In your specific case, I’d consider investing a small chunk of the proceeds in a qualified opportunity zone fund. The tax incentives are massive, but there are a lot tradeoffs that you’re unfortunately probably not in the best place to fully work through right now :(
Wallet author here. Thanks @ryan-c for your question.
BlockCypher does get the extended public key, which is necessary for fetching transaction history, balance, and UTXOs. Child private keys never leave your system [0]. I chose against hardened derivation because it doesn't solve any problems and introduces a new one.
Let's say you assume that you have an extended private key A (with a corresponding extended public key). You then use hardened derivation on A to calculate a hardened chain at m/0'. Let's call this extended private key B. We then send all our transactions to addresses calculated by B (m/0'/0, m/0'/1, m/0'/2, etc). Now we're back in our same boat, we have transactions to dozens (or potentially thousands) of addresses created by B and so we use the extended public key of B to ping a third party service to fetch the transaction history/balance/UTXOs. If an attacker gets any child private key of B, and the extended public key of B, they can derive all child keys of B, even though hardened derivation was used. What they can't do, is derive A (or any of its children). In other words, the purpose of hardened derivation is to separate risk between different wallets, not within the same wallet. You could give B to one wallet and know that if you lose funds from A it's not B's fault.
The problem that hardened derivation introduces is that if you set it up to use hardened derivation on your receiving and change chains (as m/0' and m/1' for example), then in order to fetch transaction history/balance/UTXOs, you need to reveal the extended public key for every hardened chain. Besides destroying any benefit of hardening, this is also a UX nightmare. Want to boot your wallet in watch-only mode? With hardened derivation, you need to supply an extended public key for every chain your wallet interacts with.
Wallet author here, thanks @vessenes for the comment.
Yes, as with all HD wallets, an attacker with a single private key and the the extended public key can derive all child private keys. You can read more about that aspect of HD wallets in this blog post here (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/deterministic-wallets-a...).
What's important to keep in mind, is that the child keys never leave your computer. In fact, they aren't even stored in the file system. Transactions are signed locally, and only the signature (which by definition doesn't reveal the private key) is broadcast. If you dump your private keys using the wallet (option 0 for advanced users only after booting the wallet), you will see a big warning to this effect. The app won't let you dump your private keys before confirming you understand the risks.
This only matters of course if you're going into the wallet internals. If you're just using the wallet, you never have to think about this attack.
Do keep in mind from a privacy perspective though that because you're revealing your extended public key to BlockCypher, BlockCypher is able to calculate all your public bitcoin addresses.
The use of a Materialized View here is clever, but it means that every time you add a new row you have to refresh the view. For an app that accepts user-generated content, this would be very frequent since you wouldn't want users to create content and then test the search and not find it.
It takes a while to fully understand how blockchain.info works, and how their wallet is very different from something like Coinbase/Circle/Xapo. Once you do, you realize that blockchain.info is an amazing example of the types of things that can be created with cryptocurrency that weren't possible before. They truly embody the spirit of Bitcoin.
Now if only they would support HD wallets so you don't have to backup your wallet after every transaction...
I've always been surprised that landlords routinely return security deposits in full. After a decade of renting in multiple cities, I've always received 100% of my deposit back, even in cases where it probably would've been fair to charge me for some minor things (holes in the wall from hanging things, some small stains, etc).
There are penalties in some cases (the letter in this post says in Georgia if you get caught there's a 3x penalty), but I've never heard of those actually enforced.
In other words, there's a lot of incentive for this to happen all the time, especially since landlords don't have much of an online reputation (like restaurants). The fact that it's rare in the US is a great sign for doing business here generally.
It's a bad sign for the crypto community that the market doesn't demand better terms. You can debate price forever but nobody should argue for misaligned incentives.
I'd prefer projects like this go one step further and destroy the bitcoin invested up-front. It doesn't make sense to do ex post (now in this case), but ex ante it signals a commitment to the new coin and a genuine bet on its future value.
Full disclosure: I hold some bitcoin, so other people destroying theirs might benefit me ever so slightly :)
What happens to all the bitcoins that are being sent in now if ethereum fails? In startups, investors almost always have a liquidation preference, which means that if things go south they get their money back first (or at least what's left of it).
I haven't heard any mention of this and I'm wondering how this is structured? If the ethereum founders were able to fail spectacularly and still walk away as millionaires that'd be quite a perverse incentive structure!
I wonder if we'll see city medallion prices fall as drivers like this choose to not buy/rent medallions. Once that happens, the math might change such that it makes sense for him to keep the medallion.
Sucks to be an investor who bet who bet against technology, ouch!
Let's say badsite.com stores your password in plaintext and their database is compromised (or they're malicious actors in the first place who created the site with the purpose of gathering login credentials).
Now, an attacker who sees this will try go to gmail.com and enter the password gmail.com!@#t3st1ng (with your email address), or bankofamerica.com and try bankofamerica.com!@#t3st1ng.
Would anyone have bought the bonds without this clause?
I'm not sure, but keeping in mind that these bonds were issued at a time when Argentina was considered extremely risky to lend to, I'd imagine this was more than just an oversight on the part of some lawmaker or beaurocrat. If this clause makes it harder for Argentina to reneg on their promises (as they have done repeatedly in the past) that strikes me as crucial.
It's quite telling that they structured the deal in NY and not Argentina. I don't know why a country would agree to that unless they knew it was the only way foreign investors would consider lending them money.
Most people aren't aware that the difference in energy efficiency between glass and aluminum recycling is enormous. Here are some choice quotes from National Geographic...
"each 10 percent of cullet in the mix reduces the energy required to make new [glass] containers by 2 to 3 percent"
At 70% cullet (the max), that's only 14-21% in energy savings for glass.
"creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore"
That's 95% energy savings for aluminum. Big difference!
I love that trick. I often try to type more, but since "USA", "U.S.A." and "United States" are all different it often ends up backfiring. It's eally minor in the grand-scheme of things, but it often makes me feel unlucky for guessing incorrectly!
When websites do it well I love it! They can pick the most important links for me and put them in the nav so they're always available without me having to scroll around.
If you login to Facebook, go to the search bar and type in the letter A, you will see a list of your friends whose name (first/middle/last) starts with an A, but it's sorted based on who you are most likely to be looking for. I don't know exactly how they determime this since it could be based on so many factors like messaging, profile viewing, searching, photo tagging, shared events... even pokes!
It's spooky accurate and yet Facebook goes out of their way to never mention this kind of thing: they don't want us to realize how well they know us!