I've actually had a quite similar tought as the OP for a long time. In my country there's a time limit for each crime.
This is the wiki page (sorry, it's in dutch): https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verjaring

For example, a traffic violation can only be punished if it's brought before a court within 1 year after the crime has been committed. Other crimes carry an expiration period of 5, 10, 20,... years, but only crimes like commiting genocide don't carry an experiation period.
If this expiration time has passed, it can still be proven that a crime has been comitted, the person is still guilty, but the court finds that it's no longer a good idear to actually punish somebody for a crime they committed so long ago (given the fact that they didn't re-commit the crime afterwards).

In forum terms: it's Theymos's forum, he's the admin and by having an account on bitcointalk you'll have to follow his rules. That being said, i think we can still make an argument towards Theymos and maybe make him changes his mind.
I, for one, would like to see *some* crimes "expire". Not because i have an alt account that's being banned, but because i think banning people for things they did years ago will make good community members leave this forum, making it a worse place. If somebody commited 1 act of plagiarism 5 years ago, but never did anything wrong after this 1 act, while still making hundreds of helpfull posts, would it still be a good idear to punish him/her (even with a sigban)? Offcourse, if he plagiarised 5 years ago, and re-commited plagiarism 1 year ago, he can't be punished for the crime he comitted 5 years ago but he CAN be commited for the one 1 year ago.
I think, legally, it might also be a good idear to remove old, plagiarised posts by a red warning so no offending content can be found on bct, and an offender should still receive a public or private notice that what he did was, in fact, a crime, but he's not being punished because the crime expired....

Just my inner toughts here... Open for debate..

Are you 100% certain you downloaded the binary from the link you posted?
Eventough there is no chance of recovering your funds, i'd still advise you to find out what went wrong in order to make sure your mac isn't infected. Do you still have the dmg file on your mac? If so, do you know how to check a signature or do we have to talk you trough this?

There are several attack vectors:

• Very old electrum versions (maybe the one you used to run before yesterday) used to have a vulnerability that allowed a thief to steal from a running electrum binary as long as the wallet was unencrypted
• You could have downloaded a fake electrum version that was programmed to immediately send all your funds to an attacker, or maybe send the xprv by a call-home function
• Your mac might be infected with a virus/backdoor/keylogger
• Somebody might have gotten their hands on your seed or an unencrypted wallet file

I've seen loads of people lose funds due to the use of several different wallets... In electrum's case, i've never had any reason to think the actual dev's (ThomasV) involvement. ThomasV is a public figure, he is known by his real name and has been a member of this community for a long time. All code he writes is open source and should be community vetted. He doesn't even compile all sourcecode for all os's by himself.

Aaah, this might be the cause... Did you check ThomasV's signature? A lot of fake electrum download sites are floating around. They try to make you download fake electrum versions that are built for stealing funds.

Sorry to be the barer of bad news, but if somebody stole your funds, they are gone...

As soon as the thief's transaction is confirmed, the odds of recovering your funds are ~0, that's the way the bitcoin protocol was built... It's trustless and immutable, there is no central bank that can roll back transactions... Sorry.

Best you can do is find out how you were robbed.

• Are you sure you're running an official version? Loads of fake electrum versions are floating around
• Are you running the latest version?
• Is your PC 100% spyware free?
• Are you sure the seed phrase isn't stored online?
• Are you sure nobody has physical access to the seed phrase
• Is your wallet password encrypted? Strong password?

Personally, i don't use 2FA on my electrum wallet. I find it expensive (since it's a paying thirth party plugin AFAIK... I have never used it so i have no experience).

Just a remark: my post wasn't urging you to upgrade... It was warning you the account function is depreciated and will be removed in 0.18 (the latest version).

About the fee: if you create and sign a tx in the cli of bitcoind, you can always decode the signed tx before you broadcast. You'll get a json that shows you both size and vsize. If you don't like the fee in sat/vbyte, you can skip the broadcasting and re-create a tx with a better fee in sat/vbyte

Do you mean you're using bitcoin core's account feature?

