I have never spoken about my gender on the forum, so you are all free to believe what you like.

True, but in this case, Knots has supported full RBF for a long time now, and if a Core node really wanted to run full RBF they could do that too with very minimal code changes. Relying on zero confirmation transactions has always had an associated risk, and was always dependent on nodes not implementing full RBF, which they could have done at any time.

Pretty astonishing that the monetary system of entire nations is so fragile that they have to make it illegal to even suggest that people should own their own money.

I'm not sure so much that we are used to it, but more that the vast majority of people do not understand how banks function. I would bet that >90% of people couldn't explain fractional reserve banking and don't know that when you take out a loan from a bank that is brand new money being created out of nothing and entering circulation.

Bitcoin is different. But centralized exchanges are essentially banks, but without following any regulations or laws.

I appreciate this is maybe rubbing salt in the wound, but for future, after you generate a new seed phrase and back it up, you should note down the first address in the wallet you have created before wiping/resetting everything and recovering from your written down back up, to ensure you made no mistakes and you can indeed regain access to the same wallet.

In which case, if it is definitely the correct seed phrase, and you've tried accessing it via Electrum at all the possible derivation paths, then it does indeed seem as if you have mistakenly set a passphrase.

I have a lot of experience using btcrecover, so can talk you through creating a tokenlist file to widen your search if it comes to that.

Correct.

You could also try other standard derivation paths, such as m/44'/0'/0' and m/49'/0'/0' just in case your Trezor Suite really did something weird.

Is this the only time you have tried to access the wallet? Have you tried to access it and been successful previously? And I take it you never tested your restore process prior to sending funds to the wallet in the first place?

How certain are you that your seed phrase is correct? There is no chance that you could have reset the Trezor or generated a second seed phrase at some point?

It would generate the base wallet. BIP39 turns your seed phrase in to your root seed number by using your seed phrase and a salt in 2048 rounds of HMAC-SHA512. The salt is the word "mnemonic" concatenated with any passphrase you choose. If you don't set a passphrase, it just uses the word "mnemonic". So if you turned on the passphrase function, but then didn't enter a passphrase, it would again just use the word "mnemonic" concatenated with nothing and therefore generate the base seed-phrase-only wallet.

Right, so assuming everything you have said is accurate - set up Trezor, sent coins to it, saw the coins on it, next time you plugged it in the coins were missing, seed phrase is correctly backed up, seed phrase is correct on the Trezor with the check seed function - then it does indeed seem you have the correct seed phrase but have opened the wrong wallet.

There are three possibilities here. The first is you set a passphrase and do not remember doing so. A passphrase can be any combination of letters, numbers, or symbols. Perhaps you mistakenly thought you were setting a password for your Trezor Suite software. You could try any common passwords you frequently use, or you could also just try " " (i.e. a space) in case you did something like this by mistake. Your next option would be attempt to bruteforce the passphrase using software such as btcrecover, but if you have absolutely no idea what the passphrase is and it is anything more than a few characters, you will never find it unforunately.

The second possibility is that you have somehow ended up on the incorrect derivation path. I've not used Trezor Suite in years, so I don't know if this is possible, but for this I would pair your Trezor with Electrum and cycle through common derivation paths to see if you find anything. The standard derivation path for bc1q addresses is m/84'/0'/0'. I would try m/84'/0'/1' and keep incrementing the last number a few times to see if you find anything.

The third possibility I'm not sure about, but you said you used change addresses? It might be that Trezor Suite is not displaying the change addresses since you haven't used the receiving addresses yet. If you open your Trezor with Electrum, that should solve that issue.

I would explorer the latter two options first since they can be resolved/excluded in a few minutes, whereas bruteforcing a passphrase could take years.

I agree, but as I said above, it is obvious that many entities and businesses which depend on risk assessed zero confirmation transactions for much of their functioning were caught unaware by this change. Now you can argue that is their own fault, since this has been discussed for years, but I don't think it would be wrong to give them more time to adjust their inner workings to be compatible with this change.

Having said all that, though, it isn't going to happen. 24.0 has already been finalized and will be released with mempoolfullrbf as planned, and yet another pull request to revert it has been fairly widely NACKed.

