That's one route. Maybe they could threaten mining hardware producers with secondary sanctions. That's what the Treasury Department did with exchanges. Most of the exchanges fell into line pretty quickly over 2017-2018, banning Iranians from their platforms altogether rather than risking OFAC breathing down their neck.

They've admitted to being insolvent? It seems really irresponsible to allow trading of assets they don't hold in custody.


Suspending withdrawals while allowing trading is not enough. That's what scammer exchanges do. Instead of compensating their depositors in any way -- like other exchanges have done with debt tokens and periodic buybacks -- they allowed the market to price in the insolvency so that MONA holders got completely screwed. Obviously, Livecoin wants to be made whole by the developers -- which will never happen -- and they've decided to pass on the losses to depositors.


Livecoin was attacked through a selfish mining attack. This has nothing to do with the developers.

That won't happen. Their primary concern is squeezing tax revenue out of us, deterring tax avoidance. They aren't interested in making things less burdensome.

At best, there might be a small annual exemption for gains realized this way, like in this proposed bill, which caps the exemption at $600. It'll take new legislation to carve out an exemption like that too. I don't think the IRS can just do it.


Legal tender means it must be accepted for payment of debt or taxes. Why would they do that?

Yes, I'd consider rollbacks under the umbrella of transaction censorship. You're correct that a double spend attack is possible. Since the attack would be so short-lived, though, I wonder if the rollback would survive.

Sure, the site may have been compromised. Maybe it was even a honeypot. My point is that there were no criminal charges, not even any confirmed statements that criminal money laundering was occurring on Bestmixer. This shows that despite the lack of lawbreaking, a mixer can be shut down anyway, so this emphasis on the law is sort of pointless.

It reminds me of civil asset forfeiture in the US. The police come and seize all your property, then the burden is on you to prove a legitimate source of funds for all the property before you can claw any of it back. No criminal charges. They just shut you down, take everything you own, and tell you to bring your case to court. The Bestmixer admin isn't going to be filing a legal suit against the Dutch police anytime soon. Neither will any other mixer.

This, exactly.

They are framing the issue as if sharing identity data between exchanges is the only problem. The real problem is the elaborate database exchanges will be building (and reporting to governments) full of everyone's transactions. These exchanges already have your KYC. The proof-of-knowledge protocol they are promoting is just a layer over the top. Once the police come knocking at the door of one of the exchanges, your entire financial history will be revealed to them.

Went to cash, meaning it's already been credited to your Coinbase USD wallet? No money is missing? That's probably the best you'll get. Consider yourself lucky if everything got properly credited to your account.

I've seen some complaints like this over the years. Regarding the doubled billed amount, if they didn't immediately buy the coins for you, they are unlikely to honor the lower price you bought at. You can withdraw the doubled billed amount back to your back account.

In the future, I recommend doing an ACH deposit to Coinbase and transferring the USD to Coinbase Pro instead of using their buy/sell service. You'll save considerably on broker fees and I think mishaps like this are less likely. Once the ACH clears, your funds won't be on hold. For some reason, they put ridiculously long holds when you use the buy/sell broker service.

That doesn't mean a mixer can't be shut down or the operators arrested. What happens at trial -- or whether the case ever goes to trial -- is a different question. There are no explicit laws about mixing, but court precedents haven't been set regarding whether mixing could be construed as violating various money laundering statutes. That was the implication Dutch police made with Bestmixer.

Unfortunately, police tend to shoot first and ask questions later. That's why Europol is only now "attempt[ing] to determine the extent to which criminal money laundering was used on the site."

That's the only place it's relevant, yes. The FATF guidelines require KYC and information sharing among VASPs for transfers of $1,000 or more. So essentially, if two exchanges are sharing information about your transactions using this protocol then both of them already have your KYC on file. If you get flagged for suspicious activities and the authorities investigate you, both exchanges will be able to hand everything to them on a silver platter.

It has everything to do with regulatory pressure.

