Not necessarily. As I have said previously, if you want to accept incoming connections, then port forward is inevitable if you don't use Tor, which isn't always trivial to do from my experience.

There are two scenarios. You either route everything from Tor, and send the final message to the VPN, or you use your VPN as first-end proxy, and send the message to Tor afterwards. In the former scenario, your VPN knows the final message, and can de-anonymize you to some extent, and in the latter, everything you're supposed to hide from your Internet provider is firstly sent to your VPN provider. So in both cases, you have less anonymity than just using Tor.

Θεωρώ πως είναι προφανές, αλλά επειδή η κοινή λογική δεν είναι πάντα κοινή: Ο walletrecovery έχει πιαστεί πολλές φορές να είναι τεχνικά ανεπαρκής και να καταπατά τους κανόνες με plagiarism και πουλώντας υπηρεσίες που αποδεικνύει μόνος του πως δεν είναι ικανός να παρέχει.

Μπορείτε να το επιβεβαιώσετε κι απ' το trust feedback του.

Ή τους στέλνεις email, ή κάνεις pull request στο Github repository τους. Το γράφουν κι εκεί αν το δεις:

Για παράδειγμα, ο χρήστης aKatsanas έβαλε τη σελίδα του, loveyourbody.gr με commit: https://github.com/weacceptbitcoin-gr/weacceptbitcoin-gr.github.io/pull/4/commits/f8871e394a74e6ce3c63ccf68e0615e6973f9dc1

Bitcointalk username: BlackHatCoiner

Okay, I'm going to be brutally honest with this, as I requested to write a review without being completely aware of what was this all about. I don't find one reason to use this service, unless you don't know shit from Shinola about bitcoin, which in that case you shouldn't be owning bitcoin in the first place.

1. General image

First of all, the first impression isn't newbie friendly. It's horrible. Lots of confusing things to take into account, and it's really frustrating for a guy like me who doesn't want to lose a single satoshi from some mistake. So, to sum up, just to use this service, you need:

• Mixin Messenger on some relative's mobile phone.
• Either Bitcoin Core or Mornin (I haven't tried the rest).
• Setup the Mixin Safe dashboard from the owner's computer.

I was genuinely trying to figure out where the safe dashboard page is, because I was just looking in here which describes how to create the members' wallet after you've setup the dashboard, and in here which doesn't contain some bold link that says "Dashboard". The average user won't even take the time to comprehend what's going on there. This message goes to the marketing team.

2. Custody of coins

I cannot fathom how one recommends to use a software that makes the user forfeit the ownership of their coins. The members' wallet, to my surprise, is custodial. I mean the Mixin messenger, which is the app the members use in cooperation with either the owner or the service (in case the owner lost their key). I'm not sure if I understand right, honestly, I hope I have ignored something, but if that's true, then, can't Mixin sign for both themselves and for the members' wallet if needed?

Anyway, I sent ~$30 to the wallet from Mixin messenger, and then attempted to send them to the dashboard's wallet. Boom, $7.35 -- a nice meal -- spent on mining fees for absolutely no reason. Even Binance, the worst of the worst in that matter, charges less for Segwit withdrawals.

3. Using Owner's and Member's wallet to broadcast a transaction

I attempted to empty the owner's wallet, so I create the first free transaction, approved from owner, requested members' approval, the notification sent to my mobile phone was quite cool, approved from members too, and then this message appeared in the dashboard:

Not sure what you're checking there, perhaps that it's my first transaction so I don't get charged? Hopefully. Then, another message showed up:

I'm not quite sure what's this approval. Does the network approve it's a valid transaction? Again, hopefully.

4. Pricing

Alright, I don't like at all the fact that I'm paying to make transactions (asides from mining fee obviously), and neither do I believe that the average, sane Bitcoin user does like that. But, out of curiosity, I wanted to check if you're really paying 25,000 sats for an on-chain transaction. For anyone viewing this, this is my multi-sig address: bc1q9pwsz8cwpvpcpsm3xz4280z3kaqernx9hvyrydetdnaddwc7g3msxwyt0g

Transaction - ca4677993dfb7f7e23d90359b8d01a2712c3226df670fd6df6d8e23bd90fb8cc - is the one that was supposedly paying $7.35 the miner, but to my surprise again, it only paid $0.54. But, as far as I see, the input isn't mine, so I can't really know in advance how they've scheduled to pay on-chain costs, but it's quite making a splash that my transaction (which was 1 input, 1 output btw) can't have costed $7.35.

The $2/year aren't much, but paying for transactions is. Someone who's making lots of transactions should not pick that one. In fact, anyone who's making transactions, because no user just makes one transaction and then disappears.

5. Security

Very, very questionable. The PIN is just too easy to brute force. There are less than a million combinations, a lot less, because you've introduced "easy PINs" that aren't considered secure. The UI lacks user friendliness. I'm somehow supposed to know myself how to back this up? The decentralized-recovery page is supposed to describe that in detail, but it's just filled with buzzwords as already said. Absolutely no essence, such as what to do with Mixin safe, or what if the Mixin network shuts down?

6. Privacy

Terrible. Mixin knows every transaction I make, there isn't much to be said here. The phone number is just an icing to the cake.

---

Some final, noteworthy stuff:

• I found out there are several apk files when I tried to install Mornin on mobile. There's the one in Google Play Store, the v18 from support.mixin.one, the v33 from mornin.one/key. This just makes the entire experience worse, and rises the chances your development team screw it up when working with Mornin.
• I tried to recover the seed phrase from Mixin messenger. It does produce a valid BIP39, but when I recover it, there are no transactions made whatsoever, so there must be some custom derivation path that I should be aware of?
• One of Mixin messenger's apk is bugged (?)
• There are tons of domain names. This is like a scammer's paradise.

