Your network is definitely compromised. What about the miners? Did you set up (different) passwords on each? With 2018 or earlier firmware you had to set up both web and ssh passwords, not too sure about 2019 where you are not supposed to log in with ssh, but an earlier version (May?) has an exploit in the web server that re enables ssh access...

Also, rather than losing controllers, try the recovery procedure from (micro)SD, and if that doesn't cure it try booting BraiinsOS from the sd card and see if they work that way its better to sacrifice a cheap (small) sd card than a controller (if S9s until the i model).

Perhaps you could isolate your miners from your family network, you could have them on different network segments (both physically or logically). Ideally the miners would have their own router firewall, i would setup a white list that only lets them connect to the intended pool (and maybe Bitmain, i think the things phone home iirc before they start hashing), and having a local caching dns server is wise (dnscrypt-proxy does wonders).

A proper firewall is generally choosing what is allowed and what is not, ports and sites. Usually something like single button "medium" setting is nearly useless, especially for things whoever designed the firewall didn't think of (such as Bitmain asic miners getting malware).

While i commend you for not using Windows, be aware that both Android and iOS/OSX are not perfectly safe, Apple may be a little better but don't blind trust them, especially when your device gets too old and is put out of support. You are essentially doing a sysadmin work in your home like you would in a company...

I agree that datasize shouldn't be such a strong a deciding factor, but disagree with your view about the universality of internet in the world. There are still many places with little or no internet access. Sure i have 4g, but the only existing data plan is only 600mb per month... Its been more than a year since we lost adsl here, and there is still no (cheap enough) alternative in sight.

Of course those people aren't going to bother with running a node, they won't use the core wallet, they go lite spv wallet and be done with it. There is no other realistic option, but your idea isn't bad either, i would still not use core even if the wallet showed immediately the funds available, at least until i somehow get uncapped internet again.

Remember how it took me 3 months to sync last time i tried running a full node the last months i still had working adsl? those of us in a bad internet situation will not be running nodes anyway. The current blockchain is huge and if it were to increase its size even more rapidly, it would make no difference to us in the low end.

Its like telling someone earning 5 USD a month that the plane ticket price was slashed from 2000 USD into 1000 USD. Gee thanks, it would still take 17 years of savings (assuming you magically don't pay bills or need to eat)...

I would simply drop the idea of running full nodes on very small simple devices as well. A full node requires gigs of storage, 300g but preferably 500g so it lasts a bit more, and even if you trim the node it still needs to download all that. The issue i see is that simply enlarging the block size doesn't appear to solve the issue but delay it a bit.

I don't like LN much, but at least its optional. I can stick to doing 1 sat/B transactions, until they let me do 0.1 sat/B transactions. Segwit bech32 native addresses has saved me satoshis, so i welcome it.

Not necessarily, if humans decide to live in space and make artificial colonies etc they can also take Bitcoin with them. More probably each colony would have their own blockchain due to the distances involved.

Of course humans may go extinct much earlier. Its estimated the Sun has still 5 billion years estimated to go before its transformation into a red dwarf that may or may not swallow the Earth (but would definitely destroy its biosphere). The Earth itself is only 4.5 billion years old, so it has not even reached its half life, and 500 million years from now there is no guarantee humanity as we know it will continue to exist.

Sure Satoshi reserved some bitcoins as well, but what will ever become of them?

Its not intervened, its designed so it doesn't need any constant intervention. Control means constantly changing things that were already defined, and that is not the case. The physics of this universe aren't constantly changing, whenever ignorant humans can ever entirely comprehend them is another matter.

This is also the reason why the US doesn't get rid of Putin to install their own puppet and be done with it: They make sure you understand they can hurt back as well as you do.

Your fantasy commenting is not how real life works. The US does invest too much money in the military, and you better do well to justify it, because words don't make actions and people will get angry if the toys don't justify their cost. But the US is not mighty invincible, it can be hurt, that is why all departments have to work so hard to avoid or leave the military always as the last resort.

In a nuclear conflagration you just cannot stop ALL of them, that was the point of MAD, and its the reason everyone stopped from using nukes ever since (out of fear).

