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Arden

Arden

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finance.yahoo.com

Crypto exchanges 'should be shut down’ if they don’t suspend Russian accounts: Bill Browder

Asset manager Bill Browder, who for years specialized as an investor in major Russian firms, told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that cryptocurrency exchanges should be closed if they do not suspend accounts owned by Russians.
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Asset manager Bill Browder, who for years specialized as an investor in major Russian firms, told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that cryptocurrency exchanges should...
 
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Flobee

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Arden said:
Asset manager Bill Browder, who for years specialized as an investor in major Russian firms, told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that cryptocurrency exchanges should...
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Russiagate 2.0

First they attacked the President you-the-people elected because he wasn't their stooge, now they'll attack your ability to have censorship resistant money because they don't control it. Russians using BTC to evade sanctions is EXACTLY why it exists. This is true whether you love or hate Russia/Ukraine. Bitcoin is money for enemies, that is what a trustless system is.
 
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Flobee

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Metamask banning Iranians from their wallets. Wallets that they ostensibly have sole control over. Ethereum is largely centralized through Infura. If you don't know what Infura is, IMO, you should question why you trust it. If one group can make a change and shutdown the massive majority of functionality on your chain (Most smart contracts run through Infura) then you have to question how different from the traditional system you really are.

dEcEnTrAlIzEd



Look at SS "Country blocked"
 
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Mist

Mist

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Tmac said:
How tf do you sanction BTC?
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Because it's nowhere near as decentralized as the libertarian sheeple think it is. Almost all of the money is in wallets controlled by a handful of exchanges, and they have to interact with other banks and payment processors to do business.

Until near everything can be done natively in BTC or some other blockchain, it will never be immune from sanctions or outside control.
 
Tmac

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Mist said:
Because it's nowhere near as decentralized as the libertarian sheeple think it is. Almost all of the money is in wallets controlled by a handful of exchanges, and they have to interact with other banks and payment processors to do business.

Until near everything can be done natively in BTC or some other blockchain, it will never be immune from sanctions or outside control.
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Obviously you can sanction an exchange, which is why I'm considering moving all my shit off of Coinbase. My question is how do you sanction BTC?
 
Mist

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Tmac said:
Obviously you can sanction an exchange, which is why I'm considering moving all my shit off of Coinbase. My question is how do you sanction BTC?
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By making it hard to buy it with fiat, and hard to sell it for fiat.
 
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Flobee

Flobee

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Right.

The issue isn't BTC itself, it is how we interact with BTC. On-ramps/Off-ramps are the weak point and will continue to be until native Bitcoin transactions become more common. Gresham's Law would suggest we're going to need to see USD and fiat more generally get a lot worse before that happens though. USD and any fiat currency is fully centralized and nobody wants to let that power slip away, so they'll fight.

Mist Mist is right that large amounts of Bitcoin on exchanges is a problem, not for decentralization because who holds the coins is irrelevant to how the system functions, but for the health of the ecosystem. Gov was always going to hold a massive amount of whatever "money" is but the more in the hands of normal people to start out the better.
 
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TheNozz

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Screenshot_20220214-133012_Instagram.jpg
 
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Haus

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Yeah, today was the kind of news that reminds you to DYOR on what wallets you use. Metamask has long purported to be an independent wallet, yet now we see the rely on underlying services which make it completely possible to lock access via metamask to a wallet. Time to look at alternatives.
 
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Flobee

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Haus said:
Yeah, today was the kind of news that reminds you to DYOR on what wallets you use. Metamask has long purported to be an independent wallet, yet now we see the rely on underlying services which make it completely possible to lock access via metamask to a wallet. Time to look at alternatives.
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ETH hotwallets will require access to an ETH fullnode. Since it is very difficult to run a fullnode yourself you're likely going to be reliant on someone. I'm not aware of any Metamask alternatives that don't use Infura, but surely there is one out there. This goes back to an old argument I was having in this thread. ETH chose allow contracts at layer 1, this affected their ability to scale (full nodes require and exponentially larger amount of resources as chain gets longer) as such they're inevitably going to face centralization issues. Wallets and smart contracts require a fullnode to verify current chain-state to function. If Infura and other large datacenters are the only ones that can run fullnodes...

