you're right, if my fiat bank account received a lot of money, my bank would probably notify the government. If i'm not mistaking, in my country the tax authority can even request to take a look at all your bank statements...

What i actually wanted to say was more or less pointed towards a $5 crowbar attack. If i can no longer anonimise my funds because the government simply makes my privacy illegal, they open me up to malicious people tracking how much funds i have, picking up a crowbar and visiting me at home. In this usecase, my fiat bank account has even more privacy since only bank employees and government agencies know how much FIAT money i have, and they won't come to my home to hold my child and my wife hostage untill i give them my visa card and pin code (they have other, less violent, ways to rob me).

I personally think the governement is trading in my privacy AND SECURITY for their convenience in tracking down transactions used to pay for illegal activity's. I'm all for putting bad people behind bars, but i'm strongly opposed to sacrificing my anonimity, security and freedom so they have an easyer job finding those criminals.

From my point of view, mixing isn't inherently criminal behavior either.... As a matter of fact, many people (including myself) use(d) mixer to increase their privacy. It's nobody's business how much BTC i hold, that's private information (just like my FIAT balance on my bank account). But this didn't stop the world's governements of attacking all mixing services, so i don't see why they wouldn't increase their attack surface by making every service that isn't 100% KYC and actively working with them a valid target.

But that discussion is deviating from OP's initial question i'm afraid.

Well, the technique you mentioned is one of the ways to anonimise your funds... There are many others like it, but bitcointalk might not be the right place to go into that topic, since one of the most popular forms of anonimisation was banned from bitcointalk quite recently.
Personally, when it comes to donations, i like to give people options, and monero is defenately a good option when it comes to privacy. But i also think that if you limit your donations to monero, you'll probably miss out (since not all people will hold monero, and most people won't exchange BTC for XMR just to donate).

PS, you probably get way less opinions on this thread because it has been made in off-topic, whilst it had an equally good place in the "Bitcoin Discussion" subforum. You could ask a moderator if he can move your topic if you want other people's opinions aswell.

Is the testnet supported? If so, i have about the same remark as _act_: if you pay in BTC and escrow the funds, i'd be more than happy to testdrive your wallet using tBTC. I have a couple old android phones laying around where i can mess with new apps without to much risk.

STINKYBEE is correct (eventough he removed his answer).

There is no KYC or non-KYC 'tag' in the bitcoin protocol. KYC UTXO's look exactly the same as non-KYC UTXO's on a technical level. The only difference is that with a KYC UTXO, somebody somewhere can link this unspent output to your real (psuedo)identity, so you tag such a utxo as a kyc utxo for your own administration.

Technically, there is no difference between unspent outputs that can be linked to your identity (KYC UTXO's) and unspent outputs that can't be linked to your identity (non-KYC UTXO's). They are equally valid, and on a technical level you can create a transaction using a mix of both as inputs. However, you have to realise that as soon as you use even one KYC UTXO, every input and output of the transaction will potentially be linkable to your identity.

Personally, i just use different wallets... One wallet which i use for stuff that can be tied to my identity: buying/selling BTC, buying physical items,... And a completely different wallet that's only funded with unspent outputs that went trough some form of *anonimisation*... Nowadays, however, anonimisation is seen as a bad thing by many KYC services, so be carefull when anonimising unspent outputs.

If i remember correctly (my node was shut down a long, long time ago), i just used to create the raw transaction on the watch-only (online) wallet, then transferred the raw (unsigned) transaction to the offline machine to sign it, and then transfer the signed transaction back to the online machine... IIRC, that way you didn't have to transfer any other data between your online machine and your airgapped one.

I know that doesn't 100% cover your question, but i just wondered if you might have been overthinking ... It's easyer to create the unsigned tx on your online machine, transfer this unsigned tx to the offline machine for signing, and back to the online machine for broadcasting than it is to synchronise an offline node.

I switched to a hardware wallet, and that's basically what happens with a HW wallet aswell: your watch only desktop wallet creates an unsigned tx, transfers it to your HW for signing (which doesn't have a clue about the utxo set, it just receives the unsigned tx), and then the signed tx goes from the HW wallet to the desktop wallet for broadcasting.

EDIT: if you're afraid you made an error when selecting inputs and calculating the fee, you can decode the raw unsigned transaction, either by using the cli, or by using the (offline, for your privacy) version of coinb.in (for example). That way, you can verify what you're signing, and you can make sure you didn't mess up the fee calculation before signing...

whoops, i kind of missed the fact that it was a custodial wallet... I did read OP tried to use binance accelerator, but i had no idear this also meanth he used binance as a wallet... I assumed binance was just offering a tx accelerator for the broader public (i'm not really familiar with the service offered by custodial services).

