You shouldn't be using the same passwords on any two sites or services, and certainly not on sites or services dealing with your money or personal information. Use a password manager such as KeePass to generate and store long and random unique passwords for each site. You should also be using 2FA with an open source authenticator app such as Authy or Aegis on all exchanges.

Most (all?) multi-coin wallets are closed source, and so should be avoided, but having said that, most altcoins are trash and should also be avoided. If you are intent on keeping a variety of useless coins, then at least invest in a hardware wallet to store them securely.

Not sure what you mean by this? It is not only possible but highly recommended to create your own wallet and store your coins yourself, rather than relying on third party to store them for you.

There is always going to be a trade off between ease of use and security. If you want something that is incredibly easy to use (as easy as unlocking your phone, for example), then it's also going to be incredibly easy to attack. There needs to be a safe compromise. Saying that all cold wallets are hard to make a transaction from is incorrect, though. If you are using a classical paper wallet, and you need to import your keys and create a new paper wallet to manually direct the change to, then sure, that would be hard for most people. The trade off is a hardware wallet - not quite as secure as a paper wallet, but still incredibly more secure than a hot wallet, and it is as easy to make a transaction from it as plugging it in and typing in your PIN code. A few seconds extra work, certainly not hard, and huge improvements to security over a hot wallet. Hardware wallets are the best security/ease of use compromise for many bitcoin users.

I mean, you are correct in saying there is no 100% guaranteed safe way to store your coins, just as there is no 100% guaranteed safe way to prevent your computer from being hacked. But saying that hot wallets carry "a little bit more risk" than cold storage is far from accurate. I could list 100 potential ways you could lose funds from a hot wallet, from the wallet provider exit scamming, to having poor security on their servers, to your account being phished, to clipboard malware on your computer, all of which would be several orders of magnitude more likely to happen than someone breaking in to your house, finding your cold storage, breaking the encryption on it, and stealing your coins from it. Hot wallets carry an exponentially higher risk of loss of your coins than using proper cold storage.

It's like comparing a computer which is connected to a public WiFi without any security measures in place, with a computer without a WiFi card, ethernet card, or other internet accessing hardware, which is permanently offline, and locked in safe. Sure, neither is 100% safe, but one is vastly superior to the other.

You say tinfoil hat, but it's not a ridiculous statement to make. There have been too many reports to ignore of people who have casually talked about something with their friends or family, and then start seeing ads related to that conversation on Google, Facebook, etc.

I am so glad I grew up in an age before social media. I have never owned a social media account, but I have plenty of friends who do and despite my best efforts there are still a handful of photos of me on their profiles/walls/accounts/whatever across various social media sites. Nothing incriminating, thankfully. Given how ubiquitous various social media sites are now, the majority of children of today probably have hundreds if not thousands of pictures of them strewn across the internet by the time they hit their 20s, including I'm sure pictures which could affect future education, careers, relationships, etc.

How do you know that? How do you know how many people at the bank can see your account? How do you know all those people are trustworthy and won't share that information with other people? How do you know how many third parties or governments the bank shares that information with? How do you know how many people at those third parties or governments can view that data? How do you know they are trustworthy? There is no end to the number of faceless strangers you have to trust with your privacy. If I have bitcoin in an address which is not connected to my identity, then there is nobody I have to trust with my privacy.

There are plenty of ways around all this, even if you can't spend bitcoin directly (the preferred option). You can sell bitcoin for fiat peer-to-peer using an anonymous payment method such as cash or a money order. You can sell bitcoin for gift cards for your chosen retailer, or use a third party service which will buy on your behalf. If you are shipping, you can ship to a drop off point and pick it up, or a PO Box or similar.

Most people are incredibly lax with the security of their emails, and willingly submit their email address to every ICO, airdrop, exchange, or other nonsense which offers them payment in some worthless untradeable token that's just been created out of thin air. It is trivially easy to collect thousands of email address of cryptocurrency users by launching a fake token. You can even get these users to advertise your fake token to other users, thereby gathering even more email addresses, by starting up a bounty and social media campaign and promising to pay them in your fake token. It literally costs you nothing. There are also huge lists of email addresses which can be bought, or even obtained for free, which have been leaked or hacked from various big centralized services.

There are a lot of people on this forum with a variety of utterly insane views on a variety of topics, everything from believing the Earth is flat to believing that drinking bleach will cure COVID-19. Having a proportion of conspiracy nuts and pseudoscience believers is the price you pay for having a forum which espouses free speech, and we shouldn't be seeking to censor or remove them in any way.

