I'm not sure that's true, at least with regard to the USA. For instance, Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker held licenses in Malta before they were taken offline by the US government in 2011. At the time, both sites apparently had so few US banking options that they were both funneling all cashouts through one bank (SunTrust). As it turned out, SunTrust was engaging in fraud to hide the source of the funds.


I welcome the news, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Malta (along with the Isle of Man) entered the online poker industry for the same reasons, but it only did so much.

I wonder if they're doing this because they know people aren't paying taxes on cryptocurrency gains. People are more likely to pay if the damage isn't so bad.

I think that's why my state recently changed their tax forms regarding use tax. Everyone used to just leave the line blank. Now they say "you can't leave the line blank" and point you to a table where you estimate a small liability, like $20-40. It's small, but they know that means people will pay it.

I don't see the U.S. doing this for cryptocurrency, though.

The invalid SSL certificate should have been an obvious tip-off not to enter your keys. It's not a fail-safe, as SSL certificates can be faked, but this wasn't the most sophisticated hack.


Just to be clear, they did this by replacing the DNS entry? This is similar to the Etherdelta compromise a while back, correct?


You can run it locally and generate private keys and transactions on an offline machine. Transactions are a bit of a hassle because you have to manually adjust some things in the raw transactions. Using it like an online wallet (like Blockchain.info) was never particularly safe. The site or DNS registry could always be compromised and malicious code injected after users log in. This is true of Blockchain.info or Greenaddress.it as well.

As Greenaddress says on their "best practices" page:

I think we'll begin seeing a distinct dichotomy among players in legacy finance between Bitcoin/cryptocurrency believers on one side and skeptics on the other.

Consider PayPal's founder and first CEO, Peter Thiel. He says that one cryptocurrency will become the "online equivalent to gold" and bets it'll be Bitcoin.


I agree, with a healthy touch of skepticism.

The hedge funds began seeing the light earlier on because good funds understand the intersection of markets and social trends. But even JP Morgan's analysts recently conceded that Bitcoin could become a gold-like asset class as well.

But that's exactly how people use it -- like a Facebook "like" button. We should approach merit based on how the system is actually used, not the intent. I agree with Theymos' words above, but there are other social dynamics at play. Getting merit often seems more about saying what people want to hear -- and doing it in the right venue (e.g. Meta vs. Bitcoin Discussion) -- than anything else.


Yeah, the OP ought to edit the title.


I guess the solution is: don't ever give or receive merit. But since you can't avoid receiving merit, allegations of merit abuse will always surface. C'est la vie.

Any relief would probably be temporary. The root problem isn't the bounty board or the existence of bounties. It's the fact that signatures are monetized at all. If you nuke the bounties board or something similar, the venue for hiring bounty hunters will just move elsewhere. You're not destroying the shitposting incentive.

My impression from Theymos is not that he's "content." Rather, I think he's between a rock and a hard place.

He can disable signatures entirely, or charge for signature (or even posting) privileges. I don't know how effective the latter would be. Disabling them (and avatars as well since they are used to advertise) would obviously work, but that would mean losing extremely basic forum functions. He can ban most campaigns and whitelist others -- but whitelisting doesn't work at scale, and I don't think Theymos likes the idea of controlling the market. I guess I don't, either.

And if he did that, we'd be overwhelmed by complaints. Just look at the merit system. Pretty innocuous, right? Yet lower-ranked members made a billion threads complaining about it, across numerous boards. What a fucking eyesore.

Trade-offs, no matter which way you cut it.

If someone gives 100% of their sMerit 100% of the time to another user, obviously it's suspicious.

And if we assume that any two users are random, then your assertion would be correct. But social media functions are not random. One example is the Wall Observer thread. A lot of the regulars in there seem to merit each other -- and re: the time question, the conversation actually moves really quickly. Merit distribution is probably nowhere near random even if we ignore the alt accounts, farming, etc. This isn't 4chan; users aren't anonymous. There are clearly established social groups on the forum.

I guess I would just stress caution when the pattern isn't extremely clear. People around here really love their witch hunts, though.

I think posts like that should just be reported and actions left to the administrators. I guess after years of reading the forums, the "newbie shill" trick doesn't phase me. People need to learn how to spot scams like that.

Banning IPs is not reasonable. A lot of people -- probably more on this forum than others -- use TOR or VPN. And also, ISPs sometimes cause different people to connect through the same IP, which can result in false positives.

I don't think we'll find out until the next creditor's meeting -- unless blockchain analysis leads to an exchange. It could just be an internal transfer. I wouldn't assume it's for immediate sale. My understanding after the March meeting was that the Q1 sales covered most of the outstanding liabilities.

And re: Segwit, it's not really relevant here. Paying slightly less in fees doesn't matter when you're moving thousands of coins.


What makes you think the coins will all be sold?


Well, it was reasonable for the trustee to liquidate enough to cover the debts (or most of them). The price of BTC is too speculative for a bankruptcy trustee to rely on. But once the debts are covered, it makes no sense to keep liquidating assets....

There is natural fee pressure as transaction volume (demand) outpaces available block space (supply). In the early days, that demand didn't exist. "Priority" was just node policy that all miners eventually abandoned because they could collect fees with that block space instead.

