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Messages - NotATether

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181

**Cryptocurrency discussions / Re: Note: Stripe did not roll out crypto payments!**

« on: April 28, 2024, 06:53:59 PM »

Quote from: TomPluz on April 27, 2024, 05:54:19 AM

Stripe is considered as a big payment platform and its foray into cryptocurrency can be meet with a lot of excitement and possibilities. Alas, I can see that this company is really wading so carefully and do not want to fast-track things maybe to avoid possible mistakes and to make sure it is not upsetting its own market. So one might be asking: how big is Stripe and can it make a recognizable impact in case it would go crypto in full blast? According to this published material: Based in 2022, there are 1.32 million active websites globally using Stripe, with an average of 1,000 companies joined Stripe each day. Stripe processed a global payment volume of $817 billion and as of January 2024, Stripe is valued at $50 billion. Let's hope that there will be more on this development and that all Stripe users will be able to one day use crypto as an option to pay, aside from the usual fiat money. It must be noted that in my country, Stripe has no legal business operation and I am really wondering why it is not attracted to this small but growing market in the Asia-Pacific region.

I heard that Stripe used to do Bitcoin payouts (and checkouts possibly?) until about 2018 or so during the infamous rise and crash of the Bitcoin price. They pulled out because they said that Bitcoin's price was too volatile. I don't think we will ever see Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency checkouts on Stripe barring something extraordinary happening.

182

Bitcoin Forum / Re: Phoenix Wallet to be removed from US app stores

« on: April 28, 2024, 06:28:05 PM »

Quote from: Mr. Magkaisa on April 28, 2024, 06:03:42 AM

- Just the other day, I read an article saying that the Samourai wallet(https://cryptoadventure.com/u-s-doj-cracks-down-on-samourai-wallet-for-alleged-money-laundering/) seems to be in trouble and is about to close, or is closing, if I'm not mistaken, and now it's the Phoenix wallet that the US is looking at. It seems to be true that the US is closing down the app wallets one by one.

So far, it doesn't look like the US government is interested in going after Phoenix Wallet at all. This is simply a precautionary measure the team has taken in order to avoid the same fate as Samourai wallet. Whether or not that will actually work in the end is up for debate.

However, they would definitely like to pick off the crypto wallets from the app stores one by one if they could. As if anyone even stores large amounts of crypto in a mobile phone

183

News related to Crypto / Re: SEC Delays Approval of Immediate Ethereum ETF

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:34:45 PM »

Naturally, this was the only outcome we could've expected from the SEC because when was the last time you have seen them make a speedy decision about crypto? That's right, when it causes massive damage, and only to restrict certain types from use. (See for example Terra Luna).

They have done this delaying nonsense with the Bitcoin ETFs too, until their floodgates burst.

184

News related to Crypto / Re: Samourai Wallet seized and founders arrested

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:18:57 PM »

A reminder that running your own node and wallet is perfectly legal.

And performing coinjoin with random people, as long as you know that they aren't wanted folks, is also legal.

And running your own lightning node and channels is also legal.

And also exchanging your cryptocurrency for another kind of crypto is also legal, ID or no ID.

This is FUD. This particular agency of the feds is very good at it. So, don't fall for this FUD, and keep using Bitcoin.

185

Announcements [ANN] / Re: 🌀 UniJoin.io - CoinJoin Mixer | Your Anonymity Is Our Priority!

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:12:26 PM »

Quote from: Cryptofied on April 27, 2024, 08:50:09 PM

Having seen other Bitcoin Mixers, I think UniJoin is unique in the fact that it uses anonymous addresses as outputs,

There is no such thing as an anonymous address in Bitcoin. We don't have such an address. There are legacy addresses, various kinds of segwit addresses like Nested and Native segwit and we have taproot addresses, but none of these addresses hides the scriptpubkey section of the outputs which is one of the necessary steps to have an anonymous kind of address.

186

Bitcoin Forum / Re: [Speculation] Will Bitcoin breach $100k this month?

