I've a question regarding the interface: Is RBF currently supported? (I haven't found it in the FAQ).

Recently I started an exchange and saw the fee of my transaction was too low, so I RBFed it, and the TXID of the transaction changed. However, in the exch interface, the original transaction ID was still shown as the deposit transaction, even after several refreshes. To be sure, I double spent the transaction before it got confirmed and started a new exchange.

My question is that if the RBFed transaction gets finally confirmed, will it be recognized by the exchange?

There are several examples that sometimes it worked. For example, in Argentina in the early 2010s electronic voting was to be introduced, which would have been problematic in many ways (possible hacks, privacy problems, dependency on a complex technology which could be abused by corrupt politicians, etc.). But an open-source activist group called Via Libre lobbied against it, convinced influencers like journalists and politic parties, and until now it wasn't introduced (on federal level). In Germany, in the late 2000s the government planned to store all connection data from all phones in the country, also privacy groups were able to lobby against that, and while a part of the measures were implemented, they were much less invasive than the original plans.

Even in the Bitcoin space there are examples. Remember the idea in the European Parliament to ban crypto exchanges to list PoW coins, including Bitcoin? Well there was sufficient lobbying against that idea, in part from the Pirate movement (e.g. Patrick Breyer) I mentioned in the earlier post.

This is why I consider the "nihilism" or "pessimism" even dangerous, because it cuts support for such movements which are extremely important to limit governments' oppression.

The crucial thing is: If politicians fear to lose voters, they will often be willing to learn. That's why it's important to have an outreach to "normal" people, the masses of voters, and not only to "cypherpunk" or "anarchist" groups. Being an outlaw may sound nice but you will be always a minority and have to fear to be oppressed by the majorities. If normal people understand that for example the privacy restrictions are not necessary to fight criminals, and there are better possible alternatives, then populists promising authoritarian measures will have a more difficult job.

That's already the kind of detail I cannot provide not being a lawyer

From my own interpretation of the Howey test however, I would interpret that such a token is still a security, unfortunately. Because if the token can grow in value, then: what exactly does this growth depend on?

If it's the issuer company's efforts, then it's very likely a security. And in your example you wrote that the company's income is the variable from which ultimately the token value depends. The token may qualify for some kind of exception because of its limited scope, but if it's a cryptocurrency (in contrast to being e.g. a totally centralized server-based "currency" like flight miles) it's normally tradeable via smart contracts, so people can speculate with its price.

Regarding moving the topic: Yes, you'll have to write a PM to a moderator, preferrably to @achow101 or @gmaxwell, which are the moderators here (link to their profiles is on the top of the forum overview).

In general terms I agree with the OP, even if I would formulate some parts of the text differently

But I often see Bitcoiners being a bit too "nihilistic" or too pessimistic in general -- i.e. they believe that "governments" will always be enemies and they will never change.

What about educating governments too that, for example, too strict KYC regulations may have even worse consequences regarding crime than all so-called "money laundering" through cryptocurrencies? (KYC services open up a whole new field of crime, with identity theft being now a real threat for billions of people. 1miau's text has been an eye-opener for me too, because before I considered that while KYC is a hassle it could bring some advantages, but I now am convinced it is not the case.)

Or if they don't want to hear, participate in political movements which propose alternatives? For example, about ten years ago, in Europe there was a quite big privacy movement called the "Pirate" movement (derived from the movement to support Pirate Bay). They even entered some parliaments, like in the Czech Republic and Iceland. But it seems these movements are currently quite weak, at least they are not much talked about in the media, besides perhaps some few regions. They could need all support from Bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts. Also Anarchist movements in general seem to have weakened in the last 10 years.

I think also that the crypto community should propose some alternatives to the FATF-influenced AML rules. Because if we can convince the majorities that there are better measures than KYC in every corner, then the authorities would have to react, or they lose support by voters.

1) We could first educate lawmakers that even the strictest KYC policy for crypto services will not be effective because the real "bottleneck" to launder money is the creation of "clean" fiat. This means that, it doesn't matter how much you try to obfuscate a transaction history, you will never be able to "launder" big sums of money if you can't demonstrate a legitimate origin. And that's what money laundering usually is about: funding some fake companies which can create a "legitime" income from illegitimate sources. You don't need crypto for that. In other words: Crypto mixing is often a really minor step in the money laundering process.

