What are your thoughts on BitCoin?

[Narz]

Really curious about litecoin's value when litepay come out

 

[El_Machinae]

Again I should reiterate that I agree wholeheartedly with every other part of what El Mac posted.

Bad news for bitcoin miners: It's no longer profitable to create the cryptocurrency, by one estimate

"Bitcoin currently trades essentially at the break-even cost of mining a bitcoin," Fundstrat's Thomas Lee said in a report Thursday.

I can no longer think of a more efficient way of destroying natural resources to provide no net benefit. That's what providing price support for BTC does.

 

[innonimatu]

Hope that's a sign people will come out of this silly thing soon and and let it die. Get into a less destructive fad.

 

[Narz]

Well I sold 90% of what I had. Unfortunately during a downturn, had I sold a week ago I'd have an extra $7,000 or so. Still did OK overall, still holding a bunch of altcoins (mostly ripple), price way too low to sell, just gonna hold and see what happens.

 

[Varsham Sharma]

Cryptocurrency is of those thing everyone has different opinions about. Personally I believe Bitcoin is just resting for a while before it blow up completely once again. Seems like history is repeating itself just like back in 2013 when people doubted it. It's just a matter of time now : )

 

[ori]

this one is an interesting conundrum: can the possession of a cryptocurrency be illegal?

Researchers from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany found that around 1,600 files were currently stored in bitcoin’s blockchain. Of the files least eight were of sexual content, including one thought to be an image of child abuse and two that contain 274 links to child abuse content, 142 of which link to dark web services.

“Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the researchers wrote. “Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users.”

 

[innonimatu]

As someone long ago commented on bitcoin: prosecution futures.

Another recent piece of news, intelligence agencies were quick to notice how conveniently easy it was to track the activities users of bitcoin. It's amazing how some people fell for the "anonymity" claims on a thing with a distributed log of every transaction ever made.

 

[Bamspeedy]

this one is an interesting conundrum: can the possession of a cryptocurrency be illegal?

I read a couple years ago that child porn existed within the code since every user leaves a 'signature'. Now I know that isn't just urban legend and is fact. It's too bad the law probably doesn't consider the fact whether the users are aware of what is in the files they possess.

 

[El_Machinae]

I read a couple years ago that child porn existed within the code since every user leaves a 'signature'. Now I know that isn't just urban legend and is fact. It's too bad the law probably doesn't consider the fact whether the users are aware of what is in the files they possess.

It does. Early cases would have to show intent to possess. But there also comes a time where "you should have known" becomes assumed. After the publication of such a report, the clock starts ticking. As well, it is now legal to seize computer property that contains the blockchain, regardless of whether you knew or not.

I've been hard on bitcoin, but this is one of those extremely frustrating "this is why we can't have nice things".

 

[El_Machinae]

Wait, doesn't this mean that I cannot bring forward the blockchain as evidence in a contract dispute in Western courts?

 

[BvBPL]

Crypto merchant Bitfinex is going to be engaging in FATCA and CRS reporting, much to the chagrin of its various crypto customer who want to avoid governmental reporting.

Spoiler :

 

[Birdjaguar]

Buyer Beware: Hundreds of Bitcoin Wannabes Show Hallmarks of Fraud
A Wall Street Journal analysis of 1,450 cryptocurrency offerings reveals rampant plagiarism, identity theft and promises of improbable returns

Hundreds of technology firms raising money in the fevered market for cryptocurrencies are using deceptive or even fraudulent tactics to lure investors.

In a review of documents produced for 1,450 digital coin offerings, The Wall Street Journal has found 271 with red flags that include plagiarized investor documents, promises of guaranteed returns and missing or fake executive teams.

“Jeremy Boker” is listed as a co-founder of Denaro, an online-payment project. In investor documents for a public offering in March, which claimed to have raised $8.3 million, Mr. Boker boasted of his cryptocurrency startup’s “powerhouse” team. In his biography, he noted a “respectable history of happy clients” in consulting before he launched Denaro.

