Users overpaying is a huge problem. People are paying $20 at the toll when a more efficient market would have them paying a quarter for comparable confirmation times.

It's a really hard problem to fix, though. Just like High-priority transaction rules, miners will simply remove this from their clients. Being rational, they will include higher paying fees before lower paying ones since there is no consensus issue. Even if we table the discussion of how refusing to forward transactions that pay higher fees is a form of censorship, miners and others who don't agree -- and there will be many -- will sidestep the issue by removing this code and spinning up globally distributed nodes that do the same.


That's because those transactions aren't going to confirm anyway. It's wasteful to propagate them. Refusing to propagate valid transactions that would otherwise be confirmed is a stickier issue.

Not necessarily. Identity theft is a crime very often investigated by police. People fraudulently open bank and loan accounts everyday with fake documents, which immediately provides lots of deniability for the identity theft victim. You might be sucked into an investigation and it will take time to sort out -- including on your credit report. But since no laundered proceeds, etc. could be linked back to you, I'm guessing nothing would happen in terms of criminal charges.

The main problem is you're exposed to these identity theft risks. Identity theft takes years to recover from and can make any situation involving credit or public record checks a nightmare.

As mocacinno pointed out, an internet connection is required to broadcast a signed transaction to the network, even if you can sign the transaction offline.

One option is to use a bearer instrument like Opendime. People can pass it around like cash without any movement on the blockchain. Of course, you need an internet connection to verify its balance.

It's a tough problem to solve. Eventually we'll be using P2P mesh networks and won't be fully dependent on the centralized internet infrastructure, but the technology isn't quite here yet.

I don't think that's the consensus opinion. It's very difficult to predict how quickly quantum computing capacity will grow. To say we are still several decades away assumes very slow progress, growing in linear terms. I suspect that Moore’s law is closer to the reality than that. Here is a good discussion of the issue. Research indicates that Bitcoin's elliptic curve signature scheme could be broken by the 2020s.

According to Bithumb, this was an inside job and not an external attacker:


I can't imagine how they'll recover their reputation after this. If you had any other options at all, why would you keep trading at Bithumb when they get hacked twice a year?!

There are alternative full node implementations -- Knots, BTCD, and Libbitcoin to name a few. However, Core is much more actively maintained and audited than any of the alternatives, so it's a more secure and reliable choice.


Yes, that's what it means to be a full node -- enforcement of all the consensus rules. For example, if you run a BU node and allow larger blocks than Bitcoin's rules allow, you might find your node forked off the Bitcoin network entirely.

Of course you can. Whether you should is a different matter. Keep in mind, there are privacy implications to consolidating outputs. You're tying all the outputs together into one identity. Let's say someone or some agency is studying your blockchain activity. You'd be giving them all your wallet address clusters and transaction history on a silver platter. If that doesn't matter to you, then you could send all outputs in one big transaction to one address and it wouldn't matter.

It matters to me, though. I consolidate outputs that come from a single source (like my signature campaign), but that's it. Otherwise, I have many different wallets and I don't mix together coins from different sources. For privacy purposes, each wallet represents a disparate identity. If anyone is watching me, I'm hoping they haven't figured out where all my coins are hidden.

There seems to be two options for retail stores. Accept zero confirmations with a very high fraud risk -- and maybe mitigate that risk by requiring ID -- or integrate Lightning.

I guess a third option would be to have a waiting area for Bitcoin payers who are waiting for confirmations.


Walmart and other retailers now process personal checks like debit cards. They scan the check and immediately debit your bank account, so it's very difficult to double spend. If there's insufficient funds, the bank will just reject the debit and the store won't let you complete your purchase. This can be done in a matter of seconds, which is a lot more attractive than waiting around for Bitcoin confirmations.

Which mixers? Do you have a source for either claim? I can't find anything about either one.


So we should revise history to incorporate your propaganda? You don't have evidence for anything you're saying.


What is this supposed to prove?

Bitfinex has been having ongoing banking problems for about two years now, ever since Wells Fargo apparently refused to keep operating as an intermediary bank for them. Withdrawals that used to flow in a week's time now seem to take a few weeks or more. They've also put a 3% tax on traders who withdraw high volumes of fiat money. Obviously, this is to discourage traders from stretching their limited banking capacity. Some people worry that it suggests insolvency, though.

What would you expect them to do, though? Their supply chain requires fiat money, not bitcoins. Accepting bitcoins directly (and holding them) enters them into the business of currency speculation and I think most merchants -- especially ones operating on low margins -- want no part of that.

These arguments always boil down to the same thing -- the Bitcoin economy isn't self-sufficient... yet. If adoption continues growing like other major technologies, I think we'll see a major shift towards bitcoin-based supply chains and bitcoin payroll. That will eventually spill over into both consumers and merchants demanding bitcoin acceptance at the retail level.

But we can't put the cart before the horse. The demand just doesn't exist yet.

I'm sure that'll win him the presidency!

I've seen a few Yang 2020 stickers around. I get the impression he's not mainstream enough to win the primary nomination -- unless he waters down his platform tows the party line. If Sanders, Biden and Kamala Harris run, I'd give all of them much better odds than Yang.

Have they actually released any details about the hack, or made any statements about whether cold storage was compromised? I can't even find a statement from Cryptopia about whether they used cold storage at all. We take it for granted they did but who knows?

When Bitfinex got hacked a couple years ago, it was revealed that all of their bitcoins had essentially been kept in a hot wallet, secured by online keys and Bitgo API keys which were also stored online.

Maybe they should stop inflating the crap out of our fiat currencies.

When you contrast your quickly devaluing dollars to cryptocurrencies with predictably low or zero inflation, it's hard to take his arguments seriously. We can't trust banks to secure our money and we can't trust governments not to devalue it. These are vitally important use cases in a world where people trust banks less and less everyday.

That's probably not the best metric. IIRC, Cryptopia supported close to 1,000 coins, most of which were very low volume. They probably have lots and lots of tiny traders who are trading altcoins.

Bitfinex has much thicker order books. We can also see that much larger traders use it -- they make large market orders and set up walls on the order book. Bitfinex could easily be inflating their volume but I'm pretty sure it's still much bigger than Cryptopia. Even little fish like me avoid Cryptopia because I can usually get a better price on a bigger exchanges.

I saw this post the other day and sort of just took it as truth without thinking about it:


Now that I'm searching the internet for confirmation, this is the only thing I can find:


A document was issued allowing her to bring his body home, but I can't find anything that definitively says she did.

"We won't know the extent of the damage..."

That doesn't sound good at all. Maybe they were too quick to announce that only 9.4% of their total holdings were stolen.

The comment about BTC and LTC seems to confirm word from their Discord that BTC, LTC and ETH balances would all suffer a haircut. Can anyone confirm this info:

Pretty much. All exchanges will be hacked, and some will be hacked beyond recovery or ability to compensate. When I got into Bitcoin years ago, one would have expected Cryptopia to simply disappear in a situation like this -- like Cryptsy and others did. Cryptopia probably could have handled things better PR-wise, but people should be happy they're getting anything back at all. The alternatives are Gox, Cryptsy, etc.

Is there an article in particular you're talking about? I've seen a couple small blurbs about the shooter's investment in Bitconnect but I haven't noticed this narrative about Bitcoin and right-wing extremism in connection with the Christchurch shooting.

This is from the email they just sent out:


I read this to mean Cryptopia wasn't distributing the losses to all customers as a "haircut", especially since they are already reopening trading on many pairs.

Apparently, that may not be the case. I'm waiting for an official announcement on Twitter or Cryptopia to confirm this: