We're assuming the attacker logged in before updating the 2FA, right? Meaning the login 2FA was compromised, whether from Kraken or you. The first email you list says the 2FA was updated -- did they send you an email about a successful login prior to that?

Kraken-Chase, there's absolutely no way to remove login 2FA without being logged into the account, is there?

Also, is there no email confirmation required for withdrawals on Kraken? That's typically a very basic security requirement that all exchanges employ. The OP says their email account was not compromised.

It would help if the IRS clarified exactly what "dominion and control" mean, but if you can't dispose of hard forked coins then it isn't considered income:


Furthermore, in a typical hard fork where you control your own private keys, you would receive tokens on the ledger before markets exist. The price and fair market value would therefore be $0 and you would just be liable for 100% of the capital gains when you sell.

If you receive hard forked coins on an exchange after markets already exist, then it's hard to argue you didn't receive income. The fair market value would be the price when the coins were credited to your exchange account x the number of coins.

There was a little-discussed update in the case last week. Gerald Cotten's widow is forking over nearly $9 million of her personal assets to the bankruptcy trustee to benefit the victims. This is part of a voluntary settlement agreement that presumably allows her to dodge any liability from the QuadrigaCX fallout.

Coke is better though. Different analogy, please.


They always said "over 50%" preferred Pepsi. Business Insider ran their own Pepsi Challenge and 62% preferred Coke. Which results do you trust?


I've always believed that good products sell themselves. That's why Bitcoin was able to bootstrap its entire network from a single user. We don't need marketing.

Nobody from Yobit is listening. I'm just glad someone (Yahoo) is here to keep an eye on things and liaise with them.


10 is great but 5 is better. It's pretty out of control right now. Cutting out a super majority of the spam -- rather than half -- seems more appropriate.

It's very cool to see they'll be holding and disbursing donations in cryptocurrencies. It's been a while since I saw anyone launch Bitcoin support without a middleman like BitPay.


It's probably accurate given that it came from UNICEF. The fund was just launched 6 days ago, and the press release suggests they were yet to receive their first donations yet.


That page is pretty vague -- it just says each company receives up to $100,000 in tranches over the course of a year. I wonder if they'll be publishing more detailed info.

That could probably be said about Bitcoin investors as well. Medium of exchange is only one of the three functions of money, anyway -- the others being unit of account and store of value.

Bitcoin's predictably limited supply arguably makes it a superior candidate as a store of value, assuming its other properties retain robustness.


Gold may have limited uses in industry and medicine, but its primary function is storage of value. Why wouldn't Bitcoin compete with it?

Bitcoin is a threat to gold, not the other way around. Not that I think gold is going anywhere, but Bitcoin could potentially eat into its market share vis-a-vis value storage.

Barter is one way about it, particularly during an actual crisis or temporary transitional state. But sovereign currencies are likely to be rebooted by governments -- not necessarily as free floating fiat since those would have failed, but as backed currencies. Perhaps a return to gold and silver convertible dollars, or notes backed by a diverse basket of assets. Maybe we'll return to privately issued notes like in the free banking era.


It really depends on the nature of "doomsday." In a post-apocalyptic world with no internet or power grid, miners would be bricks and bitcoins would be useless. In a really brutal world, even gold would be worthless -- bullets and canned food would be much more valuable.

I can't imagine it'll have any real impact. People don't look to dictionaries for deciding which investments to make.

It's a cool acknowledgement, though, and really shows how far we've come in terms of going mainstream. It's also a small victory for those hoping to see bitcoins become a legitimate unit of account.

He makes it sound so easy.

Post-quantum cryptography calls for massively larger key and signature sizes. For example, a Lamport signature scheme would make transactions hundreds of times larger than now. It would be horrible for scaling.

Don't even get me started on the millions of lost or otherwise vulnerable outputs that won't be made quantum-safe by implementing a new algorithm.

An entity like this wouldn't have any real legal authority. It would just be like an arbitrator and parties would need to agree to arbitration.

I'm not sure that's necessary. There are already plenty of established arbitrators out there, not to mention both civil and criminal courts to deal with legal disputes, fraud, etc.

Wow, that's great.

How much does it cost to convert BTC to USD? I don't see exchange fees listed on this page. I guess that's the part I'm missing.

It's free to deposit bitcoins and also to withdraw USD by bank wire, but surely you must charge something for allowing people to cash out their bitcoins?

Existential protocol failure would do it. I could think of a couple routes to that end.

One would be failure of its Byzantine fault tolerance, due to inadequate mining incentives. Right now, Bitcoin mining is heavily driven by speculation. Years down the road, it won't be. That fact combined with dwindling block rewards could theoretically send hash rate into a downward spiral that could create the financial incentive for large scale reorg attacks. This is one of the arguments for strictly limited block size.

Another would be the quantum computing threat. If exploited in a zero-day fashion, the reliability of the blockchain would be irreparably broken. No rollback would be able to properly secure outputs for their rightful owners.

This popped up when I visited your site:


What does that mean, exactly? A one-time 25% discount on fees?



I'm also a bit confused about the fee schedule above. Are you saying that US bank wire and Paypal withdrawals are free? Let's say I want to send you 1 bitcoin, sell it for USD and wire it to my US bank account. What fees does that entail?

Also, for KYC requirements, is a bank statement required if you're just withdrawing to Paypal?

It's essentially flipping a coin with worse odds. Even when they are not outright scams, binary options are constructed in a way to fleece traders based on the spread. Like any casino table game -- if you're gaining $45 on every win and losing $55 on every loss, it's a losing proposition.

Then we have to consider that the binary options industry is rife with fraud. I wouldn't go anywhere near them, particularly on small and unregulated exchanges. Bitoffer doesn't even show any data on CMC.

This is the clause pertinent to us:


I'm not sure how that differs from the previous policy, if at all. I already expected that Cloudflare was collecting this data.

The overall Bitcoin and altcoin/token markets are in a real lull right now. I think that has more to do with it. If conditions were like 2017, we would see a lot more projects raising money and being hyped up -- including with forum campaigns.

Then again, if Cryptotalk posters are pushing everyone else's ads off the page, that could be a real deterrent to starting one...

Like how we all used to believe that Bitcoin was anonymous?

I was pretty careless in my early years and I'm thankful I managed to avoid KYC for the most part. I'm not sure when my "lightbulb moment" was exactly. I had significant funds on BTC-e when they were shut down in 2017 and I remember becoming really paranoid about taint when we got refunds. I started looking into mixing and Coinjoins, and eventually realized that our privacy problems actually go much deeper than just blockchain analysis. One of the scariest problems today is web trackers and third parties leaking transaction data and other PII.

Combining previously unrelated wallet inputs is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's something I think newbies should start thinking about.

The fee savings are much smaller with Schnorr and Taproot because they pertain to on-chain transactions -- a flat 30%-75% fee savings for multisig vs. exponential savings on LN. Of course, there are significant trade-offs to use LN, like keeping your private keys online.

The exciting thing about the fee incentives underpinning Schnorr signature aggregation is that they'll push more and more people to use CoinJoins.

Before anyone rushes off and starts consolidating, I just want to draw attention to this point:


I usually take care to avoid linking certain address clusters together -- particularly those that have or will interface with a KYC service like an exchange. The fee savings of consolidating outputs is great but it's something to keep in mind. Consolidating all the outputs in your wallet at once could link together most of your past wallet activity.