2) Second, there could be measures for non-KYC crypto services and mixers which would be more effective against crime than KYC in many cases. I could imagine something like a preventive chain analysis for larger deposits to such services, and in case of it being connected with a recent known hack, a wallet which was emptied by a thief, or a wallet connected with terrorism, simply delay the accreditation of the funds -- that all without having to store any KYC data! And if then an order from a court reaches the service, then the funds can perhaps still be frozen and returned to the legitimate owner.

AFAIK the Security Alliance is offering such services, e.g. tracking of hacked funds. We should promote this kind of measures as alternatives to traditional AML, and educate people that they exist and are often more effective than surveillance and storage of personal data.

I think everybody and their grandma has now already heard of the Samourai case.

I was thinking about if a service which could make CoinJoins easier would be possible in a totally compliant way, without any danger of it to be considered a "money transmitter" by any authority. (I still think the American authorities are wrong with Whirlpool being a "money transmitter", but I haven't seen the code, so I can't be sure.)

First, what do we need to build a CoinJoin facilitating service? First, some kind of storage for a pool of UTXOs which are available for CoinJoins. I guess Whirlpool did this in a centralized way on its server. But in theory this could be done by the users themselves: from the moment on they offer their own UTXO, they can get informations about other UTXOs which are available. (This is actually how JoinMarket seems to work afaik. But Joinmarket is not what I'm asking for - I'm thinking about a model to create a centralized service which could offer a fee but would be easier to use than JoinMarket.)

So the UTXOs would circulate in a P2P network completely independent from the centralized server.*

Second part would be the entity "building" the CoinJoin transactions. This could also happen in the P2P network. So basically, once an user sees enough UTXOs to form a CoinJoin, he uses let's say 5 or 10 UTXOs from this decentralized pool and builds his transaction, signs it and broadcasts it inside the P2P network, so all peers which have contributed UTXOs can sign it.

What can the centralized server do to make CoinJoins easy? As far as I have understood JoinMarket, you need a full node to participate there because otherwise there are security concerns, and thus it's limited to a relatively small and wealthy Bitcoin user group.

So the centralized server thus could simply offer you this service: a trusted Bitcoin Core node you can connect to and you can query as if it was your own Bitcoin Core node. So every user can always be sure that the UTXOs he uses for his CoinJoin transaction are really there.

Such a service would be able to charge a (low) fee, for example for a kind of API subscription, but would not be a money transmitter in any way as it's not at all involved in the creation of transactions.

This would make a JoinMarket-style CoinJoin network possible where users could participate with their SPV wallets (Electrum, Sparrow et al.).

Am I missing something? Does such a service perhaps already exist?

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*Yes, chain analysis companies could of course use this P2P network too, but this would happen to all CoinJoin models.

If your token has the character of a security, it will not cease to do so if you use your own exchange to allow people to convert it to fiat.

The crucial part is if "investors" are profiting from the cryptocurrency (e.g. through premined tokens/units distributed in an ICO, or even by founders' rewards), and if the value of this currency depends on your own efforts.

One way to make a SEC compliant cryptocurrency is distributing the units in a totally decentralized way, e.g. via Proof-of-work, but all tokens have to be distributed that way, even 1% premine can make it a security. Another way is to use it as an utility token which cannot grow in value, i.e. offering your own services for this crypto, but at a fixed rate, so it passes the Howey test because people can't use it to "invest" and profit from it. From your description your plan looks like a kind of utility token, but the fixed rate is the important part. Think of it like flight miles, then it should be ok.

I am not a lawyer, but these topics were extensively discussed in this forum. However, I think you're in the wrong subforum as the thread is not so much about technical aspects, better move it to "Legal" or "Altcoin discussion".

While I haven't seen any coins cheaper than LTC (show me one with fees lower than 0.00001 USD ) I somewhat agree with you here, and partly also with the rest of your post. Litecoin seems to be a bit "off" the "attention game" where altcoins search the spotlight all the time.

