no changing his mind. But some of his fans might be persuaded, so I'm glad to see the debate happening.

Other exchanges could inject fake USD too and we would never know it. Wasn't the Willy Bot on Mt. Gox doing that -- trading with unbacked assets? The only difference is that Tether publishes the transactions on a blockchain.

Apparently, Tether has been issuing USDT "on credit" to one or more specific traders. Galaxy Digital (Mike Novogratz) was named in the last court filing. They are probably involved:

They announced on Twitter about 24 hours ago that they would go down for scheduled maintenance today. It's supposed to last for 4-5 hours. How long has it been down?

More or less. Everyone in the G20 has already pledged to implement the rules.

Then again, even in the member countries, new legislation -- subject to the political process -- will be required to enact the rules. This could take time and there may even be political opposition. And that's only a few dozen countries. The rest of the world doesn't bow to the FATF so easily. Most monitored countries have been failing to meet their standards for decades. The blacklist largely hasn't forced compliance.

Maybe so, but rational greed is inevitable in the context of exponential price gains. Like it or not, greed is also major driver of Bitcoin adoption. I can tell you from anecdotal experience that some investors drawn in by greed will stick around and develop a real understanding of, and appreciation for, Bitcoin. Just like I did. This isn't an overnight process, though.

Who cares? What is that supposed to prove?

It doesn't prove that he's Satoshi, or that the "Tulip Trust" exists. You are just doing a bunch of hand-waving to distract from the utter lack of evidence in his favor.

I can access a few pages like the Fees and FAQ pages, but I'm mostly seeing the same thing. You can't see listings without logging in. I wonder if they are trying to deter people from trading P2P using their listings while avoiding KYC. That's what I always did on Localbitcoins: Check listings, contact traders directly, trade P2P without their escrow system.

Hopefully this isn't going to be the permanent state of affairs.

I provided links to several other complaints about Livecoin. You're focusing on the OP, but to me, Livecoin's confirmed practice of permanently disabling wallets in these situations is scam behavior. Doing so causes the market to price in their insolvency. This effectively passes on all losses to depositors, who are left holding worthless un-backed tokens on Livecoin that can't be withdrawn. That's why XMR is 70% cheaper than everywhere else.

The Monero scandal is much bigger than the Monacoin one. A year later, with Livecoin still pointing the finger at Monero's developers, I think we can conclude that they will never repay their XMR depositors. More than 15K XMR was stolen in the attack -- $1.8 million at the time -- which suggests even more XMR was stolen by Livecoin from their depositors when they permanently disabled withdrawals. There are complaints all over the internet, so please don't act like they must be confined to this thread for you to acknowledge their existence.

Robinhood is the only app/exchange I know of that is "commission-free" but in reality, I think they just mark up the price a little bit to take their cut. You also can't deposit/withdraw coins there -- they just take liquidity from other exchanges.

Coinbase Pro and Kraken have the lowest fees I know of. I don't know if any of them have all the charting features you want.

It could take years to force BitMEX into compliance, although it's anyone's guess really. Seychelles is not FATF-compliant as it is. Last year's assessment was full of statements like "has not shown significant effective implementation of the AML/CFT measures" and "requires fundamental improvement in both technical compliance and effectiveness components."

The most immediate danger is that compliance-minded exchanges establish some sort of whitelist. Sending coins from non-whitelisted exchanges might put your account in jeopardy. Exchanges like Gemini and Bitstamp seem very quick these days to terminate accounts. Gemini may terminate your account just for using mixers.

It's a pain in the ass for anyone who actually complies. I'm sure hardly anyone does.

When looking at the FATF guidelines, it looks like Bitpay and similar services will be considered VASPs. So there's that.

They are obviously more concerned about bigger fish and especially about getting a handle on people avoiding taxes through exchanges, though. Those are low hanging fruit with much bigger tax cases.

Even if the developers bear legal responsibility to Livecoin -- and that sounds doubtful -- that's between Livecoin and the developers. Livecoin has separate obligations to its customers. This whole "Bob holding Alice's money hostage until Joe pays him" thing is not legally or ethically kosher.


