People looking to buy Bitcoin unfortunately often end up at Binance.
They have long offered low trading fees, while heavily inflating on-chain withdrawal fees and duping users into accepting "wrapped bitcoin" instead (that is, a layer of misdirection and nonetheless custodial bitcoin, held by Binance or some other third party).
If what the SEC allege is proven, that they moved customer coins to a separate legal entity, I don't think it's a leap to assume the coins users think they're buying perhaps don't even exist - that the exchange have been selling paper coins banking on that users won't withdraw en masse.
This is what FTX were doing too - selling paper bitcoin; bitcoin that was not backed 1-to-1 (or anywhere close, they actually held a relatively small number), instead funneling customer money into the hundreds of other coins FTX had invested in.
This could reveal the apparent mass susceptibility for VC backed "cryptos" - that the masses are not so dumb after all, or at least not in the way you thought, that instead they've been fleeced.
Bitcoin may still suffer reputational damage in the short term, but surely the elimination of such schemes is, to use an overused phrase that seems very apt now, good for bitcoin?
Personally I advocate using BitWarden for commonly used logins that, if they were compromised, would not be catastrophic; perhaps in some cases because 2FA provides another, tautologically, factor, and KeePass secured with a FIDO2 device in challenge response mode, a passphrase, and possibly setting a higher key stretching work factor to further blunt any brute force attempt, in which more important data is held.
That's an absurd amount of effort to bypass fingerprint biometrics, nice.
However, it's important to note here that biometrics isn't just about fingerprints and every OS handles their available biometrics options differently. For example, I would recommend face authentication on apple devices, however I would avoid using face for windows, and instead recommend a windows hello PIN (yes, it's handled differently than the PIN in the above article).
Ultimately, you're just trying to create a balance between the layers of protection and reasonable attacks. There's only so much you can protect against, nobody can withstand someone who is cloning fingerprints, stealing devices, has access to your separate device 2FA, etc. without severely affecting their lifestyle.
They've been present with their strange shiny orb at my local shopping mall in Portugal for the last year or two, and are often at a busy train station nearby too.
They may have lost $16B but, as they were converting customer deposits into coins the customer did not buy, such as FTT but also many others, then it seems bad math to value the customer deposits at $16B - prior to essentially shorting against their customers, perhaps those deposits were worth 5x more. And it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe more deposits would have been made, if the price of the assets their customers hoped to buy (Bitcoin is far and away the market leader) were not being shorted in this manner.
I'm not a mathematician but their activities may have amounted to many tens of billions of sell pressure against Bitcoin. Elon Musk purchased $1.5B and the price of this finite asset rallied tremendously, what might these tens of billions have resulted in?
It would be intellectually dishonest, if the foundations of your reasoning were sound.
The increase in the money supply, aka block subsidy, is a value transfer from BTC holders to miners compensating them for enforcing the consensus rules of the ledger. Very similar to if you were paying fees to a mega secure vault company, though no vault company can provide decentralised value storage; value storage without any single point of failure. Considering the unprecedented level of security on offer, the value for money is astonishing.
The miners job is to construct a block.
They're paid via a special transaction called a coinbase (a large American exchange named their company after this special transaction), which they can make payable to whomever they wish.
They take incoming transactions and may include a certain number of those; the limit is 4 million weight units, as opposed to a certain number of kB as is commonly believed.
Each transaction they include will usually include in addition to fixed recipients, a special "spend to anyone" transaction output, this is to encourage a miner to include your transaction preferentially as they can make this portion payable to themselves.
They may attempt to include multiple transactions spending the same funds to different recipients, or to insert a coinbase transaction wherein they have made payable to themselves any number of bitcoin, or include more than 4 million weight units worth of transactions, or make some other attempt to break the rules of consensus that any block they published will be tested against by thousands of other computers who will then choose to store locally the new block as the new strongest valid chain tip, or disregard.
Before publishing the transaction though, the miner must also solve the double spending problem, by providing proof of work.
They do this by going back to that block they're constructing, and firstly putting a random number in the nonce field of the header. Then, they pass the blocks bits into a sha256 hash function, take the resulting hash and hash it again with the sha256 function.
The result must meet the current block height difficulty, for example to just happen to start with 18 leading zeroes.
If it doesn't, the nonce is incremented in the header and the block is hashed again.
Without an appropriately difficult proof, first of all you wouldn't know which valid block had come first, and so would have double spend problems where after receiving payment, the block containing your payment was dropped and replaced with another, or outside of bitcoin, anyone can for example send you a transaction receipt via e-mail stating you have been paid, on its own it's worthless though, you will have to rely on PayPal or a bank to ultimately tell you if you have received a payment, and PayPal or bank payments are reversible in a way Bitcoin transactions are not so even then, you don't have the same degree of certainty (furthermore your funds are not in your custody, instead you have lent your money to the bank; they owe you it).
I hope this clears up the difference between these different fees and what they are in payment for, please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it, much of the confusion around Bitcoin results from people who have not studied it wanting to sound knowledgeable.
I don't know much about cryptocurrency, but I'm not sure I understand how your response relates to the question of whether, on average, bitcoin transactions use about $60 worth of electricity.
Thanks for this summary of the basics of mining (that most people here are familiar with). None of it presents a challenge to my two arguments:
1. BTC holders pay a fee of around 1.7% p.a. of their holdings (until the next halving) to miners (through an increase in money supply),
2. which amounts to around $60 per transaction currently. (Higher if BTCUSD rises or the number of transactions falls; lower if BTCUSD falls or the number of transaction increases, which it cannot much because BTC operates not too far from the limit.)
> please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it,
Ah, the old "you just don't understand crypto" chestnut...
The time taken to refute bs is much greater than the time it takes to generate bs. Your argument is at best mistaken and at worst intentionally misleading. My summary of mining is better than most you will find online and, only lacking in mention that the previous blocks hash is also included in each new proposed block to ensure each builds upon the chain tip.
Even if I hadn't studied the source code and game theory myself, I think I trust the technical analysis of the Steve Wozniak's of the world over yours.
A simple way to see through this argument that transactions cost $60 would be to say, that being the case, why can I currently pay $1-2 for a transaction. And if no transactions occur, why would miners still be able to continue creating blocks?
I think it's very likely you simply dislike Bitcoin and want to mislead people about it, for personal reasons.
