I don't know about Russia's retaliatory capabilities against countries that don't border them but Putin will likely try something.
Putin today announced the sale of gas for rubles to unfriendly countries. What kind of nonsense is this? There is no reason why Putin would want more Rubles? The Ruble is worthless and Putin has the ability to print an unlimited supply of Rubles. I guess he just have to double-down. If they're not doing business with Russia then he would probably retaliate by withholding access to gas and oil.
Putin cannot actually follow through on threats to stop selling oil and gas. This is how Putin is financing the war. If Putin stops selling Russian energy to the West, he will quickly run out of money. Putin's best bet is to threaten to withhold Russian energy from Europe to coerce them into lifting other sanctions, and into stopping supporting Ukraine militarily. |
|
|
|
I don't understand why someone wouldn't just use electrum if they wanted to be connecting to a particular electrum server. I feel like this is somewhat trying to reinvent a solution that already exists.
Because people want diversity and more options, and Trezor Suite is offering good open source alternative with added Tor settings enabled for privacy. If anything bad happens with one wallet you can always switch and use alternative option. Electrum is good wallet but it's not perfect, and if you already using Trezore hardware wallet you will use Trezor Suite also. Does the Trezor Suite offer any features that electrum does not? Electrum already offers the ability to connect to electrum servers via tor. There isn't any reason why anything "would happen" to electrum software, considering that it is run locally, and users are not required to upgrade when new releases come out. |
|
|
|
I would say the breach is likely not as serious as it may otherwise have been. Even if this is the case, this breach could still easily lead to someone losing their coins, and it will only be matter of time before the next breach which might include KYC documents, passwords, account balances, or who knows what else. You are right, this breach will likely (and likely already has) lead to some people losing coin via social engineering attacks. I think it is best to teach people how to spot these types of attacks, and how to protect themselves. While it is a laudable goal for people to not ever give any personal information to any company, and to have "100% privacy" I don't think this is a realistic goal. It is not a matter of time before exchange breaches include password (hashes), account balances and similar, as this has happened in the past, multiple times. It is important that people are aware of the risk of their sensitive personal information leaking before giving it up to centralized exchanges. |
|
|
|
At least Omni Layer is not a sidechain. It is a software layer for the mainchain, i.e. it uses OP_RETURN main chain transactions to transfer "coloured coins" which can be any type of tokens, from securities up to centralized stablecoins (like Tether). Yeah, but he was clearly talking about sidechains so I had to reply to him about that. As for Omni Layer for Bitcoin, it never got any real traction and I checked statistics from omni explorer showing there are only 335 transactions in last 24h. We can better understand when we compare that with Bitcoin mainchain that had over 251,654 transactions in last 24h. I am not sure what percentage of Tether stable coin is on Omni Layer but I am sure it's much less than on all other shitcoin chains. Bitcoin transactions are fairly expensive to get confirmed when compared to other chains that USDT is issued on. In order to transfer USDT that is issued via the omni layer of bitcoin, you must have a bitcoin transaction get confirmed. Originally, USDT was only issued via the Omni layer, and there were more USDT transactions via bitcoin. To answer, the OP's question, yes it is possible to issue a stablecoin-like product via bitcoin. This is being said while taking into consideration the fact that the OP explicitly said that time and cost are not issues he wants to take into consideration. |
|
|
|
|
Much of what Anonymous has done or is threatening to release is not going to damage Putin, nor his war effort.
DDoS'ing a government website, for example, most likely is not going to prevent that government agency from actually working. Dumping large troves of random, hacked/stolen data is likely not going to have much of an impact.
If Anonymous wants to seriously hamper the Russian war effort, it should release financial information about just how much money Putin and Russian oligarchs have. Western intelligence agencies likely know this information, and it is apparently a lot of money.....it would make the money that Bernie Sanders has look like chump change. Releasing this information would have the potential for the people of Russia to become very unhappy with Putin, and this discontent may spread to Putin's security forces, police and military.
|
|
|
|
|
Circle was apparently affected by this breach. According to Circle, "in the course of [their] marketing outreach initiativessic we received prospect data from various sources and stored that information in our HubSpot account".
This implies that someone's information being stored in CIrcles HubSpot account was not necessarily a function of having a Circle account, but rather was a function of the person's information being on some marketing list. If the above is true (and is true for other HubSpot clients), I would say the breach is likely not as serious as it may otherwise have been. It would mean that having your information in Circle's HubSpot account would not mean the person had a Circle account, and that there would be a lot of overlap between people in each HubSpot account.
|
|
|
|
The Russian invasion is Ukraine is likely to result in Russia being unable to supply gas to Europe, as Europe will be unwilling to buy Russian gas over the long term.
