He's making indirect income by posting it to that website where he can earn from the readers.
I bet it's mostly for that article.

He posted here to boost his views; just saying, not that it's totally a bad thing. (he's not spamming it anyways)

May I?

As long as the address has a valid checksum, it's valid.
The checksum is the last 4Bytes of the address after decoding it in base58;
To be valid, it should match the first 4Bytes of the SHA256D hash of the rest of the characters (w/o the checksum).

In fact, even without the private key, you can make valid custom address that "could exist".
Here's a tool for example: https://gobittest.appspot.com/ProofOfBurn

Yes, but why search if you already know the private key?

Take note that similar vanity addresses like 1banana12345...... and 1banana12344...... have no correlation to their private key's ranges.
Addresses are just the base58 encoding of the HASH160 (sha256 and then ripemd160) of the public key which is pseudorandom, plus some additional data.
Knowing the former's private key wont trivialize the search for the latter's private key.

Electrum version matches the stats in your previous replies when there was no issue, guess you haven't updated it.
So I think you've either leaked your seed phrase or compromised your PC just recently.

Have you used any bitcoin payment URI lately with a "file://" in the last few characters?
Where do you keep the seed phrase?

But the thing is, there's no way to retrieve the bitcoins without finding the culprit to "convince" him to send the funds back.

If you decided to follow the above instructions, try to click "Detect existing accounts" (above) instead of selecting 'legacy'.
That way, Electrum will try to find most of the common derivation paths up to their last used account index.

I hope that it's not the insecure method of selecting words and computing the checksum...
Anyways, try to check if "Electrum V2" from this repository has the right code for you: github.com/harningt/atomun-mnemonic (Java)
I can't help you much with it since I don't know Java.

For reference here's part of Electrum's code related to its seed generation: github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/mnemonic.py#L190-L222 (python)

It can't be the RAM, 4GB is large enough for most OS and applications.

You didn't specified any procedures, setup and OS so there'll be lots of guesswork here
but my guess is you've downloaded/compiled binaries that aren't compatible with RPi4's ARM CPU.

Check if it's included in this list, but do not fully rely on it in case your server isn't listed there: https://1209k.com/bitcoin-eye/ele.php?chain=btc

I'm not using electrs, but have your tried "monitoring.md" from their documentations?: github.com/romanz/electrs/tree/master/doc

As long as the sentence consist of base58 characters (base58), you can make your own valid WIF private key just like your example, but there's a limit on the first few characters:
If Uncompressed, the start of your sentence (after '5') is limited to K or J.
If Compressed, the start of your sentence (after 'K' or 'L') is limited to 1~5 for 'L' and w~z for 'K'.

For example, these are valid uncompressed WIF private keys:

• 5Kiwis5Jackfruits3Bananas7Papayas2GirLs1Cupxxw6wjAK
• 5Jackfruits5Kiwis3Bananas7Papayas2GirLs1Cupxxv2BjX2

Valid compressed WIF private keys:

• KwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakSaidTheDuckxxsHfq1vE
• L2Bitcoin7DragonBa11s6Pokeba11s4EXPtoMaxLeve1XtvCz6P
  
  

It'll be easy to do that after knowing how WIF private keys are encoded: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/wif
It's basically a reverse of that process.

Example process (compressed sample 1):

• 1. Type your preferred sentence, the starting characters should be valid and it shouldn't reach the checksum (about 46 chars inc. L/K)
  -> KwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakSaidTheDuck (43 characters, starts with 'Kw')
• 2. Add temporary characters to fill the valid compressed WIF length of 52 characters.
  -> KwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakSaidTheDuckxxxxxxxxx (52 characters)
• 3. Decode it with any Base58 tool and get the Hexadecimal value (the first byte should be 0x80; otherwise, there's something wrong with the input):
  -> 800ad27bc997b00cb75c5dd33106c68f02f5e77bbb1dd537e932446da5992d68b333c705ac11
• 4. Drop the "invalid checksum" bytes, which is the last 4Bytes and "fix" the compressed flag into '0x01'
  -> 800ad27bc997b00cb75c5dd33106c68f02f5e77bbb1dd537e932446da5992d68b333c705ac11
  -> 800ad27bc997b00cb75c5dd33106c68f02f5e77bbb1dd537e932446da5992d68b301
• 5. Compute the correct checksum from the first four bytes of SHA256D of the above.
  -> SHA256: f2371367022b6894364e13e0f2446f77422a6208511c964f31aeeda5246f27c8
  -> SHA256: 745a98efd82176195036e59f313e2f27a0725e85e0ea18a518a27870cf87be29
  -> First 4Bytes: 745a98ef
• 6. Append the checksum to the result of step 4
  -> 800ad27bc997b00cb75c5dd33106c68f02f5e77bbb1dd537e932446da5992d68b301745a98ef
• 7. Encode the above in Base58
  -> SHA256: KwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakKwakSaidTheDuckxxsHfq1vE
  
  

For uncompressed:
Do all the steps aside from the "compressed flag" part (step4), the number of characters is only 51 (step2) and the starting characters should be for uncompressed WIF.

