281–290 of 333 posts
If you're in the space, going "well actually" in every article critical of blockchain based finance doesn't help your mission at all. Ultimately you're just making up excuses for the toxic parts of the system.
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I'm on vacation in Croatia and my Spotify Premium expired. I tried to renew it with my Dutch card and was rejected, so I had to use a VPN set to Amsterdam...
Are they getting stricter? I've never had that problem, including when travelling to all ex-yugoslavia countries some years ago. I'm a New Zealander. Reminder to self: organise VPN before leaving for overseas.
My Spotify's country was set to the Netherlands but after 2 weeks abroad it forced me to change my country to Croatia (maybe due to music copyright laws? No idea).
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Drug dealers in the UK used to use inveterate gamblers addicted to fixed-odds betting terminals to launder cash in high-street betting shops. Terrible rate of return, but the rate of return doesn't matter that much if you can't spend the money otherwise.
How does this clean the money? Now it’s just associated with the gambling addicts unless the drug dealer owns the betting shop himself.
First, it destroys the traceability of notes (because they go into the FOBT machine with one set of serial numbers and the machine is going to pay out other notes and coins in different denominations). And any cash that investigators are going to track through seizures targeting an organisation gets slowly distributed through a community via its gamblers.
Secondly and more importantly, it provides provenance to the money. The gambling money mules (inveterate gamblers who are often addicts, lower ranking gang members, or the dealers themselves) can now move very large amounts of cash around on the street, because if they are stopped by police with large amounts of cash, they have a receipt to show it is what the machine paid out! The money they are carrying is the proceeds of legal gambling, not the proceeds of drugs. It's cleaned.
Here's one article about it:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mac...
Things have got a lot simpler for police, because FOBTs are now subject to more restrictions.
(And about time: in the 2015/16 year, individuals lost more than £1000 at FOBTs in a single sitting more than 233,000 times)
Context on what I believe they mean by "fraudulent". Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends. This means that the transaction has been gossiped on the bitcoin p2p network but had not yet been mined into a block and thus had minimal finality guarantees. Steam could see that they were going to receive a bitcoin payment (when the transaction was mined into a block) and would credit the users a…
>I don't know what "null cipher" means but it sounds very technical and is probably the best one.
The whole UX excuse is a bit silly considering modern Steam games take an hour to download anyway.
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I haven't I'm use to having an account on an exchange and moving money directly to the account. Is there a way I could use the lightening network directly if my exchange doesn't use it behind the scene?
You're not supposed to be using an exchange for payments, you are meant to have a wallet, ideally a non-custodial one.
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You let the user do it twice then ban them from using bitcoin payments?
They already answered this question in their previous post... The fraudster scales up their account creation. You ban then after 2, they switch to a new account... which you ban after 2, and they switch to another new account, which you ban after 2... and so on, ad infinitum.
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> it seems like waiting for 1 should be more than enough. Not in bitcoin land, orphaned blocks happen a few times a day: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2170/how-often-f... If you're willing to tolerate this risk then by all means go for it. (I'm with you I think steam should be able to tolerate this risk.)
FYI the answer in that link is from 2013, not sure how much it's changed since then but I doubt it's the same today.
One of the odd benefits of this is that old forum posts and discussions have a good chance of being relevant.
Although I will say lots of progress has been made in p2p message propagation (since this isn’t directly a part of consensus) which could definitely prevent orphan blocks, so you may be on to something in this case.
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You’re right and I take it back. If Bitcoin didn’t have replace-by-fee, then maybe it would have been a more accurate statement.
You can fairly reliably double spend regardless of replace-by-fee, you just need to coordinate which nodes you broadcast your transactions to.
Unfortunately no details were given about what makes 50% of all bitcoin transactions “fraudulent” ? What does that even mean? * did someone try to send something other then bitcoin to a ₿ address? * did a client claim he payed and did the payment seem to fail on his end? * did a client not realise that you as payee also pay for the network fee? Nowadays these kind of problems would be easily prevented by using bitcoi…
One method is to create lower-than-shovelware games, buy them with shadily acquired cryptocurrency, stolen credit cards or scammed gift cards and take real money payment from Valve. Egregious example: https://mmofallout.com/valve-bans-yet-another-laundering-gam...
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You currently pay about 10 pennies for a transaction which is included in the next block. Using Lightning is even cheaper.
Really, googling around, average transaction fee looks about $1.70? Which is much more than I pay through any other service.
Just take a look at the most recent blocks, and check the one to one or one to two transactions. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_usd(asc)&q...
You will see that those transactions cost ~0.10 USD :)