It won't change much for Russia. When there's a seller, there's always a buyer. If not at this price, there will be at a lower one. Some countries will buy Russian Gas. Eh, not necessarily. Iran and Venezuela both have difficulty selling their oil as both are heavily sanctioned by the US. The problem currently is that Western countries heavily depend on Russian oil for their energy needs. If Europe can start importing natural gas from the US and elsewhere, it can boycott Russian energy. This is not an option until they can do this. |
|
|
|
Coming up with your own scrambling scheme will likely lead to loss of your coins.
what if it is a very simple scrambling scheme? like swapping the first two words. <> It will be easier to crack, though. Especially with it being the first two (and not 'two random') words, in a simple brute-force 'descrambling' script this would probably be the very first attempt (at least how I would code it)...  How would you even know that the words are scrambled, or even that the set of words you have are a seed? If someone is keeping their seed hidden in what they hope to be a safe place, they likely are not going to want to label the seed, or advertise how much coin is "in" the seed. For an adversary, I don't think it would be a good use of resources to attempt to (efficiently) brute force the seed with a given set of words. |
|
|
|
If you are telling the coordinators that you want to mix x BTC, the coordinator will know that an output of that same amount belongs to you. A spy coordinator could agree to mix coin and end up not providing their signed portion of the transaction. But, that would only reveal them my inputs. What I want to obfuscate is my outputs. Therefore, they have to mix with me to find that out. Same goes for Wasabi: Honeypots must have used CoinJoin just to deanonymize those who mix. Knowing the input amounts is a lot of information to have. There are a very limited number of transactions in each block, and there are only so many transactions of x size (and so many groups of transactions that add up to x size). |
|
|
|
Users affected can expect phishing emails at the very least pretending to be from these companies and trying to get users to hand over account credentials or seed phrases or complete password resets. I'd also be concerned about SMS phishing or SIM swap attacks, as well as attempted forced access to email and other accounts. More complex phishing attempts could also be attempted, such as those that we saw after the Ledger data leak.
It is probably best to use a unique email address for each crypto-related service you sign up for, and to use a separate phone number for all your crypto-related services (using a unique number for each service is probably not practical). Over time, there have been so many data breaches that if you have ever provided your information to a crypto service, you are going to be barraged with scam messages. I believe the most common tactic that scammers use is to send emails trying to get people to either provide their credentials or to send coin to an address owned by the scammers under the false pretext that the address belongs to a legitimate service. Password reset attempts and SIM swap attacks (and similar) are still possible, but they are more difficult to do in masse. |
|
|
|
Lets say hypothetically you owed taxes on bitcoin but the gov didn't know about it because you never cashed out. You have no KYC btc but if you were to cash it out, you would owe a crap ton.
What if you died, and your kid inherited your btc. However the only transaction posted is from an xmr address to btc, so there are no records of how that btc came to be. That's all the kid has for records. There used to be __?__ xmr and it was traded to btc more than a year ago before the kid received the btc.
So, as far as the kid, and gov, and anyone else know, it's just btc that existed after a trade from xmr years back. Now it's just btc that sat for years, then the kid inherits it upon the death of his/her father who left them the private keys.
Is there a tax that the government would want on this?
And if for the country, can anyone please explain how it might work in the US?
Also, what differences would it make if someone lived in Puerto Rico, or even Russian tax laws, or any other nation they want to feel free to talk about?
You are discussing how the government might not know about the transfer of coin to a person's heirs, but that does not change the tax liability. I understand what odolvlobo is generally correct. The original cost basis will not matter when paying death taxes. |
|
|
|
|
I don't understand why someone wouldn't just use electrum if they wanted to be connecting to a particular electrum server. I feel like this is somewhat trying to reinvent a solution that already exists.
|
|
|
|
It's for sure that Putin has no intention of largely holding Ukraine. Putin just wants to make sure that Ukraine stays away from NATO and Russia can supply gas to Europe without any transit fees. If he really wants to do something like he has done with Crimea then we could see Kyiv been pounded by thousands of missiles already. RF trying to keep civilian casualties as low as possible but still unwanted incidents happen in the war zone.
NATO was formed in order to collectively defend against Russia. Before the invasion, there was no realistic chance that Ukraine was going to join NATO. Provided that Ukraine is not occupied by Russia, it will be pushed to join NATO after the war is over. The Russian invasion is Ukraine is likely to result in Russia being unable to supply gas to Europe, as Europe will be unwilling to buy Russian gas over the long term. |
|
|
|
Where can I get reasonable productivity estimates for miners?
