Bitcoin Forum

I don’t know if this is the appropriate section to talk about this, but am sure the post will also be useful to be newbie’s in the forum here. Am sure scammers are also on the forum here which are looking for every opportunity just to steal from us, the forum is doing everything possible to fight scammers here, and all the high rank members are trying their possible best. I just noticed something recently and I decided to share it here and  am sure lot’s of people will really benefit from it.

After creating forum account here, some of us do make mistake of leaving our email public, some people don’t really know about this so after creating account, they just start using it without changing email visibility to private. Some people’s email address is not properly protected so immediately scammers have access to your email address, they can easily compromise your email address and they will compromise everything linked to the email address including your forum account, and you will be losing your account to scammer. Just imagine scammer using your account for illegal things, they are spoiling your reputation on the forum here and some might endup selling the account to other people. I think it’s better we all take preventive measures so that we won’t fall victim .

Am sure some people don’t know about how to hide email address from public, I will be providing short steps on how to do that so that we will all be free from hackers.

Click on Account related settings.
https://i.imgur.com/GRIRH5E.jpg

You will see(Hide email address from public?), click on the box at the front.
https://i.imgur.com/W1dOnwN.jpg

What is the point of hiding your email for registration here, if your email Stable080@gmail.com can be found in bounty spreadsheets (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obTek3vk9gH0OtuQbbBxOA8u8Jm7gAffC9plcoe2O4w/edit#gid=1425559251). I am 99% sure you have used that email to register here :D

When I was making the post I edited the email to bitcointalk@gmail.com, the email I used for bounty registration is different from the email I used to register the account, so don’t worry my account is kind of safe.

When one creates an account, there is a default setting that makes email hidden; it's only when one goes to the settings that you can manually activate the make email public option. It's only those who are on this forum to advertise their product and don't care about privacy who can make their email public so that their targeted audience can reach out to them through those emails. 

I doubt that could be it; even if it is, the OP must have other active emails that he/she uses for bounty and everything else relating to this forum. 
I also don't see any point in going through the spreadsheet to search for the Ops email to prove a point. 

It is your guess that can be correct or inaccurate.

If a person is seriously about security and privacy, he will use a specific email for important registration and account. Obviously, email for bounty or unimportant things should be a different email. I agree that most of newbies will use same email for many different things both important and unimportant.

• Forum account: security, privacy, and recovery (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261696.0)
• [Guide] How to know if your email address was part of any data breach. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5201569.0)

And now you just exposed your Email. ;D

I don't know if there are existing thread about this topic, I didn't bother to check but I think could be a good tutorial for those awho have tepered with their email default settings and have made their email address visible for everyone to see.
Although, some do expose their email intentionally to the public as it meant for business purposes.

Read his post again, he just used "bitcointalk@gmail.com" for the guide purposes, that of course is not the email he used for account creation (its probably taken long time ago anyway).

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@OP since you are giving advice, let me give you one: when resizing image you don't have to use both width and height as using one is enough and the other will automatically adjust. That way image won't be slightly distorted like in your case.

You can register with a fake email. It is true that there are problems that you will face if you try to restore your account, but signing a message from the address once you log in is enough to prove your account ownership.
It is easy to create hundreds of accounts using protonmail, using paid version will give you easy management to 100 accounts which will enhance your privacy if you know how to use it.

We hope that in the future signatures will stop requesting data publicly and some of them are encrypted in private messages.

Why are you so sure Op used the same email to register on the bounty. Maintaining the security of account privacy is the responsibility of each user, maybe Op uses a different email used to register here.
Email registered on the forum need to be hidden from the public because it will be very risky to the safety of your account, while to register for the bounty you can use a backup email that is not related to any account that you think is important.

It's a choice to choose between hiding your email from being open to other members to see, this actually depends on the user involved, if you think you have services you offer or businesses that could help promote your career then i see no need hiding it but if you think about not having anything to offer the public regarding what you do, then you may decided not to hide your email, if they spam you up then you must not respond on their mails except the ones that are important should in case you make your email open to everyone.

Lol ouch is this OPs email from bounty??

I guess bounty manager was suppose to keep this part of the spreadsheet hidden as we have users out there mining for such information before your mailbox starts to receive all sorts of spam ,and possibly if you use same email addy as your bitcointalk email address people could try brute  force their way to hijacking ones account.

All in all email addresses on the forum are hidden from the public by default unless you choose to change  this for whatever reasons, so no need to worry.

