I don't disagree, but there are far bigger issues than early coins being confirmed as not lost, such as CSW endlessly harassing every developer until no one wants to work on bitcoin anymore. Any coin which is not provably lost should not be assume to be lost. If Satoshi is still around and has the power to end this nonsense, then he should.

Don't forget that the judge very explicitly called him a liar multiple times, and noted that he had put forward a deliberately false case.

My point is that no 51% attacker would do this.

You can churn out as many invalid blocks as you want, and the rest of the network will ignore them. There's no point going to the huge cost and effort of accumulating 51% of the hashrate to then mine a chain with more proof of work but which contains invalid blocks which will be rejected. All the blocks a 51% attacker generates are still perfectly valid and will be accepted by the rest of the network. There is no process by which nodes can reject blocks based on who found them, or indeed, even say for sure who found them, if the miner doesn't publicize that.

You are confusing miners and nodes. It is trivial to run a single well connected node. You can do it on almost any home computer.

This. I have yet to see any evidence that blockchain analysis and mass invasion of users' privacy leads to less crime or fewer instances of money laundering, just like there is no evidence that general mass surveillance of the population reduces terrorism or any of the other nonsense the government feeds people to justify their actions. It's never about the things they claim. It's about control of their populace.

It doesn't matter if they do. As I showed earlier in this thread, if you so much as withdraw your coins to your own private wallet and away from KYC enabled platforms, then you have already earned yourself a red flag. Whether or not you then open a Lightning channel is immaterial.

Absolutely. And how many merchants, both online or in person that you have spent bitcoin with, use PGP? For me, the answer is zero. Even getting peer to peer traders to use PGP is a challenge.

And regardless, even if everyone did use PGP all the time, that's entirely separate to bitcoin itself. If you want to use PGP as a solution, then there is nothing stopping me from also applying the same solution to Monero, for example. You give me your Monero address via PGP, and I can release your address along with the other necessary information to prove I paid you: https://www.getmonero.org/resources/user-guides/prove-payment.html

I'm not convinced that this is a drastically different scenario to what we already have in Bitcoin.

Alice pays Bob.
Bob denies receiving payment.
Alice publishes a transaction hash which anyone can look up.
Bob denies the receiving address in that transaction belongs to him.

If Alice is really lucky, she has some correspondence from Bob with the address in it which can be independently verified and which Bob cannot deny. On the other hand, there is a good chance the address was a one time address generated by a payment processor plugin on a website and she therefore has no independently verifiable record of the address.

This statement is very muddled.

Chain reorganization occurs when nodes receive details of a valid chain with more proof of work than the chain they are currently following. This would usually, but not necessarily, be a longer chain. They don't "deactivate" the chain they are leaving - they simply leave it. The chain still exists and is entirely active for anyone else who chooses to follow it. Further, "altering the upcoming block" doesn't really make sense. Nobody knows what the next block will be until it is mined, so it is impossible to "alter it". A 51% attacker could instead alter already existing blocks by replacing them in favor of a malicious chain with more work.

This isn't right either. A 51% attacker's blocks will still be entirely consensus valid (unless they do something really dumb) and therefore accepted by all other nodes who are following the consensus rules. And operating a single well connected is more than enough to have your winning block propagated and confirmed.

That's a strange arrangement.
If you want to use 9 characters from the same set, then use %9i[chars] (which says use exactly 9 characters, case insensitive), rather than repeating [CcHhAaRrSs] 9 times. For up to 9 characters, use %0,9i[chars].
Your digits at the end are also strange. You are telling it to use between 0 and 2 digits, immediately followed by 2 digits. Why not just use %2,4d instead?

I would suggest using --listpass first to at least make sure you are generating the type of passwords you think you are before letting it run for 28 hours.

The instructions are on the page that PawGo linked to above. Once you crack your password, just dump the wallet using that password and the commands given on that page, then pull out the necessary private keys.

