Biden administration unveils new crypto tax reporting rules

[johnarb]

I shorted FTX and the general market actually. But did get $1300 stuck there.

Metamask only tracks IPs under specific validators. Just change the RPC. Use your own node. This is standard stuff. Ethereum was not designed for privacy, it is meant to be transparent for a very obvious reason.

BTC miners actually sell your IP data, as the transaction leak IPs. This has been known for while. Sorry you aren't in the loop.
Any third party wallet UI for whatever crypto can track whatever data they see fit. It's just business.

And if you are gonna bring up the IRS, you might just want to educate yourself on their latest cases prosecuting those involved with Silk Road. The Bitcoin ledger is going to be a major revenue source for them, and kinda already is.

Sheesh, if you're going to bullshit, at least know the person you're bullshiting

I was a Bitcoin miner in 2014, there is no code on the Bitcoin software protocol that collects ip addresses, I asked you to show how, but you conflate blockchain analysis with ip addresses to gain legitimacy for your arguments

Are you running a full node Ethereum node?

On Bitcoin, if you ever made a bitcoin transaction, here's the process, your bitcoin node has about 8 (or more, depending on your router configuration) p2p connections that are constantly refreshing to different peer nodes

When you are ready to make a bitcoin transaction, you broadcast the tx info to the connected peers, then it propagates throughout the network, you know, like p2p, and they become part of the mempool

The bitcoin miners process the mempool transactions and pick the highest fees transactions to include on the block should they be successful in coming up with the hash that meets the difficulty target

Someone gave you bullshit info or you came up with bullshit info that the Bitcoin miners are collecting ip addresses as no part of the process above do they have access to the ip address of the originating node, nor is the mempool nor is the blockchain metadata contain any reference to any ip addresses

Prove me wrong

------

Oh, you're so afraid of the chainalysis and the silk road conviction which took a whole team of fbi and leo's and international investigators so you think they have the resources to go after all 300 million crypto users and growing so they can catch all the criminals?

US population is about 300M so every newborn child every boomer geriatric every disabled bed ridden person in the US will be going after one on one against all the crypto users in the whole world so they can prosecute all the illegal activities after building a case file

The irs is hiring 85,000 armed agents to go after tax evaders and they are not all crypto users, dude, most of them are doctors or professionals

But you would not know anything about that since you are willingly giving up your privacy to any irs agent that contacts you since you would never get involved with anything non-kyc

 

[Cryptjitsu]

But you would not know anything about that since you are willingly giving up your privacy to any irs agent that contacts you since you would never get involved with anything non-kyc

This particularly hilarious to me. You are clueless.

I'll stick to my sources, versus your self proclaimed expertise.

Glassnode literally buys data from major BTC mining pools. They have doxxed big BTC whales, as part for their premium services. The BTC code is flawed, the tx hashes have data leaks, including IPs.
Regardless, you are trying to pretend that a network designed to broadcast every transaction to the world is somehow private. It's just silly.
There are stashes of BTC that the second they move, IRS gets an alert, sometimes DOJ as well.
Surely you are aware of the Bitcoins that can't even touch CEXs, because they are blacklisted.
Or maybe you are not.

Privacy coins exist for a reason.

 

[johnarb]

This particularly hilarious to me. You are clueless.

I'll stick to my sources, versus your self proclaimed expertise.

Ohhhhhhh, you have sauces , dayum, why didn't you say so, that is absolute proof you're telling the truth

IP address is the most basic of all networking information... and it is a useless information that has no place to store on the Bitcoin protocol

It is not present on the tx details, nor on the mempool, nor on the blockhain

You got the whole entirety of google dot com plus all the AI tools at your disposal and you cannot come up with any instance of an IP address data being present on the Bitcoin protocol

It's not broadcast to the whole world, it's broadcast to connected peers, which gets relayed to other peers and on and on

The vast network of Bitcoin nodes are a strength to ensure that the originating node is anon

Which is why it's very important for all Bitcoiners to always run a full node to support the decentralized Bitcoin network

versus the Ethereum network that runs 90% on AWS nodes and has issues when Amazon has network outages
-------------

So why does Ethereum have a problem with IP addresses when Bitcoin does not?

It is not Ethereum itself, it's the centralized portions of Ethereum that are being coerced to collect IP addresses, the front end servers, the rpc servers, and now the powers that be are even going after the blockchain explorers Etherscan

If you run your own node/rpc server, and you interact with the ipfs servers of the crypto projects, i.e. AAVE, or if you manually interact with the smart contracts directly using your own blockchain explorers, then you will not have a problem with "leaked" IP addresses on Ethereum

But as you ignore my question of "are you running your own Ethereum node?" question, it seems the answer for you is a no as it is a no for most of the Ethereum users

which btw, blockchain dot com visitor IP addresses are also collecting ip addresses, it has been known for a while, which is why I run my own private Bitcoin blockchain explorer, open-source mempool built into Umbrel node
---------

And no, come on, you already tried conflating the blocckchain analysis with your chainalysis , you're trying again with glassnode???

blockchain analysis has no relations to basic networking info IP addresses

and again you're conflating crypto addresses (blacklisted) as being related to IP addresses???????

