You are still wasting your time.

As I said above, you are searching all lowercase, all uppercase, and all digits. This is 26 + 26 + 10 = 62 possibilities for each character. So for 8 characters, that is 62⁸ possibilities. Divide that number by 8,000, and that gives you how many seconds it will take you to exhaust the search space. That works out at 865 years. (In reality it will be another 15 or so years more than that since you are searching for strings shorter than 8 characters as well.) This is also assuming that you did not use any symbols or spaces in your password either.

You will need to have some idea of what your password might be, otherwise you are wasting your time. Alternatively, did you not back up your seed phrase?

Electrum wallets are hardened with 1024 rounds of PBKDF2 as it says to slow down brute forcing, but even so, 796 is very slow. I can get about 15 kP/s off the bat without any optimizations.

Do you have a decent GPU? You can try adding the --enable-opencl argument to your command, provided you have installed the necessary dependencies: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/GPU_Acceleration/

Correct. That will look for every combination of between 1 and 25 lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and numbers. It is hard to overstate how futile such a search is.

This would be just as vulnerable to something like clipboard malware as copy and pasting an address directly, and would still require double checking the address before sending. Although now you've added an unnecessary middle man in the process of your friend giving you their address, so there is more scope for mistakes and compromise, not fewer. It also encourages address reuse.

I fail to see what you gain by copy and pasting an address from an email (for example) in to an Excel document, and then copy and pasting from that Excel document to your wallet. All you are doing is adding unnecessary steps, and the more steps the more chance of something going wrong. Just double check the address in your wallet against the original email, rather than against an intermediary database.

All Electrum is doing here is ignoring the incorrect word list and incorrect checksum, and running your inputted text through the usual 2048 rounds of PBKDF2 in order to generate a wallet. This has nothing to do with the difference between Electrum seed phrases and BIP39 seed phrases.

It's not safe at all. All this is is a glorified brain wallet, which instead of performing one hash to turn your string in to an individual private key is performing a few more hashes to turn your string in to a entire wallet. Either way, the result is highly insecure.

Paxful is a poor replacement for LBC. I've never used them, but my understanding is their KYC requirements are even more invasive than those of LBC, and they will regularly lock and freeze accounts and coins while demanding even more KYC info. And as I mentioned above, if regulatory pressure is enough to shut down a centralized not-really-P2P platform like LBC, then it's enough to shut down a second centralized not-really-P2P platform like Paxful, which means you would be back at square one again looking for a new platform.

I don't see why people wouldn't just go for the best option out there (Bisq), which is immune to being regulated out of existence given that it is software which is run locally and not a centralized entity.

So, going through their Terms and Conditions, I found exactly one reference to insurance in relation to crypto (rather than in relation to fiat). Here it is:

So, doesn't sound like they are insured at all.

And in regards to their "bankruptcy-remote accounts", here is another quote:

So any crypto is held in an "omnibus" account, and if you make a trade, all that is updated is your balance on Paxos' internal systems. Which is obviously the complete opposite to holding everyone's funds in separate "bankruptcy-remote" accounts, whatever that is supposed to mean.

This is the exact same behavior we saw with FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager, etc. Claim in big letters on their main pages and all over social media that all funds are safe, insured, protected, collateralized, whatever, while their Terms of Service reveal that actually that is all complete lies and your coins are being spent and gambled.

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I don't own any LTC, but at least they are making interesting developments with mimblewimble. The other 4 you have listed there are outright scams as far as I am concerned.

I don't recommend remembering any seed phrases. That is a recipe for disaster.

If you want to use a multi-sig on only one device (as you would with SSS), you can do that too by simply importing two seed phrases in to the same device, while still benefiting from the 2-of-3 set up for your back ups. But multi-sig gives you the option to not have a single point of failure, which SSS fails to do.

Why would I need to store 5 or 6 seed phrases with a 2-of-3 multi-sig? I've just shown above what my three back ups would be. A 2-of-3 SSS or a 2-of-3 multi-sig needs 3 back ups (unless you want to duplicate for added redundancy). A SSS requires one device to spend from, which is a single point of failure. A multi-sig can be spent from one device if you want, or can be spent using multiple devices for added security. Anything you are doing here with SSS, a multi-sig does better and more securely.

A slip of paper is too big?

