https://bitcoinsv.com/bitcoin-association-releases-mining-software-to-freeze-lost-or-stolen-bitcoin/

Here we go. The next step in the complete centralization of BSV.

We know, of course, that this is completely consistent with what Satoshi said in the past: "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone, until the owner goes through the necessary legal system to force a centralized solution on miners to freeze these lost coins and then later return them to a different address, all without needing a private key or any other cryptographic proof.  After all, if there is one thing I've always loved, it is third parties having complete control over the entire blockchain."  

Can't wait for BSV miners (read: CSW and Ayre) to start freezing coins in various exchange wallets, and to see just how quickly an exchange will delist this trash when they find their assets being frozen against their will. Will be funny to see exchanges being on the receiving end of having their coins locked against their will for a change.

I wouldn't recommend anyone uses Brave at all, but I definitely wouldn't recommend using it for anything sensitive to do with either bitcoin or privacy. Despite their marketing, they are not a privacy browser. Brave accepts money from entities like Facebook and Twitter to allow them to track you. They accept money from ad companies to serve you their specific ads, which are of course tailored based on your browsing history and other information. They take money from Binance to inject Binance's code and widgets in to the browser, which again are used to track you. The last people I would want to be able to see me visiting any privacy site or using any privacy solution are the likes of Binance and Facebook.

Just use Tor. It takes 2 minutes to download and run.

Even when ChipMixer used a clearnet site too, plenty of non-Tor users were targeted by phishing (and still are) from fake clearnet sites on Google and other search engines.

Sure, but if someone is going to be using ChipMixer, then they are not the average "I have nothing to hide so I share my entire life on Facebook" type person. They are, at least, marginally interested in taking their privacy seriously, and they can discover what Tor is with 30 seconds of reading at https://www.torproject.org/

And if someone Googles "chipmixer" they will also end up on phishing sites.

There is no way to prevent every possible avenue of user error. The chipmixer.com clearnet site makes it clear that you need the Tor browser to use ChipMixer.

I'm not arguing that what they are proposing is illegal, just that it's complete horseshit. If their terms say they can put you in debt if you say something they don't like, and you continue to use their service, then sure, you can't act surprised when that's what happens. Doesn't mean it is any less horseshit that a private company are now policing what you say based on their own arbitrary decisions with zero oversight and will take your money away if you step out of line.

This is the future of fiat and CBDCs. It is terrifying. The American Social Credit System is in the works. Mass surveillance becomes a whole lot more problematic when private companies or governments can just take away your money if you commit thoughtcrime. There will never be a greater need for bitcoin.

Arthur van Pelt has just posted Hodlonaut's team's closing arguments in the case, translated from Norwegian: https://mylegacykit.medium.com/closing-arguments-hodlonaut-c326771601ce

It's a great read, very well summarizing the complete lack of evidence and all of the forgeries on the side of CSW. 2.2 and 2.3 give a good summary of the forgeries, while 2.7 highlights the absolutely absurdity of his witnesses and their statements. Points 3 through 6 discuss the legal implications of hodlonaut's tweets and argue that they are not defamatory.

Still a month to go until we get a judgement.

Never do this! In addition to what LeGaulois has said above in that you lose absolutely all your privacy, it is trivial for such a service to insert their own bitcoin deposit address or redirect you to their own malicious site and simply steal any bitcoin you deposit.

Downloading, verifying, and installing Tor is simple, quick, and free. There is no reason not to do it if you are interested in your privacy.

https://www.torproject.org/download/
https://support.torproject.org/tbb/how-to-verify-signature/

I would also suggest you take better care of your seed phrase back ups in the future. As you've just discovered, loss of your seed phrase can very quickly lead to loss of your entire wallet and all your coins. It would be worth making sure you have the correct seed phrase for every wallet you use backed up securely, and you known which one is which. You can see the seed phrase for an Electrum wallet by opening it and then clicking on Wallet -> Seed.

It doesn't seem like a mistranslation:
I wonder if he was just reading the blockchain explorer incorrectly, perhaps thinking that previous spends from that address were more recent.

Your quotes are all messed up.

No, it is still running today. The original owner (who was honest) sold the site, and the new owner turned it in to a malicious scam, which people continued (and continue) to use without realizing it due to the original site's good reputation.

There is no way your validity checker could be accurate enough to guarantee safety without also declaring a lot of perfectly safe code invalid. If you are going to write a program that locks down your wallet software to only doing the absolute minimum with no deviation allowed, then better to just write minimalist wallet software in the first place, which even someone with a low amount of coding knowledge could verify themselves.

