The "evidence" seems to boil down to this:


That's a terribly uninspiring list.

Satoshi as a programmer turned cartel boss turned law enforcement snitch? I just don't buy it. Sounds like great B-movie script, though.


That makes two of us...

Bitfinex redeems USDT for USD, which can be used to buy cryptocurrencies on its exchange. So, when Tether is redeemed this way, it can drive prices upwards. I believe this is the mechanism the CFTC has been looking into regarding its recent investigation into Bitfinex and Tether.

According to this article, huge companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks are already officially accepting payments through Flexa. This is the full list:


I'm still confused about how it works, though. Are the QR codes generated by the Spedn app somehow integrated with a larger payment infrastructure like ApplePay? What do you tell the cashier when you want to pay in cryptocurrency so that the QR code will register correctly?

Has any exchange ever provided solid proof of being hacked? I suppose an exchange would want to provide as little detail as possible about the inner workings of their security procedures to prevent further compromises.


Hence the old adage, "not your keys, not your coins." This applies to all exchanges.

After a second look, it's an obvious fake.

Here's eBay's real logo:


And here's the logo from the ads:


These cryptocurrency conferences are mostly just attention grabs and marketing gimmicks, so it doesn't surprise me that people engage in this sort of manipulation.

I think we can all agree that users wouldn't fork to roll back the chain. That would never happen and it wasn't the issue here.

The issue is this: What would users do if miners orphaned the chain with the "hack" transaction and kept all other transactions intact on a parallel branch? This isn't a fork and node operators have no power to stop it since both chains are valid.

The only way users could reverse such a block reorg is by hard forking to roll back the chain and then hard-coding the "hack" transaction into the fork. Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony?

After their earlier blunders, Bakkt stopped giving launch estimates at all. At least this indicates a reasonable expectation on their part that this will actually come to fruition this time.

The CME and CBOE went through a similar process. Even though they ended up self-certifying, it took months of negotiating with the CFTC and changes to their products before they actually self-certified and launched futures markets. I believe that's what's been happening behind the scenes for the last several months. The ICE won't self-certify until the CFTC is 100% on board with their product specifications.

Brad Sherman has been pushing anti-Bitcoin legislation for several years now. He may have finally drafted a bill, but that's a far cry from anyone in Congress taking it seriously.

Judging by the way that other legislators, regulators and industry are moving forward, I doubt Sherman's bill will go anywhere.

The genie is out of the bottle. It's not going back in...

Interesting, I hadn't seen that headline yet. I had no idea Gemini were getting into the payment processing business. I hope they know what they're getting into regarding payment volumes because these are some pretty big names:

It sure looks like it. Then again, those are billboard-style ads at a cryptocurrency conference. Technically, anyone could have bought the ad space and put eBay's name up. I wouldn't be surprised if eBay denies the rumors.

I don't care what miners want. I certainly care whether the network sustains the rational mining incentive (block rewards) built into the original design. It's simple to see that absent set mandatory fees, demand for block space needs to outpace supply for fees to be nonzero -- and certainly for fee revenue to replace the original 50 BTC per block subsidy. We need to put money on the table for miners to secure the chain. Hence the part of the quote that you removed:



As Satoshi once said, unconfirmed transactions are second class citizens. As he also once said, Bitcoin's design is such that fees are to fully replace the block subsidy. So if you want your transaction confirmed, you should pay a fee instead of assuming miners will collate your transaction into a block for free.

Miners aren't offering charity. If the block subsidy didn't exist now, miners would drop off the network en masse. In a couple more halvings, the block subsidy will be a small fraction of the current reward. Do you expect miners to secure the chain for less and less revenue, and eventually nothing? Are you okay with a situation where hash rate is spiraling downward, generations old hardware can be used to reorg the chain and attack the network, etc.?


85% of Bitcoin's supply has already been mined. In five years, the block subsidy will drop to a mere 6.25% of the original reward. Why do you assume we have decades to wait before dealing with this?

No exchange is unhackable. There is always a possibility (however slim) that a hotwallet will be drained. Exchanges ought to strive to minimize the value exposed to hotwallets, so they can cover the losses from their own reserves -- Binance did that in this case. In the alternative, exchanges can obtain insurance policies for their hot wallets like Coinbase has done.

We don't have all the details about what happened yet, but from the statements that have been made, Binance's servers weren't actually compromised. It was individual account holders who got phished or had SIM cards ported, and the attackers successfully cashed out from many accounts at once. I assume many other exchanges wouldn't cover the losses in this scenario.

Brad Sherman sure has a hard-on for Bitcoin. He's the only Congressman I can remember who's been crusading against Bitcoin for years. What a dick.

