Tails is great a live OS which I use a lot, but that doesn't seem to me what you want here, especially if you are potentially planning on running a node. I often recommend Mint to users who are transitioning from Windows for the first time, since it is the closet to Windows in terms of look and feel and will therefore ease the transition, although personally here I would probably use Debian.

Again, Tor is great and I use it a lot, but I'm not sure it serves your purposes for everything here. I would certainly use it for general browsing, downloading Electrum, etc. in order to maintain your privacy, but if you are planning to log in to centralized exchanges then you might find they start blocking your accounts since your IP will constantly be changing. I would use Firefox for everything you don't use Tor for. Stay away from Chrome.

Better than nothing if you are not using Tor, but inferior to Tor in terms of privacy. Little to be gained by using one while you are also using Tor. Same problem regarding centralized exchanges as above if your IP address keeps bouncing around different countries.

You are absolutely right regarding the dedicated computer for crypto activities. This is a smart move, and the less software you install and the fewer websites you visit, then the lower your exposure to anything potentially malicious. This computer obviously can't be airgapped if you are planning to use it to log in to exchanges, visit block explorers, run a node, etc.

The benefit that an airgapped computer brings is that it is somewhere you can interact with your private keys while keeping them 100% offline. You transfer unsigned transactions created with a live watch only wallet to this computer using a USB drive or QR code, sign them in this airgapped environment, and then transfer them back to your live computer to be broadcast. Since the computer is airgapped, you cannot use it to log in to exchanges, run a node, etc. It is solely for the purpose of storing your keys and signing transactions. Now, a hardware wallet largely achieves the same goal. If you are already going to be using a Ledger hardware wallet, then you could argue an airgapped computer is unnecessary. Personally, I am of the opinion that a properly set up airgapped computer is probably more secure than a hardware wallet, but some people would disagree with me. The biggest point to note is that it is significantly harder to properly and securely set up an airgapped computer, and it is significantly easier to mess up and ruin your security, than it is when compared to using a hardware wallet.

You can't withdraw bitcoin through the wrong network to a bitcoin address, sure, but you can easily withdraw not-bitcoin through the wrong network to a not-bitcoin address. And unfortunately many newbies do this because they just see the lower fee, and don't understand that what they are withdrawing is not bitcoin at all, because Binance deliberately obfuscates this information.

Lmao. Make it make sense. So although a segwit output is on average 3 vbytes smaller than a legacy one, apparently they need to charge an extra 30,000 sats because reasons. They are quite literally just stealing from their users. Why on Earth does anyone use this piece of shit exchange?

BIP39, which defines the standard for using a passphrase in an HD wallet, calls it a passphrase. For the sake of avoidance of confusion it is better to call it a passphrase and not a password, regardless of its actual length or composition, in order to differentiate it from the local passwords you use to unlock your wallets.

Further, calling it a passphrase helps to make it clear that it shouldn't just be a single word. Ideally you want it to be long and complex enough so that if your seed phrase is compromised, the passphrase still provides enough of a barrier against brute force attacks to keep your wallet safe. A single word does not achieve this.

As you say, the difference here is that Bitfinex were still operating. As insane as I think it was for Bitfinex users to accept payment in a centralized shitcoin, at least Bitfinex had some kind of strategy to recoup their losses and pay back their users. Celsius have nothing except a scam coin built from the ashes of a scam exchange.

A very similar situation happened with Midas, which was yet another centralized platform which collapsed a few months ago. They "paid back" all their scammed users in their own centralized Midas token instead of the BTC and other coins they were owed. Everyone immediately dumped this worthless token and recovered very little, if anything, of what they were owed. Zoom out to three months on the chart and see if you can figure out just when this happened - https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/midas/

Can anyone solve this riddle? Apparently the answer is a word from the BIP39 word list.


Edit: Too late, someone has cracked it and swept the address.

Apparently the solution to that tweet was "ring". So with that and the other clues, there were two entirely unknown words, and one word which had three possibilities for it. That gives 2048*2048*3 = 12,582,912 possibilities, which is very easily brute forcible, except that we didn't know the order of the words, or which of the 13 words was the passphrase word.

I was working on the assumption that the words were going to be in the order of these two tweets:
https://nitter.nl/wasabiwallet/status/1618631442262822912
https://nitter.nl/wasabiwallet/status/1617522201485545476

I'll wait to find out. Can't be bothered spinning up btcrecover again just to check.

Yes. Choose native segwit in Ledger, and choose BTC(SegWit) when withdrawing from Binance. These are the same thing.

When talking about Binance, unfortunately there is. When you try and withdraw bitcoin from Binance, you are told to select a network, and are given 5 options. Only two of those options are actually on the bitcoin network - the "bitcoin" and the "segwit" options. You are also given the option to "withdraw" your bitcoin on Ethereum or two different BNB chains. Obviously in these cases you aren't withdrawing bitcoin at all, but withdrawing some pegged or wrapped centralized shitcoin token owned and controlled 100% by Binance. And obviously Binance makes the fee for withdrawing bitcoin ridiculously high, while the fee for withdrawing on one of their centralized scamchains is 100 times smaller (although why not zero since it is completely centralized?), in order to trick newbies in to leaving their bitcoin on Binance and getting some worthless token instead.

You can see this here if you scroll down to BTC: https://www.binance.com/en/fee/cryptoFee

As I said - cash is king.

Wait, what? LBC have frozen your funds for 99 years!?

You can choose your own fees, I've literally never been scammed, and if you don't want to wait then just accept an already existing order.

It is absolutely not more convenient using a KYC platform. What part of scanning all your documents, sending them to complete strangers, waiting several days to be verified, risking your identity being stolen and your documents being sold on the dark net, and giving up every shred of privacy, is more convenient?

They prove nothing for two main reasons.

First of all, you have no idea if the proof of reserves is accurate. Even with the exchanges which are trying to do it with Merkle trees, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from missing out some accounts or including fake accounts within those Merkle trees. Some exchanges have already been caught doing exactly that: https://news.yahoo.com/ftx-execs-hid-8-billion-173336895.html

Secondly, even if you assume the proof of reserves is completely honest and accurate, without proof of liabilities it means absolutely nothing. Let's say Binance can prove they are holding 100,000 BTC in reserve. So what? Obviously Binance own some bitcoin. What we don't know is how much bitcoin they are supposed to have in reserve. What is the total outstanding balance of every Binance user account? If they owe their users 200,000 BTC and only have 100,000 BTC in reserve, then they are massively insolvent, despite their proof of reserves.

There is no scenario where you would need to (or even could) change the password on your local Ledger Live software or other wallet software by responding to an email. Just as there is no scenario in which you would ever need to respond to a Ledger email with any sensitive information, be it passwords, passphrases, seed phrases, etc.

If you get an email warning you of a vulnerability, then you should go on their website or this forum and double check its authenticity. If you get an email asking you to start following links, change passwords, or enter sensitive information, then it's almost certainly a scam.

Hence why I recommend using non-easily reversible payment methods. Cash is king in this regard.

I don't care whatsoever about the history of the bitcoin I receive, because I do not use anti-bitcoin services which promote the proven nonsense of "taint", and I mix or coinjoin everything I receive anyway.

And in doing so you lose all the benefit of trading peer to peer, since LBC is entirely centralized, requires KYC, passes your data to third parties, and can seize your coins. Further, just because the account you are trading with has undergone KYC, this does not prevent the person from being hacked.

I've not come across this error before. Here is the code from the Trezor plugin for Electrum which is throwing this error: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/4aa319e5c31543883346e28a5459fa3642601be6/electrum/plugins/trezor/trezor.py#L84

As it says, it can't find the UTXO for the input you are trying to spend. How have you created this transaction you are trying to sign? Are you sure it is a valid transaction?

Secondly, make sure the Trezor is up to date, and also ensure that you have the correct wallet open on the Trezor. Did you use a passphrase when setting up the wallet and have forgotten to enter it this time?

There have been a number of problems in the past with Trezor devices and multi-sig in the past, so this might be nothing you are doing wrong but rather a problem with Trezor.

The only safe assumption here is that both that seed phrase and your computer are now compromised, and you shouldn't use either of them again for anything important. You should also assume that any other wallets you have stored on that computer, as well as any online logins you perform from that computer, are similarly compromised, since you cannot be sure if it was malware which compromised your wallet and such malware could also compromise anything else on that computer.

Time to format your device and install an up to date OS on it, and not an outdated and insecure one such as Windows 7. Create a new bitcoin wallet with the seed phrase only ever written down on paper, and send any remaining coins from other wallets to it. Change all your passwords.

Are they, though?

I have traded bitcoin exclusively peer to peer for years. I've done hundreds of trades, with dozens of different trading partners, across a number of different platforms. I have never lost so much as a single satoshi, because I take basic security precautions such as not using easily reversed payment methods and trading with highly rated users. Sure, I've had a handful of trades which needed dispute resolution, or I put my coins in escrow only to have them returned to me, but I've never been scammed or lost any coins.

Conversely, it is pretty much a daily occurrence to hear about someone losing money on a CEX. Often it is simply a single user has had their account locked or their coins seized because of KYC issues, or the coins they deposited triggered some unknown algorithm, or something along those lines, but every now and then (although very frequently in the last few months) it is because the entire exchange went bankrupt or turned out to be a massive scam, and millions of users lost everything.

I don't think at this point you can claim CEXs are safer than DEXs, provided the user isn't doing anything stupid (such as selling bitcoin for PayPal or some other easily reversed fiat methods to a brand new account).

