When a transaction is first broadcast, it is "unconfirmed". Once it has been included in a mined block, it has 1 confirmation, and the number of confirmations increases by 1 for every further block that is mined.

160 confirmations simply means 160 blocks have been mined since your transaction was first confirmed on the blockchain. It is a metric of your bitcoin being sent to another address - it has nothing to do with whether the address you have sent to is owned by a legitimate operator or a scammer.

In future, it is worth spending some time researching any service you wish to use online. A simple Google of "Helix light" would have returned several results telling you that it has shutdown, and any sites now operating under that name are scams.

Helix Light shut down over a year ago. Their official site was http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion/. The site you found is a fake. I'm afraid you have been scammed, and your bitcoin are lost.


It seems that a scammer has edited the bitcoin wiki page to point to another fake site, but a different fake to the one you used.

Not quite. This cloud backup mechanism is for users of Coinbase Wallet, which is an Android and Apple mobile app they have released, which functions pretty much the same as any other mobile wallet with the added functionality of dApp support. You still can't access your private keys for a Coinbase exchange account, which to be fair I can understand - processing individual deposits and withdrawals would become a nightmare if they can't batch everyone's funds together in to a handful of addresses.

Again, this isn't foolproof, and it's best to manually check you are on the right website every time before entering any log in details. There is malware which can edit your bookmarks and change the URL they target, or even redirect you from a bookmarked or manually entered URL to a phishing or scam site.

Surely you mean only store your seed on pieces of paper or an engraved plate, rather than your private keys. For the vast majority of users, the best place to store your private key is on a hardware wallet, given the trade off between ease of use and security. Sure, a completely airgapped computer or a paper wallet are a bit more secure, but the majority of users don't have the knowledge required to safely and securely create or use one of these. A hardware wallet is a perfectly acceptable alternative.


Even then, you aren't fully protected. Take the Copay wallet fiasco from a few months back. Someone added malicious code to a library which the Copay wallet was dependent on - Copay pulled it in and then distributed it to users as part of an official update. You can never be too careful.

Regardless of where the nodes or the miners are situated, there seems to be no clear daily variation of pattern to the global hashrate - https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/hashrate/30d?g=15&r=hour&t=l.

As buwaytress points out, these data aren't showing you where the miners or the nodes are located - instead they are showing you when the majority of bitcoin transactions hit the network, which seems to be early afternoon UTC plus or minus a few hours. Perhaps this is is because of a cross-over effect: 2pm UTC is 10pm for China, 10/11am for the east coast of North America, and 6am for the west coast.

You can compare the data from this study with the data generated at Johoe's Mempool Statistics page: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,2w. Here's a random 2 week sample I took from last September (click for full size):



The dates along the bottom are at midnight (00:00) UTC. So you can see from this sample, there is a spike in fees on most days between around 10:00 and 18:00 (when Europe and then later America are awake), at which point they start reducing, and hit a low point around 01:00 - 04:00 UTC. This certainly ties in with the data from OP's study.

It's something I've casually noticed, but never given much though to. But considering it now, I wouldn't have expected such a constant and similar drop given that China has more people than Europe and North America combined.

Cloud storage isn't safe enough to store anything, in my opinion. They have shown repeatedly that security is poor, accounts and servers are regularly hacked, and personal data is frequently accessed and distributed. By using this service, you are reducing the security of your wallet from a private key or a mnemonic seed to a user generated password. Anyone who can brute force your password can access your coins. And we all know how terrible humans are at creating passwords.

This will also give a false sense of security to users who don't understand any better, and encourage people to leave their coins in the hands of Coinbase.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic or facetious here, but I would like some clarification on this.

Scam accusations are currently enforced in the following manner:
1) The accuser posts a thread outlining their accusation and supporting evidence in the Scam Accusations board
2) Users discuss the issue, and frequently more supporting or refuting evidence is found
3) One or several users (which may include DT members) may tag the accused provided the evidence is sufficient

Now let's say I find an ICO who is advertising with a fake team - using made up names, stock photos, and fictitious LinkedIn profiles with fake qualifications, job histories and business links. In my opinion, they are breaking the covenant of good faith by being dishonest with their potential customers/victims. I tag them as such. You disagree with my judgement and make a post saying as such, stating that we need evidence of theft to have occurred before a negative tag can be left. (This is just an example - we could substitute in 100 difference scenarios here.)

Who decides who is right? If it is the community who decides, then the system is no different to what it is now. Trust ratings are countered and people are excluded over disagreements already - how would this change under your proposed system? If it is theymos who decides, then are you suggesting we simply move to a trust system based entirely on theymos' decision in every case (which would never happen as the workload would be insurmountable). Is there a third option I haven't considered?


