Sorry, but no one in their right mind is going to download a random closed source executable from a brand new account, a domain registered 2 weeks ago, with absolutely no reviews, reputation, or trust. Just asking to end up with malware on your device.

If you are serious and not a scammer, then share your source code and make sure the wallet can be built directly from that source code. Then people will at least take a look.

Exchanges should be holding exactly what their customers deposit, and not a single satoshi (or shiba) less. If I deposited a bunch of dollars at my bank, I wouldn't expect them to swap my USD to CHF on the basis that CHF is less inflationary than USD, even if doing so would make me lose less money long term. Similarly, centralized exchanges shouldn't be swapping customers' assets for other assets, regardless of how moronic those assets are. This kind of playing fast-and-loose with customer deposits is exactly the reason so many exchanges are in the mess they are in. If they just held on to exactly what was deposited, they wouldn't all be insolvent.

Now, if we are talking about the exchange's own money, earned from trading fees, withdrawals fees, and what have you, then yes, they should obviously be holding a bulk of their own money in bitcoin and not shitcoins. But if they are offering shitcoins to their users, then they should be holding whatever shitcoins are deposited. Otherwise they are essentially just trading with users' money, and well, we've got plenty of examples of how that's turned out for them so far.

As I mentioned earlier in another thread, it is not impossible that there is a malicious reason behind Binance specifically choosing to this now, when they could instead of done it at 1 sat/vbyte at a steady stream any time over the last many months, saving themselves a huge amount in unnecessary fees in the process. Perhaps that is what they were planning to do in the future, but are now in the midst of their own liquidity issues and are scrambling to consolidate everything they can to keep processing withdrawals.

Meanwhile, they bump their withdrawal fee to absolutely ridiculous levels - 100,000 sats! - to encourage people either not to withdraw at all, or to "withdraw" on one of their centralized scam IOU chains which are not back by real bitcoin at all. I've spoken many times in the past about how Binance's withdrawal fees are literal robbery, and now they've doubled them!

Honestly, if you still have coins on Binance thinking they are "too big to fail" or some other such nonsense, not only are you wrong and risking everything, but you are also being massively ripped off by these charlatans.

This should be no surprise, really. This is exactly what happened with Celsius, in that they had to publish a full list of the users' names, holdings, associated transactions, and so on. As I warned over a month ago, now that this precedent has been set, then any data held on you by any centralized exchange or platform is at the same risk of similar disclosure. I fully expect a similar full list of all FTX users to be published in the coming weeks.

Just as if you don't want your coins at risk then you need to withdraw them from centralized exchanges, if you don't want your data at risk then you need to be shutting your accounts and requesting they delete all data they hold on you.

The delays they are experiencing are at least plausible right now, since Binance has chosen the worst possible time when everyone is trying to withdraw their coins from every centralized exchange out there to flood the network with ~200 megabytes of consolidation transactions. Someone with a tin foil hat might suggest Binance deliberately chose right now to clog up the mempool.

Still, this only explains the delays in bitcoin withdrawals, and not the delays in all the other withdrawals that crypto.com are "experiencing"/making up. And of course let's not mention how their centralized token has lost has lost 50% of its value in the last few days.

Such statements are meaningless. Withdraw everything.

Open your Electrum wallet. Click on Tools -> Preferences and then check the box named "Write logs to file". Close Electrum and then reopen it and open your wallet again.

Try to make a transaction so you get shown the error message as before. Close Electrum, then navigate to the newly created logs folder inside the Electrum directory (~/.electrum/logs) and share the contents of the log file with us here.

So, given that your coins were bought via a KYCed account on a centralized exchange, then it is safe to assume the exchange knows exactly how many coins you own, in which addresses you are storing them, and has linked all that information to your real name, address, and other personal information. By extension, all of this will have been shared with various blockchain analysis companies, most likely some branch of your government, and potentially a variety of third party data brokers or other interested parties who buy data from blockchain analysis companies.

So now you have to ask yourself how happy you are with all of this. Do you not care that all these entities know exactly how much bitcoin you own, exactly which addresses belong to you, will be able to track exactly any future movements, transactions, purchases, trades, etc., that you make, and potentially use this information against you in some way? If you don't care, then do nothing. If you do care, then continue reading.