In fact, Mr. Boker’s bio image was a stock photo, there is no evidence he exists and the rest of his team appears to be fictional, except for two freelancers who said they were paid by people unknown to them to market the project, the Journal found.

Spoiler :

The principals behind Denaro couldn’t be identified and attempts to reach the company went unanswered. The real person whose image was repurposed as Mr. Boker’s turns out to be Jenish Mirani, a banker in Poland. Mr. Mirani, who had posted the photo on his personal website, said “it was really shocking” to find out about its afterlife.
Investors have poured more than $1 billion into the 271 coin offerings where the Journal identified red flags, according to a review of company statements and online transaction records—nearly one in five of those reviewed. Some of the firms are still raising funds, while others have shut down. Investors have so far claimed losses of up to $273 million in these projects, according to lawsuits and regulatory actions.

Companies use coin offerings to raise funds by selling their own digital currency. Led by the bitcoin fever, the 1,450 projects analyzed by the Journal—a number believed to encompass most of those aimed at an English-speaking audience since 2014—say they have raised at least $5 billion. Since 2017, cryptocoin offerings have generated more than $9 billion in proceeds globally, according to research and data firm Satis Group.

Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued warnings to investorsthat many deals in the booming private market for cryptocurrencies could be violating securities laws, and on Wednesday launched a website touting a fake coin offering as an example of what to avoid.

Since December the agency has filed civil charges against companies and individuals in four separate cases involving initial coin offerings, known as ICOs. At least a dozen companies put their offerings on hold after the agency raised questions, an SEC official said in February.

At the heart of most coin offerings is a company’s “white paper,” a document that typically details mission statements, team biographies and the technical specifics of a project.

Of the 1,450 white papers downloaded from three popular websites that track coin offerings, the Journal found 111 that repeated entire sections word-for-word from other white papers. The copied language included descriptions of marketing plans, security issues and even distinct technical features such as how other programmers can interact with their database.

At least 121 of the projects didn’t disclose the name of a single employee and several of them listed team members who either didn’t appear to exist, as with Denaro, or were real people who said their identities were being used without their knowledge.

The Journal also identified more than two dozen companies that promised investors financial rewards without any risk—something the SEC prohibits. These white papers went as far as pledging weekly payouts or doubled returns. The SEC has recently taken action against ICOs making such guarantees, including PlexCorps, which raised as much as $15 million by promising a 1,354% profit in less than a month. In December, the agency obtained a court order freezing the company’s assets.

PlexCorps didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. On April 23, somebody posted a statement on the company’s Facebook page saying that “the PlexCoin project is not dead, it is simply on hold because some court orders prevent us from continuing the development of the project for the moment.”

Interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exploded as a frenzied rally pushed coin prices to all-time highs late last year. Now reality has set in for many in the industry as regulators step up their scrutiny and issue warnings to investors about fraud in the lightly policed market.

Unlike public offerings, ICOs generally happen outside the strict framework of regulation and don’t require filing much official paperwork, if any. That leaves it to investors to do a lot of the detective work about what’s real and what’s not.

Copied language, the absence of named employees and promised high returns are “warning signs for investors,” said Bradley Bennett, a former enforcement chief at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

“There are going to be some legitimate players that emerge from this but it’s going to be a handful—a lot of it looks like penny-stock fraud with lower barriers to entry,” Mr. Bennett, now a partner at law firm Baker Botts LLP, said of the broader coin market.

To feed the growing market, ranks of freelancers have sprouted up to write white papers for as little as $100.

At least five projects filled out their white papers or websites with executive images pulled directly from online stock photography or other sites, the Journal found.

Among the most extreme was investment startup Premium Trade. The images for its five-member executive team were simultaneously being used on nearly 500 unrelated websites: Premium’s co-founder Andrew Ravitsky was also “Dr. John Watsan,” in an online cardiology course.

Premium Trade didn’t respond to several requests for comment and Messrs. Ravitsky and Watsan weren’t reachable, if in fact they exist.

LoopX, which began soliciting money last year, vowed to build “the most advanced” trading platform in the cryptocurrency market. The company didn’t name any team members or detail how the platform would be built. Its white paper featured several key entries identical to another coin project’s.

