My understanding was the equipment was destroyed based on a court order, so it could very well have just been the opinion of a single judge. Given the (super effective ) Chinese ban on mining, if the Malaysian government had wanted to ban mining outright then I'm sure they would have done so.

Who's to say it doesn't go the other way? The US bans mining, and some European countries see an opportunity. They incentivize miners to move there on the provision that they set up near new and developing renewable projects, subsidizing the development of such projects by buying excess energy which would otherwise be wasted during periods of low demand, acting as a demand response system, and paying taxes on the bitcoin they mine.

Not exactly. It seems that to set up Jade you must connect it via USB to your computer. Since the vast majority of people who do this will connect it to a regular computer with an internet connection, then that is no longer air-gapped. It doesn't matter if you then go on to only use QR codes in the future, as an airgap should be either permanent or not at all.

Note that I'm not saying that it isn't secure, just that it isn't airgapped. Ledger and Trezor devices aren't airgapped either, although it is possible to use them in an airgapped manner if you only connect them to an airgapped computer. But if you connect your hardware wallet to a computer with an internet connection at any point, then it ceases to be an airgapped wallet.

A private key is not calculated from anything - it is simply a random number between 1 and (a little less than) 2²⁵⁶. To convert from a raw private key to WIF, you first take your 64 character hexadecimal private key, add the 0x80 network byte at the start, at an 0x01 at the end if it is going to be a compressed key, add the first 4 bytes of the double SHA256 of this string at the end as a checksum, then convert all of this from Base16 to Base58. Reverse the process to go from WIF back to raw hex.

But you are asking a question about a method you are (probably incorrectly) trying rather than asking a question about the underlying problem itself. What part of a private key do you currently have and in what format?

It's unforgivable really that there will be excess electricity being generated while simultaneously there are planned outages and power cuts. Government incompetence at its finest.

This does tie back in to bitcoin mining being used as a demand response system for a 100% renewable grid as I mentioned earlier. If there is a surge in energy demand, you can burn more coal or gas, but you can't make anymore sunlight or wind for your renewable generators. So in times of excess, you have bitcoin miners working away, using up all the excess power being produced and paying the energy company for it. Bitcoin miners get cheap energy, energy companies don't have to dump excess energy and earn nothing for it, win-win. Then in times of high demand, the energy companies can pay the bitcoin miners to turn off their ASICs, allowing the grid to divert that energy usage to elsewhere so there are no outages or power cuts. Again, win-win. This is already happening successfully in Texas and elsewhere.

It was Malaysia, but the equipment was seized due to being run on stolen electricity, not because they banned mining: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/19/malaysian-police-steamroll-1point25-million-worth-of-bitcoin-mining-rigs.html

It is amusing watching him get annihilated on Twitter.

Here's my favorite thing he's posted: https://nitter.it/agerhanssen/status/1583923967974203393#m. Could it have been "Half" Finney all along!?

My understanding was it is not expected for another 12 months or so, but I cannot find a source for why I thought that.
Edit: This article indeed says "late 2023" for the UK case.

I'm not holding my breath. These buy outs are not done for altruistic reasons to support bitcoin - they are done solely for personal profit, and a decentralized peer to peer exchange just doesn't generate the types of profit that a centralized lending platform does.

Good spot. It does seem they have fairly suddenly been hit with regulations or requests to start collecting KYC or similar, and have decided the best route forward it to simply cease operations. Perhaps if there weren't the health issues they mentioned in their statement they would consider moving jurisdiction, but doing so is more than they can deal with at the moment. Although Wasabi recently moved jurisdictions and yet continue to invade their users' privacy, so perhaps it's not as simple as that.

The best web based alternative now is probably Agoradesk/LocalMonero and RoboSats, although Bisq remains the gold standard. Let's hope a significant amount of the volume from LocalCryptos moves to Bisq and helps grow its ecosystem even more.

That's not a problem with bitcoin, but a problem with the service you are using not understanding how bitcoin works. I bet if the price went up in the meantime they wouldn't have refunded you the difference.