Next ask yourself what coinjoining will achieve in this case. Let's say you split all your coins between multiple coinjoins, coinjoin everything thoroughly, and move all your coins back to a brand new wallet with no links to your previous addresses. This will prevent the entities above from knowing which addresses you are storing your coins on and from being able to track all your future transactions. They will still know that you own some bitcoin, but will also lose the ability to know exactly how much. Their estimates of how much you own will become less accurate as time goes on, as they won't know if you are spending or selling some of your stack.

If you continue to buy bitcoin via this KYCed account and then coinjoining it, then again they will not know where your coins are or what you do with them, but will still have the data on how much bitcoin you bought over time. If you instead choose to buy non-KYCed coins via a DEX, then they will not have this data, provided you are meticulous in keeping any non-coinjoined coins separate from your newly bought non-KYCed coins.

And of course, make sure you don't use Wasabi to do any of this, since they work hand in hand with blockchain analysis companies.

As an aside to the issue you are having - this is not a cold wallet. A cold wallet is one which is permanently offline, not one which occasionally connects to the internet.

What you want to do is to install Bitcoin Core on a permanently airgapped device which will never be connected to the internet. You can then use this to generate a new wallet and private keys without needing to sync the blockchain. You then export the addresses from this wallet and import the addresses only (and not the private keys) in to a new wallet on an online and fully synced version of Bitcoin Core. The online synced wallet creates an unsigned transaction, you move the unsigned transaction to your airgapped wallet to be signed, and then move it back to your online wallet to be broadcast.

I'm not going to get in to this argument again, but I cannot fathom why you are so hell bent on using untested, biased, and insecure methods of generating entropy when everyone is repeatedly telling you it is a bad idea.

Any string you generate by manually picking 0s and 1s. It might be safe enough that your coins aren't stolen, but it will not have 256 bits of entropy and it will definitely be less safe than a properly generated string.

You almost fooled me if not for the #21,000.

Given that Bisq doesn't use a full reputation system, then that would be difficult. Although nothing stopping you from only accepting cash trades from users you have already done non-cash trades with and have a good local reputation score.

In those cases, I just politely inform the merchant I'll take my bitcoin business elsewhere, and if they would like to secure my business in the future then to consider accepting bitcoin. Don't need to be pushy about it - just let them know a demand exists and move on.

Bad idea. Easy to fake and difficult to verify for the average person.

Didn't stop the likes of Kumbhani and Arcaro (BitConnect), Do Kwon (Terra Luna), or SBF.

I'd also point out what I pointed out earlier in this thread, that court documents have shown that Tether have done one of these exact things, borrowing money from others on the very day of their independent audits and returning it the very next day. No arrests or jail time there, and in fact continues to be the largest fractional reserve scam in the whole of crypto.

So you are trying to crack someone else's private key so you can steal their coins?

You can verify it only by using data they provide, which will only ever show you what they want you to see. If they are insolvent, then they simply won't release a new audit until they are. And I can think of a dozen ways they could fudge this process. Only use a proportion of accounts to create the Merkle tree. Audit half their user accounts at once and the other half later. Take out loans or borrow funds for the day of the audit. Claw back some outstanding loans or investments for the day of the audit. Even just pay some large player to sign a message saying they own coins they don't. Convert some of their other assets which are not covered by this audit. Collusion with the audit firm. I'm sure there are plenty more you could come up with if you sat and thought about it for a while.

As utterly stupid as this meme-coin-based-on-a-meme-coin is, if customers are depositing it then the exchange should be holding it.

Some suggestions:

Not "may", but rather "already is". Various exchanges have already frozen assets and halted withdrawals.

Do not recommend Trust wallet. It is closed source and owned by Binance. Given that FTX's apps became malware in the days after their insolvency, recommending any software owned by a centralized exchange should be avoided.

I would remove the second sentence as it makes non yield projects sound safer by omission. I would also expand to cover centralized altcoins. Perhaps this:

Also, note that many altcoins, tokens, and DeFi projects are either fundamentally centralized and therefore as risky as centralized exchanges and online wallets, or are equally vulnerable to the FTX contagion due to the way that they're designed.

