Fun fact: Activity period doesn't start from the day you register but it follows a fixed cycle for everyone. If you were to register and post on 29th Dec 2020, you can post again on 30th Dec 2020 and get 28 potential activity. I didn't keep track the exact time but it's roughly every alternate Tuesday.

Your duration for you to get potential activity thus depends on when you actually register.

It's way more foolproof and safer to get a HW wallet than a cold storage. It's not that easy for newbies to manage cold storage and arguably offers more reassurances against various attacks than most cold storage, which mainly protects the user against malware attacks only. Many great points for and against HW wallet here[1].

Anyhow, OP I wouldn't go with BCVault. I can't find any reliable information about them and I cant find the source code for anything related to their device. Ledger or any other more well known wallet would be a better choice, and I don't think BCVault even support BIP39 or other seed standards. Not sure why.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5304062.0

What's your reason for needing the notification?

The simplest way is to write a script to query the blockexplorer's API to notify when your TXes gets X confirmations. It would also negate the need to leak your email address to a third party, you can run it over a proxy as well.

https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jsonrpc.html

There's no built in notification plugin that sends Email but I reckon it wouldn't be difficult to make one since they have a nice RPC interface to use. You can probably monitor specific addresses for new transactions and get transaction info after that, like a combination of get_tx_status and notify.

I wouldn't recommend you to do so though. It would mean that Electrum has to be running the whole time and I would just advice you to query the blockexplorer directly instead of going an extra hop through Electrum.

Did they close it? I don't recall them doing so in the recent release but I might be wrong.

Electrum will send all the addresses within the gap limit to the server so that it can get any transactions that is relevant to the addresses in the wallet. It doesn't use bloom filters, not that it'll make a difference. But the server will know all your addresses, used or unused.

If you care about privacy, you wouldn't be using Electrum anyways. Behavior for Bitcoin Core is like what you describe. Though unless they can saturate all your connections with their nodes, they cannot determine with absolute certainty that you sent that transaction. On the other hand, when using Bitcoin Core/Electrum with VPN, the VPN operator will see which addresses belongs to you. Tor is better in that aspect.

** I think BIP151 was withdrawn so there's that.

Depends on who you trust, I guess. Scenarios like that can happen but the probability of it happening to major projects like Bitcoin Core is significantly lesser than one which is less active.

Which means you probably have to dedicate some time to inspect and/or learn the appropriate programming language for everything that you run. That's the only way out of that scenario and I can promise you trying to learn another programming language AND be proficient enough to discover malicious code won't be quick, much less potential vulnerabilities.


You're trusting Github and the lead maintainers to be honest. The lead maintainer is the person that merges all the changes into the stable version.

Each Bitcoin Core version, including it's RCs are signed by a few of the contributors and they can be found here[1]

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gitian.sigs

Scalability is a complex issues. Any one solution will no doubt bring about a plethora of repercussions which makes it difficult to garner enough support or make it viable to implement. There are plenty of solutions being proposed, with Segwit being the notable on-chain optimization with Taproot and Schnorr due to be live soon. Off-chain wise, we have Lightning network which helps to alleviate the problem to some extent.

Most of the other solutions will bring about drawbacks and it's not easy to balance the benefit/cost. If you're able to come up with a solution that doesn't pose any drawbacks, you should try drafting a BIP and we can have some meaningful discussion on that.

It does. The Bitcoin Core does simultaneous download from different peers since 0.10.0 since they introduced headers-first synchronization. Synchronization before that was notoriously slow.

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The bulk of the earlier blocks should synchronize relatively quickly (due to smaller blocks + assumevalid) and will slow down significantly in blocks from the recent years. If OP runs Bitcoin Core and only synchronizes 9%, it would be a fairly painful process. The assumevalid block is fairly recent already. Switching to SPV will be better.