Oh, it's got the word address in common, BWAHAHAHAHAHAH

and privacy coin such as monero is all about blockchain obfuscation, they have multiple methods, you can go to the monero website to get more info

 

[NoahA]

Ohhhhhhh, you have sauces , dayum, why didn't you say so, that is absolute proof you're telling the truth

IP address is the most basic of all networking information... and it is a useless information that has no place to store on the Bitcoin protocol

It is not present on the tx details, nor on the mempool, nor on the blockhain

You got the whole entirety of google dot com plus all the AI tools at your disposal and you cannot come up with any instance of an IP address data being present on the Bitcoin protocol

It's not broadcast to the whole world, it's broadcast to connected peers, which gets relayed to other peers and on and on

The vast network of Bitcoin nodes are a strength to ensure that the originating node is anon

Which is why it's very important for all Bitcoiners to always run a full node to support the decentralized Bitcoin network

This is a question because I simply do not know, but there is a need for IP addresses to at least sync up a node. When you first download Bitcoin Core, I'm not sure where it gets it's initial list of other nodes to connect to, but there must be a list somewhere. Then, even once your node is fully synced, it still needs IP addresses to connect to peers. Now these peers will likely be behind a VPN, but your own node still needs to know the IP addresses of the nodes that it is connecting with. (this of course doesn't mean the transactions coming in are marked with IP addresses as you point out)

This gets me thinking that if a government wanted to "track" transactions, it might be possible to at least figure out where in the network the transaction was first seen. It of course would not help if my node broadcasts my transaction first, and it is behind a VPN that I set to be half way around the world from where I am, but it would still be possible I think to see how a transaction propagates throughout the network if a government has nodes all over the world and can timestamp when it first sees every transaction. My node is perhaps connected directly to government node, so although it doesn't know that my node is the first one to have the transaction, it would at least know that this node was the first of all the government ones to see it.

I imagine this is like tracking Covid. You might never find the first case that comes into your country for example, but you can at least track how its propagating around the world. Now I'm not saying this in any way reduces privacy, but its perhaps just one thing that is possible with regards to "tracking" transactions as they propagate throughout the network..

But when running your own node, I do think that its important to take steps to ensure privacy such as running through a VPN or via the Tor network, but I'm the wrong person to ask for specifics on this.

For me personally, I still haven't been able to get my node to accept incoming connections. As far as I can tell, some Internet providers block certain ports. The VPN I use now, Mullvad, has just blocked port forwarding, so apparently that will never work with running a node, and I was never quite able to get it to run over Tor. Perhaps I need to mess with settings some more, but for now, I just sync up my node when I need to make a transaction, but otherwise, but node is rarely up and running since its not providing any benefit to the network.

 

[johnarb]

This is a question because I simply do not know, but there is a need for IP addresses to at least sync up a node. When you first download Bitcoin Core, ...

For me personally, I still haven't been able to get my node to accept incoming connections. As far as I can tell, some Internet providers block certain ports. The VPN I use now, Mullvad, has just blocked port forwarding, so apparently that will never work with running a node, and I was never quite able to get it to run over Tor. Perhaps I need to mess with settings some more, but for now, I just sync up my node when I need to make a transaction, but otherwise, but node is rarely up and running since its not providing any benefit to the network.

Your computer needs an IP address in order to communicate to the internet, your computer will be issued a non-routable IP address, local IP 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x by your local router, but what you cannot see is the outside IP address assigned by your ISP

That outside IP address is an identifier to your physical location, as a court order to your ISP will get them to disclose your name and other info

Bitcoin software protocol has no utility for saving the IP address on any of its communications processes and in fact has no data place holders to hold the IP address info on the transaction details, nor in the mempool, nor in the blockchain

When start up the Bitcoin software ,there is an initial list of IP addresses then it refreshes to the peer nodes through some algorithmic that constantly are changing, these peer nodes provide you with the blockchain info

If you ever downloaded a bittorrent file, movie, music and the likes, process is very similar

Most VPN's may not allow incoming connections, and without VPN most home routers will need to portforward incoming TCP 8333 to a local IP address assigned to your laptop, i.e 192.168.1.66

even without an open incoming connections, you're facilitating the relay of information in the Bitcoin network as long as you run a full node

 

[johnarb]

This gets me thinking that if a government wanted to "track" transactions, it might be possible to at least figure out where in the network the transaction was first seen. It of course would not help if my node broadcasts my transaction first, and it is behind a VPN that I set to be half way around the world from where I am, but it would still be possible I think to see how a transaction propagates throughout the network if a government has nodes all over the world and can timestamp when it first sees every transaction. My node is perhaps connected directly to government node, so although it doesn't know that my node is the first one to have the transaction, it would at least know that this node was the first of all the government ones to see it.

