Each node has a maximum size in megabytes which it will use to store unconfirmed transactions. If it hits that limit, then any transaction with a fee lower than the lowest fee transaction it is currently storing will not be added to its mempool and will not be broadcast to other nodes.

https://live.blockcypher.com - mouse over the "Received" box to get an exact time
https://explorer.bitcoin.com - under "First Seen"

Yeah, the time given on blockchair.com is the time the transaction was received only for unconfirmed transactions. Once the transaction is confirmed, the time updates to the timestamp of the block it was confirmed in.

Many exchanges don't actually use an algorithm at all. They just charge a ridiculous fee to everyone all the time. Fair enough, they do have to pay a little more behind the scenes in terms of consolidation transactions, but for every withdrawal they pocket a fair amount of profit.

Coinbase only started batching their transactions a few months ago: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-rolls-out-bitcoin-transaction-batching-5f6d09b8b045

Only because it's been over 30 minutes since the last block. Even now, it's only at 3 MB, and a fee of 191 sats/vbyte would still put you around 0.05 MB from the tip, which is completely unnecessary. Once we "catch up" with the average block time and mine a few more blocks, it will be back to almost empty again.

It hasn't. The mempool is still empty. Look at the third graph here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h. At time of me writing this, the mempool is currently 0.048 MB.

The problem is that everyone is still using wallets and websites to tell them which fee to use, instead of looking for themselves. These services use bad algorithms which are currently still stuck with the assumption that the mempool is over full, and that you absolutely must use the highest fee if you want to be confirmed in the next few blocks. They keep spamming these high fee transactions, causing other users using these services to end up being recommended even higher fees, and the cycle continues. I just checked five or six of the most common "Suggested fee" websites, and was suggested anywhere from 70 sats/vbyte to 216 sats/vbyte. I made a transaction with a fee of 1 sat/vbyte literally 15 minutes ago, and it confirmed in the next block.

Don't listen to any automatic fee recommendation. Look at the mempool and decide for yourself. You'll save yourself a lot of money.

For the period of the 19th-25th May, the mempool was generally sitting just shy of the 100 MB mark, which means some nodes may have been dropping or not relaying low fee transactions, which might explain the discrepancy. Otherwise, it means that blockchain.com didn't see your transaction for some other reason. How long ago did you make the transaction? What date is shown on other block explorers? What wallet did you use to broadcast the transaction?

The "Received time" for each transaction on blockchain.com will be the time it was first broadcast to the node or nodes that blockchain.com use to source their data for their block explorer. If the mempool isn't so full that low fee transactions are being dropped by the majority of nodes, then it will almost certainly be accurate for the date. It may be several minutes out for the exact time, depending on how long it took a transaction to spread through the network (which could theoretically affect the date for transactions made within a few minutes of midnight).

You are correct.

There isn't actually a field for defining the fee in the transaction data. What you do define is which inputs to include in your transaction, and you define how many satoshis to send to each output. Defining a change address is just the same as defining any other output, as far the transaction is concerned. Whatever the difference is between the sum of the inputs and the sum of the outputs is taken as the fee.

Most wallets deal with all this automatically, but if for some reason a change output wasn't defined, then whatever wasn't sent to the recipient(s) would be taken as the fee.

That's how BIP39 seeds work. It is not how Electrum seed works.


You can try this out for yourself. Find the "english.txt" wordlist within your Electrum directory, back it up, and then edit it to contain any words you want. Create a new wallet, and it will give you a seed phrase using only your custom word list. Close Electrum, restore "english.txt" to the original, reopen Electrum, and create a new wallet, this time restoring from the seed you generated with your custom wordlist. The addresses will match.

Actually, it will work. Electrum only needs 2 words to create a seed. The seed it generates will be 132 "words" long (i.e. 132 bits), but it will still generate one for you.

The order of the wordlist for Electrum doesn't actually matter. In fact, you don't need to have the word list at all. If I use a custom wordlist to generate a seed on Electrum, I can restore that wallet from the same seed phrase on any copy of Electrum, with or without the custom worsdlist. The security could also very well be worse than the standard wordlist depending on how I pick my wordlist. If my wordlist is made up of 10 names of my immediate family members, then it will be very insecure.

You can also pick your own words from the BIP39 word list using a tool such as https://iancoleman.io/bip39/, which will calculate out the correct checksum and final word for you.

Picking your own words is a terrible idea though. I echo bob123's question - why do you want to use custom words?

Hopefully you have since changed to a better wallet. On May 22nd, at worst a fee of 111 sats/vbyte would have put you 2 MB from the tip, which isn't a low fee by any stretch of the imagination. The mempool was frequently clearing down to around 15 sats/vbtye, and went as low as 10 sats/vbyte. If 111 was the "minimum" your wallet would let you pay, then you were being grossly overcharged, and I shudder to think just how much the "high priority" fee it recommended would have been.

It is wallets like this that make fees excessive for everyone. There was no need to for you to pay a fee that high, and by doing so, other wallets see that high fee and then unnecessarily go even higher to try to overcome it. Even now, with the mempool essentially being empty for the last 24 hours, within 5 minutes of each block the fee to get within 0.1 MB of the tip jumps from 1 sat/vbyte to over 100 sats/vbyte. If everyone just took 5 seconds to pick a sensible fee, everyone would save >90% of their fee and still confirm just as quickly.

Huh. Didn't realize that prompted you for your password in a pop up box, rather than like the wallet.keystore.get_master_private_key('password') command, where you have to enter the password directly in the console, which then saves your password in plain text in your Electrum config file.

