Cryptocurrencies will not entirely replace the current debased fiat currencies but instead will offer people more choices as to which currency they can use to trade and store value, Crypto technology will change like everything else it will mature over time and change how we conduct payments, banking, and other financial transactions.
Governments are looking at issuing their versions of digital currencies which will still be debased imitations of crypto but will allow them to control every aspect of your life.


True Cryptocurrency is ⁣designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it and cannot be used by bad actors such as Banks and Governments to control it.

⁣My friend who knows the markets in crypto just bought Qbitsilver currency, I laughed and told him I had never heard of it, and he told me he found out from a friend at work that this coin has been gaining ground over the past two years and now was the time to invest and hodl it.

So yes you guessed it I just invested £500 pounds in this coin at the price of 5 cents a coin there is only one way for it to go and that's up, so I have been searching around my contacts for more info on this coin, let me explain, info is very closely guarded and apparently the code is uncrackable at this time, it's based around the Monero code and others of the same coding bases.

⁣AES ‍ "being one of the hardest codes to crack" is arguably the US government's Advanced Encryption Standard (aka Rijndael or AES) which the Americans use to protect top-secret information. AES is considered unbreakable by even the most sophisticated hackers.


A bounty was offered by the IRS to Crack Monero the Bounty being $625,000 a hacker's dream job.

⁣A lot of misinformation is still being posted on the web about it, but here are the facts.

Two contracts valued at ⁣$625K each were awarded, one to Chainalysis, and one to Integra FEC. These contracts were completed in 2021 with no hype from either company about the success of these contracts.

Here's all of the available docs, from US government websites:
First, the Request for Information, published 2020-06-30.
This gives a high-level view of what they're interested in:

This RFI is associated with a pilot IRS Criminal Investigation Division (CI) program. CI Cyber Crimes is requesting information about systems that will allow developers and testers to conduct investigative research of distributed ledger transactions involving privacy cryptocurrency coins (e.g., Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), Dash (DASH), Grin (GRIN), Komodo (KMD), Verge (XVG), and Horizon (ZEN)); Layer 2 off-chain protocol networks (e.g., Lightning Network (LN), Raiden Network, Celer Network); Side-chains (e.g., Plasma and OmiseGo); and tracing challenges following the integration of the Schnorr Signature algorithm.


Acquiring applications to allow an investigation to more easily trace privacy coins and other protocols that provide anonymity to illicit actors would allow investigations to be more effective, as well as facilitate a higher level of deterrence by making it harder to conceal criminal activity. It also provides an investigative efficiency that is currently limited.


We are primarily interested in 1) an interactive prototype that provides a GUI for clustering transactions involving a user (similar to tools provided by companies like Chainalysis, CipherTrace, Coinbase, and Elliptic but for the privacy coins and obfuscation technologies); 2) associate user distributed addresses with distributed ledger addresses of users (individuals or entities) suspected or known to be involved in nefarious activities; 3) provide a library of distributed ledger addresses associated with names of users engaged in known or suspected nefarious activities; 4) provide OSINT information/research about identified users, 5) has a mechanism for sharing investigative research between investigators, 6) ability to import/export investigative data in various file formats (e.g., CSV and jpg); and 7) an estimate of the cost and return on investment (ROI).


⁣Then, the Request for Proposals was published on 2020-09-04.
The original goals of the work:

The primary goals of this solution challenge are to provide information and technical capabilities for CI Special Agents to trace transaction inputs and outputs to a specific user and differentiate them from mixins/multisig actors for Monero and/or Lightning Layer 2 cryptocurrency transactions with minimal involvement of external vendors.


Provide technology that, gives information about specific parties and/or transactions in the Monero and/or Lightning networks, and allows Special Agents to predict statistical likelihoods of other transaction inputs, outputs, metadata, and public identifiers with minimal involvement of external vendors.


Provide algorithms and source code to allow CI to further develop, modify, and integrate these capabilities with internal code and systems with minimal costs, licensing issues, or dependency on external vendors.


All solutions must support cryptocurrency transactions that occurred in 2020. All solutions ⁣must support open interoperability standards (common file formats, REST APIs, etc. as appropriate) to facilitate easy integration into internally developed IRS-CI cryptocurrency analytic systems and data.


When responding, please keep the three above goals in mind. We are looking for solutions that provide the best results for tracing obfuscated cryptocurrency transactions using Monero and/or Lightning, however, all three goals are important and a solution that produces good statistical likelihoods of transaction parties but does not provide easy-to-integrate source code will not be rated as highly as one that provides both source code that can be integrated with CI systems and produces good statistical likelihoods of transaction parties. Contractors may choose to submit solutions to address Monero or Lightning transactions, or both as all approaches will be considered.

Note: the contractors were free to target either of the Monero or Lightning Networks, at their option. So successful completion of these contracts didn't necessarily mean a successful attack on Monero - they could have just gone for the easier target, LN.
The contracts were awarded to Chainalysis and Integra FEC, published on 2020-09-30. https://sam.gov/opp/5ab94eae1a....8d422e88945b64181c60 The work was structured in two phases, $500k for Phase 1 lasting 8 months to develop a Proof of Concept, and then $125K for Phase 2 lasting 4 months for testing and deployment.


You can do a web search for the two contract IDs.
Integra Contract No. 2032H8-20-C-00040
Chainalysis Contract No. 2032H8-20-C-00041
and you'll find that the contracts were completed and both companies were paid in full.
Integra Payments
Chainalysis Payments
The contracts began on 2020-09-30 and ended on 2021-09-29. Three months later, on 2021-12-10 Chainalysis started advertising support for Lightning Network. https://blog.chainalysis.com/r....eports/lightning-net
I've never been able to locate any relevant announcements from Integra at all, but presumably, if they had succeeded they'd be advertising to their customers too.


https://www.integrafec.com/blog
There have been no follow-ups on those contract IDs listing whatever results were finally delivered, but if Chainalysis had tackled Monero and succeeded, I believe they would have blogged about it and advertised it as an offering to their customers. They haven't done so.



After all a company that can crack monero would corner the market in its preferred field.


I went to the Qbitsilver website at https://qbitsilver.com⁣/gui-wallets.html and followed the instructions and bingo my new wallet setup, I emailed them my public address shown in the wallet under Recieve on top bar coins showed up together with the bonus for buying dead simple, and easy to use wallet colorful as well which is great.


Anyone new to this I will say do remember to save all wallet details somewhere safe as no one has access to these wallets "Not even Qbit" can access them without your secret keys and mnemonic seed and store them in a secure location, I screwed up the first time forgot to save them and had to make a new wallet, not a problem as I had no money in it.