Even if we imagined that the problem of verifying identity has been successfully and fully solved, I would still argue that using amount of people to determine consensus, aka direct democracy, is still a bad idea. People should be equal in rights, but they are not equal in many other qualities, and majority of people can easily be wrong, and it happened many times in history when people elected shitty leaders. Bitcoin's PoW consensus puts something at stake, which ensures that even those who wield 51% wouldn't cheat if they behave rationally, but in democracy this risk is not personal, everyone puts all other people at stake, which turns out to be a worse deterrent than individual responsibility.
It seems like a poor analogy from the OP. A 51% attack is an attack. It's not a mechanism for governance. It's a possible attack vector that is a byproduct of Bitcoin's security model. Bitcoin was purposefully designed to thwart any sort of majority governance. If you want to opt into the network, you first need to agree to the existing consensus rules. We verify using fingerprints, id, iris scan, (another 30 different ways) using file sharing.
Why would you want to upload your biometric and KYC data onto the internet? Aren't you concerned about the risks of identity theft? The cost vs. benefit doesn't seem worth it. They are already on the internet, The benefits heavily out weigh the cons. The only people concerned are criminals. the cost: giving up some personal information that is already given up to the hospital at birth. Ah, so that's your position. "Privacy is only desired by criminals." We'll have to agree to disagree.  And no, my biometric data is not already on the internet. I intend to keep it that way. You seem to be confused about the information recorded at birth. |
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The FATF is planning to publish guidelines for cryptocurrency oversight on June 21st. This is notable because the G20 has affirmed its intention to enforce these guidelines in their own countries. The guidelines will apparently require exchanges to move beyond customer KYC and begin collecting information about the recipients of withdrawn funds. Countries that don't comply by forcing these rules upon exchanges can be blacklisted by the FATF, essentially turning them into banking pariahs. Bloomberg reports: On June 21, the Financial Action Task Force -- a multi-government effort that develops recommendations for combating money laundering and financing of terrorism that’s followed by about 200 countries including the U.S. -- will publish a note to clarify how participating nations should oversee virtual assets, FATF spokeswoman Alexandra Wijmenga-Daniel said in an email. The new rules will apply to businesses working with tokens and cryptocurrencies, such as exchanges and custodians and crypto hedge funds.
Much depends on how the rules -- long governing traditional bank wire transfers -- will be interpreted and applied by country-specific regulators, but they are “one of the biggest threats to crypto today,” Eric Turner, director of research at crypto researcher Messari Inc., said in an email. “Their recommendation could have a much larger impact than the SEC or any other regulator has had to date.” The guidelines will require companies ranging from exchanges Coinbase Inc. and Kraken to asset manager Fidelity Investments to collect information about customers initiating transactions of over $1,000 or 1,000 euros, as well as details about the recipients of the funds, and to send that data to the recipient’s service provider along with each transaction.
While that may sound simple, compliance will be costly and technically difficult, said John Roth, chief compliance and ethics officer at Seattle-based exchange Bittrex, which has about $58 million in daily-trading volume. After all, wallet addresses on digital ledgers supporting cryptocurrencies are largely anonymous, so an exchange currently has no way of knowing who the recipient of the funds is.
“It’s either going to require a complete and fundamental restructuring of blockchain technology, or it’s going to require a global parallel system to be sort of constructed among the 200 or so exchanges in the world,” Roth said. “You can imagine difficulties in trying to build something like that.”
A handful of U.S. exchanges are discussing how to set up such a system, said Mary Beth Buchanan, general counsel at San Francisco-based Kraken, which does about $195 million in daily volume. Just how soon these consequences start to hit home will depend on the individual agencies. Groups like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) are expected to start to vigorously enforce the rules. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) recently issued interpretive guidance that looks similar to those being considered by FATF. Some state agencies could follow suit, raising the risk that non-compliant businesses will lose money-transmitter licenses.
