They set aside a big bundle of CRO at the beginning, for this kind of promotion. It helps them promote their platform and get new customers, because in order to get the 50% off, you have to sign up with them, and invest some money of your own (stake some CRO). It's not a straight-up, no-strings-attached giveaway. But it's no different than the letters I get in the mail from Chase Bank offering me $400 if I sign up for an account, and keep a balance there for 6 months, and transfer my paycheck auto deposit to the new account.

I think they are trying to retire MCO and switch everyone over to CRO for several reasons. One I heard was for regulatory reasons, because MCO was basically started as an ICO, and those have now been viewed pretty negatively by regulators. A second reason is that MCO is an Ethereum-based token, whereas CRO is an actual coin, with its own separate blockchain. A third reason is that I think Crypto.com structured CRO better for their business model, with the proof-of-stake, the number of coins, and a number of other things. Finally, CRO matches the Crypto.com brand; MCO is from their old, obsolete name Monaco.

You get a better deal with CRO anyways: higher interest payments, for one; and you have to stake less (in fiat terms) to get the same level. For example, before the swap, you had to stake above $2000 to get the green/purple cards; with CRO, it was closer to $1600 at the time of writing.

All in all, it seems better. Of course, as with anything, don't risk your life savings on it.

- A happy-so-far, but still slightly skeptical, customer of Crypto.com

Here's my take, as a customer of Crypto.com, and one of their early ICO investors over three years ago when they came out with their first MCO token.

• They are as "legit" as you can get in cryptocurrency companies. But remember, even "legit" companies with good intentions sometimes fail. In other words, as far as I can see right now, I have no reason to believe they are scamming us. I have put a bit of my bitcoin in, and use their VISA card, and it is very nice, with good rewards.
• But remember, people thought Bernie Madoff was "legit" until he "made off" with their money. It was all a pyramid scheme.
• It is easy to let greed fool us. Have some healthy skepticism.
• If you feel comfortable investing in, or using, any cryptocurrency company or exchange, you should feel comfortable using crypto.com.
• But don't throw your life savings into it.

A bit of history, as I know it from being a small-time investor in their ICO.

• They came out with their big plan and launch in 2017, and you could invest in their MCO token, to get a place in line to get their VISA card. That was the biggest draw for me. I think their original plans changed several times to meet market needs and regulatory restrictions.
• You could "stake" different levels of MCO to get different benefits. Staking means you commit or lock them for 6 months.
• Sometime in 2018, I believe, they acquired the crypto.com domain and rebranded themselves for higher visibility.
• In 2019, I think, they finally started shipping cards. I received mine sometime after that.
• They also had launched CRO, which is its own chain (not an Ethereum-based token). It became linked tightly to their crypto exchange.
• Currently, they are trying to retire the MCO token and shift everyone over to CRO. It's actually a better deal, as the staking levels at current prices are lower in $ terms, more within reach. CRO also pays higher interest rates.

I also wondered how they can keep paying such high rates for their own CRO currency (up to 18%). I haven't found a clear answer. Their white papers describe the allocations of the tokens, and there are a bunch reserved for initial launch and promotion of the project, so I imagine that is where most of this interest payment is coming from. Another hunch I have is that when you "stake" the currency, they actually turn around and "stake" it in the CRO blockchain (in the "proof-of-stake" sense). Stakers are rewarded in coins for validating transactions, so that may also be part of the 18% that they are returning.

However, here are my big misgivings. Though the price of CRO has risen steadily, that is in large part due to growing demand for it in the market. The demand seems to be growing faster than they are paying out in interest. That's because they keep signing up customers. All's well that ends well, right? Well, two things concern me. If the customer growth slows, the price of CRO can start to decline; that can trigger a massive selloff, crashing the price. Crypto.com has little control over this! Second, and this is probably the more hopeful end scenario: as their customer growth slows, they intelligently start reducing the interest payments so that the number of coins doesn't flood the market and tank the price. However, it's quite probable they won't be able to stay ahead of that game. After all, the high interest is one of the reasons the customers continue to flood in; as the interest rates lower, the customer growth will slow even more. That's why this has at least some risk of ending up badly.

Again: I use the service and really like it, and like the high interest rates and the high rebates especially. But I haven't put my life savings into it! HODL the majority of your coins yourself. Always.