The trust system should not be used because of differences in opinion, even when the other person's opinion (as in these cases) is completely moronic. It should be used for things that make trading with that person high risk. There might be other reasons why these users would be high risk to trade with, but not understanding science doesn't automatically mean that person is more likely to default on a loan or scam you in a trade.

This thread is a great example of what I was just talking about yesterday here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5242171.msg54275563#msg54275563

OP clearly has no idea what constitutes a "good" wallet, which wallets are recommended and which wallets should be avoided at all costs. As pooya87 has pointed out above, web wallets and closed sources wallets like Blockchain.com and Coinomi (both of which OP has suggested), are the worst possible wallets you can pick, opening you up to a huge amount of additional risk to both your security and your privacy. OP has made a "guide" thread about a topic he doesn't understand because he thinks it will be an easy way to earn merit.

In case it is somehow not obvious enough that my already rented avatar is not available to be rented by virtue of it already being rented, consider this post public notice that my already rented avatar is not available to be rented.

I do not think such an insignificant announcement regarding my already rented avatar not being available to be rented (because, if you remember from the beginning of this post, it is already rented) warrants its own thread.

I wouldn't recommend it, even if you consider that the user will reset the device before using it (which we know from previous successful attacks that many don't).

As discussed above, I'm also not aware of any successful attack where an attacker has managed to tamper with the physical hardware inside a Ledger device and steal the user's coins in that way, but that's not to say a potential attack doesn't exist and we simply aren't aware of it yet. It seems ridiculous to me to take such a risk to save yourself probably somewhere in the region of $20, for a device you are going to be using to secure hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin.

I would only ever buy direct from the manufacturer.

You are wrong on two counts. Bitcoin was never designed to be private - in fact the opposite, with the white paper clearly stating that "transactions must be publicly announced" - and so the value of bitcoin is unrelated to its privacy. Secondly, despite this, it remains entirely possible to use bitcoin anonymously (or as close to it as possible) if you take the necessary steps to do so - single use addresses, over Tor, decentralized trading, untraceable counter payment methods, etc.

Only if you let them through either naivety or carelessness. If you are signing up to every useless airdrop and ICO you see, handing out your email addresses, crypto addresses, reusing the same passwords, maybe completing KYC and sending your documents to complete strangers, then yes, your details are probably already available to be bought on the dark web and centralized exchanges will have handed over all your information to the relevant governments. If, on the other hand, you only trade peer-to-peer, never complete KYC, never give our your name, email address, or any other details, use the internet over Tor, etc., then it is going to be much harder for hackers or governments to invade your privacy.

That doesn't mean your accounts are private, it just means you are lying to your family. You have absolutely zero idea how many people at the bank know about your account, how many third parties they share that information with, how many governments they report to, etc.

It is impossible to draw conclusions about the global usage of bitcoin from personal experience. My personal experience is that all centralized exchanges are scams and I have never and will never complete KYC anywhere. The data show I am in the minority, just as they also show that bitcoin being used for illegal purposes is in the minority.

Again - exchanges are not wallets. Using them as such puts you at a huge risk of using your coins. Even if the government orders KYC, you can still just download a real wallet like Electrum and use that instead.

It is a complete contradiction to talk about privacy and security but also suggest that people should use custodial wallets with full KYC which are linked to their fiat bank accounts. These kind of wallets are the enemy of privacy and security.

In what ways are banks even in the least bit private? They know exactly how much you own, can see every transaction you make, and will pass it all over to the government if asked. They are the antithesis of private.

Lol. That's a pretty big thing you have to worry about. Using bitcoin as a retirement fund is incredibly risky - bitcoin could be worth almost anything (including nothing at all) in 20+ years.

An often repeated statement, with absolutely zero evidence or data to back it up. Bitcoin is not favored by criminals, does not increase crime, and only a minority of bitcoin transactions have anything to do with illegal or illicit trades.

No real wallet is demanding an ID or KYC to use it. The only things demanding that are online services, exchanges, web "wallets" and so forth, which aren't wallets at all since somebody else owns your coins. If you are storing your coins in one of these, you should withdraw them to your own wallet immediately.

In this example I would go further and say don't post at all. Anyone can type "cryptocurrency book" in to a search engine and look at the results. Doing exactly that and posting your results in a thread is neither helpful to the OP nor contributing to the discussion. If someone wants recommendations on books, they want recommendations from people that have actually read the book, not someone who can search for the names of books online.