Fortunately, others like Darren Soto are pushing for much more favorable regulations. I don't think this bill will go anywhere.

If they're covering the lost funds from their own money, why would you assume it's an inside job? What does Binance have to gain by telling the world they got hacked?

Because that would be incredibly slow and customers would complain about withdrawal delays. It would also be costly (transaction fee wise) and bad for the Bitcoin network because they couldn't batch transactions.


They are trying to support large scale API trading... bots, algorithms. Is that a realistic approach?


If SIM card porting was required, then 2FA (with OTP authentication like Google Authenticator) is still fine going forward.

You can only hire so many pen-testers. At best, you can outsmart most thieves, but never all of them. That's why there has been so much emphasis on reducing losses to limited hot wallets in these situations. All in all, this could have been a lot worse.

That thinking might apply to professional traders and corporate entities, but unverified users can withdraw 2 BTC per day. That's nearly $12,000 per day at these prices with zero documents -- in fact, not even a name or address is required. Their stablecoin order books compare to the major fiat exchanges and they have ample altcoin markets. That's more than enough action for the average retail user, which is their primary market, hence why they've been rolling out credit card buys and things like that.

I avoid KYC like the plague. I only ever did it with one reputable and licensed fiat exchange and even that feels like shit. I've been pretty happy with Binance's verification tiers and limits.

Same with any selfish mining or double spend attack. They benefit miners and any entities they collude with, no one else. They certainly don't benefit users directly. Miners and services have colluded in such attacks in the past, too. People try to make it out like, "This time is different!" but they fail to realize what truly free markets really entail. 7,000 BTC wasn't enough to garner a serious discussion, but a much larger loss might see stakeholders talking differently, in spite of what the little guys on Twitter might have to say about it.

In some situations, we would have actual user incentives in favor of a reorg as well. If the loss were much greater, the market might perceive it as a huge blow to the ecosystem, like Mt Gox in 2014. An exchange of Binance's size socializing losses across users would also leave a sizeable number of Bitcoin users -- especially when emphasizing active circulating supply -- scathed. In a market so driven by value speculation, everyone has a vested financial interest in a positive outcome. The most principled of bitcoiners will consider a positive outcome to be one where the market crashes and investors lose, but in this kind of situation, I think you'd be surprised how many would opt for the opposite.

Everyone has their own opinion about what would happen. I'm personally not sure. I simply think the people who are so confident that it would be the end of Bitcoin might be wrong. I'm sure the market will confirm this either way eventually. Until then, we can keep debating it.

I would hope so. A few years ago -- and even up until recently -- there were still exchanges keeping virtually all customer cryptocurrency in hot wallets. No hot wallet or automated withdrawal system is impenetrable.

Through responsible cold wallet management and possibly hot wallet insurance like Coinbase has, these situations should become more like this Binance hack and less like the Bitfinex hack a few years ago, where 120,000 BTC were stolen.

Fortunately for customers, Binance is a much more viable exchange than other recently hacked exchanges like Cryptopia. It seems like they'll recover from this.

Perhaps some people would, but I suspect they also might just be a small minority like the BIP148 contingent -- a small uncompromising group who is willing to fork themselves off the network and into obscurity.


The biggest mistake that people make is assuming that Bitcoin is immutable. It's not, and never was. This is a crucial mistake people make in their assumptions about pertinent game theory.

Bitcoin's design puts transaction reliability in the hands of miner incentives. I think Rubin made an interesting point about miners negotiating with one another about whether to build on the most recent block or to mine selfishly. We like to think that Bitcoin's incentives are perfect but there are surely situations where miners could maliciously profit (and have maliciously profited) from reorganizing the blockchain. When we think about smaller reorgs under this incentive set, we just consider it orphaning. 

So, there is an element of cognitive dissonance here and sadly, that's what this boils down to. Do you support free markets -- where miners can reorg the blockchain based on free market incentives -- or do you think these "hardliners" can and should pressure miners into ignoring short term market incentives in favor of their desired outcome?

This is the age-old question about long term vs. short term miner incentives. It really can't be answered with any level of certainty. I will say that I'm skeptical of people who think they can predict how the entire economy of Bitcoin users would react to any given situation. I'm agnostic on this question myself.

Do I want to see coordinate blockchain reorganizations? No, but if it happens, it happened because of Bitcoin's economic design -- full stop. My suspicion is that the market would understand this far better than ultra conservatives who would assume "Bitcoin is dead" because of a reorg. Those people are more like Bitcoin Cash supporters who sold all their coins because of Segwit activation because they fundamentally misunderstood Bitcoin's economic incentives. They'll be forked off and the rest of the network will move on without them.