So, in my opinion, learning brand new software (Mixin, Messenger and Mornin), including an intermediary in my transactions, paying for the privilege of doing multi-sig transactions, while having terrible privacy and security for just having a company help me recover my coins in case either me or my family member is incapable of signing a message, is simply not worth it. Educating ourselves about securely setting up a multi-sig, non-custodial wallet is a million times more preferable and responsible.

I don't have a second PIN. The PIN I entered was just one, and nothing interrupted the process. It's curious how no one else experienced this.

Edit: I just downloaded it from another source, and it worked. The properly working apk I just downloaded is mixin-400309.apk.

I have installed both Mornin key and Mixin messenger, but in the Mixin app I'm incapable of creating a wallet. When I open up the app, I get the following message:


When I'm entering the (correct) PIN, error "PIN incorrect" pops up:


Has anyone experienced this before? I have tried to uninstall, and reinstall it but it still persists.

Some people want to talk with stubborn people, and attempt to reason with them. It reinforces their understanding. Some others don't have the patience. o_e_l_e_o probably belongs to the former.

I'm leaving whirlwind to join MixTum, thanks for having me.

I hope whirlwind continues being innovative, and finally implements blinded bearer certificates. That may even kill the competition.

Even though I'm not into quantum computing, the security of a Bitcoin private key is 128 bits, because you need to perform 2^128 operations on the elliptic curve to work out the private key, assuming you know the public key.

From my understanding, there will be a fork at some point, where we will be upgrading to a quantum-resistant algorithm. Experts in the cryptographic community predict this to happen in some decade or so. There are quite a lot of threads if you search "quantum computer" in the board.

And there will always be, because electronic cash has a tangible value on its own. But not for all people, again. Some people don't care about that, and are quite fine with electronic fiat, alone. For them, electronic cash represents nothing more than an investment – an asset appreciated in practice solely by the faction that truly esteems the concept of electronic cash.

Even though I don't care much about Satoshi's intentions, I'm just going to quote two parts where he's pretty much arguing it's more than currency;

---

Honestly, I don't give a damn about being in history. I wouldn't want to be the known one who traded 10,000 BTC for two pizzas.

Username: BlackHatCoiner
BTC SegWit Address: bc1qvufqh3y0lrfmchv2ahqmtnk4c0wtdvvl9h2kap

If you don't have liquidity problems, then holding it indefinitely is proved to be a good financial decision until now.

For you. For someone who doesn't care about electronic cash, but only for the potential capital gains, it's purely an investment.

But, in practice, you're not encouraged to do that, unless you need to use cash via the Internet. The reason is pretty simple: bad money, fiat, drives out bitcoin. Fiat is better for consumption purposes, as it's getting less valuable comparably to bitcoin overtime.

Before entering into Whirlwind, be sure to upgrade your Tor Browser to 12.5.2 as there have been security updates in Firefox: https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-1252/

As far as I can tell, it's non-custodial (which is what you probably meant) and it utilizes nostr, but it certainly can't work without the development team, at least in the early stages. So, I wouldn't say the whole project works on its own (decentralized).

Why would they do that? There's Apple Pay that's dominating along with Google Pay.

None, but that isn't the point. The point is that funding surveillance firm to spy their users is malicious, especially when portraying yourself as the ultimate privacy and fungibility solution. It's pure hypocrisy.

They're probably going to be okay with it, and approve the rejection (if there's approval part from the coinjoin server, we don't know for sure*). According to this policy, though, don't expect to question them for anything: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/master/WalletWasabi/Legal/Assets/LegalDocumentsWw2.txt (Coin filtering part)

* From what I saw in the unit tests, the coordinator software makes a request to the chain analysis firm, and rejects anything without approving it.

No mobile app with lightning functionality does that, unless you're running node / hub from home.

Money, in general, is made to be spent. Spending your savings fulfills their purpose, but you should obviously be cautious on when and where to spend them. Same as with bitcoin.

Everybody don't hold bitcoin. That's what matters. What would happen if everyone did, is another story. The fact is, if you're living off the basic income, need cash and you're out of liquidity, you're going to sell your bitcoin. People who don't run out of liquidity (i.e., rich), with the same mindset and reasoning, will probably hold it for longer.

Thank God I'm not alone. Genuinely, my Internet provider couldn't make port forwarding less difficult to setup. Like, I have to call someone in their stores, and have them confirming that I'm indeed the owner of the router, so they can approve the port forward.

I mean, not just ISPs. You're literally letting every surveillance firm knowing how much money you have in lightning, and with whom you've opened channels.

It's taxation formed in such a way that any type of cash seems tax evasion encouraging. In my country, there's serious trouble with receipts. Customers and merchants frequently evade VAT after finding agreement. Well, that can't happen with electronic fiat, but that just because our tax system works terribly. In other countries, there exists fine taxation with cash, because they don't tax mainly from VAT.

Knowing that I'm using Tor, versus knowing to whom I connect to is orders of magnitude different. I don't care if my Internet provider knows I'm using Tor. And even if I do, there are bridges as said, which are unlisted and make censorship even more difficult to happen.

By the way, am I the only one who likes the fact that you don't mess with port forwarding when you want incoming connections? There's a reason why most lightning nodes operate via hidden services.

What can be better than a Bitcoin address? It doesn't require a machine running 24/7, doesn't have liquidity or connectivity requirements, is extremely difficult to error due to checksum, and it's a short text anyone can even write down if needed. It's perfect.

That is trivial to correct with running a hidden service. You'd have to, not only for that, but because it's hard for many to port forward.