If I'm asking a question on the forum, I want responses from people who understand the subject or have experience of the topic at hand. I don't want a list of copy and pasted responses I can easily find myself. I'd probably even report/delete such comments for being low value.

Examples A and B you've given should be trashed immediately, no question. Copy and pasting just an article, or even just a link, and providing not a single original thought, comment, question, etc., is essentially legalized plagiarism. It shows absolutely zero effort on the part of the poster, and zero interest in contributing to the forum or stimulating a discussion.

A lot of the time the person doesn't provide a summary or further comment because they are too lazy, are only posting to fill a quota, and maybe haven't even read the article they are copying. However, some of the time it's because they don't understand what they are posting. There have been quite a few newbies making technical guides or tutorials, linking to or copying technical articles, etc., recently which are either inaccurate or sometimes completely wrong, and it's clear they have no idea what they are talking about. It's a transparent attempt to gain merit, and you often see several other spammers talking about how great the guide/article is who also clearly have no idea what they're talking about.

As much as I agree with OP's points, I would preface them by saying don't actually post or offer suggestions or recommendations at all unless you really understand what you are talking about. Many newbies will blindly follow bad or inaccurate advice, to their own detriment.

The last link in OP's post has the text of these scams in it, so you can see what it looks like.

Even though this is a scam, and the scammer does not have a video of you, having a webcam pointed at you at all times isn't exactly a great idea. There are plenty of photos online of people who work for various security agencies (FBI, NSA, etc.) who have put tape or similar over the webcams on their laptops. I would suggest everyone does the same as a minimum.

The same applies to mobile phones. There are phone cases with built in camera covers, or small adhesive covers you can stick over your front and rear cameras, which you can flick open when you want to use your cameras. Covering your camera protects against potential hacks or scams like this one, but it also prevents against mass surveillance by governments and companies like Google and Apple.

I'm well aware of what their terms state. I'm not arguing that Binance shouldn't be allowed to ask for KYC - they are a centralized exchange and can place any demands they like in their Terms of Service. When you sign up to them, you accept those terms and at their mercy. What I'm arguing is that it is unethical and borderline scammy for Binance to continue to advertise their "2 BTC a day" unverified accounts when they clearly have no intention of fulfilling that promise in a significant number of cases.

A good analogy would be all the "free VPNs" that you see going around. Their Terms clearly state that they will collect all your data and sell it to third parties, ad companies, Google, etc., but their websites are covered with false claims of "enhancing your privacy" and "no logs". It's false advertising, and it's unethical.

I think that's a bad idea.

The whole point of a hardware wallet is to create and store your keys in a secure manner. One of these things without the other is pointless. Creating keys securely and then storing them insecurely (such as in a web wallet) is obviously a bad idea, but so too is securely storing keys (such as on a hardware wallet) which have been created insecurely.

A brain wallet creates insecure keys. There is no two ways about it. Humans are bad at being random and bad at generating entropy. Tens of thousands of brain wallets have been brute forced and had their coins stolen. Nobody should be using a brain wallet. It doesn't matter if you store the keys to your brain wallet in the most secure method imaginable, as since they have been created insecurely, they will always be vulnerable.

First of the, the terms cold storage and hardware wallets are not synonymous. Cold storage is essentially anything which keeps your private keys permanently offline. Permanently airgapped machines and paper wallets are the classical cold storage. Hardware wallets are kind of a semi-cold storage - although the private keys never leave the device, the device is still connected directly to a device with internet access, so they can't be thought of as true cold storage.

So to answer your questions:

With a hardware wallet, you can either "change" your private key by generating a new receiving address in the same wallet, by using a different passphrase to access a new set of wallets with the same seed phrase, or by resetting the device and generating a whole new seed altogether.

Not as far as I am aware. Certainly the major hardware wallets (Ledger, Trezor) only let you generate or restore from a seed phrase. You cannot import individual private keys or addresses.

Sure, they have the right to ask for KYC. But they do not have the right to hold your coins hostage and demand you provide it. If you refuse to provide KYC, then your coins should be returned to the address they were deposited from.

I don't think it should matter. Exchanges shouldn't even be looking in to where OP's money came from, let alone restricting his account because of it. They shouldn't be policing the crypto world.

Binance should be requiring KYC on all accounts and not letting anyone deposit before they have completed KYC. Allowing deposits but not withdrawals is scammy.