I don't doubt what you say, but honestly, I don't see the difference between any centralized exchange right now. The events of the past several months have shown us that every single one lies somewhere on the scale of "untrustworthy/shady" to "outright scam". They are all fractional reserve, they all gamble user funds, they all cook the books, they all exist solely to enrich themselves, they all don't give a damn about any of their users, and they are all interconnected in this massive web of lies they have woven, since the collapse of one can cause a domino effect which results in the collapse of several more. Some, such as Binance, know what to say on Twitter (fUnDs ArE sAfU!) to make people believe they are somehow different, but the bottom line is that leaving coins on any exchange is a massive risk. I don't care if it is Binance or Coinbase or Grayscale or some local exchange ran by someone you knew in high school. If your coins are not in your own wallet, then you actually own zero bitcoin and you might as well work on this assumption because before long your centralized exchange of choice will have scammed you for whatever you "thought" you once owned.

This is it exactly. We've seen multiple examples of large exchanges going down over the last few months (Celsius, Voyager, FTX) in which their customers are treated as unsecured creditors, which essentially means they are the lowest of the low and the absolute last on the list to receive anything back from the pot of funds. We've also seen official filings from the likes of Coinbase saying the exact same thing, that in the event of insolvency proceedings then their customers would also be treated as unsecured creditors.

So proof of reserves, in summary:

• Does not prove they can 100% cover their user deposits.
• Even if it did, does not prove they can 100% cover all outstanding liabilities such as loans and business debts.
• Even if it did, does not provide any reassurance that customers are anything other than unsecured creditors and wouldn't get all their money back anyway

As with pretty much everything CZ says, he will lie through his teeth if it makes him more profit, and you are a fool if you believe him.

Looks like the move has achieved exactly what it was meant to: Convinced people that somehow this shows that Binance are transparent and trustworthy, because they don't understand that it in fact proves absolutely nothing at all.

Proof of reserves without proof of liabilities is meaningless. Let's say I start running an escrow service on the forum, and want to provide "proof of escrow". I sign a message from an address with 1 BTC in it. What does that prove? Absolutely nothing. How many open trades am I dealing with? What is the combined value of all those trades? What if I'm supposed to have 10 BTC in escrow and I only show you 1? How would you even know.

The Merkle tree is trivially manipulated, and there have been no independent third party audits (which could also be manipulated). The bottom line is that Binance will only ever release information that shows you exactly what they want it to show you. If it turns out they are insolvent, then they simply won't release that information until such a time that they can temporarily fix the problem by taking out a loan or something similar. And of course lets not even mention the billions of dollars worth of crypto that left their "proof of reserves" address the day after they published their proof of reserves. Not suspicious at all, I'm sure.

I don't know how your local ATM company is going to handle it. The fact is that zero confirmation transactions were never completely safe, and all businesses which rely on them were going to have to adapt to a better model at some point. That point is now (or at least, within the next few months).

The most obvious answer is Lightning. For an ATM this seems like the easiest option. Display an invoice, you scan the invoice, it spits out cash, or you create an invoice, show it to the ATM's camera, and it sends you the bitcoin. Other options are to continue to accept zero confirmation transactions in the short term but make their exchange rate for such transactions worse to cover for the increased risk, or to require a minimum of one confirmation for everything. You'll have to wait and see which route they choose.

This proves nothing. We all know Binance own some bitcoin. What we don't know is if Binance own enough bitcoin to complete cover all their liabilities. And without proof of liabilities (which is not being provided nor will be forthcoming), then this whole thing is smoke and mirrors designed to trick newbies who don't understand any better. Just like most of what Binance do (such as their centralized scamcoins masquerading as bitcoin).

Oh look. Binance owned CMC rates Binance as the best. There's a surprise!

So they release one Merkle tree which includes 50% of customers, and a second Merkle tree which includes the other 50% of customers. Every customer can check they are included and see that their balances are "fully backed up", even though they are actually running at a 50% deficit. Or even more trivially than that, they simply create a fake account on Binance and credit it with negative 500,000 BTC. Include that in the Merkle tree and oh look! Everything checks out just fine. Not only is it completely trivial for them to do this, but it is also impossible to prove they are not doing this and impossible for anyone to verify anything at all.

