Wrong. Certain services exhibits unique behaviors, Binance often sends their funds to this address[1]. If you follow the path for the funds being transferred, you'll often discover that the address is always associated with the deposit in one way or another. Similarly, CoinBase and other exchanges also have similar behavior which would leave clues to what it is.

Of course, there is no way to determine with 100% certainty that an address is associated with a certain service. It'll merely be an educated guess.[2]


[1] https://twitter.com/binance/status/961666467325358081
[2] walletexplorer.com

Your storage space can be limited.

Assuming that the block hash being entered is valid. You will download the entire blockchain. If you don't want to wait, use Electrum.
No. Come on, the first reply clarified that already.

Bitcoin Core doesn't adopt BIP39 standards. You should be importing individual private keys instead.

It prunes the blocks as it goes. It wouldn't make a difference to the user if it gets deleted during or after the synchronizes and the former would benefit the user more. It's worth noting that pruning actually slows down the synchronizing process somewhat since it has to delete the block files as it goes to fit within the size.

The synchronization process actually gets way slower when it nears the current block height, the assumevalid makes the synchronization way faster at the start and slower at the end; you can actually speed up the end if you're in a hurry by specifying assumevalid= currentblockhash with some sacrifice in terms of security.

Yes. It could turn red briefly but should synchronize again and turn green.

Did you check whether you've downloaded from Electrum.org? Did you verify using ThomasV's PGP?

Click the bubble at the bottom right, uncheck connect to server automatically, right click on any other server and click use as server then click OK. Check if your bubble remains green and try again.

Testnet is the alternative blockchain which replicates the protocol rules of Bitcoin with certain enabled features for testing, ie Segwit was activated on that first iirc. It's great for a group of users to be able to test things without risking actual Bitcoins. Regtest does the work as well but it's limited to the user only.

Just remove that line and you'll be on the mainnet.

Why would you store customer's data on a public ledger? You'll literally hand the precious customers information on a silver platter.

There is no way to prevent a database leak using any form of ledger. The most common point of failure is with the companies' security practices. If they cannot reinforce that, there is nothing any decentralized ledger will help whatsoever. Storing files on a distributed system is mainly for it's redundancy, not security.

Bootstrap is safe but it isn't faster than synchronizing from scratch within the client as the validation of the blocks cannot be done simultaneously as the download.

There are several options though.

If you know the addresses that contains the funds, you could possibly export them and import them into an Electrum wallet. Granted you know what you're doing but I could guide you through it.

If you want to synchronize faster and have some ram, you could increase the dbcache for Bitcoin Core to have faster access to some of the files to verify the transactions. If you could, go to Settings>Options and increase your dbcache, to whichever you're comfortable with considering your current ram capacity. It'll also be way faster to synchronize on an SSD, I did it on scratch last week to test and it took roughly 8 hours to the tip, was with SSD and 6GB of dbcache though.

** Also note that the pruned chain as provided probably won't be very useful for you.

Not a fair comparison. Bitcoin Core and Electrum are completely different type of implementations, with one being an SPV while the other is the fully validating wallet. It'd be a skewed comparison because SPV wallets are generally not very good at keeping privacy as compared to fully validating node. There are however, wallets that are focused on privacy and that would actually be a better wallet than Bitcoin Core for privacy. Wasabi Wallet, for example gives the optimum privacy for an SPV wallet with it's built in CoinJoin and Tor, which Bitcoin Core lacks.

The depth system says otherwise. The DT members are the only ones selected by the voting. If you were to put ;dt, it simply displays the DefaultTrust up to the depth of 2, as per the default.

If you were to consider only those in the DefaultTrust only, you can only consider DT1. DT2 only exist because you put your trust list depth at 2.

The security risk isn't with the person spending phantom UTXOs but it's with someone relaying it to that specific client and tricking them to take the transaction as valid even though it'll never be confirmed. It's a good way to force a sybil attack on someone though, if they get kicked off the other network.

If the downloaded files are already pruned, then it wouldn't be possible for the user's wallet to be imported and be able to see all the transactions without the client reindexing.

Nope. I don't think they would incorporate it right into the client.

You can probably get the pre-validated files from somewhere on the internet but there isn't any guarantees about its authenticity or any possible problems arising with it.

**Note that the pre-validated files has to be downloaded as it is, the entire 300GB without any pruning done or Bitcoin Core will ask you to reindex again when importing your own wallet.dat.

Pruning doesn't mean that the Core doesn't have to synchronize from the start. The synchronization is still done to validate and build the chainstate, same as with any other full node but the main difference is only with the fact that Core will discard blocks to maintain the buffer as indicated.

You can go to Settings>Options and check if the configuration is active.

Depends. If you use Trezor with a wallet like Electrum, the server will be able to see the addresses associated with the origin IP. It could be requested through a VPN, Tor or proxy. If you were to see it through the transactions associated with the addresses alone, you probably won't know. Unlike custodial wallets, they tend to not have any obvious heuristics that would leave any clues.

Custodial wallets are completely different from the wallets that OP mentioned. Those wallets usually have definitive behaviors, like spending to a central wallets and for which Binance posts theirs publicly but it wouldn't be hard to determine which are the common addresses belonging to the various exchanges. As said in my reply, if you want to determine those kinds of transactions, you'll be looking at the spending habits, periodic spending to specific addresses, batched transactions to known addresses, etc.

If you're using a custodial "wallet", then this shouldn't be a topic at all.

You're included in DT2 if someone from DT1 puts you in their trust list.
Depth 0 also includes the people that you trust or distrust. You can put a ~ beside their name if you choose not to trust them, for example ~ranochigo. Depending on your depth, if you put some users into your trust list, the people whom they trust could also appear under the trusted feedback.

DT1.
If they're struck out, that means that their DT peers has chosen not to trust them and decided to exclude them from their trust list. The number indicates their DT strength.

Here's a better and more comprehensive explanation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5072734.0. More usefull guides are colllated in the thread here.: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4928968.0.

No, but your description was fairly confusing.

So you've swept the funds from your paper wallet into the hierarchical deterministic wallet that you've created with Electrum? If that's the case, having the private key of the paper wallet is useless. You have to get the seeds to spend it. You said you've saved the seeds. If you can't find the seed from where you've saved it, or the wallet file of the HD wallet that you've created with Electrum, then you're out of luck.

You can't have privacy if you're not actively looking out for it. ChipMixer is not sufficient. If you were to use an SPV wallet like Electrum, the server will know the addresses which belongs to you. Spending the funds from ChipMixer on Electrum will still leak your IP address if you're using an SPV wallet or if you're not using a dedicated proxy/tor session. If you're using Electrum, unless you're running your own server, there would be no privacy whatsoever.

If you want to have some privacy without having to run Bitcoin Core, you'd probably have to use Wasabi wallet which has a built in CoinJoin. The fees depends on the anonymity set but should generally be below about 1%.

I've used MyCelium to spend my paper wallet before and it has worked perfectly.

You can try using Bitaddress to extract the private key. Here's the github link: https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org. I would recommend you to run on a clean computer without an internet connection. In the wallet details you should be able to decrypt your BIP38 key, if it was. After which, you can import it into Electrum or MyCelium to spend it.