So you do agree that back ups are not immune to being found by an attacker.

I would suggest that multi-national tech giants like Google and Apple though to US government agencies including the FBI and the Pentagon all have serious security protocols in place, and yet all of these entities have suffered hacks or compromises. Maybe there was some human error involved, but that doesn't mean you are immune to making a mistake either. All the more reason to use a system which mitigates human error. Accidentally reveal your seed phrase? Thankfully you've not lost everything because you are using an additional passphrase.

Damn, that really sucks to hear. Wishing you and your family the best for the road ahead.

I've definitely spoken about that on a number of occasions before. It can affect anyone, at any time, with zero warning, and many people simply think "Well, it won't happen to me."

In terms of your bitcoin, it sounds like you've already realized you can no longer rely on your memory. Not just for complex things like remembering a complex passphrase or remembering the configuration of a multi-sig wallet, but also for simple things like where you wrote down the instructions to recover your back ups. Because of this, your significant other (or other trusted relative) have to become your failsafe. If they don't already know how to access all your wallets, now is the time to inform them.

Alternatively, this might also be a good place to use a timelocked transaction. Have your trusted relative set up their own wallet and give you an address. Create a timelocked transaction sending everything from your cold storage to them, locked to a date one year (for example) in the future. If, in 11 months, you are still in a good place, then spend an input to invalidate that timelocked transaction and create a new one, again locked to some time in the future. If you are not in a good place, let the timelock pass and let the relative take control of your coins.

And if your fiat currency collapses? What use is getting your money back from the government if it is only worth 1% of what it was worth when you deposited it? There are many many examples of fiat currencies rapidly devaluing so as to be almost worthless. There are plenty of such examples going on around the world right now.

How is that different to any other asset in existence? If the demand for gold disappears, then the value of gold plummets.

Fiat is printed at will by centralized governments to pay their own debts and stealth tax their citizens. I don't trust it at all.

Security, privacy, censorship resistance. You are entirely dependent on the underlying bank or other fiat payment processor for the security of your coins. If they suffer a major hack, go bankrupt, etc., then there is good chance you lose everything. You also have zero privacy from the fiat payment processor. They all log everything you buy, how much money you have coming in, how much you have going out, absolutely everything that you do, and share that information with a whole variety of third parties in order to profile and monitor you. And then you can only make payments as long as the fiat payment processor allows you do. Did you buy something they don't want you to? Did you transfer money to someone they don't like? Maybe you even posted something on social media which was critical of your government? Oh dear, your account is frozen, you can't make any payments, and you can't withdraw your money.

This censorship is not some crazy conspiracy theory - it is happening right now around the world: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387401. Bitcoin solves all of this.

Absolutely. If this is your chosen set up, then the only thing I can see to add would be to airgap your computer, if it isn't already. Encryption at rest is obviously a good thing, but if you are decrypting on an internet connected device, then there is still a potential risk there to your descriptor/pub keys. I have a handful of different multi-sig wallets which I use for storing larger amounts of bitcoin, but the computer involved is always airgapped. Once the transaction is fully signed by a combination of computers, hardware wallets, whatever, then you can load it on to an internet connected computer to be broadcast.

My back ups for a 2-of-3 multi-sig take the following form:
Back up 1: Seed A, xpub B
Back up 2: Seed B, xpub C
Back up 3: Seed C, xpub A

That way any two back ups are sufficient to fully restore the wallet, while the compromise of one back up provides the attacker with nothing useful. Using this system, I don't also have to back up my public keys elsewhere, as you have done in your password manager.

If that is the only line your tokens file, then you need neither the + nor the ^.

%1,9in will try every combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and digits, between 1 and 9 characters long.
If you want to try every possible ASCII character, then you would use %1,9q instead. This includes the full list of 95 printable ASCII characters (including lowercase, uppercase, digits, symbols, and space).
If you want to add line feeds, carriage return, and tabs, then instead use %1,9P.

If you want to expand beyond the 95 printable ASCII characters (such as to letters with diacritics or non-ASCII symbols), then you should use %1,9ic, and then specify all your custom characters using the command --custom-wild characters.

In terms of valid characters, you are looking at pretty much the full UTF-8 character set, which is thousands upon thousands of characters, including Greek and Cyrillic letters, CJK characters, mathematical operators, and even random symbols such as ⛄ and ⛅.

