No problem
About those 6 wallets in an hour: were any of their addresses funded ever? Was there any transaction history?
You can only say you stumbled upon an existing wallet when you create a random seed, use it to restore a wallet and actually see there's a transaction history in this wallet. If you use a random seed and use it to restore a wallet, but you don't see a transaction history, you've just created a new, empty wallet... In this case you didn't find a wallet that was generated by somebody else, you just generated a new (empty) wallet that can either be used by you, or discarded (i'd personally just discard such wallets, since the human brain is a terrible source of entropy, so the odds are much higher somebody else will generate the same random seed than when you let electrum pick a random seed by itself).

BTW: "the human brain is a terrible source of entropy" is a quote i picked up a long time ago, don't know who it belongs to anymore tough...

BTW2: The total number of possible bip39 seed phrases is smaller than the total address space : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1606740.msg16154287#msg16154287
This shouldn't matter tough, since converting a seed phrase to an xprv and deriving private keys from this xprv is considerably slower than incrementally scanning all private keys directly... So eventough the total number of seed phrases is lower than the total address space, it's still really, really secure.

I know i'm preaching to the choir and we're both in agreement that an ICO scammer only needs a very limited budget to launch an ICO, and that's the main point of your thread, but i do wanted to mention that i I only pay $8.99 for my .com domains, whois privacy included. I either get my SSL certificates from cloudflare (in case no sensitive data is exchanged between my visitors and my server) or i get a free certifiate from letsencrypt.
If i buy my domains in bulk, i even get a discount

Let's assume everybody in this world would have 100 funded addresses:
this means there would be ~1000.000.000.000 funded addresses at any point in time
1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976/1000.000.000.000 = 1/1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019th of the address space would be used

Now, i've seen benchmarks of GPU's generating up to 23 Mh priv keys => pub keys => addresses per second (i hope this number is correct, i got it from a benchmark i found online => source https://0day.work/using-an-aws-gpu-instance-to-generate-vanity-bitcoin-addresses/) .
Let's assume you're an evil genius and you build a farm with 10.000 GPU's generating 230 Gh addresses/second. 1 GPU works for 5? years before it breaks, costing $100/year. It runs at 300? Watt, costing 0.3*24*365*0.01 = $26 worth of electricity if you pay only 1 cent... Your farm would cost you 10000*$126 = $1.260.000 per year to maintain.

In order to find 1 funded address, on average it would take you:
2^160/(1000.000.000.000*230.000.000.000*24*60*60*365) = 201.495.273.494.322.970 years to find the private key belonging to one funded address... As long as the private key was generated by a perfect RNG. If you're talking about a botched RNG, this calculation no longer works.

Now, you're currently using FIAT money... Do you think your bank's centralised database is more secure or less secure than bitcoin's security? I mean, do you think that somebody who's willing to invest $1.25M per year for 201495 billion years wouldn't get his hands on your life savings in your bank account one way or another?

People's minds are just not able to grasp the number 2^160. As long as your private key is generated truely at random AND you keep your key 100% secure, your BTC wallet is a lot safer than your bank account... Offcourse, bitcoin falls victim to people using FUD, pump and dump scheme's, crooked wallet providers, hacked exchanges,... I personally think these are the main reasons why bitcoin isn't as mainstream as i'd like it to be (yet), but none of these reasons have anything to do about the fundamentals on which bitcoin has been built, only on human emotions and human mistakes.

I think $7000-$8000 is an overestimation... I know very little about ico's and how ico scammers work, but i do know quite a bit about hosting, themes and finding cheap prices for services.

