They've bought it for longer than crypto has been a thing!

The article says they bought the naming rights for 20 years, that's quite a lot longer than crypto has been going and almost double the time it's been fairly usable.

Yes, signing a valid transaction authorises funds to change hands (they don't change hands until a new block is mined that contains that transaction though).

And it is just a mathematic operation that's run on the unspent output(s) (unspent outputs are just identifiers for funds you have) that relate to the transaction being signed.

I think you'd need to be concerned about that either way. From what I can tell - from a search - it's a method of getting a user/owner of a private key to sign something they haven't seen or that isn't revealed to them. Equally a lot of newbie error is caused by them no understanding what they're looking at anyway so sometimes things might become more complicated than they need to be (enough people sign transactions in wallets without knowing what they're signing - just pay attention and I can't see a ledger wallet being safer than a well maintained airgapped one).

Use whatever you're most comfortable with - and if you plan to leave your wallet unused for a while, bookmark the site so you can remember what you did to set it up (or write a link to it with your nmemonic).

On the bottom of a lot of parts of electrum's window there's a small QR code icon. I think webcams/qr code scanners are quite a bit cheaper than a hardware device and allow for less transmission errors (and fewer vulnerabilities causing a problem with data being sent between the computers.

Out of curiosity, would you have heard of steganography at the time of creating these files? I'm just wondering if you had a "favourite thing to do to files" at some point to hide them - examples are as simple as changing file names to obscure what they are.

And I don't think 6kb is too small if you only had a few keys in it.

I think there are ways to skip the heuristics that are normally run to chack the encoding of a wallet file but I assumed those would be inbuilt and it probably isn't a wallet file as I doubt Google drive would be likely to corrupt files and not make backups.

Files encrypted with a password could look something like that too, it's not too much to go off to determine if it is irrecoverable.

Are the drive and hard drive files the same size? (they probably won't be but I'd be interested to know as that might tell you quite decisively if they're corrupted or not).

You did say you imported them into those recovery tools but didn't provide too much info of what they returned - was it just a standard output or did it give anything more (I'm not sure what they would return but you could share the labels on stuff just not private keys or anything that should be kept secret).

1. Yes you can sell your crypto you buy anywhere you want - they're not tied to a specific exchange and they don't refuse each other.

2. This one gets more complex.
If your using an offline wallet, you should go through your wallet if you want better privacy and mark addresses as used once they are (there should be a function for that in most wallets or you can just make a note of it).

The addresses are what are indexed, if you send 1btc to 2 addresses then it'll look completely separate on blockchain explorers (it'll be different if you use a lightweight/spv wallet like electrum as there may be a link between your addresses that could be seen by the node that sends you your information). When you spend funds, you might have to go through manually and decide what you want to spend though (eg if you sell 1.5btc then your 2btc will now produce an output of 1.5btc and 0.5btc and link your 2 together).

To use a wallet fully offline, you normally need something online to easily move the required information through to your wallet software so you can sign transactions/send funds.

This guide for electrum looks like quite a concise example of doing things offline: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html

If you have Web cam on both machines (or could source one for cheap) that might be the safest way to move information (especially since most malware are designed for infecting windows).

I think I remember neteller looking problematic (I haven't used it so can't really say for sure though).

And yes bisq is another p2p exchange like localbitcoins. You might have a fee issue again though as I think neteller is a bit of a weird asset when it gets traded p2p (some of the exchange rates look high, especially compared with things like cash deposits too).

What's the chance this was a coincidence?

There is a disclaimer on the messages tab that says the content of PMs might not remain private and you should find other ways to encrypt/transmit personal data - though I doubt the mods with privileges to access it would bother to do so.

Hi and welcome here! This forum isn't too miner focussed anymore but there's still a lot of stuff in its history that might be useful.

Miners normally come with their own software or guides on how to use them (I think there are a few competitors out there for non ASICs). Do you know what miner you're thinking of going with (or what you're going between)?

You can check the profitibility of mining on sites like this (I only mention profitibility because some pools might not pay you if they don't think you're mining fast enough): https://www.stelareum.io/en/mining/profit.html (I haven't tested this one it was just the first most simple result that came up, you can test a few and see what seems right).

Also I remember bitmain did an antrouter ltc version which just had one chip in it and ran as a Hotspot - so just acted like a WiFi extender that mined litecoin - if he's happy just with the idea he's running a miner and still gets to set it up then that might be a good option.

