Using cloud storage is not a good idea. Once you've uploaded something to the cloud, you can never delete it. You have no idea how many servers around the world it will be stored on, and who will have access to those servers. You say you want to wait "some years" before spending your bitcoin. There is no way you can be absolutely sure that in the coming years there isn't some critical flaw exposed in the RAR program you used, or the algorithm it used, or the cloud storage provider's security, and so on. It's much safer to write it down or engrave it in metal and store it offline.

It's not "unsafe" per se, it's just that Electrum seed phrases don't use the BIP39 standard and therefore aren't compatible with other wallets. You can read here for the reasons why: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html?highlight=bip39#motivation

They are talking about privacy from third parties as opposed to privacy from Bitwage.

If you are being paid by Bitwage, then they obviously know who you are and how much they are paying you. They also know the address(es) that they are paying in to belong to you. What they don't know is all the other addresses in your wallet which you might use for receiving coins from elsewhere. If you give them your xpub, then they can now see every address in your wallet, including ones they aren't using, and know exactly how much bitcoin you have received from elsewhere.

However, if you give Bitwage a single address, and someone else has linked that address to you, then they know exactly how much you are being paid and when. If Bitwage had your xpub, they could send your wage to a different address you own each time, which would increase your privacy from third parties.

Bitwage don't accept xpubs though. What they do accept is a list of bitcoin addresses. This prevents them from seeing all your addresses via your xpub, and also prevents them paying in to the same address every time.

On one hand, I agree we should all be striving to give him as little attention as possible (read: no attention at all), as if everyone ignored him then he would almost immediately fade to irrelevance. However, whenever a thread is started about CSW, then we should be quick to debunk his lies for the sake of newbie and other inexperienced members who might be unaware that he is an identity thief and a scammer.

It is disappointing when we see senior/experienced members starting threads about him, as the only possible outcomes are to give him more publicity, and to potential lead some newbies down the path of being scammed. There is no good reason to open a thread about him unless you don't know any better.

Well, then you are completely free to choose another wallet which guarantee BIP39 support forever more. As pooya87 says, it's highly unlikely Electrum will stop supporting BIP39 since it means all Electrum wallets which use BIP39 suddenly become incompatible. They would be shooting themselves in the foot and alienating a large number of their customers. But even if they did, you can just take your BIP39 seed to another wallet, so no harm done to you individually.

Theoretically yes, but practically impossible, in the same way that address collision is theoretically possible but will never happen.

Even just looking at individual private keys, there are (just short of) 2²⁵⁶ keys. Given that each key is 32 bytes, that works out to somewhere in the region of 3*10⁵⁷ zettabytes just to store the private keys. For comparison, there is around 3 zettabytes of storage in the entire world right now. So we're off by a factor of around 1 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion just to be able to store the final private keys, even forgetting the multiple keys you have to derive to obtain each one, and forgetting generating addresses, and forgetting all the computing power to do so.

Privacy doesn't actually exist anymore for the majority of the population. Only an illusion. You only have to look at some of the revelations surrounding Snowden, the NSA, Cambridge Analytica, Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes, etc. And these are only the things we know about, that have been leaked. You can guarantee there is far, far worse still hidden from the public. You can tweak your Facebook settings to hide certain content from other people and tell Google to stop tracking your location, it makes no difference. We know these companies collect all your data regardless of what you ask them to do. Every website you visit, every email you send, every piece of data you sync to the cloud, everywhere you go, everyone you meet, everything you say. They can turn on your cameras, your microphones, your GPS trackers.

The scariest part of it all is that people don't care. Not only do they not care that they are being monitored, they are usually more than happy to help out and pay for the privilege by buying technology such as smart TVs and Amazon Echoes which have been proven to be monitoring you. People are quite literally paying to bug their own house.

Privacy is no longer a right for most people. It is an inconvenience. They are happy to have Amazon monitor their conversations if it means they don't have to (God forbid!) press a single button to skip to the next song. They are happy to have Facebook track their location if it means they can share pictures of their Starbucks coffee. They are happy to have the bank keep a track of everything they buy if it means they can just tap a card and not think twice about it.

We are ever more living in a surveillance state. Surveillance breeds compliance. Meek, fearful, unthinking compliance. You'll never step out of line if you know you are constantly being watched. Anything that can break that cycle - Tor, end-to-end encryption, PGP, bitcoin - is only going to become more important as time goes on.

Wait, so his argument is that when the new domain was registered back in 2011, the evil forum administrators had already foreseen the forking of BCH, the double forking of BSV, Wright becoming an identity thief, and decided to start editing his posts 7-8 years in advance? Foxpup, have you been lending out your time machine again?

Strange it took him 10 years to say something, especially since for a full year he claims someone else was posting under his pseudonym, releasing new builds, solving bugs, etc. Perhaps he realizes that it is blindingly obvious that the person who controlled the satoshi account had actual knowledge regarding coding which CSW is hilariously deficient in, so the only way out of that particular bind is to claim it was someone else?

He's certainly right about that. Everyone knows neither the account nor the posts are his.

