Because your brain is incredible fragile, and millions of people each year suffer significant brain injuries which can lead to memory loss, at no fault of their own and with absolutely zero warning. And even without such an injury, people forget things all the time. I certainly don't want the possibility that my back ups simple cease to exist at any moment in time.

Transaction priority based on size and age of inputs was only relevant when the majority of transactions did not pay fees. This is no longer the case, and so age of inputs is no longer relevant.

If you have two transactions of different sizes which pay the same fee rate, then the miner is going to pick the one which maximizes their rewards. For example, if there is 1000 vbytes of space left in the block, and there are two transactions of size 900 vbytes and 1000 vbytes respectively both paying 10 sats/vbyte, then the miner will pick the larger of the two transactions, since they can't do anything with the 100 vbytes of space which would be left over by picking the smaller. If, however, there were three transactions of sizes 400 vbytes, 600 vbytes, and 800 bytes (again all paying the same fee rate), then the miner will pick the two smaller ones to most efficiently fill the available space.

Without a computer, this is probably the best he can realistically achieve.

What software is he planning to use to generate his wallet? Probably the simplest method would be to use Electrum.

I would then start by putting tape over any cameras on the phone, and doing the rest of the process is an empty room with no other electronic devices and curtains closed. Format an SD card in advance. Then, format the phone, let it boot up, connect to your WiFi, download and verify the Electrum .apk, and transfer it to the SD card and remove the SD card. Then, format the phone again. This time, as soon as possible after the phone has restarted ensure everything is turned off - WiFi, mobile data, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. Turn on airplane mode. Bonus points if he can make some kind of Faraday box to put the phone in while he is doing all this. Install Electrum from the SD card. Use it to generate a wallet, and then write down by hand the seed phrase and a couple of receiving addresses. Then create a new wallet on Electrum, enter the seed phrase from the hand written back up he just made and double check it generates the same addresses as he has written down. Format the SD card and then the phone.

The derivation path is wallet dependent, but it is irrelevant. An identical key at an identical path can be used in both a single-sig and a multi-sig wallet simultaneously without issue.

This is true only for extended keys, not individual keys. Individual keys are indistinguishable, and a private key at any derivation path can be used to generate any type of wallet or address. (Also, xpubs are extended public keys, not private keys.)

Have you stamped an individual key, or a seed phrase?

If you've stamped a seed phrase, the only issue I could see was if you then extracted an individual private key from your multi-sig wallet to use as a single-sig private key, then you could very well run in to major issues in the future trying to recover that from your back ups. If you are simply taking the seed phrase and using it to generate a brand new single-sig wallet as normal, then there will be no issues.

Memorization is the worst possible way to back up your seed phrase.

People with amnesia (from any cause, of which there are many) can forget their own name and fail to recognize their immediate family members. They can easily forget a seed phrase.

This is awful advice. If you are ever in a situation where your only back up is your memory, you should either immediately write down what you can remember and test it is still accurate, or you should move all your coins to a new wallet with a properly backed up seed phrase.

The problem with the statement "choose a different coordinator" is that there are to date, as far as I am aware, no other coordinators to choose from. And sure, you can spin up your own, but if it is only you and one or two other people using it, then the anonymity it provides is easily broken. People who are using Wasabi aren't generally going to bother changing coordinator, because anyone who actually cares about privacy and not having their details fed directly to a blockchain analysis firm isn't using Wasabi in the first place.

Because they care about their lining their own pockets more than they care about the privacy of their users.

Their proof of reserves is not worth the HTML it is printed on.

It is absolutely trivial for them to fudge the Merkle tree by simply including an account with a negative balance. This is exactly what FTX were doing to "balance" their books - they simply created a fake user account and then loaded it up with $8 billion in liabilities. And even if their Merkle root is not tampered with, it does not include any institutional liabilities, loans, open trading positions, and so on. Binance could be massive in the red and we would never know, regardless of what the proof of reserves says. And let's not even touch on the fact that they moved billions of dollars of crypto in to their account the day before they submitted to a third party audit, and then moved it all out again shortly after. Suspect much?

If Binance collapses, there will be $10 billion in BUSD people will be dumping and trying to convert back to bitcoin. There will be $50 billion in BNB and countless more billions in centralized tokens on the various Binance centralized scamchains people will be dumping and trying to convert back to bitcoin. There will be an unknown number of small alts where Binance makes up almost all of their volume, which people will be dumping and trying to convert back to bitcoin. And long term, there will be an awful lot of people who learn a hard lesson about centralized shitcoins and stick to bitcoin from then on.