1) you can find stolen themes from themeforest all over the web, i'm pretty sure you can find one of the themes you're looking for for $10 or less. There is no need to assume a scammer won't scam themeforest (or an other template site)
$10

1.b) hosting starts from just $2/month (you're not looking for top notch VPS hosting, a shared hosting provider will do) + domain ($10/year)... So domain + hosting => $50/year
$10 + $50 = $60

2) i don't think there is a need for an original whitepaper, there is no reason to assume a scammer won't plagiarise somebody else's work, but if they want unique work, it might cost them $500
$60 + $500 = $560

3) i don't have any knowledge about how much token and crowdsale contract writers charge, so $100 seems realistic
$560 + $100 = $660

4) the first search i did for ann designers on this forum dug up a guy asking ~$150 in BTC for reasonably looking designs... I won't post links to his thread to discourage others from using this info
$660 + $150 = $810

5) i haven't got any experience with advertising on youtube, so your statement of $1500 to $4000 might be correct. Let's take the average at $3250
$810 + $3250 = $4060

6) $200 for a campaign manager seems steep, since i see so many of those guys asking for work, but let's assume they do ask for $200/week
$4060 + $200 = $4260

7) i've never seen those profiles for sale, but let's assume a 4-pack costs ~$800
$4260 + $800 = $5060

So, my estimation an ico scammer can set everything up for ~$5k, if he's willing to to part of the job himself, cheat other people, pay people in his shittokens instead of BTC/ETH, he can probably get away with waaaay less (i'm thinking in the $3k-$3.5k range).

Bottom line: as soon as i see the word ICO on a webpage, i usually close the tab and walk away...

Eventough i think $7k-$8k is an overestimation, i fully agree with the point you're trying to make, and i love the fact that you've taken the time and effort trying to help other people

Your correction was correct, my initial response contained an error... I just realised my mistake after re-reading what i wrote the first time... My second reply was correct tough (i was talking about public key hashes, not public keys)
(it's friday, and it's hot and noisy in the office... My attention span is really low at the moment, so a few slipups are bound to happen)...

But either way, with or without my mistake, i hope we can all agree that the odds of just finding a collision are really, really, really small... So the OP shouldn't worry to much about it

AFAIK, there are 2^256 private keys mapping on 2^160 public keys hashes (an effect of using ripe-md160). On average, each public key hash has 2^96 private keys

you should read up on key collision.
In total, there are 2^160 possible public keys, so 2^160 public key hashes (addresses). The odds of you finding a private key whose public key hash was funded by somebody else in the past is really, really, really small.

Just something out of my own experience: using vanitygen i can generate ~5Mkeys/second. that's 5000000 keys/second. This means it would take 2.9*10^41 seconds to scan the complete keyspace.
This is 9268782580738856660348077325699400 years to scan the complete keyspace

Offcourse, there is no need to scan this complete keyspace, there are over 1.000.000 funded addresses (IIRC), and i would only need 1 hit to rob somebody, but given these numbers, you can see the odds are still very, very small.
There is a key collision pool somewhere, they use GPU's and pool their resources together. They claim they get a couple hits a year, but i never took the effort to verify these claims. It looks to me like the cost of running this pool is a lot bigger than the potential reward.

AFAIK, there is no official app, no... I know somebody made an app once, but it was just a private person's project, personally i wouldn't enter my password in that app (but that's just my personal opinion).

For many years now, a new forum software is being developed. This new forum software should result in a mobile-friendly bitcointalk... But for now, i don't see any timetable to switch to the new forum software, so i don't think the switch will happen anytime soon.

Last but not least: this question does not belong in this subforum (bitcoin technical support). Please move it to a more appropriate place

I'm sorry, but i really fail to understand what you're trying to say here...
 
Blockchain transactions do not occur with the help of blockchain technology, blockchain technology is used to build a decentral ledger, in bitcoin's case this ledger is used to store transactions to avoid double spends and make sure the ledger is decentral, trusless and immutable. You can generate a transaction and broadcast it without blockchain technology, it's only when a miner decides to put this broadcasted transaction into the block he's currently trying to solve AND this miner actually succeeds in solving and broadcasting this block before an other miner broadcasts a valid block that a transaction becomes a permanent record in the blockchain.

Which investors trick who?