I tried to find discussion of this elsewhere, but didn't come up with anything.

How does Utreexo compare with the Coda project? Is it a similar idea?

I run a full node at home. I don't think running a full node is for everyone, but it's not that bad. CPU usage is pretty low, disk usage is acceptable, and network traffic is not too bad. The initial syncing process takes forever, though.

We should be able to increase the base block size modestly at this time, in addition to SegWit (for various other benefits it offers), without risking much centralization of nodes. I know my (3-year-old) computer can easily handle it.

As has been pointed out in this thread, the more significant deciding power is with the miners. At this point, I'm way more concerned about the centralization of mining than I am about centralization of nodes. I would rather not have a vast majority of the hashpower located in a single country. What can be done about that?

Sorry, I believe this problem has been thought about and discussed quite a bit, though it is far enough away that not much serious action has been taken.

Though I'm not ready to run it, I'm actually intrigued by Bitcoin Unlimited's approach of letting the miners vote on the size of the blocks. Since the miners benefit from transaction fees, doesn't this effectively give them (collective) control over the supply of block space? They will increase supply when the fee market is too small, to increase their customer base. They will decrease supply when the fees are too low, to increase scarcity and drive the price up. At some point in the middle there will be an equilibrium where the fees are high enough to pay the miners' costs (and very little if any profit, otherwise more miners would join the market), but low enough that users will want to use the network.

Is there a hole in my thinking here?

I watched Jihan's talk.  I think you're missing the subtext here. Jihan doesn't like the Core team's committee approach. He would rather have a benevolent dictator leading the team, who could take decisive action. This is in line with the political environment of China right now.

I do tend to agree that committee leadership can easily get stalled. But benevolent dictatorship is not immune to problems either.

We'll see whether Jihan or one of his allies can come up with a better project led by a stronger leader for Bitcoin than Core has so far.

"Helpful..." That is an interesting interpretation of Troll's bashing, trash-talking approach.


Satoshi put in the "silly" double hashing that Troll is calling "amateur," not Greg. According to https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/779/hashing-or-encrypting-twice-to-increase-security, double-hashing was suggested in a well-known cryptography book of the time. We can debate whether it is really effective or not, but it's been there from the beginning. Not only that, but it's already pretty fast, and removing it would require not just a hard fork, but (according to my possibly wrong understanding) special handling to determine whether addresses, etc. were originally hashed once or twice... a logistical and coding nightmare, just to save a few nanoseconds.

As for the optimization Troll suggested, perhaps it would be useful. If I were a Core dev, I might even file this away on my backlog as something to look into.

But no, it's not on any critical path yet because the CPU is not a serious bottleneck. (Come on, people are running it on their Raspberry Pi's after all, whether you think that is a good idea or not!) Among the entire universe of possible optimizations, bug fixes, and features the Core dev team has to do, they may not have time to get around to your favorite one.

I get it, Troll is a self-proclaimed close-to-the-metal ninja coder. This makes him very useful in his niche, and his advice could be taken if it is truly not just trolling. But when you're very intimate with hammers, every problem starts to look like a nail, and you wonder why other coders don't just do as you would do in their place. A broader perspective may turn up some valid reasons.

"double-dare"... heh, sounds like the playground all over again.

I think what you are saying is "put up or shut up" or, show your investment in BIP148 by capital investment in hashing. I kind of agree... what good is BIP148 without some significant hashpower behind it?

In the same spirit, can we ask something of the big blockers who think Core code is so bad? Why do most big blocker projects first fork Core code then? Why not put up or shut up, and write your own superior implementation from scratch?

(For the record I am pro-SegWit and also in favor of a modest base block size increase... with more to come later, not a huge jump to 8MB or 20MB out of the gate. I want both on-chain and off-chain scaling. I'm just disgusted with how nasty this whole debate has become on both sides.)

Troll Buster: your first name fits you well, Mr. Buster.

rQDDtk2FwcFmo4BYxdorFE9tt553jE68uK

There are always people who like to criticize requests for help.  In fact I did email that address and patiently waited for a long time.

It's only natural to assume that if there is no response, one must try other channels of communication.  I tried everything others said to try.

Ultimately, as noted above, the email worked (finally got a response, and got my money back) but it took more than a month.

