Yes.

Send your coins from your Electrum wallet to an address in your Ledger. "Syncing your wallets" is impossible, ill advised, and insecure.

You should use segwit so long as it gives you addresses beginning with a '3'. If it begins with 'bc1', then don't use segwit yet (the 'bc1' addresses are not supported by most wallet software yet).

You can also use Electrum as the software side instead of Ledger's Chrome app.

It depends on the altcoin, but most are based on Bitcoin (and cloned from it) so they use the same mechanism.

Your assumption is completely wrong.

There is no "number of transactions needed to be confirmed before a block is added to the chain". That is not how Bitcoin works.

A block is a collection of transactions and transactions are confirmed by being included in a block. There is not a separate process that makes a transaction confirmed. It is part of block creation and mining. A block must have at least one transaction, the coin generation transaction (also called a coinbase transaction, not to be confused with transactions made by Coinbase the company). A block can have just the coinbase transaction, and any number of transactions until the block weight limit is reached. This means that it can have anywhere from one transaction to several thousands of transactions.

A good place to read about how Bitcoin works is the documentation on bitcoin.org

That statement is simply untrue.

The device and the wallet software that you connect it to (you don't need to use Ledger's software either) do not require Ledger to be in business for it to function. You just won't get any software updates and if a security vulnerability is found, it may not be fixed. Otherwise the device works fine without Ledger still existing.

The protection against device corruption is the 24 word seed that you wrote down when you first made the wallet. It follows the BIP 39 standard and private keys are derived using the BIP 32 and BIP 44 standards, so you can use that 24 word seed with any supporting wallet software or hardware wallet and be able to access your coins. There is no need for the company to be in business and you can still access your coins even if your device is corrupted, destroyed, damaged, or lost.

No, it will actually go to 8 MB. It changes the block weight to be 8 million which makes the largest theoretical block size to be ~8 MB.

Bitcoin Gold and segwit2x are two completely different things. They are just like Bitcoin Cash in that they are just altcoins. Because they share a history with Bitcoin, anyone who holds Bitcoin at the time of the fork has the same amount of coins in the forked chain.

Segwit2x never had consensus and it was not ok some months ago.

No. Segregrated Witness is already active on the network and has been active since August. The fork in November is a hard fork that doubles the block weight limit that Segwit set when it activated.

I don't think that is right. You should be getting a "Block not available (pruned data)" error. Are you sure the hash was correct?

Bitcoin Core does not think that it is pruned, and it probably isn't given that the variable it asks for that value is used elsewhere in the code to check for pruned-ness

Note that the datadir will be a few GB larger than the prune size because the datadir contains more than just the blockchain. It also holds the databases, your wallet file, and a few other files which consist of about 3-4 GB of additional space. The prune size only governs the blockchain data.


Can you post your debug.log file and the contents of your bitcoin.conf file?

How large is your datadir?

What block is your node synced up to? If you call getblock on a block that is more than 9054 blocks behind the block height your node is synced up to, what does it respond with?

No. Anyone and everyone should be running nodes.

Given that most protocol changes are soft forks, you would not be inhibiting the network. If a hard fork were proposed, you should continue running your node until you have studied the hard fork proposal enough to understand what it is doing and its ramifications before you upgrade to software that supports such a hard fork. Having node operators be critical about changes that are happening is a good thing and helps with the Bitcoin network's robustness.

You should consider it, but there are very few alternatives to Bitcoin Core.

However different implementations of the consensus rules is not necessarily a good thing. All implementations must be bug-for-bug compatible with each other, and that is unlikely to happen given different implementations and languages. It is likely better for the network for all nodes to be simultaneously taken down (which is what would happen if everyone ran the same software) rather than it partitioned and the blockchain accidentally forked (which could happen with different implementations).

I only know of two other full node implementations: btcd and bcoin.

Running a anti-malware scanning software should be sufficient. If you are feeling particularly paranoid, then reinstall your operating system. Note that Windows 10 itself relays a lot of data back to Microsoft, so you should disable those settings.