If you are making an offer, you need to keep your Bisq client open and connected until your offer is accepted. If you go offline, your offer will disappear from the order books until you go back online. If you are accepting someone else's offer, then obviously you will be online anyway to be browsing offers to accept. Once your offer is accepted (or you have accepted an offer) and the trade has been initiated, there is no requirement to stay online permanently, but obviously you need to check back regularly to keep updated regarding your trade.

See here for more info: https://bisq.network/faq/#why-keep-bisq-online

I wouldn't say it would be inherently more risky just because there is low volume, just that it might take longer to find an offer, have an offer accepted, or actually transfer the fiat. If you want to test it out first, then BTC/XMR is definitely the best market to do so.

It is a 2-of-3 multi-sig escrow. If the trade is completed successfully, then the relevant deposit is returned to each party. If the trade is disputed (I've never had this happen), then an arbitrator who holds the third key steps in to resolve the dispute.

99% of all altcoins, regardless of age, are not serious at all.

Newbies are safer with bitcoin, and avoiding altcoins altogether.

Marketcap is a meaningless statistic. I could create a new token right now, print 1 billion of them, sell a single token to my friend for $10, and now my market cap is $10 billion and I'm the third "top" coin. Just because an altcoin is in the "top 10", means nothing. At least half the coins in the "top 10" are literal scams.

It says it after you tick the "BIP39 seed" checkbox under the "Options" pop up when importing a seed in to Electrum:



https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/a0b096dcb2292c2826f7beae173c529d335142f0/electrum/gui/qt/seed_dialog.py#L77

It says "We do not guarantee that BIP39 imports will always be supported", which is a bit different to "They are likely to be deprecated". A very quick GitHub search says that message has been there for at least 2 years. Given how ubiquitous BIP39 seeds phrases are, I can't foresee the Electrum devs discontinuing support for them anytime soon.

That's not the issue in blue Snow's case, though. If you use an Electrum generated non-BIP39 seed, then the default derivation path is m/0, meaning the first address is m/0/0, which is neither of the derivation paths he ended up on above. Even if he had managed to import that seed phrase as a non-BIP39 phrase (which he can't, because Electrum won't accept it as a non-BIP39 phrase), then the addresses at the derivation paths we have discussed above would be different to the addresses obtained. He obtained addresses linked to the BIP39 phrase both in and out of Electrum, so he managed to import the seed phrase correctly. His issue is with using custom derivation paths, not with importing the seed phrase incorrectly.

That's not accurate. Both address he gave are generate from the above BIP39 seed phrase at different derivation paths, as I showed in my last post.

Go to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/
Paste in the above seed phrase to the "BIP39 Mnemonic" field
Scroll down to "Derivation Path" and select "BIP32"
Under "Client" select "Custom derivation path"
Under "BIP32 Derivation Path" paste m/44'/0'/1'/1, scroll down, and the first address is 1Z1EM...
Under "BIP32 Derivation Path" paste m/44'/0'/1'/1'/0, scroll down, and the first address is 1NAxs...

Although Electrum by default doesn't use BIP39 seed phrases, when importing a seed phrase to Electrum you can click "Options" and select "BIP39 seed", as blue Snow must have done, otherwise he wouldn't have obtained the 1NAxs... address.

Importing a non-BIP39 seed in to Electrum as a BIP39 seed will never give you the same addresses, regardless of how much you change the derivation path.

Essentially yes, although you can remove the words "every 14 days" from the end of that sentence. The targeted mean rate of bitcoin blocks is one every 10 minutes.

The difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks. At exactly 10 minutes per block this would be exactly 14 days, but in reality will be longer or shorter than 14 days if the mean rate is slower or faster respectively.

If the mean rate of blocks over the last 2016 blocks is faster than 1 per 10 minutes, then at the next difficulty readjustment the difficulty will increase, and the mean rate of block production will slow down. The converse is also true, and if the mean rate of block production over the last 2016 blocks is slower than 1 per 10 minutes, then at the next difficulty readjustment the difficultly will decrease, and the mean rate of block production will increase. The aim is always to bring the mean rate back to 1 per 10 minutes.

Note that when considering difficulty, it is all about considering the mean rate of production over that difficulty period. As pointed out above, block times of greater than an hour are not uncommon, and usually have nothing to do with the hashrate. A prolonged block time or two won't affect anything directly, but they will serve to increase the mean block time when it comes to the difficulty readjustment. However, short block times of only a few minutes or less are similarly not uncommon. All these outlier block times tend to negate each other. It is the average that matters.

It should go without saying, but please make sure you only use that seed for practicing, and never send any coins to any of the address, since it is now publicly viewable to anyone and everyone.

So, if you use the derivation path m/44'/0'/1'/1/0 with that seed, you get the address 1Z1EMQjFuyRvG3vZhrQpQKPjbu4zwYXsh as you say.

The address 1NAxsdvXQeuEozUVvyVgge5B3vv1SutCB1 is found at the derivation path m/44'/0'/1'/1'/0/0. This means that in the derivation path box in Electrum, you must have entered m/44'/0'/1'/1'.