Yes, this is a threat vector. Governments, not just US and most likely other (non-government) bad actors are running nodes everywhere

I haven't kept track of the improvements in the Bitcoin software but I believe that the increased frequency of connected nodes is to address it

But as you alluded to, if you broadcast a bitcoin transaction to 8 peer nodes, these nodes do not have definitive proof that your node made the transaction and is not just relaying it from one of the nodes you're connected to

So to recap, the threat from connected nodes is only during the time that you're making a transaction, all other times, your node will be listening and relaying Bitcoin communications and refreshing the connected peer nodes

So if you imagine a US government running 10's of thousands of Bitcoin nodes to attempt to triangulate all the transactions origin IP's many are running VPN's, and getting a probabilistic, not definitive information, the cost-benefit ratio seems very low, especially since it cannot be used in a court

 

[NoahA]

So if you imagine a US government running 10's of thousands of Bitcoin nodes to attempt to triangulate all the transactions origin IP's many are running VPN's, and getting a probabilistic, not definitive information, the cost-benefit ratio seems very low, especially since it cannot be used in a court

And then this means the government is actually helping the network as well!

even without an open incoming connections, you're facilitating the relay of information in the Bitcoin network as long as you run a full node

I will have to look into this, but I'm not sure. I almost think you aren't relaying anything, just consuming. If you were able to pass something on to the next node, then this should mean that you're accepting incoming connections. So the way I visualize it, you're at the edge of the network where data comes to you, and then it stops going further. But then I thought this would mean that I can't broadcast my own transaction, and it worked, my transaction was confirmed, so I'm not sure how that could work for my own transaction. If my transaction gets sent out, and if I can pass on other transactions, then how is this not accepting incoming connections and passing on all the mempool data that I get myself??

 

[johnarb]

And then this means the government is actually helping the network as well!


I will have to look into this, but I'm not sure. I almost think you aren't relaying anything, just consuming. If you were able to pass something on to the next node, then this should mean that you're accepting incoming connections. So the way I visualize it, you're at the edge of the network where data comes to you, and then it stops going further. But then I thought this would mean that I can't broadcast my own transaction, and it worked, my transaction was confirmed, so I'm not sure how that could work for my own transaction. If my transaction gets sent out, and if I can pass on other transactions, then how is this not accepting incoming connections and passing on all the mempool data that I get myself??

There is a limit of 8 connections if you are not accepting inbound connections, and if the router is configured correctly, I've seen over 50 peer connections on my node "ss -tulanp | grep 8333" for windows the command is something like "netstan -an > search-8333.txt" load into notepad

The nodes that accept incoming connections provide decentralization to the Bitcoin network but both types of nodes can receive and send Bitcoin communications protocol

From Google Bard below

 

[NoahA]

There is a limit of 8 connections if you are not accepting inbound connections, and if the router is configured correctly, I've seen over 50 peer connections on my node "ss -tulanp | grep 8333" for windows the command is something like "netstan -an > search-8333.txt" load into notepad

The nodes that accept incoming connections provide decentralization to the Bitcoin network but both types of nodes can receive and send Bitcoin communications protocol

From Google Bard below


View attachment 322328

Excellent summary, but to be honest, I have an issue with the first point about distributing workload. Each node verifies its own blocks. There is of course no need to trust another node to do this, nor is this how it works. So to me, distributing workload is completely false, unless I'm totally missing something.

I do honestly wish I could accept incoming connections as its trivial to leave the second laptop on. I already figured out the cost for electricity would be about $5 per month, and the data is unlimited. But I have to see if there is a way to do this through Tor, or find a different VPN that supports port forwarding.

There is a limit of 8 connections if you are not accepting inbound connections

My Bitcoin Core always shows 10 outgoing connections and 0 incoming.

 

[johnarb]

Excellent summary, but to be honest, I have an issue with the first point about distributing workload. Each node verifies its own blocks. There is of course no need to trust another node to do this, nor is this how it works. So to me, distributing workload is completely false, unless I'm totally missing something.
[/ATTACH]

I agree the wording seems confusing, however, given the recent controversies re: BIP-300 (soft fork), node work is more than just enforcing Bitcoin fundamental rules but also newer feature sets

For example, many nodes are running a version of Bitcoin core that is pre-TAP root, and possibly a small minority pre-segwit (needs verification if still valid to run, but given that legacy addresses are still supported by exchanges, I'm making assumptions)

So let's say 90% of the Bitcoin network do not accept incoming connections, then the 10% of the nodes have a much bigger voice on this Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 300 drive chains as each of these nodes can have 700% more connections