I don't think I made that assumption. Even if banks can cover 95% of deposits (which is a very generous estimate), FDIC insurance is still insufficient to cover the remainder. And often the money that the banks do have is prioritized for large corporations and entities, while average users (the exact ones who are holding amounts covered by the FDIC threshold) are the last in line to receive anything.

I don't. I care about the fact that all my family and friends who don't own bitcoin will lose everything if the dollar goes to zero.

European countries did not tend to trade in USD prior to the euro. They generally traded in their own currencies, British pounds, or Deutsche Marks. Countries like India, China, and Russia have used the dollar for international trade for decades. It looks like that will soon end.

In the parent folder (one up) from your wallets directory, there will be a file called "settings.json". Open it with any simple text editor. You will find something which looks like this:


Change the name of the wallet you renamed to the new name.

I am not worried about such major flaws like this.

As I said above, if such a critical vulnerability is found and patched before it is resolved, then nothing happens.
If such a critical vulnerability is found and exploited, then the entire community has the option to either have all their bitcoin fall to zero, or to run the new patched software which will rapidly be released and continue on as if nothing had happened, as happened during the value overflow bug.

The bigger concern is not critical vulnerabilities which suddenly print 92 billion bitcoin out of thin air - these are easy to detect and easy to reverse. The bigger concern is a less obvious vulnerability which allows someone to slowly start stealing coins or minting new ones undetected for a lengthy period of time. Once it is detected then perhaps many of these bugged coins are already spent, in the hands of innocent third parties, combined with legitimate coins, and so on. Trying to unwind that damage becomes much harder, if not impossible. Such a bug is maybe not critical enough to make bitcoin fall to zero, but it would certainly be enough to shake out a lot of weak hands and cause the price to fall in the short to medium term.

There are (maybe) 2 altcoins that I would trust already, so this isn't really a concern of mine. 99.9% of altcoins are money grabs, scams, centralized, or so poorly put together that no one should even consider buying them.

These are insufficient answers.

No software in existence is immune to bugs. Windows has existed for almost 40 years and is run by billions more people than Bitcoin Core is, and yet still has regular bugs and vulnerabilities discovered. Burying your head in the sand and saying "Don't worry about bugs" is a recipe for disaster. Bugs need to be continually found and resolved, and failure to do so will absolutely lead to an event where bitcoin collapses.

There have been a number of critical bugs discovered in the past. In some cases, they were discovered and fixed prior to being exploited, such as this one: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/
In other cases, they were only discovered after being exploited, such as this one: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident. In this case, a fork occurred in order to reverse the damage done.

Should another major vulnerability be exploited which would result in the complete collapse of bitcoin, then I would fully expect a fork to occur which would reverse the damage of said vulnerability and allow bitcoin to continue unaffected. It will be trivial to get the majority of the network to accept such a fork - when faced with accepting the fork or having all the bitcoin they own be worth zero, then almost all nodes and miners will accept the fork without a second thought.

Taking a step back from worrying about your seed phrases and back ups and looking at the bigger picture here, your multi-sig idea is not a great one.

There is not much point including a hardware wallet as part of a 2-of-3 multi-sig when the other two cosigners are highly insecure hot wallets (one on a phone, and one on a computer). It is exponentially more likely that someone is able to compromise your two hot wallets than your single hardware wallet, so the hardware wallet adds zero additional security. In fact, I would argue that a standard single signature wallet set up properly on a good hardware wallet is probably safer than a multi-sig involving two insecure hot wallets. In your situation I would probably set up the Trezor and then add an additional passphrase and use that passphrased wallet as my cold storage, backing up the seed phrase and the passphrase separately.

If you are desperate to use a multi-sig, then you should do so with either multiple hardware wallets or airgapped devices. Adding hot wallets as you have done weakens the security rather than improves it.

Because the entities lending us money do not care about our economy. They only care about making profit for themselves.

I didn't mean us as in individuals, but us as in our government.

It's already happening. Big economies like India, China, Russia, are already in talks to ditch the dollar.

Of course it would. Nobody is going to lend us money when it is clear they will never be repaid.

The military will only survive as long as we can pay for it. If we don't raise the debt limit, or no one will lend to us, or we devalue the dollar by printing trillions more, then the government can't keep spending, and the military budget gets slashed by billions.

It's nice, but it's not necessary. The extra protection provided by a steel back up can be replicated with paper by simply having two or more back ups in separate geographical locations.

As I said higher up in this thread, a software airgap will always be inferior to hardware airgap, and it is near impossible for the average person to actually confirm that airplane mode is preventing their phone from transmitting any data.

Nothing quite like using a tragedy to let you shit on minorities some more...

Anyway, if you want to go down this road, let's take a look at the actual numbers, shall we.

Number of mass shootings in the US as per Wikipedia:
2018 - 322
2019 - 441
2020 - 615
2021 - 698
2022 - 695
2023 so far - 123

Total = 2894
Number committed by trans persons = 4

Percentage of shooters who are trans = 0.1%
Percentage of adults who are trans = 0.5%

So that leaves 99.9% (or 2890 out of 2894) of shootings which did not involve trans people, and means trans people are 5 times less likely to commit a mass shooting than expected.

I'll give you one guess as to which demographic commits more mass shootings than would be expected.

Absolutely. I have a hot wallet on my phone which is pretty much online 24/7. I've had such a hot wallet for years, which I've spent from multiple times a week, and I have never been hacked and never lost a single satoshi from it. It's entirely possible to have a safe hot wallet. However, I am under no illusion that such a wallet is by far the riskiest wallet I own and is by far the most likely wallet I own to be hacked or exposed to malware. I only ever keep a small daily spending amount of bitcoin in it (certainly no more than 0.01 bitcoin as you say).

But the discussion here is about cold wallets. The wallet I describe above will never be a cold wallet. A mobile wallet which only goes online once a year is also not a cold wallet. It might be safe so far, but it is never as safe as an actual cold wallet. I could drive for 10 years without ever wearing a seat belt and never suffer any injuries - doesn't make it a good idea.

Maybe so, but there is also WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID, NFC, and other connectivity modules to consider too. Disabling all of them without breaking the phone is difficult. It is far easier to start with an old laptop which does not have the majority of these at all and then just remove the WiFi card.

Well then you no longer have a cold wallet. You now have a hot wallet which happens to be offline at the moment.

The whole point of staying 100% airgapped is to mitigate other risks that are harder or impossible to protect against. Are you 100% sure there is no malware lurking on your device already? Are you 100% sure your device won't be targeted when you go online? Have you completely audited every piece of hardware and every single line of code in your device prior to using it? The answer to all of these is no. But if you can stay 100% airgapped at all times, then any such vulnerabilities will have a much harder time trying to steal your coins.

Why not?

And what happens when a country prints so much of it that it costs $100 trillion for a loaf of bread? Their banking system absolutely collapses and they end up using a different currency altogether.

This has already happened multiple times recent. Look at the likes of Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi. All of these entities were running fractional reserve systems and holding a tiny proportion of the balances they were showing to their customers on their accounts, while the majority of bitcoin that had been deposited was being loaned, gambled, and otherwise risked to make profits for themselves. A small number of people withdrawing their coins was enough to cause liquidity issues followed by a larger bank run and then complete collapse.

This is the risk you take with any and every centralized exchange. They are fractional reserve scams with no one waiting to bail them out.

FDIC insurance is a somewhat different issue, but as I pointed out in an earlier post in this thread, the FDIC only has enough assets to cover about 0.5% of what they claim to insure. If a big enough bank collapses, either FDIC's assets will run out or the government will just have to print even more to cover all the losses.

As I explained above. They are buying bonds and other securities from the Treasury.

They print securities which are traded on the open market for money.

There are more ways to create money than the Fed printing it. Every time any bank anywhere hands out a loan or a line or credit to anyone, that's brand new money entering circulation.

Securities are sold at fixed rates for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and so on. Changing the interest rate today will only affect the interest on new debt issued from that change.

File with whom? Themselves?

Yes. It's called shutting down the vast majority of government spending. If we have no money to spend and no one will lend us any more, then we don't have any other choice.

Again, they are creating securities which must be bought. And even if you think endless printing of raw cash is the solution to this, just look at places like Zimbabwe or Venezuela where it costs $100 trillion to buy a loaf of bread.

Have you at least managed to identify the addresses and balances you are trying to gain access to here? You mentioned to me in your PMs that you are not sure how much bitcoin is stored in this vault.

Since we are struggling to get this to work for you, if you like you could send me your three xpubs (not private keys) and I could at least look up the addresses and balance for you. The only thing you lose by doing so is privacy by account of me knowing the addresses - there is no way for me to steal your coins from only knowing your xpubs. At least then we would know if you are wasting all this time trying to recover a very small amount of money. If you like I can provide you with my PGP key so you can encrypt any communication.

And moving forward, since we can't seem to get this tool working for you, then we could instead try going down the path of manually extracting the necessary xprv from your two keys and then recreating the multi-sig wallet in Electrum.

What a classic insane piece of franky1 rambling nonsense.

Reused k values are possible with any transaction since day 1 of bitcoin.

Nope, never said that.

I never said it was.

I never said that old transactions were vulnerable.

Nope, didn't say that either.

Maybe you should try reading what I wrote rather than just launching in to one of your usual diatribes arguing against random strawmen.

All that I stated was that if you reuse a k value, your coins will be stolen. This is a simple fact. I made no statement whatsoever regarding old transactions being vulnerable or anything pre-6979 being vulnerable. This is all nonsense you made up simply to argue against.

I assume, since you are talking about 2 or more transactions, you are referring to the situation where a wallet would reuse k values. If you have two transactions spending coins from the same address and therefore using the same private key, and these two transactions also use the same k value (and therefore have the same r value), then it is possible to calculate the private key for that address.

However, this situation is a well known vulnerability, and there is no current wallet software I am aware of which utilizes reused k values. If there was, all its users would fairly rapidly have their coins stolen. Most good wallets will generate the k value deterministically using RFC 6979, ensuring a different k value for each transaction.

Is your computer second hand? Is there a chance this wallet file already existed on your device and when you installed Electrum it simply opened the already existing wallet? It's very strange behavior for malware, which would be much better off just letting you generate a wallet normally and stealing your seed phrase.

And did you not say above that you wrote down a seed phrase? But here you say all you did was create a password?

It's highly unlikely. The only thing I can think of would be to try the following:

• Take your list of 30 private keys
• Delete all the addresses and all of the "p2wpkh:" prefixes, so you are just left with a list of 30 raw private keys beginning with K or L
• Create a new Electrum wallet, and select "Import Bitcoin addresses or private keys"
• Paste in your list of 30 private keys

This will generate the corresponding legacy address (starting with "1") for each of your private keys. It's highly unlikely any of these are the 1N8vh... address in question, but it's the only possibility I can think of.

The download link on Electrum.org is always up to date, so if you downloaded it from the official site, then this would not have happened. I am assuming you didn't bother to verify your download with the developer's PGP keys prior to installing?

There is no scenario in which Electrum will automatically generate a wallet with an address in the file name. The only two remaining options are that either someone else put it there (meaning you downloaded a malicious copy of Electrum or a malicious wallet file by mistake), or you put it there without realizing what you were doing (meaning that you must have copied it from somewhere else first - it's not a Coinmama deposit address?).

The Treasury keeps track of it, and of course the people who own the debt.

About 70% of the debt is held domestically, by things like mutual funds, pension funds, insurance funds, and a variety of private individuals.
About 30% of the debt is foreign, with the largest holders being Japan and China.

When we talk about printing money, they aren't actually printing physical cash. The Fed mainly creates new money by trading Treasury securities. This isn't something that can be done in secret.

And it doesn't bother you that the foundation of entire economy is shrouded in mystery and impossible to fully account for?

So what do you think will happen? The US national debt will continue to increase unchecked until eventually we are paying our entire GDP just in interest payments. What then? You think investors and institutions are going to continue to lend us money when it's abundantly clear we will never pay them back? What do you think happens when we default on trillions and trillions of dollars of debt and can't fund any government spending?

True, but many developers remain anonymous, and they don't have global jurisdiction.

Also true. They could, as they did with gold, simply declare it illegal for citizens to hold bitcoin and demand that everyone hand their bitcoin over to the government. The difference here of course being they cannot forcibly take your bitcoin as they could with your gold, not least of all because I lost all my keys in an unfortunate boating accident.

I'm not sure what altcoins have to do with this. If the government were hell bent on sanctioning bitcoin, then it would trivially easy for them to sanction these largely centralized altcoins as well.