There is no fixed number because everyone's risk tolerance is different. My benchmark question is usually how much cash would you feel comfortable carrying around in your wallet. If you would be fine walking down the street with $100 in cash in your pocket, then you can store $100 on a software wallet. The risk is similar - easily lost, easily stolen. Would you be comfortable walking down the street with $5000 in your pocket? No? Then you shouldn't be storing $5000 in a software wallet and should have it on something more secure, which is a hardware wallet for most users (or an airgapped wallet for more advanced users).

Another benchmark some people use is whenever you start talking about sums of money which are more than the cost of a hardware wallet. You can get a decent hardware wallet for under $100, so anything more than that and you should be thinking about something more secure than a software wallet.

Which, with a little bit of tinkering and a good wallet, can be used to your advantage to obfuscate the change output. If sending to a legacy output as in your example, you can also manually send the change to a legacy output to help hide which is which. Even better if you are sending from segwit to segwit and you still send the change to a legacy (or P2SH) output, as most analyses will then say your change is the payment and the payment is the change.

There's a record on every bitcoin node on the planet, and anyone can see it using any of the many blockchain explorers in existence.

Because there are dozens of blockchain analysis entities which are constantly analyzing the entire blockchain and every transaction which takes places, linking addresses together and linking address groups to individuals and entities.

By passcode do you mean the 4-8 digit PIN you use to unlock your Ledger? If you forget your PIN then yes, you will need to use your seed phrase to recover access to your wallets. You will also need your seed phrase if anything happens to your Ledger device, such as it is lost, stolen, damaged, or simply wears out after years of use. But as long as your Ledger is working fine and you know your PIN, then you do not need to use your seed phrase in usual day-to-day operations.

Correct. Your PIN number is specific to the device and simply unlocks the device. It has no relationship whatsoever to your actual wallets, private keys, or coins. Those are backed up exclusively by your 24 word seed phrase, plus any additional passphrase you may or may not have set. If you lose your Ledger, you can restore your seed phrase on any wallet which supports BIP39 seed phrases, which is almost every major software or hardware wallet, although doing so on a fresh hardware wallet will be the safest route.

Same old story with franky1. You might remember last year when the US passed new laws which said that anyone who was responsible for providing any service which makes transfers on behalf of another person was now classed as a broker and would be held to the same standards as a broker, i.e. needing to file the name, address, taxpayer details, amount, date, and nature of every party and every transaction, or be suspected of money laundering. Despite everyone on this forum, all of crypto Reddit and Twitter, the CEOs of various exchanges platforms, many prominent crypto media sites and personalities, and sitting Members of Congress saying that the scope of this wording was too broad and could be applied to anyone the government liked, from miners to developers, franky1 ranted long and hard about how we were all stupid and just scaremongering and hadn't read the law and didn't know what we were talking about, and he and he alone knew the one real interpretation of it and developers would never be targeted by the government. Fast forward and a Tornado Cash developer is arrested simply for writing code.

I'm sure franky1 will have some wildly convoluted reasoning as to why he is still right despite this and that these two things are definitely not linked in any way, just like he has some wildly convoluted reasoning which allows him to pick the one or two paragraphs from the FATF guidance which mention mixers while conveniently ignoring the pages and pages of the rest of the documents I've extensively quoted in this thread which mention every transaction which isn't on a KYCed account on a centralized exchange.

Which is frankly (pun intended) a hilarious assertion. He thinks the FATF are surveilling every transaction which uses a mixer, but if you deposit coins to any other non-KYC platform and then withdraw some different coins, they'll just throw up their hands and say "Well, that's not a mixer, so nothing we can do here! Damn, these guys are clever. Back to the drawing board I guess." Lol.

True, but he's already going after the likes of Coinbase and Kraken for "misrepresenting bitcoin", as Lucius shared above. Wonder why he's not going after them for hosting the whitepaper like he did with Cobra.

But it shouldn't matter. The burden on proof is on him to sign a message, not on Satoshi to sign a message calling him a fraud. If you make a claim like "I am Satoshi" and provide absolutely no hard evidence to support it, then you can and should be ridiculed for such a ridiculous claim. It's Russell's teapot. You make the claim, you prove it. The fact that he has been allowed to get this far with absolutely no evidence or proof is shocking, and partly the fault of the all the crypto "media" which keep giving him the spotlight, repeating his nonsense, and not calling out his lies for what they are.

