Miners are concentrated in regions which would net them the most profits, factors are but not limited to: cost of labour, electrical costs, cost of landspace, cost of shipping and setting up the ASICs. Higher energy surplus, vast availability of land space, etc. It isn't hard to see why China is such a great place.

They haven't really done anything to the miners until quite recently. Even then the crackdowns were justified to be for the environment and not against Bitcoin.

Again, message signing is done with the private key. Don't consider the concept of addresses, the same message when signed with a single private key can be validated against P2PKH and P2WPKH, provided that they're derived from the same public key. You can sign messages using your bech32 address (actually the private key, but since you insist on not talking about the private key), just replace the legacy address being shown in the results with your own bech32 address. You're probably talking about message validation as opposed to signing, for which you will be correct.

Apologies though if you found that I was repetitive. I had a hard time following your train of thoughts.
There is a BIP actually, still in the drafting stage: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0322.mediawiki.

You need to understand that you're not signing using an address, you're signing using the private key. The public key is derived using the ECDSA signature and the client can parse and convert it to an address, if the address generated matches the address given and that the signature is valid, then brainwallet will return positive. This is also the reason how the client can deduce a set of possible addresses using the signature alone. As BlackHatCoiner has mentioned, replacing a message that was signed in brainwallet with its legacy address also means that the signature is valid for the bech32 version as well, because your client can generate and confirm the bech32 address that is given.

Brainwallet doesn't convert any addresses to Segwit, unless there is some fork out there. It has been discontinued for quite awhile. Message signing at its current form doesn't prove knowledge of the private key.

Alright fair enough. I wasn't very happy after spending quite some time reading through both threads to figure out what's going on and got chided like that. I was just trying to clarify on the scenario that you've presented. Your second response explained everything that I needed to know, didn't respond afterwards seeing the reply and edited my post instead to avoid padding the thread up unnecessarily. Nonetheless, apologies if I was harsh on my words.

HCP's response basically encompasses the gist of the entire thread.

There is no reason for anyone other than China to ban those that you've mentioned. Think about it, why would any other country want to ban Google? Not everyone has a motive like China to ban western products.

Conversely, US banned Huawei and influenced loads of its allies to choose alternative solutions for their 5G networks. Last I checked, Huawei isn't doing so well. Admittedly, not an apples to apples comparison but that is what strict regulations on Bitcoin can do.

Bitcoin mining is often seen to be damaging to the environment and having them in certain regions can be damaging to the local climate and/or exacerbate any energy shortage. Tons of reasons to try to ban anything that helps Bitcoin, most governments aren't exactly a fan of Bitcoin. What China did was to set a dangerous precedent; mining is huge in China and they're happy to let go of that share. Sure, it'll thrive, that is how it is designed but the adoption will still be crippled to a certain extent.

By importing the private key into the fork wallets. You should always transfer the Bitcoins out before attempting to recover any forkcoins.


On a side note, are you sure you want to redeem your Casascius coins? Depending on the condition, the actual unredeemed coin can fetch up to a couple grand more than it's loaded value. Check the collectibles section to see if anyone is interested.

It isn't that much of a concern. It is difficult to regulate mining if done on a smaller scale and some countries are definitely more welcoming to miners. At worst, the hashrate drops significantly and smaller scale mining operations thrives. The problem arises if the country has a certain agenda, that isn't favourable to Bitcoin.

Miners are important economic agents in the economic system. While you can argue that they don't wield as much power in terms of the network decisions, they still play an important role. If the country that the miner relocates forces the miners to adopt policies that are detrimental to Bitcoin, then I suppose there is really some real concern there. Certainly don't think everyone wants to see more pools adopting some dubious OFAC compliant blocks.

Mining will always be centralized, even if China bans it. There is no telling of the kinds of regulations that the relocated miners will be subjected to. If anything, China banning it just shows that they never had any intention of weaponizing the miners that they have so it really wasn't of any concern in the first place.

The actual problem is the fact that governments are starting to take anti-Bitcoin stance. That is not good, no matter which government is implementing it. The negative sentiment is mostly focused on the drop in the value of Bitcoin. Demographics of the investors makes it such that they are particularly susceptible to FUD.

Yes. Casascius coins uses mini private key as their format which is supported by Electrum. Download electrum from electrum.org, verify the authenticity and open it. Create a new wallet > Import Private Keys or Bitcoin addresses.

Put it in this format: p2pkh:PRIVATE KEY.

I assume you're talking about P2PKH, not P2PK.

Go to Window>Console, and type in this:


If it is encrypted,

Core automatically generates (and imports) all 3 main address type (P2PKH, P2WPKH, P2SH-P2WPKH) during importing.

I'm having some slight troubles understanding what you're implying.

So first of all, if you've generated the wallet by selecting Standard Wallet > Create a New Seed, then there is no need to mess with any derivation path. The derivation path for Electrum standard seeds are always correct and has never changed.

The only reason why you would check "BIP39 Seed" is if you've used that previously *AND* sent your funds to it. If not, there is no need to check "BIP 39 seeds". Unless the user specifically asks for their seed to be imported as BIP39, then Electrum won't use BIP39 and you shouldn't restore your wallet using that.