This is a point often made by people who have never actually even tried to trade peer to peer before, and are just mindlessly repeating the nonsense they read online. Maybe conducting the actual trade on a CEX is somewhat easier than a DEX, but with a CEX you also have to factor in opening an account, completing KYC, sharing all your information, waiting days to be approved, the risk of data leaks/hacks/sales, identity theft, linking your fiat bank account, having your fiat bank decide you aren't allowed to spend your money on bitcoin, linking a different payment method, waiting more days for this to be approved, and then giving away your fiat or bitcoin to a complete stranger who, as we have just seen repeatedly over the last several months, will take your money and simply gamble it on whatever they like. Doesn't sound particularly easy to me. It also isn't easy to go through lengthy court processes when your identity is stole or you lose all your coins because the centralized exchange was one of many many scams.

With a good DEX you literally just select a trade, send the bitcoin to escrow, transfer the fiat, and release the bitcoin. Now that's easy.

Probably, but those figures are still net change. So any new deposits are being cancelled out and more by withdrawals.

Not sure such data exists, but I suppose you could trawl through some Binance or Coinbase withdrawal transactions and see the general trend. I would imagine it would be a mix of both.

It's the amount on the blockchain. If you click on the link on the tweet I shared above, it directs you to the glassnode page where they explain their methodology:


They of course wouldn't be able to have data on how much is in all the accounts on an exchange unless the exchange chose to share those data, and of course no exchange is going to share data which show them to be insolvent.

As I said above, this is fraud. Try it if you want, but be prepared for your bank to close your account, trash your credit score, seize your money, and potentially file criminal charges against you.

What would you say anyway? "The transaction is fraudulent but I didn't think to do anything about it for a month or two but now FTX has collapsed I'm taking action"?

If you give your coins to scammers, expect to be scammed, and coming crying to fiat banks to save you isn't going to work.

I've never had any funds on centralized exchanges to begin with, so nothing to withdraw. The people I know locally who are involved in bitcoin are people I trade peer to peer with, so we rarely (or indeed never) talk about centralized exchanges. So I suppose the best I can go on is the general feeling on here and on Reddit, and the reports/data about what is happening.

Trezor report a surge in sales of 300% since FTX collapsed: https://cointelegraph.com/news/trezor-reports-300-surge-in-sales-revenue-due-to-ftx-contagion
Large outflows of bitcoin from centralized exchanges, with the amount being stored on centralized exchanges now at the lowest since early 2018: https://nitter.it/glassnode/status/1591943265296998400

Popcorn on standby. Let's just ignore the fact that they are desperately consolidating everything because they aren't sure if they actually have "proof of reserves", or the $2.7 billion in Tether they moved out of their "proof of reserves" wallet less than 24 hours after they published their "proof of reserves".

Of course it is better for them to batch their transactions, but they way they do it is moronic. There is no need for them to consolidate everything at the same time while paying a fee far higher than needed. They could very easily have a system which broadcasts a large consolidation transaction every 10 minutes paying 1 sat/vbyte, instead of dumping 200 vMB of transactions paying 14 sats/vbyte all at once. But as I said above, they don't care because it is the users who are getting fleeced here, not Binance. There is also nothing stopping them from creating a batch transaction which consolidates deposits and pays out withdrawals at the same time, rather than create twice as many transactions as needed to consolidate first and then pay out later.

They have done this kind of thing before, but I think this the largest they have ever done and the timing is obviously not a coincidence. There is stuff happening behind the scenes we are unaware of. As always, get your coins off exchanges and in to your own wallets.

I think that's a small inconvenience for the benefit of not having scammers knowing your full name, address, and phone number. It isn't just spam calls and the like, but also things like a SIM swap attack. It takes 2 minutes to send a mass SMS to all your contacts with your new number, and you can update your number on websites and businesses the next time you use them. Keep your old number active for 6 months and redirect any legitimate contact to your new number.

In the future you can also consider using a burner phone number which you throw away and replace every 3/6/12 months or whatever. If you need a phone number to sign up to something, but don't want to hand out your real one, use this one instead.

Yes, use a well known exchange, but not Binance. Binance is centralized. Peer to peer on Binance is not peer to peer at all. It is peer to Binance and Binance to peer. They act as a "trusted" third party, they can spy on everything you do, they can seize your coins, they can reverse your transaction, they can censor you, and they report your activities to blockchain analysis. You lose literally all the benefits of trading peer to peer if you trade via Binance. Might as well just use Binance normally - you have the same amount of privacy and security with both methods. Namely, zero.

