The best solution is to use Bitcoin in the way it was designed to be used.  Which doesn't involve handing your money over to an exchange at all.  That way, the only people who will get hacked are the speculators, who should simply factor that into their potential profit calculations, seeing as they're only gambling anyway.  

You can buy Bitcoin peer-to-peer.  That's what I did each time I've bought any crypto with fiat.  I handed a friend, or a known and reputable acquaintance, some fiat cash.  They sent me some BTC or whatever other coin I wanted to buy.  Simple.  I've only ever used exchanges for gambling small sums on altcoins.  Sums which I wouldn't be devastated to lose.  This limits the potential to get burnt.  If you do have to rely on an exchange for buying BTC, because you don't know anyone selling any, withdraw them immediately to a wallet you control as soon as the deal is done.

If you are holding significant amounts of bitcoins for either your savings or for spending on goods and services, there's literally no good reason to leave them on an exchange.  If you do leave them in the hands of a third party, you're effectively asking for someone to come along and take them.  You are the reason these hacks occur.  If you're a day-trader, too bad, risk comes with the territory and you should expect your luck to run out sooner or later.

Ultimately, if you leave it on an exchange, it's not really yours anyway.  It belongs to the exchange (or the hackers) and you are merely a creditor (with very few rights if anything goes wrong, I might add).  

If you don't have sole control over the private keys of your coins, you don't have any coins.  Rule #1.  Learn it.

If the top 20% think it's in their best interests to leave the actual economy and have 100% of nothing, best of luck to 'em.  Again, a small number of wealthy elites does not constitute a functional economy.  If they want to live in an isolated, incompatible bubble with no one else in it, their system won't work, simply because it's built on the backs of the less wealthy.  The reason they became millionaires and billionaires in the first place is because money flows to the top of the pyramid.  It can't do that if the masses are using different money.  The wealthy need the proles to feed off.  They always have and always will.  That's how social class structure works.  There is no denying this fact.

The middle class will love you for it, though.  They'll be the new top of the food chain if you want to Darwin-award yourself onto the endangered species list through sheer abject stupidity.  Be my guest and do it now.  Sooner the better.





Nope, I'll just lose some of my 0.5.4 worthless Thiefcoins.  Just like I'd lose some of my coins on that proposed fork where they decided that coins that haven't moved in 3+ years go back into circulation.  It's not Bitcoin, so IDGAF.  Again, it's not an economic majority if you can't actually maintain an economy.  Enjoy your 100% of zero.



//EDIT:  Also, you better tell the 0.5.4 maintainers they've probably got some work to do.  Guess it'll be 0.5.5 now?

You're actually shitting up the Wall Observer thread with this nonsense too?  You've got some brass, I'll give you that.  No clue, mind, but definitely some brass.

And thank you for linking in HairyMaclairy's more compelling argument.  Troll or not, it demonstrates how far gone you really are.  Ultimately, whatever FUD you might spread about ANYONECANSPEND, none of it applies in the real world unless you completely disregard the alignment of incentives (or come up with your own warped interpretation of it).



Yeah, great, "miners can take these".  We get it.  Now pay attention for once.  I could theoretically fork tomorrow with a version of "Bitcoin" that lets me steal any and all transaction types.  According to you, the Schelling Point would be overwhelming (I'd start calling it the "Shelby Point", because it clearly isn't a Shelling Point, but I suspect your colossal ego would enjoy that).  Look at all that booty.  All ~17 million coins in circulation and they're all mine.  I can take these.  That means I'm the new wealthy elite now.  I've made sure it's "immutable" now that I've stolen it, too.  No more SegWit.  So... what's the reason you're going to provide me with that you or anyone else should follow my chain, where I've stolen all the money?  Who's going to legitimise this chain by running this code?  Who's going to mine this coin?    

Since I know you won't be able to provide an answer for that, let's make it clear that absolutely no one would follow that obscenity of a chain.  Not a single sane and rational person would recognise that as Bitcoin.  I'd be the only one using it.  The only person running the code.  No one apart from me would be mining it.  Which suddenly makes my ~17 million tokens completely worthless.  Equally as worthless as your 0.5.4 tokens would be if anyone was stupid enough to steal SegWit coins.  Which is why it's not going to be worth their time or effort.  You don't actually end up holding tokens that have value or utility.  Which is why it's never going to happen.

