I doubt they will be able to obtain a proportion that high under their purview, but yeah never really know.

51% attacks would definitely have far more repercussions than simple censorship. Reorganizing and opting out blocks that they don't like probably won't sit well with most people, more so than censorship within their blocks. If they're smart, they would either choose another pool or just sell their ASICs right away.

Yes, censorship and yes.
Yes. If there ever comes a day where the entire network is under regulatory control (if I may add, IMO highly implausible), you can't mix your coins if it doesn't get confirmed in the first place.

It isn't wrong to be talking about the reference implementations though. There isn't any reason for people to be messing with their default mempool size and thus it would be safe to assume that most people which runs the reference client (Bitcoin Core) do not change the various settings that doesn't directly affect them (minmempoolfee, minrelayfee, mempoolsize). Miners probably don't run the reference implementation but if a user creates a transaction after it gets dropped, it would probably have a higher fee and miners would definitely want that transaction to be relayed to them.

While the mempool is unique and specific to each node, your best and most accurate assumption would be based on the typical default behavior of the majority.

Hmm, then I guess though we do have agreements on most issues, we'll be on the opposite sides regarding this. My take is that the unusual circumstances of this warrants the need to violate certain tenets of Bitcoin, for the betterment of the community at the very least.

Would it be possible for it to be implemented in a trustless manner on the protocol level. Doing something like this requires the user to expose their seeds and subsequently the private keys to someone, it wouldn't work if it is to be implemented on the network.

Really? I saw estimates that they're 30% of the hashrate coming from China. XinJiang's climate isn't that terrible, it still has a seasonal weather and certain parts of it are still fairly cool.

Cooling probably isn't the main priority nor do they really care. Paying extra on cooling is mostly redundant, you get fairly marginal benefits from overclocking them anyways. Ambient temperature delta is not that substantial to warrant additional cooling, if you consider the cost of installing them.

Are they exempted from the tariffs? The cost to ship the ASICs to the States would definitely be more substantial than having to sell it locally. If the profit margin makes sense, then there isn't any reason to not sell them.

Indeed, its a moral dilemma but either of the solution will make sense.

However, if it reaches that point; it gets easy enough to attack ECDSA within a reasonable period of time and with a good cost/benefit ratio , your coins would be stolen anyways. Either you prevent people from stealing Bitcoins or you allow people to steal those Bitcoins and potentially ruin Bitcoin as a whole, eitherways the Bitcoins would probably be stolen/made inaccessible somewhere in the future. Is Bitcoin still really worth X, if 2 million coins (potentially more as we near that phase) can be siphoned from those addresses at will?  Moving to a quantum-resistant algorithm can be done years before it becomes feasible, thus giving those people a few years to recover those coins before finally switching to that algorithm completely. Great thing is: you can choose to support either of this forks in the future and choose which side you would side on.

IMO, it doesn't really reflect anything negative on Bitcoin. Locking those coins probably doesn't benefit anyone and the issue at hand is quite obvious, any decision made can be quite justifiable.

Most wallets allows you to remove the transaction and thus avoiding any rebroadcast. Doing so will not prevent someone else from rebroadcasting that TX for you.
Not really stuck per se. Just that any "conflicting" transactions will have poor propagation if it doesn't signal RBF and meet the RBF requirement. Even if there is a poor propagation, there is still a chance for miners to be able to see your transaction if the propagation just so happens that it reaches the miners. The nodes are just intermediaries which increases the chances of a good propagation.

If you want to have any privacy, Electrum is not the wallet to use. The nature of Electrum will leak privacy and Tor only obfuscates the IPs but will still result in the addresses still being linked to each other. The Tor feature would probably be better to circumvent any internet restrictions instead of privacy.

You need a coordinator, which is what Wasabi has.

If you want privacy or anything like it, don't use Electrum. There is nothing that preserves or attempts to preserve your privacy to any significant extent included in Electrum.

No doubt that it would be equally easy to find something that displays in the actual decimals but my node returns the values as it is: http://163.172.57.208/getmempoolinfo.txt.

Feel free to refer to that if needed, it is running at default settings as well.

Anyone can rebroadcast the transaction as long as they have the raw transaction (which is something every node has once it is propagated). But yes, that is basically the reason why.

Your wallet is not the only one that can rebroadcast the transaction. Anyone with your raw transaction will be able to do so and that includes your recipient as well.

There is really no guarantee that your transaction will ever be drop due to the fact that anyone can rebroadcast your transaction at their will. That is why we normally use opt-in RBF to replace the transaction if it gets unconfirmed for far too long. Some wallets don't check the mempool to see if your transaction has reached its expiry, violated the min fee, etc. In those cases, the transaction can very well remain in your wallet as unconfirmed even when the majority of the network has dropped it.

You might want to consider using Tails for a far easier setup.