If you actually want to trade peer to peer properly, then use an exchange such as Bisq. No centralized website, ran via Tor, escrow is a multi-sig between buyer and seller which Bisq has no control over, never need to deposit your coins to a centralized wallet or give up control, no possibility to be spied on, censored, or have your coins stolen/seized/frozen.

Other good peer to peer exchanges are listed here: https://kycnot.me/

Is this laptop permanently airgapped? I.e. it has never been online, nor will it ever go online. Even better if you didn't even put a WiFi or ethernet card in it so it physically can't go online. If not, permanently airgap it then format it and reinstall your distro of choice.

After that, the set up I would use would be to run Core on your main online computer and run an Electrum server on this computer as well. Then run Electrum on your airgapped laptop, set up a new wallet, and create a matching watch only wallet on your online computer (which syncs only via your own server). You use the online watch only Electrum wallet (which does not contain any private keys) to monitor your addresses and create unsigned transactions, and your airgapped Electrum wallet to sign those transactions (after transferring them back and forth using either a USB drive or a QR code).

You could also skip Electrum here and do the same process just using Core, but lots of people find Electrum easier to use. You can also use your Ledger device with this set up, and interact with your Ledger via Electrum on your online computer, again routing everything through your own Electrum server connected to your own node.

More to the point, where are the security checks and controls? Why can one staff member simply access, download, and share a database of KYC information without requiring additional permissions from anyone else? Pretty basic stuff, especially for a supposedly security focused company. Just another great example of how pretty much every centralized company in this sector is amateurish, at best.

I don't have any hard data on this, but my feeling is that people who chase worthless tokes and airdrops have far less solid security practices when compared to the average bitcoin user. It's probably quite easy to trick these people in to entering the seed phrase on a website as part of some scam airdrop or similar.

Why not change your phone number?

As I said in another thread, I don't even care at this point. I've long advocated to keep regulation out of bitcoin, but I'm fed up of bitcoin being associated with outright scams such as centralized exchanges and a whole host of centralized shitcoins. Bitcoin itself should remain unregulated, but I don't care if governments around the world regulate every centralized exchange so much that it is impossible for them to remain profitable and every single one of them shuts down. Sure, bitcoin would take a temporary price hit, but then at least it would be used as it was designed in the first place - peer to peer, without third parties.

Centralized exchanges were one of the worst things to happen to bitcoin.

Yup. Bring all centralized exchanges under even more centralized government control, just like banks, and let them run like the banks they've clearly been imitating for years. Highly risky, fractional reserve, printing new tokens out of thin air, and so on. I'll stick to actually owning bitcoin, not a worthless IOU from a scammer.

This has been evident for quite some time. They regularly broadcast both withdrawal transactions and internal consolidation transaction which pay fees up to 100x higher than necessary. It's taken them 5 years to finally start to update to segwit and save themselves a third on all their fees (although I'm certain they won't pass any of that on to their users). It's easy to run a horrendously inefficient system when you are ripping your customers off to the tune of 50,000 sats per withdrawal, when 500 sats would more than cover it though. They can continue to pay their ridiculous fees and still simply pocket 95% of every withdrawal fee as pure profit.

Never ceases to amaze me that Binance users put up with this. It is theft.

Sites will generally give a suggested fee rate, rather than an absolute fee. The fee rate should be in the format of sats/vbyte. This is how much satoshi you will pay for each virtual byte of space your transaction takes up. The number of virtual bytes a transaction takes up is dependent on the number of inputs, the number of outputs, the exact type of those inputs and outputs (legacy, segwit, etc), and a few other factors.

For example, if your transaction was 2000 vbytes and you paid 1 sat/vbyte, you would pay 2000 sats. Your transaction would be right at the bottom of the current mempool, since miners care more about the fee rate than the absolute fee.
If your transaction was 250 vbytes and you paid 8 sats/vbyte, you would also pay 2000 sats, but this time your transaction would be much nearer the top of the current mempool.

A transaction moving 10 bitcoin could involve 1 input and 1 output and therefore be as low as 110 vbytes in size, or it could involve 100 inputs (or more) and be thousands of bytes in size. It all depends on across how many inputs that 10 bitcoin is spread.

Well, yes. That's what makes it a superior system - it takes in to account second and third choices rather than just a single choice.

Well that wouldn't work, since the individual voters last year were not told to rank their three picks by order of preference.

Regardless, the competition is now launched, so this discussion is kind of moot.