Now this EMP thing is nothing to write home about. Maybe its just some EMP mounted in a supersonic missile, maybe the idea is to launch those ahead to attempt jam the defenses before the ones with actual payload hit. The Russian (and Chinese?) deterrent works as follow: Enough numbers of supersonic missiles are still cheaper than, say an US carrier. And given enough numbers, some will pass. Only one needs to hit the carrier.

This is the anti us naval task force tactic they devised decades ago, and are continuing it. One keypoint is to make the Americans lose enough expensive toys so that people back home start questioning those responsible for the economic and human loses. And this is why you see so much emphasis in cruiser missile technology. No these have nothing to do with ICBMs, don't bring that because that is sub orbital stuff, not fly above the speed of sound close to the water surface or ground.

The Americans also have plenty of EMP things, but you should know this. The latest fashion is unmanned flying, but still probably more expensive than mundane supersonic missiles, yet cheaper than certain stealth planes and such.

No, the Russians are not attacking you so lower that pointless rhetoric (And Putin isn't going to get deterred by your comments in Bitcointalk). Military contenders for the USA? Realistically its just those two: Russia and China. Doesn't mean they have "more" firepower than you, but China certainly has more people and Russia more territory. Ask any military official and they rather engage some middle eastern country rather than those two; maybe not out of fear but out of cost, and human lives which tend to push the politicians against the wall and force their hands faster than the actual military opposition which will also play the attrition card, and lengthen the conflict like the ex-Yugoslavia conflict.

Rather than issuing threats no one here cares about (Seriously you are scaring no one with those "mighty" words), study what this is about and inquire in your own readiness and counter measures. That's what the actual professionals do anyway, solutions to problems.

Don't justify mistakes, How is that people died by the Iran attacks but it was covered up? Do you even remember what happened in Libya with the US embassy? Not all is "don't show the cards to the opponent", bad things do happen in conflicts. Maybe the cover was to give time to diplomacy and intelligence. The conflict did not escalate after all...

Lol, you are the type that would probably get infected by moving away from someone that scares you but doing that gets you closer to a wall or something somebody else has sneezed at before, getting infected that way without you ever knowing who it was but left the place minutes ago.

I don't see the point of scuba glasses or gloves, but the typical flu mask is meant to keep the flu to themselves, its not meant to stop things from outside getting in (its not an anti-gas mask). It's similar to you sneezing into a fabric rather than in the open, to trap the things in the fabric and not leave them floating around for others to get infected.

Your reaction was indeed wrong. If you are that scared, don't go out for a couple of months. If you are the type that sneezes in the open, you are the one spreading it. But if you instead use a fabric when sneezing, (such an Asian wearing a mask) you are trying to keep others from getting infected as well.

Note that its pointless to wear the mask when you are fine. Remember what i just wrote above. It may be that they were also doing things by ignorance, such things happen when people get scared.

Imagine what the medics need to face everyday in a hospital, and the professionals attending the actual quarantined areas, or the immigration officers and the people who get in contact with travelers from the affected areas (and those that keep it a secret, or even escape quarantine).

Natural source, but not from eating. The handling of the animals, or simply having them close to the human, made possible for the virus to jump species. Of course you could say they kept those animals close so they could eat them...

Sometimes it just jumps to an intermediary animal first, such things are possible in farms or where many animals are kept or maybe processed (slaughtered, etc).

Its too weak for a bioweapon...

Interesting analogy, using Anastasia for Satoshi impersonators. I guess the communists just copied the French when they did their revolution so the country could never ever return to monarchy.... Now communism is gone, but so is the monarchy. Strangely enough the current leadership doesn't appear to change much...

Craig? Who cares. I think implying him to be equal to an Anastasia impersonator is giving him way too much credit. He should be put aside with the rest of the faketoshis, a dime a dozen.

Yes its super easy, its just dd image device. In windows there are a bunch of tools that do the same, such as rufus or windd.

Then you reboot the computer and tell it to boot from that, you probably need to reboot into bios/uefi and tell it to boot from the usb. Fast/secure boot probably needs to be disabled.