You installed Windows and Chrome. They are both spyware. So not a great start.

There is no such thing as "kind of airgapped". What you have is a non-airgapped device.

No, it's not necessary (although it is certainly beneficial) to have an airgapped computer if you are using a hardware wallet.

This couldn't be farther from an airgapped system. It's a dedicated system only for crypto activities, sure, and that's definitely better than doing all your crypto activates on your main system, but don't trick yourself in to thinking what you have is airgapped. It isn't even close, and if you use it as one would use an actual airgapped system (i.e. to generate entropy or store private keys), then you will run in to trouble and potentially lose your coins.

The rest of your steps are fine. The only thing I would add is to make sure to verify all software you download (Ledger Live, Electrum, etc.) before you install it.

Minor nit pick: Bech32 is an encoding system like Base58, not a script type like P2PKH. And bc1q address are not pay to script hash, they are P2WPKH or P2WSH.

As hosseinimr93 says, you should pay attention to the fee rate, not the absolute fee. Paying 50 cents to send a transaction which is 200 bytes is very different to paying 50 cents to send a transaction which is 2,000 bytes.

But also, you shouldn't think in terms of cents (or pence in your case) at all. Your fee is paid in bitcoin. Miners do not care about the fiat value, and this will change constantly anyway. They care about the fee rate in satoshi.

I would point out that over the last year or so, a fee rate of 50 sats/vbyte would be a vast over-payment like 99.99% of the time, even if you were desperate to get in to the next block.

If you are looking to trade fiat to bitcoin or vice versa, then currently the three best exchanges to use are (in my order of preference) Bisq, AgoraDesk, and HodlHodl. All three of these will let you trade peer to peer with other users without completing KYC or submitting any personal details. If you are using Lightning, then there is also RoboSats (Tor only).

Bisq has the highest barrier to entry, but it is also the most anonymous. Rather than running through a website like every other exchange (which can then collect your device fingerprint, IP address, etc.), you instead download the Bisq software and connect directly to other peers via Tor. And of course if you want to keep your anonymity very high, then you'll need to choose fiat payments methods which reveal the minimum possible amount of information to the other party.

It can be submitted, sure, but it will be widely rejected by the community. Why would every node and every miner agree to change which would devalue current coins and therefore make them all lose money? Someone can even create a fork which increases the block reward or slows down halvings or whatever in order to breach the 21 million coin limit, but no one will use it.

Many will eventually be recovered when the ECDLP is eventually broken (presumably) by quantum computers. But many will remain lost forever.

You are talking about a tail emission, in order to maintain the circulating supply at close to 21 million. If you are interested, there was a long discussion about this on the mailing list recently (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020665.html), and also on the forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5405755.0).

I've certainly found the technical boards on this forum to be one of the best sources for accurate information. Stackexchange is another good resource. Reddit is very hit or miss, and often completely wrong posts are upvoted to the top. Youtube and other platforms used by crypto "influencers" are just a complete mess and should be completely avoided, except for one or two notable exceptions such as Andreas Antonopoulos.

Since the revelation that an attacker with physical access to a Trezor hardware wallet is able to extract the seed phrase, it should be mandatory to use a strong passphrase on every wallet you are using on a Trezor device.

Correct. This is defined in the original BIP39 documentation: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki#from-mnemonic-to-seed

Passphrase, not password, but essentially yes. If you don't enter a passphrase for a BIP39 wallet, the string "mnemonic" is still used as a salt for PBKDF2.

I've not read that particular wiki page before, but it is very poorly written.

It interchangeably uses the words password and passphrase. Better to define them and then keep them separate. When talking about extra words added to your seed phrase, most people would call that a passphrase, and reserve the word password to mean the password you type in to your wallet software to unlock it.

Also, passphrases do not encrypt your seed phrase in any way. Your seed phrase remains entirely unencrypted and readable in plain text. What they do is change the process by which you derive your root seed number and then the rest of your wallet from that seed phrase.

"Something you know" is just plain bad advice. You should not rely on remembering any passphrases you use. You should back them up on paper separately to your seed phrase.

If a passphrase is not present, PBKDF2 does not use an empty string. It uses the word "mnemonic" in the case of BIP39, or the word "electrum" in the case of Electrum.

But on to your questions:

1 - Most good hardware wallets do.

2 - Yes. Both Ledger and Trezor devices support the use of passphrases.

It is a very good feature and I make use of it on almost all of my wallets.

All the more reason you shouldn't be trying to make up your own seed generation system. You will almost certainly trip up somewhere and end up with something very insecure or very difficult to recover from.

There is already a complete program for securely generating Electrum seed phrases. It's called Electrum.

Then use it as a BIP39 seed phrase. If you want an Electrum seed phrase, then use Electrum to generate one. Trying to convert one to the other will likely just end in disaster.