The supply cap and speculative investment aspects discourage spending, but they don't mean no one wants to spend Bitcoin. The network hit > 400,000 confirmed transactions in a day a few weeks ago. Clearly, there is growing transaction liquidity.

Bitpay also released some data that suggests lots of holders begin selling after large price rises.

The fact that Bitfinex lost the $850M to begin with is alarming, though. They can't launch a token every time this happens. The market won't keep bailing them out -- it needs to not happen again. That risk is real.

The NYAG had no power to do anything. I don't even understand what they were trying to accomplish. I'd be a lot more concerned about federal agencies. They spend years building cases before pouncing. The CFTC investigation goes back something like 1.5 years.

Satoshi, a cartel boss? And then a law enforcement snitch? Sounds likely!

This was discussed a while back in another thread. The evidence is razor thin, just a bunch of weak circumstantial nothings. It doesn't seem convincing to me at all.

My cable provider (AT&T) actually does accept Bitcoin now. I noticed the "Bitpay" option when I paid my bill last week. I wouldn't have imagined that in my wildest dreams 5 years ago!

Concerns over market manipulation -- at least that's the answer provided by SEC chairman Jay Clayton. This is what he said earlier this year:


Presumably, they want to see global trading volume shift towards regulated jurisdictions and away from entities like Bitfinex, BitMEX, OKEX, etc.

This is a much more interesting proposition, although still incredibly contentious and unlikely to ever be implemented.

Enforcing the re-circulation of lost coins would make the supply even more predictable -- as impossible as that seems given the hard cap and transparent blockchain. Future generations wouldn't need to fear, for instance, the Satoshi coins suddenly being moved and sold at any time. Reintroducing those coins into the supply would rather be a predictable and transparent process.

Would you just gift the lost coins to miners? That adds some additional security to the protocol design by producing new honest mining incentives.

I don't ever see it happening for Bitcoin since it betrays the system's original rules/design, so users wouldn't support the fork. But I always liked this idea, particularly for privacy coin protocols where undetectable inflation can happen, like with Zcash. If it were implemented in the original protocol, I think it could be a good feature. Somebody should do it with an altcoin.

According to Bitcoin's design, "the right thing" for miners to do is to process transactions based on fee priority and nothing else. Blacklisting, rollbacks, etc. based on external financial incentive is an attack on the network.

I understand why people want to do this and I can agree with their sentiment, but it would completely erode trust in the protocol. Bitcoin would no longer be seen as irreversible and would instead be subject to some kind of morality code. I'm not sure investors and users would take kindly to that.

If you're in the mood for a terrible crime thriller that mentions Bitcoin a few times, check out Crypto. It's supposed to be truly awful and as expected, unrealistic. That's the only mainstream movie I'm aware of.

Honestly, I've been pretty disappointed with all the Bitcoin documentaries I've seen. It's hard to recommend anything.

Are we for censorship resistance, or not? Blacklisting is antithetical to what Bitcoin is. The entire proof-of-work mining incentive exists so that miners publish transactions regardless of any other consideration than rational profit motive. If users/miners can start meddling and deciding that some transactions are illegitimate, then clearly Bitcoin can't be trusted any more than the trusted intermediaries (like banks) it was intended to replace.

Exchanges and other centralized services are free to coordinate and blacklist coins among themselves, but implementing a blacklist at the protocol level would be impossible to do. Users wouldn't have it. Blacklisting nodes would eventually split from the Bitcoin network when the outputs are spent.

I'm an advocate of free markets, so I'd rather not.

Also, selling your property is now "cheating" people?


Right, because that's what Bitcoin is all about: redistribution of wealth. I guess I need to go re-read the whitepaper. I can't recall the part about stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

You realize that no one will invest in a currency that steals and redistributes wealth, right? Plus, everyone will just structure their holdings to <10 BTC per address.

Guys, please stop bumping this thread. This subject has already been authoritatively decided.