Nevertheless, its popularity seems not to be declining - here I disagree. Apocallapse has already shown the transaction chart, and if you go backwards in time, you'll see that the transaction count is in fact increasing every year. Litecoin is the most popular payment coin, and this is in fact something new, because it has surpassed Bitcoin as recently as early 2024. (In 2014 or so when everybody talked about LTC, LTC had in fact ten times less transactions per day than nowadays).

And regarding its ranking per market cap, it's the only altcoin existing in 2011-13 which still ranks in the top 25 (or top 20 if you only count L1s). So the comparison with EOS (launched in 2017 or 2018, declining steadily) is not really convincing. Remember that also Doge is part of Litecoin's ecosystem - it's merged mined so it can't exist without LTC. Together, Doge and LTC would have a firm Top-10 marketcap.

The "problem" however of LTC is that it is not mentioned very frequently when talked about as a an investment. Since MWEB there were also no really interesting upgrades. The "altcoin circus" lives from spectacular news, from the next "Bitcoin killer" and "breakthroughs", and that's not something LTC can provide now, even if these "breakthroughs" are mostly fake (I don't consider Solana, for example, a big tech achievement) and no coin has "killed" Bitcoin.

I think a real problem is also that there are few P2P options to buy LTC directly with fiat, basically only forums and an old P2P exchange I don't even want to link here anymore because of how dead and untrustworthy it looks. If I would give an advice to the LTC community it would be to develop such a service or lobby to include it in other P2P exchanges. I guess even P2P exchanges would profit because of the cheap transaction fees, which would it make easy to buy small quantities of crypto, to enter the crypto space without major risk.

First, decentralized mixers and non-KYC services are not subject of the AML directive! There is not a single source the OP can provide which backs the thread title. If OP has any dignity he should simply change the title to "set to delegalise centralized mixers".

Second, there are strict data protection laws in force -- the famous GDPR. Every website or service provider who serves European customers has to protect the personal data of its customers, including of course crypto services.

I don't know if you mean that the EU should provide a verification service itself, but I don't think that's a good idea. A lot of state offices were hacked in the past, and if we have a big centralized EU "personal data" silo, this would of course be an extremely interesting target for blackhat hackers.

I repeat that I don't like the AML directive because for me, even centralized mixers should be allowed in my opinion because everybody should have the right to privacy and blockchains are public. But the problem is that all/most governments are trying to comply with the FATF rules to avoid being put on a black or grey list. And FATF rules - which are not laws but guidelines - currently treat every crypto custodial service like a bank or fintech. Even if they forget that to "launder" money with crypto, crypto-crypto services like mixers are a minor problem - the big issue are the techniques to get "clean" fiat.

In an ideal world, the crypto community should propose rules to FATF which don't criminalize privacy services but allow effective measures to stop thieves, blackhat hackers and terrorists. But for that to happen, the crypto community must get much stronger.

Si la idea es hacer CoinJoin (como lo hacían Samourai y Wasabi), todavía queda la opción de JoinMarket, que es totalmente P2P, es decir no hay nadie que opera algún servicio centralizado. Imagínenselo como un Bisq pero con transacciones Bitcoin solamente.

Hay una guía aquí en castellano (solo video) y otra en inglés (video y texto). Hay también un subreddit y un hilo en Bitcointalk. Aclaro que nunca usé este método, pero no sería mala idea informarse. Lo que puede ser problemático para algunos es que (aparentemente) se necesita una conexión a Bitcoin Core.

En este artículo de Bitcoin Magazine se explica como hacer un CoinJoin uno mismo, es decir con una persona conocida. Puede ser actualmente cualquiera del foro por ejemplo al que tengas confianza que no trabaje con una compañía de análisis. Tu(s) contraparte(s) no puede(n) robarte los BTC en el proceso.

Edit: Encontré también la página CoinJoins.org que describe un par de opciones más.

Otras opciones incluyen:

- Lightning Network
- Monero (cambiar los BTC a Monero, por ejemplo con un servicio como Exch, o con un atomic swap, hacer un par de transacciones en XMR entre diferentes wallets -- una sóla si realmente querés privacidad puede ser no suficiente! --, y luego volver a BTC u otra cripto)
- Grin (idem Monero, lamentablemente hay pocos servicios de intercambio)
- Litecoin con MWEB

Then you have again the same problems as if you "ban" OP_RETURN and Taproot. People will create, mint, and transfer tokens with fake P2(W)KPH transactions.

