I can't see support for the Nano S being withdrawn within 2-3 years, especially when they will still be developing for the S Plus and the minimal amount of work needed (if any) to adapt firmware/software updates for the S.

If you are concerned about support disappearing for your hardware wallet in 2-3 years, there is no point buying another device now. Bear in mind that even when support ends, you will still be able to use the device as it currently is, probably for many more years. And if you buy another device now, how do you know you won't have run in to the same problem with it in 2-3 years? And bear in mind Ledger have given absolutely no indication that they are going to pull support for the S any time soon.

If I was using a Nano S, I would have no concerns continuing to use it until such a time that Ledger announce support is ending, which will be years away. Only then would I start shopping around.

I've never used one, given my well known stance on KYC and privacy, but my point was I don't want to sell my bitcoin at all. I want to spend it directly with merchants and retailers, so what the banks think is irrelevant.

Yup. And plenty of fiat banks or other fiat payment apps, accounts, cards, and whatnot do this too. Don't spend your funds or don't use your account or your card and start paying an inactivity fee. But the whole idea behind bitcoin is to get away from this kind of predatory behavior by third parties who exercise complete control over your money. Centralized exchanges are more and more turning in to the very banks we are trying to get away from. Time to stop using them entirely. DEXs plus your own wallet is much better set up.

There is no way to verify an address on Electrum for Android. Verifying an address is more commonly done when you pair Electrum with a hardware wallet, and you then verify the address on the hardware wallet's screen matches that being displayed by Electrum. With Electrum on a computer, you could verify that you do indeed have the private key for the address you are being shown by signing a message from that address and then using an independent tool to verify that message. The closest you can come on Electrum for Android would be to export the private key for the address to an airgapped computer and ensure that the private key does indeed generate the address you are being shown, but this is a much more complex process and involves handling your raw private keys which puts you at a significant risk of your funds being stolen.

Since Electrum on Android is a hot wallet, you should only be using it store very small amounts of funds, and so most people simply trust that their phone does not have any malware which is modifying the address they are being shown. You should make sure you downloaded the app from https://electrum.org/#download and verified it prior to installing it, rather than downloading it from the app store.

The 2FA part of your wallet only comes in to play when you try to make a transaction.

That's a good point. Still better to use DEXs and spend bitcoin directly though, rather than using yet another centralized third party to switch to fiat on the go.

I would suggest that if you aren't making a trade in the next one or two days, then you should be withdrawing your coins to your own wallet and not leaving them in the hands of third parties. If you aren't making a single trade in the next month, then your coins should absolutely be in your own wallets.

Any coins you store with a centralized exchange do not belong to you - they belong to the exchange. They can freeze or seize them at any time. An inactivity fee is just an extension of this.

And if faced with the option of either having to tell users that they have to temporarily uninstall their other apps to use a larger bitcoin app (which takes all of ~10 seconds to do), or they are not able to use the bitcoin app at all and therefore rendering all Nano S devices around the world useless and pissing off a huge portion of their user base, it's a pretty easy choice for the company to make. And the users would obviously pick the same option too.

And I can't foresee a situation where the bitcoin app becomes so large it doesn't fit on the Nano S at all, at least, not until such a time in the future that most Nano S devices have experienced hardware failure. As I said above, there is no incentive for Ledger to forcibly phase out these devices.

Given that exchange insurance only protects against the exchange themselves being hacked, and not against individual accounts being hacked, then the insurance provider should really be charging based on the value of assets the exchange holds rather than the absolute number of accounts. I take the point regarding customer service, but no customer service provider anywhere is charging $10 per month per account, so obviously most of the charge is just pure profiteering by the exchange as you rightly point out.

The more that centralized exchanges pull stuff like this, then the stronger the argument for DEXs become. Already DEXs win hands down on security of your coins, on security of your data, on privacy and not selling your information, on fees, on not being hacked, on not scamming their users, on not being fractional reserve, on not freezing accounts or seizing coins, speed of setting up an account, not requiring KYC, the list goes on. The only thing CEXs have going for them is the speed of individual trades, but continue to alienate users and that one metric becomes less and less important.

I imagine much of the differences between models (such as Bluetooth, etc.) is dealt with by the device's firmware, rather than the individual apps. And as far as I am ware, the app for the S Plus would be identical to that for the S.