A chain is only as "immutable" as consensus permits it to be.  If you break consensus, you also break immutability.  It's just code, after all.  What matters is the people who freely choose to run the code.  If enough of them agree that SegWit coins are immutable, then they're immutable.  They can only be stolen if people run the code that allows them to be stolen.  People would ignore the worthless 0.5.4 chain no matter how many times you call Core the fork and insist your outdated software is the real one.  0.5.4 would be seen as an obscure novelty at best.  Barely even a footnote for the history books.  All the non-crazy people will still have a chain where SegWit coins can't get stolen.

If it's inevitable, please sell all your BTC, assuming you even have any and aren't just here as a pathetic no-coiner troll (which seems far more likely than any Bitcoin doomsday scenario you've ever come up with), for 0.5.4 when it happens.

Wrong.  You don't matter.  Speck in the wind, remember?  Bitcoin was designed to disrupt the arrogance and folly of the world's banking oligarchs, not create a bunch of new (decidedly psychotic and egomaniacal) banking oligarchs.  The minority do not decide what Bitcoin is and you are evidently very much in the minority here.  

Also, all of this is largely irrelevant anyway, since we're talking about Schrödinger's Thiefcoin.  We won't know you're wrong 'til someone does it and they're never going to.

Of course they don't get a "vote".  That's not how Bitcoin works.  We've surpassed the primitive concept of voting:


No one gets a "vote".  But what they do get is total freedom and self-determination.  They're not going to surrender that by following a chain that would steal from them and only serve the interests of a few self-obsessed elitists.

Go ahead and build your 0.5.4 chain.  See who takes part.  I normally consider it ill-conceived to preempt what the market will do, but I think it's safe to say they won't follow that abomination of a chain.  Just like they won't follow a "Bitcoin" chain with blacklisting or an increased supply above 21 million.  You clearly perceive immutability as Bitcoin's most important aspect, but others feel that decentralisation is the more important quality (and would also argue we haven't sacrificed immutability anyway).  I don't know how you expect to maintain a decentralised system when the only participants are the limited number of fruitcakes running the 0.5.4 client.  

You can't have a decentralised oligarchy, it's self-contradictory.  Users won't support a system that doesn't support them and your chain won't survive economically without users.  Network effects have a tremendous impact on value and utility.  How do you propose your 0.5.4 chain will amass value and utility if only a few zealous cultists are using it?  Keep dreaming.

You have no greater claim to what Satoshi's vision was than anyone else does.  You can keep calling 0.5.4 "Satoshi's protocol" all you like, but that doesn't give it any sort of special status or privilege.  No one in their right mind is going to use it.  It exists just for the crazed fundamentalists.  If Bitcoin went to zero, the 0.5.4 chain (assuming it ever exists) would go with it.  People would simply abandon Bitcoin altogether because the project has clearly failed if any of this were to occur.  There's no conceivable way they would reward a bunch of isolated headcases who clearly have no respect for property rights, particularly if it cost them money to do so.  If you think they would, not only does it show your game theory needs some serious work, but also that your brain is so "special" that you are totally incapable of understanding how normal human beings behave.

Literally the only reason you believe you're right about this is that your ego is beyond measure.  You think so highly of yourself that, in your mind, there's no other outcome possible than the masses bending to your glorious vision.  If you were to briefly climb out of your own posterior for just a moment and observe the world for what it is, you might realise that it's not remotely plausible for any of your vivid fantasies to come to fruition.



Are you their new spokesperson or something?  Is your presence here solely to promote that loony bin because they're short on patients and need some fresh volunteers to have themselves committed?  Are the poor deluded souls getting lonely over there?  Aww, bless.

If they offer you the lobotomy, I suggest you take it.  

Indeed, there are some big security implications to consider.  Hackers have definitely attempted attacks using exchange API keys before, so if you aren't totally confident you know what you're doing, it's probably not recommended to try.

It's not a question of semantics.  The chain with the most people behind it is Bitcoin.  Anything else is an altcoin.  You don't get to pick an arbitrary point in history and declare that "nothing beyond this point is the real Bitcoin", because that's not your sole decision to make.  Again, 0.5.4 is an outdated client run by a small but vocal number of hardline fanatics.  That's a speck in the wind compared to the combined will of an entire network of users all over the world who couldn't give two shits what you or MP thinks.  The moment a fork occurs and 0.5.4 isn't compatible with what everyone else is running, 0.5.4 becomes the altcoin.  They can have their Thiefcoin, the rest of us will ignore them and have Bitcoin.

You don't decide what the "real Bitcoin" looks like.  That's not how consensus works.  You've been duped if you think otherwise.  But then that's only natural, because that's what drinking the trilemma kool-aid does to you.



