It's probably worth pointing out that every one of the centralized exchanges and lending platforms which has gone bankrupt over the last few weeks has said some variation of "your funds are safe" in the days leading up to halting all withdrawals. Of course they are going to say that - they want to minimize any panic and any bank runs which would accelerate their demise. It's probably also worth pointing out that Coinbase lie, like, a lot. "We don't insider trade." "We don't sell your data." Lol.

Rather than basing your investment decision from a tweet, maybe look at the actual legal filings which show Coinbase making huge losses and the fact that all users are considered "unsecured creditors" (which means in the event of bankruptcy, you are absolutely last on the list to get back anything at all, as all the people who have lost all their money on Celsius and Voyager are currently finding out).

Mt Gox was too big to fail. Lehman Brothers was too big to fail. Coinbase is just another exchange.

For what it's worth, I think Coinbase probably aren't going bankrupt any time soon, but the fact remains that you should absolutely not be storing your money with them or with any other centralized exchange.

Any source for this?

Their legal documents for Version 2 already state that zkSNACKs is based in Seychelles and has done for over a month already. If they are already based there, and the whole point of their move was to avoid blacklisting, then why are they still talking about blacklisting and not reversing their position?

Completely agree with this. They are not blacklisting yet, but are still operating, meaning there is no legal requirement forcing them to blacklist or be shutdown. So there is nothing stopping them from continuing to operate without blacklisting while they move jurisdictions.

And even if this were the case, then the honest thing to do would still be to direct people to other coordinators while they spin up a different coordinator in a different jurisdiction, rather than supporting this taint nonsense.

If a family member is willing to murder you to steal your coins, then they are definitely also willing to murder you plus one other person to steal your multi-sig coins. Or simply hit you with a wrench until you crack and reveal the location of your other back ups, or phone up your other family members and have them hand over their shares, or unlock the multiple devices/wallets you have to spend your multi-sig coins, etc.

Multi-sig or no multi-sig, either you hand over your coins or you die. The only protection against physical attacks on your person is plausible deniability.

By creating a multi-sig wallet and handing out shares, you are advertising the very existence of that wallet. If you are this concerned about physical attacks, then you need a hidden wallet that nobody knows about, probably created by utilizing a passphrase on top of an existing wallet's seed phrase.

You need to have a read about all the revelations from Snowden and others about the mass surveillance programs that pretty much every government in the world are undertaking, and the fact that most of these governments are sharing this data with each other. Not to mention the exchange itself will be collecting all your data, selling it to data brokers, who will then combine that with all the other data they have on you from a myriad of sources, and then sell all that on to literally anyone who wants to pay for it. It doesn't matter if you are a criminal or not - there is no evidence that mass surveillance prevents crimes. It is about control.

But still, none of that changes my original point: It does not matter in the slightest as to how well regulated or otherwise an exchange is. Any coins you deposit to it are no longer yours and are at constant risk of loss.

Ok. So roughly how much BTC do you have to support the operation of your mixer? Can you sign a message from an address holding some part of those funds?

Perhaps you could also explain why your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are plagiarized word for word from /en/terms/]https://[banned mixer]/en/terms/?
And perhaps you could also explain why your letters of guarantee all return a bad signature from Jambler's public key?

It sounds like you don't understand the market you are in.

Here's a ChipMixer deposit of 1,000 BTC I am aware of simply because we were discussing it an another thread: https://mempool.space/tx/1e7c498469369e90dfdd0c8258c6aa5325661553f441a2c6897d93b210f8ef67. There are plenty more such examples.

Further, a balance of 20 BTC does not let you mix anywhere close to 20 BTC. Since we know now that you supposedly have a balance of 20 BTC, if someone were to deposit say 5 BTC to your mixer, then there is a significant chance that their withdrawal would be easily linked to their deposit due simply to matching the size of the inputs and outputs. I would not even be comfortable mixing 1 BTC on a mixer with only 20 BTC being mixed, which is hardly "unlimited".

Here you go:

PubAddress: 15starM7dZoz3bzD4utKJ6RRxXGv2mCRXq
PartialPriv: 5K9effT7wMAjcDRcLfsp9XX2QwStGUudKMU3G3skmHkNLD3qB3x

PubAddress: 1FiveSt1NBDYRd9Ce4LBceHCnjSXza4H9x
PartialPriv: 5JeHJcfpqPWeMCB3JUrEgdyr7ch4JAvYwoRHcu5Ef7XrBu9zGty

---

So, I've just been poking about with this interaction between VanitySearch and bitaddress and discovered a few things.

