It was pretty expected, honestly. I expect privacy-focused coins to go off-grid in a matter of years at most. But meanwhile, privacy is going to become more and more sought after.

Besides pure trading, I don't see the reason why Monero or other privacy-focused coins would be placed on non-anonymous exchanges anyway. Like, if privacy is an issue for you, just avoid exchanges that don't go in line with your expectations. There are plenty of alternatives nowadays.

So let me guess: the PH adopting crypto only is a "bad" thing for crypto because that makes us all implicitly supporters of illicit activity, right? Let me guess: next up, we have to expect "Bitcoin soars 9999% after PH adopts it as a payment method for sexually abusive videos" kind of headlines

As far as I know, there is no website out there that is allowed to show adult content with minors/non-consensual activity in it. Therefore, if PH has this issue, then they need to be closed. Simple as that. It was VISA and Mastercard's choice to cut ties with PH. That's either been done on purpose to destroy the image of cryptocurrencies or they just don't want to get in trouble - although I honestly suspect the former to be the case.

What lots of people don't get is that crypto is decentralized. It's not a movement crypto is taking and it's not something we or anyone else can control. It's something PH and VISA have decided to do, and cryptocurrencies aren't at fault for that. USD has been used for such crimes as well. I do not support crimes, but we have to be realistic here. The issue is allowing PH to exist as one of (if not the) most popular adult websites in the world while also having this kind of content. Disgusting.

Oh, they surely are, no doubt! Authorities are on a mission to link back transactions together through blockchain analysis + external information, and mixers should be on their blacklist.

Well, the main target isn't a specific customer of the exchange. It's usually an attempt to find out multiple law-breakers by requesting information about a specific exchange's customers. One exchange doing that makes everything really bad for your privacy.

They now have the IP you've used the website through and the address your BTC came from. And now, if you jump from exchange to exchange starting with an amount of 0.15 BTC, you're going to keep jumping the approximately same amount of BTC (minus fees).

So in the end, what you're really doing is.. you're making it easier for authorities to identify not only who the owner of your address is, but also other accounts you have on other exchanges!

Giving your citizens some money and enforcing a specific usage for it sounds scary - pretty close to what a communist party would do. If the gov truly cared about where the money goes, then they'd instead give each citizen a check that can only be used in shops.

But to me, it seems like they only want to pull that recession closer. They don't seem to care about where the stimulus checks go; they care more about pumping more money into circulation ..

It's a decentralized sphere, so everyone can come up with their own coin. It just happens so that human greed always takes over the control and people often care more about the potential money they make than about coming up with something effective, new and useful.

Before? The point of creating another cryptocurrency was either as a testing ground for some different concepts/rules. Today? It's all about the money. There are very few projects that launch with no premine and no bad intentions. If you think about it, having this many currencies is as useful as having so many fiat currencies: you only exchange them when you need them, hence why BTC still sits at the top. It's pretty much the most needed one.

Purchasing a pizza and cutting it in half does not give you double pizzas. It only splits it into two pieces, but put together it's still the same.

Say some brand new tech is developed and a new scientific discovery is made, which makes us able to grain a 1oz coin of gold into pieces as small as the millionth part of a picogram. Does this remove gold's scarcity? It doesn't. Just because you can split it into more pieces does not multiply its existent supply.

I personally cannot compare the physical vs virtual worlds because both of them are constantly changing and in both of them we make new discoveries. Even the millionth of a picogram could probably be split into millions/billions/trillions of other pieces, it's just that we have not discovered a way to do so yet.

From Wikipedia: "Scarcity as an economic concept ... refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources.."

If you can divide Bitcoin into more units than you could've done before, it does not make it less limited. It does not make it easier to gather an entire BTC. If BTC had 16 instead of 8 zeros after the decimal, it would be just as hard to get 1 satoshi as it is today.

This is something that's unfortunately becoming more and more common, but if you start using mixers and breaking the chain then I honestly don't think it makes sense, after breaking it, to send the coins again through mixers. You either go anonymous or you don't.