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:05:30 PM »

Quote from: salad daging on April 26, 2024, 06:12:00 PM

Quote from: EthereumDev_ on April 26, 2024, 05:44:03 PM
Quote from: rizqillah on April 25, 2024, 11:25:02 AM
It seems that Bitcoin has struggled and been corrected for almost a month, but in my opinion Bitcoin still has the ability to rise more than the previous ATH. It's just a matter of waiting, and we also know that news wars also affect crypto prices
It's true, as you have seen, the price of bitcoin has been going down for too long, if there is no good news that can trigger an increase in the price of bitcoin, it is likely that the price of bitcoin will collapse again and more and more people will sell bitcoin at low prices because many will panic.
Bitcoin is still stagnant, this is normal after halving there is always a long correction that makes the price go sideways, you don't panic too much let them sell because they can't wait for the pump then I will continue to accumulate while the price is still low even though it is now said to be high.

Maybe many are tired of HODL where when halving nothing happens, I don't think about that but the future and patience are important where never panic or sell when prices are still low.

It is more helpful to just check the CryptoPanic website which aggregates all of the news related to cryptocurrency on the internet. Generally speaking, if there are many bullish articles about crypto, then Bitcoin will probably keep going up, else it will continue to go down. That being said I strongly doubt that we are suddenly going to find $30,000 necessary to breach $100K.

187

Bitcoin Forum / The 134th reason why you should not use Wasabi Wallet.

« on: April 28, 2024, 06:01:34 AM »

Once upon a time, Wasabi Wallet was one of the most formidable, if not the most private wallet the Bitcoin community had to offer. It ran your bitcoins through WabiSabi, a CoinJoin protocol, and it "mixed" (if you want to call it that) your coins for you and gave you clean coins. Just like many of these mixers that you see advertised around here.

Unfortunately, Wasabi, like many other mixers and coinjoiners, had one inherent and fatal flaw - It ran a centralized coordinator. It was not decentralized at all.

This means that not only can law enforcement destroy a coordinator, but the coordinator itself can sabotage it's own users.

This is exactly what happened with Wasabi Wallet. While zkSNACKs, the owner of the coordinator, was busy preparing its draft announcing its intent to blacklist UTXOs that it doesn't like, the community was aloof of this news.

Of course, they were very angry when they found out about this, because there were no criteria for blacklisting a UTXO, not to mention the entire concept of blacklisting was unethical in the first place, so that basically meant that zkSNACKs could make up the rules on the fly for what UTXOs they would like to block.

Believe it or not, this is old news. It happened 4 years ago.

Since then, a couple of sockpuppets have taken it upon themselves to defend Wasabi of any wrongdoing, justifying harvesting your UTXO set for this purpose while decrying competing wallets doing the same. You can find these accounts on many platforms, like X and bitcointalk.

Fast forward to today, and now Wasabi announced that no American is allowed to use the Wasabi wallet or access their website.

I am sure you are shaking your head at this point thinking "but I thought only exchanges do that kind of stuff!" Well, that was the case for all KYC-verified services for a long time, but at least they had the excuse of obeying the law. Now though, even anonymous services are hiding from US users, not out of legal obligation, but out of fear. It has never been illegal for Americans to own bitcoin, even though the government wants a tax cut out of all bitcoin transactions at this point, which is not hard to see.

I actually think nopara73 (Wasabi founder) ran away from Wasabi Wallet because he saw this coming. I guess he didn't want his reputation to be further in the mud or something.

Do not use any bitcoin wallet that geoblocks its users. Bitcoin is a global, permissionles, decentralized, P2P electronic cash.

188

Bitcoin Forum / Phoenix Wallet to be removed from US app stores

« on: April 27, 2024, 07:08:26 AM »

Just when you thought the fallout from Samourai Wallet's demise couldn't get any worse, here we are again with news from last night that apparently, Phoenix Wallet is planning to cut off all their US app users.

Phoenix Wallet is not just a Bitcoin Wallet, it is also a Lightning Wallet, and that is a big problem since Phoenix Wallet opens the channels for you, which also means that those channels are soon going to be cut (or in Lightning Network jargon "closed").