I don't know, since in my short test (about 60 minutes), it's stable and my RAM didn't even spiked with btcrecover.
But it wont hurt to follow the message and use --no-dupchecks for stability.

The "PubKeyHash" that you can decode from the address can be encoded into different type of addresses without the associated public/private key.

@Fivestar4everMVP
Perhaps you're talking about this site, but it's not a blockexplorer: https://privatekeys.pw/address/bitcoin/1CKCVdbDJasYmhswB6HKZHEAnNaDpK7W4n?

Try this command and tokenlist for this sample seed phrase: minimum outer blind acoustic farm evidence senior agent festival retire install mesh

Command:(add or edit command line options depending on your system specs)

Token list: https://pastebin.com/YD3kS87b
(name it as indicated in --tokenlist in the command above)

Using that setup is the same as testing your seed phrase,
but if you insist on using your seed phrase: replace --addrs 1address with your first receiving address and edit the first five words in the token list with your own first five words.

Electrum has a setting where you can pick the camera input source.
It's in "Tools->Preferences->Misc->Video Device", check the correct camera is not pre-selected.

Sparrow can create TapRoot addresses, it's a wallet that can import existing BIP39 seed phrase or generate new ones.

But we've gone quite far from the original topic, further discussion needs a new thread IMO.

You're in a bad situation because you're downstairs; even other noises will seem louder than usual if you live downstairs.

It's better if the miner(s) are in the basement where the noise will be less noticeable upstairs, you can offer the space to your neighbor if you have one.
But without proper ventilation, the space will be quite hot.

It appears that you're using an old version of Bitcoin Core because of the "daemon" folder and missing salvage command in bitcoin-wallet tool.

You have two options to use it:

• Option1 is to update Bitcoin Core to the latest version or download the Windows zip file, extract it to a different directory and use the provided instructions.
  The latest binaries can be downloaded here: bitcoincore.org/en/download/ or the "news" link above the forum.
• Option2 is to use your old Bitcoin Core to salvage but the wallet.dat needs to be pasted to be in the correct wallet directory and IIRC, the command line option was -salvagewallet.
  Salvage was previously included in the main software before it's moved to bitcoin-wallet tool.

I hope you created backups of the recovered wallet.dat file because tools will likely modify it during the recovery process.

---

I see that you're using Windows, the first thing to try is Bitcoin Core's own bitcoin-wallet tool.
It's pre-installed together with Bitcoin Core, should be in "bin" folder inside your Bitcoin installation folder (Program Files default).

To use it, go to that bin directory then right-click on an empty space in that file explorer window while not selecting any file, and select "Open PowerShell window here".
PowerShell will open and the displayed directory should be where bitcoin-wallet.exe is.

In PowerShell, type:for example, if I put the corrupted wallet.dat in the same bin directory:

If there's an error, the wallet file is too corrupt or there are other issues.
If there's no error, salvage worked and the wallet may have been retrieved, the original wallet is renamed as .bak file while the new wallet.dat is the restored wallet file.

Those are the setting you've set in the "Welcome Screen" and the "Options...->Settings" in the GUI.
Welcome screen can be re-accessed by adding a command line option -choosedatadir

If you've set a custom datadir in the welcome screen, QT wont use the datadir entry in the bitcoin.conf file nor the lines in bitcoin.conf in the default datadir;
Bitcoin-Qt will use the bitcoin.conf in the custom datadir instead, perhaps that's what happened to OP.

Ah, this is what all of those threads are about.
Such service couldn't exist, anyone who claimed that they can recover from scam are also scams.
(so next time, there's no point in asking if it's another scam)

Rule of thumb is: Confirmed Bitcoin transactions are permanent, there's no way to recover it from the recipient without gaining access to their wallet/private keys.

Bitcoin transactions when broadcasted will be relayed to your node/server as soon as the sender press "Send" or "Broadcast".
Screenshots prove nothing until you've seen it in your own wallet.

Just do not rely on screenshots plus wait for at least 1~6 confirmations and you're good to go.

I don't know if ChatGPT is involved but it's true that there are a couple of improvements to the Payserver plugin recently this week.
Here's the commit history: github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commits/master/electrum/plugins/payserver

Developers don't reply here in Bitcointalk so we'll never know unless you ask them in one of those commits in GitHub.