If they're in an electrum wallet and you don't have any private keys, no. But how do you know they're in one, how did you track them? Electrum wallets don't look special afaik compared with the other wallets so I'm not sure how you'd have been able to track that - unless they dumped a public key somewhere or something...

I'd spend bitcoin on leisure stuff actually, like cinema tickets and such - they're cheap and an experience (it's also likely they're being bought with profit from crypto if you've been here a while since we're at an ath).

Itll probably extend the audience of crypto a bit if they advertise it as a payment method on their website too (but not much) - amc were one of the pump stocks too so the owners might be used to those risks.

If you recovered your wallet correctly, your change addresses and the right balance should be there.

Do you know how you originally created the wallet and do you have the original wallet file? Have you tried recovering the wallet from your mnemonic again just to be sure you did it right the first time?

Also does it look like you have a similar number of addresses and change addresses as last time?

Surely banks would seek to mint their own stable coins? They could then use those coins to make the price of btc more stable (if they wanted to) or just keep people locked in to using their services anyway and increasing their balance sheets.

USDT might, in itself, be a danger to financial institutions as it can be printed by the company that issues them and there's no limit on how many can be minted - what if supply doubles and it's badly managed.

I'm not entirely sure on that one but I think they split into two parts while I was using them and had their regular cfd exchange and a "money" bit. I've only ever used the app to exchange crypto for cash though.

I'd be putting it nowhere near the top on a list of places to buy crypto from, especially if you want to withdraw it - they made that a confusing process by splitting the two things up.

Yes it could be accessed while you're online as the filesystem will still be there on the drive. I doubt the driver for reading a vdl/ISO is that huge too that a virus couldn't pack it in itself to attack a system - especially in the future if there aren't many attacking that now.

7zip can read a lot of different archive files (I've used it on ISOs before) and it's console version is 900kb.


If you don't plan to use the stick for anything else, you can put as big a system on it as you want - I'm assuming you'd be doing live boots though too so you don't need space for files?


You probably still need to find an operating system you're happy using though too...

You're probably going to want to update your OS every so often too, even if you just put a months' old version on and keep going that way every few months (providing there aren't critical updates).

Coinbase pro was easy to register for for me and the fees were a lot lower (although to get a 15% fee you're either not buying much or using a card or another expensive method).

The most you'll pay to buy or sell from coinbase pro at the moment is 0.5%.

Regarding using a custodial wallet, if you're confident you'll be bale to manage your bitcoin then get one - if you're not - you might be better off getting comfortable with sending funds first and practicing good security with those.

And there are sites that will give you returns on your crypto but those also are custodial.

If people pull out now, it's not a bad time at all. Whether it's good or bad will be reflected in the price (and potentially immediately quite soon too).

The current bull run shares similarities with the last in its price fluctuation so far, it might also be possible people are hoping to move funds to an exchange to put a sell at their desired target and then forget about their coins until it reaches that price.

There's the other possibility that coins are just moving hands and potentially moving to different investors. If someone buys now then they'll probably expect a decent return anyway (and consider that they won't have to wait too long for it) - this is a reflection of an opinion of how I think some people end up trading this market it doesn't make sense to hold bitcoin in a year like 2018 if you're just after quick returns.

I don't know if PoS is as secure as PoW (eg if someone holds a lot of one currency) but I also doubt this will be a universal thing for all other countries to follow and that might be the problem - the EU already get more than half of their energy from renewable resources (wherever those miners move to might not).

The problem with every market is that no one knows when to expect a dip...

I think anyone entering or thinking of buying more needs to consider both the upsides and downsides of investing and not investing and try to gain confidence in not selling when the price drops if you're wanting to make a profit (ifsomeoje wanted the orchestrate a bull trap, they could probably still do it and knock the price down to scare investors - I'm not completely sure this isn't what happens in normal markets to make a crash so institutions/investors can buy cheaper)...

I'd doubt the safety of something like this though. With normal vaults, you can doubt the strategy of an attacker to disregard a bunch of papers in favour of a precious rock or jewellery - you can't do that if everything in the vault is crypto stored in a presumably similar way.

That being said, storing private keys across several vaults in several countries is probably safer (as long as you have enough redundancy/failover in your plan that you won't lose your keys).