189

**Cryptocurrency discussions / Note: Stripe did not roll out crypto payments!**

« on: April 26, 2024, 04:10:13 PM »

Reddit has incorrectly reported that Stripe is enabling crypto payments for all customers (i.e. people who buy stuff). This is false. The actual news from many outlets including TechCrunch:

Quote from: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/25/after-6-year-hiatus-stripe-to-start-taking-crypto-payments-starting-with-usdc-stablecoin/

Stripe, the fintech giant, continues to inch its way back into the cryptocurrency market. On Thursday the company announced that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with just one currency in particular, USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable.

Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday’s news has no customer names attached to it.

That's right, this USDC support is only for the Stripe merchants themselves. It is not for the consumers at all. In fact, nothing has changed for them, it is still business as usual.

Although, I won't deny that it would be a coup if you could suddenly start paying for subscriptions via Stripe using crypto.

190

Announcements [ANN] / Re: 🛡️ MixTum.io - Premium Bitcoin Mixer | Launched in 2018

« on: April 25, 2024, 07:16:50 PM »

Quote from: Lucius on April 25, 2024, 05:02:22 PM

There's no doubt that Tor is an extra level of privacy, but it's far from someone who should feel completely anonymous using it. If "they" want to find you, not even Tor helps, but you surely know all that. However, for ordinary people who do not deal with any bad things but just want privacy, I would definitely recommend to try Tor - after all, it is just a browser that does not require any special knowledge to use.

It's not so much about actors exfiltrating data from the user's device than it is about the actors exfiltrating the data from some CDN's cache dump, considering that they put their own TLS certificates in front of the website's.

191

Bitcoin Forum / OP_CAT and Bitcoin

« on: April 25, 2024, 03:20:36 PM »

I know most people don't understand anything about Bitcoin Script, so I will try to explain this as best as I can.

When you create a transaction, the outputs of the transactions have scripts attached to them, which contain instructions that an input must replicate in order to unlock those inputs for signing.

Mostly the script looks something like OP_DUP OP_HASH160 OP_PUSH <some hash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG or maybe OP_DUP OP_PUSH <some hash> OP_EQUAL.

Scripts can take inputs, which are stored on a stack, similar to a programming language, which is created when a Bitcoin Core node verifies a transaction and is destroyed when verification is completed.

Ever since the introduction of Taproot, people have been finding rather creative uses for these opcodes. One of these led to the creation of Ordinals.

However, having opcodes that can do complex operations will save fees on the bitcoin network and will allow more transactions to be mined in the same block at once (due to something called "sigops"). OP_CAT is one such opcode: It combines the two highest values on the stack.

For example, if the stack looks like this:

NotA
Tether

then OP_CAT will delete these two values and put "NotATether" on the stack.

Or if the stack is

Not
A
Tetether

and you do two OP_CATs, then it will also create NotATether. (first NotA, Tether and then the complete string NotATether).

The good news is, OP_CAT finally has a BIP number, BIP 347, and that means that the BIP is under serious consideration.

It might even be added into the Bitcoin protocol again. It was first disabled by Satoshi Nakamoto himself very early on in Bitcoin's life.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/04/24/op-cat-proposal-to-bring-smart-contracts-to-bitcoin-finally-gets-a-bip-number/

192

Gambling & Crypto Casinos / Re: STAY AWAY FROM 1XBIT

« on: April 25, 2024, 03:08:18 PM »

Quote from: Charles-Tim on April 25, 2024, 01:52:36 PM

In my country, there is no where you will go to that you will not see 1xbet ads. I even thought it is a Nigerian gambling site, but I later knew it is a Russian gambling site. Also most influencers and YouTubers and others are promoting it with their promo code in my country. Is 1xbet also a scam site or only 1xbit? I know that 1xbit does not have good history on Bitcointalk.

1xbet is also a scam casino that ironically looks like it is being used as a front for money laundering (maybe the DOJ should've taken down that instead of Samourai Wallet?). Just go to AskGamblers and look at all the negative topics about it.

