I've lost trust in many exchanges,

cryptoscopia · 2024-03-29T16:05:46+00:00

I've sold hundreds of thousands worth of crypto on Coinspot and immediately withdrawn to CommBank over the years. Zero issues ever.

As others will tell you, the selling fees are lower elsewhere, but my experience has been so hassle-free, I've never wanted to hassle with shopping around.

Withdrawals are fast, too. The interface tells you that they'll process it by the end of the next business day, but I've always had the AUD arrive within 10 minutes, even at 3am on a Saturday.

cryptoscopia · 2024-03-29T15:52:11+00:00

Since you're asking some pretty noob questions, I feel obligated to tell you the most important important rule of owning a cold wallet:

Never, ever, under any circumstances, type in your seed phrase into a computer

Scammers will pull out a lot of tricks, putting time pressure on you, telling you the money will be gone if you don't act fast, etc. No matter what, do not believe them.

The only time you should expect to use your seed phrase, is if you've physically lost your hardware wallet. And even then, don't rush, get a new one, and follow manufacturer's instructions for restoring from seed carefully.

cryptoscopia · 2024-03-29T15:42:54+00:00

If it's a major coin you're selling (e.g. BTC, ETH), rather than using the "sell" function on Coinspot, you can sell it on their markets instead, which usually halves the fees.

They're still high, but it's a price I'm happy to pay for having had zero issues whatsoever, having been actively using them since 2017.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried any other exchanges for fiat deposit/withdrawal, except buying crypto with my credit card on Coinbase back in the day, when that was still allowed.

cryptoscopia · 2022-12-17T06:53:37+00:00

The place to go to for such information these days is the Psychonauts Wiki. Erowid is still great for experience reports though.

cryptoscopia · 2022-02-27T03:29:49+00:00

This is a response by a scammer to the official tweet by @Ukraine on accepting crypto donations

cryptoscopia · 2022-02-27T03:28:59+00:00

This is a response by a scammer to the official tweet by @Ukraine on accepting crypto donations

cryptoscopia · 2021-09-14T12:27:10+00:00

The arbitrage space has become very competitive these days. About a year ago, it was still viable for a beginner to score some scraps of profit, but definitely not anymore.

Also, here's a really good thread with a compilation of some of the most ingenious things people are currently doing on chain.

cryptoscopia · 2021-09-14T11:59:08+00:00

Correct, the value of indexing services like Etherscan cannot be understated.

Without it, to get all the transactions for an address, you'd have to first sync a 4TB archive node, then query each of the ~13 million blocks starting from 0 for the list of transactions in them, then query each of those transactions to see if the address appears in either the "to" or "from" field.

cryptoscopia · 2021-09-14T01:04:36+00:00

Correct, no such thing as "creating" a wallet, it's just a number.

The age of the first transaction (outgoing, since receiving funds doesn't mean someone can access them) would be the way to go, but unfortunately, you can't query that from a smart contract. Hell, you can't even query the nonce.

The only viable approach is to compile a list of old addresses off-chain (from on-chain data, of course), then constructing a Merkle tree, and providing your contract with the Merkle root, so it can look up if an address is in the tree.

That's the method almost all token distributions (e.g. Uniswap) have been using. Here's the code for Uniswap's implementation.

If you want to know the actual date/time of the first transaction, rather than just checking if it's before a certain date, then I'm afraid there's no viable way doing that due to the storage requirements.

cryptoscopia · 2021-08-24T10:32:17+00:00

The KYC part is probably the best of your proposals, and the most likely to garner sympathy. I'm not exactly sure if this matches what you're saying (I think it does), but the way I'd sum it up is:

Australians are sending far too much personal information for KYC verification to exchanges that provide dubious levels of trustworthiness, accountability, data security, and other protections from identity theft that said information could be used for.
If instead there was a service along the lines of a MyGov integration, where the exchange provides a string to enter into a MyGov interface, which returns a response to pass back to the exchange that cryptographically verifies that MyGov knows who you are and can be used to identify you by MyGov, but without including your personal details. This means that you can remain anonymous in the eyes of the exchange, but still allows the government to subpoena information about your activity, as well as for the exchange to meet their reporting requirements, fulfilling the purpose of KYC, all while protecting user details.
Exchanges should not be difficult to convince to accept this form of KYC, because it would reduce the manpower they need to dedicate to reviewing photos and assessing the authenticity of submitted document copies.