If a country doesn’t comply with FATF rules and is placed on its blacklist, “it can essentially lose access to the global financial system,” said Jesse Spiro, head of policy at crypto investigative firm Chainalysis Inc. Link to the full article |
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6) and yes a future HF to increase the blocksize beyond the current 4MB of weight
From a technical/scalability perspective, I am more open to this than I was years ago. But when I consider the social/political issues around it, I'm skeptical a non-emergency hard fork would ever be easy to pull off at this point. You think broad consensus is possible? What kind of timeline and activation process are we talking about, and how would we gauge the risks of a network split? |
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This is an interesting proposal. I wish I had the technical expertise to judge the "retirement attack" vector. For example, what exactly do these statements imply? What is the risk in real terms? The only way the entity can cheat is if they work with a previous possessor of an transitory key. Even so, they'll only be able to steal that particular UTXO. This becomes much harder with MuSig. Yes, that is what 4.1 means. They can steal it at no cost, but we all know who stole it. |
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blocksize: transaction count increase onchain = more users. = less fee per user but the total combined fee of block adds up to MORE That sounds nice, but can you explain the economics behind it? Users aren't paying a fixed fee, so we can't simply assume that more transactions = more fees. If block size limits > demand for block space, then fees will drop close to 0 -- why would anyone pay when there is free space? Miners will include your transaction anyways. Without fixed fees or a fee market based on full blocks, there is no basis for you to say that increased adoption alone will increase fee revenue for miners. You've suggested keeping a "buffer" between block size limit and observed usage, meaning no one would ever need to pay fees at all. With inflation dropping to nothing and fees dropping to nothing, you must expect miners to secure the network out of charity! |
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watch towers are needed, because LN as just a 2 counterparty agreement just wont work.
if LN worked perfectly between 2 people. watchtowers wouldnt be needed. so watchtowers is big red neon sign that something is up It's not that LN doesn't work, it's that the security model requires users to be online 24/7. Watchtowers are a solution to this obvious UX problem. EG if you put a 90 day lock on funds on the bitcoin network. you SHOULD live in peace for 89 days,23hours 50minutes without having to care what your counterpart might get upto. That wouldn't work very well. If all LN funds had different timelocks, it would destroy fungibility. Who wants funds that are stuck in LN for the next 90 days? These wouldn't be worth 1:1 to Bitcoin because they can't be used on-chain. |
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"Nguyen" is the most common surname among the Vietnamese. Around 40% of Vietnamese people have that name. A pretty common coincidence!  |
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On the whole, the much simpler and easier option is to start using Lightning Network. More and more vendors are now accepting LN, you can open a channel when fees are low and then spend whenever you need to, instantly and cheaply, regardless of what the current mempool status is.
How many people are using custodial wallets like Bluewallet because they don't want to manage an online node and channel liquidity 24/7, though? This seems really common, but I don't know that there are any statistics about this. Hopefully Watchtowers and better UI in non-custodial wallets will turn the tide towards better (trustless) practices. If the choice is between holding/using an altcoin and using a custodial LN wallet, the latter doesn't seem any better. |
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We verify using fingerprints, id, iris scan, (another 30 different ways) using file sharing.
Why would you want to upload your biometric and KYC data onto the internet? Aren't you concerned about the risks of identity theft? The cost vs. benefit doesn't seem worth it. |
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Nobody has talked about it, but one thing is strange:
Clam's crypto-crash was on May the 26th, but Poloniex took money from its customers on June the 6th. For 10 days, they had covered the loss. And I didn't even knew that the Clam crypto-crap had crashed. Then, suddenly, Poloniex changed its mind, and decided to make their customers pay.
Good catch. I didn't even notice the dates. They may have overestimated their ability to convince defaulted borrowers to pay up. A few poor saps probably deposited coins, but they probably switched gears once they realized the loss won't be recovered. This seems to be the extent of their legal threats to borrowers now: All of the defaulted borrowers’ accounts were frozen after they defaulted and will remain frozen until they repay their loans and comply with Poloniex terms of service. Good luck with that, Poloniex.  |
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Malta would be monumentally stupid to ignore this, and this is why places like Binance flocking there may wind up getting screwed. I'd be less inclined to trust a company that moved to Malta than one that stayed put.
Sounds like Binance may soon be on the run again. Hong Kong, Japan, Malta... where to next? The British Virgin Islands? Or maybe Binance will finally be brought to heel like Shapeshift was? Bitfinex and some others are still managing to offer trading without KYC if you don't transfer fiat money, but the pressure on exchanges from regulators really feels tangible now. |
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Having said all that, if something like Quantum Computing or similar ever did become a credible risk, we could simply soft-fork to a new algorithm to mitigate it.
Yes, but there's no way to fully mitigate the problem, i.e. move the entire supply to quantum-safe addresses. P2PK outputs from 2009-2011 -- like the Satoshi coins -- and of course any coins sitting in reused addresses would be at risk. There could be millions of previously "lost" coins that could be brute-forced over time. Lost coins certainly won't be donations to holders in that case! Lamport signatures would also be horrible for scalability. Hopefully something better comes along. |
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That's correct, but it's not the amount only, it's the vulnerability of the site against hacking.
They are a billion dollars exchange, and their trading volume (daily) is over $1 billion, so they can easily recover the hack amount, but if this happens again, I doubt if they can regain the confidence of the people again, this will lead to a their downfall as the next hack might result to loss of bigger funds.
