That's pretty neat! The concept has been discussed several times before (both on Bitcointalk and on Reddit) as it's probably the most straight forward way to do a dead man's switch in Bitcoin, but it's the first time I see it actually implemented (at least without the necessity of manually creating a raw transaction yourself).



Not that much of an issue if you have separate accounts for daily spending and long term savings. Creating a new "insurance transaction" every few months when you refill your daily spending account doesn't sound that bad.



Well, one can always keep their seed phrase in a safe deposit box (made accessible after your death), with a passphrase passed on via a separate channel (e.g. a notary executing your will, separate safe deposit box). Involves third parties which makes it less fun, but maybe more practical while still reasonable secure for most people.


Alternatively -- just to put it out there -- make your last will a scavenger hunt for your seed phrase. Something out of Indiana Jones. Or Saw, depending on how well you like your relatives.

Without access to the rest of the internet a meshnet is reduced to a local area network. Which still has its use cases but is not viable for any global applications such as a cryptocurrency.


In terms of centralization the network infrastructure should be the least of your worries. It's Facebook, Apple, Alphabet etc. and their walled gardens and consolidation of data / content / power that you should worry about. That's where the centralization of the internet, the loss of privacy and sovereignty take place -- on the application level, not the network level.

Don't get me wrong, meshnets are great and I love seeing the many meshnet initiatives around the world. But they too have their limitations and are only a piece of the puzzle.

If you strive for pure decentralization and autonomy on the network level you can't stop at mesh networks though. Mesh networks still rely on centrally controlled undersea cables and / or satellites to stay globally connected. You'd need physical alternative infrastructure to connect the world's continents.

That being said, running on centralized ISP infrastructure does no harm to the permissionlessness of a cryptocurrency, given that its network requirements are modest enough to reliably work on mesh networks or other alternatives. Put differently, an off-road vehicle being able to drive on regular roads does not make for a lesser off-road vehicle.

Regardless of that there's various efforts by Bitcoiners to circumvent centralized ISPs. There's Bitcoiner's using mesh networks, as mentioned by ETFbitcoin. There's Blockstream satellites (ie. an example of intercontinental physical alternative infrastructure -- run by a centralized entity obviously, but if Blockstream can put Bitcoin satellites into space, so can other private entities). There's even been efforts on Bitcoin transactions via radiowave transmission -- and that's honestly as decentralized as it gets.

Yes, it's exactly like that. Which is also why apparently there are users trying to goad other users into depositing more coins (see adaseb's post above).


Unlikely, the admin has been missing for 1-2 years now. Regardless of that there has been movement on SafeDice's cold storage every few months or so, but it's unclear if that's some automated script refilling the hot wallet or the admin silently siphoning money. Either way I wouldn't get my hopes up. Besides there's plenty of alternatives.

Hats off to both laszlo and jercos, that's a spirit we don't see often these days anymore. I wish greed wouldn't have become such a big part of crypto.

Only if someone else is unfortunate enough to miss the warning and deposits some coins.

Try again in a few days or maybe try smaller amounts and then never turn back, that site is a goner.

In this concrete case they trademarked one of the most commonly used logos:
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/detail/ES500000004046141

Or as Wikipedia puts it, the "prevailing Bitcoin logo".

No idea how in the living hell they managed to trademark a public domain logo though.

For reference, here's the archived thread with bitboy releasing the above into the public domain in 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131213113233/https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=1756.0

(The thread can still be found on bitcointalk as well, but the image links are dead by now)

That's... dumb.


Because we all know that scammers abide by trademark law

If anything that will make it harder for legit crypto business ventures to take a foothold in Spain.


On a side note they only got class 35 (Advertising, Business and Retail Services) -- so I guess if they are indeed "a bitcoin salesman", which could be seen as financial service, one could still file a trademark for class 36 (Insurance and Financial Services) just to fuck with that guy.


Nonetheless how this trademark got through in the first place is a complete mystery to me.

No, I mean literally in terms of qubits. Google latest quantum chip is at 72 qubits (up from 54 qubits last year). The estimates I found on how many qubits are required to break ECDSA are conflicting, but most sources place it at 1500-3000 qubits.



Agreed.

Those statements are not for Bitcoiners; they are for everyone else. So that later on JP Morgan can say "See, we told you all along that Bitcoin has potential. Come buy your Bitcoin shares from us!"



Amen to that.

Processing power of quantum computers may increase more rapidly relative to classical computers but it does not in terms of qbits gained. Quantum computers still need to increase their processing power by a factor of 20-30 before things get interesting.



That was my first thought as well, but just because the algorithm already exists doesn't mean it's necessarily easy to implement. I do assume development on implementing Shor's algorithm will start as soon as it's computationally possible though.

We don't have to wait for QC to be available for the general public to become a threat to Bitcoin's security. It should be considered critical as soon as a single government or corporation has access to a powerful-enough quantum computer.

Remember, Bitcoin's security proposition is that no single entity has the power to compromise it. That goes out the window as soon as the technology becomes available, even with limited access. But luckily even that is still many years out.

