Huh. And here I though one bitcoin = one bitcoin. But it turns out if a customer deposits one bitcoin, the price of bitcoin in fiat falls, and they then try to withdraw that one bitcoin, suddenly that one bitcoin isn't worth one bitcoin anymore and the exchange needs to sell a bunch of other assets to let that one bitcoin be worth one bitcoin again? Isn't that weird!

In other words, they were doing what every other insolvent exchange over the past few months has been doing, and were running a fractional reserve system while using customers' deposits to gamble on various investments for their own profit, loan out to questionable third parties for their own profit, or maybe even just spend outright like FTX were doing.

I don't disagree with that, and I don't think it will make any difference to the final guilty verdict, but at the same time there is probably nothing for him to gain by pleading guilty. He will not be offered a plea deal, or lighter sentencing, or anything like that, in return for doing so. So even if he knows he is guilty on all charges and fully expects to be found guilty on all charges, it still makes sense (from a personal preservation point of view) for him to plead not guilty and let his legal team try to come up with something or find some kind of legal loophole or grey area which could lesser his sentence.

Probably. He has the right connections and made plenty of political donations to both parties. I'm sure he will be rewarded accordingly.

In terms of reversibility, then yeah, really the only completely safe payment method is cold hard cash. Any electronic fiat method can ultimately be reversed, although some are obviously much harder to do than others, and with PayPal it is almost trivial to scam the other party. I generally stick to cash or bank transfers when trading peer to peer, and have never had a problem with someone trying to reverse a bank transfer, although I am quite selective with whom I choose to trade. Look for other parties with good reputations and you'll likely have zero problems.

My favorite DEX - Bisq - purposefully does not allow people to use methods such as PayPal which can easily be reversed.

My statements regarding how fingerprint scanners work are factual and can be confirmed with a simple web search. My statements regarding turning fingerprints in to private keys are hypothetical since (to my knowledge) this has never actually been done.

As I explained in my post which you quoted, it is not an issue with encoding the fingerprint, but rather an issue with reliably reproducing the same result every time.

The first link you gave is simply a method for turning a fingerprint in to a QR code. Irrelevant to this issue of reliability.
The last link you gave is simply a method of generating artificial fingerprints with a hidden message. Irrelevant to the issue of turning real fingerprints in to private keys.
The middle link includes the following statement:

Which confirms what I have said above. If the image of your scanned fingerprint is slightly different, because of noise, angle, pressure, warmth, moisture, ambient lighting, dust, skin aging, damage, scars, whatever, then the whole system falls apart and you will generate a different private key (or in this case, barcode) to the one you generated before.

You can easily set up a system to turn a fingerprint in to a private key. The problem comes when you want to restore that private and cannot reproduce it from your fingerprint because of the above issues.

Step 1 - Hold bitcoin in your own wallet
Step 2 - Wait

That's it!

You can try to day trade if you think you have the knowledge to beat the market, but most newbies who try day trading end up losing money. Anything else is just too risky. Any centralized platform which offers interest, yields, lending income, etc., will take your coins and essentially gamble them on the open market or high risk investments, if they don't just steal them outright, and there is a high chance that you will lose everything, as has happened with literally millions of users across dozens of such platforms which have all gone bankrupt in recent months.

A scam, perpetrated by a proven identity thief.

It's not rumored - it is public knowledge. BSV have been very public in their release of software which allows CSW and his buddies to simply confiscate and take control of any coins they wish from any address in existence. There is a good summary of it here: https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-sv-hardfork-significant-security-risks/

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If you spend any money on BSV, expect to lose it all through either price collapse or outright theft. You should also exercise extreme caution when using any centralized exchange or service which also supports BSV. If CSW suddenly decides to confiscate all the BSV in an exchange's wallet, then that exchange could very quickly run in to liquidity issues and end up insolvent, taking all your deposits of other coins with them.

I don't think so. Both systems have the same underlying goal - require the combination of multiple different back ups in order to spend the relevant coins.

Whether you are splitting a private key or a seed phrase using SSS is more or less irrelevant. The weaknesses and vulnerabilities are the same.

