Ordinarily yes, but OP has said he wants to print out the seed phrase he is using as a QR code so he can then put it on an object for his mother to display in her house. Going through this process probably exposes the seed phrase to the internet, but more importantly, anyone who visits his mom can scan the QR code and access the seed phrase in 2 seconds. That could be anything from families and friends to babysitters to trades people and so on. Hell, it could be someone looking through the window. I would consider that seed phrase to be highly insecure, and therefore the security of his whole set up hinges on his weak human generated password.

There have been a number of vulnerabilities across multiple different hardware wallets which could result in funds being lost. Ledger had a vulnerability where an attacker could trick you in to making a bitcoin transaction while your device was showing you a transaction for some altcoin. Trezor still have a vulnerability where the seed phrase can be extract from the device by someone with physical access to the device. There will 100% be other vulnerabilities discovered in the future.

As you say, they are generally secure, but no method is 100% safe.

I don't. I consider encrypted airgapped cold storage to be more secure than any hardware wallet which is connected directly to your computer or phone.

I agree. OP seems very confused. In his first post he said he needed to recover a brain wallet, but now he is talking about Merkle trees, nonces, and BCash, and claiming he knew about bitcoin 2 years before Satoshi announced it and that he was mining pretty much from day one.

I don't know what he is actually trying to achieve here, but if he does have coins locked behind a brain wallet, and has absolutely no back ups, then as I stated previously his only chance is to either remember the brain wallet phrase or to brute force it. Anything else to do with random deformed addresses or TXIDs which don't actually exist is irrelevant.

Beyond this, I don't think there is anything anybody else can do here to help him.

Do you use a centralized exchange? They have all been hacked at some point.

This is an unobtainable standard. Every piece of software in existence has bugs in it. Bitcoin itself has had a number of critical bugs, probably the worst of which resulted in 92 billion bitcoin being created out of thin air.

What's the benefit of your online wallet being on another instance of Tails, as opposed to just your usual OS? Provided your computer is clean, free from malware, and your watch only wallet is connecting exclusively to your own node, I don't see what is to be gained by using Tails for this part? I suppose the benefit comes if you are not connecting to your own node at all and are just using third party Electrum servers?

If you want to do it completely trustlessly, then the only way to do it is a DIY solution where you add the key to the collectible yourself after you have received it.

You can spread the trust by having some kind of multi-sig set up where two or more different collectible producers add private keys to the collectible separately. But as mentioned, all you are doing there is spreading the trust, not eliminating it.

You could potentially do a multi-sig or split key set up where I generate one part and the collectible producer generates the other, but that then means your collectible on its own is worthless. Without my share/key/etc., then the collectible is unspendable, and you will have a hard time selling it to anyone else since they cannot trust that you and the producer are not conspiring together.

BIP38 doesn't work at all since at some point one party must know both the private key and the password.

You are certainly along the right tracks.

I'm not sure you need a hardware wallet in this situation, especially if you are planning to destroy it after you have generated the seed phrase. Given that you say you already have an old laptop with no hard drive and will be running a live Linux OS, then you can just use that to generate your seed phrase. Bonus is that you can do this using only open source software, which you won't get with a Ledger hardware wallet, and it avoids all the issues with data leaks from hardware wallet companies.

I would suggest not using bitaddress or Ian Coleman to generate your entropy seed phrase. Javascript is a very poor choice for generating entropy.

In terms of privacy, yes you can extract your master public key from the seed phrase and then use that to endlessly generate new addresses to send coins to. You would need to be careful how you handle this master public key though if privacy is your goal. If you import it in to a random hot wallet to watch your addresses, then whichever server(s) your wallet is connecting to will be able to see all your addresses are linked to each other. You would instead need to be looking up your addresses via your own node in some way, such as with your own Electrum server or by running Sparrow wallet pointed at your own node.

I would also strongly suggest making more than a single back up of your seed phrase.

I was going to kick up a fuss about nutildah excluding me from the thick skin gang, but if I do that I'll no longer be a member.

color=transparent works even better.

I remember trying to help the user in that quoted thread at the time. If I remember correctly, he told me in another thread that his encrypted shared seed began with the characters "6P". Is this the case for you? Two additional questions regarding your user seed. Does it start with "5", "K" or "L", and is it 51 or 52 characters long?

If the answer to all those questions is yes, then it should be fairly easy to recover your vault in a wallet such as Electrum. If not, then we'll need to figure out exactly what format your two seeds are taking.

Can you use the Electrum GUI to do this instead? It is trivially easy.

Simply go to the send tab, and in the "Pay to" field you enter OP_RETURN followed by your message in hex. So for your string "Hello, world!", your entry would look like this:

Then just set the "Amount" to 0 and hit pay. You'll get the usual Electrum pop up to choose your fee, etc.

There is no such transaction in the mempool.

Further, I am unable to find an output of 12.426792 BTC anywhere in the blockchain. This means this isn't just a mistake on the part of whoever sent you the screenshot. They can't just say "Oops, forgot to hit broadcast, silly me!" This is categorically a scam, since the outputs they are supposedly sending you do not exist.

Also looks like the scammer accidentally included an invalid character in his fake hash. "L" is not in the hex character set. Lol.

I care far less about the algorithm you use and far more about the fact that it only requires a human made weak password in order to compromise your wallet.