So in the end it's just news that gets overblown because crypto was involved. Got it.

To be fair "Local post guy to face mid-sized administrative fees for stealing electricity worth a couple of bucks from their employer in a small town of rural Russia" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

In other news, a bike got toppled in China. Possible cause of recent Bitcoin price drop? Details at 10.

OTC trading still relieves buying / selling pressure, even if it's not visible to the other market participants. I fully agree that margin trading is a wholly different beast though, which is why I chickened out at assessing its market impact.



I wouldn't say that the disadvantaged group is directly the source of the holders' wealth, but purchasing power doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you visit a poorer country than your own the same amount of absolute wealth has increased purchasing power by merit of everyone else being poor alone.

But who am I kidding, that reddit point is close to impossible to hold.

That's if you view Bitcoin as a commodity that needs to be liquidated (ie. exchanged into a fiat currency) before using it to spend on goods and services. Since you can use Bitcoin as a currency this line of thinking doesn't fully apply in my opinion. Of course one may argue that someone somewhere down the line will have to exchange Bitcoin into their local fiat currency but then again this applies to international trade with foreign currencies as well.



The (relative) rise of purchasing power is twofold: First, due to the rise in price of course. Second, however, because the rise of wealth in a group of people often leads to goods and services becoming more expensive for those outside this group. Most commonly you'll see this when cities or city districts go through a process of gentrification -- In absolute terms the purchasing power of the disadvantaged group might be unchanged but in relative terms they are pushed down. In a way you could see this as realized opportunity cost.

Now the severity of this secondary effect is of course debatable and will largely depend on each individual situation (ie. how strong your local currency and how wealthy your country is). And its impact is likely limited unless Bitcoin pulls a McAfee for whatever inconceivable reason. However I would not completely dismiss its significance.



Depends on whether you want to account for opportunity cost.

As with most things it's a spectrum, with no-coiners being straight in the center, but some lines of thinking necessitate a binary cut (ie. "if you're not with us, you're against us"). Upon inspection this may be a sign of being on the wrong track though.



Excellent, excellent point. I'd argue that whether their "purchases" contribute to the price growth depends on whether they are holding or instantly selling to cover running costs and then some.

If they hold, they contribute to price growth in that they are literally withholding supply from the open market (and from other miners that instantly sell). I do concur that the majority of miners is likely "betting against Bitcoin", however it'd still be interesting to see what percentage of coins get immediately sold vs held.

I actually find the list of Top Altcoin countries more interesting and wonder about what relevance each Altcoin has to the respective country.

IOTA being large in Germany and Austria makes sense, after all they are based in Germany and have (or had) partnerships with German industry.

DOGE being top in Bangladesh makes sense as well, because of course it is.

With the rest I really do wonder though.



Can we please make the term "bitcurious" a thing?

Depends a bit on how you read it. If you take "those who bet against Bitcoin" as no-coiners they are not entirely wrong. Holding coins in a bull market increases your purchasing power over those that don't, so relatively speaking they lose purchasing power ie. "pay for it".

Note that actively betting against Bitcoin requires to have bitcoin to sell in the first place either by (a) having it bought before or by (b) borrowing it in the case of margin trading. In case of (a) that means you can't drag the price down without having it pulled up first; additionally you presumably bet on Bitcoin at least one point in the past. In case of (b) you presumably have a counterparty taking the opposite position.

So the only move to actually "bet against Bitcoin" is by not participating in the market at all, ie. being a no-coiner as mentioned above. At least in case of (a), in the case of (b) I'm not so sure.



I guess I now ended up arguing in favor of the reddit post, which is not what I intended, since it's still a silly argument. In the end I mostly take issue with the "completely fair" bit that triggered the reddit response in the first place:


There's no fairness to any of it.

(And I mean, any, not just Bitcoin)

Arguing that "those who bet against bitcoin" are "paying for it" as per the reddit post is just trying to rationalize the inherent randomness of the world. It gives people an illusion of control, an entitlement based on a perceived "fairness" whatever that may be. "If I get rich I must be in the right."

Just accept that sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

Don't. At best, you'll lose 10k. At worst, you'll lose other people's money as well. So yeah, just don't.

Guy probably had his own office, so for all we know he might have simply "hidden" them there. After all according to the wattage it was at most 1-2 rigs running. Additionally that's such a small scale that most people won't bother calling someone out on it, especially if they are their superior. I'm honestly surprised somebody bothered at all.

Seeing some of those names makes me feel weirdly nostalgic.


Yeah, I think the large amount of "unknown" is simply because miners and mining pools marking their blocks didn't take off until 2012/2013.

e.g. Look at Slush's pool block history:
https://slushpool.com/stats/blocks/?c=btc

Around page 2895 (Mid January 2011) you'll see that they mined ~10% of all blocks per day. Around March 2011 they were already at ~20%. In the stats Slush's pool doesn't show up until late 2011 / early 2012, so the stats simply show when Slush's pool started marking their blocks rather than their actual hash power.