Even then, I'd imagine old versions will continue to work just fine for several more years, and probably even longer if you pair your device with a 3rd party wallet such as Electrum. Barring some critical vulnerability being discovered in the current version (which could still be mitigated against by using your Ledger device connected to a clean airgapped computer), I don't think there's much to worry about.

It's obviously just to make more profits. Once they've set up a wallet to receive coins, and then received coins to that wallet, there is no additional cost of maintenance. What are they charging for exactly? Not unlocking the wallet and not making any transactions?

But I don't care if they want to charge this ridiculous fee. The more reasons to turn people off from using centralized exchanges, the better.

Peer to peer via platforms such as Bisq, AgoraDesk, RoboSats, or even the currency exchange board on this forum. You can't be charged a fee by a centralized platform if you don't use one. Not to mention all the privacy and security benefits of not having to hand control of your coins or your personal data over to third parties.

According to GitHub, 2.0.6 is still the latest release: https://github.com/LedgerHQ/app-bitcoin-new/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Looks like from the development branch the next version will be 2.1.0. They are currently working on rc3 by the looks of things, so not too far off release: https://github.com/LedgerHQ/app-bitcoin-new/tags

Stablecoin regulation is not far off, particularly because they directly compete with the CBDCs that most governments want to implement in the near future. And once Tether start getting audited properly, you better make sure you are not holding too much USDT (or any other stablecoin for that matter). And lets not even mention that just like CBDCs they are completely centralized and even coins in your own wallets can be remotely frozen or seized against your will.

This FTX nonsense is just the same. Shady stuff going on behind the scenes, entire ecosystem built on top of a token they can print out of thin air at will and then lend/give to themselves, questionable loans and acquisitions, and users with absolutely no idea what happens to any coins they deposit to the site. As with any other exchange or any other centralized shitcoin, the advice remains the same - get bitcoin, and get it in to your own wallet.

And yet, I'm the toxic bitcoin maxi because I advise people not to lose their money on scams and shitcoins.

Put me down for a piñata full of bees. And I'll ask Foxpup if we can borrow a gimp for the day.

USDT is the prime example of this. I cannot fathom why anyone stills trusts this absolute junk. First they said it was backed up 1-to-1 with USD. Then they said it was backed up 1-to-1 with USD and other assets. Then they dropped the 1-to-1 claim altogether, with court documents showing as little as 14% of USDT was actually backed up. Those same documents showed that Bitfinex transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to Tether on the day of their independent audits, and then transferred it all back out again the next day.

It later emerged that these "other assets" they claimed included uncollateralized loan repayments, including loan repayments to themselves from the $800 billion USDT they printed out of thin air and gave to themselves. They also included bitcoin they had purchased with the USDT they first printed. Print USDT out of thin air -> buy bitcoin with it -> claim USDT is now backed up with bitcoin. Unbelievable. And since all these revelations that USDT is an insolvent fractional reserve scam, its market cap has grown to $70 billion. The day it finally collapses a lot of people will lose a lot of money, but they can't say they weren't warned. The writing is on the wall.

And then look at centralized lending/staking platforms. Even after Celsius and Voyager collapse, people are still using such platforms. Even after BlockFi revealed they needed a bail out to the tune of $250 million, people are still depositing their coins there.

And throughout all these scams, Ponzis, insolvencies, bankruptcies, and more, I'm just sitting over here quietly using bitcoin peer to peer, as was intended in the first place, having never lost a single satoshi.

Such is the nature of coinjoins, and indeed, bitcoin. If you are serious about privacy, then you must run your own node. As n0nce points out, without it, you are by definition relying on unknown third parties. You can either run your own node and coinjoin in a decentralized manner using JoinMarket, or you can not use your own node and depend on third parties, be that Electrum servers, Samourai servers, Wasabi servers, whomever. And if you depend on third parties, then you are subjected to their rules, spying, and censorship, as we have seen in the case of Wasabi.

By using Sparrow you are still depending on third parties, but at least those third parties aren't in cahoots with blockchain analysis companies. But if that is still too complex for the average user to use without compromising their privacy in some manner, then you can just stick to ChipMixer.