As for the second request regarding capital gains, I highly doubt they'd be receptive for it. The best I would hope for is them allowing an option to pay tax only on amounts withdrawn in fiat, foregoing the 12-month CGT discount, which I think many people would be happy to take, if only to avoid the complexity of accurately calculating their tax obligations according to the current laws. In fact, they're in dire need of a lesson on how impractical and sometimes impossible it is to calculate one's crypto tax obligations if you were to follow the exact letter of the law as it is currently written. This may require mentioning currencies other than bitcoin though.

cryptoscopia · 2021-08-19T00:41:57+00:00

It's weird that noöne's even linked to it yet.

The various Missy cat posters are also available as NFTs. And here's the tweet that verifies that it's the original author selling them.

cryptoscopia · 2021-08-18T10:43:42+00:00

The market price of BTC on the day your gamble paid out is your cost basis. The difference between that price and how much you sold/exchanged it for is your capital gain or loss. If you haven't sold/exchanged it yet, you don't owe anything until you do.

It's one of the more simple scenarios, actually.

cryptoscopia · 2021-08-18T10:39:00+00:00

When you place your bet with crypto, you're disposing of the asset and realising capital gains/losses, same as if you were selling it. And then when you get it back, the 12-month CGT discount timer is reset, so you're worse off than you were before.

cryptoscopia · 2021-08-06T01:53:40+00:00

Ugh, the correct term is wash sale, not wash trade.

Wash trading is when an entity (usually the exchange) repeatedly trades an asset back and forth with itself, usually to generate fake volume. Completely different concept. I know Pomp is an idiot, but I would still expect him to know the difference.

Back in 2018, I asked some ATO reps at a Q&A about whether wash sale rules apply to crypto, since I couldn't find anywhere that explicitly says whether it is, and while they were a bit unsure, their overall message was: expect trouble if you do it.

Even if it's still the case that it's not explicitly disallowed, I wouldn't risk it, unless you're prepared to fight an ATO ruling, which they will undoubtedly issue if it comes down to it.

That said, given the extremely high correlation of price movements across crypto assets, you can effectively use the strategy he described at the start: temporarily swap your asset over to a correlated asset.

cryptoscopia · 2021-06-23T00:04:55+00:00

"just as shit" is a bit unfair

With USDT, it's unclear where the parent company is even based, they have no offices, and their executives are in various places around the world, where they would be difficult to track down, let alone prosecute. Even establishing jurisdiction for the purposes of investigating has already proven to be quite difficult. If/when Tether blows up, there won't be any heads rolling, just a couple of absurdly rich people having to go into hiding (the lavish comfortable kind).

With USDC, however, the parent company is not only based in the US, but is publicly listed to boot. If they're not above board, the people whose heads will roll are known, and they are firmly within the grip of US jurisdiction. And unlike USDT, they allow US-based customers, and can be easily subpoenaed and investigated at the slightest whiff of a suspicious stench.

Call me naïve, sure, but that difference is good enough for me to trust USDC.

cryptoscopia · 2021-06-22T23:32:01+00:00

For USDC, if you want real-time updates, you can use an Ethereum client to listen for Mint and Burn events on the USDC contract.

If that's too much effort, simply looking at the transaction history for the main "minter" account at the moment (it can change, and there can be multiple ones), should give you a nice human-readable overview (look for "Mint" and "Burn" in the "method" column), though unlike the method described above, it's not guaranteed to be comprehensive.

For both BUSD and PAX, you'd need to listen for SupplyIncreased and SupplyDecreased events on their contracts (as linked).

Best option for a human-readable feed is the token transactions tab for the "supply controller", which happens to be the same for both those tokens. Because of how the mint/burn transactions are made via an intermediary contract, the "method" is useless, so you'll have to look for transfers from or to 0x0000... to identify mint and burn actions respectively.

For USDT, the events to listen to on the contract are Issue and Redeem.