One of the reasons the block size (or weight) limit exists is to encourage the replacement of the block subsidy with fees. As the block subsidy gets halved and halved, fees need to replace them -- at least to an extent that deters a downward spiral in hash rate. Eventually, fees will be the only revenue source for miners.


They do have total freedom in that sense. That's really their only power. They are free to mine zero transactions beyond the coinbase transaction. But they are rationally incentivized to collect as much fee revenue as possible.

And what does "high enough a reward" mean in the context of skyrocketing mining difficulty? Mining is an arms race.

A quick Google search doesn't reveal anything like that. However, the address shows activity going back to 2017, which suggests it isn't part of a newly generated wallet.

Do you have a transaction history from bitcoin.com? They should provide you a transaction hash and output address. Does it match the address you posted?


If you sent the funds to an address you don't control, yes, it's gone. Bitcoin addresses do have a built-in checksum at the end to prevent "typo" kinds of mistakes, but that won't help if you copy/paste a valid address that you don't control.


That depends where the address came from. Some malwares replaces pasted bitcoin addresses, so you need to pay attention. Is it possible you copied a deposit address from an exchange or something like that?

How many forum signups a day are there? Newbie jail sounds cumbersome at this point.


I'm guessing it'll get neglected and not many people will escape newbie jail. The bigger problem there is the Beginners forum will probably become endless threads about being stuck on that board.

Yeah, it's tough to "be your own bank" when your funds are physically in the custody of someone else. But every storage medium has its tradeoffs. It just depends what the biggest threats are.

A friend of a friend had his house burglarized and his safe stolen -- everything gone. Probably a targeted/inside job. Anyway, in hindsight, I guess he'd have been better off with a safe deposit box. I think the moral of that story is don't put all your eggs in one basket. You should never store everything in one place.

Any kind of bet against Bitcoin involves risk.

If you sell, you risk having to buying back higher. If you short, that equates to dollar losses, not just bitcoin losses. And leverage carries the risk of margin calls. You need collateral to short, and just storing funds on BTC exchanges is risky: they are prone to hacks, exit scams, DDOS and API failure during volatility, etc.

The only kind of "no-risk" trades are arbitrage schemes. That means buying low at Exchange A, selling higher at Exchange B and sending the fiat back to Exchange A. Or you can arbitrage futures. Here's a guide on how to do that. Arbitrage usually brings pretty low returns, though.

What would it take to change their minds? Bitcoin has CME futures markets and shitcoins get pumped on CNBC now -- if that's not endorsement from the establishment, I don't know what is. It seems pretty normal to own BTC as an investment if nothing else.

It's not like you could ever eliminate association between BTC and darknet markets. Censorship-resistant P2P money is perfect for them.

Consider this. Binance recently received a warning letter from Japan's financial regulator for operating without license and registration.

Per Reuters:

That warning was a message to many exchanges, like Kraken, who have been operating outside the law for years in Japan. Jesse Powell is smart enough to know when to cover his ass and bow out of the market.

I guess it doesn't matter. Either they are getting pressure from law enforcement, or they are anticipating it.


I think it would be less of an issue if they were a simple classifieds service. But yeah, they offer an escrow service where they physically hold and release the assets. That could make things precarious if they are construed as facilitating money transfers without KYC procedure in place.


They've been enforcing KYC since at least January and I don't think they've announced anything. Chances are they'll keep quiet to prevent an exodus to other platforms.

I was under the impression that Localbitcoins was enforcing KYC (beyond some unknown thresholds) for some time now. For example, this thread is from January. Maybe they've started enforcing it en masse or lowered the thresholds and that's why news is emerging now.

I imagine Localbitcoins might have some regulators breathing down their neck. This will push some business to Paxful, but eventually regulators will come knocking there, too.

Peer-to-peer fiat/BTC trading is going the way of the dodo, sadly. I've fortunately still got some old contacts that I trade with from time to time, but they've all left LBC in the past few years due to fears of law enforcement.

The market might tend towards the cost of production, but there's no guarantee of that. You're accounting only for supply, not demand. If speculative mining were a sure thing, we'd all be doing it. Miners are taking huge risks and big losers will eventually shut down and sell at a loss rather than continue bleeding. Some miners are probably also leveraged and if the market gets bloody enough, they'll have to liquidate their entire operation. This has happened before.


Concern trolls try to paint this catastrophic picture where all miners will collectively shut down at once -- conveniently ignoring the difficulty algorithm -- so that the blockchain grinds to a halt. Then they point to the top bubble price and say, "Look how much price fell! It's all crumbling now!" Never any mention of the long term investment plans of industrialized miners, those with subsidized energy and access to competitive chip production, etc.


Exactly. Let the marginal miners shut down. Life goes on.

In a technical sense, no, because LN is specifically not Bitcoin. It's a different protocol with a different security model. LN isn't for value storage; it isn't for permanent censorship-resistant transactions. That's what the Bitcoin blockchain is for. In fact, LN leverages Bitcoin's redundancy in the case of dishonest actors -- the blockchain is used to arbitrate disputes. 


You're laying it on a bit thick. Sure, growing pains for LN would encourage some FUD for Bitcoin since it's often touted as the ultimate scaling solution. No big deal, though.


It's not, but that's irrelevant. The Bitcoin blockchain entails the entire mining infrastructure and redundant transaction storage. Lightning doesn't. They shouldn't be judged as one and the same.