An exchange wallet is not ideal to store bitcoins. Download a desktop wallet like electrum or a hardware one like Trezor

The suggested options of converting to a stable coin or fiat are possible solutions, but this practice has it's downsides. For one, you cannot game the market, there's no huge indicator for when a bear season would hit, the price is always fluctuating and it's impossible to decide which decline would lead to a price dip. You would likely end up switching to fiat at a loss and jumping back in when the bull run has already taken off.

It doesn't create a vulnerability per se, but it allows hackers and scammers to identify a wallet and all the transaction linked to it. If you use one address for purchases, trades, gambling and so on, there would likely be a link between it and your offline personality eventually.

No one can take money out of your address without the private key. The reason for protecting your address is to prevent others from knowing exactly how much Bitcoins you own. This can attract a $5 wrench attack.
You can always create a completely new address to receive bitcoins, while having a separate private one for the bulk of your funds.

Use multiple addresses. If you're buying from only one platform, you can use a coinmixer to avoid detection.

If there's no demand, then there's no value.

Posting screenshots would not be necessary, neither would it be taken as complete proof. Report the message to the admins, this would give them permission to read it and take appropriate action.

I'm not an expert on tax regulations as it's not yet much of an issue where I reside. But if your tax report shows a Bitcoin purchase at $1000, then it's assumed you still own it until you report that you have sold it at a certain price. If you purchase on a centralized exchange which logs transactions, simply sending out (even using mixers) would not blur out the history, as you have been recorded to own xxx amount of Bitcoins already and omitting it completely could be termed as evasion of tax.

If you did purchase it just 2 days ago, the transaction should be included in your tax report, right?

For really high amounts of any digital asset (Bitcoin, ethereum, etc), you will be much better off keeping it in a hardware wallet like Ledger, where it would be completely off the internet. This offers more security and privacy, reducing the exposure to hacks.
Ensure you're buying from the right source and check the device to confirm it hadn't been tampered with.

To monitor transactions and address balance, you can use a watch-only wallet.

I agree that posting frequency would drop significantly if signatures are removed, but niche boards like Goods, Lending or Currency Exchange are not the best reflections of that. These sub boards are only for users who have a specific purpose and not simply for general discussion, contributing to why posts there are not accepted by some managers.
If signatures were removed from Bitcoin discussion or development and technical support, there would still be topics for enthusiasts to discuss.

These boards faces the issue of what topics fit in there. Most of the topics posted there could easily fit into some other boards and users would likely pick the other board for better interaction.

If by easily you mean asking for ridiculously high loans using a newbie account, with no collateral, then Yes.
Usually, only users with wrong intentions get tagged when offering or requesting a loan.

Afaik this is incorrect. Getting positive feedback from a DT1 member does not automatically put a user on DT2, only being included into their trust list does that.
Trusting someone's judgement is much different from trusting them in a trade and should not mixed up as it would affect how users give trust feedbacks.

This is correct, it used to be 5 minutes a couple of years back, but was changed to 10 minutes. Also, asides the edit time not being displayed, the edited posts within that time period are not logged and are not available to admins. So, it sort of acts like a grace period;

I agree. There would likely have been very little content for newbies to gloss over inorder to fully understand what Bitcoin was and how it works, and someone would have needed high technical knowledge to understand the whitepaper or make sense of the information available at that time.


I mostly avoid looking at it this way. Very few people who had Bitcoin at the early stage would be holding till this present time, and if we always consider the value retrospectively with what it is today, every sale would have been a bad one. Likewise, any sale now would likely be a bad financial decision few years later if you consider price difference.

Most likely an attempt to use Bitcoin and gain traffic. Some people give very pessimistic views or highly optimistic ones to make media headlines and draw attention to their projects. Some others simply try and loosely link their projects to bitcoin to achieve the same result.

Everyone could have an opinion on Bitcoin and a choice to hold it or not based on their opinion. Do not base your choice on the opinion of others (i.e, do not fall for FUD or FOMO).

I've been using protonmail for sometime now and haven't had any issues with it, it's secure, safe and end to end encrypted. Recommend highly.
Gmail also offers a fairly good security in my experience, but poses privacy concerns as the messages are not really encrypted and as such you are not certain who or which server is reading your mails without your permission. If you do care about your privacy, you'll be better off using protonmail. You can also opt into the paid version

Remember not to reuse email addresses for different services and to change your unique password often.
2FA would also improve security

It depends on what they are trying to do. If it's to link multiple addresses to one pseudo personality, then it could be effective. If the purpose is to hack and steal funds, then dust txs doesn't offer much except suggesting that a certain group of addresses could belong to one person and gives an idea of how much bitcoins that person actually owns.
Scammers could know your identity on the forum (or in real life) and may know a couple of your addresses which may be empty or doesn't give away your actual worth; a successful dust attack could reveal that information.