Lol. Is this what people are subjecting themselves to these days in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to give their coins away to a complete stranger and lose all ownership rights of them? You can take out a credit card with a bank statement with your name and address on it. You can fly around the world with a passport. But those things are obviously beneath the almighty "Cloudbet", who need a bank statement, passport, street selfie holding a newspaper, video of you saying "My name is x and I love Cloudbet", and the password to your email account so they can check the bank statement you gave them was actually emailed to you directly from the bank. What a load of horseshit.

Every day that goes by I seem to be more and more justified in my stance of never completing KYC anywhere.

Or just create a new wallet on Core and import all your canary addresses in to it. Since your node is running 24/7 anyway, then it will immediately know about any movement. From there you can set up a local notification system to send an alert to your phone or something similar if you want for times you are away from your computer. Or set up a watch only wallet on your phone (assuming your phone is probably with you 24/7) pointed at your own full node.

I'd much rather use a self-hosted set up than rely on a third party, especially an insecure one which does not use end to end encryption by default like Telegram.

I don't think it was Satoshi who signed this message; rather just another early miner. If Satoshi is still around and wanted to end this CSW nonsense, they could simply sign a message from the genesis block address and/or their PGP key stating that they are not CSW. It doesn't make sense to me that they would risk revealing themselves by publishing a message, but not include the genesis block address.

This is not accurate. This upcoming Hodlonaut case and the previous McCormack case were only to determine whether CSW suffered damages from the statements made, and not to try to prove that he is Satoshi. CSW is very careful in this regard - he knows he would never win such a case, because he does not have the means to prove anything.

And yet we still have wallets which allow users to skip the seed phrase back up step, and we still have wallets which allow users to unlock them using a fingerprint instead of a PIN or password. You might expect this kind of nonsense from poor quality closed source wallets like Coinomi, but we also see this from multi-billion dollar corporations. Coinbase's wallet, last I checked, allows you to skip the seed phrase back up, and Block's new hardware device they are building uses a fingerprint scanner. It is no wonder that newbies will take these easy but highly insecure routes to storing their bitcoin when some of the largest players in the space enforce the idea that it is acceptable.

Joke's on you, that's where I store my barrels full of millions of dollars, not my bitcoin back ups! Wait...

That's not a bad idea, actually. However, I am more than happy that all of my off site back up locations are incredibly secure and are highly unlikely to be found by anyone either accidentally or deliberately looking for them. If any of the back ups were to be compromised, it would far more likely be due to a massive natural disaster, in which case the canary wallet would not help (although I would probably be aware of the fact via news reports or other media). And in the case of someone deliberately looking for my back ups, they would know not to spend the canary and attract attention to themselves, since as I said after finding one back up they would still need to search for others to be able to steal anything from me.

As amazing and hilarious as it would be for Satoshi to donate to Hodlonaut, the signed message thing already happened. CSW provided in a previous court case (under oath no less) a list of bitcoin address which he claimed belonged to him. Most of these address were very early bitcoin addresses which had been inactive for years and which many people thought belonged to Satoshi. Very shortly after he provided this list, a signed message from 145 of those addresses containing a combined 7,250 BTC was published calling CSW "a liar and a fraud". Here's a thread about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5250960.

I find it incredible that this is not brought up more, particularly in subsequent court cases. His lies were definitively proven by a method which cannot be faked and anyone can verify. And yet here we are.

Good find. While I stand by what I said in the other thread, that the chat logs alone were not enough to conclusively prove a link, this blockchain evidence is irrefutable that these two users are the same person.

It is completely justified for OP to keep the amount he was scammed. What happens with the remainder of the amount is up to him. Personally, I would probably return the remainder of the funds, although I can see the merit behind either donating them or trying to refund other victims of this scammer.

+1

I don't think Coinbase are setting out to deliberately steal coins from their users, but there is absolutely no doubt that their poor procedures and controls to which you refer are having the outcome of users being deprived of their coins. You can go their subreddit or Twitter accounts and see post after post after post of people having accounts locked or restricted and coins frozen or seized and receiving absolutely no help from Coinbase Support or even an explanation, even after months of sending support tickets. I'm sure that as you mentioned above that a not-insignificant proportion of those users will be telling a slanted story or leaving out important details, but it certainly isn't all of them and Coinbase are certainly to blame in some situations.