As I said above, you've added an entire extra level by adding in an extra /1', which results in a completely non-standard derivation path. It is possible (but not recommended) to add as many extra levels as you like - the key at each level is simply derived from the parent key at the level above it. But as you have discovered, when adding in additional levels you will end up with a completely different set of addresses, you might not be sure how you got there, and there is a very high potential to lose your coins.

These error codes are unique to the cryptoapis.io platform. They are nothing to do with bitcoin, bitcoin core, the bitcoin network, and despite what OP has said you will never encounter any of these codes unless you specifically use cryptoapis.io to trade. OP has simply copy and pasted something he doesn't understand in a transparent hunt for merit. It's not the first time this user has engaged in this kind of behavior.

This is compounded if are trading to or from fiat. Depending on which fiat payment method you are using, you may end up waiting a couple of days for your chosen method to process/clear/confirm/etc., especially over a weekend. To begin with this made me a bit uneasy, but if you stick to trading with trusted parties you should be fine. Much like if you trade a lot on the forum, over time you will build up a history with a couple of individuals and you will be more comfortable doing larger and larger trades with them.

Bisq removed payments methods which allow chargebacks such as PayPal to reduce the chance of fraud from that perspective, and as 20kevin20 says, both parties pay a security deposit to incentivize honesty and speed.

So in the screenshot of Electrum you have posted there, as you say m/44'/0'/1' refers to legacy addresses (44'), for bitcoin mainnet (0'), on the second account (1'). Every address generated within that wallet will have the same m/44'/0'/1' beginning to their derivation paths. You don't specify the last two numbers (which refer to change and address index) when generating a wallet, because every address generated within that wallet will have different last two numbers. The first receiving address in this example would be m/44'/0'/1'/0/0, the second would be m/44'/0'/1'/0/1, and the first change address would be m/44'/0'/1'/1/0.

Now, you've written the following: You need to be careful here, as you've added an extra /0' at the end that is unnecessary. If you override the suggested derivation path in Electrum with that, Electrum will use that to generate a wallet instead of m/44'/0'/1', so you will be left with a very non-standard derivation path of m/44'/0'/1'/0'/0/0 for your first address (and so on), which will generate an entirely new set of private keys and an entirely new set of addresses. If you don't remember that you've done that, then you could have serious problems trying to recover your coins in the future.

As Electrum says, if you don't fully understand derivation paths, it's best not to mess around with them, because you could lose your coins somewhere in the infinite number of addresses you can create.

Two additions to the above points.

Running alongside fractional reserve, is that when banks give out loans, they can create new money out of nothing. Lets say you take out a loan for $1000. The bank issues a credit to you of $1000, and also a debit against you of $1000. The bank's bottom line doesn't change; their books are still perfectly balanced - a new $1000 liability, and a new $1000 asset. Except now you have $1000 you can spend, $1000 which didn't exist before you took out the loan.

Secondly, a month ago, the Federal Reserve reduced the minimum reserve requirement of US banks from 10% to 0% - https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm. This essentially means banks can print unlimited money in the form of new loans, since there is no requirement for them to hold any percentage in their reserves.

No platform is ever going to be 100% safe. As Pmalek pointed out, there was a vulnerability exploited recently which led to 7 users losing money, although Bisq are planning to cover their losses. There are no currently known security vulnerabilities, but that's not to say none exist, which is the same for everything from your OS to Bitcoin Core.

It runs over Tor. If you want to remain completely anonymous, then you will need to use anonymous fiat methods such as cash or money order, and well anonymized bitcoins.

Yes, absolutely. See their fiat payment methods here: https://docs.bisq.network/payment-methods

Bisq have their own YouTube channel, which includes video tutorials. Here's their video playlist of how to get started on Bisq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTfM4AsxNHY&list=PLFH5SztL5cYOBvV3_TZJlFi14_65AbMwi

Sure, and if you commit serious crimes then you should be punished by the law, but we shouldn't be seeking to legislate against bitcoin in the process. If a bank robber is caught he goes to jail, but no one suggests we should ban cash to stop it from happening again. The same should be true of bitcoin. Commit a crime, the individual is punished, but the method of payment, be it cash, gold, bitcoin, whatever, is left out of it.

As I've said above, I would say that not only do we not have a solution, but we shouldn't have a solution. I've never spent bitcoin on anything illegal, but the day that a third party can decide to freeze or reverse my transaction because I've spent my own money on something they do not approve of, is the day I say goodbye to bitcoin.

Emphasis mine, and that's the crucial point. Their software is entirely closed source, so we have no idea actually what they can and cannot access. They say it's not custodial, they say they have no access to your seed phrase or private keys, they say everything is completely secure. We have no idea, and can only take them at their words. Whatever happened to "Don't trust, verify"? Given the number of security flaws they have had in the past, and given the number of posts on here and on reddit from users who have had their funds stolen from a blockchain.com wallet, I certainly won't be trusting them any time soon.