The default answer is going to be no it cannot be traced.
The real answer that people do not want to hear is 'it depends'. Just some random person on the internet probably could not find you.
But a government trying to figure it out well within possibility. Remember, they have shown that they can with a little effort track down any person hosting an .onion site.
You having a node online all the time that occasionally broadcasts transactions. Yes, they can find you.

The amnesic Tor sessions would be better, so long as you do keep a note of what electrum nodes you connect to and verify that you don't keep using the same ones by some random chance.


-Dave

Which was why I said that all the NEW ones were committed to buying / using 100% renewable.
There have been no new applications that I have seen for months, probably due to the BTC price drop, but the last few that were proposed were either supposed to be 100% renewable or buying renewable.

Or to put it another way, it's good PR for the government 'we are making NY green' while actually not doing much of anything.

Kind of like after all the insurance companies were forcing all the safety improvements on cars, and the the government stepped in and made anti-lock brakes mandatory. After most car insurance companies were jacking up the rates of cars that did not have them into the stratosphere.

-Dave

It's been discussed before in other places on the forum but miners are building more efficient BUT more powerful miners.

Every new generation of miners use less power to generate more hashes. BUT, they then cram in more chips to make each miner more powerful. Made up numbers but: If in the last generation you needed 100 chips at 10 watts each to generate X amount of hashes but in the newer generation you need 80 chips at 8 watts each to generate the same X amount of hashes you could in theory make a miner just as fast as the old one but that uses a lot less power because you would be using less chips that are more efficient.

But what they do is make a miner that is much faster then the old generation by putting more of the more efficient using even more power but then now generate X+50% hashes. 

Great for big miners in big data centers where power and noise does not matter. And well, the small home / hobby miners are out of luck.

To put it bluntly, for now, WE ARE NOT THEIR TARGET CUSTOMERS. There are obvious exceptions, there are people here who are running larger farms and such, but are the exception.

Gone are the days of the R4 and things like it, for now anyway.

-Dave

None. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Except for the ones that were obvious scams all the new mining setups coming into NY were 100% renewable. Also, in NY since power is more or less fungible, all you have to do is BUY from a green supplier not have green power coming in.

It's also a ploy to get some money to redevelop a lot of old power plants that the miners wanted to take over and run. Putting aside everything else. You have a bunch of locations that could host mining now as-is BUT they are at the edge of being useful. A few more years and they will not be. But, if you leave them empty you can then gut and rebuild into something newer and better.

It's get a little revenue today vs more revenue tomorrow.
The other side of that is the 'bird in hand' argument. Will you find someone to redevelop? How long will that take? And so on.

But since there were no pending permits anyway, BTC is hovering at $16k, and so on it's not a big deal.

Also, and this is a personal big one, it's tough to fight the states like Texas where miners get paid more then they would make mining to shut down during hot days to conserve power. https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/texas-bitcoin-miners-paid-shut-down-power-grid-electricity-blackout-heat/ You can't fight it when the state government takes money out of its citizens pockets to give it to businesses. *This is not just a Texas thing, other states do it for other industries, but for here and now we are talking about mining.

-Dave

It's easy to understand people that do. We have been trained for years to leave our money in banks, use brokerages to hold our stocks and so on.
Centralized exchanges are just the progression of that. What I don't get is that after so many have imploded that NEW people still do it.

Drawing an arbitrary line, say a week after FTX imploded, there were still people posting about not just using them for trading and pulling their coins off ASAP for no reason I fully admit someone paid me back a bunch of money in ETH that I thought I was never going to see. So I have it sitting there with a trade open for a fair amount more then it came in at. But there are people leaving funds on 3 tier no name exchanges because they don't know how and don't want to know how to do self custody.

Why? Well IMO as I said, because they have been taught that you leave your cash in the bank and your stocks in the brokerage so why not leave your coins on an exchange.

-Dave

So more then likely some big institution pulled their coins out, probably to calm their investors. Proving that they have it and it is safe. Not a big deal, and between the article and what we have discussed here spent more time discussing a non event then it's worth.

If, picking on a random brokerage, E*Trade pulled a bunch of cash out of one bank to bring it in house it would not even make the press.
If a investment fund switched some back end stuff around as to who held their investments if they did not do it in house it might make a line or 2 of text in places like Bloomberg.

-Dave

I don't think it's drama, but since it's out there and people are hearing about it, there will be reactions.
Much like people did not understand years ago that AOL was not the internet instead of just being a small part of it, or that the banks do loan money they don't have, or....
Pick your example. People will learn over time, but it takes time.

At the moment, I think the only people stressed are those who had it all in FTX. And people who bought at the ATH a year ago and thought BTC would keep going up instead of it being another cycle.

-Dave

It depends if you are looking for new or used and where you are located.
If you know people in tech and such they are (including myself) giving away used 1TB drives a lot of the time. They have just about 0 residual value on the secondary market here in the US. 2 TB are not far behind if they have high hours, low hour drives are usually 'pizza' money.


You really don't need a WD gold for this, as I posed above I have ironwolfs running 2 bitcoin nodes and a ETH node and they are not even noticing the load once the IBDs are done.


SSDs have a finite lifespan, the bits can only flip a certain number of times before they stop working.
I have had both SSDs and spinning drives die. A lot also depends on the environment, a spinning drive in a sever in a data center with proper cooling and power with very few on - off cycles is probably going to last far longer then an SSD in your kids laptop.

Either way important data should be mirrored anyway.

-Dave

The problem with a wallet.dat and a password is that it's a single point of failure.

If whatever you wind up putting that file on when you want to send funds whenever in the future has any sort of malware / keylogger it's all over since they now have the file and your password.