I think for the most part users simply do not have the time, money, or resources to pursue a lengthy legal challenge against a multi-national multi-billion dollar corporation, the cost of which in most cases will be more than the value of the coins they have lost.

As explained above, a better solution would be to make a transaction sending a tiny amount of coins to the paper wallet address, and including an OP_RETURN output with some information on how to contact OP, perhaps with a link to this thread. This prevents any issues in the rare but possible case that the true owner has a signed transaction involving the original output stored somewhere.

Yeah, that's a good point. I also have a number of back ups stored off site, as everyone should. These backs ups are obviously highly secured and incredibly unlikely to end up on a beach somewhere (not to mention that no single back up is enough to compromise any of my wallets), but at the same time, I obviously don't check on these back ups every day. It is possible, however unlikely, that I would lose one of my back ups and not realize for a period of weeks. There is no telling how diligent or otherwise the true owner of these coins might be, and it could very well be months or even years before they realize that their paper wallet is lost.

Because he can't, because he has never owned the private keys to those coins.

Because it's the only way he has to continue this charade.

Satoshi's account is disabled. Even Satoshi himself couldn't log in to it, without contacting theymos with some proof and getting the account unlocked first.

Probably because Vitalik owns a huge amount of Ethereum due its pre-mine, and so could easily bankroll and win any lawsuit. CSW only wants to harass people who can't fight back. Hopefully with a big community backing for Hodlonaut, we can prove that everyone has the ability to fight back against his lies.

---

After the massive 47 BTC donation yesterday, in the last 24 hours there has been over another 1 BTC and $5k donated. Let's keep it going.

So I just stumbled across this post from Greg Maxwell on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ws8wfd/starting_september_12th_in_oslo_norway_hodlonaut/ikxqxoo/. Everyone with even a passing interest in bitcoin (which includes you, if you are reading this forum) should read this post. In fact, I would read the whole thread, because Greg has made a number of excellent posts.

Next month a pseudonymous individual by the handle of Hodlonaut will go to court in Norway to defend himself against known fraudster CSW. For anyone out of the loop, here is an update on the case: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/timeline-of-hodlonaut-craig-wright-case. The very abridged version is that Holdonaut posted on Twitter what everyone knows - that CSW is not Satoshi - and now there is a court case to determine whether these tweets are lawful and whether Hodlonaut has to pay damages to CSW.

This case doesn't just affect Hodlonaut; it affects all of us. Hodlonaut is not just defending himself; he is defending us all, as explained in Greg's post I linked to above.

So what can we do to help? Well, CSW is being bankrolled by Calvin Ayre and CoinGeek. Hodlonaut, on the other hand, is being bankrolled by nobody. Got some spare sats kicking around? I can think of no worthier cause than the defense of bitcoin itself.

https://www.defendingbtc.com/
https://nitter.it/defendingBTC

#WeAreAllHodlonaut

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Twitter links of individuals who are at the trial:

https://nitter.it/bitnorbert
https://nitter.it/SpecificMills
https://nitter.it/kristiandoble/

---

Thread continued here: Hodlonaut Trial

This should have been a red flag. In peer to peer trades, you should never feel rushed or harassed by the other person. Whenever you do, it is usually because they are trying to pull something shady. In this case, he was rushing to get you to send your half of the trade before his transaction confirmed, so he could replace it with RBF and steal your money. However...

I am not convinced that any of the characteristics you have listed are enough to make a definitive link between these two accounts. It seems to me that there is a not insignificant chance that you have just stolen $500 worth of bitcoin from an innocent third party.

People are banned for a variety of reasons. Being banned does not mean that they have not made other posts which are merit worthy. Further, it is unreasonable to expect merit sources to check the status of every user they want to merit using third party tools.

The amount of merit being sent to banned accounts and therefore not recirculated is minuscule and not worth worrying about. Most merit sources are sitting with significantly more than this in their stash, not mentioning all the merit sent to inactive accounts (like the 4.5k to Satoshi) or other users who simply don't hand it all back out again.

If you think there are good posts going unmerited, then link to them in this thread: [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source