As for running nodes, just run them trimmed if your storage is low. You still need to wait the 250g download for Bitcoin alone. Once in sync bandwidth use shouldn't be much, but beware of the initial download (don't do it on metered connections).

Its not a subsidy its a reward for taking the effort of solving the puzzle. This reward becomes half after each halving.

This is of course more important for miners than traders, this design gradually reduces their activity rather than suddenly, its been working fine. We are now at the last remainder, that remaining 14% of coins left to be minted, most of which will be produced the following years while there is still some profit to be made mining.

A price increase could delay this, but don't count on it to compensate for the halving, and if it does at some point, don't expect it to last long. Looking at the whole picture (ie. zoom out) mining has simply became more and more expensive, less profitable overtime at the same time most coins have already been produced following the programming schedule (which is in Bitcoin's code).

To make a donation campaign like this you have to be an established entity with a proven record. You just cannot randomly start your own, and expect the money to actually reach its intended destination.

If OP collects money, who is going to ensure it reaches China? And the entirety of it? Sure the Chinese government probably accepts donations, and such donations probably wouldn't even be used for the virus and there is no way you can even audit that. Some organizations send things instead (such as masks) but again they will go to the government and then they will decide who gets them and who don't, and what quantity.

This is a big problem with raising money for causes. Or are you going to aid big pharma develop a vaccine?

The Chinese companies are taking the chance to improve their relations with the government, don't think the likes of Binance are suddenly humanitarian. Yes its nice of them, maybe they get some tax exemption later. Lets just hope some of their money actually reaches victims, but no one can truly audit that, people can only hope.

I think the best thing you could do is in fact help develop a vaccine funding those efforts to something local to you (that you can verify), or ask one of the world renown non gov humanitarian organizations to see if they are taking bitcoin donations.

Something similar happened before with the Amazon fires, people here wanted to "give money" but didn't stop to think what that money was doing (if anything). Indeed Brazil did not stop their century old deforestation policy ("developing").

Please when you feel the urge to donate your money, be smart as if you were doing an investment. Perhaps doing an actual investment in something that might benefit the intended cause may actually be better.

As long as people don't suddenly decide to withdraw their money... (Ie. world panic).

It only takes about 10%, worldwide of simultaneous withdraw to crash the system (and world economy). People are largely unaware of how fractional reserve banking works, else they would be very scared.

Banks safe? Heh, you should start reading about fractional reserve banking...

Just don't throw parties while there is a pandemic virus causing deaths around. You want to avoid groups of people in close places, remember for this Wuhan corona virus it only takes one sneeze...

Its the obsolete systems that check for "valid" bitcoin addresses that refuse bech32, even when they already have a perfectly validating bitcoin node running in their platform.

I have both types, a "Legacy" (starting with 3) and a "Native" starting with bc1q. I use the native for everything, the only reason i kept a legacy address is because of one pesky mining pool too stubborn to bother with native, but the difference in fees is noticeable especially when you do like me to always use 1 sat/B transactions (rather than 400ish sats they are like 150ish).

There is no need to keep the ones starting with 1, those are the ones with most expensive transaction fees. You can just keep the bip39 wallet (starts with 3) and a native segwit (bc1q).

BTW: multi-sig addresses start with 3, don't confuse with those. Even worse, at some point in a long forgotten past, Litecoin also used them.

And don't forget to always force your tx fee, there is no point in using anything but 1 sat/B unless its "urgent". You can wait minutes, hours, you can probably wait a day for most things think about it and set the fee manually. Don't fall for that silly "guess the network traffic" (and its exploitable abuse) thing. Most of my 1 sat/B transactions get confirmed within the hour, only exception was Jan 2018, but that hasn't occurred ever again, and besides you can always accelerate later with RBF replace by fee thing.

In my view, 1 Sat/B should be the default and only rarely for extraordinary reasons should people ever touch that.

Also, the number of inputs matter a lot, some wallets let you use more or fewer for various reasons (Its easy to configure in Electrum, don't know about the others).

This is a hard to answer question. In general Android is insecure, and rooting it is akin to running windows as administrator all the time (which a worrisome amount of people do anyways).