It might be "safe" (depends what you mean by that), but it's not privacy-enhancing. In fact, it is most often the opposite. Once your IP is recorded with a withdrawal request, they know it's also you who deposited. Sending money from exchange to exchange is like moving money from bank to bank hoping the government will not find you.

Privacy, anonymity and Bitcoin are quite sensible subjects to say the least. You cannot achieve a high level of privacy unless you become paranoid. You have potential backdoors and flaws everywhere, so what I like to do is I consider everything I do as a potential danger for my privacy.

Example: you want to transfer funds from your Electrum wallet. The easiest way to do it is just go to the Send tab and use the simple UI to send a tx. However, the convenient way of using Electrum to send txs may harm your privacy because you might end up using together anonymized with non-anonymized coins. The solution is.. coin control.

If you want to break the chain of coins linked to your identity, you could consider:
 1. Using Bisq and/or HodlHodl as an exchange for your future transactions
 2. Using a reputable mixer such as ChipMixer
 3. Using Wasabi's CoinJoin to join coins together anonymously (remember: you need a minimum of ~0.1 BTC to do that, the fees may be higher than you wish and you will get a change you should take care of.
 4. If you're not in a hurry, you could even use JoinMarket's Yield Generator to make (very small amounts of) Bitcoin while continuously anonymizing your coins.

Jumping from exchange to exchange only probably makes an authority question your txs even more than they would normally do so. Imagine having 2 suspects out of which one of them exchanges normally and withdraws to their personal wallet while the other just keeps jumping from deposit to deposit addresses.

The cheapest way to anonymize your coins is currently ChipMixer or JoinMarket. Out of these two, the most convenient is ChipMixer. Remember: if you mix/join coins, be careful not to ever use them together with non-mixed/non-joined addresses again!

While it does not create more Bitcoins to circulate around, I honestly think what truly matters is what the average person thinks about adding another zero after the decimal. Like, would the vast majority of people take that as a supply increase? Because if yes, then it'd be a dangerous move.

I personally support the denomination change as well. It doesn't change anything but solves some of the issues we currently have. Trust me, no real BTC supporter would want a supply increase.

I don't really verify the codes and the only reason is that I do not know any coding language. If I did, I would personally verify the codes by myself (or at least take a peek over them). This makes me feel a bit insecure honestly about the software I own, but as long as nobody complains about a certain version (I usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new Core version is released, for example), I take that as a trusted version to run.

I suspect >80% of Bitcoin txs are traceable due to people not giving a damn about their privacy. Even privacy-focused coins aren't perfect because human mistakes could easily lead to leakage of very important information.

Oh man, I see this going wrong so many ways! Imagine how much powder there'd be lost - especially for gold. How about pushing the powder-filled box/cup by mistake and losing a significant part of your powder?

The first thing you should think about is.. how realistic is it really to think of gold or silver as a currency to replace cash? It isn't as realistic as it sounds. Precious metals are nowadays easier to fake than ever before - would you trust a p2p transaction with me where I give you silver and you give me gold? I wouldn't. If the government bans cash, the worst thing they can do is allow precious metals to be used as a currency. Cash can be controlled; gold and silver can't. If they want to ban cash due to their thirst of control, then PMs are going to probably just have even more usage restrictions than they have today.

Both grinding and analyzing requires quite expensive machines if you want both accuracy and speed. It isn't practical for the average household/Joe.

You've just solved your own problem. Bitcoin has no minimum purchase amount. You could purchase as much as you like - 1 BTC is not required, obviously.

Even if Bitcoin was $1, if there was mass adoption there wouldn't be enough BTC for everyone (21M BTC for 8B people). But the minimum denomination of 1 BTC is small enough to currently be affordable by anyone. I have to admit though that fees currently do not make it a good daily driver, especially for less-developed countries.

S-ar putea sa vorbesc prostii, insa pentru varianta 1 daca vrei sa functioneze, singura varianta ar fi sa obtii cetatenie in tara respectiva si sa renunti la cea romana astfel incat sa nu mai aiba pretentii statul de la tine sau, daca exista un cadru legislativ in acest sens, posibil sa nu trebuiasca sa renunti la cetatenia romana deoarece pot exista deja legi referitoare la dubla-impozitare. Am citit intr-o vreme legat de asta, dar am ramas in urma ca lumea cu informatiile.

