I'd say that it is a pretty good news. It has given cryptos in general a huge exposure in the stocks market as well as in the public. Their financial are actually quite pretty but you have to keep in mind that their stocks would probably be closely related to the trend of cryptos, especially Bitcoin.

I personally wouldn't get into their stocks, they don't have especially crypto-friendly business practices and I'd rather just purchase Bitcoins directly than purchasing a stocks that would probably be following the trend.

You cannot identify all of those kinds of transactions on Bitcoin due to its nature. If you are able to, then there is no privacy with Bitcoin. I'll take any studies like these with a pinch of salt. It relies on linking those organisations which are known or cracked down with their transactions being associated. This means that you won't be to identify transactions which are hidden well or unlinked. Bitcoin is still mostly the method used with ransomware or other smaller crimes.

Given that the price of Bitcoin has been rising steadily, I won't be surprised if it gets more viable for large scale money laundering in the far future.

It is possible.

Electrum will derive the address using the private key that you've provided. The reason why it becomes greyed after a small deviation is due to the fact that there is a checksum in the last few digits of the private key which checks whether the key is entered correctly. This helps the user to identify if they've mistyped their keys. If you're able to derive the correct address from the private key offline, then it would be valid. You don't have to be online to do so, Electrum doesn't interact with any server to generate an address.

Only exception being ViaBTC but even that has a 100 TX per hour limit and a minimum of 10sat/byte. The confirmation for that would probably only come when they mine a block.

If you're in a hurry and is willing to pay a lot more fees, you can use CPFP. Assuming that you're controlling 16qAvw1qDmJbAR9yeS54yrVe2r38d1T86K, you can spend a transaction with a higher fee to bump your total transaction fees. The total size of both transactions would be 416 bytes if your child transaction is 1 input-1 output. You can calculate the fees that you need by a simple calculation; calculate the total fees needed for your desired fee rate and calculate the amount of fees your second transaction needs and thus its fee rate.

If you're willing to wait, then its fine. Fees can get much lower during the weekends, I made a <8sat/vbyte transaction during the weekends and it was confirmed fine within a few hours.

I thought so at first but the bundled python broke compatibility with an older version of Electrum at 3.0.X and if that was the issue, OP shouldn't have been able to run 3.3.4 (?). Worth a try but it is hard to say without knowing what the error is.

Electrum also shouldn't corrupt/change the password like this as well.

You can identify the illicit transactions by linking them through blockchain analysis with known addresses. The problem is this is that if you believe that they have accurately identified most of the illicit transactions, then you're insinuating that Bitcoin is not doing enough for privacy; granted most people involved in these would be more inclined to cover their tracks than the average Joe. Interesting to note that the study actually states this limitation of the estimates.

The narrative that Bitcoin is used solely, or has a huge proportion of illicit transactions is wrong. Media outlets will do anything to sensationalize fake news and people would consume it willingly and probably won't even bother checking the facts.

Electrum currently does not communicate with any USB devices on their Android version. You need some sort of interface code to be able to communicate with it in the first place. Implementing that first would be the first step in supporting HW wallets, which AFAIK is in the pipeline.

You don't need to use wget. Just download both the.asc and the .tar.gz file to a directory, navigate from the terminal to that directory and validate it as stated in the post.

Bitcoin Core uses sha256 signatures in a PGP signed message for validation. Probably would be roughly the same complexity, if you aren't familiar with it. The only downside of Bitcoin Core is that you'll have to download and verify the entire blockchain which can take a very long time. Would you be fine with that?

There is no Electrum 3.4.

What kinds of installation are you getting? Did you close your Electrum completely before attempting the upgrade?

You're not requesting everything. You'll be asking for the entire blockchain and thereby validating it yourself and thus not having to trust anyone; SPV clients trusts their peers are feeding them accurate information. It is unlikely that it would be an attack vector for OP though, I don't think SPV clients are inherently unsafe or anything to that degree. Having a full node is definitely not only for privacy but also for your own security as well.

---

Did you import the PGP key of ThomasV? Did you download the correct signature file?

Try parsing it with ASCII and you should be able to see the message decodes correctly.
80 bytes, but I think there is a few bytes of overhead.
No. That isn't a very smart way of encoding messages, though it has been done using a similar method but not with an address that would be obvious to the eye. It'll be inefficient and creates unnecessary UTXOs though.

A better example would be the million Bitcoins that Satoshi has (presumably) mined and never moved.

It is secure, for now. If you can get to a sufficient qubit, you would reduce the complexity of the operations to 128^3. It'll be secure if quantum computing doesn't get any more advanced, but that simply won't be the case.

While a mempool estimate can be used as a reasonably accurate estimate most of the time, the mempool will appear to be fairly uncongested usually after a block and it would slowly start to accumulate again. It happened a few days ago when consecutively blocks were mined and the mempool diminished quite a bit before slowly going back to its usual levels. If you're not in a hurry or if you understand the caveats of relying solely on that, then mempool estimate is better than ETAs as it is far more conservative.

That's where Multisig comes in. You can try making a 3-of-4 Multisig and give two of your children one of the keys each and a lawyer the other, making a total of 3. You can include it in your will so they'll be able to spend if after your death.

An automated system to automatically do so is insecure by nature and would be difficult to implement in the first place. Using Multisig for something like this would be simpler.

You need an interface for communication between Electrum on Android and your hardware wallet it is not as straightforward as porting it from Windows to Android. Most of the hardware wallets uses USB and you'll have to use the phone's USB C port for communication which could be difficult.

No. I was talking about the Electrum servers.

Your client sends the list of addresses in your wallet to the server that you're connected to and thus links that group of addresses to each other as well as to a specific IP address. Regardless, it doesn't have to be done in Electrum as well, Bitcoin Core would be fine too.

Yeah I found it.

The privacy policy seems to indicate that they are able and will store certain personal identifiable information. While they *probably* won't have access to your private keys, you cannot assume that they are not actively tracking their users as well. Their privacy policy allows them to collect certain information and also share them to law enforcement if necessary.

The inputs for that transaction was spent in 4b483d81bcfadc62278fb456d7ead952639b052075cde3c156ee5314d4e039f8 to a different address. It is possible to create different transactions that spends the same inputs but are spending to different addresses. As it is confirmed, the transaction that you have referenced is now invalid.

UTXOs cannot be spent twice, in the event of two competing transaction, the transaction which confirms first wins and the the other will be invalid.

Bitcoin Core requires OSX 10.12 and above. If you're able to upgrade to that version, you're fine though the synchronization process would be very slow.

I wouldn't buy a dedicated node for this, you'll probably be trying to run a node to help the network instead of using it as a wallet and they are still not that powerful. If you're able to get a new computer, it'll work just fine.