Since you're looking at vps's (at least, the link you posted has vps in it's name), you could always take a look on https://lowendbox.com/

They always have pretty good deals from all kind of vendors... Some accept crypto, others don't...

By default, Wasabi only connects over Tor. So, i don't know if there would be an extra attack vector if you have a virus anyways... If you have a virus that steals data, it wouldn't need Wasabi to send your data to the virus writer, and it probably wouldn't matter what wallet you used anyways, if it was unlocked the virus writer would probably be able to find an attack vector no matter what wallet you were running (unless it's a hardware wallet or an airgapped one).

I see more problems with the censorship part than with data stealing/virus problems. I mean, if your system gets compromised you're in trouble no matter which desktop wallet you use...

LeGaulois is keeping a list of mixers here => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2827109.0;topicseen

This being said, it's a DYOR list, you have to double check each and every mixer... Personally i wouldn't use one with negative reviews, nor one that uses cloudflare...

I personally use the mixer in my signature from time to time... I know, they do pay me, but i wouldn't promote them if i didn't trust them. Other than that, i use wasabi wallet aswell to do some coinjoins, but the company behind wasabi started to blacklist unspent outputs which the community disproves of. It's up to you wether or not you trust them.
I personally still give them the benefit of the doubt (since blacklisting unspent outputs is not equal to stealing from somebody), but i do understand people that stopped using them.

No problem. Most of us aren't native english speakers, so sometimes things go wrong during translation

As for getting your money back: i'm afraid crypto transactions are irreversible...
Getting your money back will involve law enforcement. You can help them a little bit by tracking transactions and hoping they don't pass a mixer and end up on a KYC exchange, but your odds are very (very) slim i'm afraid.

Anyways, i hope you get lucky.

It works so well they got your initial deposit AND managed to squeeze you for the money for "tax" and it looks you're still not convinced this is a scam... Or at least, that's the feeling i get from your response.

It's quite simple: you're responsible for your own finances. We all warned you about all the red flags and the typical scam behavior. If you value the layout of that site over our experience, you could always just ignore our warnings and proceed... There's nothing stopping you. The only thing you cannot expect is us condoning a site that exhibits many of the red flags of a typical scammer.

Maybe you get lucky (and we got it wrong), but i seriously doubt it... All in all, there's nothing more to say...

I wish you good luck, and i hope you won't lose any more money than you already did!

Kudos for the domain name and the project, i need an easy to use AND easy to remember source that gives me a weighted average (and i need it multiple times per day).

I agree with ETFbitcoin: we (I) need the satoshi unit, even more than the other units you have listed.

I started playing with the sources and switching between USD and EUR... Suddenly i ended up in a situation where 1 BTC was exactly 20.000 USD, and exactly 20.000 euro... And the only thing i could do to "fix" the issue was refreshing the complete page.. Is 20.000 EUR-USD/BTC some kind of default value you hard coded in case something goes wrong?


Also, it seems like the anchors at the bottom (for example: Bitcoin to gold) are missing... Maybe delete them?

But if i read your posts correctly you DID invest with them, but when you wanted to withdraw they asked you for more money to pay for "taxes" (eventough they could have used  part of your money they already had), and you DID pay those "taxes".  Then they apparently still didn't want to release the funds (because you say your friend had to help you?) and now they're asking a ridiculous amount of money as a "warranty".

Now ask yourself: why would they need cryptocurrency as a "warranty" to give you your own money back? There simply isn't any reason to do so... If they were legit, they would have taken the taxes from your money they already had access to, and maybe they'd force you to go trough a KYC procedure... There simply isn't any reason to ask for more money, cause this will prove nothing... What would they be doing? You give them $20k, they then proceed to give you your own money back and the $20k extra? Is having $20k a sign of honesty? For them, asking such an amount would prove nothing and it would solve nothing... The only thing it solves is their scam methodology.

There are multiple red flags here:

• continuously asking for more money because they won't release your money if you don't pay them more money first (pro tip: if somebody asks you to pay money in order to get money, it's 99,9999% certain that it's a scam)
• domain is only 89 days old
• hidden whois info

I can be wrong, but after looking at that site, it was pretty hard to navigate, the wording seemed strange to me, the proceeds seems relatively high... All in all, i'm pretty sure this is a scam. You're free to do whatever you want, but if it was my money, i'd go straight to the cops and i certainly wouldn't give those guys any more money.

Ouch...
Sounds a lot like a scammer trying to scam some extra money from their scam victim by trying to make them pay for "taxes", then for "warrantee", and if you'd pay that, i'm pretty sure they'll say you also have to pay to "unlock your account", and before they leave they'll make you pay a "fine". And once you've payed all that, they'll dissapear and they'll probably contact you using a different identity and offering you to help you find the scammers for a nominal fee.