Firstly, it works sometimes, but not other times. My initial thought was that since both pieces of software say they are adding the private keys together to reach the final private key, that it has something to do with how they deal with resulting private keys which are beyond the upper limit of the curve order. I thought that if the resulting private key is below the upper limit then they both return the same private key, but if it is above the upper limit then something is different with how they wrapping it back around and so you end up with different private keys and addresses. Both VanitySearch and bitaddress say they are simply adding the keys together modulo n, however, so this doesn't appear to the case. *shrug*

Secondly, it is not unique to segwit addresses, and the same behavior can be seen with legacy address.

However, you can still make it work by just generating a bunch of addresses with the relevant prefix and then testing them yourself in bitaddress one by one using the two public keys rather than the two private keys. You will eventually find one that works.

Pedantic nit-pick, but that derivation path is invalid because the indices at levels 3 and 4 are beyond the valid range (0 - 2³¹ for either hardened or unhardened).

But otherwise I agree. Relying on the luck of someone not generating a specific address type (especially when some software such as Core automatically generates all address types when you import a private key), or making up your own wild derivation path which will be difficult to back up accurately and easy to make a mistake with, are both poor ideas. If you want to hide coins on the same seed phrase, then use one or more complex passphrases, and back these up separately to the seed phrase.

You can see the code for the best_effort_reliable function which generates this error here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/ed65f335bd44c3430581c47e78db0a041540aa5c/electrum/network.py#L845. Essentially it tries multiple times to make a request, and then fails if it is unable to do so.

There has been an issue raised about the vagueness of this error message, but it generated no discussion and has not been actioned: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5815. There are more reasons it can fail other than just "not connected" though.

Which is completely fine for my use case. I don't use, and will never use, any company or service which attacks bitcoin by enforcing taint nonsense, so I have absolutely no care about the history of the coins I receive. All I care about is that it is not my history and cannot be used to link my previous transactions to my future ones.

How funny when Wasabi's blockchain analysis partner changes their rules and suddenly Wasabi's team's own coins are no longer allowed.

If you send Monero directly from one centralized service to another centralized service, then sure, but if you send Monero to your own wallet and then to someone else in a peer-to-peer trade, then this kind of tracking becomes impossible.

This is exactly what happens. See my post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5395035.msg59905002#msg59905002. 25% of coins in Binance's hot wallet were blacklisted.

That's a good point - I'm not sure what's worse. That they handed out loans without any idea what they were going to be used for, or they handed out loans knowing they were going to be used to gamble on pictures of apes with funny hats.

Ok, here's the same statement which was last edited just a few months ago and is still being displayed on their website: https://support.celsius.network/hc/en-us/articles/360002174718-Does-Celsius-have-an-insurance-policy-

Yes, you can. It is almost certain that any seed phrase could be used to generate every private key which could possibly exist. Allow me to explain.

BIP32 allows 1 byte for extended keys to specify their depth. This means 256 possible values. 0x00 is for the master key, leaving 255 levels for child keys. This means that a derivation path can have at most 255 levels beyond m/. It also allows 2³² possible indices per level; 2³¹ hardened and 2³¹ unhardened. This means that any seed phrase can generate (2³²)²⁵⁵ possible child private keys. This number works out to 2.5*10²⁴⁵⁶. This number is obviously many many orders of magnitude larger than the set of all possible private keys, so while it is impossible to prove, it is almost certain that any seed phrase can be used to generate any private key, if you can just find the right derivation path (which is, of course, impossible).

It won't. Although bitcoin private keys are 256 bits in length, they provide 128 bits of security, since the most effective attack against them is not random brute force but to reverse the ECDLP, which would require (on average) 2¹²⁸ operations. This standard is intrinsic to the secp256k1 curve which bitcoin uses, so no matter how many bits of entropy in your seed phrase, your private keys will never provide more than 128 bits of security.

You can see this in Standards for Efficient Cryptography. SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters. (Table at the bottom of page 4.)

There is a huge difference between blockchain analysis firms blanket surveilling every address and transaction which exists, trying to gain whatever information they can from it, and your own wallet actively paying a blockchain analysis firm to spend extra resources to look specifically at your addresses and your coins and asking them to obtain very specific information about the so called "risk" your coins pose. I would liken it to the difference between Google trying to passively track everything everyone does online, and actively using Google search while logged in to a Google account, knowing they will be tracking you very closely and very specifically.