You may have noticed that any fork which proposes a fundamental change to the founding principles doesn't even get off the ground.  Your fork would be held in the same esteem as forks that propose raising the 21 million supply, bringing "lost" coins back into circulation, anything to do with blacklisting certain addresses.  People who appreciate Bitcoin for what it is don't give those projects the slightest bit of notice.  They're irrelevant.  As is Thiefcoin.

If you have coins held in SegWit addresses, you would indeed fight against the 0.5.4 chain, but you wouldn't do it by buying 0.5.4 coins to dump them.  It would be contrary to your own financial well being to give even the slightest hint of recognition to the chain trying to steal from you.  The best way to combat a chain like that (which is clearly an affront to the underlying principles of property ownership and crypto in general), would naturally be to tell everyone to ignore the 0.5.4 chain completely and leave it to rot in the gutter.  There wouldn't be an actual economy on that chain and it wouldn't be sustainable.  So all that would remain is a niche blockchain where the sole purpose is to effectively quarantine the insane from the rest of society.  As such, I eagerly await your fork and you disappearing off to the land of make-believe to play with the other inmates in the asylum.
  

Technology-wise, there's stuff like:

• MAST and Atomic Swaps,
• AMP payments,
• Schnorr Signatures,
• Mimblewimble

And those are just the ones I'm dimly aware of.  Plenty of interesting concepts in the pipeline.  I don't understand much of it on a technical level yet, but the people developing it do.

---

Ideally, no.  More centralised exchanges aren't exactly a laudable goal for a decentralised ecosystem.  We can do better than that.  Exchanges are a relic of the "traditional" finance world.  The idea of Bitcoin isn't that a custodian looks after your money for you.  Literally the last thing we want to do is encourage more of that kind of behaviour.  When the tech reaches its full potential, we won't need exchanges for most things anymore.

Some wallets might let you use the seed itself to recover your funds, so see if your preferred wallet allows that. 

If it doesn't, you should be able to search the results on that 'Mnemonic Code Converter' with Ctrl-F (in most browsers) and typing in the BTC address you sent the BCH to (or copy/pasting it in, even quicker).  The one you need is in there somewhere.

 

I'll see if I can lay it out step by step.  Some of these steps will be optional depending on how paranoid you are about security and how much money we're talking about.  I'll leave that judgement for you to make. 

---

Make a backup:


So yep, that screenshot shows the message about making a backup.  Should be a simple process (but again, I've never used that particular wallet).  

[optional] If you want to be extra security-conscious, don't transfer your backup from your android device to your PC just yet.  Wait until after you've downloaded all the bits you need and then disconnected from the internet.  Also ensure your PC is clean of any viruses and such.

---

Stuff to download:

As per this post, you'll need decrypt_bitcoinj_seed and the Python + Protobuf and pylibscrypt bits detailed on that page.  

Then go to the Mnemonic Code Converter

[optional] right click somewhere on that page and save it to your PC.  

[optional] Maybe save a copy of HCP's post too if you're doing if all offline for security.

And lastly, (if you don't already have one) you'll need a BCH wallet.  It's up to you if you want another android one or a desktop wallet for your PC.  You might find desktop easier for importing the key.  But then, you'd probably want an SPV lightweight client where you don't have to download the entire blockchain.  My understanding is that "Electron Cash" is a popular choice (but I'm not an expert on BCH by any means).  As I mentioned before, make sure it's legitimate software.  Don't get phished by downloading a fake.

---

Recovery steps:

[optional] Now, disconnect from the internet and close any unnecessary programs.  

Transfer your backup file from your android device to your PC.

Run decrypt_bitcoinj_seed on your backup as per the instructions.  That should give you the magic 12 seed words you need.

Put the seed words into the Mnemonic Code Converter, following those instructions from the linked post.

From the results generated, find the private key which corresponds with the BTC address you mistakenly sent your BCH coins to.

Import that private key into your BCH wallet.  

[optional] Remove any trace of the private key and seed words from your PC and then reconnect to the internet.

---

Fingers crossed, you should have access to your coins again.

Equally possible, I suppose.  Crazies gonna crazy.

I love that even on the rare occasion we're on the same side, we still somehow manage to find a difference of opinion to argue over, heh.  As long as we agree that Anonymint is delusional, that's good enough for me.  The "how" and "why" are largely immaterial on this one.

Try actually reading the replies first before you go spamming the thread with largely worthless posts that give completely the wrong impression.  We've identified some potential solutions.  There is still a small chance these coins can be recovered, albeit with a bit of effort involved.  It's not like the coins have been sent to an address the OP doesn't control, since that would be game over.  But since OP owns the address the coins are in, they might still be recoverable.