It's been said in this very thread: walk away... Every cent you give to these people is gone forever. Even if they offer to "free" all your money for a very small sum, they'll just keep that sum on top of everything they've taken from you.

The only thing left to do, is contacting your local law enforcement (if possible). Odds are big they'll do nothing, but at least your complaint will be on file, and if they ever catch those scammers you might have a very, very small chance you'll get part of your money back.

Your guess is as good as mine... And everybody who tells you otherwise is either lying or overconfident. Sure, you can look at a lot of factors and make a prediction, but even the best predictions are still predictions.

That's not how mining works... There isn't a formula that goes "haspower x time = guaranteed block"

What a miner does is creating a new block header which includes (amongst other things):

• a merkle tree: in simple terms, this is some kind of hash "tree" that provides proof that none of the transactions in the block are changed
• the previous block header: this way the block becomes part of the blockCHAIN
• the nonce: a "random" number which can be incremented by the miner

It also includes things that aren't important for this answer (nor to understand how mining works).

What a miner does is creating a new block header based on the previous (valid) block and the transactions in his mempool + the coinbase transaction funding his own address. Then he increments the nonce, creates a sha256 hash of the sha256 hash (sha256d) of this header. He compares the outcome to the current target. If the hash is smaller than the current target, his block header (and his block) is valid, and he can broadcast said block. If the sha56d hash is bigger than the target, he starts again by incrementing the nonce and creating a sha256d hash.
Current asic's are doing this at speeds of >100Th/second. This means they try their luck more than 100.000.000.000.000 times a second.7

The thing is, you can not predict a hash outcome based on the input. A single bit that changes in the input will give a completely different output that can not be predicted. Finding a header whose sha256d hash is under the current target is just dumb luck. It's possible that somebody that copy/pastes the previous block header's hash into an excel sheet to calculate a new block (containing only a coinbase tx) finds a valid hash in it's first try, whilst somebody else has 1000 miners trying at 100.000.000.000.000 times/second doesn't find a valid block at the same time. This being said: you can only meaningfully mine using a recent ASIC, the odds of finding a valid block by hand, with excel, with a cpu or with a gpu are soooooooo close to zero, that in reality you could say they *are* zero.

This is why mining is just based on odds and averages. The difficulty gets adjusted every 2016 blocks, so the target changes every 2016 blocks (since the target only depends on the difficulty). This difficulty is set in such a way the AVERAGE time between 2 blocks is ~10 minutes. However, nobody knows how many miners there are, miners don't have to register, miners don't get "appointed" a block they have to solve... Everybody works on finding the "same" next block (not exactly the same, but the same height), and the person who, by accident, finds a header whose sha256d is under the current target "wins".

There is a formula for the AVERAGE time it'll take to find a block given your current hashrate and the current difficulty. keyword being AVERAGE... In reality the time it'll take you to find a block by dumb luck are somewhere between 0 and infinity seconds. The odds of finding a correct hash are the same the very first hash as they are with your 100.000.000.000.000.000'th  hash.

You can buy just one ASIC and run it from a suitable place (dry, dust-free, internet, electricity, where you have no problems with noise).

This being said, most of the time it's a bad idear for an individual to do so, since you need really cheap electricity to have any chance at making a profit. (and even then, it's always a gamble... Diff might jump up, price might go down, your gear might break, your partner might not like the heat or noise produced by the ASIC,...)

An ASIC is expensive, but not *that* expensive.
For example: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020220616112636834T0C1ADTd062A is around ~$6000
Canaan also has some nice miners, but they don't show prices on their site (AFAIK). There might even be other good vendors around, but i haven't mined in many years, so i haven't kept up with the current state of the art when it comes to ASIC's. When i was still following that market, you had decent ASIC's starting at ~$1500 (IIRC)

There are literally hundreds of sites/papers/books/movies that explain how bitcoin works... so let's not reinvent the wheel..

Here's the page on the bitcoin wiki answering your question in much more detail than i would do: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block

I usually look up reviews aswell... See if other members (or higher) on bitcointalk have had positive experiences with the shop in question. If not, i start looking at review sites, but focus on the negative reviews since positive ones are very easy to buy (eventough sometimes a competitor buys negative reviews aswell).

But yeah, ssl means nothing... Site age *can* be an indicator, but everybody has to start somewhere, so new sites could just aswell be *good*, just like scam sites can be around for many many years (so old sites can be *bad* aswell).

Hidden WHOIS info is sometimes (but not always) an indicator of a *bad* site.

If something seems to good to be true, it's usually also an indicator of a *bad* site.

All in all, it's very hard to distinguish an honest vendor from a scammer, there's no 100% certain way of filtering out the bad apples.

+1

Next to that, those who don't think crypto is a scam mostly use it as an investment, to HODL... Or to trade and make (or lose) some more money.
The amount of people who don't think crypto is a scam AND want to use it as an actual currency instead of an investment tool is very small...

