I think the good associated with signature campaigns probably outweighs the negatives. From what I can tell from reading old threads, signature campaigns have allowed people to get paid to learn about bitcoin. They also provide a medium in which bitcoin companies can advertise and expand their user base with a fairly modest budget. Both of these will increase adoption in bitcoin and help the economy of bitcoin companies.

Unfortunately, there are a few bad apples out there that take advantage of the money making opportunity associated with signature campaigns. This highlights some of the drawbacks associated with globalism (globalism is not perfect, but is a net positive to the world economy, and the standard of living of everyone). Ultimately, disincentives need to be given for users to not post garbage, and incentives need to be given for users to post useful content. A modest fee (by third world standards) to enable signatures with any meaningful features would probably put a fairly large dent into the amount of useless posts because those who spam would be afraid of loosing the money they invested in their fee to enable signatures.

Not everyone participating in these forums has substantial amounts of coin, or any coin at all. You can also keep your forum identity separate from your IRL identity to mitigate your risk that you will be targeted by a wrench attack.

I think this is an edge case. For this attack to be successful, an attacker will need to compromise the computer you use with your trezor one ahead of time in a very specific way involving having physical access to your computer.

Someone who is able to execute this attack on a (non-upgraded) trezor one would also be able to learn of the private key associated with a paper wallet by compromising other computer components that would most probably be easier to compromise.

I am not surprised, and I have observed this while looking at older threads.

I personally condemn racism, and hold the belief that it is very wrong. However I also acknowledge and respect a person's right to hold these views, and do not believe these people should be silenced. I actually believe the best solution to most of these people is to engage in debate so to attempt to show them why racism is wrong/bad.

My issue with the OP is his extremist views, including a call to "purge" jews as I quoted above. The OP said he wants jews to leave the "Shanghai pact area" when he says "purge" however "purge" means at the end of the day that killing will be involved, and I believe this is very wrong. I don't think this is the first time the OP has made these extreme of statements, but I would need to look and find examples.

I strongly believe that everyone has the right to disagree with one another, and personally enjoy debate when someone is acting in good faith and disagrees with me. However I believe the OP has crossed a line, and not by a little bit.


He was able to essentially delete his account. His only remaining posts are OPs of threads he created, and a small number of replies that for some reason he did not delete.

The solution to a $5 wrench attack, and other similar attacks involving physical force to you as a person is to keep a small number of coin associated with a BIP 39 seed with the passphrase/last seed word being something different than the passphrase that secures the majority of your coin. This will allow you to give something to the attacker while both preserving a portion of your coin and maintaining your safety.

To answer the OP's question, I would not over complicate my cold storage setup. I would choose a HW wallet manufacturer I am comfortable is making a product that cannot easily be compromised, keep my coin secured by that HW wallet, and use the paper card as a backup with the seed hand written on it stored in a safety deposit box.

I am a strong supporter of free speech, but I personally find the OP's extreme views something I wish was not here. I especially do not approve of the OP's extreme racism:

A script to remove all posts should not be difficult to create if the OP is serious about wanting this done, and if he is serious that he and his extremist views are going to go someplace else.

I prompted an AI text "generator" to address this question, and this is the response I received:

I would say that I have to agree, at least until it starts to sound like nonsense. Current AI publicly available algorithms are not going to generate anything much better than something tangentially on topic. The quoted text above what the response I got after my first try, but subsequent topics poised looked like even more nonsense. I believe most publicly available text AI code is not very good, and probably will not be for some time.

There are multiple AI related projects researching how to generate speech, whose researchers have decided to stop making the underlying code public out of fear it will be misused. Those who are trying to teach computers how to create algorithms after being fed large sets of data (AI researchers) are making six and seven figure salaries, so I don't think they would be interested in profiting from spamming a forum with posts. I believe a bigger risk would be the spread of fake news, and the like.  

Btctalk name: PrimeNumber7
Btctalk URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2561166
Rank: Full Member
Current post count: 465
 

edit: changed starting post count from 466 to 465 due to this:

What you can do is avoid the "wrench attack" by avoiding being the target of a wrench attack. You can do this by obscuring how much coin you have via things like coin control,  not reusing addresses, and minimizing the number of transactions that can be publicly attributed to you.

I looked through your post history and you need to put a lot more effort into your posts if you want a realistic chance of ever receiving merit.

The website you cited uses misleading statistics by using gun deaths, which includes accidental deaths and suicides. Look at places like Chicago or Detroit that have very serious gun violence problems and have the strongest gun control laws in the country.
I don’t think many mall security guards carry guns.

https://youtu.be/yywmSuC9wJc

This is an interview with the guy. It is widely available on many news sites.
There are a lot of things that can inflict mass casualties. In 2017 in Charlottesville, a person drove his car into a crowd during the “free speech” march. There was someone who drove his car into a parade in OK killing 4 and injuring 48 in 2015. In 2016, in France, a terrorist drove a truck into a crowd killing 86 and injuring hundreds more.