You have to think again about such authoritarian measures: they simply don't work in a decentralized network if there is an alternative which is allowed.

Even if vjudeu's method to identify spendable public keys works, these keys could be still faked, you only have some more restrictions in the "number space". Imagine a sort of "VanityGen" for public keys. You could even store the information in a private key, and compute the public key from it; this would make a transaction technically "spendable". Nobody stops you from publishing private keys if they are only used for information storage.

Ich könnte mir gut vorstellen, dass der Dip gerade starke Parallelen zum Januardip (direkt nach der ETF-Genehmigung in den USA) aufweist. Auch damals ging es erst zu einem bestimmten Punkt runter (in dem Fall ca. 40.5 K) aber dann am Ende noch mal ca. 5% unter diese Marke (38.x K).

Mein Verdacht ist, dass der Grund dafür Liquidationen sein könnten, insbesondere von Stop-Losses ("wenn es unter 60k geht dann stürzt der Kurs bestimmt mindestens auf 50, also lieber bei 59k verkaufen!"), aber auch anderen Long-Positionen. Es könnte es also eine bestimmte Gruppe Trader darauf anlegen, bei bestimmten Gegebenheiten nach diesen 5 Prozent zu "fischen". Wenn also gerade etwas Unsicherheit im Markt ist, vielleicht gerade ein paar kleinere Bad News reinkamen (Samourai, Enttäuschung bei den Hongkong-ETFs), mehrere Drops hintereinander kamen und es möglich ist, einen solchen Boden wie diesmal bei 59-60k doch noch zu durchschlagen, obwohl die Tendenz eigentlich eher bullisch ist.

Auch am Ende der Konsolidierung auf 26K (Mitte 2023) gab es einen solchen Drop noch mal drunter. Gefühlt wird dadurch das Double-Bottom-Muster abgeschwächt, d.h. dass bei einem anscheinend stabilen Boden immer noch mal mit einer Bewegung darunter gerechnet werden kann.

Inzwischen sind wir ja wieder in den hohen 62ern bis tiefen 63ern. Mal sehen ob sich der Kurs da halten kann, wenn ja, wäre es ein Indiz für diese Hypothese. Allerdings müsste der Kurs irgendwann aus dem kurzfristigen bärischen Kanal ausbrechen. Desssen Obergrenze liegt gerade bei etwa 63.500, und dann gilt es noch das Hoch von 64.500 von vor ein paar Tagen zu knacken. Wenn das also durchbrochen wird, ist die Chance auf relativ baldige neue ATHs hoch. Sonst könnte noch mal ein Test der 56.5k Lows folgen.

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@1miau: alles klar, Spruch wurde eingetragen Ich denke der gilt für alle bärischen Phasen, kurzfristige und längerfristige. (Da du Merit erwähntest, mach dir da keine Gedanken, da hab ich genug ...)

I think you meant it as a joke, but as people often take jokes seriously, I'll comment on it.

First I link to the approved text here so everybody can look into it, because articles in crypto media often simplify and you can get the wrong impressions:

>>> AML Directive approved text <<<

The new "Obliged subjects", i.e. those who have to conduct KYC, are "crypto-assets service providers". This category of service providers is defined in the MiCa regulation (Link to MiCa). In general, those obliged to realize KYC are (centralized) exchanges, wallets and other "custody" services, trading services, and financial advisors. Neither forums nor signature campaign management should fall into this directive, these are simply entities paying for services.

This EU AML directive reform will come into force in 2027.

I think here you confused two numbers. The 10.000 € are a hard limit for (single) cash payments, and from 3.000 € on KYC has to be conducted on them. In addition, there is some due diligence which has to be done by obliged subjects if they detect a non-cash transaction of 10.000 € or more (or several linked transactions, i.e. if somebody sends two times 9999 euros the same day or one day later to the same bank account).

Crypto service providers like those I mentioned in the EU will be instead forced to implement KYC regardless of the amounts operated, from 2027 on. But that is already partly the case, at least in most countries, because countries have their own regulations in place and many are already regulating these services.

PS: This does not mean I endorse this directive. I think it is a dangerous one, and I think Bitcoiners should fight in their countries that such legislation is not introduced.

