I don't understand why you don't just share the address here, since that remains by far the most likely route to letting the owner of the coins track you down, far more likely than anything which will be achieved by blockchain analysis by this local individual.

We obviously can't force you to do anything, but be aware that if this person asks for anything about the private key, then they are trying to scam you/steal the coins. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for them to require any information about the private key, and knowledge of the private key does not allow them to do any kind of blockchain analysis or investigation beyond that which can be done from knowledge of just the address.

Trivial. And trivial of course to link every such machine to a centralized database of taint. But they dont do that, and people should ask themselves why, when we know that hard cash is the preferred method of transaction for criminals, money launderers, terrorists, and all the people they say they want to protect us against. So why not apply taint to cash like they want to do with bitcoin? Because just like mass surveillance, it has never been about preventing crime and there is absolutely no evidence that it does anything whatsoever to prevent crime. It is about population control. That's it. In the same way the knowledge that you are constantly being watched makes you compliant and obedient, knowledge that your coins will be tainted makes you compliant and unwilling to do anything your government doesn't approve of.

They don't need to do this with cash, because the vast majority of people use digital fiat now, with the banks enforcing the rules of the government and performing mass surveillance for them. Look at the Canadian truckers as a prime example of this happening in a western nation. Spend your money in a way the government don't like? Uh oh, now all your accounts have been seized.

Oh right, sure. I was assuming he would have some coin he would be able to swap for ETH, most likely BTC, since he did say earlier in this thread that he was holding several coins. But yeah, he can't swap a coin he can't actually move.

Never used that service before, but I see they only support BTC and ETH. Any similar service that would swap Lightning BTC to XMR and back again?

There is a clear difference between stealing and finding something which you then give back to its rightful owner. There is much less of a difference between stealing and finding something which you then keep for yourself, despite it not belonging to you.

I am curious if you would be fine with someone emptying all your wallets if they accidentally found your seed phrase back up (ignore for the sake of this example any passphrases, multi-sig, etc.) How would that be any different to OP emptying this paper wallet that he found?

And respectfully, given that by your own admission you know very little about bitcoin but have now been convinced to start handing over data privately to a single individual, there is a high chance here that this individual will attempt to steal the contents of the wallet for themselves.

All he should share is the address. Anything else is unnecessary and will make verifying the true owner more difficult in the future. If he will not reveal the address, then the whole thing is pointless.

Not at all. If it is encrypted, it stands to reason the true owner either knows or has access to the decryption key. If OP can reunite the encrypted key with the owner, then the owner can decrypt it and access their coins.

CEXs might fill the demand, but there are many CEXs other than Binance which do not rip off their users to such a ridiculous degree.

If they are using a centralized exchange to store crypto, then they don't actually own any crypto. They own an IOU at best, which can be taken away at any time and for any reason.

You don't need to understand the technical side of bitcoin to appreciate having sole and uncensorable control over your own money.

First of all, how did you arrive at the number of 35,000? A 12 word seed phrase missing 2 words gives 2048*2048 = 4,194,304 possible combinations. Even excluding the 15/16 of those which would produce an invalid checksum, you end up with 262,144 possibilities.

I would also use btcrecover to do this. Since you do not know an address, then you would instead use an address database: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Creating_and_Using_AddressDB/

Set it up with your database, tell if the 10 words you do know and the locations of the two you don't know, and let it run. It will try every possible valid combination and check if the first x number of addresses in whichever derivation path(s) you specify have ever been used.

Pretty much this jerry. Since you are trading your fiat for their bitcoin, then there are two ways around your fear of incredibly rare double spends. The first is to ask them to send the bitcoin first, and wait until it has 1, 2, 3, or whatever you are comfortable with number of confirmations (and pre-agree with the other party how long you will be waiting) before you send them the fiat. The second is for them to deposit the bitcoin in a non-custodial escrow, such as the 2-of-2 escrow provided by Bisq or the trustless smart contract escrow provided by LocalCryptos, you send the fiat across, and then you both agree to release the bitcoin from the escrow and send it to your wallet. Since it is coming from one of these escrows, then there is no chance for a double spend prior to it being confirmed as reaching your wallet.

Either way, probably better to do the ground work now so you ready to go when you do decide to send your coins/tokens back to Coinbase. Don't want to be ready to sell and then find that the Ethereum network is so clogged up that gas fees are a hundred bucks or more (which Ethereum seems to be in the habit of doing).

I have no idea what Coinbase's usually Ethereum withdrawal fees are, or they vary according to network conditions, but the gas fees at the moment seem to be low so it might be worth getting some Ethereum on to your hardware wallet now so it is ready when you need it.

It's such a hypocritical situation. No vendor ever worries about the history of the bills they receive, despite it being perfectly possible to exactly identify individual bills which were involved in robbery, theft, scam, etc., due to their serial numbers. And yet large fiat institutions advance the concept of bitcoin taint, despite it (usually) being completely impossible to identify individual bitcoin or satoshi which were involved in a robbery, theft, scam, etc., due to the very nature of UTXOs being joined and split.

In fiat we can be 100% sure which bills are tainted, but no one cares.
In bitcoin we can only poorly guess at which outputs are tainted, but apparently it has to underpin the entire ecosystem.
Buying in to this nonsense is an active attack on bitcoin.

Absolutely. It is the next logical step in the surveillance state. In many countries people are already scared to speak out against their government. That fear will only get worse when the government can choose to immediately freeze all your money pending your "re-education".

