That's usually what happens when legacy giants start entering the market. They have a huge reputational and branding advantage. The first mover advantage of the CCNs and Coindesks didn't give them much of lead over Forbes Crypto and the like.

I don't think Bitcoin is that popular in India. Localbitcoins only shows 200-300 BTC worth of volume per week. Bitnodes shows only 29 reachable nodes in India.

There probably wouldn't be enough people affected by this for mass protests. Maybe that's the point -- trying to nip it in the bud before it catches on.

If Bitmain did want to unload its BCH holdings, this would be the smartest way to go about it. They can leverage their brand, market position and connections to help create an OTC market which probably barely exists yet. The only notable OTC counter I can find for BCH is itBit. My guess is that volume there is paltry.

They obviously wouldn't need to do this to liquidate bitcoins OTC. BCH is another story. So yes, I suppose it's pretty obvious this is about selling BCH.

You can see the total transaction fees paid to miners on a daily basis here. On average, there are ~144 blocks mined per day, so you can calculate the trend over time.

On the current trajectory, transaction fees won't quite replace the mining subsidy (now 12.5 BTC per block) in the future, but some combination of increased fee revenue and rising Bitcoin prices will probably be sufficient to properly incentivize miners.

That doesn't really address energy consumption. The advent of LN isn't taking miners off the network. On the contrary, hash rate keeps increasing and is near the all-time high.

There are two big issues I see. One is whether mining operations are drawing on excess capacity or not -- how much net increase in electricity generation are they causing vs. load balancing? The other is the trajectory of green energy usage in the coming decades and what percentage of Bitcoin mining will shift away from things like coal-fired energy.

What if something happens to one of them? The coins are lost, right? If you trust your wife, it's probably safer to just give her access to the private keys. But then you really need to trust your wife.

No, the total number of nodes is not important there. Latency is not a major issue at these block sizes.

What matters is the ratio of peers allowing incoming connections to those who don't. If there are 10 million non-reachable nodes and only a handful of reachable nodes, the network will have major problems since most nodes will be unable to make outgoing connections to receive blocks.

If the network added 10 million nodes today reflecting the current distribution of reachable nodes, it wouldn't be an issue.

I always found these conspiracy theories -- a common one is that the NSA created Bitcoin -- sort of outlandish. I doubt these people would think that anonymously launching Bitcoin on an obscure mailing list would have succeeded. If it was a serious move by some elite group, they would have made a more concerted effort to see it succeed. Instead, hardly anyone used Bitcoin at all in its first year of existence.

Countries are competing against one another economically. That's why I don't think we'll see bans by most major economic powers. If one economic power prohibits things like cryptocurrency exchanges, services, usage they know it'll push all that economic growth -- and tax revenue -- to other competing countries.

Bitcoin was never banned in China. Domestic ICOs and exchange businesses were. There is still a robust OTC market there. Weekly Localbitcoins volume alone is in the 30 million CNY range. Not to mention the mining industry.

Some Indian legislators have proposed a bill. Nothing has happened yet.

It happens in the stock market all the time. Uber and Lyft were massively hyped IPOs, yet both were recently trading below their IPO price. Often times, company performance doesn't live up to the hype. This is especially true with ICO companies, who were often peddling vaporware and unsustainable business models. After the hype ends, the hangover comes.

Here's the full tweet:


I agree, the threat of a 10-year prison sentence seems like a huge deterrent. Black markets tend to be much smaller than their white market counterparts. Maybe he thinks it'll cause capital flight, or that wealthy Indians will leave India in order to invest.

Get ready to have your identity stolen.

A company being registered and compliant with all data protection laws isn't enough to guarantee the safety of your documents. Database compromises are happening everyday at major companies. The more companies you volunteer your information, documents and selfies to, the more likely your data will be hacked and sold on the dark web.

You should always consider that risk and weigh it against the potential benefit. Is this STO really that promising -- will the profits be large enough to justify this risk? Do you really want to hand your documents over to company named "Altcoinomy?" Because yes, KYC will typically be mandatory with security tokens. They are subject to various securities laws.

Binance DEX is much worse. For instance, Ethereum DEX transactions (on IDEX or EtherDelta) are secured by proof-of-work and traders truly control their own private keys.

On Binance DEX, Binance literally runs all the validators. There is no decentralized consensus as with proof-of-work mining. Binance also holds custody of all the assets -- every asset trading on the DEX is just a token issued by Binance. Traders don't hold private keys to real coins, just fake paper assets. This is no different than a regular centralized exchange. It's a gimmick.

Sure, Ethereum's development process and DAO fork three years ago may lead one to call it "centralized" -- especially compared to Bitcoin -- but these are truly apples and oranges. Plus, Ethereum obviously can't even hard fork to recover the >500K frozen Parity/Polkadot ether, so I'm not too concerned about a repeat of the DAO fork. Those days are probably over. 

You should have a back-up of your wallet seed in case of hardware failure. You should never depend solely on one device. Consider keeping a copy of your seed written down on a piece of paper and hidden. Also consider keeping an encrypted copy in another physical location (like a safety deposit box or your parent's house) in case your house burns down.


I would avoid using closed source wallets like Jaxx or Exodus. I recommend Electrum and Bitcoin Core.

You might consider using multiple security models. An encrypted cold storage wallet.dat here, an encrypted cold storage Electrum wallet there. Multiple copies on different mediums (USB, disc, SSD) in case of hardware failure. Maybe a paper wallet. You never know what vulnerabilities might be discovered later -- best to spread around your risk to different models.

If tokens are offered to US persons (located inside or outside the US), the SEC has jurisdiction -- at least in their eyes. Issuers in foreign jurisdictions therefore need to be very careful to comply with Regulation S if they want to avoid problems with the SEC. There were lots of ICOs who probably did not properly comply. This is good news for them.

I'd love to see someone weigh in on this topic who actually knows how lawmaking works in India. Most of us are completely ignorant. As you said, this is just a proposal, not an actual law. While there is some bureaucratic support for the measure, I'm not sure that means passage is obviously going to happen.

Maybe Pompliano knows something we don't. Even if it does pass, he thinks it will drive adoption even more:

Go ahead and try. We're all waiting. Your domain registration analysis was less than convincing.

Satoshi intentionally used generic language and writing style. I believe he obscured his identity using best practices at the time, but history shows that even best practices -- in hindsight -- are constantly leaking identifying information that can be analyzed later. I doubt such clues will do average joes much good, but agencies like the NSA are in a much better position to zero in on him.

Satoshi disappeared when 3-letter agencies started infiltrating the community. Maybe that's not a coincidence.

I feel sorry for people who lost coins this way, but it was at least partially their fault for using terrible security practices. Always go to the original source to download updates and verify the release signature -- this is a basic precaution.

If you click on a link simply because a pop-up told you to and then download and run executable applications, you are bound to lose any coins that are stored on your machine.

The recent Binance attack was a case where compromised accounts used the withdrawal system and Binance mistakenly authorized the withdrawal. I believe they mentioned plans to institute more comprehensive internal checks like TimeBits is talking about. They say their wallets weren't compromised, and I can see my deposit addresses haven't changed.

This appears to be the new frontier for exchange hackers: Compromise accounts, patiently wait, then try to slip through the withdrawal system unnoticed. Another similar attack on Gatehub just happened, where dozens of user accounts were compromised through API keys. The attack netted a $10 million reward for the hackers.