Not necessarily. There are lot of things to consider when trying to extract entropy from a physical process, things which most people don't even know exist and so make the mistake of thinking it is a straightforward process. I've spoken about this before: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5395587.msg59983088#msg59983088

Here's a post of mine from over 3 years ago, which is just as relevant today as it was then: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5181053.msg52340461#msg52340461. I'd encourage anyone to go and click on the various ICOs I linked to in that post and zoom out on their charts.

My prediction was during the next bull run we would see newbies throwing their money away on shiny new projects which turned out to be complete trash. This is exactly what has happened. Centralized lending platforms promising >10% interested gone bankrupt. Countless DeFi projects, staking, yield farming, or whatever else, abandoned and worthless. The value of Metaverse "land" down 94% with only a few dozen active users.

Lots of money for the creators, and a bunch of disillusioned newbies losing everything.

Can't wait to hear about how SBTs are the next big bitcoin killer, how they will revolutionize the internet, how they will change the world, how they are the best thing since sliced bread! Fast forward 5 years and no one will talk about them, just as no one talks about 2017 ICOs now.

But in this case, it isn't their property. PayPal are absolutely within their rights to shut down your account if you said something they don't like. That's how centralized businesses work. Fine. What they aren't within their rights to do is pull $2,500 from a completely separate bank account or send debt collectors after you because you said something they don't like. That is absolutely not their property.

This policy was no mistake or accident. This is the future direction PayPal are heading in. They may have put it on hold for now, but you can guarantee they will reintroduce it again at some point, once the outrage has passed.

Which they've already been doing (and over-zealously, it seems, given how many innocent users have lost funds on PayPal). This new policy isn't about that - it's about censorship and control.

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I'm actually feeling positive about this new policy from PayPal. It doesn't affect me in the slightest since I have never had a PayPal account, and the more people whom fiat institutes start arbitrarily censoring, fining, and preventing access to their own money, then the more people who will start looking for a trustless, censorship resistant alternative.

Bitcoin fixes this.

Decentralized exchanges like Bisq, LocalCryptos, or RoboSats already work anywhere, and in any currency you want. It's up to the people in these communities to simply start using them. If your currency isn't being offered for trades it is because no one is choosing to offer it, not because they can't. And they are probably not choosing to offer it because no one else is choosing to use it either.

It's all got to start somewhere. Post some buy or sell offers and encourage your friends to do the same. Advertise the fact you have done so on this forum, on Reddit, on Twitter, or other online areas your local community/state/country uses. This is how peer-to-peer trading works.

Yes. Peer to peer trading is also spread and grown in a peer to peer manner, through word of mouth and encouragement of friends and other users, not via centralized advertising.

This is wild. I took a good look through their User Agreement here: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full. I've pulled out all the relevant parts below:


So if PayPal decide you've said something they don't like, they'll charge $2,500 from your PayPal account. If they can't do that, they'll pull $2,500 from any linked banked account or credit card. If they can't do that, they'll send debt collectors after you.

What about this post? This post is harmful to PayPal. Would they charge me $2,500 for it if I had a PayPal account? Who knows. It's within their terms to do so if they wanted, and it's at their sole discretion.

So, anything that some unnamed and unknown person at PayPal deems is harmful, misinformation, or just generally unfit for publication, and you are fined and censored. How many people in the traditional banking world still think that promoting bitcoin is spreading misinformation? And you can't say anything that might hurt someone's feelings? Lol. Glad I've never had a PayPal account. What a scam.

Note, of course, that PayPal won't be implementing these kinds of draconian rules for fun. (I know they have reversed course for now due to the backlash, but these rules will absolutely return either when no one is paying attention, or in small increments over time so people don't notice.) It is governments and regulators which are forcing PayPal to implement these kinds of rules. And if they are forcing fiat institutions to do it, you can rest assured they will soon be forcing crypto institutions to do it too.

Bitcoin is censorship resistant, but centralized exchanges absolutely aren't. Bitcoin is the solution to this if and only if you hold your own bitcoin in your wallets.

Whenever a hardware wallet wants to support coins other than bitcoin, then it has to introduce new code to do so. Any new piece of code poses a risk, as it is impossible for the developers to discover every possible way in which that code can be used or interacted with. For example, there was a (now fixed) vulnerability a few years ago with Ledger devices, in which an attacker could trick you in to signing a bitcoin transaction, even though the hardware wallet showed that you were signing a transaction on an altcoin. If the Ledger device did not support altcoins at all, then such an attack would not be possible.

The less code of any type on a device, the more secure it will be. Whether or not having bitcoin only firmware actually prevents any future attacks, though, is obviously unknown.

The choice is up to you. There are plenty of people out there who are only interested in holding bitcoin, but there are also plenty of people who want to buy dozens of altcoins. I would, however, point out that >99% of altcoins are either vaporware/useless/pointless or outright scams.

