I would not be surprised if these days, airdrops value became less and less for new users.

Because now there is demand from everyone wanting to get rich => everyone sells their bags => price tanks => FOMO people sell their coins => price tanks and so on and so forth.

I guess back then there were more holders. That's the only way I can speculate there not being an immediate flash crash on exchanges.

Quote from: bounceback on May 09, 2024, 08:35:11 AM

but for some trader have spend time with offline job, make buy or sell limit order and opening after having free time are there your order filled or not?

Are you asking whether a trader with a full-time offline job has a daily routine of making an open order and checking if the order is filed or not? I'm not a daily trader myself but if I have a daily goal, then checking my trades daily is a given. It doesn't matter how often you check the market in a given day if that is your goal IMO, unless you can't control yourself and get swayed easily by terrible signals, influencers, etc.

90% of you on this thread are not traders and have no reason to check on your assets every few minutes unless you left your wallet application open and you clicked on it by chance while doing something else.

Checking on your prices so frequently causes anxiety and fear, anyway. Why do that to yourselves? Once a day is enough.

Finally the update has been published.

Some mirrors are not responding to this update so one of these days I will have to remove the dead and/or out-of-date items.

All:

Do you think it would be a good idea to offer a simulation of how a bitcoin mixer would work, on testnet maybe?

It could be useful for people to understand exactly what is happening when people use a mixer.

(of course it will never go on mainnet)

There are blocks and blocks of 10 sat/vbyte transactions alone. Same for 5 sats/vbyte. But anyway, I am content with a 20 sat/vbyte fee for Bitcoin. As long as fees do not shoot up again, I think the conditions are going to be very good for making transactions for the next few weeks at least.

Although with the volatile nature of fees, you can't really predict anything.

So I found this interesting article on the internet about the practices of the UK bank Standard Chartered over 15 years ago: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richholmes/standard-chartered-bank-money-iran-fbi

"Two employees blew the whistle on Standard Chartered's accounts. The FBI wasn't interested. But the bank's own reports raised similar concerns."

The Government And The Whistleblowers

Confidential records from the FinCEN Files show that the bank was reporting its own suspicious transactions about customers with links to Iran until at least 2017.

On a summer morning in 2012, Anshuman Chandra read a news article about a Saudi Arabian financial institution suspected of facilitating the funding of al-Qaeda attacks, including 9/11. The bank was called Al Rajhi, and a US Senate committee cited allegations it had handled payments to suicide bombers in Somalia, Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines.

Chandra was deeply troubled, he said, and not just because he knew people who had died in terrorist attacks. He was disturbed because Chandra worked for Standard Chartered bank, and he realized that his employer was doing business with Al Rajhi.

So Chandra warned a supervisor about what he had learned, he said, but he never heard back.

From Standard Chartered’s Dubai office, where Chandra was a client services manager, he dug deep into bank records. He later learned, examining a yearly profit report, that in 2009 alone, Standard Chartered earned $2 million from its relationship with Al Rajhi. (Al Rajhi did not respond to a request for comment.)

But that wasn’t all. Poring over Standard Chartered’s accounts, he found a number of customers in Iran, a country under US sanctions, and Chandra feared that they too had been indirectly supporting terrorist activities.

“I actually got goosebumps,” Chandra said.

This time, he decided to bypass his bosses. He turned to the US government.

By the fall of 2013, Chandra and another whistleblower, Julian Knight, had handed US authorities thousands of internal bank records that they claimed show Standard Chartered was giving safe harbor to a number of customers moving money to Iran.

The documents came at a significant time. A year earlier, the bank had acknowledged its role in concealing tens of thousands of transactions with businesses in Iran. Under threat of criminal prosecution, the bank had agreed to clean up its act.

Ultimately, the government walked away from the whistleblowers. But the two men had flagged real problems. The bank itself, confidential records show, later reported to the US Treasury that it had suspicions about at least 31 companies contained in the data the whistleblowers had handed over.

So as you can see, these banks can get away with not only money laundering but even terrorism financing. But then let's take the case of Samourai Wallet, which the prosecutors call a mixer (it wasn't). The Whirlpool coordinator was targeted for "allegedly" being used for money laundering despite a complete failure to identify who was using the service. However, in the case where the government has all the information about the banks' customers, transactions, accounts, and who is violating the law, they did not do anything. Actually, they didn't care.

What I'm seeing here in the regulations is less of a genuine concern to prevent AML and feels more like it's just a partisan jab in order to hurt non-democrat's standings in elections.

See also: https://stacker.news/items/532922

I don't like this because it shows that the crypto market is also influenced by politics. Binance should limit sanctions to individuals directly involved in this war instead of impacting all Russian users. The Russian people also opposed this war.

You see, that would require too much work and investment. So what do these companies do? They just put a blanket ban over everybody, because justice is too expensive to be served.

Meanwhile the actual puppet-masters behind the Ukraine war get to move their funds freely, with fiat, and be relatively unharmed. In fact, it's really only North Korea who is rampantly abusing crypto privacy.

Quote from: dkbit98 on April 18, 2024, 09:21:37 PM

Security is better for bitcoin and there is no founder that can be arrested and blackmailed.

I agree. This is a problem of Vitalik's blockchain.

He centralizes too much power over the network... he can be coerced by governments to make changes in the protocol

Well, in defense of Ethereum though, they do have different full nodes and reference implementations, and they can't all be coerced into implementing the same EIPs.

I'm not even sure if Vitalik is able to get an EIP approved all by himself, in the event that he was compromised by a government. Because the EIP would need to be published in order to start a change.