And on top of that, even although the onus is absolutely not on anyone else to disprove his unsupported claims, we still have screeds and screeds of evidence showing his lies for what they are, including not least a signed message from 145 addresses he claimed belonged to him calling him a liar and fraud. What more can we possibly need?

Perhaps they are each running one of the two BSV nodes which are actually at the chain tip. You read that right; a grand total of two nodes at the chain tip: https://nitter.it/hodlonaut/status/1562500694359539712

No, they can't.

Completely meaningless. Anyone can do this with some basic code, modest hardware, and a bit of time - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5368214.msg58303553#msg58303553

I want to see a signed message directly from the genesis block address or Satoshi's PGP key. Not signing from a sum of various keys, not having one person say that you definitely did it, not signing using your own laptop in a private room and not allowing anyone to independently verify the signature, or any other parlor tricks. If you have the key you can sign a message. Anything else is meaningless.

JoinMarket isn't new - it was first launched over 7 years ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0. This is less than 18 months after Greg Maxwell proposed coinjoin in the first place: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg2983902#msg2983902.

JoinMarket is the oldest coinjoin method there is, as well as the one with the most volume according to https://www.bitcoinkpis.com/privacy. The reason that many people haven't heard of it is because it requires you to run your full node and is a bit more technical to set up, and is not run by a centralized entity which collects fees from users to then spend on advertising and the like.

You haven't read it at all, have you? Do you just search for the word mixer and copy and paste that paragraph while ignoring the rest of the document?

Here's some more direct quotes for you. Emphasis mine.

So no, you are wrong. The advice is to countries and national agencies about all VA activities. It is neither advice exclusively to VASPs or exclusively about VASPs.

And you are ignoring the direct quotes I gave you which show the FATF have called out unhosted wallets and peer to peer trading directly and undeniably, which involves literally every single person who doesn't interact with bitcoin exclusively through a KYCed account on a centralized exchange. So if you want to call out mixers based on the FATF rules, then you also need to call out every DEX, every merchant who accepts bitcoin, every personal wallet and indeed Bitcoin Core itself.

That's not a good statement to make for two reasons. First of all, the satoshi account on this forum is locked. No one can log in to it, even Satoshi themself, without theymos first unlocking it. Secondly, hacking in to a forum account is significantly easier than stealing a private key, and there are literally billions of online accounts which have been hacked in the past.

Signing a message from the genesis block address is necessary (but not sufficient) for Satoshi to begin to identify themself, if they so choose.

I'd mentioned before that a few exchanges host the whitepaper, and a quick test shows that those links are still available from a UK IP address. Wonder why CSW hasn't gone after them like he went after Cobra for hosting it?

It would certainly be good to see the likes of Coinbase step up here and actually support bitcoin for once, instead of always undermining it for the sake of their own profits. The more defeats CSW racks up then the better for their own legal teams, and it is good publicity for them to be seen to be supporting the community too.

You mean like the research I did 3 pages ago which thoroughly debunked this nonsense you keep repeating but you have simply chosen to ignore?

Since you seem to be so keen on what the FATF have to say about bitcoin, here are some more great quotes from them you might be interested in (but will probably also ignore):
So, any transaction which does not involve a centralized exchange "should be monitored".

And from the same document, under the headings "Risk factors":
So, any transaction to or from your own personal wallet constitutes a "risk".

So go ahead and bleat on about how mixers are high risk according to the FATF, while conveniently ignoring that fact that the FATF say that any transaction which is not part of a KYCed account on a centralized exchange reporting directly to your government is equally high risk.

Another excellent comment from Greg on the Reddit thread has answered this question for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ws8wfd/starting_september_12th_in_oslo_norway_hodlonaut/il0gvgy/

You can still file charges against a pseudonymous individual, and you will win by default if they do not violate their privacy to defend themselves. Although you cannot enforce the rulings on that person, you can certainly enforce the rulings through third parties. In the Wright v Cobra case, this would have been in the form of all UK ISPs simply banning access to bitcoin.org. There is a statement made by Cobra after that judgement was passed available here, which answers this more thoroughly: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/issues/3698

It's certainly suspected that he was in the individual behind that donation, but I don't think it has been confirmed. Given that that donation was made anonymously, then I'm not keen to go digging to try and expose the individual responsible. If they want to remain anonymous, then let them.

