There's also these webshop plugins by blockonomics:

https://www.blockonomics.co/merchants#/page1

I haven't used them myself so far, but this approach seems to be the middle ground between writing your own implementation and relying on a third party exchange. You'll have to look into the details yourself, but from what I've gathered you have full control over your own keys with them earning money via prepaid payment fees.

Only if you ignore that the drop in hashrate was preceded by almost a year of bear market. That the hashrate would plateau and then drop until the market recovers is hardly a surprise.

I'm not saying that your theory doesn't have its merit, but it also doesn't quite hold when looking at the surrounding factors.



Power consumption of non-mining full node should be negligible as the computational requirement of full nodes does not exceed most consumer PCs [1] and there are currently only about 10,000 public nodes [2] on the network.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#minimum-requirements
[2] https://bitnodes.earn.com/



Oh definitely. But which consensus algorithm would that be, that's the Gretchenfrage, isn't it? So far attempts at answering this question have been less than impressive.



Definitely not easy, but necessary. I'm a bit surprised though about the deforestation issue, most windmills I saw in Germany are in open fields (ie. crop areas).

In general most of Europe appears to be doing well on the renewable energy front anyway, unlike some of the other major economic forces out there (I'm looking at you U S of A, you guys would have a lot of space for photovoltaics and wind power; just sayin').

More efficient miners only lead to an increase in hashrate, not to a decrease in power consumption. That is, if for example the cost of running mining hardware just got cut in half, a mining operation will simply double their hardware in an attempt to double their profits.

Not really.

Mining uses the same amount of energy regardless of there being 10 transactions or 10 million transactions per block. Miners spend as much on electricity as they can while still turning a profit. Accordingly the amount of money miners can spend on electricity mostly depends on the block reward, transaction fees and crypto-to-fiat exchange rate (other factors being infrastructure and hardware acquisition costs).

So one way to lessen the CO2 footprint of a PoW-based cryptocurrency is to shorten its currency emission timeframe, similar to Monero's. Making larger blocks unfortunately is not.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is not a working payment system at the moment, because it is, despite it's scaling probles. I'm saying Bitcoin is not yet able to fully replace existing payment systems -- assuming you want to reduce Bitcoin to a mere payment system (ie. there's also the matter of store of value, financial sovereignty and maybe at one point a useful token / smart contract economy).

In the end it breaks to whether we deem 1) cryptocurrencies a worthy endeavour and 2) PoS and other PoW-free consensus algorithms viable security models.

Regarding the first point, reclaiming individual financial sovereignity and possibly replacing existing, more energy and especially labour intensive financial infrastructure seem worth it. Just imagine the amount of human resources one could free up by automating a large part of the financial industry. At least financial service workers will have a better chance at finding new jobs than most of the manual workers one can expect to be automated away in the coming decades.

Regarding the second point I have simply yet to see a consensus algorithm other than PoW work in practice. Crypto's history is full of failed PoS attempts and most other consensus algorithms are either permissioned or require trust.

That's just my 2 sats though.



Thanks for doing the math

I think people tend to underestimate the amount of energy required for water to reach boiling point.

Disclaimer: I'm a PoW hardliner who's not convinced of PoS and its derivatives (at least those that I'm aware of)

I'm under the impression that whenever the power consumption of PoW gets brought up that one factor is largely ignored: Grid energy storage.

Maybe the hard facts will betray me once a comprehensive studies comes out (so far most studies I found regarding the power usage of PoW were on shaky grounds at best, link me up if you have something interesting), however so far I'm under the impression that economic forces lead to PoW mining using energy that mostly goes beyond what can be stored in the power grid and would therefore get wasted for the most part.

That is, based on the assumptions that
1) miners are driven towards places with the lowest energy cost,
2) energy is the cheapest where there's a surplus of electricity and
3) current energy storage capabilities are very much lacking
we can come to the conclusion that the additional power consumed by miners is energy that is otherwise wasted. Unlike consumers and most industries that have other economic factors at play (eg. you can only drill for oil where there is oil, you can only produce commodities where resources are either nearby or cheaply delivered) electricity is almost the sole concern for mining operations.

But like I said, the hard facts may betray me, so hopefully at one point a proper study will take place proving the above either false or correct. Also I'm neither an economist nor a grid engineer, so for all I know my assumptions could be utterly void.

That being said, I would very much love to see an increase of Bitcoin's transaction throughput as to make it actually feasible to phase out some of the legacy banking system in favor of cryptocurrencies (ie. IMHO Bitcoin's PoW wouldn't feel like that much of a waste if it were to successfully supersede parts of the existing system rather than running redundantly alongside it).

I think it's been mentioned by other people in this thread, but so far it seems like the only ones filling the hot wallet are other players depositing coins. So the last ones do deposit will end up with their coins stuck.

And that's just BTC. XMR and BCH withdrawals haven't been working since their respective hard forks, so unless admin returns those funds are stuck for good.

I'm slowly getting tired of hearing from those two. But good for us, I guess. The more time they waste squabbling, the less time they have for interfering with Bitcoin. They can have their coins, we have ours, everybody wins.