Hamstrung from birth.
 
ShakyJake

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A word of caution to those who have Coinbase accounts: I am fairly certain these guys have some kind of security hole in their system. As some may recall, I had my entire Coinbase assets sold and transferred out of my account without my approval. I had two-factor authentication setup for both Coinbase and all my email accounts. Somehow, some way an attacker was able to bypass all of that. Of course, Coinbase laid the blame at my feet suggesting that it was my email account and/or phone's sim having been breached somehow. However, after checking with all my providers I can verifiably prove that no one other than myself has accessed those systems. So clearly whatever the security hole exists is with Coinbase. In fact, I can see several other users on Reddit complain about the same bizarre bypassing of security measures.

So bottom line is, if you have a Coinbase account do NOT let your funds just sit in your account. Transfer them to cold storage or something.
 
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Rangoth

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I feel bad for you man, i really do, but ivehad no issues thus far and ive been with them over a year doing many different transactions.
 
Tmac

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ShakyJake said:
A word of caution to those who have Coinbase accounts: I am fairly certain these guys have some kind of security hole in their system. As some may recall, I had my entire Coinbase assets sold and transferred out of my account without my approval. I had two-factor authentication setup for both Coinbase and all my email accounts. Somehow, some way an attacker was able to bypass all of that. Of course, Coinbase laid the blame at my feet suggesting that it was my email account and/or phone's sim having been breached somehow. However, after checking with all my providers I can verifiably prove that no one other than myself has accessed those systems. So clearly whatever the security hole exists is with Coinbase. In fact, I can see several other users on Reddit complain about the same bizarre bypassing of security measures.

So bottom line is, if you have a Coinbase account do NOT let your funds just sit in your account. Transfer them to cold storage or something.
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Did you also have the authenticator active on your account, so you had to put in a special code to pull stuff off the exchange?
 
ShakyJake

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Rangoth said:
I feel bad for you man, i really do, but ivehad no issues thus far and ive been with them over a year doing many different transactions.
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I've been with them for over 2 years and never had a problem either. May just be a matter of time? Or some recent vulnerability has cropped up. I'm wondering if that log4j issue could be a vector of attack? I see Vmware posted a critical security warning regarding that.
 
ShakyJake

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Tmac said:
Did you also have the authenticator active on your account, so you had to put in a special code to pull stuff off the exchange?
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Not at the time, but I do now. I have Google Authenticator set for everything. Regardless, if the user had attempted to log into my account through normal means an email would have been sent to me informing me that access was being attempted from a unknown IP address as well as a SMS text. Coinbase even gave me the IP address which accessed my account which isn't anywhere close to my public IP. I never received any notification and I verified that my email address was never accessed by anyone other than myself. So that begs the question, how woudl this be possible if it wasn't Coinbase itself that was vulnerable? Hell, could even be a malicious employee.
 
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Flobee

Flobee

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ShakyJake said:
I've been with them for over 2 years and never had a problem either. May just be a matter of time? Or some recent vulnerability has cropped up. I'm wondering if that log4j issue could be a vector of attack? I see Vmware posted a critical security warning regarding that.
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Whether the vulnerability was on your end or theirs, having coins/cash on an exchange is an attack vector. Just like any hotwallet you should minimize your exposure. You're trusting a third party with your cash that is not insured in any way shape or form. There is no regulation protecting you. It is just generally a good idea to hold your own keys. Exchanges aren't banks.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but its a good example for others on why they should take custody of their keys
 
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Flobee

Flobee

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Whoa... if you're lending crypto its time to get out. If you've got money on Blockfi I would suggest the same. Things will probably get ugly if you're levered in any way.

 
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Flobee

Flobee

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Treasury's response to Biden EO on crypto got leaked allegedly. Looks like its gunna be "We're studying it" essentially. Price popped when this got posted/deleted.

web.archive.org

Statement by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on President Biden's Executive Order on Digital Assets

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen released the following statement on President Biden's executive order on digital assets. "President Biden’s historic executive order calls for a coordinated and comprehensive approach to digital asset policy. This approach will...
web.archive.org web.archive.org
 
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