This involves much larger philosophical discussions. Arguably, checkpointing thwarts the entire purpose and validity of POW by establishing a "developer consensus" that overrides POW consensus. We shouldn't expect developers to add checkpoints before the fact, or to reverse attacks with forks after the fact.

If a service like Livecoin gets attacked, the losses are their own to bear. They can reassess the risks of listing the coin, require more confirmations and set up additional internal checks to detect such attacks, or they can de-list the coin entirely if its chain is too insecure.

But whatever they do, they should allow depositors to withdraw their coins. At the very least, they should be up front about the losses and establish a compensation plan rather than pointing the finger at open source developers. That will get them nowhere.

Insolvency just means inability to pay their obligations. For an exchange Livecoin's size -- even if it's just limited to those two coins -- millions of dollars may be nothing to sneeze at. I don't want to speculate too much about that, but we should acknowledge that -- unlike many other exchanges in their position -- they made no move to make their customers whole. That's a red flag.

The OP put forth the scam accusation, but he's certainly not the only one complaining. Here are a few other examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/c40uqf/i_obtained_some_monero_at_wwwlivecoinnet_almost_2/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/brd4nf/livecoinnet_xmr_wallet_offline/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7m64dy/anyone_know_why_livecoin_doesnt_allow_monero/
https://www.reddit.com/r/livecoin/comments/9q005m/disabled_monero_wallet/

I've also seen complaints about other long-term disabled wallets but I'm not sure on the specifics. I see dozens of coins listed with "N/A" under withdrawal fee -- Monacoin and Monero included -- on Livecoin's site. Can anyone confirm whether those wallets are disabled? Are they like Yobit, keeping various wallets in "maintenance" for months/years at a time?

My understanding is that Livecoin expected them to orchestrate some sort of bailout/rollback fork to reverse their losses. The Monacoin developers refused, which is a perfectly respectable position for developers of a POW protocol. An impasse was reached and Livecoin never did anything to rectify the issue and compensate their customers.

Same with Monero. Livecoin simply expects the Monero developers to pay them $1.8 million to reimburse their losses. Legally, the developers have no liability. It's right in their software license! On the other hand, Livecoin is legally liable for the deposits its customers made and now won't pay out.

The way Livecoin is acting, you really have to wonder how deeply insolvent they might be.

They are the victims of theft and they are insolvent. These aren't mutually exclusive.


Insolvent means being unable to pay their debts. That seems like the state of things to me. Livecoin should have converted MONA balances to debt tokens, denominated in fiat if necessary. Instead, they simply lost their customers' coins, refused to pay them out, and when customers complain, they disable their accounts and accuse them of violating terms.

This is obviously unscrupulous behavior. Stop trying to rationalize it.


Bitfinex immediately converted the insolvent accounts to debt tokens which they reimbursed. Livecoin did no such thing.

With regard to the recent margin lending fiasco, Poloniex has reimbursed 10% so far. We'll see what happens from here but I would say their actions have been less than scrupulous as well. I also think the risks with P2P lending are more concrete -- if borrowers default, lenders may not recover the principal. This is a peer-to-peer contract.

In contrast, customers deposited coins to Livecoin, Livecoin lost them in an attack due to their own negligence, and then they told their customers to eat the losses. These are two very different things.


Yes, and Livecoin didn't account for the unreliability of Monacoin confirmations. They negligently accepted deposits and allowed withdrawals with far too few confirmations. They suffered double spending and passed the losses onto customers rather than eat the losses themselves.

Livecoin was allowing deposits, withdrawals, and trading and did nothing in spite of the known vulnerability. They were completely negligent. Imagine if exchanges accepted zero-confirmation transactions in Bitcoin and then began blaming Core developers because customers managed to double spend attack them. This is the same thing. It's laughable. An exchange needs to require sufficient confirmations and have internal controls to detect/delay fraudulent withdrawal attempts. You're giving them a free pass for their negligence.

When the attacks occurred on Monacoin, Bittrex didn't steal from their customers and permanently disable withdrawals. Livecoin should learn from their example.