Pending on the casino website you mean? This means they haven't actually sent the transaction yet. Some sites wait for several customers to withdraw and then batch all the transactions together. You'll probably just have to wait longer. Once the transaction is actually broadcast you'll see the coins show up in your Electrum wallet - first as "unconfirmed", and then they will confirm a little later, depending on the state of the network at the time.

Correct.

Correct.

If you look at the zero fee transactions using the link you have provided above, there are generally two categories of transaction. The first are transactions with 20-30 inputs. Each of those inputs come from the same address, are in the region of 6.3 BTC, and are all outputs from coinbase transactions. These transactions are a mining pool consolidating their block rewards in to one or two addresses. The second are transactions with 1 input and 3,000 outputs. The inputs to these transactions are consolidated outputs from the transactions just described above. These transactions are mining pools paying out earnings to all the individual miners mining on their pool.

So yes, the majority of zero fee transactions are mining pools directly mining their own transactions.

They are counted. Witness data is counted as one quarter the size of regular data.

The calculation is defined in BIP 141. To calculate the transaction weight, you take the base size of the transaction without the witness data, multiply it by 3, and then add the total size of the transaction with the witness data included. This means that the witness data is only counted once, while non-witness data is counted four times. This gives you the transaction weight in weight units, which you divide by 4 to get the virtual size in vbytes.

In effect, this means that for non-witness data there is a 1-to-1 correlation between bytes and vbytes, while for witness data, it is 1 byte to 0.25 vbytes.

I don't think it is.

The single winning hash itself is wasted, sure, because that block is eventually made stale* when the other winning block at the same height is built upon. But all the hashes which failed to find a winning block are not wasted.

As an example, consider that we have 200 EH/s at present. With 200 EH/s, the average block time is 10 minutes. Two miners simultaneously find a block at the same height and broadcast them. Half the network, 100 EH/s, attempts to build on Block A, and 100 EH/s attempts to build on Block B. Within 10 minutes on average, someone will successfully mine another block on top of one of those blocks, and the other block will be discarded.

Now, let's take the situation where half the network build on Block A, and the other half of the network do nothing. We now only have 100 EH/s instead of 200 EH/s, and it takes twice as long to find the next block. All the miners who were trying to mine on top of the now discarded Block B did not waste their work any more than any other miner who did not find the winning hash of the next block wasted their work. They all went to securing the network, regardless of the method by which they were unsuccessful.

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*Although commonly used, orphan is the wrong term here.

You can use the same address again, or you can you use a different address from the same wallet. It makes no difference in the long run. You do not need to go through the process I gave above of generating a set of seed words a second time.

They cannot claw it back. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. Once it is in you wallet, it will stay there until you send it somewhere else (provided your computer is not hacked or anything like that). Make sure the 12 words you wrote down are kept safe and offline, and never share them with anyone since you can use them to gain access to your wallet.

Looking at the current state of the network, your transaction should be confirmed by now and your coins should be in your wallet.

I wouldn't say no big issues. There have been facial scanners which have been fooled by a simple photo of the subject. Someone was able to bypass an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner simply by taking a photo of the necessary fingerprint with his phone and then 3D printing a replica, in a process that took him under 3 minutes - https://imgur.io/gallery/8aGqsSu. Biometrics are not secure.

You don't even need to go as far as this.

When cells multiply, as is happening inside your body all the time, they (in general, excluding a few specific types of cells) must copy your entire genome. Although this process is very accurate, it is not 100% accurate, and random mutations, swaps, insertions, deletions, etc., are happening constantly. These mutations often occur in genes which that cell doesn't use, or in non-coding parts of our DNA, or even in a gene it does use but it doesn't affect it significantly, and so on, meaning that the cell isn't faulty and so isn't removed by your body and the mutation lives on. If you took two different samples from the same person at the exact same time and sequenced their DNA, then they will not match 100%.

Now, this doesn't matter for most of the things we use DNA sequencing for. Crime scene investigating, for example. If the DNA matches 99.99999%, then you can be certain it is the same person. The same for screening for genetic diseases, or tracking ancestry, or so on. But for generating private keys it's a far different story. If you don't match exactly (which you never will), then you will not generate the same private key.