OP, it's just hindsight now, but in the future it might be a good idear to switch to a non custodial wallet... It's really not a good idear to keep funds on custodial wallets (or exchange wallets).

It wouldn't cost me anything to help you... And your cost would basically just be the fee for the CPFP (which has to be high enough to cover the fee for both the stuck and the cpfp tx). Which wallet are you using? Wether or not we can help you out greatly depends on this answer tough... It has been said before: if it's a custodial wallet, you're more or less stuck, but if it's non-custodial, odds are good you can do a cpfp.

I wrote a tutorial to guide newbies a long time ago in case they were using electrum as their wallet (electrum can import most seed phrases, private keys and can be used with many hardware wallets) ... My server went down, and so did the screenshots... But maybe the text is enough to guide you? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5285192.0

just FYI, it has been said before, but child pays for parent is ideal for situations where you're the receiver... And it wouldn't be to expensive either... If you'd use the output of the stuck transaction as input for a new one with a fee of ~4700 sat, it would probably go trough pretty fast.

177 vbytes for the stuck (parent) tx + 200 vbytes (rounded up) for the child transaction = 277 Vbytes. The "ideal" fee according to https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight is ~25 sat/vbyte.
277*25 = 6925 (let's round up to 7000).

Your parent already payed ~2300 sats in fees, so if you'd create a child tx with a fee of 4700 sat, the miners would have an incentive to add both tx's to their block... At current preev rate, that's about $3,5... So, if you do a cpfp, you can get your tx unstuck right now for a measily $3,5.

Or, yeah, you can wait... that would work to... If your tx isn't confirmed in one or two days, you can always go for a cpfp.

If it doesn't hurt your privacy, it could be a good idear to post the tx id...

Other than accelerators offered by big pools, you could potentially bump the fee (if you created an opt-in rbf tx) or a cpfp (if you're the receiver, or if you received change). Both will be cheaper than paying viabtc, but both are conditional (they only work if they are opt-in rbf or one of the addresses you controll was funded by the stuck tx)

Personally, in the current climate, i wouldn't run a crypto mixing service even if that would mean my family would have to seriously cut down on basic expenses... It's just not worth going to jail over running such a service.

On top of this, you need to be a very good coder, since the slightest slip-up in your code could mean that either your mixer gets drained by hackers, or the anonymity of your users is compromised, or your workflow gets messed up, or LE gets on your tail.

Sure, if you don't look at the legal aspect and the risk of bugs/vulnerability's, the costs of running such a service are low, and if everything works flawless the risk of not running a profit is very low since you could basically dynamically adapt your fee based on the current optimal transaction fee + take a percentage... So you're basically guaranteed a (very small) profit on each transaction. You do need a ton of promotion to get some traffic to your site tough.

TL;DR;
Personally, i would strongly advice against running a mixer (and this is coming from a crypto veteran with enough relevant coding experience) because:

• you will get targeted by law enforcement sooner or later
• you will probably get targeted by the tax authorities
• you will need to be an OPSEC specialist
• you will need to be an excellent coder
• you will need to invest tons of time to gain a good rep

So, basically, you'll need to invest tons and tons of time (and a little bit of money) and you'll be in constant risk of going to jail, getting audited, getting your mixer drained, hurting your client's anonimity or finances... And in return you'll get profit... For me, it just wouldn't be worth it.

There used to be a problem with dll's on very old versions of windows (i think windows <=7).
Here's the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5390032.0

Maybe you can verify if it's the same dll at least... if it is, you could read that thread and try out some of the sollutions (use your due diligence tough)

Other than that, maybe try to reinstall the latest version? If that doesn't work, install it on a different machine? If that doesn't work, there's alway bluewallet (they should support electrum seed phrases).

AFAIK, using a prebuilt binary on linux windows that is broken makes it rather hard to turn on debug logging... I think you need a terminal for this (on linux, there's a verbose flag).

BTW: are you 100% certain you downloaded the official binary? doublechecked the sigature? Just to make sure you're not running a fake wallet...

Just for extra clarification: a seed phrase generated whilst running electrum in testnet mode is also a valid seed phrase when you'd run your wallet on the main net... However, odds are big you didn't re-use the seed phrase for your testnet wallet when you generated a wallet on the main net (most people just generate a new seed phrase when they generate a new wallet).

Only when you wrote down the seed phrase when you generated a testnet wallet, and then used that same seed phrase when you switched to the main net, this seed phrase will give you access to your funds (and those odds are usually low).

Never mind, i re-read your post and just noticed you only transacted on the testnet... In that case, you could just generate a new wallet on the main net... You don't have to re-use your wallet, just generate a new one and make sure you write down the seed phrase when you do! Nobody is keeping track, you can have as many wallets as you want, and derive as many addresses as you want. There is no need to recreate a wallet if you're 100% sure you never used it.

After bitcoin, i'd stick with litecoin or ethereum... Not really a fan of those newer coins and tokens...

Whoops... Missing a zero does sound like something i'd do... In hindsight, your re-calculations do sound more plausible, given the block reward and current exchange rate my calculations would have been impossible because 2 blocks would give a block reward of 2x6.25BTC = $840.000. It would have only taken ~12 days to break even (not including many factors like spare parts, power, datacenter, personel,... But still, the ROI time would have been waaaaaay to short).

EDIT: i missed a zero in my calculation... Look at Stompix's post further down, but basically everything would cost a tenfold more than what i calculated

I do get what you say... But it is impractical...
Nobody is stopping big payment processors to already do this on a technical level. On a practical level, however, the cost would be enormous.

if you look here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

you'll see the time (in seconds) to mine one block can be calculated by this formula:


Let's say we want at least 2 blocks a day, since we're a big payment processor... This means that we have a time of 43200 (half a day). The current diff is 83.947.913.181.362


You'd need ASICs whose combined hashrate is about 8.346.146.798.180.488.581 hashes per second.

Since the common prefix for counting hashrate is "Terra", let's round it down to 8.346.146 Terrahash per second.

An Bitmain Antminer S21 Hyd (335Th) seems to be the current fastest ASIC. It hashes @ 335Th/second, so you'd need 2.350 machines like this, running 24/7. (not including the fact you'll need a couple hundred spares).
One machine costs $4,200 and pulls 5400 Watts out of the socket.
The total investment for a big company to mine 2 blocks each day would be about 10 million USD and they would draw 304.560.000 killowatt hour per day. That's 304 Megawatt hour. I asked chatgpt about "normal" western european prices per megawatt hour (wholesale), and it said $30 to $80, but in peak periods $100 or more wasn't an exception, so your electricity costs would be ~$50*304 per day (=~$15.000)

Sure, they'll get a discount, but that $4200 is not including taxes, shipping and handling, datacenter, racks, cooling, personel,... I'm not going to go into those, but to house 2350 ASIC's, you need a lot of racks. It has a height of 41 cm. A standard rack can handle about 180 cmd of material, so 4 ASIC's per rack. Let's assume a non-standard one that handles 5... You'll need a datacenter fit to have 470 racks. You'll need a massive amount of cooling since you're burning 304 Megawat hour per day, you'll need a dedicated team of at least 4 or 5 techs to have an on call system,....

I'm not even going into details about the fact that if enough companys would start a "private mining" farm, they would push the difficulty upwards and they'd have to add more hardware each month just to keep hitting 2 blocks per day.

Now, for sure, you would get mining rewards aswell... So you'd make money... The point is: they are payment providers (or other big companys transacting in BTC). They're not interested in starting a mining farm that would cost them millions to setup just to make sure their clients can get fast confirmations whilst cheaping out on the fees... They just want their clients to pay a high enough fee so "normal" mining farms have an incentive to add the transactions to a block they try to solve.

You're answering on a 3 year old topic i'm afraid... Nowadays, bitcoin core creates descriptor wallets by default. You can't import private keys into these wallets.
I haven't run bitcoin core in a while, but if i remember correctly, the wizard to create a new wallet in the gui allows you to create a non descriptor wallet (this is also possible from the cli). If you create such a wallet, you *should* be able to import your private keys. You should probably add a "false" at the end of your command to skip the rescan if you want to add multiple private keys, then manually start a rescan after you're done importing.

Do be carefull tough, there's a reason why by default core creates descriptor wallets nowadays. Make regular backups of your wallet to be safe!

I never keep funds on an exchange... If you've been around for a while, you'll probably remember many instances of exchanges that were trusted in the community, but still went bankrupt/scammed/got hacked losing millions and millions of dollars in crypto.

Moving funds from cold storage to an exchange is a matter of minutes (if you don't mind paying a decent fee). Waiting for a couple confirmations might take an other hour... But in ~2 hours you can have your funds from your aigapped device on an exchange, ready to sell... It's defenately not worth the risk to keep it there IMHO.

For me, the only time any funds (be it crypto or FIAT) is ever on an exchange is right before and after i buy or sell... crypto goes from my hardware wallet to an exchange, gets exchanged to FIAT, and the FIAT is withdrawn the very same day... Other way around exactly the same: FIAT from my bank to the exchange, as soon as it's cleared i do the exchange, and as soon as possible the crypto goes from the exchange to my hardware wallet...

if it's just a convenience type of thing, you could create a .bat (if you're running on windows) or an .sh (if you're running on linux/mac) to start core, electrum, sparrow, ... in testnet mode.

I hadn't checked the .com in ages, but you're right, that one works again aswell