This proves nothing. If you leave coins on any centralized exchange after the events of the past few months, then you absolutely have no one to blame but yourself when you lose everything.

It doesn't matter. Coinbase own some bitcoin. That is no surprise to anyone.

The only question which matters, and which cannot be answered in a truly trustless way, is what do Coinbase have on their books? Holding 2 million bitcoin is insufficient if they have liabilities of 3 million bitcoin across their customers. As DaveF has pointed out, this doesn't just include individual users but also business entities and affiliated entities such as brokers and Coinbase Commerce. Do Coinbase hold a lot of bitcoin? Yes. Does that mean Coinbase aren't fractional reserve? Absolutely not.

So it doesn't matter. Any coins on Coinbase are not yours and continue to be at risk, regardless of the balance of their wallets.

It's not even the fact that most wallets won't let you do it, but rather, most nodes won't bother to broadcast it. Yes, you can create a transaction on Bitcoin Core which pays less than 1 sat/vbyte in fees, or indeed zero fee altogether, but given that the vast majority of nodes use the default minRelayTxFee of 1 sat/vbyte, then your transaction simply won't be broadcast through the network.

I was not aware that such a thing existed.

True, but you have to do more and more just to stay at the same baseline. Someone who questions this issue now and goes to great lengths to reclaim some of their privacy probably still has more data gathered on them than the least privacy conscious individual 30 or even 20 years ago.

Employers stopped offering it, and most employees didn't care or even welcomed the move. I'd probably have as much change of being paid in cash as I would of being paid in bitcoin.

You can read the rationale behind it here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2021-May/003033.html

This has been discussed to the death across multiple pull requests, and has now already been released. Only if some earth shattering bug or vulnerability was discovered (which is highly unlikely) would anything change for v24.1.

Bitrefill are still accepting zero confirmation payments at the moment, and I don't use Muun wallet but don't see any announcements on their Twitter or website. I assume they will both be monitoring how quickly this is adopted and then implement changes as necessary.

Hmm. Probably not at the end of the day, for the reasons you discussed above - I already have sacrificed my privacy to be part of the fiat banking system, and trying to disentangle myself from it now would be exceedingly complicated and does not allow me to fully reclaim that privacy. All the solutions which avoid having a bank account that you mentioned still carry exposure to all the same risks - third parties, non-ownership, censorship, etc. - and indeed make these risks that much more significant. And of course I can still move my fiat in to bitcoin any time I like in a private way using peer-to-peer trading.

If I had an option to avoid fiat altogether and to be paid directly in bitcoin, I would take that.

I do DIY all the time. All my neighbors would hear is a bit of banging and drilling (just like when I host a Foxpup party). I could easily just be putting up some shelves or building some new piece of furniture. No one is going to suspect someone is engraving a seed phrase every time they hear a bit of building working going on.

I have some wallets which I haven't accessed a seed phrase back up once since I set them up many years ago, other than to check the integrity of my back ups. But if the words are engraved in a safe and bolted to my wall/floor, then I can be certain the integrity is just fine unless my home has been destroyed.

Then use a good password manager such as KeePass. Every new account goes in there automatically, meaning you never lose track.

This is something I accept. As much as I hate banks, I couldn't get paid for my job without one. I know I have zero privacy with my bank, I know I can be censored, and I know my funds can be frozen against my will. These are all significant drawbacks, but drawbacks I must accept to be able to by paid for my job. However, the whole point I got involved in bitcoin was that it does not possess these drawbacks. The whole point I got involved in bitcoin was to regain some financial privacy, to hold my own coins, to be censorship resistant, to be free of third parties, to be free of arbitrary seizures, and so on. Why would I get involved in bitcoin for all these reasons, and then immediately give them all up and go back to a fiat model by using a centralized exchange?