It is not a trivial problem to ensure that you can extract the exact same private key from different DNA samples from the same person. And if you figure out a way to do it, then an attacker can do the exact same thing with a few of your dead skin cells which you leave on everything you touch.

There are a lot of red flags here which make me think this is a scam, from the "seller" sending OP a raw private key instead of making a transaction, through to the key containing invalid characters. However, there is nothing OP can do about any of these red flags now, and we can only attempt to work with what he has in his possession. I strongly suspect OP has been scammed and there are no coins to recover, but we can at least try.

You can correct me if I'm wrong (since I've never used PayPal), but my understanding is that there is a time limit of 180 days to open a dispute. PayPal are not going to entertain a dispute for a transaction which is in the region of 10 years old.

It has to start with 5H, 5J, or 5K.

The invalid checksum is telling you that the checksum is not correct for the key you entered. We already know that is the case because the key contains invalid characters. This does not necessarily mean the checksum contains errors - the checksum may very well be the correct checksum for the correct key and will validate just fine once you sort the other errors.

Use btcrecover as I suggested above. If you are struggling with this, then your only option would be to ask a third party wallet recovery service to run it for you. I'd be happy to give it a shot as well, but this will necessitate you sharing your incorrect private key with either the wallet recovery service or myself.

Segwit addresses begin with "bc1". You say the withdraw button is not clickable when you enter a segwit address.
Legacy addresses begin with "1". You say the withdraw button is indeed clickable when you enter a legacy address.

Some poorly set up websites only accept legacy addresses, so this seems to be the problem here. The instruction I gave you will let you set up a legacy wallet in Electrum. The "seed thing" is known as a seed phrase, and is a very common part of bitcoin wallets. By writing down the 12 words you are backing up your wallet, and the same 12 words can be used to recover your wallet in the future.

Yes. There are many ways you can trade bitcoin in your wallet in to a fiat currency of your choice.

You are confusing different concepts here.

Lightning transactions are never committed to the blockchain. It does not matter if you pay someone you are directly connected to, or if you pay someone via 20 intermediaries. These transactions do not get broadcast or mined on the main layer.

The "first and last" transactions you have read about are the transactions to open and close your Lightning channel. Let's say you open a channel with me. That opening transaction is broadcast and mined on the blockchain, even though we haven't actually exchanged any coins yet. We can then pay each other back and forth as many times as we like, and if I am connected to other channels too, then you can pay other people using me as an intermediary. None of those payments, either between us or you using me as an intermediary, are broadcast or mined. When one or both of use decides we want to close our channel, then the closing transaction is broadcast, just like the opening transaction was.

If you want to use Electrum to generate a legacy wallet, then this is the way to do that. You can see in the Electrum code here that what I have given you will "Create a seed", and that seed will be standard (i.e. legacy) as opposed to segwit. You can also Google the command "make_seed" to confirm that this is all that it will do. It will spit out a 12 word seed phrase, and the rest of my instructions will show you how to create a new wallet using that 12 word seed phrase, which will be filled with legacy addresses starting with "1".

Wasabi does not support legacy addresses at all, so if you don't want to use Electrum to do this, then you will need to download a different piece of wallet software.

I'm not aware of any method to accurately and reliably reproduce identical strings from biometric data. A hash function can reduce the size of the input to a much smaller output, sure, but even enormous inputs which differ by only a single data point will produce vastly different outputs.

The only way I could imagine even approaching this would be via DNA sequencing, but even your DNA does not remain constant throughout your life. And of course you leave your DNA on everything that you touch, wear, drink from, breathe on, etc., making it very easy for an attacker to obtain a sample and reproduce your key.

It's not a case of how often does it happen, but rather, why would you use a private key which could be stolen by someone doing something as simple as lifting your fingerprint from something you touched. And most currently used biometric systems are equally easily recreated, from facial recognition to eye scanners.

The solution to that is you use the biometrics as the input to some function which you salt with a password or some other data, and so if the resulting key is compromised you can generate a new one with the same biometics by choosing a new salt. The obvious downside to that is that you have now reduced the security of your system to that of a brain wallet, which are the most insecure wallets in existence.

Honestly, this is sounding more and more like a scam. However...