It is utterly ridiculous that YouTubers would knowingly promote a scam to their own followers. The only conclusion is that they want to make more money and they don't care how they do it.

193

Bitcoin News & Updates / Buy Bitcoin sign sold for 16BTC

« on: April 25, 2024, 03:03:02 PM »

I mean, who can possibly forget this moment if you have seen it on television.

Clearly the guys on the left and right of the Bitcoin Sign Guy are either smirking or staring disapprovingly at it, which makes it all the more comical.

Well recently, it has been put on auction, and the winning bid was for 16BTC, which is about $1,000,000 in US dollars.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/04/25/buy-bitcoin-sign-sold-for-over-1m-at-auction/

I hope the buyer enjoys his new ownership of this piece of Bitcoin history.

194

Cryptocurrency discussions / DOJ thinking transactions are an Unregistered Money Transmission Business

« on: April 25, 2024, 02:47:30 PM »

Why it is possible the DOJ might rule wallet transactions as unregistered money transmission

If you have not been out of the loop, you will have heard the news that Samourai Wallet was seized by the US government yesterday. Two people running the project were arrested as part of that, and they have been charged with (you guessed it) money laundering and operating an unregistered money transmission business.

That is what the indictment says (and I got the excerpt from over here).

Quote

COUNT TWO
(Conspiracy· to Operate an Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business)
The Grand Jury further charges:
31. The allegations contained in paragraphs 1 through 28 of this Indictment are
repeated and realleged as if fully set forth herein.
32. From at least in or about 2015 up to and including in or about February 2024, in the
Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KEONNE RODRIGUEZ and WILLIAM
LONERGAN HILL, the defendants, and others known and unknown, willfully and knowingly
combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed together and with each other to commit an offense
against the United States, to wit, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, in
violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1960(b )(1 )(B) and (b )(1 )(C).
33. It was a part and object of the conspiracy that KEONNE RODRIGUEZ and
WILLIAM LONERGAN HILL, the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did
knowingly conduct, control, manage, supervise, direct, and own all and prut of an unlicensed
money transmitting business, which affected interstate and foreign commerce, and (i) failed to
comply with the money transmitting business registration requirements under Section 5330 of Title
31, United States Code, and regulations prescribed under such section, and (ii) otherwise involved
the transportation and transmission of funds that were known to the defendants to have been
derived from a criminal offense and were intended to be used to promote and support unlawful
activity, to wit, RODRIGUEZ and HILL conducted, controlled, managed, supervised, directed,
and owned all or part of Samourai, a business that transferred funds on behalf of the public, without meeting the Federal registration requirements set forth for money transmitting businesses...

Now let's get the ducks in a row:

- Samourai Wallet was not a company, it was an open source project.
- The Whirlpool coordinator was software that ran on their computer servers, and was not ran as a business.
- The primary function of Samourai Wallet is a bitcoin wallet, not to transfer money on behalf of random users.
- CoinJoins are not money transmitters in the same way that regular Bitcoin transactions are not money transmitters.

So, given that Samourai Wallet is just a bitcoin wallet, that performs Bitcoin transactions, and the government is hell-bent on winning the case, then this might cause them to rule that bitcoin wallet transactions are unregistered money transmitters and are hence illegal.

What do you think of this? Do you think the DOJ will go that far? Or do you think they will hand out some other kind of charge? Do you think they will win the case?

195

Forum related / Re: No option to self moderate threads here?

« on: April 25, 2024, 02:10:40 PM »

Quote from: bitterguy28 on April 20, 2024, 09:56:07 AM

really there is a recycle bin in this forum ? this means post deletion is also not necessary here because we cannot completely hide anything from this forum lol.
but self moderated thread is also something that the forum may not be concern of because of this recycle bin feature .

Simple Machines Forum software doesn't have recycle bins. They have a trash can for deleted topics, but that is usually only visible to administrators.

Anyway, why would you guys need to self-moderate a topic? That is only needed if you have tolls running amok on the forum who you don't want replying to your posts. I haven't seen any here so far.