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Showing posts from 2016

Is making 400% trading options and Forex 'with the right strategy' really possible?

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If it's so easy making 400% trading 'with the right strategy', why isn't everyone doing it? Let me guess: the 'right strategy' is a secret known to only a few select, but for the right price you'll let me in on it and tell me this incredible secret that you 'guarantee' will make me a fortune. But no, you can't show me how much money you've made, or explain why you're hocking this instead of using it yourself. That's part of the secret. And if everyone knew why, the government and the Feds would shut it down cause they don't want people to make money. Wall Street hates it too. Honest. Now it makes sense. Where do I sign?

This Linux flaw could open you up to attack

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Download PDF A flaw in the Linux kernel lets hackers inject malware into downloads and webpages, smash Tor connections, launch denial-of-service attacks, and more. This sounds pretty serious. It sounds like if either side of a connection is affected by this bug, and an attacker knows both sides' IPs, then they can quickly confirm that a connection exists and insert whatever data they want into the middle of the connection. They can't read data sent between the two parties, though. Where this is most worrying to me is system updates. On Linux, it's unfortunately fairly common for updates to be automatically delivered over HTTP and then not checked in a secure way. For example, Gentoo by default downloads packages insecurely, and on yum-based systems, even though the stock configuration is often secure, it's common to add insecure repos (for example, the official nginx repo is by default insecure). If your system downloads updates insecurely, then an attacker can ma

This is why "Credible friends app" is bad - don't use it

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The fees for this are stupid high. 25% fixed APR. The lender only gets 15% and the company that made this gets 10%. With fees like that, you're better off screwing your friends with high interest rates outside of this app. Because you know you're just as likely to get paid back, and a company isn't making money off of both of you. It is a shitty premise to take advantage of the financially illiterate or truly desperate. Almost any borrowing is cheaper than this. There is also no mention of how funds will be collected should the borrower not repay their money. Are you supposed to go around to their house and ask for it back - talk about killing friendships. Connecting your social networks and allowing friends to borrow at a locked in interest rate seems like a dangerous game to play, at some point a loan is going to go sour, and rather than a damaged credit score, it'll be a damaged friendship. Exchange Bitcoin, e-currencies; withdraw to your Visa/MasterCard (iss

This is why even rational Bitcoin users might use credit cards

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If you happen to live within your means and have an emergency savings fund, credit cards are excellent ways to get free money. Free $100 from the signup bonus to buy some Bitcoin with? Yes please! Of course, those rewards only exist because there are enough people who are either unfortunate or foolish enough to owe interest on their balance. In addition to that, the debit/credit card companies stick vendors with the transaction processing fee, which is passed on to all of the vendor's customers. If a Bitcoin user could write 5% off a gas purchase or grocery transaction from their credit card balance, then they're always going to spend their fiat because: A) Gresham's law , B) Credit card rewards lower the out-of-pocket cost to transact as a buyer, albeit artificially, that Bitcoin often cannot match in most cases. Bitcoin only makes sense to use if it is the only option to transact with, or if it is cheaper for the user to perform the transaction with Bitcoin than an

How 16 years old boy learned a valuable lesson about margin trading

I gave bitcoin to my 16 year old brother as a Christmas present. When he eventually found out how to use it he went to poloniex and discovered margin trading. He didn't have bitcoin for long.

US verified accounts at Bitfinex are frozen and withdrawals are not possible

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Reports from yesterday seem to suggest that US verified accounts are frozen and unable to withdraw. There are suggestions that Bitfinex doing this as a punishment for Synapse Pay not allowing their theft US verified. All my remaining BitFinex balances are frozen. I can't buy/sell or withdraw anything. They're using SynapsePay as their excuse, but I don't see why they can't quickly (it's been days since everyone else got to resume trading) do one of two things: 1) Reduce our BitFinex balances by the amount Synapse sent us (as of the last settlement 16 hours before the exchange shutdown), even if that makes our USD balances negative. Then allow us to trade but not withdraw until we bring the USD balance out of the red. They're already manually approving all withdrawals, so it shouldn't be hard to check for negative balances 2) Just take from our BTC or other coin balances whatever is necessary to achieve the haircut. This wouldn't be sufficient for cus

Capitalism is dead

Capitalism finished a long time ago; if it ever existed. The use of capitalism as a synonym for greedy business is a sad commentary on the lack of language of our day. Capitalism is about capital formation and nothing to do with the ripping off of the masses. That's the role of religions and politicians who encourage everyone to work harder and accept their lot.

Unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions and you: What's going on, where are your bitcoins, and what you can do about it

If your transaction is not being confirmed, and you did not use replace-by-fee (you almost certainly did not, very few bitcoin wallets support this) then you will have to wait for the network nodes to drop your transaction from their mempool before you can attempt to resend your transaction. After 72 hours of being unconfirmed, most mempools will drop it (nodes with default settings). If volume is particularly high and mempools are completely filled up (beyond 300MB for default settings) then it will be dropped sooner. However there is no way to know if your transaction is being dropped or not, beyond just going to common blockchain explorers and seeing if they have it. Blockchain.info has very liberal node configurations, they keep almost every transaction. Chain.so is an example of one with conservative settings, they are likely to drop your transaction before other explorers and nodes.

Why isn't the price of Bitcoin surging even more now that Brexit has been decided?

Big money moves ahead of news. Small money moves after news.

Brexit will make Bitcoin more popular

I think the media and press coverage Bitcoin is getting as being a safe-haven asset will increase investor awareness and eventually make it a recognized safe-haven asset as investors reevaluate options. But I expect that to occur over a more gradual timespan of months to years as investors encounter long-term global financial instability. Very few people had their finger on a trigger to buy BTC the way traders were ready to shift GDP to USD or gold. Until Bitcoin has an ETF or Forex presence (on major Forex brokers) I don't expect markets to react on a similar timescale.

Drastic shortening of attention spans

I teach at a university and since Facebook I see a drastic shortening of attention spans allowed for reading and listening. If I cannot say it in less than 3-5 minutes, then I've lost them. Before Facebook and smart phones, I had 20-30 minutes. Attention span planning is forcing major changes in education. It's our world... journalists have to adjust too. SusieMach Source .

When you print important crypto stuff (private keys) make sure you use a proper font and don't leave traces on your printer's hard drive and your computer's hard drive

When printing your keys make sure you use a proper font (that don't have similar characters - like "I" and "l", zero and big O). Also don't trust your printer - some printers have hard drives. And copy of all printed documents is saved on your hard drive (and then "erased" but it still revocable using "undelete" programs) - even in Linux. You can use this trick to prevent copies of printed pages to be written on the computer's hard drive (this is NOT applicable for printer's hard drive): mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /var/spool/cups chmod 0710 /var/spool/cups chown root:lp /var/spool/cups mkdir /var/spool/cups/tmp chmod 1770 /var/spool/cups/tmp chown root:lp /var/spool/cups/tmp Also you need encrypted home folder (/home/yourusername) to be safe and use tmpfs for writing the secrets before encryption. The default installation of Linux distros like Ubuntu is not very secure if you don't know what you are doing. For exa

Confessions of a former employee at a financial institution - why you should not make transactions of exactly $10 000 USD (or equivalent) in USA

Used to work in compliance, specifically AML/BSA. Sorry, ton of words coming... There's a pretty blurry line between informing the client of a delay regarding a compliance investigation and what's known as "tipping off". If a financial institution is found to have tipped off, the penalties are stiff. Jail time and big fines to the person who did it, and potential loss of MSB licensure for the business. Again, that line boils down to interpretation. Most FIs won't say anything other than, "sorry for the delay," and nothing about compliance. This is especially true if the investigator has found something they find to be suspicious. What's suspicious is also muddy. Could be that the amount is the "magic number" of 10,000. Despite the rule that all cash deposits "larger than $10,000" must be reported, most suspicious activities like fraud, account takeover, etc are exactly $10,000, even if they aren'
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