If you make a mistake in a transaction, broadcast the transaction and wait untill it's included in the blockchain, you can lose the value of the unspent outputs you used when creating this transaction. The network, however, does not care about wether or not you made a mistake. For the network: the transaction is either valid, in which case they put it in their mempool untill it gets mined or pruned.... Or the transaction is invalid in which case it gets rejected without any big problems being created.

The great thing about linux and most of these wallets is that you don't need a precompiled binary... You can always just compile a wallet yourself. Make sure you have a proper build environment, make sure you have all the dependancies and just build the wallet yourself

If you stick to electrum forks, you don't even have to build those wallets, just install the dependancies, clone the git repo and run the wallet directly (it's written in pure python, so it can be ran without having to compile the binaries).

I haven't used armory in a while now, so anything i say here can be wrong/outdated, but since nobody else seems to be answering you, i'll give it a shot.

IF i'm not mistaking, armory isn't using bitcoind's interface directly, it's merely using it's data files. So, i don't think there is a way to connect armory to a remote running bitcoin node directly.

It *might* be possible to export bitcoind's data folder as an nfs mount on one machine, and mount it on a second one... I haven't tried this, so i don't know if it would work.

nope, i also confirmed this in my first post. The oldest version i can remember using is v2.4.x, at least 2 years ago. AFAIK, electrum never mixes HD and non-HD wallets, unless it were versions pre-2.4 (in which case i wouldn't know).

Like i said in my first post: the OP either created a non-HD wallet, in which case he needs all private keys he initially imported, or he created a HD wallet and swept his brain wallet instead of importing it (in which case he needs the recovery seed).

A last option would be to search the initial wallet file, in which case it wouldn't matter if he created a HD or a non-HD wallet.

Sure, at the moment a block is limited to 1 Mb, excluding the witness data (in case of segwit wallets). At the moment, i estimate an average sw transaction to be around ~200 bytes, so the number of transactions/day could be
(1000000*6*24)/200 = 720.000 transactions per day (mind you, this is a very, very, very raw estimation i made without looking up references or completely thinking about all possible factors).
A lightning channel has to be opened and closed by an on-chain transaction, so if more than 360.000 channels are opened (and respectively closed) per day, all blocks could potentially be filled by opening and closing transactions.

However, if i open a channel, i do plan on creating more than 2 lightning transactions using this channel before i close it, otherwise i would have just used one or two on-chain transactions... So if everybody only used the LN (so all transactions in all blocks from now on were solely for the purpose of opening or closing channels) and all lightning channels were used to create/pay at least 3 lightning invoices, the overall throughput of the bitcoin network would increase by 50%.

PS: there is no need to have your closing transaction in the very next block. Lightning transactions are almost instant, and there is no need to close a channel after your lightning invoice got payed. If you wish to close your channel, you can do so whenever you want, but preferably you'd wait untill there was no more use for the channel.

A (simplified) scenario (using simplified terminology, and disregarding fees and stuff) like this one would be perfectly fine:
1) you find a local seller of dog food, he accepts BTC and has an LN node and is properly setup to generate lightning invoices
2) on the 1st of may you open a channel to this seller, the opening transaction has a value of 0.02 BTC
3) from now on, you use the channel to the seller to buy 0.0005 BTC of dog food from this seller every single day
4) on the 31st of may, your "side" of the channel has (0.02 - 31*0.0005 BTC) = 0.0045 BTC. The seller's "side" has 31*0.0005 BTC = 0.0155 BTC
5) at this point, you decide to switch sellers, and close the channel, the closing transaction funds your address with 0.0045 BTC, and the seller's address with 0.0155 BTC. A miminum fee is required, but there is no need for this closing transaction to be included in the next couple of blocks (unless either you or the dog food seller is in a hurry).