Edit: Spelling

The crisis in Venezuela started long before the oil prices dropped. I mean, yes, the government was relying way too heavily on oil money, but the bigger factor was how that money was spent. Very little of it was spent on the Venezuelan people, infrastructure, economy, etc. The majority of it was spent by the corrupt government to help Maduro consolidate power, gift to his friends and supporters, pay off or "silence" enemies, etc.

Venezuela's current crises goes way deeper than simply not having enough money.

Be careful about adding every suggestion to your OP.

Browser extensions are an easy way to distribute malicious code, since if your extension looks good/professional enough, many people will download it without really thinking about it. I've not even heard of some of these extensions, which is usually a warning sign for me given how much attention I pay to online security and privacy. I would certainly be considering checking the code out for yourself before recommending it to others.

Having some nice fish and chips is a good way to get more iodine, since it is found in high concentrations in seafood. It's also pretty plentiful in dairy products, so it's fairly uncommon to see true iodine deficiency in developed nations.

I like your optimism that "summer is approaching"! If you could tell that to the ice I had to scrape off my car this morning, that'd be great.

If there's a serious reason to report it - plagiarism, linking to malware, the opening post of a spam mega thread that needs locked, etc - then sure. If it's just for spamming and shitposting, then I generally don't report anything over a week old - the spammers will already have been paid, and any time I spend reporting these older posts could be better spent reporting new ones.

I have an old computer with Windows 7, and it's an absolute nightmare trying to use it with Ledger Live. Regularly crashes or freezes, blank screens, won't recognise the Nano S, won't sync, suggests utterly hilarious fees - once I tried to send 0.1 bitcoins from it and even with custom fees set at 3 sat/byte it was giving me a total cost of over 20 bitcoins. I've not tried to update via Windows 7, but I can only imagine it would also be a total headache.

Windows 7 will soon be unsupported in terms of security updates from Microsoft, so best to think about moving away from it.

That article links to this reddit post, which is well worth a read.

Essentially, they have identified 5 address which are almost certainly part of the Quadriga "cold wallet" under the control of Gerald Cotten, which received direct deposits from the Quadriga hot wallets. A couple of these addresses both sent coins to the same Bitfinex account deposit address in the same transaction back in December 2017.

Why would the owner of Quadriga be sending customers' coins which were deposited to Quadriga directly to Bitfinex? And over a year ago as well. This whole thing gets scammier by the day.

https://www.coindesk.com/indian-death-certificate-crypto-exchange-quadrigacx-death

The certificate is made out in the name of Gerald Cottan rather than Gerald Cotten. That might seem like a small error, but in any developed nation (including Canada) this would quite simply not be accepted. If this is the only death certificate they have, then legally speaking Gerald Cotten is not dead, his will cannot be executed, and his assets cannot be touched.

The hospital issuing that death certificate is part of the "Fortis" chain (as you can see on the right hand side), which have recently gone through a pretty big fraud scandal.

You are underestimating by just a touch. Our best estimates are that since modern humans first evolved 50,000 years ago, there have been around 110 billion of us on the planet. That means that every human that has ever lived could have started using a trillion new bitcoin addresses every second of every day of every year for the last 50,000 years, and we would have so far used 1.73*10³⁵ addresses, which is somewhere in the region of 0.00000000001% of all possible addresses.

I'm sure Google and Apple will be thrilled that Coinbase has just made their Cloud servers a massive target for hackers.

You are placing trust a complex process of encryption, transfer and storage, which I have no doubt will not be open source. You are also trusting Google or Apple to protect their servers from hacking (which they have shown repeatedly they are incapable of doing) and/or not build in a backdoor for law enforcement agencies that ask for it. You are also trusting your own ability to create truly strong and non-brute-forceable passwords, which we know 99% of the population are incapable of doing.

Bad idea all round, but no doubt many newbies will use it anyway.

There's some good advice in here, but also some misleading advice.

It is definitely good advice to use an ad-blocker, but Adblock Plus isn't that great a choice. uBlock Origin is generally considered the best option

Private browsing does absolutely nothing to protect you online. All it does it stop your computer from saving local history, which is only relevant if you don't want someone else using your computer to see what you were doing. It makes no difference to online privacy or security.

In terms of the hosts file, here is a great resource to get you started: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

This is incorrect advice. Scams are not moderated:


Scams and scammers are not moderated, and you should not be reporting these posts to the moderators. They will not be dealt with and will only waste moderators' time. Scams are dealt with via the trust system. If you think someone is a scammer, you can leave them negative trust and/or open a thread in the Scam Accusations board for the attention of other users.

Spam, on the other hand, should be reported to the moderators.