Super, war mir entgangen dass der Faden offen ist. Nuja, in einem kurzfristigen Bärenmarkt sind wir ja (73-> runter) deshalb:

Jeder Dip kann der letzte sein!

Setzt sich der langfristige Aufwärtstrend fort, dann gibt es immer einen Dip/Dump/Crash bzw. ein Tief, das zum letzten Mal einen bestimmten Preis erreicht, und dann geht es nach oben und der Preis wird zumindest für viele Jahre nicht mehr erreicht ("nie" könnte man auch schreiben, aber man weiß ja nicht ob Bitcoin nicht irgendwann doch auf Null geht). Beispiel Post-Halving-Dip im August 2016 von 650 auf 550: Alle waren enttäuscht, dass der Preis nicht explodierte, und verpassten so womöglich eine exzellente Kaufgelegenheit, denn was ab Ende 2016 passierte wissen wir alle

The AML directive is nothing new and was already discussed intensely here.

"Tools", i.e. software, are not banned. But if the directive is accepted, is that EU centralized crypto asset service providers (CASPs) cannot offer anonymity tools. Basically, the AML directive treats CASPs like any other banks or fintechs with some few exceptions (like providers of gift/prepaid cards with low amounts, which don't have to abide to the AML directive).

I have read the original formulation and for me it is even unclear if "privacy coin" accounts would be banned completely, because while they mention privacy-enhancing coins, the scope is on accounts facilatiting the anonymization of funds or transactions, including "through" privacy-enhancing coins. This could mean for example that an exchange perhaps could offer a Monero account but only if it does full KYC and perhaps investigates the origin of the funds on each transaction.

No, it wasn't the offline wallet providers who would have had to do these checks, but CASPs (like exchanges, centralized wallets etc.). They would have to be forced to check any transaction incoming from a self-hosted wallet. Probably like some exchange in the Netherlands 1-2 years ago which had required its customers depositing funds from self-hosted wallets, to confirm that the origin wallet was controlled by them; or in other cases, indicate the person who sent the funds.

Somewhat true ... CASPs in the EU won't be able to offer mixing services.

However, it's likely that something like Samourai would not be a CASP under this directive, where CASPs are entities in general which control funds, realize transactions on behalf of customers, or give financial advice. If Samourai only provided a server to receive messages from potential CoinJoin participants, but did not sign these transactions, then it wasn't in control of the funds and also didn't "realize" the transactions.

Mit der Grundaussage kann ich zustimmen, auch wenn ich bestimmte Formulierungen ("Sklaverei") etwas übertrieben finde, hab ich ja schon in einem der anderen übersetzten Fäden geschrieben.

Ich denke, dass Bitcoiner sich tatsächlich mehr für Privatsphäre und eine nicht zu übergriffige Regulierung von Kryptowährungen (und auch generell pro-Privatsphäre) einsetzen sollten. Aber eben zumindest ihr Recht als Wähler wahrnehmen. Und viele rennen da leider bestimmten Populisten hinterher, die zwar ihnen versprechen, was gegen die "böse Regierung" zu tun, die die "kleinen Bürger" unterdrückt, aber im Fall einer Regierungsübernahme noch mehr Freiheiten beschneiden würden. Ihr könnt euch sicher denken, welche Art Populisten ich meine

Etwas traurig ist es, dass die "Piratenbewegung" außerhalb einiger weniger Staaten wie Tschechien, wo sie sich etabliert haben, kaum noch existiert. Die hatte sich ja eigentlich gerade den Kampf für Themen wie Privatsphäre auf die Fahnen geschrieben. Ich habe deren Entwicklung in Deutschland von außerhalb etwas verfolgt. Es scheint mir fast, dass sie von bestimmten Leuten unterwandert und diskreditiert wurde, vielleicht war sie aber auch selber schuld wegen internen Streitigkeiten. Aber auch Bewegungen außerhalb politischer Parteien wie "Freiheit statt Angst" scheinen mir schwächer geworden zu sein.