I find this tutorial useful because I have been exposed to diverse security tips like using different emails for a different purposes. This is because privacy is key to avoiding scammers and fraud. This might make one have many email accounts that will be very difficult to maintain. Hence, it might not be out of place to keep a record of these emails to facilitate easy access. I have had to go through recovery processes because I usually forget the details of some of he email accounts I had opened all in the bid to pursue privacy.

The point is - if you are here to teach someone, start from yourself. What is the point of telling how important it is to hide your email, when you flash yours?

Am sorry to ask but how did I flash my email? The one you saw on my profile is just an example, I deleted my main email and I used bitcointalk@gmail.com, you know the email won’t be available by now. The email you saw on bounty spreadsheet is not the email I used to create my account, I won’t just create thread when am not following what am advising other people to do.

I'm not sure why this forum is specifically mentioned for hiding an email address when it's a thing everywhere on the internet. Just don't leave your email address public anywhere, it will almost certainly be misused in some way. The Bitcointalk forum is no special exception.
There are also bounty campaigns that collect email addresses, I believe that many of them have submitted their primary email address.

Even if you take care of all such things, "hacking" of the user base of a large service happens very often, so you can easily be overwhelmed by spam.

Some email providers allow you to enable 2fa which makes it very hard to compromise the address. I've never had any of my accounts with 2fa broken into. I usually have a password that consists of letters, numbers and signs and often use a burner email address for public forums, giveaways, product registration and similar things.

Don't worry about your email being visible people. Rather have a good and secure password, the longer, the better, enable 2fa and don't mix forum emails with the ones used for billing, taxes, or any government stuff. Keep crypto and personal information separate!

Just a guess, but Erumo is so sure but has been denied by the OP that forum registration emails and bounty emails are different even though there are slight similarities in account names. :D

Maybe the bounty manager forgot to hide this part or it is his rule that he publishes everything that is entered in the spreadsheet, so nothing can prevent him except awareness of the bounty manager.
But you are right with the email being published in the spreadsheet so that more people will know including the scammers who will send spam messages about other types of fraud, but the OP has denied that email is not the same as on bitcointalk.

There is no point of explaining all this OP, I think @Erumo should note the explanations that has been made by other users.

Privacy is very important that is why the forum already set hiding mails as default so that problems of account hacks can be minimized because if the email is exposed many people will attempt to try their luck to hack into users account.

Everything is alright but the things you are suggesting or sharing , you already don't apply on yourself .
We are seeing that your email  on your screenshot, I think you forgot to remove or blur that part.
Any way there is no doubt that email hiding is also a good idea to avoid the scammers- and phishers phishing emails link.
And I think for hiding your email from the beginning you don't have to go through this process you can easily done this on the registration form of bitcointalk forum by checkmark the box.

I think it’s better you read other members comments first before you make your own comment, if you read all the posts that are ahead of you, then you will know that I applied it to myself. I already said it more than once that the email that you are seeing in my post is fake, I decided to edit my main email and replace it with the one you are seeing on the screenshot when I wanted to make this post.

AFAIK, when you create a new account, your email address is automatically set to hidden settings like by default, so how can new users can do the mistake of making their email publicly, plus i can not imagine how someone having access to your email address can hack your BTT account, because As clapping is not done with one hand, so is the account can not be hacked by only making it publicly visible.

Origin of hacking starts when the victim made some mistake, for example, a spammer or hacker can use your email address + your wallet address in different airdrops or giveaways which have no double confirmation system to get high number of affiliate by masquerading. And hacker can send you email or messages to convince you to click on the provided link. And once you do it, all of your access to BTT account could be compromised by the hacker. (cross site scripting attack; a very common cyber attack) If in future your account got hacked you can look into the following topics. (maybe now for use in future.)

• Recovering hacked/lost accounts by theymos (Administrator) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089777.0)

The best practice to safe your Bitcointalk account is;

• Do not use your main BTT email in any bounty, signature, airdrop or giveaway campaigns. Use another email address.
• If you are using another email address, then never link your publicly visible email with the main email address.
• Do not fall prey to phishing attacks. How? get familiar with the environments and by remaining up-to-date.

Overall, the security of our assets and accounts is in our own hands.

Well, services that collect email addresses can always use them for their benefits, they may even sell them to email marketers for money without your consent, or maybe with your consent since you might at some point agreed to their terms of service without even realizing what kind of rights you are giving them about your personal data.

