I used to participate in threads like this one with my own opinion and arguments of who is really Satoshi. I don't anymore, and would urge others to consider doing likewise. My concern is that it brings real-world risk on the heads of those people who, rightly or wrongly, are nominated as possible "Satoshis." We don't need some deranged (or non-deranged) criminal kidnapping and torturing any of the possible Satoshis to try to get his private keys, or the widows of those nominees who are deceased.
<p>
Satoshi obviously wanted privacy, and we have good reasons for respecting that. It would not be good for bitcoin if he were outed against his will, or worse yet if something was done to him and it made the headlines.

I would also point out Kraken dates from 2011 and is still healthy and doing well. I thought they were the oldest survivor, but maybe Bitstamp has them beat?

That's why I don't speculate publicly any more about Satoshi's identity. He deserves his anonymity, very much so. (I do have a clear opinion as to the best candidate, just not voicing it.)

Against the notion that Satoshi was a team, I pretty strongly believe that it was a single individual (albeit one who was well aware of the many failed attempts that pre-dated bitcoin). Part of my conviction is that it is much less likely that multiple people have managed to keep the secret this many years. But the biggest reason is that I'm convinced a single mind had to conceive of all the working parts and visualize how it all worked and was robust against any fatal flaw. Committees can improve pre-existing things, but it tends to be lone inventors who make the breakthroughs that are famous in history.

I mined altcoins in 2014. In 2017-18 I ran across a note in an excel file that suggested I'd left a fraction of a litecoin on a mining pool. I started going through all my old mining pool accounts and wound up finding about $300 worth of Dash, Litecoin and other coins that had been below the withdrawal thresholds back in 2014. That was a fun exercise.

Knowing Bitcoin, we'll see both 30K and 28K before the ball drops... and I have no idea in which order.

On an unrelated note - I had a person recently tell me they were unable to donate bitcoin to a vanity address I had generated in early 2019, using software from probably a couple years earlier. They said their wallet or service (they never told me what they were using) said it was an invalid address. I pointed out the address has a couple test deposits in it and that Bitcoin devs are very careful to maintain backward compatibility during updates to the bitcoin code so that BTC does not become stranded, but does anyone know why a bitcoin wallet would be refusing a transaction to a vanity address?

I don't suppose there is anything to do except wait for those of us who had PIGGY on Cryptopia? I didn't have a large position, but large enough to pay attention if there is any means to recover PIGGY there somehow.

I took a haircut on BTC, but all my PIGGY is there.

LOL, no.

Obvious clickbait.

The pattern has been for BTC dominance to plunge during bull market rallies. Meaning that when it approaches a new ATH we can expect that alts will be growing faster in general. The notion that bitcoin will be the only surviving crypto is just harebrained and keeps getting wronger and wronger as time goes on. There will be myriad financial niches filled by myriad cryptos in the future.

Do you have a website or anything that fully explains what is going on with PIGGY? I'm glad to see the announcements here, but it seems kind of piecemeal.

What about people with PIGGY on Cryptopia? Will we need to withdraw the coins and do some kind of operation to claim new PIGGY, or is it expected that the exchange will handle it?

Best wishes!,
ebliever

I've been out the loop for a while, but just learned about the hack of Cryptopia. Let me be the first to congratulation Piggycoin for NOT getting around to converting to an ERC20 token, as was mentioned some months ago. I'd have lost a fair chunk of PIGGY on Cryptopia had that been the case.

As it is, those of us with PIGGY stuck on Cryptopia will just have to hope for the best that we can withdraw eventually and that losses from other coins/tokens are not "shared" to non-ETH/ERC20 coins.

What is important for me is that Bitcoin allows peer to peer transactions, not that it requires them. So long as this is true I have the advantage of being able to conduct direct peer to peer transactions when I wish, while keeping the convenience and utility of other arrangements (such as lending platforms and "banking" services) the rest of the time. The future is not all-or-nothing because financial transactions occur for myriad reasons and in innumerable situations. What Bitcoin provides is greater flexibility in addressing those situations than was possible with centralized fiat systems. That is part of what gives it enduring value and the opportunity to supplant centralized fiat systems going forward.