Don't get me wrong here, I don't believe there's any chance at all they'd be successful in such a ludicrous "attack".  I just wouldn't rule out the possibility of them having the groundwork already in place due to the sheer level of egomania they're prone to.  It's simply not wise to underestimate those who may be mentally unhinged.  As Last of the V8s pointed out, there are 10 TRB nodes openly disclosing their version.  Apparently they've managed to synchronise and download the full blockchain just fine.  And it's impossible to tell if any others might be out there that are masking the version they run.  

It may not be the simplest thing to do, it might be a load of belligerent, regressionist, hardliner groupthink, but damned if they aren't delusional enough to do it anyway.  I don't question their belief or determination, just their common sense and grasp of reality.  The fact that such an attack isn't remotely practical in the real world doesn't preclude them from running outdated nodes simply because that's what they see as "right".

It is nonsense, clearly, but that alone wouldn't stop them even if they recognised the fact.  You're expecting them to behave rationally.  Consider they might not be doing that.  It seems they have their own definition of "rational" and it isn't remotely the same as ours.

They literally believe they're the New World Order.  Your new Kings.  Gods amongst men.  That sort of self-aggrandising lunacy.

Not necessarily.  If you have a slightly geeky friend who you would trust not to run off with your money, you could get them to follow the "rather convoluted" steps I posted earlier.  

Alternatively, if you can find a backup file of your BTC android wallet (the one where you sent the BCH coins to), there's a slightly less complicated option, although admittedly still more technical than you would normally expect to be dealing with as a newbie.

You know exactly where the funds are, so you haven't "lost" them, as such.  It's just that you can't move them without a key or seed phrase to import into a BCH wallet.  If it's an amount you wouldn't feel comfortable losing, don't give up yet.

Keep us posted on what you find, and we'll tell you if you're heading in the right direction or not.

At this stage, I'd recommend posting a brand new, self-moderated, topic to discuss this elsewhere.  Then you can nuke anything off-topic.  I don't think we're going to salvage this one.



I wouldn't be so sure about that part.  I distinctly recall some of MP's fervent disciples openly encouraging client spoofing as a means to derail support for XT.  It's unlikely they're displaying their actual software version.  It's not difficult to change.  And it makes sense if you're an extremist who wants to stay under the radar.  I'd agree there probably aren't many "0.5.4." nodes running, but I suspect it's more than zero.

Apparently, Bitcoin Wallet for Android isn't the simplest wallet to access the keys directly.  There is a guide for how to export your private key, but sadly, it sounds like a rather convoluted process, so we'll leave that to one side as a last resort for now.  Ideally, there's an easier way.

Hopefully you still have your seed words, since that's the far easier solution.  Don't disclose your seed words to anyone, since they give access to your funds.  Also, make sure you don't inadvertently download any malware when you try to download the equivalent BCH version of the Android wallet.  Find a legitimate wallet, not a malicious copy designed to steal funds.  Unfortunately, it's all too easy to get this part wrong, since unscrupulous people have taken advantage of this rather common mix-up and have created fake wallets.  I don't really use BCH or the android wallet for either coin, but hopefully someone reputable can point you in the right direction for a safe download link.  Once you have the right wallet, use your seed words and you should find your coins.

Try not to panic, since that's when mistakes are more easily made.  Take it slowly and calmly.

Institutional investors will firstly have to figure out where the extent of their involvement lies.  Most of them aren't holding actual bitcoins.  They're opening contracts based on what the future price might be and placing their fiat bets accordingly.  They aren't bringing anything to the table.  They don't get to call it liquidity if they aren't dealing in actual bitcoins.  They're not in the same market. 

Sadly not.  The report was published by a law-firm, but that's not the same thing as an audit.  An audit would give a full history of how much money there was at any given time over a set period.  All the notarised documents show is where the money was on June 1st.

For example, someone who was in debt for most of the year might still be able to convince you they don't have an issue if they can show you a bank statement of the one day in the year when they had some money spare.  It doesn't rule out the possibility of having some serious financial difficulties in future if the money is invested poorly.

I'd like to see evidence the money sits there 365 days a year and they aren't gambling with it.  To me, it just looks like they're trying to make people believe it's fully backed because they wanted to issue more tokens.  The timing is way too suspicious for my liking.

*ignoring anonymong's thread derailment and continuing with the actual topic*

Some are saying that BLS signatures would take longer to verify (and I think they've now edited the medium post to reflect this), so that would mean they're not necessarily an improvement over Schnorr in some areas.  It might save space, but if it's slower, that might cause other issues.  There are probably trade-offs whichever route we take.