For sure. I actually wouldn't follow a lot of people on that list. A lot of the "top" people just play to their following and repeat useless crap for likes and retweets. And some others are highly antagonistic and closed-minded. (Hi Vinny, Erik, Roger, and others!)

I would add Kyle Torpey and Aaron van Wirdum to the list. They're genuinely objective reporters who are actually knowledgeable about the protocol and community (unlike many journalists in this space).

I'm guessing Nasdaq is just listing cash-settled futures like the CME Group and Cboe. There's no way to do direct arbitrage and they shouldn't have much effect on the markets, as I understand it.

But the ICE listing might be interesting. The article almost makes it sound like they are launching a spot exchange, but they've said in the past that they plan to offer BTC-settled swaps with real delivery -- technically contracts regulated by the CFTC. So if mainstream and institutional investors want to buy and hold BTC without touching the risky, unregulated spot markets, this could be a new option.

From the sound of it, he’s not a practitioner, just someone who works in healthcare. I think my employer would laugh me out of the room if I told him to accept Bitcoin.

I’ve definitely read about some sole practitioner attorneys or small law firms taking BTC. Not doctors, though. Healthcare is very corporate where I’m from — not likely to accept BTC. But the fact that I’m seeing acceptance among other professionals and also for things like real estate tells me that adoption is ramping up.

I'm not sure it's that clear-cut. I haven't seen a convincing argument yet that Ethereum passes the Howey Test:

Whether something is an ICO only speaks to the "investment of money" and "common enterprise" aspects. It's crucial that there is an expectation of profit based solely from the efforts of others.

Ethereum seems to fit a grey area because it was not a money-making venture and as I recall, it was not marketed with an expectation of profit based on the issuers' efforts. I'm guessing there's also a distinction between a tokens issued on a centralized platform (like "Munchee") vs. a decentralized platform (like Ethereum). On the latter, the success of the platform largely depends on distributed miners and users, the viability of POW, etc. So any profit derived from the ICO would not be due solely to the efforts of the Ethereum founders.

You could look into a hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano S supports BTC, ETH and ERC-20 tokens, NEO and other coins as well. I don't have one myself, but I hear it's easy to use. I would buy only directly from the manufacturer.

I generally don't trust desktop multi-coin wallets like Jaxx -- disappointing security-wise.

For Bitcoin, I prefer the Core wallet.

Censorship resistance, I think, is built on the rational mining incentive, not users running full nodes. Miners are incentivized to publish any/all transactions they can based on fee priority, because of the block reward. That's what keeps them from censoring any given transaction -- fees.

The problem with SPV wallets (aside from privacy) is that users can't know if a payment they receive is valid. Whether a payment they send is censored by the mining network is a separate issue entirely.


Sure they can. A malicious group of miners just needs enough hash power to orphan any blocks that contain your transaction from the best chain.


I believe this is correct. Non-mining nodes don't really participate in the consensus process. They merely validate what miners do.

But the existence of validating non-mining nodes is a powerful check on miners, since a robust network of full nodes will reject attempts at dishonest mining that break consensus rules. "Reject" isn't even the right word; they'll be completely ignorant of the invalid forks because they are incompatible protocols. Major economic nodes like exchanges are especially relevant here, because they won't risk accepting invalid coins from miners, which presumably keeps miners in line.

If a miner breaks consensus with economically relevant nodes, his future block rewards may end up worthless. That's a strong incentive not to break consensus.


Many people predicted that would happen when Bcash forked. Instead, Bcash had to hard fork a second time because of slow block times.

Apparently, there wasn't enough incentive amongst miners to risk attacking Bitcoin. What makes you think that incentive will ever emerge?


For various reasons (like massive ventures with significant required infrastructure and high electricity costs), industrial miners are not anonymous. As Peter Todd points out, colluding and openly attacking the network could bring significant bad PR or even criminal charges.

Segwit transactions represent 1/3 of the network. You think when 1/3 of the network has their outputs stolen, that all users are just going to quietly eat the losses? They'll download the miners' client and start following the miners' chain? Why?

UASFs / hard forks to address such miner attacks may be extremely inefficient. However, it doesn't follow that most users will remain on a network where the majority of miners have participated in thefts of this magnitude against its users. And those "other miners" you mention? They need to weigh their long term rational interest in a healthy network against the short term incentive of "free money."

This brings me back to the rational mining incentive I mentioned earlier. In your scenario, that incentive has blatantly failed. There's no point in switching networks to follow the miner chain if there is apparently no reliable incentive to keep miners honest. If that's the case, Bitcoin's value should plummet and this whole conversation is moot. (And that's the overarching reason why miners will probably avoid ever engaging in the sort of attack, unless at the behest of a powerful nation-state)

Ultimately, it seems like decentralized repositories will be the best long term solution. Apparently, establishing new code-signing and merging protocols will take some time and effort, so I wonder if it makes sense to adopt a centralized replacement in the meantime. It sounds like it's not an urgent issue.

What are these "arrogant polemics" you speak of.....? What argument was I even employing.....?

I never made an argument, and I certainly never employed one against you. Literally, what are you talking about?

By your own words, no one in the thread provided specifics or said what would actually happen. So I'm at a loss for how repeating "read the thread" multiple times is helpful, but thanks for the advice. I thanked marcus_of_augustus for providing some additional context, though I'll note his mention of "the inevitable changes in Terms of Service for Github rolling out" as well. Between his reply and Wladimir's comment that "[Github] could certainly mess with reviewing" the picture became clearer for me: this doesn't affect the security of the repository itself at all, but it could potentially throw wrenches into the review process.