Convenience is one that I have never understood. Often on this forum people talk about the convenience of centralized exchanges, when it is clear they have never actually ever used a DEX to compare. And I fail to see how jumping through hoops to complete the most invasive KYC imaginable, followed by waiting several days for your documents to be confirmed, and then several more days for your fiat deposit to reach the exchange, only to be at risk of hacks and risk of identity theft is any more convenient than performing a peer to peer trade in a matter of minutes via Bisq or Robosats.

I also think a large part of it is advertising. The likes of Coinbase and Binance obviously have huge advertising budgets, and market themselves aggressively to newbies via Google ads, Facebook ads, and so forth, whereas DEXs such as Bisq, by their very nature, do not have an advertising budget.

We obviously can't force anyone to stop using centralized exchanges, but we can continue to point out the countless risks they take and countless examples of scams, hacks, thefts, breaches, and data leaks, all of which they expose themselves to constantly.

There are lots of people pointing out that the Fed can just endlessly print money to fund the debt, which is true, but no mention of the debt ceiling.

We are continuing to rack up more and more debt at an ever increasing rate. The very day to day running of the country is absolutely dependent on us taking on more and more debt. We can endlessly devalue the dollar to pay that debt, sure, but there is always the debt ceiling to consider. The debt ceiling currently sits at $31 trillion, and we are rapidly approaching it again. Usually it is raised each time without issue, but occasionally one party likes to refuse to raise it in order to force through some legislation or gain concessions on some bill. If it cannot be raised to fund not only the ongoing functioning of the government, but also the payments on the already existing debt, then the government will shutdown.

Usually such disagreements are resolved within a few weeks, but not without leaving hundreds of thousands of people without pay and costing the economy billions of dollars. Temporary measures can be put in place to free up some money to fund core departments and continue to pay the existing debt. A prolonged shutdown would exhaust these temporary measures, however, and would also lead to a default on the debt.

As to the effect on bitcoin, who can say? We would be facing an enormous financial crisis, with enormous cuts across the board and millions of job losses.

You might find this page helpful regarding how to use as passphrase on the BitBox: https://shiftcrypto.support/help/en-us/21-optional-passphrase

If you enable the optional passphrase option, then every time you unlock your device you will be asked to enter a passphrase. If you want to access the base wallet with no passphrase, you can just leave this prompt empty. If you want to access a passphrased wallet, then enter the passphrase.

There is no such thing as an "incorrect" passphrase. Every single passphrase you enter will lead to a different (but reproducible) wallet. You will never get a warning about an "incorrect passphrase" for this reason, as the BitBox does not know what passphrase you meant to enter and stores no data about the passphrases you do enter. You can create as many different passphrased wallets using as many different passphrases as you like.

Whenever a centralized exchange offers any new product or service, you need to ask the question "What is it in for them?" Exchange have always been about their own profits first. Whatever new service, product, reward, interest, prize, etc., that they offer to their customers, you can be 100% assured that they will be making more profit out of it in some way.

So what does this NFT cost them? Literally nothing. They attach an NFT to some address in your Binance account, which you cannot move, trade, or sell. It costs them nothing. What do they get in return? They get a bunch of users now signing up with ever more invasive KYC in order to receive this amazing prize! So a whole bunch more data which they can monetize and sell to third parties.

What does this NFT cost the user? Complete privacy invasion, as well as the new ability for Binance to tie all your data to an on-chain entity and share that information with third parties, allowing you and your coins to be intricately tracked. What does the user get in return? A completely useless NFT.

This is just the next step in government surveillance and centralized exchanges invading your privacy, but with a shiny thing slapped on the front to make it seem palatable to idiots.

If this were true, then malware would no longer exist because every possible workaround had been patched. There will also be a new workaround.

Depends on the random number generator on your computer. Is it better than some javascript RNG? Yes. Is it better than /dev/urandom? Probably not. However, it is also harder to do, easier to make a mistake, and easier to do in an insecure manner, so I wouldn't generally recommend it to most people.

You can report the sites to Google to have them delisted, but this will achieve almost nothing. Firstly, Google are quite happy to accept money from proven scams to either run ads at the top of every page with those scams, or to bump those scams up their search results. Google don't care if you lose all your money to a scam you find via their search engine. All they care about is their profits. Secondly, even if you succeed in getting one of these scam sites delisted, it will be replaced by two more within 24 hours.

You could try taking Google to court, but their various Terms of Use are very explicit that they will in no way be held responsible for things you find via their search results. And they can afford much better lawyers than you can.

You should never use a search engine to find an important site, be that ChipMixer, a wallet, an exchange, a bank, or so on. And you should just stop using all Google products altogether. Follow Pmalek's advice above and find the true link from this forum.