It's important to note that Binance wasn't actually hacked. They are still using the same hot wallet today, which they've said is limited to about 2% of customer funds. Some users -- including some with very high account value -- had their accounts compromised. Binance didn't have proper internal checks in place and authorized very large withdrawal requests from these accounts through its automated system. An attack like this can't drain anything beyond what's in the hot wallet. We can also take some comfort in the fact that Binance's system wasn't actually compromised. Fixing this problem is a matter of implementing more strict controls on the withdrawal system, not identifying unknown security holes and rebuilding the system. |
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if you think about it, why doesn't other websites like Coindesk are having any trouble like that? They are. Apparently, their visibility is down about 35% since the update. Cointelegraph experienced a big hit as well. Neither were as bad as CCN's decline, but I'm sure they are all hurting. Quality has already been going down across the board for a while -- including sites like Coindesk. So, this isn't exactly a good sign for what's to come. |
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I am curious to know if forensic analysis tools, used by Surveillance companies can put Humpty Dumpty together again, after it has exited a CoinJoin process like this? Blockchain analysis companies like "Chainalysis" might have the capability to dissect this transaction and to find the source of the input addresses. I'm sure they are actively working on it. There are certainly no guarantees. We should probably assume that any obfuscation method -- if it can't be completely broken -- will leak extant data that can be used to de-anonymize you later. TOR has vulnerabilities and is always under active attack. There may be ways of analyzing Coinjoin transactions (or Wasabi's implementation of them) that haven't been discovered yet. And of course, we are limited by the anonymity set -- the number of parties in the transaction. How many Coinjoin transactions you cascade will affect how strong the privacy will be. |
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"I say if you do not become a millionaire in the next 10 years, then it’s your own fault." It's a big statement! An 18 year old male who grew up in an affluent family, is not a good fit for making such statement! Becoming a millionaire doesn't make you eligible for such statements! I remember this kid. He came off like a privileged, entitled jerk in his interviews. Not everyone is given thousands of dollars by their grandparents to buy whatever they want!  It sounds like he was just immensely lucky that his brother introduced him to Bitcoin, and that he had money to invest at the right time. That's a once in a lifetime opportunity! |
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I want to use a metaphor for this because I don`t think 2 people understood in the polls.
Keep in mind Bitcoin 2.0 is not Bitcoin2 I have no clue what that is
Bitcoin = Playstation 1
Bitcoin 2.0 = Playstation 2
Bitcoins = the games
You can use ps1 games in a ps2. Why would you not accept a ps2 for free? LOL
I'd be happy to accept PS2 games for free, but like other Bitcoin spinoff coins, I would probably just sell them. What would make it "2.0?" Just the fact that Satoshi came back and said so? Or because on its face, it's a truly superior technology? I'm pretty uncomfortable with this sort of appeal to authority. Satoshi released Bitcoin obscurely and anonymously and disappeared the same way. He let the market decide. I don't think he's interested in using his authority now to push an alternative technology. If he wanted to release "Bitcoin 2.0" then I think he do it anonymously and let the market decide again. |
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Rumors are emerging that CCN might be acquired by Scandinavian company Stankevicius MGM. Apparently they bought another dying crypto site last year, too. I'm not sure how reliable these rumors are, though. None of the larger media sites are reporting this yet. So they got bought out. It would be interesting if this rumor did turn out to true.  Because they are reporting on their own websites demise. So it is not giving the complete facts of the situation and only telling what they want to display to the public. Which is one sided. Here's one idea: CCN announced they were shutting down, then Stankevicius approached them with M&A talks after seeing the headlines. If CCN really knew they were getting bought out, I'm sure they wouldn't have publicly thrown in the towel like that. Even if Stankevicius is serious, the sale may not happen. They may be trying to be buy them out for pennies. |
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Well, it is not just about the identity of Satoshi as such
Let's not forget that he presumably has around 1M bitcoins, which is worth almost 8B dollars at present prices. If you take into account this little fact, things start to look somewhat different (mildly speaking), and finding out who is hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto suddenly stops being a matter of pure curiosity or idle interest. In other words, this individual has good reasons to keep his incognito (while others to break it)
If he hasn't moved them by now, why would he ever move them? He clearly doesn't need them for financial reasons, and he hinted with his statements about lost coins that they might be a "donation" to Bitcoin holders. If Satoshi were planning to spend these coins, it would have made sense to move some of them early on to prevent all this folklore about "the Satoshi coins." I think under most scenarios, those coins are long lost. The bigger question for me is when quantum computing might allow some entity to steal them. Since so many of these early bitcoins are held on exposed pubkeys (instead of pubkey hashes), this is a distinct possibility. |
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Rumors are emerging that CCN might be acquired by Scandinavian company Stankevicius MGM. Apparently they bought another dying crypto site last year, too. I'm not sure how reliable these rumors are, though. None of the larger media sites are reporting this yet.
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