Correct. If one of your devices containing all your xpubs is compromised, then the attacker can view your wallets.

You should absolutely back up the xpubs along with the seed phrases, but you don't need to back up every xpub with every seed phrase, which again protects your privacy in the event that an attacker discovers one of your back ups.

I never said it was easy. But yes, I have hand written xpubs like that before. Sure, it takes time, and it takes even longer to then type them back in to your computer from your hand written back up in order to check the accuracy, but you only have to do it once when you set up your wallet. I'm obviously not doing it for every wallet I own, but for a one off super safe cold storage wallet, I don't mind spending the time doing so. It's the same argument as when people say flipping a coin 256 times takes too long so cut corners and end up with some harebrained and insecure scheme instead.

But as I said, you can also opt to print off your xpubs with minimal additional risk. All the xpubs will be present on each electronic device which holds one of your multi-sig wallets anyway. So if you have a dumb printer, there is very little additional risk to plugging it in and spitting out however many copies of each xpub.

The currency you have is bitcoin. There is no "euro bitcoin" or "pound bitcoin". There is just bitcoin. If you want to sell bitcoin for GBP, then you should select that you want to receive GBP.

I have absolutely no idea how the UK banking system works, but I would be surprised if someone can transfer you EUR and your bank automatically changes it in to GBP. Rather, you would need to trade with someone in the UK who already has a UK bank account. Maybe I'm wrong though.

That's a scam. Please delete the link before you are responsible for someone downloading this malware and losing their coins.

As if a closed source piece of software being distribute via YouTube wasn't obviously enough a scam, you can just look at the hundreds of blatantly obvious bot accounts posting generic spam comments that don't even make sense in relation to the video. And if all that wasn't enough, just watch the video where the person enters a random address and 15 seconds later the software has managed to crack the seed phrase for that address.

Please pay more attention to links you are sharing in the future.

Yes you need to back up the xpubs, and yes that is a pain/error-prone to do by hand. I don't think that means you need to back up electronically, though. You can still write them by hand, provided you take your time, use clear writing, and triple check everything (including checking that you can successfully recover each share before you fund the wallet). There is also less risk involved in printing out xpubs than there is in printing out seed phrases or private keys, for obvious reasons. Provided you have set up your multi-sig properly (e.g. using 3 different and completely separate devices for a 2-of-3 multi-sig), then printing out xpubs from each device presents minimal risk.

And of course, you do not need to store every other xpub with every seed phrase, but rather n minus m xpubs with each seed phrase (provided you pick the correct ones, of course). Doing so also brings a privacy benefit since an attacker with access to one back up cannot even view your wallet.

Before you create an offer, search for existing offers from other people looking to buy bitcoin. You will probably do better picking an already existing offer from a reputable trader, as opposed to a brand new account posting an offer with no trading history.

The first box in HodlHodl is the price you want to sell at. You an either choose an exact number (e.g. I want to sell at a rate of 16,000 EUR per BTC), or you can choose to fix your rate to the current market price (e.g. I want to sell at the current price per EUR on Binance, + 1%).

You then set your contract limits - how small or large a trade you would be willing to accept.

If you are dealing in EUR, then I assume you would pick European SEPA transfers, but I can't confirm.

The currency for the amount will be the same currency as however you have priced what you want to sell in the first box. If you price it in EUR, then you will choose an amount in EUR, and not in BNB (which is another altcoin you want nothing to do with).

Once you confirm your payment method as a bank transfer, you should put your bank details in to the "Payment details" box. There will be a question mark symbol next to these boxes you can click on to get more info. You can also get more info about the whole process here: https://hodlhodl.com/pages/faq#what_does_offer_mean

A handful of layoffs can be normal or expected. Firing 50% of your workforce is something different entirely.

And it's not just the layoffs. They are cancelling all staff bonuses and cutting pay for the employees they aren't firing. Apparently they are also forcing all employees to take their salary in stablecoins rather than in fiat. And after those announcements, Justin Sun shut down all internal communications because his employees were rightly going mad. There have been huge outflows from the exchange. Not least of all Justin Sun himself cashing out over $1.5 billion over the past couple of months.

