Bitcoin is not merely a medium of exchange, and its network can secure more than just Bitcoin transactions. Why is that a bad thing?

Users can use either token as a medium of exchange, depending on which security and UX trade offs they prefer. Why is that a bad thing?

Gemini significantly raised their fees recently too. Coinbase Pro did as well not long before that. Licensing and regulatory compliance costs are undoubtedly rising in this climate, and these are all "legitimate" licensed exchanges who are upping their fees.

Now that they've established a solid market share, they're ensuring profitability. Can't blame them.

The IRS has no legal right to broadly fish for information like that. That's why they had to fight Coinbase in court for 2 years just to get data on ~13,000 higher volume traders.

I'm sure Poloniex has responded to one-off requests from the IRS before, but I'm also sure it's nothing on the scale that we've seen from Coinbase. The OP confirmed he sold bitcoins through Coinbase during the tax years in question, which corroborates the theory that it's Coinbase users who are receiving these letters.

There's a reason why we use the term consensus -- not majority rule or democracy or any other such nonsense. This is not a vote. You either join the existing consensus or leave it.

This is free open-source software. Nobody can stop anyone else from splintering off. That's their free choice.

It's the same idea. These guys were probably trying to extract the cash inside the ATM, not private keys to bitcoins. Some of these ATM manufacturers are incredibly dumb about security, but most of them are probably safe from physical compromise due to encryption.

It looks like they cased out the area pretty well. Nobody noticed the ATM was gone for a week:

We don't. We won't know until after the fact, once ECDSA is broken and nothing is done. It'll be a roller coaster, that's all I know.


The amount of vulnerable bitcoins probably goes far beyond the "Satoshi coins" -- that's just the lowest base line to start our assumptions from.


That could be done with a soft fork. Miners have incentive to enforce it since it would prevent unpredictable inflation.

That's actually how network consensus works. Consensus means unanimity. It's impossible to get every single Bitcoin user to affirmatively agree to a new consensus -- i.e. a new set a consensus rules; a hard fork. So if users (like those who created BCH) want to create an incompatible fork, they are therefore leaving the consensus and establishing a new network, completely incompatible (and incommunicable) with the old. Breaking consensus = leaving the network. This is literally what happens on a networking level.

The Bitcoin network keeps chugging along as always, regardless of whatever hard forks are being spun off.


Hard forks are inevitable in any FOSS project. Bitcoin isn't immune to that. People are free to fork the code, and they will.

Youssef is an idiot, especially since he thinks we can conclusively identify Satoshi's coins to begin with. He's proposing this for the wrong reasons.

There are, however, good reasons to have a related discussion about this. In a post-quantum world, the "Satoshi coins" are probably the biggest lot of vulnerable (public key exposed) bitcoins we know about. But there could be several million lost bitcoins out there in addition to these early mined P2PK outputs, a sizeable subset of which are P2PK or in reused addresses.

These will all eventually be stolen and recirculated into the supply, possibly causing a huge divergence from users' perceptions about Bitcoin's "deflationary" monetary supply. There goes that whole idea about lost coins being a donation to other bitcoin holders! More like a donation to bitcoin shorters.

They do use the US dollar, quite a lot more than Bitcoin I'm sure. But how is Nathaniel Popper supposed to spin that into a New York Times article?


That's the argument, anyway. Get ready for $1,000 KYC thresholds -- if not outright mandatory KYC -- to use most Bitcoin exchanges, services, etc. Enjoy the wild west while we still have it. It won't be around much longer!

What a headline! Popper is at it again!

It shouldn't surprise anyone that militant and terrorist groups are trying to raise funds with Bitcoin. They've already been doing it for years in dribs and drabs. At least they're apparently getting smarter -- no longer storing funds in one address, or at Coinbase.


Exchanges aren't decentralized. Governments can target centralized entities with regulations and law enforcement. Bitcoin network unaffected.

The reality is slightly less exciting than the headline:


Still impressive nonetheless, and shows that Chipmixer is handling many thousands of bitcoins at once. I wouldn't worry about trusting them with 0.02 bitcoins.

The circumstances of that case are reminiscent of the Hansa darknet market shutdown in 2017, also compromised by the Dutch police. In fact, I wouldn't be all that surprised if Bestmixer was actually a honeypot run by the Dutch police.

History shows that any questionable service should keep their servers far, far away from the Netherlands.

Since when? Merchants dropped Coinbase after they started forcing merchants to custody their own coins, but literally all the merchants I use process payments through Bitpay.

Bitrefill would be an exception, but last time I checked they were giving me worse conversion rates than Bitpay, even after accounting for Bitpay's annoying "network fees."

Binance is playing with fire with that one. They burn BNB based on profits made -- lowering the circulating supply -- so it seems like there is indeed an expectation of profits. These are the four metrics of the Howey Test. BNB seems to fit every one:


Arguably, they issued unregistered securities to US persons. I also don't think that's the only area where they have legal exposure to the SEC.

Sure, there are no guarantees in life. Bitcoin's design is based on brilliant game theory, not irrefutable law. But the more years and years that go by, the less convincing your position is.


What would you have me read?

Tell us, why isn't Bitcoin being constantly 51% attacked?


As I recall, a super majority of hash power signaled support for SegWit2x. It was also supported by the biggest companies in the space, including Bitmain.

Why did they all back out and stop supporting the 2x hard fork?


It sounds like miners don't really control the network at all, do they? What do you think will happen to Coinbase -- legally, and in terms of market share -- if they replace their customer bitcoins with an altcoin fork? The exchanges will let the market decide, not the miners. That's been the precedent since 2017.

At most, the miners can reorganize blocks or censor transactions -- incurring great financial cost for the privilege. How is that "controlling" the network?

That's an odd assumption since the US government has never openly targeted mixers like that.

I also don't think they care in the slightest about the Binance hack. No American victims, no customer losses at all -- why would they care? The US government is probably more interested in shutting Binance down than helping them recover stolen bitcoins!

It makes no sense to measure value with time -- that tells people nothing about the actual value/cost of goods. After all, everyone values their time differently.

People need a standard monetary unit -- called a unit of account -- to properly compare the value of different things. This requires some semblance of stability and also widespread usage and acceptance. Bitcoin offers us neither attributes at present, so don't expect people to treat it like a unit of account just yet.

Hash power merely decides which valid chain is the best chain. Essentially, their only power is to decide which transactions get confirmed, and in which order. They can't just arbitrarily change consensus rules like the the total bitcoin supply. If they break consensus rules like that, the economic majority -- exchanges, services, economically relevant users -- would just ignore their chain.

If Chipmixer is set up properly, the most the US government can do is seize their clearnet domain. Even if they can get their hands on servers, proper encryption should leave all funds intact. The service could be restarted within a few days in that case.

When fiat money isn't involved, the US government isn't that great of a threat.