You got it entirely wrong as far as I am concerned. Hardware wallets are not downloadable. They're literally pieces of hardware.

If you're referring to apps such as Ledger Live, these are just wallets to check balances and initiate transactions with the HW. You could use a lot of other apps and sites, including Waves DEX, Binance, Electrum, Magnum Wallet etc. There is no need to save anything anywhere besides the seed your Ledger shows during the first-time setup. You just write that seed down and store it somewhere safe.

Private keys are usually not scrapped from the Ledger for security reasons. As long as you have the seed, it's enough to recover all your balances.

Even with a compromised computer, the HW is known to be safe - while the PC's screen might fool you, the hardware wallet's won't. If the PC is infected so that the transactions only show to be correct while in reality the destination wallet is a thief's, your hardware wallet will always show the real destination one and requires your physical input to confirm or decline the transaction.

But besides checking wallet balances, you basically need the wallet the entire time. You have to confirm addresses, transactions etc using it.

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Disk failure. I always fear that scenario. Another concern I personally have is that a vulnerability might be found someday for encrypted archives and my money would just suddenly be transferred into another wallet just because I held my seed/wallet.dat in an archive and someone got in touch with it. I don't trust digitally stored personal stuff.

That is in case you lose your hardware wallet like you said and cannot purchase another one for replacement. You can simply recover everything using your seed, or just buy another wallet. Ledger has 3 PIN tries before it automatically resets, so in case you lose it you'd need someone who knows what a Ledger is who also knows an unknown physical vulnerability in order to have it compromised. Otherwise, you could lose 10 HWs with the same seed on them all and you'd still be perfectly fine.

I usually had a pretty hard time trusting any wallet that I had to download offline. For example, there was a time I used to generate paper wallets but I was very paranoid every single time no matter how safely I generated them.

Hardware wallets basically removed this fear - with Ledger, you just open up Electrum (or Ledger Live) and you generate as many accounts as you wish without having the constant "what if some stranger knows it" fear. Moreover, carrying it in your pocket is safer than carrying a wallet around, as long as you stored your Ledger seed properly. Losing your wallet means losing everything you had in it while losing a Ledger means recovering your funds when you get back home. It's not like you can insert a random code inside a software and get back your lost ID, cash, cards etc.

Being offline, you don't have the fear that a keylogger might get to unlock your software wallet and get your funds out either. Although it might not be the most secure wallet, HWs avoid the hassle and constant stress of possibly not doing something right and having all your funds flush out of your addresses. This is mostly why I love my Ledger. Think of it as a mini & handy airgapped device you can conveniently carry around in your pocket.

It's easily stolen from some people because they do not have the necessary education to know how a digital wallet or file can be safely protected from hacks and thefts. With every new generations, it'll be easier and easier to get them understand why Bitcoin is better than centralized currencies and why it's such a genius idea. After all, you should store your keys the same way you store your precious metals or other valuable stuff you have.

For sure, hence why I said that checking from multiple sources is something I advise. Almost anything could be compromised in the online world, so I'd rather not believe anything and be safe than skip a website verification and have damage occuring to my wallets.

At least with social media you can see when a certain change happened. If you have a website and someone gets to hack it, it could be as simple as the criminal redirecting your real site to his fake one. Chances are way lower to get onto a fake site if you verify whether the same link corresponds on multiple sites (e.g. an older article mentioning the website, a social media account, a Bitcointalk thread, maybe even asking a friend who uses it etc).

(I snipped a large part of the post)

These are quite contradictory - we're basically replacing the trust we have in search engines with your post. Someone with malicious intent could edit the links from your post and redirect other users to fake ones. I guess the best way to find if a website link is legit is by looking through various sources and, if you're that paranoid, search from another device as well.

• Websites such as Binance have social media accounts. You can check them out because most of them have their websites placed on their profile.
• If you're using Tor Browser, there are some sites (such as ProtonMail or the website of Qubes OS) the browser automatically detects an ".onion" link for - that's another good sign that the website you are on might be legit.
• Some sites such as Facebook show the company details to the left of the address bar. Facebook displays "Facebook, Inc. (US)" and you can check for more details by clicking on that thing.
• Always visit https sites.
• Sometimes, a scam verification is as easy as a "<insert_domain_here> scam" search away. Our forum, for example, has a lot of suspicious domains found by users. Chances are you might find an accusation made by reputable members.

There are a lot more ways to validate a website's legitimacy, but this is all I can think of for now.

This is one thing I have never really taken care of, to be honest. I have this fear sometimes that I might die and my coins would simply stay locked. I don't think there's anyone I know who could get inside my wallets without prior research about BTC..

I might either teach a few of them (closest ones) how to use the wallets and where to take the passwords and seeds from or, otherwise, I'd probably write it all in a notebook although this is a quite bad idea to do so. Imagine writing a "how to get my Bitcoins!" tutorial for in case I die and a thief finding it. That one should either be very very well hidden (perhaps buried underground, but there's moisture and a lot of other factors you have to consider..).