But, with an external hardware wallet you avoid that risk.

-Dave

A Seagate Ironwolf 12TB 7200RPM, which although being sold as a NAS drive does work very well for blockchain storage, is under $249
Use anything you want for your boot / OS drive and stick the blockchain on there and you are good till just about the end of time.

I use a pair of slightly smaller wolfs mirrored together and they hold the data for 2 BTC nodes, and an ETH node and I/O utilization even under the IBD I am doing now for a MyNodeBTC I am setting up for someone is under 15%.

Drive storage is cheap. Used 1TB drives are just about free.

-Dave

Was thinking that yes inflation will allow for lower paying but 'easier' campaigns.

$20 for 15 posts kind of thing. People who might be feeling a bit of financial pressure where $1000 a year will help out, and they are posting about that much here anyway so why not.

If things are 'good' for you making sure you meet that post count and everything else may not be worth the effort. But keep the effort low enough and you can keep the payment lower and people who just want / need an extra few dollars a week who are good posters and normally would not want to be bothered with a sig campaign might join.

-Dave

That does bring up an interesting point. At least here in the US there are a lot of 'unbanked' people, usually not by choice. It just costs them more to exist so to speak. There are check cashing places that do exist that will give you cash for your paycheck, but they charge a hefty fee. Local banks will cash checks written by their customers, but if you work for a large company your payroll check might be written from a corporate bank on the other side of the country.

Some places give you a payroll debit card, but that brings in another set of issues.

Would you take 10% off the top of your pay to not have to use a bank?

-Dave

Kind of funny I was actually going the other way and thinking that I am not going to enable it for a while on any of my nodes that have funds.

Since, at the moment the only nodes I am running that have funds are all tied to lightning channels I figure it's safer at the moment to wait.
The ones that don't have funds are all up and down and not as reliable for others to connect to so it probably does not matter as much.

-Dave

I don't know the way Thailand's regulations work, but does anyone know / have a link to how extensive are the financial / operations checks when you are going public?
Here in the US it's actually pretty lax, once you are public you do have more scrutiny but that also depends on a lot of other factors such as where it's being traded.
Pink sheets / OTC don't require nearly as much as other things: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pinksheets.asp

Getting listed in a highly regulated environment does allow them to say 'we are somewhat legit'. But, considering the number of legit places that have imploded due to fraud over the years it does not mean as much as it used to.

-Dave

I'm not saying that it really can't be done. But, IMO since I am so far down that road already it's going to be a lot more difficult then had it been done from the beginning.

Off the top of my head, I have met F2F at least 6 people on this board and had dealings with a lot more. So if DaveF disappears and someone else from this area starts occasionally buying and selling collectables and hardware sooner or later someone may figure it out.

I drop off all the exchanges and move all my existing coins through enough hops and places tat they could never be traced back to me.
And so on.

It's not that I don't care, just that past a certain point, at least for me, it's going to be a major battle.
Do I give up the 10% cash back on gas with my Gemini card? And a dozen other things.

So I'm not saying it can't be. But, since you asked shy don't I care, it's not that I don't it's just that since I am so far down the road the time and cost and effort for me now is just going to be greater then the benefits. For now. If I retire and wind up with more free time that may change.  

-Dave

I have brought up a similar question and at times it's not that you don't care about privacy, it's that you can't un-ring a bell.
How many people got into BTC / crypto and then figured out that they have now leaked out a lot of personal info.
Yes you might be able to start new accounts and move funds to them in untraceable ways and so on.

But, the 1st time you mess up and NewDaveF is found out to be DaveF you are back where you started.

You never know what leaked where, and how it can be traced.

-Dave

jtoomim is at times pushing out some updates / fixes / tweaks but not a lot. Some as recently as a few months ago https://github.com/jtoomim/p2pool/tree/master/p2pool

With the way pools are going it would be a tough call. Having all the money and resources and so on to develop and run a pool from scratch is one thing. But, in that respect would there be a better use of all that money and time? Better wallet? Better BTC processing for merchants? Better education for regulators?

Now, as a thought experiment as to if there is a better way to build & run a pool that is a different thing. And yes, if you really think you have something better it is probably worth it. Just don't go too far down that path before as you noted you wind up in the list of failed pools.

-Dave

Adding to what @stompix said Coinbase also runs the crypto back end for a few brokerages and other businesses. So yes it's a lot of money, but not 'theirs' they are just holding it for other people.
So you have

1) Direct customers like you and me
2) Custody customers
3) People who have BTC through their broker and don't even know it's Coinbase holding the funds
4) Businesses that are using their services like Coinbase commerce so it's just 'passing through' but still held by Coinbase.

Either way, it's a ton of coins. And that is just the BTC, makes you wonder how much ETH and everything else thy are sitting on.

-Dave

In the post covid work from home world 23GB per day is not that much. Add in the number of people who are streaming things out of their homes to the internet these days it adds even more people to the heave bandwidth users. A few years ago that amount of bandwidth would have been noticed, today not so much.

Now, the flip side of that is that the above statement depend on where you are. If you are in an area where the providers are a bit more limited, then they might care and notice. But them they tend to target the to 1% or 2% of users does not matter what you are doing it's just looking at a chart and saying these people use the most.

-Dave

As I posted, I also don't think they are going to be doing this alone, I can see other exchanges, even ones that would benefit from Kraken going away helping out in terms of expert witnesses, lawyer costs and so on.

Not quite 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' but close enough that it make it worth their time and effort and money to help Kraken. This way they don't have to be the one dealing with him and his BS.

You can help in the background and still be in competition with someone.

-Dave