Some software that you might use would probably not be open source. If you're using it for a single purpose only, then its probably quite possible to only install things that are open source on it. It really doesn't mean much if you don't verify it and compile yourself; there were plenty of instances where supply chain attacks compromised well known programs and installed their own backdoor into it. Whenever possible, minimize the applications that you're using on the computer.

Eavesdropping on your network is possible, whether you're using WiFi or not. Fact is, most sites uses TLS which really just negates the risk. If you want to protect your funds, just get an airgapped wallet or a hardware wallet. Maintaining security of any device that is connected to the internet is a tedious task.

What was the exchange rate on the site when you used the service?

The exchange sent 0.00138782BTC to your address, are you expecting this amount? If you were expecting more, you have to ask the service yourself whether the exchange rate was right or if there were any undisclosed fees. There is nothing wrong with Electrum or does it have anything to do with Electrum. You have to know how much you exchanged your Euros for. Fees are indeed higher now, as compared to years ago.

Guys.. OP probably meant to send the funds in BTC instead of mBTC, hence why the reply to my post.

Sending 59 satoshis to anyone is completely absurd, Bitcoin isn't worth millions of dollars. I'm sure this topic is solved and no further discussion would be required.

Why did you contradict your own topic?

Nature of Bitcoin won't allow any third party to be accurately tracking illicit and normal transactions. These estimations are (probably) based on known and exposed activities.  I'd say Bitcoin has been integrated into loads of ransomware and used in place of the gift cards or WU that were mainly used for this purpose. Cryptocurrency are great for money laundering but fiat is far more untraceable.

The seed phrase is 24 words long.

If you've lost your seeds, you have to create a new wallet and transfer the funds to an address in the new wallet. You can't change the seed phrase without generating a completely new wallet anyways.

I've mentioned the tendency and the source of any statistical bias in my previous replies.

Check the links (CBECI) referenced in my prior replies. It doesn't take the data solely based on the pools but a sampling using the connections established to the pools, which accounts for 37% of the network hashrate. You can interpret it as the composition of the miners in those three pools, extrapolating to the rest of the Chinese pools would probably still bring it to an acceptable margin of error, note that some of the other pools also directly operates several farms within China, so those could possibly have even greater composition of Chinese miners.. Data is accurate for April only.

Anyways, unless someone is intentionally trolling, I doubt anyone in the right mind would try to use a VPN/Proxy to masquerade as a Chinese Bitcoin miner or to any significant capacity. Understand that it has to be an assumption but it is just so unlikely.

No, the stats that the user is providing is not completely wrong. As in the graph represents the aggregate IP logs across the (few) pools. I mean you can't really get anything more accurate than this considering the top pools are all based in China. You can interpret the stats both ways, whether it is indicative of the actual situation or not.

IMO, its a 50-50; you're counting only Chinese pools but a significant proportion (I think 2/3) of them is Chinese anyways.

Yeah so the pools that are Chinese controls about 80%. Only if the rest of the network are not Chinese, then I presume it would be around 50% actually.

If you're not an expert in this topic, then why do you assert that "QCs are nothing but FUD?"

1. You cannot protect outputs which requires an ECDSA signature to unlock. They are inherently vulnerable.

2. A successful attack will most likely not be detectable. Siphoning funds slowly from exposed addresses would be pretty much undetectable, given that people would go with the suspicion of a having malwares, etc and if the knowledge of a QC technology is concealed well enough, it could be quite a while before the community catches on.

Payout variance is something that you cannot solve without having miners in the first place. Miners are far more likely to favour larger pools due to their reliability as well, fees can matter less in some instances.
CBECI has randomized data here: https://cbeci.org/mining_map.

** I didn't see the edit when I was typing. But given that the data consists of only pools based in China, it could very well be possible that there might be some discrepancies from the actual values due to the sampling method.

Don't look at the data and judge it solely based on where the pools are based in. Most pools have servers in different locations and people from all over the world can connect to their pools, mainly from the lower fees or payout variance.

In the recent months, the proportion of China miners has indeed decreased in comparison to the rest of the world. US is certainly still not the most conducive place, isn't there still tariffs on ASICs from China? I'd think that labour laws are stricter there and probably would have to spend more on that as well. The decrease in proportion is most likely due to the decrease in the miners from China rather than an increase in miners from the US.

It is a known limitation with Bitcoin, miners having the say in the kinds of transaction to include would lead to potential problems like this.

OFAC is a US entity which likely has no jurisdiction elsewhere so that isn't really a problem. I'm almost certain that the Chinese pools won't bow down to pressure from US or any other countries. If there comes a point where a good proportion of the pools implement such censorship, those kinds of transaction gets more expensive but miners can still mine them. If it gets included in the block, should the other pools re-org the chain and effectively execute a 51% attack against Bitcoin?

While something like this is dangerous, mining pools do not necessarily have to be regulated by any government. International policies won't be effective as well, if history indicates anything.