Yeah, I understood what the article talked about, this is basically how double spending works.

But to the average person the article makes it sound like Bitcoin can be double spend as in you can validate 2 txs using the exact same coins, as if the network itself is flawed. It's basically just a wallet glitch (later edit: it's not even a glitch! it's just that some people may get confused and think that a recevied amount of BTC means it's already confirmed, which is literally lack of knowledge.. seen at newbies) and the simplest way you can avoid it is by checking if the tx has been confirmed yet or not. If the tx hasn't been confirmed, it means the received coins aren't valid yet.

I'm not 100% sure if this could be another "fix" but my Live shows on the left side of the transactions a circle with an icon (to differentiate sent from received amounts). When the circle is filled, I know it's a confirmed tx so I can't really be deceived. Any empty circle means the tx hasn't been confirmed.

So as the article @DdmrDdmr mentioned says, it’s not a vulnerability, but instead a clever piece of social engineering where a malicious actor would try to trick you. Only complete newbies would probably fall for such a trick.

Most downloads nowadays also allow you to verify their legitimacy through various methods, mostly through signatures. I usually also do this if the time allows me to do so. Even trusted sources could be malicious if they are under an attack themselves. Qubes has a thorough tutorial (.onion version here) of how to verify their ISO even for the most paranoid ones out there.

Internet has its own dark places for sure. My rule of thumb is .. just keep your cryptos on an old device, be it a Pentium old PC and flash a good linux distro on it - or buy a hardware wallet. that saves you from so many potential issues.

You don't randomly collaborate with someone. They most likely have a contract they depend on, it's not as easy to "turn bad" as it sounds when you have CZ. I guess he knows what he's doing since he got Binance on his hands and was successfully able to turn it into something convenient for all kinds of crypto users.

A bit scary when you consider the fact that they're trying to expand to basically all existing crypto branches - including coin ranking sites, and now gambling. Could turn out to be the next Google of crypto

Graphics look great tbh, can't complain. They probably make for a successfully addictive platform alone.

While "crypto backed by gold" sounds great, I'm not sure anymore if the advantages are worth it. It makes cryptocurrencies non-trustless again so it defeats their purpose. I guess a fixed, deflationary supply with PoW mining is enough for a coin to have value.

Most coins backed by precious metals offer you the opportunity to sell your coins for physical metals but that's just centralization. You simply can't create a decentralized physical gold transfer - and they request your personal information too & KYC. It's a much less hassle to simply buy real gold (or gold stocks) than purchasing these kind of tokens. So that's a no from me.

If they sell, chances are multiple people will get to purchase the coins one farm has mined - hence, the coin distribution gets better (and there's an increased coin circulation too). If a large farm does not sell any, don't they basically store a lot of coins and start posing an incremental risk over the market the more they mine? It's one of the reasons for which some are worried Satoshi may own a million BTC. Maybe there's a better word that fits in my previous reply than "network" but I guess you get the point.

What?! Is this official or just a thing you hear around? I'd be interested to read more.

All that under the name of "fighting terrorism". Every time. It honestly just feels like they have been lately only using the names of "racism", "terrorism", "drugs" etc to push a privacy-shrinking agenda. Without these names, we wouldn't be the only worried ones.

Same goes for the Russian school face recognition system named "Orwell". I mean, the purpose of it is literally in its name. Most people go for the "it's fine as long as it's used for our good" opinion but they never question if they are ever really used for us and not against us..

And then comes the "yeah but that's russia, man" argument. Yea, sure..

I doubt Charlie Lee, Rorger and any other big name in the crypto industry live their life completely normally. If I was a big name in this domain, I'd be paranoid as hell but it probably wouldn't be too evident.

Even larger company owners are usually paranoid - it's their (and their families') life at stake. That's why you used to see bigger names carrying around Blackberries and guns years ago. Some big names out there probably even wear bulletproof vests under their clothing when going in public.

If Lee was to be taken hostage for his crypto holdings, it would've hit the news and a massive investigation would've taken place. The same thing happening to a not so well known guy would probably only have a small article over the web talking about it.

As a criminal, it's quite stupid to go for big targets. We're more vulnerable than they are.

They most likely are paid reviews. There are more than enough places to buy them from, and it's a shame that you can literally launch a malicious app on a platform that is supposed to be trusted and get fake positive reviews for a matter of bucks.

Agreed. From ads to fake YouTube giveaways to fake, malicious software on their own services, it's getting really annoying. I would have probably trusted that app if I saw the rating it has, it's one of the factors I consider - only few check source codes.. I usually go to the official websites I need to get something from and get the Play Store link from over there.

Although the price may be driven by miners too, don't forget that miners selling is actually a good thing for Bitcoin. If they mine and never sell, they'd accumulate in their own wallets which centralizes the network more. While that'd also mean less supply on the markets, if you put that next to the centralization you'd find out it's not really worth it to let the latter win.