LastPass had a leak a few years back. Password managers are by no means immune to anything and should not be used to store information that are too sensitive. There are better alternatives though, some don't even require the trust of the operator.
Password managers should be seen as a balance between convenience and security. They can't possibly ensure impenetrable security given that you're literally giving them the information (albeit secured) but there is still a risk of inside job and stuff like that. I find them useful to help users to avoid reusing password across sites and it's arguably more convenient than generating your own password and writing them down. It's alright for stuff like passwords for your social media or exchange with 2FA.

Should go to Scam Accusations/Investigations, it's not a technical support thread. Make sure you don't dox the wrong person, the ownership was changed before it became a phishing site.

Anyhow, it seems to be the site which generates address with weak/predictable RNGs and thus allows it to be compromised easily. Don't think you can really do much about it, unless you find the current owner.

That's what I theorized at the start. However, such implementations will inevitably need the private keys to be sent to the C&C which will result in more detection by AVs. From what I observed, most of the stealthy ones will have a list of addresses (a huge list) to choose from. I think the more plausible explanation is for the malware to have a randomized replacement, (ie. to have a malicious address every x tries).

That depends on what kind of wallet you're using. Custodial wallets will no doubt do some logging that would compromise your privacy. SPV wallets like Electrum are generally terrible for privacy, even with bloom filters, the server can still deduce the list of addresses tied by the IP. In the case of full nodes, it's unlikely that someone can deduce the addresses linked to your IP with certainty. Searching up addresses on Blockexplorer as well. It all depends on your habit.


To obfuscate the origin, you want to look at the mixers available on the market, like ChipMixer and I've used it frequently. CoinJoin is also fairly popular but CoinJoin txes can get flagged by exchanges for stupid reasons.

Yes. If you are really serious about privacy, either run your own Electrum Personal Server (which isn't hard and I've done it on my RPi) or use a full node or Wasabi Wallet (for CoinJoin). It really depends on how you manage your privacy, taking care to not link addresses with the same TXes together, not using services which could expose them etc.

Behavior likely persists with internet or not. The clipboard malwares that I've looked at has a whole list of addresses embedded and it'll pick a similar address from the list when it detects a Bitcoin Address in the clipboard. It doesn't require internet.

I think it won't be completely safe given how you can't identify the source of infection and your antivirus are not showing anything.

I don't trust antiviruses for that reason. They only flag malwares based on the corresponding signatures and/or the program's behaviors when in runtime. It is not difficult to evade the detection using ciphers or disabling the behavior when inside the sandbox or antivirus scans, etc.

It'll be pretty difficult to determine when you were infected, especially if the malware was well made. Have you ran any unknown programs recently?
Change your password. Some malwares have a keyloggers together with it. I'll assume the entire computer and whatever information that you've ever typed in the computer to be compromised.

Clipboard malware. It'll replace any addresses that you copy to the clipboard with one that is visually similar in terms of the firstbits. Format your PC (re-install your OS) and reset your accounts and you'll be fine.

Bitcoin Core provides users with more features but they're mostly for advanced users and normal users who are looking to just receive and spend Bitcoins will likely never touch it at all.

Electrum is a great wallet but it comes at an expense of privacy and (slightly) in terms of it's security but it's perfectly fine for most users. If you want better privacy, look into Wasabi wallet.

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Depending on your computer, the initial synchronization will take up to a few days and perhaps maximum of a week. You can probably bypass the synchronization process by downloading a pre-sync'ed data directory but that negates the benefits of having Bitcoin Core so I don't really recommend it.

They removed the binaries but you can compile it yourself.

HCP did a pretty detailed writeup earlier[1], might want to refer to that.


[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5304446.msg55964982#msg55964982

That sucks. Do wipe your computer, in case your OS got infected with a malware as well, they happen pretty often.

As for the verification process, here's[1] a very well written guide.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0

Looks like it.

Where did you download your Electrum from? Did you verify it with ThomasV's PGP?

First of all, are you seeing the transaction in your wallet? The balance should appear automatically.

Go to the addresses tab (View>Show Addresses) and right click on the address and right click to select spend from.