“Along this journey, we found great partners and mentors who were strongly committed and excited to work with the ever-progressing vision of LoopX,” the company wrote in one of several passages identical to those in an earlier online payment startup called UTrust.

After claiming to raise $4.5 million, LoopX disappeared from the internet in early February. Its website is now down and its Twitter account features a single message linking to a news article alleging the founder or founders ran off with the money. LoopX couldn’t be reached for comment.

When contacted by the Journal, Swiss-based UTrust’s CEO, Nuno Correia, said he was aware his white paper had been plagiarized but didn’t think there was anything to be done about it.

“We get a lot copies of our white paper,” Mr. Correia said. “My picture, my description, my team, even our website was copied.”

Seven other coin offerings also featured passages that appeared earlier in UTrust’s white paper.

Along with Mr. Correia’s biography, the Journal found lawyers in California, an escrow agent based in Ukraine and the co-owner of a media company whose identities had been hijacked in order to lend credibility to a range of cryptocurrency projects involving education, e-commerce and crypto mining.

“I’m a little creeped out by the whole thing,” said Amanda Gavin, co-owner of a media production company in San Francisco, whose image and name were taken from her LinkedIn page and used for a coin offering she had never heard of called Pixiu.

Pixiu didn’t respond to several requests for comment via email and social media.

At least four coin promoters have been sued by investors seeking to start class-action cases. During its 2017 offering, Paragon Coin raised more than $70 million, according to a lawsuit filed in a California federal court alleging the business was an “overly ambitious, vague, and impractical” venture to raise funds to purchase real estate.

Paragon, founded by a Russian internet entrepreneur named Egor Lavrov and his wife, Jessica VerSteeg, promises to “connect the cannabis industry through the blockchain,” according to the company’s white paper. This July, the company plans to open a co-working space in Los Angeles paid for “exclusively in cryptocurrency,” according to the company’s website.

“Paragon is dedicated to staying compliant with all applicable laws, and endeavored to do so throughout the entire ICO process,” said Ms. VerSteeg, who was the 2014 Miss Iowa United States and is currently Paragon’s chief executive, in a statement provided by the company. “Paragon holds itself to a high standard of compliance with our token holders and will continue to do so as it moves forward.” Mr. Lavrov couldn’t be reached.

After the coin offering for Denaro closed in March, the entity’s website went dark and investors are now alleging on social media that the founders ran off with millions.

Daniel Armstrong, who said he worked for Denaro as a freelancer through February, proofreading company literature, now believes the startup was run by Lithuanians, based on evidence he saw from payment details, documents he edited and a message posted to Slack by one of the founders written in another language.

“I did some marketing text for them,” Mr. Armstrong said. “When they sent it to me it was terrible and written by a non-native writer.”

Denaro didn’t die entirely. An offering for a new payment system recently emerged called Pluto Coin with a similar website and an identical white paper. Half of the Denaro team members had also been recycled for Pluto Coin, including an image of Mr. Boker, which appears in coding for the website but isn’t visible to casual viewers. He has been renamed “Ivan Denver.”

So far, Pluto Coin claims on its website to have collected at least $10 million from investors. It couldn’t be reached for comment.

—Jean Eaglesham contributed to this article.

—Additional development by Shane Shifflett

—Illustration by Jessica Kuronen

 

[Moriarte]

Over time, Bitcoin transaction fees could rise further because the subsidy miners enjoy by being partly paid with rewards of new units of currency, will decline given the total supply of Bitcoin cannot exceed 21 million. Furthermore, the costs of Bitcoin mining are enormous. Its current annual electricity consumption is estimated by some to be up to 52 terawatt hours, double the electricity consumption of Scotland. In comparison, the global Visa credit card network’s energy use is less than 1⁄2 of 1% of that of Bitcoin, despite processing 9000 times more transactions.