I don't mind miners selling their mined coins. After all, without them, the network cannot exist and they have to live, pay rent and utilities too.

The system is. But it's trustless as in you don't need a third party to prove that the money I gave you came from my wallet, has not been double spent so the coins exist and are legit and is valid.

That is completely different from the trust some people put in BTC. You need to trust Bitcoin as in you need to believe it'd be a good choice during a recession for it to survive.

If enough people do not believe it's a good safe haven asset, it won't be. Price is decided by us. If you don't believe BTC would be a good choice during a crisis, you'd sell. Same goes for other people. Well, if the number of coins sold exceeds the number of coins bought during a recession, price would obviously fail. You can't have 80% of the Apple fans never buying their products again without a big downfall and potential even collapse of it. We decide how some things go.

A large part of the electronics even you use have small quantities of gold or silver in them. Ever heard of "gold-coated adaptors"? To me it still looks like gold is something. We may not be creating and using golden tools anymore, but it's still used a lot in many industries. In fact, your "overpriced, manipulated and useless" part doesn't even make sense if you take a 5 second look at the gold price chart over the last 10 years.

I'm quite sure that even if you have some balance in your account showing up through a glitch, you can't really spend it as the network would not allow that to happen. It's not as if a hacker could create a modified version of Electrum to allow double spending - if that was the case, there would've been way more BTC around than we currently have and the coin would've already been dead anyway.

I understand CoinDesk might need fancy article titles for clickbait, but this one honestly sucks. It makes those who've never researched about BTC think double-spending is now a thing through wallet vulnerabilities.

It helps if you have a broad knowledge of blockchain tech/BTC in general and helping others out/explaining some stuff a significant % of members had no idea of though. People may throw a lot more merits at you, as you've most likely seen with some members out here.

Otherwise I'd say it's mostly a subjective thing - if one believes you deserve a merit, they'll give it to you although maybe for others your reply is silly. But that obviously is the case only if you also spend a bit of time to think and construct your reply. My case is the same as yours - I earned most of my merits through discussions as well.

Uncertainty is what makes it not be a safe haven asset. When you'll buy BTC and know that no matter what happens it'll grow during hard times or at least be somewhat stable, you could place it in that category. But honestly, the fact that it's only around a decade since it was born gives you doubts. It might've been the same when precious metals such as gold were found. Now it has a history and it's still being used after so long in so many domains.

You can't go to a Bitcoin ATM and say "I'll buy this for hard times". I mean you can, but it'd be silly to think that way. This year's beginning was a great test for BTC as a safe haven and it unfortunately failed, at least temporarily. Give it time - for now, it's mostly speculative. Maybe things will be decided within 2-3 generations.

We probably all forget where we started from at one point.

I may not have the highest quality posts, but I guess I have improved over the years and I still keep trying to do so. To be honest, visiting this forum for the first time and seeing there are some campaigns that literally pay the best members out here over a thousand bucks a month is insane and attracts you as a member.

I bet more than half of the members have joined this way. I honestly cannot remember if I also did, but the answer is probably positive. Still, as @Royse777 said, this is a community. We're supposed to be here for the sake of learning more Bitcoin stuff from the best members out there and to be here simply because we enjoy the community Satoshi has launched.

If there is one bad thing I remember doing, it is burstposting and the day campaign manager yahoo removed me from a campaign for doing so. I literally had no idea what burstposting was and thought it was fine to reply to 20 threads with the same subject in a 2-hour span, so being kicked out of the campaign and not being accepted in future ones was a hard lesson that I had to digest but made me wake up.

At one point though, some stuff gets oversaturated. "Bitcoin vs Gold" threads, (not so) subtle merit begging etc gets really annoying especially when a lot of members spam the forum with it. And when the forum gets oversaturated and some members feel like they've had enough of it, they may not give the friendliest replies - but in the end we all change by constantly learning through mistakes.

I'll end this reply with a quote from theymos' birthday, written by himself:

Governments will never be able to enforce drug illegality to a 100% yet most countries in the world have it. I still can't comprehend how most think Bitcoin banning is so far-fetched; didn't India, with almost 1.5B people, just unban it? If they were able to hold on to that ban for that long, other countries are as well.

I have been fearing this scenario of a crypto ban for years now, but honestly with time passing by it only gets closer to that point. I guess it'll either be a ban or artificial centralization; it looks like they're pushing for the latter, but if it fails then they might go for the former. The average person has no idea how to buy BTC without having KYC stomping on their face at one point anyway, I mean in a matter of 1-2 years it got to the point where the safest (in terms of KYC avoidance) fiat <-> crypto exchange is face to face.

If we ever get a crypto ban, good luck to those willing to avoid it. It's called immutable ledger for a reason. What you do on it stays there forever, so one little leak and you're out.

It's honestly kind of a good karma in the end for those falling victims to those scams. They're basically trying to scam the casino and get scammed in return by those telegram users. If one has such a bad greed they end up accepting to steal money from a casino, then I think something must be very wrong and needs to be fixed ASAP.