That isn't only for bounty campaigns, but it's for every service that we use on the internet where we provide real and authentic personal information a lot of times. We don't realize what we are doing when we click on the "I agree" button given at the end of every registration page.

Come on, don't be too bitter about this thread. I think we need to be grateful for each piece of information and education that's been shared here because probably not all people are aware of this, and besides, it's in the Beginners & Help section, which means it's primarily intended for newbies. However, thanks to those who clarified that the email hidden setting is actually on by default. We can change the default setting if we want to show our email for certain purposes. All of this is valuable information for newbies, so there's nothing wrong with it.

Maybe he used different one for airdrops and bounty. Of course before doing an account here an email is provided and that can be a private email, and not will be used for that activity since its personal. But I think there is always an option for a change email if the one he used has been exposed or already been used for airdrops.

I once thought about a single advantage of unveiling our email address on our profile page, except that it's also linked to our account and used for forgot password activity, guest of the forum who can't send pm can easily contact a member through their emails for business purposes. Supposing that the forum is filled with only cool headed people both guests, that would have been a good alternative means of contacting people. Since the disadvantages as Op advised outweighs the advantage it's important to hide the email and substitute it with our social media links, a space is made available for that too.

Most members hide their email address for security reasons.  Even after opening an account, everyone's email address is automatically highlighted in the system if the user does not click on the option to show email address later in the account settings. 
However, for security reasons, it is better to heighten everyone's email address. Because if the email address is shown in the profile, different fraudsters or hackers try to do their different illegal activities with that email address.
But if you create an account with a temporary Gmail then there is no need to hide that Gmail. Because no fraudster or hacker can succeed in any of their activities with temporary Gmail.

However, accounts should always be created with an active Gmail account. Because later, if there is any problem with the account, the account can be accessed with that active Gmail.

There are services where you could try to limit the emails that you use. What I mean by this is you are going to be using the iCloud as the tool in which you could hide email if you do not want to be public in the first place in any registration.

It is the Hide My Email function. It is really helpful for me because I want to use a single email but not completely possible lol but it helps.

I registered on Coinmarketcap, although honestly, I'm still not sure why I did it. A couple of years ago, they announced that their database had been hacked, and after that, I was flooded with spam. The same thing happened to me after the hack at Ledger. It took some time until I adjusted the spam filters, luckily there was an alternative email address, and it didn't cause me many problems.
Whether it was a hack or they sold email lists, is very difficult to prove.

If you're care with your account's security, hiding your email address aren't enough, you need to follow few other steps:

1. Don't use a same email address or password if you want to sign up on the other sites.
2. Don't set up security password because it could make your account locked.
3. Don't share your social media in this forum, this will increase a risk in your account.

Maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no. But he is teaching to hide email after registration, yet his email is seen when he registered for bounty. Then where is that edge and criteria where to hide and to show emails?

What is the goal to hide email in profile? For protection and to prevent being scammed. It took me few minutes to get his email from bounty. More advanced search from a professional can connect that email with something else and who knows where that could lead. Perhaps even to an email used here for registration.

For me his advice looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/tQ9UKqT.png

Anyway, just forget about me. Stable090 has given a good advice. Well done !

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Beijing_bouddhist_monk_2009_IMG_1486.JPG/1200px-Beijing_bouddhist_monk_2009_IMG_1486.JPG

Not always, if you want you can hide but dor someone who is offering service via bitcointalk then keeping it is public is important and if you don't want your primary email to be exposed you can change your email at anytime you want and keep it public.

I get the intention of OP is trying to say most malicious links are sent via email and if its available in public they can Target a newbie because they are easy prey for scammers since they can be deceived easily.

Except for a gullible fellow, else everyone supposed to have designated emails for different purposes according to their importance to you. It's another way to show how responsible you're about your privacy and security.

So @Erumo if you have been using a single email for different important purposes they it's advisable you desist from it as your assets and information are easily susceptible to access without any scammer or hacker haven to think twice if the particular email is the right one for the very information they need.

It is generally advised that one should not use their official email for Crypto activities or even here onboard this platform. So I believe OP knows about that and would not make such mistake. Maybe that email he saw on the spreadsheet might be a default email just to fill up the space by abiding to the campaign rules.

However, the forum administrators knows about this that is why upon registration, the email is first on default that no one would have access to it only you not until you change the settings to wether you want the general public to see it or only you alone can see it at first.

