You can set up an airgapped wallet using an old laptop. It doesn't have to be a Raspberry Pi - this is simply the cheapest option if you are buying a device specifically for this purpose. Any old laptop you have lying around can be repurposed in to cold storage.

It depends what you are trying to achieve here. A Ledger Nano S is perfectly acceptable to use as long term storage. You don't also need a cold storage wallet on an old mobile phone, although you can set this up if you want. In your situation, I would probably use the Ledger Nano as a cold wallet to store the majority of your bitcoin which you keep at home, and a mobile wallet as a hot wallet which stores a small amount of "spending" bitcoin which you carry with you. You can then top up your mobile wallet from your cold storage as needed.

Here's what Satoshi actually said on the matter:

Even if bitcoin became a global currency, he was in favor of sticking to the 21 million cap, and potentially forking to show more decimal places. As I said above, the Lightning Network already deals with milli-satoshi.

Says who? 21 million divided among 8 billion people is 0.002625 per person. 30 million divided among 8 billion people is 0.00375. It is impossible to say one is "extremely scarce" and the other is "relatively scarce".

I mean, I've been making these points on multiple occasions long before I was DT1, but whatever fits your narrative. I also don't actually care whether or not I am on DT. I do care about thousands of newbies who don't know any better seeing "trusted" feedback from scammers and people gaming the system for their own benefit.

As Loyce says, my suggestions would decrease the power of DT1 members, not increase it. Why would you take issue with that?

Requiring inclusions from at least 2 or 3 DT1 users to become DT2 would largely negate this problem, along with the problem of trust self-scratching. Increasing the requirements to be voted on to DT1 wouldn't be a bad move either.

Ahh right, you are comparing the fee they actually charge against the fee they could charge for a "high priority" transaction.

However, if you compare the fee they charge for the time you have to wait, compared to the fee you would pay yourself for the same wait time, then you will almost always be better using your own wallet. Sure, you could pay 2000 sats, be lucky that your transaction is the last one to be included in the batch waiting list, and have it broadcast and included in the next block. But more likely is that you will pay the fee and have to wait several hours for other people to request enough withdrawals for your transaction to be broadcast. Meanwhile, you could have made your own transaction at one tenth of the fee and already have been confirmed.

There is around $37 trillion in narrow money.
There is around $73 trillion in all stock markets combined.
There is around $90 trillion in broad money.
There is around $0.5 - 1 quadrillion in derivatives.

If we ever reached the point of 1 sat = 1 dollar, then 21 million bitcoin would be worth 2.1 quadrillion dollars, more than enough to cover every market in the world and then some. If you still think 21 million isn't enough, then a far better option to increasing the market cap is to subdivide it further. Lightning Network already works in milli-satoshi.

You will also find some good alternatives at these links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google
https://prism-break.org/en/

They are focused mainly towards privacy rather than decentralization, but since there is a significant cross-over you will find quite a few decentralized or self-hosted alternatives on those sites. Certainly if censorship resistance is you main motivation given your comment regarding YouTube, then you will find links to a number of decentralized or peer-to-peer YouTube alternatives.

Wallets don't have fees. Transactions have fees. You should find a wallet which lets you pick your own fee, and doesn't dictate a fee to you.

I'm not sure I follow you here. What do you mean they take a "slightly smaller fee compared to a transaction's fee"? They are charging 1772 sat for a withdrawal in 6 hours. Given that even without batching a withdrawal would be a simple 1-input 2-output transaction of around 220 bytes, 220 sat would probably be enough to confirm within 6 hours. Almost all centralized services overcharge for withdrawals because they have to cover the costs of consolidation transactions which happen in the background, as well as take a bit of profit.

Then don't reuse addresses and don't broadcast which addresses belong to you.

That's nothing to do with bitcoin. Bitcoin remains decentralized, and it is entirely possible to use bitcoin to its full extent without ever touching a centralized platform. If people want to use centralized exchanges to buy centralized scam coins, then that's on them.

Nonsense. If you decide that only criminals deserve privacy, then the only ones who will have any privacy will be criminals. If you think privacy isn't a big deal, please share your real name, email address, social media profiles, and passwords to all your accounts, so I can have good snoop around your life and post whatever I like publicly. No? Didn't think so. Why is that any different to letting anyone who wants snoop around your financial transactions?

