With FinCEN Notice 2020-2 it's clear that the US wants to treat crypto as foreign bank accounts to coerce disclosure but that severely limits the scope of regulation they can do as it would place public blockchains as strictly not being American jurisdiction, and it would make monitoring American activity on these blockchains outside of the scope of domestic agencies and spy agencies would not be legally able to spy on American activities on these blockchains. When you understand these facts it explains why the US pursued dubious NK sanctions over what would be a much stronger case of considering the Tornado Cash protocol an unregulated bank which it is. There is a very big technical and legal distinction between what centralized BTC mixers do with UTXOs to be considered laundering and how the Tornado Cash protocol exploits how ETH works on-chain to combine ETH in a single account without taking KYC.
This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?
Here's what the Bitcoin whitepaper itself speculated.
"As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner."
And here's an early Bitcointalk thread. Traceability was discussed and acknowledged from the very beginning.
Everybody should browse the internet on Tor from time to time to get an understanding about how the web works on a second class IP address and a slow connection. On some exit nodes reCAPTCHA actually enters an endless selection where it's impossible to pass.
On the other hand Minecraft is the best-selling PC video game of all time and it was originally written in Java and the Java client is the definitive experience of the game.
Theoretically the whole area could be turned into a dirty bomb with a few strategic strikes and it would be carried down a river destroying vast areas of Ukraine for millennia.
Many ISPs give customers much better download speeds than upload speeds. I remember personally having problems using bittorrent and seeding too much destroying the network for all using it.
This somehow reminded me, wasn't there a competition years back to see who could generate the most compiler error output with the least amount of C++? A few too many templates and you could generate terabytes. Edit: don't think it was this but this is still a fun read https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/1956/generate-t...
Americans by and large aren't able to trade crypto in any meaningful way to impact the markets, unless they are an American institution operating on foreign exchanges. Look at trading volumes by pairs and exchanges. The US occupies a small portion of overall spot trading and is absent in derivatives trading, which is almost all of the crypto markets. It's no wonder superbowl ads have no impact on price.
Trace your family ancestry and look for any types of citizenship by descent you are eligible for. If you can get another passport leave, then change your name and start fresh. If you have the means you could even try citizenship by investment. For a few hundred grand you can get a new passport, but it might be tricky if they look into criminal past. Move to the Caribbean and work remotely.
The 10 minutes also isn't accurate because the ability to obtain private keys from public keys would completely destroy the incentives of the Bitcoin network. Miners are incentivized and compensated for including transactions in a block due to fees. The ability to steal the coins from an incoming transaction would create incentives not to include transactions in a block and to instead spam the network with as many malicious nodes as possible to halt the proliferation of transactions.
It never ceases to amaze me how incompetent some high profile criminals are. Encrypting a file is simply too difficult apparently. The entire purpose of crypto is that the exclusive holder of a private key cannot have funds seized. A 15 year old kid probably has better opsec with their crypto wallets than these people. Astonishing really.
Has anybody ever thought of something like a real world NFT? Imagine if you took a bunch of dried plant pigments and mixed them with oil and smeared them onto a canvas. Because it is physical it couldn't be duplicated or double-spent and it has a simple materials-based minting cost. I don't think anybody has done this before and there is probably a large market for buying and selling something like this. These are early days.
NFTs are essentially a technical fraud that combines the failures of DRM technologies with the failures of perceptual hash functions. Whereas blockchains provide a novel solution to the double-spending problem through distributed consensus to enforce scarcity and have real applications based on proven technical merit, NFTs tokenize digital media which can be copied through analog means as with any other piece of digital media hence zero scarcity and zero need for tokenization, and the uniqueness of an NFT is impossible due to the limitations of hash functions hence scarcity also fails in this respect. NFTs aren't actually technically possible. Imagine going to an art gallery and seeing hundreds of Mona Lisa prints next to each other that look the same and taking pictures of them with your DSLR good enough that you don't need to buy a print and some guy says they are all unique and special because they are one pixel different, that's NFTs.
https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1116945693946433536