There is something big happening at Huobi, and they could very well be the next exchange to collapse. Withdraw all your funds now, if it isn't already too late. Also make sure you delete any Huobi apps from your devices, given what happened with SBF/one of his employees pushing malicious auto-updates to FTX's app after they became insolvent.

They likelihood is that Ellison and Wang were offered deals in which they pleaded guilty and dished the dirt on SBF in return for lighter sentencing for themselves. SBF will have no such possible deal available to him, so his best defense is to plead not guilty and let his lawyers come up with some sort of a case to lessen his sentence.

The parents are complicit, from what I've read. Properties bought with FTX funds but then registered in the name of the parents, the father widely promoting/shilling FTX, the mother moving FTX funds through her super PAC, etc. They could also be facing charges.

You're not expected to know all this. Take your time and read reputable sources of information (not YouTube) before you decide how to proceed. There is no rush.

Because everything is public as I said above, Coinbase can look at your coins and see where they came from. And because Coinbase maliciously decide that bitcoin which come from a casino are somehow "tainted", then you may run in to problems if you try to use them.

Banks which say they don't deal with bitcoin usually mean they will not send or receive money from known bitcoin services, such as Coinbase or Binance. As I said above, they do not know if you sold bitcoin to another person based on simply receiving a bank transfer from another individual's account, unless the individual labels it as such.

It's up to you, but I strongly advise everyone to avoid centralized exchanges like Coinbase. Handing your personal information and KYC documents to a complete stranger is never safe, and as above, they may decide simply to freeze your account with your coins inside because your coins came from a casino.

That's what I aim for.

If you are planning to physically hide your wallet as a main part of your security set up, then a phone is bulky and difficulty to hide. Compare to some of the much smaller hardware wallets which are on the market, or to just a simple sheet of paper with a seed phrase written down. Not only are both a good airgapped hardware wallet or a properly set up paper back up easier to hide than a phone, they are also more "cold" than a phone could ever be.

And more importantly, because it is closed source and connects exclusively to Binance's servers to obtain transaction history, broadcast transaction, and so forth, then even if you don't end up losing your coins on it Binance can still harvest all your data and sell that to all the usual third parties and governments.

Typing "bitcoin wallet" or similar in to Google is one of the fastest ways to download malware and lose all your coins. You shouldn't be using Google for anything. The ads which are promoted at the top of every page and the first handful of results are more often than not complete scams.

Most platforms have methods built in to deal with this. For example, on HodlHodl you can set a stop loss which will disable your trade if the price fluctuates outside a price range you have set. Or on AgoraDesk you can use floating price so your trade takes places at the price when the offer is completed, not at when it was posted. Or you can just take your offers down when you go to bed.

If you are the only person offering a service which is in demand, then you can charge a premium for doing so. This is not unique to bitcoin.

It would be impossible to get accurate figures, but I agree the number will be very low.

Let's look solely at P2SH outputs as an example: https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/p2sh-repartition-by-type

We currently have around 4.7 million BTC in P2SH outputs. 3.2 million of those outputs are on addresses which have never been spent from, so we can't say anything about their script. Of the 1.5 million which we do know the scripts, over half are nested segwit scripts, and only about 600k are in multi-sig addresses. However, we also know that there are some major centralized exchanges which hold tens or even hundreds of thousands of bitcoin in multi-sig wallets, meaning that number of 600k becomes significantly smaller when considering coins held in multi-sig set ups by individual users.

Now obviously there are P2WSH multi-sigs, there are probably some P2MS outputs still kicking about, there are now P2TR outputs which we don't know if they are multi-sig or not, and there are all the unspent outputs which are in multi-sig set ups that we don't know about yet. But even extrapolating the above numbers out to cover all this, multi-sigs will very much be in the minority for the average user.

Based on a very rough estimate of this difficulty period running around 11% faster than average (at the time I made my calculation), a random guess that the next difficulty period would run ~4-5% faster than average, and who knows about the one after that. But more because it gives me a wider range rather than squeezing in around the 774,450s - 774,500s, and avoids me doing the "someone else's guess +/- 1", which (no offense to the people who did that) is what you might call a "dick move".