It seems like their in-built wallet makes use of a system they call Samsung Knox [1], which secures private keys by managing application privileges [2] and ensuring the integrity of said application privileges by verifying the boot process on the hardware level [3]. So to my understanding while private keys are probably encrypted they are not stored in a secure hardware element as is the case with common hardware wallets such as the Trezor or Ledger. Samsung Knox's track record is not exactly splendid [4][5] but I guess we'll see in the next few months whether they have brought their shit together.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-includes-private-crypto-key-storage
[2] https://developer.samsung.com/tech-insights/pay/device-side-security
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox
[4] https://blog.securegroup.com/why-samsung-knox-hardly-has-anything-to-do-with-security
[5] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/samsung-knox-lock-hack,news-30062.html

According to bitblender.io's Tor website they are shutting down as well. Looks like we have another wave of closures at our hands. A sad day for privacy.

"Just asking for a friend"

On a more serious note, if more than USD 70MM worth of cryptocurrency just lying around the blockchain unguarded isn't proof of Bitcoin's security model than I don't know what is.



To you and any other newcomer reading this:

Do not share your wallet file with strangers. That's how you get your coins stolen.

@OP: If you have found a way to retrieve lost coins that may be helpful to others, please post it publicly so that other users can be helped as well.

The size of the block reward is irrelevant when the coin itself is worth nothing in fiat terms ie. purchasing power. Miners can't pay their running costs and hardware based on the arbitrary number that is the size of the block reward.

The only reason why the upcoming difference in block reward between BTC and BCH / BSV is relevant at all is because we're looking at running systems sharing the same mining resources with a somewhat stable equilibrium that will soon be broken. For all we know BCH / BSV might as well manage to offset their premature halvening by doubling their value relative to BTC.

Regardless of that I'm looking forward to see the first coin apply sharding to cryptocurrencies. Be it Ethereum, be it a Bitcoin fork or be it something else entirely. I personally doubt that blockchain sharding is the scaling solution that some people make it out to be, but the worst case that can happen is a learning experience for all.

Interesting to hear, let's see how long it stays that way.

Austria and Germany appear to be a bit more strict in this regard (or maybe the respective companies are just more conservative and careful in their approach).



Hah, that's law enforcement in legal grey areas for you.

Well connected company with political ties: "their actions may be unconventional but it's technically legal so there's nothing we can do"

Some rando business: "seize everything just to be safe"

Are there anonymous Bitcoin ATMs? IIRC pretty much all ATM providers both in the Americas and in Europe follow KYC procedures of some sort. At least I'm not aware of any that don't. Granted, the effectiveness of said KYC procedures may vary, but at least there are some in place.

Also I remember a thread by a Bitcointalk member that operates (or used to operate) Bitcoin ATMs in the Netherlands ranting about strict regulations and questionable interference by law enforcement so it does seem like Bitcoin ATM operators need to tread carefully.



As it stands they don't know (yet) who ran the service, right? Or did I miss this in the reports? So far it seems like they only got the servers.

With BCH currently mining at merely 5% of Bitcoin's hashrate [1] they already have a problem with subsidizing miners and keeping the network safe as is, no halving needed. It's definitely going to be interesting to see what happens after BCH's and BSV's first halving regardless.

[1] https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

...or it could also just move sideways for the next few weeks. Because sometimes the surprise is... that there's no surprise.

The block subsidy becomes less relevant with each halving, as it slowly phases out in favour of mining fees. About 4 halvings from now (ie. in about 16 years) we're looking at a block subsidy of 0.78125 BTC which is less than the transaction fees per block during peak times. 2-3 more halvings after that and we're at a block subsidy that roughly equals current transaction fees during calm times.

Regardless of that Bitcoin's price doesn't matter all that much for network security as long as Bitcoin remains the largest coin by the fiat equivalent of block subsidy + transaction fee within its PoW scheme family (ie. as long as Bitcoin is able to sustain more SHA256 miners than alts that share its PoW).

The Microsoft of today is not the one we had in the 90s. They have become incredibly open and much more open source friendly during the last decade. Just check their GitHub:

https://github.com/Microsoft

TypeScript is a boon for every web developer and while I personally don't use it, vscode is a pretty awesome IDE.

Either way, it doesn't seem like we have yet enough information to judge on what path MS is taking here. But their planned usage of Bitcoin and IPFS is a hopeful signal. At least they are not on the forefront of permissioned blockchains (looking at you, IBM), even although their offer of running a private Ethereum instance on Azure is (was?) rather silly.

Here's a list of cryptographic hashes that are currently employed by various PoW coins:

https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Mining_algorithms

This list is far from complete and to be honest I'm not even sure how current it is, but it should serve as a good starting point.

In general any cryptographic hash function can serve as the basis for a PoW scheme, however not all may be equally suitable. Additionally some coins cycle through cryptographic hash functions (if my memory serves me right, may also have just been a concept) and some coins shift between cryptographic hash functions depending on their emission lifecycle (eg. Grin will be shifting from CuckARoo to CuckAToo [1]).

[1] https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/how-to-mine-grin

That is indeed pretty weird. Maybe admin is borrowing money for their defense attorney? >_>



"not as good as before" is an interesting way to put it.

Their support is gone, with the exception of the coin movement mentioned by DarkStar above there hasn't been a sign of life for months now. As it stands your only way to get Bitcoin out is by some other unlucky soul unsuspectingly depositing coins in SafeDice's hot wallet. And probably sooner rather than later the account funds for either their domain or their server will run out and the site will go offline for good.

I'm sad to see SafeDice go, but at this point everyone should simply stay away.