All I can say is, my experience trying to contact Jered in August was an exercise in patience.  But as others have said, he eventually came through.

All the other methods of contact didn't work-- he eventually responded to my request at info@tradehill.com.  We have settled accounts to my satisfaction.  I believe he is trying to do right by his former customers, but he's moved on and is working hard on another business venture or two.  He's probably only sporadically checking the info@tradehill.com account.

So contact him there, perhaps once a week until he responds.

I finally got a response from Jered.  He says he was taking a much-needed break from the claims.  I am in the process of settling accounts with him.

I finally got a response from Jered.  He says he was taking a much-needed break from the claims.  I am in the process of settling accounts with him.

I finally got a response from Jered.  He says he was taking a much-needed break from the claims.  I am in the process of settling accounts with him.

I understand the unfortunate circumstances, and I haven't been one accusing Jered of outright theft.

If you know this much information about Jered, could you at least pass along to him to respond to me privately here or elsewhere?  It has nothing to do with Dwolla-- Jered claimed after TradeHill shut down that he had all of the BTC safe.  All I'm asking is for the return of the BTC and the USD balances I had with them since around the middle of 2011, before this whole Dwolla thing happened.

Keeping quiet about a legal case shouldn't preclude fulfilling one's obligations in private to an individual.

Except no one seems to be reading that email or any of the other email accounts I've tried to contact.  I've also tried his Twitter accounts, his personal phone that he posted in this forum a few months ago, and various other avenues.

From past accounts, he's been pretty honorable about returning people's money.  However, there are still a few of us here that haven't gotten ours back, and it now seems he has shut himself off completely from any further TradeHill claims.

While I understand he's had to deal with fraudulent claims, it should be easy to verify the remaining true claims by asking for confirmation of amounts, transaction dates, etc.  Anyone who is dealing in BTC ought to have kept track of that and be able to confirm their account to him that way.  (I can-- I have my records all kept in Quicken.)

Great for you guys who live in San Francisco and can walk down to 20mission, but for the rest of us whose phone calls and emails he's not responding to, it's not so easy to reach him.

If anyone reads this and has personal contact with Jered, please ask him to take a look at our claims.  There are still a few of us out here who didn't hear about TradeHill shutting down until just this past month or so.  We're "coming out of the woodwork" (at least I am) because the Bitcoin market shows signs of life, and I'm now suddenly looking for the funds that I thought were safely stowed away.  (Bad assumption).

I'm offering 20% of my claim to anyone who helps me reach Jered and get my account balances back.

Thanks!

I guess he figures he's washed his hands of TradeHill business and moved on.  However, he should (and hopefully has) reserved some funds and time for those of us laggards who just found out.

I'm upping my offer to 20% of whatever I can get back from him if anyone who knows Jered can help me get his attention and get my money and BTC back.

Thanks...

Jered,

I know you've been pretty silent on this topic for a while, but can you also get my BTC and $ back to me?  I had approximately $1000 combined in USD and BTC at TradeHill last year.  When the Bitcoin market crashed, I was content to let my balances sit there, thinking the market would eventually come back.  (No point in selling the bitcoins at the low price, taking the loss.)  With that and with moving twice, I pretty much ignored Bitcoin for about a year.

Come August and I notice the price is back up, so I try to log into TradeHill-- only to find it's been gone for quite some time.  Shocked!   This is probably a really old story to most people on the forum, but it was news to me.

(I had left balances at Mt. Gox too-- those are safely in my possession now.  I won't make the same mistake twice.)

At any rate, now I can't seem to get in touch with you about these balances I had at TradeHill.  I've tried nearly every channel that has been discussed here on the forums, even your phone number that you yourself posted a few months back.

Of course, I've also heard that you've been swamped with fake claims.  It is understandable if you should take some time to respond, but I would like to get this resolved before too long, especially given the time that has already passed.

I have detailed records of transactions (dates, amounts, etc.) that I can show you (Jered) to validate my claim.  I won't post them here, obviously, as anyone could then use them to impersonate me and take the claim.

To anyone else-- if you know Jered personally, or know of a way to get through to him, please help.  I would appreciate it greatly.

I'd be happy to give you 20% of whatever I can get back from Jered if you successfully put me in touch with him.

Thanks!