I never had any strong opinion and was actually seeking clarity, so it's frankly bizarre that you keep accusing me of making polemics and arguments. I saw this comment by sipa and thought it sensible, not really understanding what the big fuss was about, hence my original post:


I still don't understand what the risks are specifically (beyond "Microsoft is bad"), but I'll concede this discussion is going nowhere and there's no point continuing.

The interviewer was great. He really pushed for the answers we want. Too bad Clayton was cagey and rehearsed. He really only confirmed that 1) BTC is not a security and 2) ICOs sold as investment schemes with an expectation of returns are securities. We basically already knew that.

More than anything, I'd like to know whether POW or POS altcoins, especially those with genesis block ICOs like ETH, NXT, etc. might be deemed securities. On that front:

"What about Ether?"
"I'm not gonna comment on specific crypto-assets..."

It sounds like the general script for defining securities vis-a-vis cryptocurrencies is, "am I giving you my money for you to go off on a venture?" Well, how does that work when the venture results in a decentralized platform? What if there is no expected ROI -- where funders are paying for the product, not a hypothetical return?

I asked for specifics because no one in the thread provided them and the prognosis was unclear to me. Thanks @marcus_of_augustus for providing some context for us plebeians.


What did I say that resembles "arrogant polemics?" Sorry for not immediately understanding, and for asking questions...

I'm not sure what the big difference is really. "No longer going to pay for this when it’s just another Microsoft tax," Wladimir said. Seems a bit over the top to me.


What exactly is going to happen under Microsoft's ownership? What do you mean by "get out of dodge?"

He just means he expects their price to rise more (or decline less) than BTC in the near future. In other words, he's bullish on the EOS/BTC and TRX/BTC charts.


That's the nature of predictions. No one has a crystal ball. The people I've known who are successful at trading don't really make predictions. They wait for an obvious trend to appear and then they ride it.

You might find legitimate disagreement on this point. Why, specifically, is bidding on your own auction (in the open) unethical? It might not be the norm and other bidders might not like it, I'll give you that. But is there a specific forum rule? If not, we should look to brick-and-mortar auction customs.

I came across this blog that discusses the legal issues (with reference to US law):


It looks like there are cases where it's legal and customary for a seller to bid on his own auction. I imagine outside of the US, there may be jurisdictions with less restrictions on this as well.

As such, it definitely seems overkill to permanently tag someone over a first-time offense for this. It's impossible for anyone to be defrauded by Anduck's actions here, since it was done in the open. No one ever heard of a warning?

What is this, the 10th time he's repeated this forecast?

The guy is like a broken clock -- someday he'll be right, I'm sure. But it's getting hard to take him seriously. When these hedge fund megabulls finally start shutting up, maybe we'll get somewhere...

Outdated, how? Because there are no bailouts or centralized currency issuers? What is being done with Ethereum or Ripple that is so cutting edge, and are these things useful in any practical way?

BTC is the reserve currency in this space. I hold some altcoins here and there, but BTC is where I hold my wealth. There are no altcoins I feel comfortable holding as a long-term store of value.

I've got nothing against altcoins specifically. I think they're great as a test bed for features that can be built into (or on top of) Bitcoin, or for experimenting generally. And they're good for a trade/speculative gamble.

Certainly not, if you set no delay.

I've never heard of this site either, and a quick Google search reveals nothing about them -- no discussion, reviews, announcement threads. I'm assuming it's a scam. I'm glad it was just a few mBTC.

Chipmixer is reliable and trusted. I've also read positive things about Bitcoin Blender, although I don't think they have nearly the same volume, which is important for a mixer.

What I'm talking about specifically is businesses who take deposits and payout withdraws in BTC, for the purposes of gambling. I'm not convinced that these businesses are money transmitters, so I'm unsure where the KYC requirements emerge from.


Sure, I can understand if a site wants to go "fully legit" in an attempt to appease regulators. This is the approach of Coinbase and Gemini. But as you point out, I also suspect that some casinos, ICOs, etc. are using this trend as a way to withhold rightful payments.

The former is possible.... there's been some analysis about this. Apparently, Hal Finney stated that he mined one of the first 100 blocks. Per the same article, the hash rate stayed constant around 5 MH/s for the first six months after genesis. I suppose that suggests there weren't many other early miners.

That author concludes:

I think it makes sense to assume the Satoshi coins number somewhere in the millions. Pinpointing a number would be a futile exercise. Let's hope those keys were destroyed.

I doubt he was mining the Satoshi coins. According to the article, this all happened in 2010. There were already millions of coins mined by then.

I do remember that Satoshi complained about GPUs and even asked people to stop using them:
Didn't know Laszlo was a GPU mining pioneer, though.

 
Technically, it was the miners. By my recollection, there were not many BIP148 nodes at the time -- no surprise since it was rolled out on such a hasty timeline. BIP91 was activated by miners, and it was hashpower -- not users -- who meaningfully rejected non-conforming blocks.

If miners didn't activate BIP91, I believe BIP148 would have flopped and hardly anyone would have noticed, because BIP148 was incompatible with Bitcoin Core -- most of the network -- absent majority hashpower.

I believe this distinction is worth noting for posterity. The next time you guys plan on activating a UASF on such a rushed timeline, it may not work out so well.