Given that we have access to a perfectly good (or even better) coinjoin implementation which doesn't do this, I see no reason whatsoever to ever use Wasabi.

Any platform, service, exchange, or wallet, which implements blacklists and does not accept particular coins is actively undermining the core principles of bitcoin and should be avoided.

On the contrary: A non-KYC peer to peer trade such as via Bisq or LocalCryptos often has far lower fees than the same trade on a centralized exchange, once you factor in the centralized exchange's trading fee and withdrawal fee.

No it isn't. It is unlikely, yes, but it isn't impossible by any means.

If you double your bet every time you lose you do with Martingale, even if your first bet was only a single satoshi, then you can only make 50 losing bets before you breach the 21 million coin limit of all the bitcoin in existence. And even if you win a bet, your maximum winnings is still only ever going to be a single satoshi.

Martingale only makes sense if you have infinite money. Since nobody does, you will lose everything if you run it for long enough.

Let's bump those numbers up! Instead of two thousand people, let's use every one of the ~8 billion people on the planet. And instead of creating a wallet a day, why don't they each create a wallet every second. And instead of doing that for 100 years, why not let them do it for a million years? After all that time, they will have used 0.00000000000007% of all possible 12 word seed phrases.

So yeah. Never going to happen.

I mean, the video does give an explanation why there will never be a seed collision, but it is filled with inaccuracies.

The number isn't 2048²⁴; it is 2²⁵⁶. He seems unaware of the checksum.
When he holds up the piece of paper with the number 2048²⁴ expanded out, he has 7 too many zeroes and actually shows the number 2.96*10⁸⁶. This seems to step from his misunderstanding that "e+79" means "add 79 more zeroes", which is not what it means at all.
There is an English word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
The number of atoms in the universe is estimated at 10⁸⁰. So even his incorrectly large number is still smaller than this. The real number is smaller than this by 3 orders of magnitude.

Doesn't absolve people of the responsibility to do a basic amount of research in to where they are sending their money. Every service or product in existence advertises themselves positively, as does every scam in existence.

Based on thorough risk assessments, credit scores, income analysis, and so on. It seems very much like Celsius were handing out loans to any large entity which wanted one without really any due diligence on how that loan was to be repaid or what it was to be used for.

Yes, but these users have very strict limits as to what they will lend without collateral. They certainly aren't risking amounts sufficient to put them out of business should their customer default.

Mine is. While they claimed all loans were collateralized by at least 150%, we know now that this was not the case.

If someone with the equipment and expertise required was able to physically attack your Trezor, then they are "only" able to extract your seed phrase and access your base wallet, or unlock with your PIN and access your base wallet. Any passphrase protected wallets would remain both hidden and protected by the passphrase (which should obviously be long and complex enough to be resistant to brute force attacks).

Again, only your base wallet, not any passphrased wallets.

But, you can quite happily use both the SD card and one or more passphrases, so no need to choose one or the other.

If you play blackjack with a perfect strategy, then you can reduce the house edge to a minimum, which will depend on the exact rule set of the table you are playing at. It is still very much a game of chance though, the house will always have an edge, and no amount of skill or strategy will remove the house edge (unless you are able to card count, which is obviously impossible online or with a continuous shuffler as many casinos now use).

This sentence is absolutely nonsense. You are no more likely to win after a streak of losses than you are to win on any other hand. This is the classic gambler's fallacy. And you never get a "much higher payout" on Martingale. All you ever get is break even plus your original bet, which in this example, will be $5. Doesn't matter if after 10 losing hands you are now betting $5,120 and you win $10,240. If you add up all your bets prior to that win they come out at $10,235, meaning you've just risked $10k to win 5 bucks.

It's not effective for any type of game, but if you are going to use it, then all that matters is finding the game with the smallest house edge. Blackjack played perfectly might well be that game.

No, obviously not, but to complain that Celsius did with your coins exactly what they said they were going to do with your coins is just downright stupid. Nobody reads the Terms of Service for buying a video game online, sure, but you would expect if you are going to be depositing several bitcoin (or an equivalent amount of value in fiat/altcoins) to any platform then you might spend a couple of minutes reading about that platform.