Maybe it would be interesting to read following release notes https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.17.0

In detail, following subsection might be interesting to you:


source: https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.17.0

I've never used the account feature myself, but i've seen several people getting confused with this deprecated feature and reporting errors... Best not to use it.
Also: there is no such thing as an actual negative balance... It's only because the account feature doesn't work properly... So you'll probably have a negative balance for one account matching a positive balance for a different account...

I'd be happy to be the 20th reviewer

My address is: 1MocACiWLM8bYn8pCrYjy6uHq4U3CkxLaa

Edit: removed my post since all 20 slots are filled

Never mind, just realised you already have 20 testers... Sorry for bumping your thread, i'll remove this application as soon as the 24 hour lockdown period has ended

why don't you just run bitcoin core on your server and use json-rpc queries to create transactions?

An alternative would be to run an electrum daemon...

Do test out your setup on the testnet before you go live tough, creating raw transactions can be tricky if you're doing it for the first time... You wouldn't want to mess up your fee calculation and end up overpaying...

Ok... We started namecalling... Sure, why not... Let's go there.


Well... I have NEVER said that people won't get scammed... Ofcourse scammers jump on any opportunity or technology that isn't well understood trying to scam innocent users... btcrecover is no exeption. I'm pretty sure the OP will get several offers of people wanting to help him that are, in fact, scammers without even bringing any tool into the conversation.


I never said btcrecover is the holy grail, i never said it's the go-to application, i even clearly stated that for a strong, random password the odds of finding the password are very low. Sure, there are better tools out there, but i have used btcrecover in the past and i found it pretty easy to run, so from time to time i do give this as one of the potential options a user can try so he doesn't have to give his wallet.dat to a thirth party.

I don't think tools like these have many success stories anyways... It's pretty hard to brute force a password, so i guess most people that try never succeed, and people that succeed only very seldomly post their success story. Only the people that try and fail start to ask questions. I'm not naive, i'm a realist.

I did use this tool myself, and since i have no stake in this question (i'm not trying to charge the op for brute forcing his password), i do hope i'm a credible witness (i'm sure you'll disagree, but i don't really care). If not, i did a quick google and did find this story: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/issues/286
I know this proves nothing, but at least you can't say the tool doesn't work at all.

I'm not affiliated with btcrecover, the OP is free to chose whatever tool or person he wants... Based on your last post i can only assume you claim to have found a weakness in the way bitcoin core implemented wallet encryption (since you bring up the fact you claim to have 7 years of C++ and reverse engineering experience, i can only assume you're not planning on brute forcing the password).
Eventough i haven't seen proof of any of your claims, i wish you the best, and if you're for real and did find an exploit, you'll have a much better chance of helping the op than anybody with a brute force tool... But for now you'll have to understand it's a big if, i haven't seen any proof...

Good luck, i have no intention to keep bickering with you, so i'll remove this topic from my watchlist and hope the OP makes a wise decission.

Where do you get these 5,000,000 incorrect passwords from? The op didn't mention he had a list of 5,000,000 passwords and only one is/was correct... If he had an ascii file with 4999999 incorrect passwords and 1 correct one, i would defenately have pointed him towards btcrecover... Using such a small password file would have been pretty easy.

Even if his password is only 9 characters long (lower, upper, number, special), there would have been 572,994,802,228,616,704 combinations... Where do you get 5.000.000?

OP: whatever you do, don't send you wallet file to somebody you don't trust... It's ok to let somebody write a walktrough for you tough.

I'm out, good luck

Can you tell me what sounds good when i initially explained btcrecover in this very thread.. Here is how i explained the OP's odds:


And i still stand by my words... I have used btcrecover on my own wallets in the past, but i had a relatively decent idear about what my password might have been... I clearly stated that if the OP has no clue, and he chose a relatively strong password, his odds are very, very, very small... And i don't know about any "tricks" that make password recovery for an encrypted core wallet any easyer... Sure, you can use other, more performant, tools, but it'll always be brute forcing...