I wonder, is there any way to estimate the % of brainwallets (either by number of accounts created or amount of funds deposited) that have been compromised? This would take more than just blockchain research but I'm curious as to whether researchers have taken a stab at understanding just how bad use of brainwallets really has been. 1%, 10%, 90% lost?

It's not a problem for there to be less miners/hashrate, so long as it is distributed (decentralized). There's no reason to say that we have to pay miners some set amount or maintain parity with the current level of profitability.

My apologies if this has been discussed, but is there any kind of status on when HitBTC will be awarding Monero V to customers who were holding Monero in their accounts at the fork point?

Bitcoin is open source, so even if all the current devs with Bitcoin Core got hit by a truck it wouldn't matter. There are other teams working with the consensus protocol and new devs could just pick up and continue the work. Besides, I don't think Gavin has even had commit access for years, so I don't think your worry about his access is even remotely accurate.

Lost bitcoins are lost. There is no plan to steal/"recover" "lost" bitcoins as such would be fiercely opposed by anyone who thinks it though. It just makes the remaining bitcoins more scarce and valuable, and how do you know which bitcoins are truly lost/unrecoverable, and which are simply being held by a very patient and quiet hodler? (Hint: you can't.) Everyone should consider their inevitable demise and plan accordingly for how they want their cryptocurrency dispositioned when they die, if they don't want it lost or randomly snagged by the first tech-savvy person with access to their belongings once they die.

1. There are many exchanges you can use, though you will want to pick one that can handle this sort of volume without slippage. Coinbase/GDAX, Gemini (and their OTC desk in particular), Bitfinex (for institutional clients, also has an OTC desk) and Itbit spring to mind as among the better possibilities. But if you don't have existing accounts I would caution you it may take some time to get approved for this kind of volume.
2. Avoid BoA and Wells Fargo. I've not heard of any trouble with Ally Bank. Probably most banks are OK, but you might google around for horror stories with your lead choice or talk to someone in their compliance office before settling on one.
3. Bitcoin is currently treated as property, so it would be capital gains. Long term if held more than 1 year.
4. I don't believe so. I haven't read of further requirements at any rate. See https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-virtual-currency-guidance for additional details though.

Best wishes with it!

Your criticism is based on your blind faith about LN hubs being forced into AML/KYC by government regulation - despite the complete absence of such regulation currently. It would make more sense to assume that the centralized exchanges you mention would be targeted far earlier and far more effectively. Because if an exchange is targeted it must comply or it will be shut down and personnel hauled off to prison, and exchanges make big fat juicy targets.

It's funny that a bcasher (as a I assume you are) places such blind faith in centralized exchanges despite their miserable track record. Kinda fits with Ver's endorsement of Mt. Gox, come to think of it. But makes a laughingstock of their claims to favor decentralization because they choose centralization and authoritarian control at every opportunity.

If I'm a random LN node operator and some government passes a law demanding I comply along with a million other nodes/people, that government is going to have a miserable time finding out I'm even in their jurisdiction, and then tracking me down to force compliance. All for a node that might have all of $20 in funds in it. If they try this we'll bleed the government dry with guerrilla warfare tactics. It will be one huge game of whack-a-mole that the government will keep miserably losing at.

So give the bcash FUD a rest, it's just an expression of their delusional raving, as usual.

Hackers, yes. Muggers/kidnappers, maybe not. (For absolute security in such circumstances you'd be looking at multi-sig and keeping the keys in ultra-secure locations. But that's probably overkill for 99% of us.)

Keep in mind some wallets have features like the ability to host multiple seeds, such that you can trick a kidnapper with a secondary address that only has a small portion of your funds.