You've got it now, but bear in mind the network fee they pay is hugely overpaid as well. The vast majority of bitcoin transaction I have ever made I have paid a rate of somewhere around 1-2 sats/vbyte, which works out (at current prices) of around 10 cents. With large batched transactions, as is the case with withdrawals from centralized exchanges, then the relative size of your individual output is even less, meaning that your part of the transaction would cost less than 5 cents if you had control over signing and broadcast. But instead of paying 5 cents they charge you 20 bucks, overpay the network fee, and then pocket the rest.

I still have never managed to figure out why people seem to be OK with this. Why use an exchange which charges you 20 bucks to access your "own" money when they could do it for 5 cents? Why do Binance users put up with this highway robbery?

You can do either. If you buy on Coinbase and transfer across, just be aware of whatever withdrawal fees that Coinbase may charge which might eat a good chunk of your coins, especially if you are just buying a small volume. If you swap via Ledger Live, then be aware of which third party (such as Changelly) that is processing your trade and what else they might ask from you in terms of KYC or other personal information.

Ledger Live also might not support the pair you are interested in. You can check which coins can be swapped to/from here: https://www.ledger.com/supported-crypto-assets

This is a poor metric for gauging whether something is a safe or not. My house has never been broken in to, which means I could have written my seed phrase in large letters across my bedroom wall and it still wouldn't have been compromised. That doesn't make it a good idea though.

This. Your security should not depend on a criminal either not knowing to look for a seed phrase or not knowing what a seed phrase is when they find one. And when you consider how terrible most people are with their privacy - completing KYC, using centralized exchanges, using the same email for everything, posting things on social media, and so on - then many bitcoin thefts will be targeted attacks by criminals who know exactly what they are looking for.

I'm afraid I absolutely would not recommend Brave. They are better than Chrome, sure, but only because Chrome is literally the absolutely worst browser on the planet in terms of privacy and securing your data. Brave, while they run a very flashy marketing campaign about being very pro-privacy, are actually nothing of the sort. They take money from companies like Facebook and Twitter to whitelist their trackers and allow them to spy on you. They take money from various ad companies to specifically serve you their ads (which are of course still profiled to your information), but users seem to accept that because they get paid peanuts of some useless token in return. They take money from Binance to inject their code and widgets in to the browser, which again are used to track you. The secretly auto-direct your browser to URLs you didn't enter or click on and insert their referral codes in the process. They are entirely driven by making themselves money, and a lot of the things they once stood for in terms of privacy are not long forgotten in pursuit of more profits. And don't even get me started on a so called privacy browser asking for KYC.

If the Chrome app isn't even installed then it can't track you, no. But depending on what OS your phone is running there could well be some deep rooted Google stuff in there that will be impossible to remove.

Well, of course. I assume most people would trust themselves to not send themselves malicious data.

Exactly this. It is trivial to run an Electrum server. An average home computer running a full node could run multiple servers simultaneously, meaning a large blockchain analysis firm could easily run the majority of public servers if they wanted (and indeed, this could very well already be the case). Even if you only ran a single server, then simply over time you could collect enough data to link addresses from most wallets simply by matching the IP of all the requests your server does receive.

And given how trivial it is to run an Electrum server, no reason not to just spin up your own one.

Again, irrelevant. Whether or not it is morally right to steal money which does not belong to you also does not depend whatsoever on how careful or otherwise the owner has been with that money.

I don't see the difference whatsoever. Whether you find a paper wallet or whether you break in to an electronic device to access the wallet, you are stealing money which is not yours. What about if you accidentally stumble across someone's seed phrase back up? I would suspect that most people would view that as outright theft. How is that any different from stumbling across a paper wallet?

I mean yes, but that's beside the point.

Completely correct. If all the bitcoin you have purchased is on a centralized exchange, then you own exactly zero bitcoin.

Once again, absolutely do not do this. The most likely way for the owner to access his funds is by realizing his paper wallet is lost and moving them. If you move them first, they cannot do that anymore.

Irrelevant. Whether or not it is morally right to steal money which does not belong to you does not depend whatsoever on either how easy that money is to steal or how likely you are to get away with it.

No. Because bitcoin that might be lost equally might not be lost at all.

OP said "0.6104...ish". There are no addresses which contain exactly 0.6104 bitcoin. There are 85 addresses which contain between 0.61040000 and 0.61049999 bitcoin.

So hacking a hardware wallet is theft, but stealing a paper wallet isn't? Why?

No, it isn't. The owner no longer has access to lost cash. The owner may very well still have access to these bitcoins.

Could have been fee. Could have been block time. Could have been a combination.

The "priority" of a fee is constantly changing based on what other transactions are in the mempool at the time.

Not unless the mempool was super full and they had set a fee which was unlikely to confirm for days.

They could try, but they are unlikely to be successful if the original transaction is already viewable across multiple block explorers.

The solution to all this remains the same as the solution I gave you above: Just wait for a few confirmations.

What? No. Finders keepers? So if you lost your mobile or hardware wallet on the street, you would have no problem with someone breaking in to it and emptying your wallets? How is that any different to emptying out a paper wallet you found which does not belong to you? Sure, OP is highly unlikely to get caught, but that hardly makes it morally OK.

All you need is the address (which one of the presumably two QR codes will be encoding) and you can look that address up on any public block explorer website* to see the balance. Every transaction on bitcoin is public and can be viewed by anyone. All you need to know is the relevant address.

Make sure you do not enter the private key in to an electronic device or scan its QR code, as doing so risks the funds being stolen.

*Examples:
https://mempool.space/
https://blockchair.com/