You can google "mining calculator" to get an estimate as to mining revenue that a miner with a particular amount of hashrate has. There are several calculators out there. If you are mining on an S9, and have free electricity, you can expect to make just under $80 per month based on current price and difficulty. If you have electricity that is free and have an unused amount that will go to waste if unused, it is in your best interest to use as much of the unused electricity as you can. Although doing so will likely result in you having to make a larger initial investment. |
|
|
|
If "everyone" is a "coordinator" you are going to potentially have less privacy because you would need to tell other coordinators your inputs and outputs. You'd only need to advertise the amount of money you want to mix. Your outputs would be created once you found a user who'd also want to mix their funds. Your inputs and outputs and their inputs and outputs would be known only to you and them. In fact, that sounds better with more people (such as with triangular connections) as the coordinators would just exchange signatures, but there would be none would know every input's destination, in contrast with Wasabi. If you are telling the coordinators that you want to mix x BTC, the coordinator will know that an output of that same amount belongs to you. A spy coordinator could agree to mix coin and end up not providing their signed portion of the transaction. You could also choose a reputable coordinator and do this traditionally, same as with mixers.
The reputation that mixers have tends to be that their customers will actually receive the proper amount of money, not that the mixer actually provides any kind of privacy (even though they advertise they do). It is not possible to know if a mixer keeps logs or not, and it is well documented that transactions can be traced through most mixers (with chip mixer being the exception). |
|
|
|
|
If "everyone" is a "coordinator" you are going to potentially have less privacy because you would need to tell other coordinators your inputs and outputs. I think "spy" coordinators could be used that don't (need to) actually participate in transactions, but say that they will to get the inputs and outputs. Obviously, with the status quo, there is the potential that the centralized coordinators are keeping track of this information.
|
|
|
|
|
I would not read too much into this figure (assuming it is accurate). I would speculate that more institutions have been buying coin as long-term investment and have come up with ways to hold their coin on their own, as opposed to keeping it on an exchange.
|
|
|
|
If they are willing to ban certain inputs, then it won't be long before they are willing to cooperate with blockchain analysis and de-anonymize transactions altogether. Yet another good entity which has sold out its principles and its users. What a shame. Still, it seems that Wasabi has never been as safe as we all think: Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges. As you note, it appears that Wasabi transactions can already be tracked by blockchain analysis companies. Most likely, Chainanalysis did not need information from Wasabi to trace their transactions -- they only needed to use the service to see how it works. This will push more people to centralized mixing services.
Ehh, probably not. A centralized mixing service can do the same thing. Pardon my ignorance — but how hard is it to run such coordinators in a private manner? At the very least private enough for the authorities to have a very hard time in finding you if it's the case that you didn't comply.
Probably very difficult, if not impossible. Even if you are running a tor hidden service, the authorities will attempt to find ways to get your hidden service to leak information about the "real" IP address of your server. Pretty much every darknet site has been shut down this way. Obviously running a coordinator is not the same as running a darknet site, so law enforcement may not put as much effort into finding the person behind it. But you never know. |
|
|
|
24! is the equivalent of just over 279. The entire bitcoin network is producing 200 EH/s. While these two things are not directly comparable (since every valid seed phrase needs several more operations over and above the hash required to verify the checksum in order to check for balance), as a rough idea it would take the bitcoin network about 52 minutes to produce 279 hashes.
The slow part would be trying to check the balance of calculated addresses. ASICs perform calculations on an input, and will not compare the output of these calculations to a list. I don't think it is possible to develop an ASIC that can compare a calculated value to a list. So in theory, someone could calculate all potential seed combinations, however, they would be unable to efficiently compare this to a list of addresses that have ever received a transaction. |
|
|
|
But you want to build something to handle geometric energy growth,
...
Energy consumption won't rise exponentially. That's because difficulty and efficiency advancements kind of cancel each other out. There is no reason for power consumption to grow with a steady Bitcoin price. Of course, if Bitcoin goes 10x, it would make sense for more people to mine and consumption to go 10x, but that's to be expected in a normal business. Like, if you produce 10x more phones, you need 10x the energy - I think that's self-explanatory. The supply of miners is limited by manufacturing capacity, and it is not trivial to increase manufacturing capacity. Currently, power consumption by the miners is primarily a function of the supply of miners, although the price of bitcoin does influence this. If there was sufficient supply of miners, the power consumption of the miners would be entirely a function of the price of bitcoin. Increasing mining manufacturing capacity requires substantial long-term investment, so I don't know if there will ever be a sufficiently large supply of miners that power consumption is entirely determined by the price. People criticize Proof of Stake, but they cannot even make a test network without staking.
They can; Testnet is running on PoW. However, if it were the case that PoS was better for a test network in which the coins are worthless, then you kind of shot yourself in the foot if you believe based on these facts it would be a suitable algorithm for an altcoin's main network. 'Sure, lets use an algorithm that is well suited for worthless coins for our cryptocurrency!'..  Also, testnet is just for... testing... why should it be super decentralized and whatnot, it's just made for testing Bitcoin applications without losing money. You point out another deficiency with PoS. With PoW, it is possible to have a testnet because PoW equipment that has real value can be used to test a PoW coin. However with PoS, nothing of value is needed to "stake" via testnet, therefore someone wanting to mess with the testnet could do so at zero cost. As such, it is not possible to have a PoS testnet. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