You need to very careful with address reuse using your set up. Whenever you spend from an address, then the three individual public keys for that address are revealed in the transaction data. If someone was to then compromise a single one of your paired back ups, they would have all the information required to spend any other coins on that address.

I'd also be quite uncomfortable about the wallet files on your PC, depending on your set up. If your wallet files are simply on an online computer then that is not very safe, since you are relying on the secrecy of your wallet descriptor/public keys not to reduce an attacker to only needing 1-of-3 of your back ups to compromise your wallet.

You can read how it happened in this post on that thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263379.msg54860249#msg54860249

It was a bug in Atomic wallet where it extracted the pubkeyhash from the doge address which was pasted in and then generated a corresponding bitcoin address using that pubkeyhash. The user in question ended up sending bitcoin to this mistakenly generated bitcoin address, and not to the original dogecoin address he pasted in, which as I said would not be possible as the network would reject such a transaction.

Interesting solution. The compromise of your password manager leads to a complete loss of privacy, but your coins cannot be spent. Is your password manager local only, on your own server, or synced to some third party cloud provider? Or do you keep offline back ups?

I'm not sure I follow you here. Are we talking about a 2-of-3 multi-sig? You keep two seed phrases backed up in each location, so the compromise of a single location means someone has access to the threshold number of seed phrases (but not the third xpub)?

I'm curious as to how and where you are backing up your xpubs if you are not backing them up alongside your seed phrases?

I generally back up n minus m xpubs with each seed phrase (in a specific pattern) so that with the threshold number of back up shares I can fully recover the wallet, while the compromise of one back up is not enough to spy on my wallet.

They can, but they don't care. They don't actually care about what is best for their users, otherwise they would let them actually withdraw bitcoin to their own wallets. All PayPal care about is taking a cut of trading fees. Far easier to find some random third party to do all the work for them and just sit as a middle man taking a cut, rather than actually invest in their own infrastructure to do things properly.

There could be a legal aspect to it as well. If PayPal lose "your" bitcoin, then you can sue PayPal directly. If some unknown third party lose "your" bitcoin, then PayPal simply put in a claim against the third party while being able to say "Well, not our fault!", and the customer is the one left out of pocket.

If you try to send bitcoin to an invalid address, either your wallet software will return an error or the transaction will be rejected by the first node you try to broadcast it to and will never reach the network. You can only send bitcoin to valid addresses, which will receive a confirmation at some point (barring rare cases when the mempool is too full). Your proposed software has no way of knowing whether the bitcoin address you have entered is valid and correct or valid but incorrect. You just have to manually double check.

This is not possible. You cannot send bitcoin to a dogecoin address. The network will not accept such an invalid transaction. Perhaps he had accidentally generated a bitcoin address from a private key in his dogecoin wallet?

Again, not possible. This transaction would be invalid.

You're wrong. It make take a few days or a few weeks, but the mempool will empty out again.

I wouldn't necessarily say it was only congested if we start purging transactions. If we have been stuck with 200mb of mempool memory usage for a day or more, then I would definitely call that congested, for example.

I don't find total transaction count a very useful indicator at all. We can have thousands of transactions which are only a few hundred vbytes in size each and don't take up much space at all, and conversely, occasionally an exchange like Binance will drop a handful of consolidation transactions which are all tens of thousands of vbytes in size. We can end up with the same amount of block space taken up by 10 transactions or 1,000 transactions.

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Personally, I use a combination of https://mempool.space/ and https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),8h,weight to pick my fee for a transaction.

What is your local currency, if you don't mind me asking? Is it supported and there is just no volume, or is it not supported at all? If it's a lack of volume, then you should feel free to create your own offers! Every market starts somewhere, and you might be able to earn yourself a couple of percentage points over the market rate since you are the only maker.

If it's not supported then you could open an issue on their GitHub (if there isn't one already) about getting it listed. Alternatively, can you swap your local currency to USD, EUR, or something else, and then trade with them instead?

With the closure of LocalCryptos and now LBC, there could well be a higher demand for Bisq to start supporting other currencies. People aren't going to want to move to a new exchange which might also close down in a few months, whereas by moving to Bisq, there is very little chance of that happening due to its decentralized nature.