I haven't upgraded yet, bet when I do I'll likely enable it as well. I don't really want my node to holding on to transactions which other nodes have already replaced. Although it could also go the other way, in which my node accepts a replacement transaction, but the original ends up getting mined. Could be a bit of a mess for a while.

Lol. I'm pretty sure he's aware of 24.0 being released, considering he is one of the people who signs the checksum file with each release.

If you look for any sensitive website via Google, you will probably be scammed. Google will happily host and promote scam sites, software, apps, and so on, without a second thought, as long as the scammers are willing to pay. Still using Google for anything is the biggest mistake here.

The "strange link" is a standard Tor link, which is now the only way to use ChipMixer. It is safer and more private than using clearnet, anyway.

Then you should have a read of the mailing list post from one of the developers of Muun wallet and the CEO of Bitrefill. Here they are:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-October/020980.html
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-October/021056.html

Just because you see it as a "nothing feature", does not mean it won't have significant implications on how some businesses operate.

I mean, anyone can change any setting they like in their node and have it run any way they want already. In terms of full RBF, this has always been possible, as I said above, simply by changing some code yourself or running a client such a Knots which provides it as an option.

---

24.0 has been released. Will be an interesting few months to see how the mempool behaves.

You are forgetting about the bitcoin being traded itself. Generally (for fiat/btc trades) both parties put in a security deposit (and trading fees), and the party selling the bitcoin puts that in the escrow address as well. Should the seller not receive payment from the buyer, then the escrowed amount includes the full amount of bitcoin which was going to be sold, plus two sets of security deposits, so enough to refund the seller everything they put up plus pay for their inconvenience. And if it is the buyer who does not receive payment from seller, then again, the escrow contains all the bitcoin which were to be sold, so can fully reimburse the buyer plus use the security deposits to cover the inconvenience.

STOP!

Electrum no longer shows you the option to create legacy wallets, and hasn't for over 18 months. While you may simply have downloaded an old version by mistake, you may also have downloaded a malicious version which is waiting to steal your coins. The current version is 4.3.2. You should download it from this link and only this link: https://electrum.org/#download. Ideally, you should also verify your download by following the instructions on that page.

Electrum remains one of the best choices of wallets to use, but you must make sure you are using it safely before you send any coins to it. I would also suggest that after creating a new wallet and backing up its seed phrase (after you are sure you are using a legitimate version of Electrum), you practice restoring from your seed phrase back up before funding the wallet.

Do you mean btcrecover rather than bitrecover? I'm not aware of any relevant software by the name of bitrecover.

Your only options are either:
1 - Share with us as much as you can remember about your password and what you have tried so far, and we can try creating a new tokenlist file to widen your search.
2 - Pay for a professional recovery service as bitmover has suggested.

The arbitrator is reimbursed from the Bisq DAO, generally using the funds which the two involved parties previously locked in escrow.

The escrow is indeed 2-of-2 as you say, but as part of it being set up, both parties sign a time locked transaction which sends all the coins in the escrow (so both users' deposits) to the Bisq DAO address, time locked to 20 days after when the escrow is created. If the parties cannot reach an agreement within 20 days with the help of a mediator +/- arbitrator, then the transaction is broadcast and the funds in escrow are sent to the Bisq DAO. The arbitrator will later request reimbursement from the DAO depending on the final outcome of their arbitration.

For the exact reason you outlined in your earlier response: Separate identities.

As much as I preach about all things privacy and against ever completing KYC, I also admit I have a bank account. To have a bank account, I've completed KYC with the bank. It is entirely logical, as you point out, to want to keep my banking activities separate from my bitcoin activities, and just because I've completed KYC with a bank does not mean there is zero additional risk to completing KYC with a crypto exchange. On the contrary - go and do a quick web search to see how many major banks have leaked scans of their customers' passports or similar. Not that many. But when it comes to centralized exchange, there is a new leak or hack pretty much every week, if not more.

But even considering if you are already KYCed on one more CEXs - every time you complete KYC on another CEX you take on ever more risk. You expose your documents to more people, have them duplicated on more servers, and give them a bigger attack surface.