50 USD today. Who knows how much it will be worth in 10, 20, 50 years?

I do not like gifting bitcoin in this way for two reasons. First of all, the recipient needs to trust you completely, both your competence in setting up the wallet in the first place and your honesty to not keep a copy and swipe it later. Secondly, it teaches them to trust third parties instead of holding their own keys, which as we all know is a terrible idea. Much better for them to set up their own wallet, give you an address from their wallet, and then you can use that address to generate a QR code for their gift.

As I said above, with reasonable hardware and a correctly configured tokens file, btcrecover will be able to try every date from the last 100 years in one specific format in around 30 seconds. So even if you come up with multiple different ways to write out the date, this is trivial to brute force, provided it is just a date and nothing else.

Let's say you have "two thousand nine" and "two thousand and nine" for the year. 2 possibilities. For the day/month, you could have "January first", "January the first", "First January", or "First of January". 4 possibilities. You could put the year first, or the day/month first. 2 possibilities. 2*4*2 = 16, meaning you can try every date in the last 100 years with every combination of those possibilities in 8 minutes.

Even if you come up with 500 different possible formats to write the date, you can brute force them all in a few hours.

Bcash didn't fork until 2017. It did not exist in 2009-10 as you are talking about.

Either a problem with your phone or with blockchain.com. There is nothing wrong with the address itself.

Again, you sound confused. In bitcoin, a Merkle tree is used to combine all the transactions in a block. It has nothing to do with individual private keys, and knowing a Merkle root does not give you any information about those private keys.

No exchange is safe. We are seeing DCG's subsidiaries starting to have major problems. Everyone knows about the problems with Grayscale over the last year or so, and now Genesis are reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy. They are also selling off CoinDesk. DCG have tens of billions of assets under management. If they are not too big to fail, then neither is Binance or Coinbase or any other exchange.

So how long before Binance start to get investigate for money laundering?

If you have an electronic device, which you must to be able to use bitcoin, then you can create a wallet safely.

The options are safe, cheap, easy. You can pick two.

Hardware wallets are safe and easy, but they are not cheap. Paper wallets or other cold storage is safe and cheap, but they are less easy. Hot wallets are cheap and easy, but they are less safe.

If cost is the biggest factor for you, then you can rule out hardware wallets. However, you can still use hot wallets for small amounts relatively safely by taking standard security precautions. I keep a small amount of bitcoin in a hot wallet on my phone and have done for years, topping it up whenever I spend from it. I only ever keep a small amount on my phone, but I have never once been hacked over the many years and multiple phone handsets I have used such a wallet. Hot wallets can still be relatively safe if you use them properly.

And if you want cold storage, then you can do that for free by just taking a bit of time to learn about what you are doing and how to do it. All the tools needed - Tails or some other Linux distro, Electrum, pen and paper - are either free or very cheap. The problem is that most people don't bother to learn how to do it properly, cut corners, and just fire up a random website on their usual computer and then wonder why they lost their coins.

Hardware or electronic wallets are prone to the exact same damage, as well as general degradation of their components or storage medium.

Less convenient, maybe, but generated properly a paper wallet is exponentially more secure than a hot software wallet.

Nonsense. We've just had more than a dozen exchanges or other centralized platforms collapse, and the price is pretty much at a six month high. If Binance collapses then sure, there will be short term price fluctuations, but bitcoin will come out the other side just fine, just as it always does.

Yup, it's an absolute mess. And of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface, since you can easily add on dozens of other exchanges to that diagram and there will be hundreds of deals and arrangements going on that we have no idea about. And of course with fiat or any bitcoin you don't keep in your own wallet, then any money you "own" is somewhere in all that mess, handed over to who knows who for who knows what.

Perhaps we could make a similar diagram for self custody. It would be very simple. It would look like this:

	-	- - - - - - - -	-
	-		-
	-	My wallet	-
	-		-
	-	- - - - - - - -	-

Satoshi first went public with bitcoin in October 2008 with an email to the cryptography mailing list, which was only a few months before the genesis block. And you could not buy bitcoin anywhere for several years after that.

There is no transaction in the blockchain with that TXID.

Deformed in what way? That is a perfectly valid address.

I wouldn't. As I mentioned above, I think using websites for anything like this is a bad idea from the start, even if you are following all these precautions. Most users should download (and verify) a good software wallet such as Core or Electrum for small amounts, and get a good hardware wallet for larger amounts. If you know what you are doing then airgapped cold storage is even better, but I don't recommend this for non-technical users and I certainly wouldn't recommend generating cold storage from any website.

But as OP was asking, if you want to use Ian Coleman, then on an airgapped machine with a clean OS is the only safe way to use it.

This is not a collision, it is not the first time ever, nor is it in any way difficult to do. It is an inherent property of the secp256k1 curve that bitcoin uses. Taking the negation of any private key modulo n is the same as negating the resulting public key across the x axis. As such, the two private keys which OP has given, which are modular negations of each other, produce public keys with the same x coordinate but different y coordinates.

Here's another pair:

which give the following two public keys:
04c6047f9441ed7d6d3045406e95c07cd85c778e4b8cef3ca7abac09b95c709ee51ae168fea63dc339a3c58419466ceaeef7f632653266d0e1236431a950cfe52a
04c6047f9441ed7d6d3045406e95c07cd85c778e4b8cef3ca7abac09b95c709ee5e51e970159c23cc65c3a7be6b99315110809cd9acd992f1edc9bce55af301705