Hence the beauty of a passphrase. If your seed is stolen, it is useless on its own, and if your passphrase is stolen, it is similarly useless on its own. If you want even more security then you can store your seed encrypted or even split it in to a 2-of-3 or similar secret sharing configuration.

Then use different wallets. I have a mobile wallet I use which I simply back up with a seed written on paper in one place. It's easy to use and portable, but much higher risk of being stolen than my cold storage. But I only store a small amount of bitcoin on it compared to my main cold storage. In the same way that you have cash in your wallet, a checking account, a savings account, a credit card, you should have different bitcoin wallets for different purposes.

Yeah, they did. You can read here (about halfway down): https://bitpay.com/blog/bitpay-dashboard-id/ If you make a payment of more than the equivalent of $3,000 using BitPay, so around a third of a bitcoin in today's prices, you get asked for KYC.

I would suggest that if a merchant uses BitPay, then you choose a different merchant if at all possible, even if you don't trigger their KYC threshold. BitPay are anti-privacy and anti-bitcoin, and funded by known scammer Roger Ver. Do any of these gift card providers use BitPay? Gift cards in particular are one area where there is no shortage of merchants to choose from, so avoiding BitPay should be easy enough.

If a merchant you are using is using BitPay, ask them to look in to switching to BTCPay instead.

I can't see any information regarding regulations, terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc., on your site. In fact, I can't really see any meaningful information at all. Am I missing something? Please provide a direct link to the information regarding the European Regulations you are following.

If I had a satoshi for every time I'd seen a person/company/business/entity "promise" not to violate their users' privacy, and then do so anyway when the government comes knocking, then I'd hold more bitcoin than Coinbase (who also sold out their customers to the IRS).

Who mediates the dispute? What access does this mediator have to the coins involved in the dispute? Are the coins in a multi-sig wallet?

You haven't addressed my question regarding KYC. What information and KYC documents will you require from your users?

Multiple back ups and redundancy. For my main cold storage, I have my seed phrase backed up on paper in two separate places and my passphrase backed up on paper in two separate places. Add those back ups to the actual wallet itself (which is encrypted and on a permanently offline device), then I would at a minimum need to suffer complete and simultaneous data loss in at least three geographically separate and very safe/secure locations to mean I lose access. This is incredibly more robust than having everything stored in only one place, especially a place so fragile as your brain.

You are wrong here. There are hundreds of reasons someone might suffer memory loss, and many of them are completely unpredictable and can happen to anybody at any time with no warning. Everything from head trauma from a simple trip or fall, through to an aneurysm in your brain you didn't know existed rupturing. Even with slow onset memory loss, many people don't realize their memory is fading until they've already forgotten significant amounts of details, by which time it would probably be too late for you to access your coins. 15 million people have a stroke each year. 70 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury each year. 10 million people develop dementia each year. That's an awful lot of people with the potential for memory loss. I don't like those odds.

On the site it explains your passphrase is hashed using SHA256, and the output is used as the entropy needed to create a BIP39 seed phrase.

Interestingly, if you look at the source code, since it is mostly lifted directly from https://iancoleman.io/bip39/, it copied across the feature to perform a SHA256 hash if you are not using the "raw entropy" option, so in reality, your passphrase is hashed twice.

https://github.com/armorybrainwallet/brain2bip/blob/master/js/index.js#L292
Here is the first section of code where it SHA256 hashes your brain passphrase to generate your entropy

https://github.com/armorybrainwallet/brain2bip/blob/master/js/index.js#L1132
And then the second section of code where it SHA256 hashes your entropy a second time

You can test all this yourself. For example:

Inputting the string "thisisatest" as a Brain Passphrase, generates the following 24 word seed phrase: couch machine virus lion good camp topic maid common plunge history love where online case chest library shuffle obvious post okay force envelope birth

If you perform a SHA256 hash on "thisisatest", you generate the following 256 bit output: a7c96262c21db9a06fd49e307d694fd95f624569f9b35bb3ffacd880440f9787
If you perform a SHA256 hash on the above number, you generate the following: 30f0b3d241164641b944302e74ddb0c23fa535c8c93c8118ee62d4599eb612f0
If you then convert that second number in to binary, you get the following (which I've split in to groupings of 11):


You can then take each grouping of 11, convert it back in to decimal, and map it the relevant BIP39 word. 00110000111 in decimal is 391, which maps to "couch" at position 392 on the BIP39 word list (remembering to add one since your converted numbers will start at 0, whereas the word list starts at 1). 10000101100 in decimal is 1068, which maps to "machine" at position 1069. And so on.