Hiding email is not important here. If you think I will hide the email then you can hide the email. And if you think I won't hide the email then that's your personal matter. But here if your email is not registered with a strong password and if your bitcoin account is created with the same password of that email then of course you can hide your email. Also, if your email is being used for any good business purpose, you must hide your email. Because later there may be problems for your business site. Apart from that, I don't see any problem.

Rule number 1, don't ever use your original email address to open forum account, there us no way to know if anyone is watching you and your email address might be a target, always use an alternative or brand new email account.

Also, this forum automatically makes your email account invisible when you register on this forum, you will have to make your email address visible yourself by activating it in your profile, which is a stupid move to me.

Imagine talking about how much money you've made from crypto investment in a thread and bad actors on here decide to use your email address as a trap for you, they can send malicious emails to your inbox and wait for you to make a mistake by clicking on links.

Yea, it seems things have changed because when I was a newbie, someone called my attention to my visible email address to hide it. Which I believed was unhidden from beginning. Although, I wasn't the one that created my account, maybe someone that did unchecked the hide email box. I doubt that anyone will like to uncheck that.

Recently, I created an account for someone and the hide email box was checked default. Maybe things are changing rapidly in the forum.

It was clearly stated by the manager not to use email related to users account, it doesn't take more than 3 minutes to create new Gmail account but lazy bums will still use primary emails, this is the internet and no matter how careful one may be one also left something behind for hackers to use, keeping it completely private on the internet is the most difficult thing to do, those who care about privacy and security don't use social media

use social media.

Oh, this is wonderful. It should have been checked automatically when we first got here, as many of us had our email addresses exposed, but it's nice to see that the box is now checked by default.

Well, when we create an account on bitcointalk, the email visibility is hidden by default and therefore we do not need to experiment with its settings. Some people may make their email visible and there could be number of reasons for this. For example someone offering any service or selling any goods and may want his email to be visible to everyone so people can contact him via email too.



The signature campaigns especially the bounties, does not care much about the privacy of the individuals as they often ask for Telegram, Emails when filling the bounty spreadsheet. And those sheets are publicly available for anyone to get the emails / telegrams and use them for advertising stuff.

I appreciate your efforts OP in reminding beginners about the importance of maintaining the privacy of the email used to register in this forum so that it is not displayed to the public. But actually it should also be noted that the setting to hide email from the public in this forum has been applied immediately to every newcomer who registers. or by default the email will be hidden from the public after we register. So I'm not worried that beginners will skip this step. because their email has been automatically hidden from the public by the default forum system.

but I think what we have to worry about and we have to remind beginners is that they have to register/provide an email that is different from the one registered for an account on this forum if they take part in a bounty or something that requires providing an email address as a condition for joining. although it seems that even without warning, beginners are also aware of this. but it never hurts to give each other attention and advice.

I didn’t notice if it’s always hidden by default, I was just going through my account recently and I came across it, then I decided to check if people can see my email, after making sure that it’s hidden, then I decided to start thinking about risk associated with leaving your email address public. With your email public, your account can be easily hacked, am sure most newbies might not even know this.

Some managers are high rank members of the forum, it will be better if they can adjust their rules, I see no reason why they should publish users email address and telegram username on spreadsheet, even if they need those details, it should be kept private not public where everyone can see and copy it, am sure lots of people will have been scammed just because managers publish their details on spreadsheet and scammers were able to have access to it and the scammer will start communicating with the user.

Your account email will be hidden by default, so you don't have to worry about that. But if you deliberately display your account email in your profile after setting your preferences, then it means you have considered the risk. But you know, some users only use disposable emails for their accounts, so they are not too worried about the risks. But of course it will make it difficult for them to recover the account if it is hacked or stolen.

A security tip to prevent you from being exposed to risky threats is to not display your sensitive data anywhere online. Consider not posting your active email anywhere, and preferably using a different email than your account email if you decide to register on some other online platform. This will prevent your main email from getting spam or phishing, so I think you should know about it.

Bounty managers expect their participants to know some basic security tips such as having multiple email addresses, you set them apart, some for trusted websites, some throwaway ones for untrusted website and for public exposure, thus whenever you receive an email in your throwaway email addresses, you'd be extra careful how you'd handle them, and you might just decide never to open any email received in it. Having said that, next time one wants to apply in a bounty that requires posting your email address, let them use their throwaway email address, and as for your TG username, do not respond to unsolicited messages if you receive them.