That's not really accurate. Nodes keep an updated mempool of unconfirmed transactions, which is indeed updated after every transaction they receive. Miners create a candidate block from this mempool, but only once a block is mined is the blockchain itself updated.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at the setup guide for Jade, it must be connected to your computer via a USB cable to set it up via Blockstream Green. As far as I am concerned, this immediately makes it non-airgapped, in exactly the same way Ledger or Trezor are non-airgapped. Perhaps it would be possible to use it in an air-gapped manner if you only connected it to an airgapped computer running an entirely offline version of Blockstream Green (although having never used this wallet I don't know if that is possible), but Jade itself is not an airgapped wallet.

There are hundreds of ways to end up with a not entirely random arrangement of cards after a shuffle, most commonly as lots of people simply aren't very good at properly shuffling cards. You could reduce this bias by repeated shuffles and washes, but this adds a lot more time and is still not a guarantee. More importantly, though, is how do you convert your series of cards to a usable string of bits without losing entropy or introducing bias? It is not a trivial problem.

The only real implementation of cards to seed phrase I am aware is that on https://iancoleman.io/bip39/. I am not a fan of how it works, though. It assigns different bit values to each card. 32 cards are assigned a 5 bit string, 16 cards are assigned a 4 bit string, and 4 cards are assigned a 2 bit string. 32+16+4 = 52. There are two main issues with this. First of all, it makes some cards 8 times "more secure" than other cards, by way of them contributing 5 bits instead of 2. This simply doesn't make sense. Secondly, it encourages someone to shuffle a deck of cards and then draw them one by one, meaning that once a card has been drawn it can never be drawn again. This reduces entropy, since that particular string of bits will never occur again.

A better way of doing it would be to assign each of the four suits a 2 bit value - spades 00, clubs 01, diamonds 10, hearts 11 - for example. Then draw a single card, write down your two bits, shuffle that card back in to the deck thoroughly, and repeat. This would take much longer than simply flipping a coin though, and still does not eliminate any unknown bias in your shuffles.

I pay zero attention to such metrics. It is easy to fake these numbers with bots, and indeed many malicious wallets do just that to make their app seem more legitimate.

You are confusing what you have read. With bitcoin, transactions have always been verified and shared between nodes. This process of transaction verification was present from the start; it was not developed or introduced later. Double spending was less difficult in the earlier days of bitcoin, but this was generally due to things like a less well connected network, increased latency, or the potential for an attacker to have a significant proportion of the hashrate and mine in secret. It was not due to there not being a process for verifying transactions which were broadcast.

These terms are not synonymous. A race attack is a specific type of double spend, but there are others. See here for more info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Irreversible_Transactions

This is not always the case. Many jurisdictions and companies pay fixed rates for electricity that they buy from consumers, such as from household solar, and the rates are often abysmal - a tiny fraction of the cost the consumer pays to buy electricity. Often it will be more profitable to use any excess electricity you generate at home to mine bitcoin than to sell it back for a cent or two per kWh.

You sure about that? Want to compare the environmental impact of the US dollar, from printing, moving, handling, etc., through to the electricity for banks, call centers, ATMs, etc., through to the military industrial complex which is built around maintaining its status?

Well, if it were me then my laptop would already be using full disk encryption so it wouldn't matter. But too late for that for you now.

In your case, I would either just uninstall it normally and then delete any files left behind, which will hide the fact that it was installed from most people. Or if you want to hide it from even the most determined attacker, then use ETFbitcoin's suggestion of Revo Uninstaller. I can't vouch for this program since I don't use Windows, but it seems like it will remove as many traces of the program short of formatting your drive (which you've already said you don't want to do).

Relaunching with an anonymous team from a different jurisdiction would be the best outcome here, but even so, most peer to peer exchanges such as LocalCryptos still operate from a centralized website and so can still be targeted by governments and regulators. Thankfully we still have Bisq which is largely immune to any such attacks by way of not having a centralized entity responsible for its operation, as well as some new anonymous Tor based platforms being developed such as RoboSats.

Really disappointing to see a much used and much respected peer to peer site close down. I agree with the above, and suspect that external regulations are probably the main culprit here. But that is exactly the reason we need peer to peer exchanges in the first place!

I'd be hopeful some of the team would take their expertise across to other similar platforms and continue to help grow the peer to peer ecosystem. A small part of me wonders if this is because many of the team members are doxxed as LocalEthereum was not set up privately in the first place. Perhaps they will all launch a new platform or join other platforms, but anonymously.

Yes. As much as I am disappointed to see them close, shutting down entirely is a preferable option to going the LocalBitcoins route and becoming yet another centralized exchange demanding KYC and spying on their users.