If you are looking for the security and ease of use of a hardware wallet, then why not just buy a hardware wallet? If you catch a good sale or promotion, you can get a Ledger Nano S for around $40.

If you want real cold storage, then either you will need to use a paper wallet or a secondary device which is permanently airgapped (i.e. no internet connection). As ranochigo says, this device could be a Raspberry Pi, but it could also be an old desktop or laptop you aren't using anymore. Some people will even use an old mobile phone in airplane mode or a live OS on their main computer, although neither of these approaches are as secure as a second computer without any internet capabilities whatsoever.

Paper wallets also provide a large degree of security, but to set them up securely you should also be doing so from a permanently airgapped computer, so this doesn't really help your situation if not having access to a second computer is this issue.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of web wallets which only require an email address and password or wallet ID and password, which OP says he has. In fact, many web wallets don't let you access your private keys at all, so you certainly don't need them to gain access to your account.

If you set a password on your Electrum wallet, then all it protects is that specific wallet file. It is not linked to your seed or private keys in any way, and if you have your seed or private keys stored elsewhere, then you can import them in to a new wallet with an entirely different password or no password at all, with no knowledge of the original password.

BISQ is my go-to for trading at the moment, and I wish it had more users and more liquidity. It all comes down to convenience again. If you are willing to give up your privacy to Binance, then no one can pretend that Binance isn't incredibly more convenient than BISQ. With BISQ you have to download clients, browser for offers you like or wait for someone to accept your offer, pay security deposits, wait sometimes for hours for the other person to complete their side of the deal, if you are transacting with fiat then wait hours for the fiat payment method to process, etc. With Binanace you can deposit, trade, withdraw, and be done in 20 minutes (provided they don't freeze your account or demand a compliance review or some other nonsense). Unfortunately, as I spoke about in my first post in this thread, people are all too willing to give up their privacy in exchange for convenience, everything from having a Google Home record all their conversations to sending their documents to complete strangers across the internet.

I would agree with this, and it's something I've talked about on a couple of occasions before, most recently here - A board for Privacy, Security, and online Safety? We see quite a lot of threads regarding general privacy and security dotted about the forum in various boards where they don't really fit. A dedicated board would not only help to organize these topics in one place, but it would be a good starting point for users to educate themselves further, as you say.

No. I got lucky and iasenko didn't.

The exact number of activity you need to turn from Hero to Legendary is random per user. For interest, you can see the formula used for calculating the activity requirement here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237597.msg8298386#msg8298386

Essentially, your user ID is concatenated with a salt, the result is hashed using SHA-1, the first byte of that hash is taken, converted from base 16 to base 10 (giving a number between 0 and 255), and added to 775 to give a result between 775 and 1030. It is impossible to calculate this number without knowing what salt theymos has used in his equation.

Yes it can. That is the basis behind a double spend attack. It also happens when staled blocks are dropped from the network. That's why many services will require you to wait for 6 confirmations before crediting your deposit, as transaction with 0 or 1 confirmation can be altered.

No it isn't. Bitcoin is a tool to transact peer-to-peer. If people choose to misuse that tool to steal from others, then so be it, but that doesn't make a bitcoin a "tool for stealing" any more than it makes the internet a "tool for stealing" because email scams exist.

If you were to simply "start" using addresses at index 100 as you say, it wouldn't make any difference, as you don't need to derive all the keys in between index 0 and the index you are interested in. The process for generating a child private key simply takes your parent public key, your parent chain code, and the index you are interested in, and hashes them together, before adding the left 256 bits (modulo n) to your parent private key. You can derive index 100 (or 100,000, or 2 billion), just as quickly as you can derive index 0. If, for example, you thought your address was around index 100, then you could search your addresses 90-110 just as quickly as you could search 0-20.

The issue would be if you had no idea what your address index is and you needed to derive every address from 0-100.