That's pretty neat!

Thanks for the link, I wasn't aware of this proposal. Seems like this approach could greatly improve privacy even when swapping currencies that are not necessarily privacy focused. The amount of privacy you get might depend on the amount of other users using anonymous swaps though (ie. if it's just you and 5 other guys it might be rather easy to correlate transactions).

Well, on the other hand anyone who goes for an open source exchange to run their platform as if it were just another WordPress site is probably better off that way than trying to cobble their own custom solution. Whether one should use such an exchange is a different question of course, but if one is not to be stopped from running an exchange of their own, using an open-source platform might be the lesser evil. Even without having looked at the code of this project I'm fairly certain crypto has seen worse exchanges in terms of security. Not that the bar has been set that high, unfortunately.

Keep in mind that to improve your privacy using atomic swaps you'd still need to do the swap with a privacy focused cryptocurrency (similar to what fravia suggested, except without the need for a centralized exchange).

However this appears to be a bit of a challenge when talking about Monero, for example:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58630/would-it-be-possible-to-do-atomic-swaps-with-monero-and-bitcoin

Not sure about the situation as far as other privacy focused coins are concerned (truth be told I'm not sure about the state of atomic swaps in general right now as things seem to have grown rather silent).

This reminds me though that it's worth noting that using Lightning Network also improves privacy. While not the main goal of LN the usage of onion-style transaction routing should make Blockchain-analysis quite a bit harder.

You mean the Chinese government? The majority hashrate is already located in China:
https://www.coindesk.com/highest-in-2-years-65-of-bitcoin-hash-power-is-in-china-report-finds

We're still talking about private companies running these mining operations, not the government. The confiscation of private mining facilities to launch a 51% attack seems rather unlikely as China knows better than to kill their own cash cows.

There's CoinJoin, whichs allow for trustless mixing by using special transactions:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

It's used by Wasabi wallet for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5064006.0

In the case of Wasabi there's a central server coordinating said transactions but the server has no access to the coins itself and can be used over TOR. Ease of use still seems to be a bit of a problem though, as the amounts you can mix are rather limited (ie. you can only mix rather specific amounts) and lack of userbase often causes prolonged delays. Might have gotten better since I last gave it a try though.

Samourai Wallet also offers a CoinJoin implementation called WhirlPool, amongst other privacy features that might be interesting for you to study.
https://samouraiwallet.com/

Since this hasn't been mentioned yet: It's also important to note that PoS requires an initial coin supply to be centrally issued, otherwise there's no coins to stake with. Depending on your stance on decentralization this is rather problematic, with some projects trying to mitigate this problem by either running PoS / PoW hybrids or starting off with PoW before shifting towards PoS.

What if an adversary changes the Bitcoin address that is aliased by human-readable shortname though? According to their site "you can easily delete or modify your addresses linked to your CRUX ID" which has me wondering what would prevent such an attack from happening. To make matters worse, people would feel safe that their clipboard hasn't been tampered with, while in the background payments are being routed to the wrong address without the user even having the chance to double-check.

Interesting service though, will keep an eye on it.

Stick with Ether then, it's a free market after all.

Assuming you're right Ethereum seems to be vastly undervalued right now, so once Bitcoiners recognize Ethereum as the better coin you stand to make quite a profit. It's not the bet I personally would take but that's just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Außer die UK passt ihre Geldwäscherichtlinien an die EU an dann ja -- zumindest so wie ich das verstehe.

Die größere Frage wäre in dem Fall allerdings was am 31. Januar dann tatsächlich passiert, bis jetzt ist der ganze Brexit Prozess ja ein eher schleppender Vorgang mit viel Rechts-Unsicherheit.

Und vielleicht relevanter, was zwischen dem in Kraft treten der Regelung am 10. Januar und dem etwaigen Brexit am 31. Januar passieren soll. Nachdem Bottlepay nicht vor hat diese Geldwäscherichtlinie umzusetzen müssten sie so oder so zumindest temporär dicht machen und alle Accounts schließen.

Got any more info than that? According to the ZDNet article their slip-up was actually more technical in nature:


Reading through the article their money mule / laundering infrastructure seems to have worked surprisingly well, but I'd be interested to read about any trails they left behind on this front.

Miners censoring transactions would require an amount of centralization that's probably nothing short of what is required to run a 51% attack. As long as some miners are willing to mine a "blacklisted" transaction it will enter the blockchain eventually.



The minute Bitcoin is controlled by a single entity it's dead. That has been known from the beginning. And it's luckily very unlikely to happen.