It also allows mass physical surveillance to be far more effective. Cameras monitoring an entire crowd are one thing - cameras monitoring an entire crowd linked to a handy database which already includes multiple scans of every single citizen's face are much better.

This is a downside of biometrics in general. If your password is compromised or lost, it can be replaced. If your biometrics are compromised or lost, then tough luck. If I think a password, PIN, access card, physical token, etc., has been stolen or duplicated, then I can log in/phone up/visit/whatever the entity in question and rescind and replace whatever it is. If I think my face has been stolen from a database, then I'm screwed.

Biometrics are not safe now, and will probably be even less safe as time goes on and biometric databases become widely hacked in the same way that password databases are widely hacked today.

I wouldn't blacklist.

There are so many better privacy projects out there that are not succumbing to these unknown "regulatory pressures" that Wasabi is claiming are being forced on them and them alone (despite them having the lowest volume of the three main coinjoin techniques, lower volume than many mixers, lower volume than many DEXs, and far lower volume than privacy coins). If projects such as Samourai, JoinMarket, ChipMixer, Bisq, LocalCryptos, Monero, and anything else which gives users as good or better privacy than Wasabi can continue unencumbered, then Wasabi can too. They simply choose not to.

So, sanction yourself and modify your own behaviors now in anticipation of what the government might do in the future? Yeah, that's going to be a hard pass from me, as I said earlier in this thread:


Of course not. Tornado Cash was a centralized service built on a centralized coin. Not only could they shut down the service, but they could also freeze all the coins and addresses involved. On the other hand, I can open a Lightning channel directly with another user in a peer-to-peer manner with no input from third parties. There is nothing there to sanction, short of sanctioning the entire bitcoin network.

Correct. A 51% attacker will mine a completely valid blocks which will be accepted by the rest of the network. Otherwise there is no point to the attack at all.

Which raises an interesting question - are these honest miners still honest? Surely honest miners should just follow the chain with the most work, regardless of who generated that work? Once miners start choosing to follow a minority chain to protect their own rewards, are they still honest?

The question then being "What is the optimal amount of correction data?" Too much and you weaken the security of your system. Too little and you could end up spending hours generating key after key from your fingerprint trying to find a collision to the one you generated in the first instance. (And better hope that first key wasn't some statistical outlier, or else you might never generate it again!)

He already did that: https://bitcoinassociation.net/bitcoin-association-for-bsv-tulip-trading-ltd-settlement-statement-and-faq/
Not much to be gained from stealing a million coins of a shitcoin which is worth 1/500th of what bitcoin is worth and has no real volume so couldn't be sold to anyone anyway. Which is why he needs to continue attacking real bitcoin.

I'm not 100% sure, but even if you think CSW has had no impact on any developers yet, it is easy to see how one or more developers could decide to protect themselves from his litigation by either reactively or preemptively cease their involvement with bitcoin. It is clear CSW is being bankrolled by Calvin Ayre, and therefore has the whole CoinGeek entity and its employees doing his bidding and repeating/publishing what they are told to.

They can certainly jail you for not revealing your passwords, but there are several such cases of people claiming that they have forgotten their password/PIN and being released by appeals courts as it is impossible to prove they are lying. This is not the case for fingerprints or other biometrics.

Again, certainly in some cases, but there are also plenty of cases they have been unable to break the password or decryption key, or even something as simple as an iPhone unlock PIN.

Have another read of the post by Greg Maxwell I linked to in the OP of this thread. I trust his judgement and statements on issues such as these, and here is what he has to say on the matter:


That's the thing though - CSW never had any arguments in his favor (no good or even logical ones, at least). But that hasn't stopped him harassing and continuing to harass a variety of bitcoin developers and other members of the community. This doesn't seem to be a fight which will be won on logic, since logically as soon as hundreds of addresses which CSW claimed were his signed a message calling him out, the whole thing should have been over.

Apologies if I'm missing something, but I don't see how that solves the problem at all.

Whether or not Alice signs a message before making the transaction is irrelevant. Before the payment is made and the scam has taken place, then there is nothing to be gained by Alice signing a message saying she is intending to make the payment. After she has made the payment, the payment will be verified by a third party viewing the transaction, not by any signed message. And as you point out, with or without a signed message, Bob can still deny the receiving address is his.

Privacy coin or not, hidden addresses or not, without a signed message from the recipient confirming their payment address, there is always the possibility that they deny the address is theirs.