In an ideal world, smartphones wouldn't come with unwanted software users are not allowed to remove, additionally the likes of AT&T wouldn't add even more of that software if you make the mistake of turning the phone with their chip still in the first time (specially when you are in a completely different country). Also ideally they would provide security updates and even OS upgrades, but the vast majority won't.

The smartphone ecosystem is bad. Apple is a little but not much better, what with dropping support (no security updates) to perfectly working devices because its out of fashion for them.

In general, if you don't have a really pressing need to root your phone, don't. If you just wanted to remove junk, you could root, remove, unroot. But, not all phones can be "rooted" safely, and some can be bricked. Also try not to leave the adb thing enabled when you play with the thing, preferably never go online with that, its a serious infection vector.

Good or bad, well depends if you truly know what your doing, which is sadly not the usual case.

Not really, its just Debian with Tor pre-configured. I think installing that is easier than a normal Debian install. But the main use of Tails is to use it without installing it at all, directly booting it from an optical media or usb thumb drive.

And no, you should just not use "any" OS, avoid insecure OSes like the plague and stop contributing to malware paradise. If you are not familiar with Linux or *BSD, its time you start familiarizing with them before doing serious things like handling money, ESPECIALLY when you are your own bank. Show some responsible attitude.

Its nothing personal, this is how things like google search ranks up sites. I also tend to remove links from quotes for that reason. Its not what someone believes or not, its just how it works. Indeed any tiny little url you include will help willingly or unwillingly to rank position that site, usually tied to the words surrounding the url.

If you didn't notice, the BBC article i linked refers to this whistle blower Doctor, it was probably news in several sites across the globe anyway.

You can bring stories from other sites, with a brief summary and link. In fact the link is needed so you don't get accused of plagiarism, and a summary falls under fair use. Only the link and no summary is rather rude, i simply don't visit offsite links like that, especially youtube links, but in principle i stick to whatever is shown right here on the forum.

Free books should be offered in .epub format, period. What good is a device that can delete your books when they choose? Using the kindle is madness (and on top of that, it shows ads, yuck).

There are decent e-ink book readers out there perfectly capable or opening the open format .epub. E-ink pearl is simply the next best thing to read things after paper with traditional ink; except without the deforesting and pollution; or the weight, or the physical limitations (scarcity, out of print, etc).

At this point i would recommend something like the Pinebook Pro. This is an ARM laptop meant to run Linux or *BSD.

Normally the weirder the architecture is, the chances of being good increase, they tend to have hardware that works with Free and Open Source software. Since there is no windows for it, kind of forces the company selling it to cherry pick decent components.

It also takes deters temptation to pollute it with unsafe operating systems.

If you come to my country right now your credit card is useless. The Trump administration ordered Visa and Mastercard out, they cannot process payments here. Even before that, there were many places where credit card were not accepted for various reasons.

Bitcoin's price is based on the market, that is the amount of people who find it useful overpower the ones that consider it not useful. The tendency not only has not regressed, it keeps increasing over time, albeit slower and slower as it should be for a coin that does not lose value because its production is limited in code and cannot be changed on a whim of a select few. Bitcoin is valuable because of the made its made, and because of its distinct features. The proof is the market price. It cannot go zero over night like you imply, because the market is backing it up. Any attempts of dumping it will find and equal and probably stronger force of pumping it.

If you still do not understand this, you do not understand the value of things. The value of things depends on the usefulness to both the seller and the buyer. It is useful to millions of people, this is why it has the value it has.

Things that go zero overnight are things that can be destroyed, like companies, governments of countries. There is nothing in particular you can do to destroy Bitcoin, short of destroying electricity generation and communications worldwide. It is easier to see the US dollar or the Euro disappear than Bitcoin. Even gold is weaker. Each Bitcoin (satoshi) is unique and its intangible, it can be exchanged across borders at the speed of light (confirmation takes minutes but thats another matter). Bitcoin is so useful the number of people wanting it is slightly increasing over the amount of coins that are and will ever be available, which is why its price keeps climbing. Well that, and the fact that all fiat coins have infinite production, which makes them lose value intentionally over time.

Once you understand this and the rest of the features that make Bitcoin secure and reliable, you get to understand while the demand keeps even after 11 years and counting.