Every additional 3 words brings an addition 32 bits of entropy, meaning there are 2³² more possibilities. 2³² is in the region of 4.3 billion, so there are 4.3 billion more possible 15 word seed phrases than there are 12 word seed phrase. As hosseinimr93 correctly states above, there will be 2¹²⁸ times more valid 24 word seed phrases than 12 word seed phrases. This is approximately 340 billion billion billion billion times.

The more words you have, the easier it is to brute force missing words (provided you are comparing the same number of missing words). Missing 1 word from a 24 word seed phrase is easier to brute force than missing 1 word from a 12 word seed phrase (although both are still trivially easy to do). Once you get beyond 4 words for any seed length then it becomes prohibitively expensive.

Their users won't care. Look at Bitfinex. They do exactly the same thing and worse with Tether. They even printed $800 billion USDT out of thin air and then loaned it to themselves to prevent Bitfinex from going bankrupt, and yet somehow both Bitfinex and Tether continue to grow and be ever more widely used. You can do pretty much any shady stuff you like in crypto and still attract morons to give you their money.

After seeing the incredibly shady stuff platforms like Celsius and Voyager were doing, then I have no doubt whatsoever that FTX are also doing similar things behind the scenes. This revelation is probably the least of it.

You should work on the assumption that any and all data you give to a centralized exchange, from an email address to a scan of your passport, will eventually be sold, shared, or leaked to a variety of third parties.

Because 24 words are more secure than 12.

12 and 24 word seed phrases were created at the same time with the publication of BIP39, which you can see here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki#generating-the-mnemonic. But BIP32, which predates BIP39, recommends 256 bits be used as a seed, which equates to a 24 word seed phrase.

The biggest risk you are exposing yourself to here is relying on your memory to back up your seed phrase.

Note that "password" and "passphrase" are commonly used to refer to two different things. Password is generally used to refer to the password you would use to unlock your wallet software, while passphrase is used to refer to the seed extension or additional phrase which is combined with your seed phrase to derive your wallets. If you lose the password to unlock your wallet, you can recover that wallet from your seed phrase and passphrase. If you lose your passphrase (and don't have a back up), then your wallet is lost forever (just as if you had lost your seed phrase).

Private keys provide 128 bits of security, not 128 bits of entropy. The entropy of a private key will depend on how it was generated.

I'd point out that BIP32 recommends using 256 bits of entropy (i.e. a 24 word seed phrase):

You should have the same approach to this forum as you have to the internet in general. Assume that anything and everything you share online is impossible to completely delete and will always exist online somewhere. Anything you post on this site, anything you post on any social media, any email you write, any message you send, any picture you share, any document you upload, any file you store in the cloud, etc. It doesn't matter if you delete it from everywhere you can see it or access it, as you have no idea what other entities have scraped it, what other servers it is backed up on, who else has accessed it and stored it, and so on.

Anything share or store online should be assumed to be permanently compromised.

If an IP address looks up one post from Husires, it could be anyone. If an IP address looks up multiple posts from Husires, repeatedly over multiple days, than that is probably Husires themselves.

There are plenty of other user friendly non full node wallets with such features. Granted, most don't provide coinjoins, but when you are also being spied on, censored, and having your addresses reused, then some might say a wallet without any of those features is better than Wasabi.

If you don't want to run a full node then I would suggest Sparrow wallet as the next best option to access coinjoins.

Absolutely, but I think it is the right thing to do for two reasons. I understand the points that this is only a setting which is defaulted to off, and actually any node or miner who wants to run a full RBF policy can do so at any time even without this setting. However, I don't think it is right to release a feature which has divided opinion so strongly without spending a bit of time working things out, and it would also give the developers and services which seem to have been caught off guard by this change some more time to react. Although this has been discussed for years, and the developers in question really should have done a better job of keeping up to speed with ongoing developments, I don't think it's a good look for the community to now say "Well, sucks to be you" and release a feature which some developers are saying will completely break their app/software/business model.

Now, as I said above, full RBF is the natural state of the system, not to mention the necessary benefits it brings to allow further development of Lightning and other projects, and so I fully expect it to arrive in v25.0 if not in v24.0. But I don't think delaying it from v24.0 is necessarily a bad thing, and if we did, then hopefully by the time v25.0 comes round many of these issues would have been discussed and resolved.