Yes, Bitcoin = nerd money. See this post for confirmation:

Japan is acting as sort of a test case for the G20 since they've been quicker than any other country to pass cryptocurrency regulations and establish licensing procedures. Thankfully, they're not really "heading" anything, though. I hope the world doesn't follow Japan's example because their approach seems to get more rigid and overreaching as time goes on.

The latest example: New stricter regulations that are expected to cause huge financial barriers to entry and force small companies out of business. New lower limits on margin trading, etc.

What constitutes "cheap"?

Once we establish that, I guess we can talk about the economic implications and how it affects the design. I strongly believe that the sustainability of the system has to be the top priority, much more important than cheap fees.

All manner of economic and scaling designs should be tested. If cheap fees (with regard to "the masses") are truly important, there's an abundance of Bitcoin copycats with bigger blocks and cheaper fees. I suspect that Bitcoin's value stems from elsewhere than cheap fees though, and that there will be strong demand for Bitcoin's block space even at orders of magnitude higher fees than seen today.

It seems like Bitstamp's approach is to go above and beyond required regulations out of an abundance of caution, for fear of various allegations, especially money laundering. They seem to have really ramped up their KYC process since 2017, perhaps in response to the BTC-e shutdown -- they were taken down on money laundering conspiracy charges -- or maybe in response to all the SEC and CFTC attention on the industry.

They're not the only ones. Gemini is becoming notorious for closing customer accounts and being overly worried about legal compliance. They even explicitly prohibit mixers in their terms.

He gave people a couple days to withdraw, and then brought the servers online again a day or so later so the laggards could get their coins. For an exit scam, that's extremely generous.

We don't know how his site was set up. Maybe he is right to be paranoid.

At the end of the day, there are good reasons why we always tell people not to store coins with third parties. That risk is especially true with services that may be targeted by governments.

The issue is well-known on Coinbase. They've been closing accounts linked to gambling sites for years. There are countless threads about it, like these:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=747596.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1231723.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1508261.0

Gemini has a similar anti-gambling policy in its terms and seems to be employing the same blockchain analytics methods.

You can't necessarily just use your own wallet as an intermediary. They'll still flag your account.

Unlike Coinbase, I've never seen anyone complain about problems with this from Binance. I can't say from experience, but you're probably in the clear.

I'm not sure whether or not they truly have obligations under the UIGEA or Wire Act when dealing with US residents, since they only deal with cryptocurrencies and not fiat.


It seems like he's just paranoid, probably because some other exchanges -- like Coinbase and Gemini -- terminate accounts over this.

Here is a more comprehensive list for you.

Mixers don't necessarily remove the traceability of your bitcoins. They can certainly make them harder to trace, but adversaries are always trying to break them. Not all mixers are created equally, either. Some mixers employ much better techniques to evade blockchain analysis than others, so it's worth doing some research to find the right mixer.

There are privacy considerations. The longer you wait to withdraw, the less likely you are to be linked to your original deposit re: blockchain analysis. Chipmixer has discussed this before:


Aside from that, I've known people who used darknet market accounts as wallets, too. I also made the same mistake with exchange accounts in my earlier days. In my experience, people like to store coins on whatever third party services they normally use (out of convenience) until it comes back to bite them once or twice. Then they learn their lesson.

Nobody cares about the interests of pools. I surely don't. The reason I care about maintaining adequate miner incentives is not for the benefit of pools. It's so that confirmations remain reliable and Bitcoin is able to sustain Byzantine fault tolerance. In other words, it's to ensure "honest mining."

I have no interest in letting miners decide the block size. They can easily sacrifice the long term health of the system for their own short term gains. This is why we have consensus rules -- to ensure they have no ability to do that.

If block size limit is larger than transaction demand, fees will always tend towards zero. That's very simple economics. Since the block subsidy is already heading towards zero, that would mean block rewards will tend towards zero. That's completely unsustainable in a system that is designed to rely on rationally incentivized "honest mining." You can't remove the incentive and expect miners to stay honest.