A quote from “the future of money” speech by Mark Carney, governor of Bank of England

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/m...hash=A51E1C8E90BDD3D071A8D6B4F8C1566E7AC91418

My question is - what is the point of comparing bitcoin mining costs (“estimated by some”) to visa electricity expenditure directly? Isn’t there bigger picture, bigger electricity expenditure and other capital costs residing in other parts of current financial system? Visa is a tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, Visa credit card network =/ fiat money. How much does it cost to run all the banks in the world, including centralised financial institutions? How much money is wasted on building and maintaining skyscrapers, how much is used to finance official arms trade and stockpiling, how much is taken up by banking comissions on every corner of money travel? How much is payed to specialists in every shop of financial world?

And what figure will we arrive at, when we add up and compare real expenditure of running fiat money vs replacing some of this market with few solid, perhaps, regulated cryptos, which would stand the test of time.

 

[El_Machinae]

We compare bitcoin mining to visa, because that is the aspect where bitcoin is competing. Bitcoin is not a banking service, bitcoin banks are a banking service. Bitcoin is a commodity that some people want to become more liquid, to the point where it's used in transactions very commonly. And all the current holders implicitly want the price of bitcoin to rise as well. Those other services will continue to exist if bitcoin increasingly co-opts local currencies.

Now, we're currently bumping into the ecological and fiscal damage of having bitcoin be too high a price, to the point where it's encouraging excessive miners. Once the reward for mining drops, you'll find people dropping off as well, which means that the process of updating the blockchain will become more centralized. That will decrease the net transaction costs, but also change the incentives to update the blockchain. You'll only pay to update the blockchain once you have a transaction on the line, or if you can bring enough hardware online to make a permanent change to the underlying software via its majority process.

I'll tend to agree that the future is blockchain. But if you think countries should give up their sovereignty, you might be making a strategic error, especially if you're in a developed nation. Your country protects you from a lot of very bad actors who would pop up if you lost sovereignty. We do a lot of free-riding, but to net-benefit.

 

[odpadnik]

As someone long ago commented on bitcoin: prosecution futures.

Another recent piece of news, intelligence agencies were quick to notice how conveniently easy it was to track the activities users of bitcoin. It's amazing how some people fell for the "anonymity" claims on a thing with a distributed log of every transaction ever made.

Got a link to support that?

People can track transactions between accounts, but matching an account (which is gibberish "random" data") with actually personal info of John Doe, is not really something that the Bitcoin stands for.

Unless you know exactly WHO stands behind the BTC address, that is. Or am I wrong here?

 

[innonimatu]

Matching an account with actually personal info is something that happens whenever bitcoin is traded for something real. OR even traded online on any platform under an obligation to keep and provide information.

 

[Narz]

I sold most of my remaining bitcoin to a friend who's using it for online poker.

 

[odpadnik]

Matching an account with actually personal info is something that happens whenever bitcoin is traded for something real. OR even traded online on any platform under an obligation to keep and provide information.

Oh, right... Well, trading BTC for BTC / moving from wallet to wallet should still be anonymous, as I know. But when it comes to actually buying stuff - yeah..makes sense.

 

[uppi]

Oh, right... Well, trading BTC for BTC / moving from wallet to wallet should still be anonymous, as I know. But when it comes to actually buying stuff - yeah..makes sense.

It's not really anonymous, but pseudonymous. Every transaction has pseudonyms that are unique to the persons involved. If you manage to find the mapping from the pseudonym to the person, all protection from identification is immediately gone. That is only as strong as the weakest link. So one transaction can lead to the identification of all other transactions.

 

[odpadnik]

It's not really anonymous, but pseudonymous. Every transaction has pseudonyms that are unique to the persons involved. If you manage to find the mapping from the pseudonym to the person, all protection from identification is immediately gone. That is only as strong as the weakest link. So one transaction can lead to the identification of all other transactions.

Point taken.

But,... This only counts if I 1. want to hide my identity 100% for some reason and 2. The person(s) on the other end really want to find out who I am.

For the time being, I'm happy to buy/trade BTC and other currencies as it is. Long as the platform I use is regulated, licensed & offers great overview, I'm a happy girl (I'm not a girl, but still). I still manage to get away from all that banking BS and no financial institution can poke their nose in my finances.