As OSS points out above, there is no risk to your coins from someone accessing Ledger Live without access to your hardware wallet.

After you uninstall Ledger Live, make sure you check out whichever directory you installed it to and delete any left over files. This will prevent most adversaries from even knowing Ledger Live was installed, although I'm sure Windows being as it is will have left over temporary files or registry keys which a determined attacker could find to ascertain that Ledger Live was once installed.

Even in the unlikely scenario someone was able to recover all the files they would not be able to see your accounts unless they also had your Ledger Live password or could brute force it. The only way to erase all traces of Ledger Live will be to format the drive and reinstall the OS, which I'm guessing you don't want to do and seems like a bit of overkill to me unless you are selling or giving away the computer (in which case you would definitely want to format your drive for other reasons).

Note that Ledger also have an uninstaller .exe you can download from here: https://www.ledger.com/ledger-live

When considering generating private keys for bitcoin, then my answer is zero. I don't see why you would settle for anything less. This is why I advocate for using coin flips with von Neumann's algorithm, since by doing this you can be certain you have eliminated any bias in your coin, as well as not introduced any new bias by performing randomness extraction or other processes you don't fully understand on your data.

Any method of testing for bias can never rule out bias 100%, only make it less and less likely but after an exponential number of test flips/rolls.

People involved in bitcoin who have the ability to read and analyze code, as well as the time and motivation to do so for free, generally aren't using random low quality wallets like Cake which they stumble across on the app store, which might explain why nobody picked it up sooner.

In the US there are pretty strict regulations about hospitals having back up generators or other sources of power in the event of power outages. Most critical equipment such as ventilators and infusion pumps have their own built in batteries, but for complex power hungry equipment these batteries might only last 30 minutes. Not to mention the chaos of being in the middle of a surgery when all the lights and electrical operating tools stop working. I imagine there would be similar regulations in the EU.

But yes, you make a good point. In the scenario of planned power cuts, then governments might start placing limits on what you are and are not allowed to use electricity for. Good luck enforcing that, though.

It's almost like bitcoin mining is completely inconsequential! Not to mention that in China a large proportion was using excess energy from hydropower which was otherwise being wasted during periods of low demand.

So Ayre is finally running out of money so has started pulling in his friends? Ager-Hanssen has appeared on CoinGeek interviews before, so is obviously already invested in this scam and therefore has a vested interest in funding some more of CSW's shenanigans or be left bagholding a coin going to zero which is under near constant attack.

The quotes from that Twitter thread show quite clearly he is just as out of touch and confused as the rest of the BSV cult:
Amazing logic there. By this logic, surely he'll believe me if I say I am Satoshi? I have exactly zero evidence, but apparently that doesn't matter (and actually, zero evidence is still better than the dozens of proven forgeries CSW has ).

Cool. No one cares. Get CSW to sign a message then we can talk.

I flagged this up in my thread on the topic a few months ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5403254.msg60731947#msg60731947

I've got to say, props to Nuri for acting with honesty and integrity here. They've been open and transparent throughout, and have let customers continue to access their accounts and funds at all times. Compare with Celsius, who locked all accounts without warning and were still advertising deposit promotions <24 hours before they locked down. Looks like every user of Nuri should be able to withdraw their money, whereas all the users of Celsius are still fighting over scraps while it emerges the CEO cashed out about $45 million in the days prior to the bankruptcy.

At least millions of innocent users haven't lost everything in this particular case, but how depressing that the bar has been set that low. It is yet another warning that you should never be leaving coins with a third party.

According to what I've read on Reddit (but can't confirm since I don't have an account), users are shown a notification as soon as they log in.

I'm not going to derail this in to an argument about vaccines, but I would encourage people not to make this comparison when arguing about bitcoin's energy use. All evidence points to vaccines being safe and effective, just as all evidence points to bitcoin mining using an insignificant amount of electricity and using one of the highest proportions of green energy of any industry. But regardless of that fact and your own personal beliefs about vaccines, if you link arguments about bitcoin energy use to anti-vax sentiments, or anti-climate change sentiments, or any other fringe belief for that matter, then you risk sounding like a conspiracy nut and having your arguments dismissed without consideration.

It is enough to simply stick to the evidence. Spread the facts about bitcoin mining far and wide without drawing unnecessary comparisons to unrelated topics.