Natürlich gibt es die traditionelle anarchistische Bewegung, aber die ist geschwächt durch diese ewigen Kleinkriege zwischen "Anarchokapitalisten" und "Anarchokommunisten". Für mich sind das zwar verschiedene Modelle, aber die man in einer freien Gesellschaft sozusagen als "Geschäftsmodelle" ausprobieren könnte (also die Kommunisten als Genossenschaft, die Kapitalisten als Aktiengesellschaft usw.). Also vielleicht sollten sich all diese Bewegungen wieder etwas zusammenrotten, zumindest gegen die Überwachungsgesellschaft ...

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Ein verwandtes Thema, das eher bitcoin/krypto-spezifisch ist, ist aber, dass die Bitcoingemeinschaft sich etwas mehr einfallen lassen sollte, wie man gegen Kriminelle vorgehen könnte, die tatsächlich Bitcoin oder Monero für ihre Geschäfte (Ransomware usw.) missbrauchen, ohne an jeder Ecke KYC einzufordern. Ich hab da als nicht-Sicherheitsexperte leider keine eigene Ideen.

Gelesen habe ich z.B. was über die Security Alliance, die eine Art Notdienst für Kryptodiebstähle und ähnliche Fälle anbietet. Vielleicht könnten sich No-KYC-Dienste sich auch verpflichten, ein paar Confirmations mehr verstreichen zu lassen, bis sie eine Einlage offiziell "annehmen", um Gelder aus Hacks, Diebstählen usw. gegebenenfalls einfrieren zu können, ohne die Kundenidentität zu kennen. Ist natürlich ein Problem für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, da KYC-Exchanges dann schneller wären, aber dennoch vielleicht eine Überlegung wert "für das große Ganze".

Wenn man nämlich beispielsweise den Politikern und auch anderen Mitbürgern (die oft erschreckend uninformiert sind, siehe Kommentare unter Medienartikeln zu Bitcoin und Krypto) klarmachen kann, dass es auch ohne KYC Sicherheit vor Kriminellen möglich ist, dann werden die Argumente für eine KYC-Pflicht immer schwächer. Und Politiker können damit nicht mehr beim verängstigten Otto-Normal-Wähler punkten.

Con respecto a Hong Kong también hay algo que no me cierra en cuanto a los números. Balchunas en su Tweet dice que el ETF de ChinaAMC terminó el primer día con 123,61 millones de dólares en AUM (AUM significa Assets Under Management, es decir el valor total de los activos). Entonces parece que los 9 millones de "trading" se refieren no a los que fueron "comprados", sino a los que fueron "comerciados", probablemente. 123 millones sería bastante impresionante para un mercado tan chico.

Acá Balchunas parece explicar esta diferencia:


Pero no lo entiendo del todo: lo que yo interpreto es que ya "existían" algunas de las unidades de los ETF, que quizá fueron adquiridos en algún mercado OTC por inversionistas antes del lanzamiento, mientras que en EE.UU también los inversionistas que expresaron interés de compra con anticipación deben comprar el primer día.

Sobre los ETF brasileños hay un artículo en Coindesk. Fueron lanzados en agosto de 2021, lo que posiblemente los transforme en los primeros ETF "spot" de Bitcoin (el Jacobi ETF de Guernsey fue autorizado recién en octubre de 2021, pero no estoy seguro si alguno de los canadienses estuvo antes).

This is wrong. These altcoins are not "scalable", they are only trading centralization for more transaction density. Solana is basically like Bitcoin SV, a coin with nearly unlimited blocksize. It's the dream of big blockers.

I've recently read that almost nobody is able to run an non-pruned full Solana node because the blockchain is over 100 TB big (the 100 TB estimation was in 2022). Not even stakers know the state history down to the genesis block, so this potentially exposes the blockchain to all types of unknown Nothing-at-stake style attacks.

Litecoin has potentially unlimited TPS because it supports Lightning.

On EVM blockchains like Solana you can have DEXes, to trade tokens of other DEXes It would be interesting how many transactions on Solana are actual value transactions and not some circlejerk.

Solana blockchain is also known to be halted every couple of months due to some strange bugs or problems. This cannot happen at LTC as its PoW is proven and reliable. Ethereum for example also is much more reliable.

Tokens of any kind are available on Bitcoin-style blockchains like Litecoin too - since about 2013. It's actually a bit a pity that LTC has mostly seen adoption of the worst possible* token standard, BRC-20, and the "meh" standard Runes, and not something more modern like RGB, but adoption work of RGB or Taproot Assets to Litecoin should not be difficult.

