Umm, what the actual fuck is this: https://nitter.it/wasabiwallet/status/1550510985022169089

TikTok is one of the worst privacy invasions in existence (a few selected links at the bottom, but you can find thousands more with a simple web search). So much so, that the FCC is recommend that the app is banned in the US. Here's a quote from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr:

So Wasabi want its users to follow them on TikTok, therefore linking the fact that they use Wasabi to their real identity, their biometrics and facial scan, their location, and all their clipboard data, for starters. Did you so much as copy one of your addresses? Maybe you looked up your transaction on a block explorer? Maybe you saved a couple of screenshots of your wallet, or some back up file? Great, now we've linked your entire wallet to your real identity too. Privacy = zero.

This is mad. Even if you want to argue that this isn't actively malicious, it is so incredibly naive that it beggars belief coming from a team which are supposedly focused on privacy.

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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tiktok-circumvent-apple-google-privacy-140000271.html
https://www.engadget.com/fcc-commissioner-google-facebook-ban-tik-tok-064559992.html
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/tiktok-just-gave-itself-permission-to-collect-biometric-data-on-u-s-users-including-faceprints-and-voiceprints/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-tracked-user-data-using-tactic-banned-by-google-11597176738
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/07/tiktok-app-phone-access/

Correct. But there should be no need to, really. If you can generate a QR code for an address to import in to Electrum, then you can also just copy the address normally in the first place.

Not necessarily. A webcam on its own would suffice, provided it is not built in and so you could there point it at the screen on the same device. Or there are plenty of websites to which you can upload a QR code as an image file and they will decode the QR code for you - whether this is an unacceptable security or privacy risk to you depends on what you are transferring via QR code. (Of course with the caveats of blindly trusting a third party QR decoder and that you should still double check whatever is decoded against the source.)

The only issue with this is that it is very easy for a scammer to take advantage of using gift cards. If the store or restaurant they are accepting the gift card for doesn't offer some kind of online tool to check the balance, then the receiver has no way of verifying the balance of the gift card without physically going to the merchant. And of course, even if the receiver does confirm the balance on the gift card, the other party can still spend the balance in the meantime.

There are plenty of reputable gift card sellers such as Bitrefill or CoinsBee which you can still buy from anonymously. I would favor those over peer to peer via giftcards, unless it was with a trading partner you have already developed a level of trust with.

Based on this comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/Electrum/comments/w4f7s3/tx_decided_failed/ih9vq97/) and the screenshot on that Reddit thread, it looks like OP exported his address as a QR code, saved that QR code as a picture, and then tried to import that actual .jpeg file in to Electrum, which is obviously not how QR codes work. The resulting long string of hex data was obviously not a valid bitcoin address but I think Electrum probably interpreted it as a script, which allowed him to proceed but returned the error when he tried to send coins to it. Once he changed whatever he copied to an address belonging to an exchange, it worked fine.

Which also means, of course, that he wasn't double checking whatever he pasted against the source he copied from (or else he would have realized he didn't copy the address correctly), which means he is a prime target to lose his coins to clipboard malware.

Name and shame please. Any exchange which actively attacks bitcoin by enforcing made up taint nonsense should be widely exposed and condemned so other people know to avoid them. There should be no place in the crypto ecosystem for exchanges which apply arbitrary and provably false metrics to users' coins.

I would go further. If you have bitcoin stored on any centralized platform, then you don't own that bitcoin. Withdraw everything, everywhere.

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Here's another exchange which has paused withdrawals: https://www.msn.com/EN-US/news/markets/zipmex-joins-growing-list-of-crypto-exchanges-to-block-withdrawals/ar-AAZPGFn
Seems like they have partially reopened some withdrawals in some regions since that article was published, but are obviously still scrambling to try to cover the big deficit in their books.

Even ignoring the house edge and assuming a completely fair 50%/50% chance to win/lose each game, then you will go bust very quickly. As anyone who has ever gambled will tell you, runs of 3-4 reds are exceedingly common. With a 50/50 game, you have a 1 in 8 chance of any 3 rolls being all red and a 1 in 16 chance of any 4 rolls being all red. Those are not good odds. If you change the multiplier from 2x to 3x, all you are doing is reducing the number of reds in a row you can hit and speeding up the rate at which you will run out of money.

So you go to Send and paste in your address from your Electrum Tails wallet?
You then enter the amount of coin you want to send and hit pay?
You then get a window asking you to set a fee?
You then hit send and get a new window asking you to sign and broadcast the transaction?

Talk us through the steps you are taking and where exactly you get the error message. Also please copy and paste the error message exactly in here.

"TX decode failed" is a Bitcoin Core error message, not an Electrum one. Are you trying to sign a transaction on Electum and broadcast it on Core? Or are you trying to export a partially signed transactions? What version of Electrum are you using? Are you getting some other error message from Electrum?

It didn't. The mempool was empty 24 minutes ago, meaning everything with the minimum fee of 1 sat/vbyte was confirmed. The current next block fee rate is only higher than this because we haven't found a block in 24 minutes. Just make your transaction with 1 sat/vbyte and it will likely confirm within the next hour. If you are unlucky and it doesn't, then it will confirm overnight when the mempool empties out again.

What are you trying to do with your transaction?

I think you need to be clear there is a difference between the Electrum wallet software which you are downloading from the website and is used to show you the GUI and to create new wallets, and your Electrum wallet file which is specific to you and holds your private keys and therefore your coins. It is still not clear to me whether your USB drive holds only your Electrum wallet files, or the entire Electrum directory including your wallet files and the software itself - can you open the Electrum software on your airgapped device without the USB drive connected?