You could set up some sort of remote access (e.g. SSH, Remote Desktop, Teamviewer) and access your computer from your phone to spend your coins.

Generally, no. A virus needs access to your wallet files. With a virtual machine, your wallet files are stored in a virtual machine disk file, which makes it harder for a virus to access the file and steal it. While they could do that, I find it unlikely to happen.

No. Bitcoin does not actually work with addresses or balances. It works on transaction outputs. Every time you receive a payment, it creates a transaction output. When you want to spend you spend those transaction outputs. Receiving 100 payments to one address creates 100 outputs, likewise receiving 100 payments to 100 addresses is still 100 outputs.

Official announcement of what? That segwit2x is going to happen? Or that the coin distribution will be like that? For the latter, it is guaranteed to happen because that is the nature of hard forks.

It is no so much that users are against larger blocks and lower fees but rather they are against the way that the fork was planned and is happening. The fork was planned without users or developers participating in the discussion. They were not invited to the agreement signing nor were they consulted in writing the agreement. Furthermore, the fork is not even well defined with a technical specification even though it is only a month away from activating. Users are opposed to the segwit2x fork more because it represents centralization and something similar to a corporate takeover of Bitcoin. And of course, some are opposing it because they follow the Bitcoin Core developers who are opposing it for a variety of technical reasons too.

Additionally, users who wish to run full nodes may not be able to with larger blocks and thus are likely to oppose the fork.

That's strange, I don't see any scientists supporting segwit2x. In fact, most of the "scientists" in Bitcoin (i.e. the developers and technical community) do not support segwit2x.

If UASF were a minority fork, it would have hard forked anyways, NYA did not do anything to "save their asses". It is arguable that UASF is what caused the NYA to happen and caused segwit to be activated because it lit a fire under those businesses and miners' asses to activate segwit.

Also, a lot of the companies that support segwit2x claim that we need more block space, yet they so far have neglected to implement segwit in their transactions which would allow them to use the extra block space brought by segwit and take advantage of the lower transaction fees.

And segwit2x can fork off and find that no one is actually using their coin.

That's not happening. It is a big deal to allow a little more block size because it can very negatively effect the network. Why should we stay and work on something we don't believe in and believe is detrimental to the network?

You will have 1 BTC and 1 B2X after the fork. Note that B2X (segwit2x coin) is not the same as Bitcoin Gold which is a different altcoin that has different parameters and is forking at a different time.

The hardware wallet itself does not really care about which network or blockchain is being used. It depends on the software that it is connected to on your computer. If your software has support for the KeepKey on whichever chain you want to use, then it should be fine. You may need a firmware update depending on what changes with 2X, but their current plan won't require a firmware update.

Bitcoin Core (and other wallet software) allow you to have full control of your Bitcoin by giving you full control of your private keys. You don't need to use it, but it allows for the some of the best security and privacy. Bitcoin Core is also a full node software. This means that it fully validates every single block and transaction. Bitcoin Core nodes make up the backbone of the Bitcoin network; without nodes, transactions and blocks would not be able to propagate well and the network would not be decentralized.

No, that statement is true. Each ADDRESS has on average 2⁹⁶. Each public key has exactly one private key and vice versa. Public keys and addresses are not the same thing.

Legacy means that you will be using addresses of the form 1... Segwit means that you will be using addresses of the form 3... or bc1... (one is for P2SH nested segwit and the other is for native segwit). Note that 3... addresses are for P2SH addresses in general and are not just for segwit. bc1... addresses are for segwit specifically but not all wallets support it yet.

Yes.

Yes. When you want to send money, transaction fees for spending a segwit output will likely be lower from spending a legacy output.

Hashpower and addresses are unrelated. In fact, addresses don't even exist on the network; they are just a human abstraction that tells the wallet what to put in the output script of an output.

No, no there are not two chains. Segwit is activated on the Bitcoin blockchain.

If you want to use segwit, get some segwit addresses and begin giving them out to people when you want to be paid. You can also make a transaction sending your coins to segwit addresses in your wallet. If you don't want to use segwit, then do nothing. Either way is safe.