If you take away everyone’s guns, there will not be many gun deaths, but bad people will use other means, and people will be in a worse position to defend themselves.

Gun violence is much worse in states/areas with strict gun control laws and the number killed in these areas are many magnitude larger than all gun deaths in mass shootings. The shooting in TX was stopped/slowed down by a citizen with a legal gun— if not for this hero, the number of deaths would likely have been higher.

The underlying problem is untreated mental illness. It is estimated that there are a million people in the US in various communities in who, several decades ago would be treated in state Mental facilities/hospitals and it is estimated that approximately half are receiving treatment.

You can just not create any posts. This is the only way to guarantee you will not receive merit.

Fair enough. Although I believe the possible attacks on what you describe would include the same attacks possible on a HW wallet such as trezor or ledger, and include additional attacks above that.
Yes, ideally you will have a house that allows you to be certain there are no cameras watching, but this is not always possible. You might live in an apartment that doesn't have any rooms without windows, or you might have roommates that live with you. If you have your blinds closed, the wind or a fan may cause your blinds to sway enough for someone with a camera to see your paper wallet. Or someone may not fully understand how to best secure their coins, and use a paper wallet in a library or coffee shop.

A QR reader would not keep you safe from printer attacks because you still need to print the QR code/image. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect to be able to not print a QR code, while you could hand write a private key/seed.

The advantage of using a QR code is it reduces the time your key is exposed to any potential cameras. Scanning a QR code will only take a few seconds, while the next best thing, a written seed will take probably close to a minute to enter and a private key will arguably take several minutes to type from a paper.

Whenever you are copying information on a paper wallet onto a computer to spend, you must expose it in a way that potentially someone will capture the information via a camera you are unaware of. The longer it takes to copy the information on your paper wallet, the longer it will be exposed.

Bitfinex doesn’t allow US customers. I believe you can lend on all the other platforms you mentioned.

If you lend on any platform, you run the risk of the loan not being repaid. Most exchanges will not guarantee repayment and disclose that traders may have insufficient equity to cover the loan plus interest.

I believe that because of the discussion in this thread, it is most likely the OPs account was hacked or otherwise compromised, and that the hard drive being described does not exist. It would also be very cheap to bruteforce the HDD if it is encrypted as the OP describes, and anyone would be crazy to part with the HDD for as little as the OP is asking for.

If the OP was telling the truth about the contents of his HDD, I believe it is most likely the coins would be spread among many addresses, probably from mining using his computer. I would believe the inability to prove/disprove the OPs claim is an additional red flag that should discourage anyone from doing business with him. 

I suspect there are actually a small number of spammers creating junk, with each spammer creating a large amount of junk posts. This means if you negatively affect a small number of spammer accounts, you will negatively affect a larger portion of actual spammers.

There are ways you can be efficient in affecting spammers. For example, some signature campaigns have requirements to have a minimum number of posts in specific sections, such as gambling in order to be eligible for payment. If the spammer needs to make 5 posts in gambling sections, and has made 6, getting 2-3 posts removed in the gambling sections might have the same effect as having 25 or 50 posts removed as far as the spammer is concerned because it means they wont get paid for any of the posts they made that period.

I don't personally like these types of requirements, and this is one reason why I haven't joined a campaign in the past few months (I think the concept of getting paid to talk/learn about crypto is pretty cool), because I believe it encourages posts in certain sections when there may not be room for discussion.

If you are using leverage, by design you are exposed to counter-party risk, because the exchange must be able to take your collateral to cover your margin loan if prices move against you.

If you are using LN or some other technology that allows for near instant confirmations, having a decentralized orderbook (to also include order matching, and liquidity) is moot because a trader can frictionlessly move coin from one DEX to another.

Today, all DEXs settle trades on-chain, and never take possession of any coin -- everything is held in a smart contract, and the entity running the DEX does not actually have control or possession of any coin.

Here is a quote from the link in the email you cited in the OP:

I am unsure of what you were using GitHub for, however they are required to follow US law being subject to jurisdiction in the US. According to the above, if you are not working for the government or an SDN, you can use GitHub on a personal basis via their free services.

If you are working for the government of Iran, I would point out that the Iran government has a very poor history of Human Rights violations against their own people, and I would encourage you to defect.

I read the article inside the email quote posted in the OP, and it looks like the OP had some kind of paid subscription to GitHub, and that GitHub is unable to accept money originating from Iran (nor from anyone inside Iran) due to US sanctions. My reading of the article posted in the OP is that those in Iran can still access GitHub and have a "free" membership.