Topic: ㅤ (Read 470 times)

Congratulations Ratimov, your doings in this forum are worth emulating, I took my time to read your post, you are a good mentor, and people like you deserve not just kudos but more than that, I have learnt a lot from you by encouraging hard work in my little way, your 4 years in this bitcointalk forum has been good for the entire forum at large, I am grateful for the knowledge you have impacted on me, keep it up sir.

You can say this again. During my early days in the forum, I admired Ratimov and wanted to follow his footsteps. I tried and it was moving well until he dropped a post title Beginners and Help Encyclopedia.  After reading the post I was just demoralised instead of being motivated. He dedicated so much time and resources in that very post. I wonder why such post hasn't been pined in the B/H board by now.
Congratulations Ratimov and remain exceptional.

Congratulations Ratimov. You have been an asset to the forum in different ways. Your posts are evergreen because they are filled with timeless information. I read the entire original post and I must confess that I have never had such a lesson as I did after reading. This lecture was indeed a good birthday gift. I use to patronize some exchanges until the fall of FTX. Many of my friends lost so much money, and from then I avoided all exchanges. But your seven years of experience as written in this post have outlined some basic steps that will help to reduce the risk in dealing with exchanges. The issue of KYC has been a major issue when using exchanges but your experience has shown that these problems might not be generally surmounted, however, they can be controlled or reduced. Thank you for all you do for the community.

In-depth knowledge of your centralized exchange will make users more efficient. For those of us who trade in cryptocurrencies, it is very common to use centralized exchanges. I benefited a lot from your article. I sometimes faced some problems but did not know the solutions to those problems. I have registered with a few exchanges. As a trader I am using a top one and a medium level exchange. There are a few good reasons to use Top Exchange, one of which is the liquidity which you have shared notably. But besides this I am using another centralized exchange because it is not possible to know when what kind of problem will arise. Use a different exchange so I don't lose all my assets. Hopefully nothing like that will happen though.

I registered with my email address but later when I started KYC they also asked for phone number which I couldn't avoid. Now I have to do 2 verification to withdraw money which of course implies hard security. I initially thought the message on the phone number was boring but now I think positively.

Before considering the entire article i can say that if a new user reads your article before using Centralized Exchange he can be free from various complications.

I suppose this is slightly different from the typical "KYC" requirement, which is just to know who the customer is (duh) and ensure it's an actual person and same person -- I am against it too, don't get me wrong, but as I noted above, I feel like where you come from, where you operate from, and how connected your country is to other regulations -- definitely something to consider.

As I understand it, my situation is unique and triggers all kinds of flags on systems mainly all due to multiple location, nationality, currency I use.

So instead of asking for my personal identity (as in my name, etc.) I was instead asked:

Proof of Asset (signing from wallets) was to prove the crypto was my own and deposited by me.
Proof of Source of Income: The tax documentation was to prove the source of income if I was salaried, or if I was freelancer, etc. I didn't give tax docs, I substituted with invoicing proving payments to my crypto wallets used as Proof of Asset. To show the money I earned to buy crypto, or the crypto I earned, was earned, rather than stolen or given.

Perhaps none of this will ever apply to you or 90+% of people on this forum since I honestly haven't met someone asked for these. And after your response, I guess my fact-finding continues.

P.S. Well done!

Whao! Ratimov congratulations to the anniversary, I didn't not even notice the thread but it was through The Sceptical Chymist that I noticed the thread. Yes as The Sceptical Chymist said, and I also noticed it, many users have spent years in the forum but they are still in Jr. Members, Full Members or probably Sr. Members. But made more that 10k merits within this period. That is a great achievement with great reputation. I can still vividly remember that you were the first person to rank me up to Member Rank early last year. You are the first generous Merit Source I encountered in the forum. As The Sceptical Chymist said, keep the good tidy in the development of the forum.

Ratimov, I don't know how but I missed this thread completely.

Usually I don't congratulate members for being here for an arbitrary period of time, but in your case I will.  Four years is a long time to be an active member of any discussion forum IMO, and I'd say that 99% of members (and probably more than that) won't even make it to Sr. Member in that time frame, much less hold the title of 6th place in the most earned merits category.  That's impressive--and I have to admit I hadn't taken notice of how many merits you have in a while and didn't realize you were over 10k.  Props to you for that!

I also give you props for generously giving others merits, which I've known you to do for a long time now.  I know you're a merit source, but to all of those who aren't or who might be new, it's important to keep those merits circulating so that the system runs like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg device, which is how I always view Theymos's forum creations.  Keep up the great work, homie!

Great thread OP! Not so much because of the wealth of experience being documented, but because it can be tied to a known frequent user, as opposed to random reviews online and what I call incidental or anecdotal records, which is wholly unreliable if you come in as a new user wanting a serious dig in to "what to expect".

I want to add that experience probably differs greatly on your nationality. Myself, without revealing too much (I hint many times throughout my forum use as I also want to add my experience and help people who have my not-so-unique challenges), I find that my nationality has had a significant impact on my use of CEXs.

To start off, I actually don't use CEXs so much, and rely heavily on p2p over the years, despite it being more and more difficult, it was helpful that I started on LBC in 2016 and the networks I still use today are built from the trust of these 6/7 years.

Without going into too much detail (yet) -- the biggest reason I don't use CEXs is that they've slowly made it more difficult on the KYC for me. Since 2021, particularly, I've been subject to pretty heavy Proof of Source of Income and Proof of Asset (they use slightly different terms) checks. These range from straightforward tax documents, employment contracts, to pretty serious stuff like signing from depositing addresses (to prove ownership of the wallets I use to deposit). I wrote about it on some of the discussion threads but can't easily find them, but asking others, I actually don't know personally anyone else who's had to do this to keep their accounts.

At the accounts I still keep, they actually request this annually. So this year, my 3rd time doing it on one CEX. And no, it's not even to do with value transacted. I hardly have 5 figure dollar annual volume on each!

I'm surprised you didn't mention it, or is this also because you're not subject to them?

I guess we have different ways of looking at it. We probably also have different experiences. As for me, I could even say that in a hundred ICOs, 90% of them are most likely scam, unrealistic, shabby, unsustainable projects. I encountered so many seemingly promising ICOs way back in 2017 and 2018. Most of them are dead. The same is true with airdrops. Retrodrop wasn't a big thing before.


The portfolio is long-term, designed for ~3 years. I do not follow the development of altcoin projects at all, only the charts.