Without the LN: 31 transactions
With the LN: 2 transactions
Risk to the seller: neglectible, even when the channel was open for 31 days
Risk to you: neglectible
Sound like we saved on a lot of fees, and a lot less data was permanently stored on the blockchain

Electrum has 2 kinds of wallets:
1) an HD wallet, this wallet basically uses an xprv (a master private key) to derive subkeys (private keys), the subkey can be used to derive a public key, and the hash of the public key is the address. An unlimited amount of subkeys can be generated, each time one of your addresses gets funded, a new private key/public key/address gets derived, each time you generate a new transaction, a new change address gets derived.
When you generate a new HD wallet, you are presented with a recovery seed. This is basically a phrase consisting of x words. If you restore your wallet, and enter the recovery seed, electrum can regenerate the old xprv, and derive all old private keys...

2) you can also generate a wallet by importing one or more private keys. Such a wallet cannot generate new addresses. If you import a private key from, for example, a brain wallet, the address generated by hashing the public key belonging to the private key you imported will be the only address that is ever monitored by your wallet.

In reality, only 2 things could have happened:
1) you generated a new HD wallet, and unwillingly swept your brain wallet. By sweeping the brain wallet, a new transaction was generated that spent all unspent outputs funding your brain wallet in order to fund an address belonging to your HD wallet

2) you generated a non-hd wallet, in which case the unspent outputs shouldn't have moved. If you remember all private keys you imported during the wallet creation, you should have access to your balance

So, in order to regain access to your funds, you need:
1) either the wallet seed phrase, if you generated a hd wallet and swept the brain wallet

2) or all private keys you imported during wallet generation... If you imported multiple private keys, it *is* possible you need all of them to regain access to your funds

3) you could try to find the old wallet file, it'll either have the xprv, or the private keys...

I wrote a tool to do exactly this a while ago:
https://github.com/mocacinno/mocacinnoforkchecker/

It hasn't been maintained since the 7th of may, so some api's might have gone down/new forks might have been added, but the tool should still provide you with unclaimed unspent outputs on many forked chains
Good luck!

Not that it really matters, but i can give a positive vouch to fasttech. I used them numerous times in the past to spend some of my btc, never had any problems with them.

No, the testnet is a network of nodes that also keep a decentralized blockchain ledger, just like the main net.

The biggest difference between the testnet and main net is that at the very beginning, everybody agreed that testnet coins are worthless, and that the testnet can be 'reset' at any point in time... There are some other differences, but overall, the testnet behaves like the mainnet. So, you can use the testnet for testing without risking real money... If  something works on the testnet, it'll most probably work on the mainnet

It's probably just an internal address... It's normal for exchanges to move funds around between wallets, create change addresses, combine many unspent outputs into one to minimise fees, store BTC in a cold wallet, retrieve BTC from cold wallets,... It's probably not a customer's deposit address since it received ~1400 BTC in ~1600 tx's.
In reality, it doesn't matter why bitfinex chose to use this address, they'll probably have their reason (technical, emotional, practical, security, minimising fees,...), however i doubt you'll ever know the exact purpose of this address without asking bitfinex directly.

OK, 7 different companies might explain the income, but the question still remains: were you ever able to spend any of those funds in the past, are you sure you had full controll over this wallet?
Also, i really fail to understand why none of these 7 companies would allow you to change your withdrawal address... Seems like a very logical question to ask them.

At any rate, i'd consider this wallet to be compromised. I would focus on getting an uncompromised (hardware, paper or airgapped) wallet and focus my energy on convincing those 7 companies to change the withdrawal address... I don't think there's a lot of other things you can do at this point.

I would also urge you to file an official police report... Thefth of 6 BTC/day is something serious... If your local authorities are at least the slightest bit competent, they should realise that the daily thefth of ~$45.000 is something they can not ignore.

EDIT: like i said in your other topic discussing the same problem:

Please don't duplicate your topics...
This is a copy of https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4437135

It's possible you're in a panic when you see funds leaving your wallet, but posing duplicate content will just lead to confusion. Lock this thread, and stick to the one you opened previously please.

EDIT: after some further digging, i found that this address is part of this wallet: https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/Huobi.com-2
It's part of Huobi.com's hot wallet. So if your story is legit, you were scammed by a scammer who gave you a watch-only wallet monitoring an address belonging to an exchange to keep you happy while they robbed you.