Don't add any more. Too long and people don't read it.

The Celsius CEO did an AMA where he spoke about how trustworthy and transparent they are three days before they went under.
Voyager released a statement saying they were "unaffected by market conditions" three days before taking out an emergency loan worth $200 million and 15,000 BTC.
FTX made a bunch of tweets showing off their new offices and saying how everything is fine the day before this all kicked off.
BlockFi made statements also reassuring users everything was fine two days before freezing withdrawals.

The bottom line is that no exchange is ever going to come forward and say "Yeah guys, we are struggling", because they know that doing so would kick off a bank run which would be guaranteed to end in them insolvent and bankrupt. Every exchange is going to come out with variations of the same nonsense over the coming days and weeks - we don't lend funds, we are fully solvent, we are backed 1-to-1, here is our proof of reserves, here are our bank statements, and so on. Every one of these statements will be exactly what the exchange wants you to hear, with absolutely zero guarantee or way to verify that they are accurate, honest, or truthful.

Statements are meaningless. Withdraw everything.

Great, do it! And if someone doesn't like your offer, they are free to create their own offer which under cuts you. And thus begins the start of an ecosystem of cash trading in your local area.

I've always disliked the argument "There is no liquidity in my area/currency/chosen payment method/etc." when it comes to talking about platforms like Bisq. You don't have to wait for someone else to create the liquidity for you. Such is the beauty of a true DEX - you can create the liquidity yourself, easily, and at no cost. The largest peer to peer trading ecosystems started with a single person posting a single offer.

Then we better get a lot more places to start accepting bitcoin directly before that happens.

I am making analogies, not literal comparisons, which you seem to be misunderstanding.

The point of these analogies is that human behavior is not random. You might think you are being random, but you aren't. Not truly. This has been studied and proven.

Which makes thing even less random. Now you are thinking "I know that statistically I "should" have a run of 5 of the same at some point. I've not done that yet, so lets put that in now. Ok. Now we'll do a few much shorter runs of just 1 or 2 the same, because you probably wouldn't have 5 the same immediately followed by another 5 the same. Ok. What next?" And so on and so forth. This is not random. Not even close to it.

Another analogy. I'm simply saying that although you might generate a unique string that no one has generated before, it doesn't mean that string is safe or secure.

The final collective result of the behavior of a group of distinct and disconnected individuals is in no way comparable to a single person picking 0s and 1s.

But of course there probably isn't an even number of blacks and whites in the bag, and with each one you eat you reduce the odds of that color appearing again. So overall a bad system.

Fine. Let them be regulated. Let regulators shut down as many as possible and let the ones which still exist stop printing fake tokens out of thin air and running fractional reserve scams. Centralized exchanges have leeched off of bitcoin for long enough. I don't care if every single one of them ends up being regulated in to oblivion at this point. I've never used one anyway.

The worse centralized exchanges become, the more users who will start to use bitcoin as it was intended - peer to peer, without trusting any third parties.

No, but I'll tell you what I can verify - the bitcoin in my own wallets. Impossible to verify anything with a centralized exchange. If people had bothered to verify that they actually own bitcoin and not a worthless IOU from a centralized exchange, then they wouldn't be worried about verifying the source of information about exchanges being hacked.

Don't forget the follow up tweet where he outright lies to his followers by calling Trust wallet open source: https://nitter.it/cz_binance/status/1591804907702874113
Believing anything CZ says is a mistake.

I agree with the suggestions above - Bisq, RoboSats and AgoraDesk are the best fiat to bitcoin decentralized exchanges at present. You can also use them to trade altcoins, although there are various instant exchangers for altcoins but I can't recommend any as I don't use them. You'll also find more info here: https://kycnot.me/

Nothing major, otherwise any time anyone made a bank transfer you would be at risk, since you reveal your name and account number. I'm just saying - if you don't want to reveal your account number, there are other methods you can choose.

Then you can be the first! Create an offer and see if anyone takes you up on it.

Well, the easiest way to avoid that is to avoid the bank altogether. If you can't spend bitcoin directly, then sell it for cash and spend the cash directly. Better for your privacy too.