Wrong choice of words. The inputs will be perfectly valid. If they weren't valid inputs then they couldn't be spent at all, and they might not even have been allowed to be created in the first. Most wallets will reject a transaction if you try to send coins to an invalid address, for example, but it is also entirely possible to send bitcoin to invalid locking scripts which can never be unlocked, meaning they can never be spent.

The node will verify the child transaction, and although it finds that the child transaction is spending unconfirmed inputs, those inputs will be perfectly valid. If they are not valid inputs, then the child transaction will be rejected.

Sure, I appreciate that, but the original argument several pages ago was about letting someone you trust know about your bitcoin and your back ups in order to inherit them or to recover them if you were incapacitated or suffered memory loss. Obviously if it is a forced or arranged marriage that one party is looking to get out of as soon as is safely possible, then that is a different thing entirely and you wouldn't want the other person to inherit anything should you die anyway. But in the case of marriages where you are actively building a life together, taking out a mortgage together, having kids and grand-kids together, then such a marriage is completely based on trust. You don't trust someone to know about your finances, but you trust them enough to take out a mortgage with you or help raise your kids? That makes no sense to me.

That's correct.

The coins can be spent before the parent transaction is confirmed. That's the entire basis behind CPFP. I spend some unconfirmed coins in a new transaction with a higher fee, and then (hopefully) a miner will include both the parent and child transaction in the same block in order to cash in on the high fee paid by the child transaction.

That's also correct. Spending unconfirmed UTXOs is entirely valid and nodes will verify and broadcast such a transaction without issue.

The sentence from me which you quoted was simply referring to people trying to make transactions with less than the "minimum amount required", as asawale put it. If you try to make a transaction spending more coins than you have, that transaction will simply be rejected. This is a different concept to spending coins which you do have, but are not yet confirmed.

So, literally the exact same shit which caused FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, and more to go bankrupt? Customers deposit money, exchange takes that money and trades/gambles/loans it for their own profit. So absolutely not "too big to fail", and like every other centralized exchange, running a fractional reserve system and a single bank run away from insolvency.

Also hilarious that on the surface Binance and CZ bleat on about their provably useless pRoOf Of ReSeRvEs, and under the surface they have a completely uncollaterized "stable" coin with a deficit of almost $4 billion. And by the way, who in their right mind is using a token pegged to a stablecoin pegged to a rapidly inflationary fiat currency!? I-heard-you-like-third-parties-so-I-put-a-third-party-in-your-third-party-meme.jpg

Here's hoping. They've been trying to centralized the entire space around them for some time, and they outright lie and scam to their users constantly.

No. As has been explained above, the confirmations keep coming because each new block which is mined and added to the blockchain adds one more confirmation to all previously mined transactions.

You are confusing blocks being mined with some centralized exchange or centralized platform allowing users to withdraw coins from their account. If you attempt to make a transaction which spends coins you do not have, it will be rejected as invalid by any node you broadcast it to, if your wallet software lets you sign the transaction at all.

In those cases; no, probably not. The simplest way to use bitcoin, while still maintaining some amount of safety and self custody and not just relying on a centralized custodial (which after all is the whole point), is to download a good wallet app on your smartphone, write down the 12 or 24 words it gives you, and generate a receiving address. It can't really get much simpler than that. If, however, we are talking about people who have never learned how to use a smartphone at all, then no, they cannot use bitcoin, just as they cannot use digital banking, Google Pay, PayPal, or any other electronic fiat app.

It is worth pointing out that such people are in the minority, and without being too macabre, that minority is rapidly shrinking. In developed nations where smartphones are ubiquitous and have been for years, then as time goes on the elderly population which have never used them shrinks, while the number of people who have exposed to them pretty much from birth grows. With the technology getting cheaper and with more and more old and second hand devices being sold, then in developing nations they are becoming much more common as well. As time goes on, the number of people in the category you are referring to will continue to shrink.

You simply can't use a digital currency without some ability to use a digital device.

This does not happen. When a transaction is broadcast to a node, a node will attempt to verify it against its own code and protocols. If it is successfully verified, then the node will broadcast it to other nodes. These other nodes will perform the same internal verification before broadcast it on. At no point does a node compare the transaction to other nodes and ask for their feedback.

Again, nodes don't compare their recent blocks to other nodes. They simply receive a new block, attempt to verify it, and if it verifies successfully then add it to their chain. This is how chain splits can happen when 2 or more equally valid blocks are mined at the same height. If nodes compared their chains to each other then there would have to be some mechanism for resolving the split before the next block is mined, which there isn't (and indeed, can't be in a decentralized system).