Either way, as I said above, you should not connect that USB drive to an internet enabled device, as that defeats the purpose of having a cold wallet.

No. If there was, you could calculate the entire private key and bitcoin (and elliptic curve multiplication) would be entirely broken.

Take public key K which corresponds to private key k. With G being the generator point, then k*G = K.

If you can work out whether k is odd or even knowing only K, then you can work out whether the last bit of k is 1 or 0. You can then take the multiplicative inverse of 2 of K, which has the effect of halving your private key, which shifts all the bits one position to the right (you would have to do K+(-G) first if the last bit was 1, so you are halving an even number). You can then work out whether the new k is odd or even knowing your new K. You can then repeat this process for the entire length of the private key until you know the full key and then spend the coins.

But if they are taking their trading fees in BTC, ETH, or some other coin, the price of that asset in USD absolutely matters to how much profit they make in terms of USD, which is all they really care about.

It also conflicts with their own ToS, which say that they are under no obligation to hold on to any collateral whatsoever.

And you trust them? As I pointed out in my previous post, Coinbase lie constantly. And as we agreed on just there, other platforms such as Celsius have told blatant lies. These platforms will say anything to try to placate their users or attract new ones. Until I see legal documents from Coinbase (i.e. never) saying that users are not unsecured creditors, then anything else they say can and should be ignored.

If Electrum is installed on your airgapped computer, then you will need to download and verify the latest version of Electrum on an internet connected computer and then transfer this file over to your airgapped computer to be installed. I would use a completely clean USB drive to do this.

I don't understand what you mean by "cold and hot wallet version on the USB drive". There is only one latest version of Electrum. Whether it is cold or hot depends on if the device you are running it on is permanently airgapped or not. If that USB drive also contains your wallet file, you should never be connecting it to a computer with an internet connection if you want it to be a cold wallet.

Oh dear. Let's ignore all the reasons (and there are a lot of them) you shouldn't store coins on a centralized exchange even when you are alive, from censorship and lack of privacy to hacks, thefts, scams, and bankruptcy. From the Binance Terms of Use:

If Binance ever find out that your wife is accessing your account, then she can wave goodbye to all of your coins, since your account will be immediately suspended. In classic Binance fashion, probably the only thing which would allow her to unfreeze your account is for you to complete "enhaned KYC" or some other such nonsense, which of course will be impossible after your death.

Impossible to say for two reasons: We don't know how much of each crypto they are holding, and we also do not know how much of their outstanding liabilities are denominated in crypto (or in which crypto), as opposed to in fiat. If I loaned Celsius $20 million which they used to buy bitcoin, and they later return that $20 million (plus interest) by selling a small portion of that bitcoin which has since gone up in fiat value, then sure, that's fair. If, however, I loaned Celsius 1,000 BTC when BTC was $20,000 (for a total value of $20 million), I'm not exactly going to be happy with Celsius repaying that loan by paying me back 400 BTC when BTC is $50,000 and calling that fair.

This is something I see often. People who have never actually used a DEX talking about how there is too low volume or it is too risky to trade with other people. Meanwhile I've been using DEXs exclusively for years and have never once been scammed and never once struggled to find a trading partner (although maybe that's because I only trade in fiat/Bitcoin/Monero and not a bunch of useless shitcoins).

If you are day trading to try to make profits, then sure, a centralized exchange is probably going to be your only option. But for everyone else, there is no good reason to use a centralized exchange. As you say, you don't need bitcoin now, and a DEX will work just fine. You will spend just as long (if not longer) waiting for your fiat deposit to be credited by a centralized exchange than you will waiting for the same fiat deposit to be confirmed by a peer-to-peer trading partner.

"Invalid input" means exactly that - one of the two keys you have copied in is invalid. I've double checked and both the keys I gave you above are valid, which means either you are not copying/pasting them accurately, or you did not accurately save your original private key.

Double check everything again, and if it still fails, then generate a new key pair and I will generate some new addresses for you.

They barely openly talked about it even when they announced it. It's not really surprising why - obviously they don't want a lot of publicity around the fact that a so called "privacy wallet" is now anti-privacy and pro-censorship.

They've been moving in the wrong direction solidly since this announcement. They have doubled down on a lot of things and continued to attack others to such an extent that I cannot believe it is all just some clever ruse.

Well, they've had loads of time to do it, and apparently no pressure to implement blacklisting. So why not launch an alternative coordinator first, change it the default, and then announce blacklisting on zkSNACKs? Makes no sense.

A DEX will replace them for you if you want it to. I've never so much as registered on any centralized exchange and I've certainly never completed KYC at one, yet I would bet that I buy, sell, trade, and spend bitcoin more than ~99% of the user on this forum. I certainly wouldn't be giving up all privacy for the sake of $20 worth of some shitcoins (never mind the fees I would pay to the centralized exchange just to be allowed to swap that shitcoin in to bitcoin and withdraw the bitcoin), and I'm certainly not letting Coinbase sell my data to a data broker and risk identity theft for $20 of some shitcoins.

Not at all. Multi-sig has many uses, and I use several multi-sig wallets myself for various purposes. But hiding the very existence of coins to protect against physical attacks is not one of their uses.

But what about when it is connected? Or what about the files you presumably had on your main HDD before you transferred them across to your external drive? Did you create and transfer these back ups using an airgapped computer?