I think handing it over to an organization, or at least a small group of people, rather than a single person would be a much better solution. Such an organization could include people with the most commits to bitcoin.org, such as Will Binns and David Harding, the most commits to bitcoin core such as Wladimir van der Laan and Pieter Wuille, and some other well known and trusted developers like Greg Maxwell and Andrew Chow. These are just names I've pulled off the top of my head - would be interested to hear other suggestions (or indeed, if the people I've named would actually have any interest in doing so).

Bitcoin Wiki page in question: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitcoinPaperWallet

Please see this thread for full details: Why has my newly created Bitcoin address already been used?

There is a preponderance of evidence that the site BitcoinPaperWallet.com is now a scam. It was sold in 2018, and since then, there are multiple reports of users having their coins stolen from addresses created by that site - see the linked thread above for links to forum posts and reddit threads stating as much. Since it was sold, although the site still makes references to their GitHub repository, no GitHub link could be found. The Wiki page still states it is open source (which is no longer the case), and links to the old GitHub repository which hasn't been updated in over 2 years - https://github.com/cantonbecker/bitcoinpaperwallet.

The Wiki pages should be updated to reflect these developments, for the safety of users reading it.

Ooft. Having a closer read of the text on their website, it is fully of shady implications like this.

This is utterly meaningless. "Based on a trusted open-source engine"? All the scam versions of Electrum which were downloaded were "based on a trusted open-source engine".

Can anyone find a GitHub repository? I can't find a single link anywhere on the site. The original is here: https://github.com/cantonbecker/bitcoinpaperwallet, but obviously hasn't been updated in 2 years.

Their "endorsement" by Andreas Antonopoulos was from before the site was sold.

Worth noting that the Bitcoin Wiki still says it is open-source and links to the now defunct GitHub. This needs updated. I'll make a post in the Wiki board.

I've only given these a quick skim, but they seem to be giving accurate and sensible advice. Having said that, the full "Hodl Guide" is quite complicated and probably beyond the scope of what you want to set up as a first time user. The "Hodl Guide Light" for using your Ledger device with Electrum is more than enough for the majority of users. There's also a guide on how to do this direct from Ledger themselves: https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005161925-Set-up-and-use-Electrum

Guess the right post number and transaction hash before he makes them, and I'm officially revoking your "Verified human" status.

I don't know if you already knew this, or if that sentence was just sheer luck, but you can actually suffer from heart failure secondary to a stress inducing event, which includes such things as being told you have cancer or some other life threatening condition. It's called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as broken heart syndrome.

The community and the developers. If you decide you want to use larger blocks, there are plenty of altcoins you can pick from which do so.

They don't. Block size has only been changed once, from a limit of 1 MB to an effective limit of 4 MB, as hatshepsut93 has explained above.

That's not quite accurate. First, block weight is measured in weight units, not in MB. Secondly, not all blocks have a maximum weight. It is certainly the case at the moment, because the mempool is full and therefore every block is full of transactions, but if you look back a week or so to when blocks weren't full, then you will find plenty of blocks with a weight far below the 4 million limit. For example, block 629169 had a weight of only 577 kWU.

If your Ledger device is not connected to your phone then the app essentially becomes a watch-only wallet. You can view your accounts and balances, and you can generate receiving addresses, although you will be met with a warning that any addresses generated without your hardware wallet connected can not be verified. You will not be able to make any transactions without connecting your hardware wallet.

If the app was able to make transactions on its own without the hardware wallet connected, then that would mean that your private keys were no longer stored in the hardware wallet and were instead stored in the mobile app, making the mobile app no better than any other mobile wallet. The whole point of the hardware wallet is the private keys never leave it, so the coins accessed by those keys cannot be moved unless the hardware wallet is connected.

A lot of it is to do with people just accepting whatever fee their wallet tells them to use, which as we know are often wildly inaccurate and overpriced. If you look back at yesterday, blocks 630,116, 7 and 8 were all found in the space of 7 minutes, which cleared out all the high fee transactions. At that point, a fee of 14 sat/vbyte would have put you within 0.1MB of the tip of mempool. Within 5 minutes, despite the mempool increasing in size by only 0.6MB, the fee to get within 0.1MB of the tip had skyrocketed to 120 sat/vbyte. It is completely unnecessary, and if everyone involved had paid a little bit of attention and chosen a sensible fee, they would all have saved ~80% of their fees.

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blockstream.info shows the fees correctly in sat/vbyte.
blockchair.com shows in the incorrect "Fee per byte" at the top right, but if you click on "Click to see more", it does also show "Fee per kVB" in bitcoin per kilo-virtual-byte, which you can easily convert to sat/vbyte in your head.

Technically, we should all just be working with sat/vbyte at all times. As nc50lc has said, sat/vbyte is identical to sat/byte for legacy transactions, meaning sat/vbyte will always be accurate regardless of what kind of transaction you make, whereas the same is not true of sat/byte and segwit transactions, as we have seen in this case. Continuing to use sat/byte when they are inaccurate 50% of the time only leads to unnecessary confusion.

Or unless you read the source code to see how the k values were being generated, as I said above.

Provided you are importing your paper wallet to an airgapped computer in the privacy of your own house, and you don't have a camera pointed at you while you are doing it or something equally stupid, what kind of things are you referring to that make a paper wallet more risky than an airgapped wallet?

It's a shame, but you are correct. Until there is a bigger push back from the community against merchants who continue to support anti-bitcoin companies like BitPay, then they will continue to use them just for their convenience. And given that there is generally a limited pool of merchants accepting bitcoin at all, then most users will continue to shop at those companies using BitPay because there are no alternatives.