Ar trebui sa gasesti o cale prin care sa te scapi complet de orice datorie fata de statul roman si sa te inhami la responsabilitati fata de celalalt stat catre care te indrepti, respectiv cel care iti confera un avantaj crypto.

O cale usoara, 100% legala, care sa te scape de taxe .. nu prea exista.

The only way companies/banks create money out of KYC and AML regulations is by selling your personal information, which is quite expensive to say the least. It is becoming harder and harder to access services without giving away personal data, that's true, but it isn't like money is created out of thin air when you complete these forms.

Miners will still earn a revenue because even without fees, block reward still exists. Technically, we do not really need fees to transfer BTC. However, as miners obviously prefer txs with fees over free ones, it just became a constant competition over who gets their tx to be mined first. You could initiate a free tx at any time - given you are ready to wait for months, if not years (or.. forever) to actually get it mined.

I love this feeling. It seems like it's an unique one I only get every ~4 years when BTC bull runs happen. But most amazing of all, while I still feel like I do not have enough BTC in my wallet and wish I had more, it's the first time I'm sticking onto what I currently have and also the first time I enter a BTC rally with Bitcoins in my bag as the predominant % of my portfolio.

I'm expecting a bull run similar to 2013-2015. If that happens and a harsh crash is awaiting us within an year or two, then this is going to be the perfect opportunity for me to recover from what I've missed in the past few years. This time, make it go back to $100 before the parabolic run so that I can collect all available funds while weak hands desperately sell believing it's on the brink of death.

Long live BTC!

The main difference between a hardware wallet with proprietary firmware/hardware (such as Ledger's Secure Element) and a PC that has proprietary firmware/hardware is to me that the latter can be purchased from batches that have been produced before Bitcoin's inception. It makes me paranoid that a hardware wallet, which has been specifically created to hold cryptocurrencies on it, has closed-source components in it.

What keeps me in between cold wallets and hardware ones is that HWs come with a preinstalled, verified OS compared to cold wallets for which you download and verify everything on your own, which means you make your own security. Makes me a bit anxious that I might be creating a cold wallet and not verifying everything the right way, making all my funds poof in a matter of milliseconds. I could be sending 0.05BTC as a test and leave it there for a month, just to test whether it's a malicious version or not - only to send everything else there after a month's passed, without knowing I have a malicious version that steals funds from BTC wallets once the balance goes past 0.1BTC.

On the other hand, the fact that HWs come with preinstalled OS is also bad, especially in extreme cases such as Snowden's. You could easily be a target and have a malicious OS installed on it.

(possibly off-topic) To be honest, the safest way I think we could ever have to be able to create cold wallets is if we could create a seed and derive addresses from it solely using a paper and a pen, to then use the seed completely offline on an airgapped PC to sign txs. If we could do that and verify things using our own hand & brain (which aren't perfect, but are easier to trust than a software's code), that would eliminate most risks such as those posed by proprietary software/hardware or by not verifying a software the right way.

I've been using JoinMarket on a full node for a while but I'm planning to switch to a smaller, less power-consuming device which doesn't have enough storage space to hold a full Bitcoin node on it. It's synced right now, but it's pruned. How can I set up JM to work with an already-existing ".dat" file rather than creating its own so that I don't have to resync the blockchain from zero?

Yeah, Bitcoin surely isn't a perfect network and there are lots of things that could be changed to make it better. Have you thought about using Coin Control so that you set your own fees instead? The network is pretty clogged up during parabolic bull/bear runs, so expect those smaller fees to get buried in the mempool until things cool down a bit.

I honestly don't think Bitcoin is suitable for daily usage. It fits better as a store of value than as a daily driver..

Doesn't CoinJoin show up as 1 tx after which the address is considered "used" and the joined coins go to another unused address though, which pretty much means the said address likely shows up as having 1 tx only (the join)?