You can also use another email for this forum, that is also what I am doing, I have different emails for different platforms and social media accounts. There is no sense in hiding your email address here because it is only an email, but then if you dont want to you can do what the OP's saying.
If you are using different email, try to make different passwords for each email as well, do not use one password for all the emails that you are using that is risky.

Before, I used to leave my email address set to public video until one day  I read a topic like this and then I weighed the pros and cons. There was just too much to lose having built my account from the ground up. Losing it would affect mental health. In addition, we know that a lot of people are on this forum with different motives and intentions so one cannot be too over careful. If you are a newbie, please follow the OP's advice. Hide you email address even if do not understand it yet.

To be honest just few percent of newbies will know about it, most of them use their main email address for all registration, which at the end their email address might even be complicated and everything connected to the email address will be affected. Some managers always request for email address but they are always making sure it’s kept hidden and not public on spreadsheet, but we shouldn’t trust even the bounty managers, some low managers might end up selling hunters information to scammers even if it is not published on spreadsheet. But I know reputable managers won’t want to spoil their reputation so they won’t wan to do that. The best thing to do is just have separate email address for bounty activities.

Sometimes people doesn't use their main email for bounty, and another purpose of making their email used for creation of bitcointalk account hidden is because of hackers, and besides people who hackes email does not value email that doesn't have a merit, so I believe that, they are only targeting a grown-up account so that they can sell to another country person to use, so it's advisable to hide your emails, because checking across no prominent user of this forum the email is not hidden via the profile, I think  they have a tangible reason that is in place.

Yes, I remembered that (email hidden by default), If I want to create more new accounts here, 1st time I have to do is hidden online. For me (hidden online), it's 1 thing crucial also for your privacy. So when people look at you Online, that is possible (if they try to scam you) and they will message you. I just remembered when I was still a newbie, someone message me suddenly when online. he spoke at length where the point is to invite me to join the investment. But, because I was still a newbie and don't have money, I ignored him.

Forum account: security, privacy, and recovery (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261696.0)
The forum cares about user privacy so default, email address is hidden. It is user responsibility to show it and forget to hide it later.

About the Online status, I know what you meant but if someone targets you, he will send you a personal message no matter you are online or offline. Mostly scammers will use newbie account to do that, so as a prevention, you can turn this on off "Allow newbies to send you PMs." in Personal message options.

Usually, DM first and send invitation to join investment, ask you to send money first is very possibly scam.

All these things are personal matters. In this case, if you think that you will use multiple email accounts in different places, that is your personal matter. But the most important thing in this case is that you must remember the password that you use for multiple emails. If you forget any email password then you will be in trouble. In this case, I want to tell you that if you create multiple emails, it is better not to give different passwords. Because what do you do when your phone is broken or stolen? Then you cannot recover it in any way. Again, if you want to work here, you have to create accounts on different websites, you cannot remember them by creating different passwords. Write in the notebook If your notebook is stolen then all your efforts will be in vain. So whatever you do, do it carefully.

Now I can guess right about where the emails containing the series of malicious links come from. They always ask to update my metamask wallet with links to follow. This is really helpful for us as newbies.

I think that the best security rules would be to register a new mailbox for each service on which you register. And of course use different strong passwords for them.

Previously, there were bounty companies where you also had to connect Facebook, Instagram, and of course Twitter. Everyone has seen your addresses, all the information about you. At the same time, it was unwise to use a new account - it was appreciated how many subscribers you have, which means that people connected their Main accounts. The author of the post is right - you need to try to spread a little information about yourself.

Unfortunately, in my case, this will not work - because I am an Artist, I am a public person.

Yea. Mate I believe @Erumo should accept the op's explanation without further discussion. It is obvious that the forum has a default that, once an account has been registered, the default will automatically hide the user's email until you decide to leave it open for everyone, which, if caution is not exercised, puts your account at risk of being hacked. Some people use different addresses for bounty, which I believe is another approach to secure your privacy since even if they try to steal your account using that mail, they won't be able to. Therefore, just because you see an email on someone's profile doesn't indicate that is his primary email.

It is exactly our choice and it will relate to the kind of having more privacy. Morover those who are not joining any bounty programs. I do agree that I also prefer to hide my forum email in my profile. And for some people here, they may not use their exatc email similarly in their registration profile email and in the bounty spreadsheet.
This will not be a big matter. But once more, this is an option to be more privacy. So, fhere is nothing wrong with this.