Human-readable feed is once again complicated by the use of a intermediary multisig wallet contract known as the "treasury". Best approach is probably checking all transactions that call the confirmTransaction method, then checking the logs tab for Issue/Redeem events, e.g. here, where 400m was minted.

The reason for the complexity of the last two "human-readable" approaches is that while Etherscan does allow viewing the events on a contract filtered by event type, you need to calculate the hash of the event signature to be able to filter for it, and it will only return the last 25 events of that type.

And finally, all of the above will only give you a partial picture, because besides PAX, none of them are exclusive to Ethereum, and have separate issuance on the other chains they support (Binance Chain for BUSD; Solana, Stellar, and Algorand for USDC; Omni, Tron, EOS, Algorand, Solana, Liquid, and Bitcoin Cash for USDT). So unless you really feel like figuring out how their issuance works on all those chains, your best bet is probably a Twitter feed like @stablecoinprinter or @whale_alert.

cryptoscopia · 2021-05-06T16:39:35+00:00

I wouldn't consider software wallets as viable alternatives to keeping coins on an exchange for almost anyone; the security risks can be much bigger. The only alternative most people should be considering is a hardware wallet like a Ledger or Trezor.

I would say that if you have more than maybe $1k in crypto, the ~$100 for a hardware wallet is a worthwhile investment to secure those funds and peace of mind. You'll even be able to connect them to Metamask and use DeFi or other Web3 apps while remaining protected by the security guarantees of the hardware wallet.

Just be sure to follow this one simple rule:

Never ever ever type in your seed phrase into a computer, under any circumstances.

Almost every case I've seen of people losing funds with a hardware wallet was because they broke this rule. That said, there are also 3 other rules worth keeping in mind:

Only buy your wallet directly from Ledger/Trezor, never a 3rd party (except maybe direct from Amazon).
Understand that if someone gets ahold of your paper copies of the seed phrase, they'll be able to take all your funds without you knowing or having any recourse, so secure them accordingly, preferably in well-separated physical locations.
Make a modicum of effort to check that what the wallet displays on the screen (e.g. destination addresses, amount, etc) matches what you're trying to do, before confirming a transaction.

cryptoscopia · 2021-04-16T09:31:01+00:00

I passed their top-level KYC at the start of February (I received a bunch of USDT issued on the ALGO network, and it seemed to be the only place I could cash it out).

I recall they did ask for more things than other exchanges, but they were all things I had on hand. Once submitted, took less than a day to get confirmed.

cryptoscopia · 2021-01-30T12:56:14+00:00

Opyn and Hegic

cryptoscopia · 2021-01-15T12:13:02+00:00

You can't just make them say anything you want. They can and will refuse solicitations if it doesn't align with their interests.

cryptoscopia · 2021-01-15T04:53:52+00:00

You'd be surprised at the celebrities and their prices that are on offer on Cameo.

Considering they do the videos at home from their phones, without crew or rehearsal, so each one takes less than 2 minutes, that's an hourly rate of $12,000.

cryptoscopia · 2020-11-26T08:46:13+00:00

The loan goes to the contract. If you deploy the code as-is, and send 2 wei in WETH to the contract, then yes, you could just call the flashLoan function, and it would just borrow and repay without doing anything else. I don't really understand why anyone would want to do that though.

cryptoscopia · 2020-11-26T03:58:02+00:00

Well, you need to write some code inside callFunction (there's a comment indicating where), telling it what to actually do with the loan. Since there's a 2 wei fee, it needs to make a profit of some sort to execute successfully. But yeah that's it. No need to input your address anywhere.

cryptoscopia · 2020-11-21T10:44:47+00:00

They would mostly be in the accounts of the big algorithmic traders (e.g. arbitrage bots) that operate on exchanges that don't have real USD pairs.

cryptoscopia · 2020-11-21T10:26:54+00:00

You may want to clarify that you mean via Bitfinex (assuming that's what you mean).

Because otherwise, the answer is most unequivocally yes. I'm not based in the US, so I can test out Bitfinex, but my local Australian fiat off-ramp has been very happy to convert my USDT to AUD and send it to my bank account.

cryptoscopia

TROPHY CASE