Whether or not the new transaction has RBF enabled is irrelevant. That's the not the transaction you are trying to replace.

khaled0111 is correct. All that this method is doing is attempting to double spend your initial transaction. The vast majority of nodes are set up to reject double spend transactions, even those with higher fees than the original, you will likely be hit with a mempool conflict error when you try to broadcast your new transaction. Even if you do find a node which accepts it, then that node will almost certainly be unable to broadcast it to other nodes for the same reason.

Did you attempt this method? What was the outcome?

Ahh my apologies, I misread that as "Why do folks not recommend Bitpay".

The most commonly recommended alternative is BTCPay, which if you pair with a payment forwarding service, can be configured to auto-convert to fiat. There is a good medium post explaining one way of setting this up here: https://medium.com/@prayankgahlot/instant-fiat-conversion-with-btcpay-1d2f3dd57352. In-built crypto to fiat conversion is also on BTCPay's roadmap for the future. BTCPay is self hosted and does not rely on any third parties.

There are other custodial/hosted payment processors which have in-built conversion, but without the privacy invading and anti-bitcoin stance of BitPay. CoinPayments and CoinGate are both quite common. They obviously require KYC from the merchant, but do not require KYC from the customers as BitPay does.

Here is a list of some other alternatives: https://github.com/alexk111/awesome-bitcoin-payment-processors

We shouldn't need it for any bitcoin transaction. The whole point of bitcoin is to be peer to peer, and not require approval from some third party who needs all your documents and to perform a full background check on you before deciding whether or not you are allowed to spend your own money. That's what fiat is for.

I would argue the opposite. If every time you want to spend bitcoin you are forced to perform KYC and send a photocopy of your passport to a payment processor, then bitcoin is going nowhere. There are already 20+ different payment processors, not to mention all the merchants who accept bitcoin directly, meaning you are more-or-less going to have to complete KYC for every new merchant you want to spend bitcoin at. Not only is that a massive inconvenience, but it's also a massive risk to your own security.

Or, if you already have Electrum installed and working on an airgapped computer as in OP's case, you can just pull the master private key directly from Electrum itself.

Remove the wallet password as pooya87 has said
If you don't have the console enabled, click View > Show Console
In the console, enter wallet.keystore.xprv
Then again go to Wallet > Password to re-enable your password

Transaction data does not include a timestamp.

Since SegWit, a block can contain up to 4 MB of data.

Since SegWit, transactions are measured in either virtual bytes or weight units. Measuring in plain bytes is no longer accurate unless you are dealing with a transaction which only contains legacy inputs and outputs.

This is only the case if you have 1 BTC in a single UTXO. In that case, you have to spend the whole UTXO and get 0.95 back as change. If, however, you have 1 BTC in your wallet but it is split among several UTXOs, then your wallet does not need to spend the whole amount, but rather the minimum amount of UTXOs to make up 0.05 BTC.

The letters after the colon, beginning with a "K" or a "L", are your private key.

The letters before the colon tell Electrum what kind of address to generate from the private key.

"p2pkh" generates Legacy addresses beginning with "1"
"p2wpkh-p2sh" generates Nested SegWit addresses beginning with "3"
"p2wpkh" generates Native SegWit addresses beginning with "bc1"

See the first reply in this thread and the link within it I posted.

Support for the Chrome apps has been discontinued for a long time. They do not work with any firmware versions since 1.5.5 which was released in January 2019, and they hadn't been actively developed for months before that. Using them means you are exposing yourself to risks and vulnerabilities in their code, and also exposing yourself to risks and vulnerabilities by using old firmware on your hardware device. This is not a recommended approach.

You can get your extended public key from Ledger Live by opening the relevant account, clicking on the "Edit account" icon in top right, and clicking on "Advanced Logs".

I mean, this is categorically not true. A very quick search on here, on Reddit, on Twitter, on Medium, etc., will reveal hundreds of users who were trading below the 2 BTC a day limit and got hit with demands for KYC, with Binance refusing to unlock their accounts and release their coins unless they complied. Binance can and will arbitrarily decide you have to complete KYC without any warning, and once they do, your options are either to give in or give up your coins.

I'd like to know what data you are basing that statement on, or if it is an unsupported statement you have just made up. Bisq, for example, has had exactly two incidents of scamming in its history - one involving chargebacks for which they have since removed the guilty payment method, and one involving an exploit in the code for which they are refunding the users affected. Compare this to the huge amount of BTC lost on centralized exchanges and the huge number of times we have see centralized exchanges disappear, exit scam, freeze or shut down accounts, have their wallets hacked, have your individual accounts hacked, etc. Trading on a centralized exchange is far more risky than trading on a proper peer-to-peer platform. Peer-to-peer trades are only risky if you are doing something stupid like picking a random newbie member from the marketplace and not using escrow.

That's the whole point. If someone's ratings start showing up as "trusted" in default trust or my own trust list, and I have no information whatsoever to judge them upon, then I can place exactly zero trust in those ratings. Therefore, I don't want to see them.

They haven't earned anyone else's trust and they have had no interaction with anyone else on the forum, so why shouldn't other people be allowed to distrust them without you opening a thread complaining about it?

If you are free to add users who have left no ratings whatsoever except a single positive rating to you to default trust, then other users are equally free to exclude such users.

There are a number of different types of mods which may or may not be able to handle a report depending on which board the report was made in and the rank of the user being reported. Local moderators and board specific moderators can only handle reports in their given boards. Patrollers can handle reports on posts made by newbies across the entire forum. Global mods and admins can handle all reports in all boards, as well as having some additional powers such as being able to issue bans. If you make a report, it will be visible to all the moderates who are able to handle it.

You only need to make some reports on Beginners and Help to confirm that they do indeed get handled. They will be handled by either a global moderator, or in the case of a newbie post, a patroller. MiningBuddy isn't actually a moderator at all anymore, his name just hasn't been removed from the page.

Make 300 good reports, and then go here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine