What is the timeline here? How soon before your first withdrawal from Coinmama did you set up the Electrum wallet?

I ask because the first transaction to that address was on April 20th, 2021. However, approximately one month earlier, Electrum released version 4.1.0 which stopped generating legacy seed phrases and legacy addresses (without going through the console) and started generating segwit seed phrases and segwit addresses instead. Such addresses would start with "bc1", and not look like the legacy address which you have shared.

Pretty much. There is no end to all the projects you can fund when you can just print money out of thin air. But at some point that has to come to an end, either because you stop printing money or you print so much of it the whole system collapses.

Well, it depends. If the other party is happy to accept bitcoin through their Coinbase account, then you can pay them without any real bitcoin moving whatsoever: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/sending-or-receiving-cryptocurrency/instant-sends
If the other party wants bitcoin sent to an external wallet, then of course Coinbase would have to send out real bitcoin, but with them running a fractional reserve system doing so leaves even fewer bitcoin to cover the deposits of other customers who are at constant risk of losing everything in a bank run.

Because of fiat. It is impossible to have an instant decentralized fiat/bitcoin exchange because of how slow fiat is. CEXs get around this by taking custody of your fiat first, but the price you pay is zero privacy and zero security.

The caveat to what you have said is that some exchanges, such as Coinbase, already allow instant off-chain transactions between their users. Such transactions are internal only - Coinbase update balances on their internal database, but nothing ever touches the blockchain. In such cases, Coinbase doesn't move any bitcoin and does not even need to own the bitcoin in question. Such transactions are absolutely "thin air bitcoin", as you put it.

Only if you have bitcoin in your own wallet do you actually own any bitcoin. Otherwise all you own is an entry in a spreadsheet.

Or indeed, no money at all. In 2020 the reserve requirement for banks in the US was lowered to 0%. Yup, you read that right. There is now no requirements for banks to have any money on hand whatsoever.

It is not just the remaining money that is loaned out, but banks also create new money out of thin air when they hand out loans.

Bitcoin could absolutely solve this, but if and only if people actually hold it in their own wallets and not on centralized exchanges. We already know that most centralized exchanges are running fractional reserve systems with bitcoin and other coins. We've seen this in particular over the last few months when the likes of Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, FTX, and more have collapsed and been unable to pay back everyone who had deposited. With a centralized exchange you don't own any bitcoin - all you have is an entry on their spreadsheet. That exchange can show you any number they like, while they actually spend/gamble/loan your coins out freely. The only difference is that centralized exchanges cannot just create new bitcoin out of thin air like banks can with fiat, but they are very much fractional reserve just like banks are.

And risk collapsing their entire company if the community then decides to fork to an ASIC-resistant mining algorithm, as many other coins have done in the past.

It is in the banks' and the politicians' best interests to keep the population uneducated. Insert here that quote form Henry Ford about there being a revolution tomorrow if people actually understood the banking system.

The US was in the Middle East long before 9/11.

It's low, but it's not zero. The US defaulting on its debt could lead to very rapid devaluing of the dollar.

The very reason the SEC can crack down on stablecoins is exactly because they are completely centralized. They are ran by a single entity, issued by a single entity, controlled by a single entity, can be seized/frozen/confiscated by that single entity, and if that single entity scams or goes bankrupt then the whole thing collapses. The SEC can simply put pressure or lay criminal charges on that single entity, and they can do what they like with that stablecoin. The same is generally true for centralized exchanges and other centralized services.

The same is absolutely not true for Bitcoin or for truly decentralized exchanges like Bisq. These things are entirely decentralized. There is no single entity with the power over Bitcoin or Bisq to shut it down or alter it, and so there is nothing the SEC can do. Unless they feel like targeting every Bitcoin node in the world or every Bisq user in the world, which is obviously not possible.

And so I say let them. Too long have centralized exchanges leeched off the popularity of bitcoin with their centralized shitcoins, their token printing out of thin air, their fractional reserve scams, their privacy invasion, their data harvesting and selling, all in the name of making themselves profits. Let them all be regulated in to oblivion and shut down entirely. Bitcoin will be just fine, and will be stronger for it.

Yes. If you don't specify it in the command line, then a pop up will ask for it.

No, two would be the minimum. You can't use one since one can't be compared to zero others, but you could use two with ^r1^ coming somewhere before ^r2^.

Note that with relative anchors (but not fixed anchors), you can use the same relative anchor on multiple lines. So if I had one line with ^r1^, and two different lines both with ^r2^, then both of the ^r2^ lines would come somewhere after ^r1^, but in either order.

As I say, it all depends on the format of your tokensfile, how many lines there are, the possibilities on each line, how much descrambling might be needed, etc. It also depends on how many guesses per second your hardware is capable of. If you share your tokensfile with the actual words redacted (feel free to PM it to me if you would prefer), I can do some rough math to work it out for you.

If you run without --no-eta, then it should calculate it for you, but in my experience this doesn't really work very well for large numbers and tends to just freeze up.

You just have to copy and paste the quote tags multiple times around each section of text you want to quote.

I think maybe it would be worth clarifying the difference between the current set up and your future plans.

At the moment, with whirlwindmoney being the sole operator of the site, then they are in control of all 3 keys in a 3-of-3 multi-sig. This provides additional security against a single server being seized or infiltrated, but it still requires complete trust from the end user that whirlwindmoney won't scam them, as it would in a normal single-sig set up.

In the future with blinded bearer certificates and the involvement of other third parties, then presumably the best option in that scenario would be to migrate to a different multi-sig. Let's say they recruit nine other people to be signers for the blinded certificates. Maybe something like a 7-of-10 multi-sig would be the best in that case, which provides a good mix of security against some of the signers being dishonest as well as redundancy against some of the signers being taken offline, seized, infiltrated, etc.

CMIIW.

Absolutely not, which is the point I am making.

When you said "unless you're Satoshi..." I took that in reference to it being impossible to print any more bitcoin. Reading the line that I quoted from you again, perhaps your intended meaning was that bitcoin could not be used to fund wars, unless Satoshi donated their stash? I don't strictly agree with that either, though. Bitcoin can be used to fund anything, if it is owned in sufficient quantities by the "right" people. I think it is fairly likely that a number of governments around the world are holding not insignificant amounts of bitcoin.

Good. The sooner we rid the space of these fiat surrogates, the better. They are centralized, fractional reserve, not backed up, printed out of thin air at will, can be seized out of your accounts at any time, and pegged to a rapidly devaluing currency. They take all the worst bits of fiat, and add in zero privacy from the centralized issuer, zero protection from scams or bugs on behalf of the centralized issuer, and complete lack of regulation or FDIC insurance. There are court documents proving that the various centralized entities which print these coins use them for their own purposes, to cook their books, bail themselves out, pump their own coins, and other generally shady and illegal activities.

These stablecoins are a ticking timebomb, with several losing their peg or even collapsing outright in recent memory. It would be a wise move to sell any you are holding and your money back in to bitcoin.

Yup. Just the interest payments on our debt cost us half a trillion dollars a year. And since debt is increasing, interest payments will increase too. It won't be long before interest payments become one of the largest outgoings of the government's budget. And what happens then? When we pay more on interest than we do on military or healthcare? How much money do we have to print then? How worthless does the dollar become? Or do we just renege on our national debts and let the whole thing collapse?

Either way, the outlook for fiat is bleak.

That's the way it was designed. College and other tuition fees have been artificially inflated to extraordinary levels so for many people this is their only option if they want to go to college at all.

Just imagine if someone shilled an altcoin with the properties of USD today:

• Several trillion in circulation, but we don't actually know how much
• Unlimited supply
• Constantly printed at will, but new coins are exclusively given to the top 0.1% of holders
• Lost >99% of its value since launch
• Can be seized out of your accounts at any time

Somehow that's even worse than your average shitcoin scam!

Satoshi returning and moving any of their stash does not equate to new bitcoin being printed, though. We will never breach the limit of 21 million.

Bingo. This is normal now. The latest balance sheet shows they've printed another $100 billion since I made this thread a few days ago.

Here's a link without the paywall: https://archive.ph/EoHSv

Not necessarily. If you've made more than one account under the same passphrase, then it could be m/84'/0'/1' and so on.

If you are searching using the xpub and --mpk, then you don't need to set an address limit anymore.

No, that would be the case if you were using fixed anchors rather than relative anchors.

Fixed anchors (^x^) place that word in a fixed position. Relative anchors (^rx^) place that word in relation to other relative anchors.

If you use ^3^Word3, then Word3 would be the 3rd word.
If you use ^r3^Word3, then Word3 would be placed somewhere between the words you set as ^r2^ and ^r4^, but there could be other words between them as well, and ^r3^ wouldn't necessarily be the third word.

It's all going to depend on the size of entire tokens file. But if you change the number of possibilities in a single line from 1 to 2, then that is going to double your search space. Change another line from 1 to 2, and the will double it again, so 4x in total. So even a few extra possibilities can dramatically increase the search space.