A few years ago, everyone was using unverified accounts and withdrawing freely without regional restrictions. Basically overnight, unverified accounts were dropped to 0.025 BTC and 0 BTC daily withdrawal limits depending when the account was created. Then they're banning Iranians, Crimeans and others. Not long after that, they segregated US users from the rest of the world and pulled dozens of token markets from US investors, due to pressure from the SEC. Then came mandatory KYC for all users. Now, similar to Bitstamp, we're seeing increasing numbers of complaints about their enhanced due diligence policies. The list goes on. They're obviously reacting to pressure from the Treasury Department, SEC, FINCEN, possibly Homeland Security and others too.

Bittrex seems to be turning into the next Bitstamp/Gemini -- quick to freeze or terminate accounts, overly invasive AML/KYC/CFT procedures, etc.

This doesn't address the fundamental problem -- required KYC with your VASP and transaction reporting for tiny amounts of money.

This is the beginning of a dystopian nightmare. Regular people will have voluminous files about their personal and financial life that the authorities can parse through if they are ever interested for any reason, malicious or not. There was never any pretense to do this level of reporting with banks, with cash or any other monetary instruments.

Fearmongering around cryptocurrencies and terrorism has made these extremely small $1,000 thresholds acceptable to people. What a nightmare.

BSV's price benefits greatly from the endorsement of "Satoshi" even if Wright is later debunked. By all appearances, he's just using this drama as a ploy to temporarily create value out of thin air. It's a "pump and dump" so he and his associates can dump their BSV on naive investors.

I agree. They used to allow unverified accounts with limited withdrawal limits too, but things have completely changed since early 2017. Bitstamp and Bittrex are two exchanges I completely avoid because their customer due diligence is too burdensome and invasive.

The Sabre case is just a regular embezzlement case. With Crypto Capital, the operators have been charged with bank fraud and unlicensed money transmission because they were fraudulently moving billions of dollars for different exchanges. The $850 million wasn't embezzled. It was frozen by multiple government authorities. This is comparing apples and oranges.

According to his story, he doesn't control his own bitcoins. He trusted that other people would cooperate with him to recover his bitcoins. No back-ups or contingency plans. Just flat out trust.


This whole case is smoke and mirrors. I don't think it has anything to do with the Satoshi coins.

If Bitcoin exponentially increases in price, it follows that electricity usage will increase similarly. Let's not view this in a vacuum, though. It should be viewed in the context of taking market share from other extremely energy intensive monies like gold and fiat. Again, the fundamental problem here is that reliably secure and usable money requires significant energy.


The ability to 51% attack one time for a few hours doesn't imply trust. In fact, the possibility of 51% attacks has nothing to do with trust. The only thing the attackers can do is censor transactions for a short time.

Japan isn't a "Bitcoin-friendly" country. They are a nanny state hellbent against privacy and free market speculation, and they are creating huge barriers to market entry for service providers.

This is exactly how regulation strangles innovation. The whole point is to bankrupt small businesses with compliance costs and consolidate the market in favor of a handful of large whitelisted entities. These entities can be easily pressured and controlled by the government.

What was the point of creating Bitcoin, then? If you read the whitepaper, the point was to eliminate trusted intermediaries and custodians like trusts. Wright's convoluted excuses contradict the whole premise.

Apparently, you change your user agreement at will with no notice to users, and retroactively apply the terms. Pray tell, what local laws were broken? I don't think your terms are even legal or enforceable in most jurisdictions. You can't legally steal customer funds just because they publicly posted correspondence with your support.

If you are insolvent and can't fulfill withdrawals for a particular asset, you should de-list the market and come clean to your users. You shouldn't allow trading to continue on assets like this.

Blaming the developer team for their own incompetence and lack of risk management, and then selectively scamming their customers to recoup the losses -- that's what this amounts to!

I'm surprised such an unscrupulous exchange is running such a prominent signature campaign on Bitcointalk. I was hoping this would get rectified quickly, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like LiveCoin -- according to their behavior around their terms -- are just scammers.


All signs point to insolvency and selective scamming to stay afloat. I agree that anyone in the position to withdraw funds should do so immediately.