AFAIK, governements have been going after mixers for quite a while now... I'm pretty sure that IF they find a mixer operating from a country where the government doesn't quite like crypto, they'll be closed.

I don't think this is anything new. Governements don't want privacy, they want taxes, and you can't tax things they cannot find/trace... Sure, it's nice that the couple percent of illicit transactions cannot be mixed either, but i somewhat doubt this is their primary objective...

It looks like we're missing part of the story here...
@OP, the usual (normal) workflow of creating and funding an electrum wallet should go like this:

• Download the wallet software from electrum.org
• Verify the signature of the wallet software
• starting the wallet software for the first time should take you into the wizard that allows you to create a new wallet automatically
• in the wizard => chose a name for your new wallet
• in the wizard => option "standard wallet" should be chosen in your case.. (at least, i don't think you have a hardware wallet, and 2FA costs money per transaction)
• in the wizard => option "create a new seed"
• in the wizard => you should have written down the seed on a sturdy piece of paper, defenatly not in the cloud
• in the wizard => you should have confirmed your seed
• in the wizard => you should have chosen a strong password
• now your wallet should have opened

Can you confirm that this is what you did? If you deviated from this list, could you tell us what you did different?
A "normal" wallet can not become a "watch only wallet" just like that... And a watch only wallet cannot be converted into a normal wallet... Something must have happened...

I know the feeling... I regret telling one of my (technical) colleagues about my bitcoin hobby. Every time the local newspaper prints an article on how bitcoin's price is going down, he just comes to my desk with a big smirk on his face telling me my "magic internet money" is based on thin air and i'll lose every penny i invested (if the prices rise he just keeps quiet).

So far, i guess about ~20 ish of my friends, family members and collegues know i'm a crypto user (which isn't to bad since i've been in the community for ~8 years and i've switched jobs and citys during this time). Except from the one collegue who is jealous of the fact that i've made some profit and is constantly repeating every bad news article he reads (ignoring all other articles about crypto), nobody has ever shown any intrest.... and that's ok....

Over the years, i've given up on explaining technical stuff to non-technical users that basically just want to use a technology.

It's no use to explain to somebody how (for example) firefox is open source, and show them how you can patch said code and compile it... they just want a browser to look at [insert url here].
In my IRL job, i'm pretty sure not even the developers or power users know what OS their SAP instance is running on, let alone which relational database. They just don't care.. They want to start their pre-configured developement environment and start writing code, they don't care if SLES 15 SP3 is end of support in x months, or that hana 2.00.62.00 contains a bug and needs to be upgraded to 2.00.63.00. If they come to me, it's because their development tools showed an error, or their code compiles to slow, and they want me to fix it without telling them what i'm fixing, or why i'm fixing something.


Same with bitcoin: if your friends are interested in crypto, it's very possible they're interested in USING it, not in the technical background. In this case, i'd just explain them the difference between a custodial and non-custodial wallet, explain them they can never ever give away their recovery seed or private key, make sure they have a safe setup, explain to them that transactions are irreversible and they cannot invest money they're not willing to lose... And that's about it (i guess).

If they are interested in the technical background, i'd probably guide them to a beginners book or simple youtube video instead of trying to re-invent the wheel. Very smart people have invested tons of their time to write good books and make informative videos... No need to re-iterate stuff they have already presented in a newbie-friendly way.
Once they're on board with using crypto and they've read a couple of books/watched a couple of videos, they can always come to you with very specific questions.

Well, the main problem isn't KYC (except for bitpanda, who, for some strange reason, always tells me the picture of my identity card is to blurry, no matter how sharp it is).
I'm not a fan of KYC, but i have already reconciled with the fact that, if you want to use a bigger semi-trustworthy company to exchange FIAT <-> BTC, you'll have to fork over your identity card, utility bill and selfie at one point in the process... Sad but true... If you want KYC-less trades, you're pretty much forced to use shady services or P2P, and for people that are not doing such exchanges on a regular basis, it's just not worth it

So far, i haven't found a single service that lets me use virtual visa cards with denominations < 10€ to buy crypto... I guess i'll give up and buy amazon gift vouchers or something... Thanks for the tips guys, so far they haven't panned out, but i still appreciate the hints!

Indeed... It's the small amounts that are a problem... Those cards are very hard to spend at any place tbh... IRL, the only way i ever managed to spend them is by buying gift cards and using those cards as a partial payment for bigger sums. But in the crypto world, this isn't a feasible option anyways... I really need a service that accepts smaller denomination virtual visa cards if i want any chance for spending my funds.

I already tried wise.com, but they give me this error:




also tried skrill... got an error in the same category:

And finally tried b t c bit [dot] net (the one from BestChange)... Doesn't work either