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*well, Stampchain SRC-20 and Doginals are even worse, see the gazillon of threads about Ordinals.

Seguro que ya mucho los saben, lo pongo más que nada para completar este hilo, pero los ETF de Hong Kong ya están activos desde este lunes. El primer día para algunos fue decepcionante con un volumen de trading de 9 millones de dólares (más 3 millones en los ETF de Ethereum). Pero Eric Balchunas, un analista de Bloomberg, opinó que los números eran buenos teniendo en cuenta que principalmente el producto va dirigido a habitantes de Hong Kong. Nada más que algunos influencers habían hablado de posiblemente miles de millones creando expectativas totalmente exageradas.

Las empresas que operan los fondos son ChinaAMC, Harvest International y Bosera Asset Management.

Aparente hasta hay posibilidades que los chinos "continentales" inviertan en estos ETF, pero es difícil ya que deben poseer una cuenta con un broker con licencia en HK (ver este artículo).

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Con esto, tenemos ETFs "spot" de Bitcoin en:

- Estados Unidos
- Canadá
- Reino Unido (técnicamente: Guernsey)
- Brasil
- China (Hong Kong)
- próximamente: Australia

¿alguno más que me haya olvidado?

Eso significa que Solana es ahora el sucesor oficial de Bitcoin SV

El tema es que hay siempre un dilema entre "capacidad"/"escalabilidad" y "descentralización". Cuando más transacciones almaceno en la cadena principal ("on-chain"), mayores son los requisitos para los nodos. Solana tiene entre 15 y 35 millones de transacciones por día, con un mínimo de 96 bytes por transacción. Es decir, el mínimo de bytes que tienen que procesar un nodo de Solana por día es de 1.4 GB. Eso no suena mucho pero es el mínimo absoluto y probablemente son hasta 10 veces más. En 2022 se estimó que la cadena de Solana pesaba 100 TB, ahora debe ser aún más (ver aquí). En cambio, la de Bitcoin pesa unos 570 GB.

Si bien aparentemente aún los validadores de Solana usan nodos con "pruning" en Solana (lo que no exactamente es ideal teniendo en cuenta la seguridad de la cadena), tener realmente un nodo que sea equivalente a un full node en Bitcoin es prácticamente imposible con una PC estándar o con los recursos de una persona de clase media que no está ganando dinero a través del staking u otro tipo de servicios. Y eso es el argumento que siempre los "small blockers" de Bitcoin han repetido una y otra vez: que para una persona interesada debe ser siempre factible operar un nodo full. Ethereum ya es bastante más costoso pero con alrededor de 1 TB (con pruning, sin pruning: 15 TB) debe ser aún posible para mortales de operar un nodo, aunque ya algo caro.

Básicamente el modelo de Solana prioriza al factor "capacidad" por sobre el de "descentralización". Es decir, entre el extremo "Visa/Paypal - totalmente centralizado pero decenas de miles de TPS" y "Bitcoin - completamente descentralizado pero pocas TPS on-chain" se encuentra más o menos en el medio. Personalmente prefiero el modelo de BTC y hasta Ethereum que son expandibles con cadenas laterales y LN/Plasma/etc.

Yep, that's "in theory" the way I'd approve to take NFTs out of the Bitcoin blockchain. There was a quite elaborate proposal called L2O (website: https://l2o.io/) describing even a method to take BRC-20 tokens out to a sidechain (a zk rollup) and it would continue to "live" there.

I wrote "in theory" however because the problem the stubbornness of the Ordinals community to insist on their NFTs being available on "OG Bitcoin". The value proposition of these tokens and NFT collections was very much tied to the fact that they were stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. There are lots of cheaper chains, and I believe Litecoin or Dogecoin are nearly as secure as BTC when it comes to long-term availability, but the LTC and DOGE Ordinals spinoffs never really took off.

Ordinals NFTs are however much less of a problem now than in 2023 and I believe at least Ordinals is about to die (see particularly the post-halving stats, total Ordinals size on the Bitcoin chain since then is less than 10 vMB per day, which is equivalent to a little bit more than two blocks). Runes may be a little longer around, but they seem to have been a very short hype (most runes are already making losses only days after the halving).