• Open Electrum
• If you cannot see a tab called "Console", then click View -> Show Console
• Click on the Console tab
• Paste the following code:

• Write down the 12 words you are given on a piece of paper
• Click on File -> New/Restore
• Choose a new wallet name and click "Next"
• Select "Standard wallet" and click "Next"
• Select "I already have a seed" and click "Next"
• Enter the 12 words you just wrote down and click "Next"
• Choose a password if you want and click "Next"

This wallet will contain legacy addresses which start with "1".

Absolutely! These are generally referred to as a "node in a box". You buy the box, plug it in, and you have a node. You could look at MyNode as an example. But all of these kinds of things bring a price which is far higher than if you just set up a node yourself.

There are lots of very newbie friendly Linux distros which do not require any command line stuff to set up and run. I would suggest looking at Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Both have GUIs which will feel very familiar to most people. And of course Bitcoin Core itself can be run entirely from the GUI.

I have a separate device for running my node (as I suspect most people do), but there's nothing stopping you from running a node on your main device.

I would still say just give it a go. If you get half way through and throw your hands up in frustration, then you've lost nothing and at least you can say you tried.

Maybe they were once, but I think they have run their course. There is nothing of real utility (i.e. on/off ramps, not staking for 70% APY or other such obvious scams which are of no real world utility) that a centralized exchange offers that is not offered by a decentralized exchange in a safer, more secure, and more private way. The problem with advising newbies to use centralized exchanges are spelled out by myself and LeGaulois above - once they realize the huge risk and lifelong implications from completing KYC on a centralized exchange, it is too late to reverse their decision and they will forever have their government and various third party agencies spying on their bitcoin activities.

And yeah, this doesn't just apply to centralized exchanges, but other centralized scams in this space, like the vast majority of altcoins.

Celsius and Voyager were centralized exchanges and lending platforms, so they are included in the umbrella of CEXs. Terra was a centralized altcoin with their own centralized platform.

Every major hack, collapse, scam, bankruptcy, etc., in bitcoin's history had been of a centralized platform, service, exchange, altcoin, whatever. From Bitconnect to Luna, from Mt Gox to FTX, from ICOs to DeFi. It's always some centralized trash promising the world and delivering nothing.

I don't know why the posts above are mentioning things like Electrum and Tor. All you are doing is adding more confusion to an already very confused newbie.

For the third time, share the name of the casino and a screenshot of the withdrawal page and what they are asking for. There is absolutely no difference between a Wasabi address and a Blockchain.com address, and indeed the casino has no way whatsoever to know what wallet your address comes from. It sounds like they are trying to scam you.

The only thing the casino needs to process a bitcoin withdrawal is your address. If they say they need more than this, then they are trying to scam you.

This will solve nothing.

First of all, blockchain.com is an online wallet so you don't download anything. Secondly, since it is a web wallet it is a very poor choice of wallet and I wouldn't recommend using it at all. But most importantly, it will not solve your issue. It also does not have "public links" since these do not exist. It will simply provide you an address just the same as Wasabi wallet does.

We can't help if you don't answer the questions I asked. Can you share the name/website of this casino, and can you share a screenshot (or at least a direct copy and paste quote) of what they are asking for on their withdrawal page?

There is no such thing.

The only thing you need to withdraw bitcoin from a site is a bitcoin address. This will be a string of random numbers and letters, usually 26-42 characters in length, starting with either "1", "3", or "bc1".

If you want to withdraw euros from a site, you cannot withdraw them to a bitcoin wallet. You will need to withdraw them to a standard fiat bank account or similar.

No, they don't. The only thing they need to process a withdrawal is your address. Either you are getting mixed up or this site is trying to scam you.

I would suggest that you share the name of the site you are using as well as screenshots of their withdrawal page or where else they are asking for your "public link".

First - why? What are you trying to achieve? What is wrong with current methods of generating a private key that you want to do this instead?

Maybe, but it is very high risk. Biometric unlocking systems such as fingerprint scanners on your phone are based on comparing your scanned fingerprint to a registered fingerprint and making sure they are close enough to unlock your device. Close enough is not suitable for generating private keys. Even a single data point being off by the smallest measurable margin will produce a completely different private key.

And even if you did manage to develop a system which can 100% reliably turn your fingerprint in to the same private key every time, then someone else can also do that and therefore utilize the inherent insecurity of biometrics to steal your coins. And of course a very minor injury or even just natural change over time would be enough to break the whole process.