Again, it depends on what exactly you are searching. If you know all 12 words exactly but have them in the wrong order, then that's 12! = 479 million possibilities. If you know the order of 12 words, but each word could be one of four possibilities, then that's only 4¹² = 17 million possibilities. It will all depend on exactly how much you know and how much is unknown.

It is utterly beyond me how you can seriously claim that Wasabi provides fungibility while you actively discriminate against certain coins. This behavior is the antithesis of fungibility.

Almost. Take the fresh address it path it shows you under your xpub and knock the last two sets of digits off it to get the derivation path for your xpub. So if it shows m/84'/0'/0'/0/5, your xpub's path will be m/84'/0'/0'. Make sure to include the ' symbols, these are very important and will generate entirely different keys if you miss them out.

The last thing to be sure is that this xpub is definitely coming from the account protected by the passphrase, and not from the base account with no passphrase.

If the order is off, then you are really going to struggle. Based on your initial post of 15-20 words, and the fact that I can descramble 12 words in a little under an hour, then 15 words would come out at around 100 days and 20 words will be in the region of hundreds of thousands of years, even assuming you were 100% correct with all your words and symbols.

So, assuming you know the order, then I would try something like this initially:

And so on.

The ^x^ before each word fixes the position of that word. btcrecover will then take one entry from each line and assemble that in to a passphrase in that order to try. So on each line, you put every possible permutation of that word. This is also assuming no spaces between the words.

If that fails, then change your tokens file to all caps.
If that fails, then take your second wordlist (e.g. veg instead of fruit) and follow the same process.
If that fails, then combine your wordlists and follow the same process.

Note that if $ is the last character of a token, you will need to replace it with %S otherwise btcrecover will interpret it as an end anchor.

In terms of the numbers at the end, you can do what you are doing and put every possibility on a single line with $ at the end, or you can use a wildcard if you are unsure about the numbers. For example, %3,4d will try every 3 and 4 digit combination. Note that this will significantly increase your search space, however.

I understand that, but my concerns was more about how users would be able to redeem their certificates should your service be seized or shutdown. It doesn't really matter that the funds are secure and cannot be stolen by third parties if the real owners cannot access them either.

And if you have a solution to this problem, how would that change if you move to multiple third party signers as you have mentioned above? Would I have to go to each signer individually and have them validate my certificate and approve my withdrawal? How would I even track down the signers in your absence?

Of the four browsers you have mentioned, Firefox is the only which isn't based on Chromium and filled with unremovable Google code. It is easily the best browser to use, other than Tor, when it comes to privacy and security.

If you are going to change your search engine, then no point moving from one corporate spyware engine such as Google to another corporate spyware engine such as Bing. You should choose one which is actually private, such as DDG or SearX.

A few questions:

Am I correct in saying the notes you talk about on the Tor site are not blinded bearer certificates? Rather, they function similarly to ChipMixer chips, in that I can combine or split them and redeem them later, but they are not blinded to you?

Once blinded bearer certificates are operational, how does the end user protect against your service/website being seized/shutdown? How could they redeem their certificates in such a case? How would they be able contact the threshold number of signers in order to redeem their certificate and receive the corresponding bitcoin from your multi-sig wallet?

How did you export the xpub? If you are sure it is correct, then you can just use that directly instead of then deriving an address from it. Your search will also be a little faster using the xpub since btcrecover does not have to derive one or more addresses for each attempt.

Instead of using the --addrs argument, replace it with --mpk xpub6ABC...
If you also know the derivation path for that xpub, then include the following as well to narrow down the search further, replacing xx with the relevant numbers:

If you can give us much information as you know about your passphrase (obviously without revealing the actual words), then we can try to optimize things as much as possible.

Which is my point exactly. $1.7 billion is nothing. We spend $800 billion a year just on our military. That's 0.2%. The completely unnecessary extra 6-7% of GDP we spend over and above European countries because of our moronic healthcare system equates to about $1.4 trillion.

So the average spending on healthcare in developed nations by their government is around $6,000 per person. For us, it's almost $13,000. As I said above, our government spends around 6-7% more of our GDP on healthcare than similarly developed European countries. But on top of that, we also pay huge insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses which most European countries don't have. And, for that huge amount of extra government spending, employer spending, insurance spending, out of pocket expenses, people going bankrupt, etc., the care we get is constantly rated as one of the worst in the developed world.

But God forbid we actually want to get better care for less money by cutting out all the predatory insurance companies and middlemen! That would be sOcIaLiSm!

No, far better to hand huge amounts of money completely unnecessarily directly in to the pockets of insurance company CEOs and the like. They are the ones buying out our politicians after all. And why not? The government can always just print more! Brrrrr!