Edit:

Slightly offtopic. FFS. There's really no point being frustrated with people trying to seek clarifications to your question.

You literally said:

then I get different addresses which I have used after I have updated the wallet.

And

If I don't check the BIP box then it generates the wallet I had after the update.

Those two statements would probably be confusing for most.
Also, there's obviously a bunch of misconceptions in your post and answering them individually would've helped us to narrow down and eliminate all the possibilities. I believe my question was completely reasonable given how your response was phrased. Well... Good luck if you're going to be pissed at people trying to help you.

Electrum has never changed the derivation path for legacy wallets, AFAIK and it has always maintained backwards compatibility. Each of the seeds has a specific version to recover specific wallets and the fact that the checksum is valid for Electrum probably means that the seed is an Electrum seed.

Are the addresses in your recovered wallet bech32 (bc1) addresses? It is quite unlikely for that to happen.

Electrum doesn't store the phrases for BIP39 recovery. If the checksum is mismatching for BIP39, then you shouldn't be recovering using it. Any working wallet will not generate a seed that has a wrong checksum, because there'll be no use for a checksum.

Try this. Electrum logs communication with the servers which should give some clues as to what is happening.

It is not. Think about it.

Mining is an entire industry by now and the barrier of entry has been raised again and again. China explicitly banning certain Bitcoin farms might have some impact on the difficulty in the future but it has certainly affected the prices right now. Those miners have access to the lowest electrical rates and ASICs, as they're doing it in bulk. Do you really think an average person can mine at a lower cost at them? Most likely not.

Any difficulty drop is almost always shortlived and the subsequent difficulty change will result in a significant change in difficulty as well. It is possible for people to be mining for a profit (probably 1-2%), if difficulty drops further and price increases. Reaching ROI can take months and most revenue are not sustainable. I can guarantee you that it is faster (and safer) for people to put $4K in Bitcoin than to purchase an ASIC, wait 7 months for ROI, if that is even happening and potentially risking having to stash it away somewhere after the difficulty starts increasing again.

There are a ton of things that can and will go wrong in the process. Investing in mining equipment without taking into account further fluctuation in profitability is just stupid.

---

Also, difficulty hasn't changed. It is less profitable to mine today than 6 days ago.

I think there is actually certain criteria and it changes according to the kind of transactions that is being created. If I remember correctly, signalling RBF actually defaults to an economical estimation instead of conservative. I can't check this right now so perhaps someone can chime in if I'm wrong.

If the transaction is signalling opt-in Replace by Fee.
Both of the arguments are for Core's fees estimation. Core collects data and builds a set for which it would provide a certain degree of confidence whether it will be confirmed within the conf_target. This is dependent on your estimate_mode, conservative results in a higher fee while economical is vice versa. Unset allows Bitcoin Core to automatically choose either of them.

It is possible. Don't bother running Raspbian if you don't need to. There's nothing wrong with running Windows, it is worse to be using OSes which you have zero idea about.

Are you planning to install any Linux distributions? If so, install it and follow this guide: https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#linux-instructions. It doesn't get simpler and more concise than that.

Difficulty hasn't changed for the current epoch. Any profitability change will occur in the next epoch. I highly doubt that it is very profitable for anyone right now. Difficulty remains unchanged and the price has dropped quite significantly.

The only time casual miners are able to get any significant profit is that if the difficulty drops drastically while the price rises at the same time. Else, difficulty tracks the profitability and you're better off just buying your coins.

Bitcoin is a currency and the value has to be determined against other currency. Bitcoin can survive without fiat as Bitcoin is not dependent on it. If fiat were to collapse overnight, people would simply start to establish the exchange rate against other mediums, like precious metals.

The only reason why this issue matters now is due to how much Bitcoin fluctuates against fiat. Bitcoin is sufficient to fulfill the various economic functions of a currency. Payments can be settled using Bitcoins in absolute amount or the approximated amount when compared against other forms of currencies, this is dependent on if they care about that. But as far as I'm concerned, 1BTC = 1BTC.

I can but there are better ways around it. It is unlike the $5 wrench attack, the complexity of such an operation is fairly high, given that users should verify the integrity of their ISO files and that dev/urandom is often mixed with other unpredictable variables. There are tons of other theoretical ways to compromise airgapped setups as well, some can be far more practical.

But you're not trusting your kernel in the first place. What stops the kernel or the OS from using these tactic to introduce covert vulnerabilities? Most wallet uses deterministic signatures nowadays so that is actually addressed. Well, unless it somehow works in an unintended manner due to external influence.

That is not the point though. You're assuming a compromised kernel and possibly other parts of the OS. Then what stops the OS from destroying the security using other methods? There simply isn't anyway for the average person to not be reliant on certain degree of trust on their hardware and their software. If you can't trust the OS, don't bother generating your own entropy because that won't help in making your keys more secure.

Tl;dr if you cannot trust your OS's integrity, you're better off using a pen and paper.