It is possible to set up automatic fiat conversion with BTCPay, using automatic payment forwarding to an exchange, and then automatic selling on said exchange, but obviously that's considerable more work to set up than BitPay. There is a medium article about it here: https://medium.com/@prayankgahlot/instant-fiat-conversion-with-btcpay-1d2f3dd57352. BTCPay have said that automatic fiat conversion is on their roadmap, so hopefully once they implement that it will be easier to convince companies to stop using BitPay.

Well, you would certainly hope so. It's not like the halving was unpredictable - we've known it was coming for a decade. Any responsible miner should have figured out and implemented whatever steps they needed to take to remain profitable after the halving well in advance.

The most accurate data we have suggest that 74% of energy used in bitcoin mining is from renewable sources. The main cost with using renewables is the set up fee, but once you've paid for the solar panels, wind turbines, whatever, then their upkeep cost is minimal. In these cases it makes no sense for miners to stop mining - they've already paid to install the renewable generators and can't get that money back, so turning their ASICs off would just be wasting free electricity.

Any coin or token which is only listed on a single, unknown, shady exchange, isn't worth your time or money. You will end up being scammed by either the exchange or the token itself.

Your default position should be to not give your personal data to anyone. And just because an exchange is listed on Coinmarketcap or a similar site doesn't mean it is automatically legitimate. These sites are simply a list of coins, tokens, and exchanges which exist. They do zero research as to whether or not they are scams.

The other choice is to stop spamming this forum and other websites with adverts for meaningless altcoins and tokens which exist only to make their creators easy money. They are all scams.

It isn't. Authy is free. However, it is also not open source, so it's a poor choice of 2FA app. Google Authenticator, like all things owned by Google, is an even worse choice, though.

There are plenty of good, free, open source, apps out there which have far more functionality and have allowed encrypted exports and back ups for years. Options include andOTP and Aegis on Android, and Authenticator and Tofu on iOS.

There have been 123 blocks mined since the halving, and it took 20 hours and 21 minutes to mine them. This gives an average of 9 minutes and 55 seconds per block. Between the halving and the last difficulty adjustment, there were 1007 blocks mined in 6 days, 15 hours and 18 minutes, for an average of 9 minutes and 29 seconds per block.

If there has been a drop in hashrate in the last 20 hours (it's not a huge amount of data to go on, and so random chance will fuzzy the numbers a bit), then it has been small and likely hasn't dropped below what the hashrate was when the difficulty was last adjusted. If miners do start feeling a pinch in their profits, it's likely to be over the coming days to weeks and not immediately though, so it's too early to draw conclusions.

At both previous halvings, it was the second difficulty adjustment after the halving where we saw a significant decrease in difficulty signifying a drop in the hashrate.

Block 211,680 saw a 2.00% reduction
Block 213,696 saw a 11.59% reduction

Block 421,344 saw a 0.04% increase
Block 423,360 saw a 5.43% reduction

If the hashrate is going to be affected from this, it's too soon to tell.

There were quite a few "Happy Halving" and "Thank you Satoshi" messages in block 630,001, but there weren't any at all in 630,000. Seems like the 20 second block time caught out everyone who was waiting for 629,999 to be mined before broadcasting their transaction with a high fee.

We had a price prediction of $148k by the end of next year:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/916145cc845e969b89be7ee25ce927a9c9480936a9897984a4b4f54339f1a68d

A couple mentioning COVID-19:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/065f61e52271bd7d3c154f79f68cc2a7704e32bdd4d2922c5601859cd592f6bd
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/70a8639bc9b743c0610d1231103a2f8e99f4a25670946b91f16c55a5373b37d1

These are all OP_RETURN data though. No other mining pool included any message (outwith their usual stamp) in the coinbase data.

Yes, that will work fine.

So in this case, OP bought BTC at Coinbase and withdrew it to Trust Wallet, but is now holding a BEP2 pegged token in his Trust Wallet. Since Coinbase obviously doesn't support a Binance pegged token, that means that somewhere along the line Trust Wallet has converted his BTC to a BEP2 token. Did OP mistakenly select that feature without realizing it, or has Trust Wallet automatically exchanged it as soon as it was deposited? That would be super shady if Trust Wallet is automatically converting BTC deposits to some stupid Binance token without people asking for it.

If you are going to use something like Electrum on your airgapped device to import your hand-generated seed phrase to give you an address to send to, then you could skip manually calculating the hash for the checksum altogether and just brute force it, as Electrum will tell you when you are using an invalid checksum. With the first 3 bits of entropy already known, there will only be 256 possible words.

You still need to be sure that the software you are using isn't just spitting out pre-generated addresses regardless of what seed phrase you enter. You could go through the process of performing each operation from seed to address manually, or more simply (as Loyce has said above) you could import your seed phrase in to multiple different wallets (all airgapped of course) and ensure the generated addresses match up.

Yeah, there's no good reason to settle for an invalid checksum. If you input a 24 word phrase in to iancoleman which has an invalid checksum and then click "Show entropy details", it will automatically change the final word to the correct checksum, maintaining the same 3 bits of initial entropy. Doing so will obviously then lead to a different wallet with different addresses, so can only lead to more confusion down the line.

All I meant was that it was set up in the same way you would generate any secret share, paper wallet, mnemonic seed, etc., to ensure that your secret isn't stolen in the process of you creating it. It should be done preferably on a permanently airgapped computer, but if that is not possible, then at the very least on a computer booted to a live OS from a USB drive or similar with the internet access disabled, printed using a "dumb" printer, with no one else around at the time, etc.

I would say that using any m-of-n secret share where m = n leaves you open to data loss though if you lose a single share, which is why most people would opt for using a setup where m < n. If I was going to do a 2-of-2 secret share, I would be making two copies of each secret, which kind of defeats the point in the first place. Why do a 2-of-2 and print each secret twice when you could do a 3-of-4 and have better security.