I don't have any social media accounts, but from the number of reports on here, Reddit, and Twitter of people who have been scammed on social media, I would steer well away from using them to trade unless either you already know and trust the person you are trading with, or you are using a mutually agreed on reputable escrow. There have been plenty of such reports of scammers suggesting an escrow, and the escrow was working with the scammer all along. Pick one of the reputable escrows from this forum.

There is also the currency exchange board on this forum.

This actually doesn't bother me too much. P2P isn't going away; in fact, its volume is growing as centralized exchanges become ever more draconian. More volume on fewer exchanges means a better experience across those exchanges. If everyone did away with the semi-decentralized exchanges which operate via centralized websites and just moved the pinnacle solution - Bisq - then the volume on there would be amazing and would solve everyone's issues. We only need one decentralized coin, although there are plenty of lesser imitations. We would do just fine with just the one truly decentralized exchange.

I don't see any issue with that, but I do see an issue with both individuals having their own account, them sharing a joint account, and then one of those individuals having an extra secret account which they are skimming off some of their income or savings or whatever to hide from the other person. In such a case you obviously do not trust your spouse, which goes back to the initial question of why did you marry them in the first place?

I have argued long and hard in defense of all things privacy, and so if you want to keep parts of your life secret from your spouse than that is absolutely your right. I guess I just don't understand why you would be in such a relationship. If I trusted someone so little, I would be keeping a much more casual relationship with them.

This is the same with if you are new to anything. There is of course a learning curve. But again, I've found online guides and online communities much more helpful with Linux than with Windows. Not to mention that with Linux you can actually fix the problem, whereas with Windows it seems half the time you have to do some crazy work around or just get told "Tough luck, that's how Windows works".

Or perhaps that I'm simply running software specifically designed for Linux, rather than trying to get Windows software such as gaming engines to run on Linux.

The only time I use Windows is on computers at work, where obviously I don't have a choice. On more than one occasion I've been in the middle of a very time critical task, and you get a little box that goes "Hahaha, I'm going to restart in 5 minutes, fuck you" and there is nothing you can do about it. It's not just annoying; it's actively dangerous. I have no idea why anyone would choose to use such an OS.

There is no requirement for miners to add as many unconfirmed transactions as they can fit in to their block, and indeed, there is no requirement for miners to add any transactions at all other than the coinbase transaction to their block. It is not that rare to see empty blocks being mined which contain only the coinbase transaction and nothing else. There have been two such blocks within the last 24 hours - 778,469 and 778,448.

Usually this happens when a miner finds a block very soon after receiving the previous block. They have not yet fully verified the previous block, so rather than have their equipment sitting idle they simply attempt to mine an empty block for a few seconds until they have verified the previous block and updated their UTXO sets.

In terms of the two attacks we are talking about here - the ECDLP and a 51% attack - neither are particularly helped by the umbrella term of "AI". Until we have (or indeed, if we ever have) large, stable, functioning quantum computers capable of running Shor's algorithm on the size of numbers we are using (which will be decades away at a minimum), then the best attack against the elliptic curve multiplication used in bitcoin requires in the order of 2¹²⁸ operations. An AI can't change that fact. Maybe it can run those operations slightly faster, but 2¹²⁸ is still many orders of magnitude outside the realms of possibility.

And in terms of a 51% attack - an AI can't generate hash rate unless it has the hardware to do it. And we already have very specialized hardware called ASICs which do just this. Mining bitcoin is not a difficult problem which requires a super advanced AI to figure out - it's simply a case of performing a very simple hash operation as many times as possible as quickly as possible. And so any AI running on non-ASICs will be inferior to the ASICs we already have.

Perhaps there would be a role for an advanced enough AI to help design the next generation of ASICs and squeeze out a bit more efficiency, but an AI isn't going to attack bitcoin.

As an example that I just stumbled across via Reddit this morning - a lockbox called the MojoBox. Selling on Amazon for $70. Lots of boasting from the manufacturer about operating between -30 and 140^oF, being water resistant, having a hardened enclosure, tested against physical force and pry attacks, yadda yadda. Then the Lock Picking Lawyer comes along and shows that it can be opened by slapping it. No, seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3bS1oLEbIM

Which goes back to my point above. If a simple fireproof safe was actually completely safe, then everyone would use one and there would be no need for anything else. But this is simply not the case.