I doubt phishing attacks could be linked to dust attacks. Your address or group of them doesn't offer enough information to support a phishing attack.

You can replace 'not being good enough' with unconstructive or low value. The forum doesn't set high standards for what a post should be, especially in some of the boards. There could be a difference of opinion between what the mod and user considers low quality, but, if it's off topic, or contributes little to the thread then it would likely get deleted.
Some boards are moderated stringently, but there's lots of freedom on the forum.

On the aspect of post length; I do not think a mod would delete an on topic and quality reply cause it's not long enough. Number of characters does but really matter.
If you just add a 'thank you' or 'good job' reply to a thread, it would get deleted as it specifically breaks forum rules.

A common reason could be to get rid of dust coins. Dust coins are really small amount of bitcoins (usually the minimum possible amount that can be used in a transaction). They are sent to an address to try and identify it and link it with other addresses should it get used as an input in a future transaction.
Those who do not like such dust transaction sitting in their wallet can send it to a burn address so it gets lost forever and doesn't connect any of their other addresses.

There could be other reasons why one would want to lock Bitcoins permanently, but they shouldn't be that common.

This is wrong. You should never back up your private keys online, much less trust an email service to keep it safe. They are meant to be kept in an airgapped device or written on a piece of paper where it would not be exposed to hacks.

Have you checked the transaction history on a block explorer, like https://blockchair.com/ ? I have never heard of this 'evercoin wallet', could be a vulnerability from that end or you're using a corrupted file. Much better to use a reputable wallet like electrum and verifying the keys.

You did a couple of things wrong as I've already mentioned; storing your funds in a relatively unknown wallet and using email as a back up.
To the second question, I do not think there is any possibility of a wallet taking actions for the user like, locking accounts or sending out funds to keep them safe. Except you are using a non custodian wallet, which this appears to be.

There are different possible scenarios;
• The wallet was compromised and hackers already had access to it and sent the Bitcoins out as they were received,
• There's also the possibility that the email was hacked and your private keys leaked in the process (I assume this is less likely as it would take a bit of time for the breach, except of course your email was already compromised).

Legacy addresses for Bitcoin Cash is just a way of representing the public address in a different format (cashaddr format), to make it distinct from Bitcoin address. There is no difference in keys (private or public).

Electrum suggests new addresses anytime you request one to receive a transaction, all addresses are linked and generated from the same master keys. This is done to enhance privacy.
When sending, electrum would randomly pick from different UTXOs.
So, if you receive transactions in different addresses (or a single one even) linked to one xpub, let's say $4, $5, $10, and you want to send $11 to someone. The wallet would take the inputs from a combination of the funds in the different addresses and send your change back to a new address to maintain privacy.

Do you still own the master private key?

Something of that sort. Exchanges reuse addresses for different users and store them in secure hot or cold wallets, so an exchange address would have multiple transactions, possibly thousands, far more than a regular user would make and also multiple outputs. This is one way to identify it.

You can assume to a degree of certainty that it's an exchange address, specifying that it belongs to coinbase is more difficult than that.
Try searching it up on this site to know if the exact exchange comes up - https://www.walletexplorer.com/

I do not think there is a way to know the exact exchange which owns an address, although it's possible to determine if it is an exchange hot or cold wallet by looking to the transaction history of the wallet and you can pick it apart from an electrum address.
Exchange addresses are not random and do not belong to a particular user, unlike non custodian wallets like electrum; so there would be multiple transactions of varying amounts in an exchange wallet like coinbase, depending if it's a hot or cold wallet, but this would not be the case in electrum, only txs you sign appear in your history.

There was a service to identify addresses of exchanges, but it seems to no longer be functioning now.

Yes, it's possible to know which addresses sent Bitcoins and which addresses received them. You can do this by checking the txid using a block explorer like blockchair.com.
Transactions consists of inputs and outputs;
• Inputs are the addresses which the coins are coming from,
• Outputs are the ones which they are going to.
A transaction can have more than one input and output.

Here's the screenshot of a transaction on blockchair showing the sending and receiving address(es):

It's news cause they are choosing to hold Bitcoin in their reserve funds over fiat.
The fact that a company is affiliated with Bitcoin such as this doesn't mean they have to trust it as a store of value. Mining is profitable if you have affordable access to electricity and modern equipments, the profit is what attracts most. But holding your reserve funds in Bitcoin is a different level of adoption.