This transaction was included in a valid block about 9 days ago, since then it has +5000 confirmations... If an online wallet provider tells you that this transaction is unconfirmed, they're lying.

I've never heared about an unspent wallet... There are unspent outputs funding an address whose private key you controll, but afaik there is no think like an "unspent wallet".
You can use those unspent outputs funding addresses you controll to create new transactions funding an address from coinbase... Is this what you want to say? In this case, my initial answer is still correct. If the transaction you posted is the one you created to fund a coinbase address, and coinbase is not crediting your account, you either copied the wrong address, or coinbase's wallet is not sync'ed (or they're having some other kind of technical problem)

If you used the same wallet to create transactions funding "other wallet" and "coinbase", the same algorithm should have been used to calculate the fee, so there should be no technical difference between those transactions.... Ofcourse, there's always a chance one of the transactions contained dust outputs or the fee calculation contained a bug so one of the transactions is technically different from the others.

Are you sure the transaction is actually unconfirmed, and it's not just coinbase's wallet that's out of sync?

But, in the end, the only way we can actually diagnose what went wrong is if you share transaction id's... Sharing txid's is not harmfull security-wise, but it can reduce your anonimity...

Mooi gezegd,
Ben het er volledig mee eens, als ShopemNL deze dienst zou aanbieden zou ik er enkel van gebruik maken als hij onder de prijs van de huidige sellers zou gaan én toch evenveel kwaliteit en betrouwbaarheid zou bieden... Het lijkt me idd wel niet zo bijzonder moeilijk om deze dienst aan te bieden, ik weet bijvoorbeeld dat bitgild niet zelf over een stock beschikt maar gewoon een reseller is van een betrouwbare duitse aanbieder dewelke geen cryptomunten aanneemt.

As far as i know, paypal is a licenced credit institution... I'm no lawyer, but my best bet would be that faking a name when opening an account would be some sort of fraud... Worst case scenario you could probably end up in jail for faking a name when opening a paypal account...

Best case scenario they'll probably lock your account and demand KYC documents so you can prove you're the person who initially opened the account... Which is impossible since you faked the details.

Don't want to give your real name? Stay away from paypal...

Just my 2 satoshi's.

Ik ben al een tijdje klant bij bitgild (geen grote aankopen hoor, maar zo nu en dan enkele grammetjes)... Mij maakt het eigenlijk niet uit in welke vorm goud/zilver bij me aankomt, zolang de verkoper maar eerlijk en betrouwbaar is, het metaal zo zuiver mogelijk is en de  prijs zo kort mogelijk tegen de huidige spot price aanzit.
Persoonlijk zou ik nooit 18 of 22 kr goud kopen...

In praktijk komt dit voor zilver vooral neer op munten aangezien die belastingsvrij zijn, voor goud meestal op goudbaren...

Indeed, or to give a link to the rules:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0

OP: i advice you to read rule #25

You're basically asking how to make a paper wallet... In this case, i'd say to use https://www.bitaddress.org/ . I have no idear why you'd chose an online wallet like blockchain.com to create a paper wallet, that's really not what they're designed for.


If you create a paper wallet, follow following steps for maximum security:

• DOWNLOAD their sourcecode (at this moment, the latest version of their sourcecode can be downloaded from https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org/archive/v3.3.0.zip , But you shouldn't trust anybody that shoves a link in your face and surf to bitaddress.org yourself and find a link to the lastest version of their sourcecode)
• disconnect from the internet
• unpack the sourcecode, open the index page
• create a paper wallet (bip38 encrypted), print it on a directly attached printer... Make several copies
• Reboot the printer + PC before you even attempt to reconnect from the internet
• Laminate the paper wallet(s) and store them in multiple dry, dark, cool, physically protected places (like a banksafe)... If a fire destroys your house, you still need to have a copy of the paper wallet in order to access your funds