Any major miner stopping mining altogether is a win for decentralization as other miners take their place. If ASICs for some reasons stop existing, people will regress to GPU and CPU mining. Simple as that.

I'd say within limits.

In my opinion both gold and Bitcoin are good hedges against unexpected economic events, but while gold has a significantly longer track record I believe that Bitcoin still has a larger upside potential. Additionally Bitcoin is easier to store and trade and the gold price is not as stable as it's often made out to be.

So in the end I'd mostly treat Bitcoin as a hedge against economic downturns and gold as a failsafe in case Bitcoin is not up for the task.

Bitcoin is far from perfect, but in terms of decentralization it's still the best bet we currently have.


I think we still have a couple of small(ish) miners on Bitcointalk that would disagree? Profit margins and economics of scale have pushed towards mining consolidation, that's true, but despite all that Bitcoin remains uncensorable and secure. And that's the important bit.

I wouldn't be so sure of that, to me it seems that for every criminal with a "short lived career" there's many more out there that never get caught. Let's not forget that malware is a huge global industry and those guys are just the tip of the iceberg.

Here's another interesting article on said operation:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-bayrob-malware-gangs-rise-and-fall/

According to this article they made tens of millions of US dollars before they got caught and apparently it took law enforcement 8 years before they got a trace on them. Had they stopped after the first couple of millions they probably would have gotten away with it.

Wär tatsächlich ganz interessant rauszufinden wie aussagekräftig man Geldströme auf Basis dieser Metadaten verfolgen könnte (also Bank -> Konsument -> Geschäft -> Bank). Mit genug Datenpunkten könnte man so wahrscheinlich sogar die Geldströme kleinerer Geldscheine einigermaßen verfolgen (Bank -> Geschäft -> Konsument -> Geschäft -> Bank).

In der Praxis ist hierfür aber wahrscheinlich der Aufwand viel zu groß und die Metadaten zu lückenhaft. Dazu kommt das gerade die interessanten Geldströme (also Schwarzgeld) so gut wie nicht erfassbar sein werden, dh. die Zwischenschritte Bank -> ??? -> Bank werden zuviele sein. Druck auszuüben Richtung bargedloser Gesellschaft ist da wahrscheinlich um einiges effektiver als zu versuchen einen Überwachungsapparat für Bargeld aufzubauen.

There's also the Project Development boards:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=12.0

It's mostly for projects in very early stages but I've also seen people use it to get early feedback for their current works in progress. Depending on the state of your project this board might be more appropiate.

It's not only possible, it's also very common. Even under normal network conditions, without adversarial behaviour by other nodes. It's part of what makes logic that relies on network connections so tricky.

That's the point. There's no need for cooperation as a single adversary can relatively simple take over the vast majority of the network.

Mining costs a significant amount of electricity so attacks are both expensive and logistically hard to pull off. At least in terms of Bitcoin and most of the larger alts.

The payment system you are describing can be crippled for days on end by spending a couple of hundred bucks on your friendly neighbourhood botnet-operator (or AWS, for that matter). I'm not even kidding.

So now we have a network filled with adversarial nodes that share a wrong propagation time. The "average propagation time" can be moved towards any arbitrary value depending on what the attacker wants to achieve. They can push the timeframe down to a few milliseconds, or the can inflate it to a few years. Both of which will render the network unusable.

Also erstmal find ichs super das ihr da eine Einsteiger-Seite gebaut habt wo die Leute nicht gleich Richtung Daytrading und Casinos gepushed werden (auch wenn ich persönlich weder gegen das eine noch das andere was habe).

Hab die Seite mal ein bisschen überflogen und muss sagen ihr habt da gute Arbeit geleistet. Auch eine vernünftige Selektion an seriösen Exchanges, auch wenn ich persönlich Bitfinex auf Grund der unklaren Beziehungen zu Tether als grenzwertig betrachte.

Paar Kleinigkeiten die mir aufgefallen sind:

1) Das der KeepKey Referral-Link shortened ist find ich leicht problematisch, allerdings nehme ich mal an dass KeepKey Referral-Links nun mal so ausschauen

2) Bei den Wallets fehlen noch genauere Infos zu Desktop Wallets!

3) Bei den FAQ bin ich über ein paar 404 gestoßen, ich glaub da müsst ihr nochmal nachkontrollieren. z.B:
https://www.bitcoin-beginner.de/bitcoin-faq/technologie-und-entwicklung
https://www.bitcoin-beginner.de/bitcoin-faq/mining-und-transaktionen
https://www.bitcoin-beginner.de/bitcoin-faq/technologie-und-entwicklung
...