Let me be honest here, I was (gullible enough to get) hacked a couple of times over the years crypto became my hobby. I've dealt with well over 200 different wallets over the years and probably like 2 dozen different miner softwares (still have most of them) and it took a while before I started I got slapped with a dose of reality and losing many coins. Then I started using Sandboxie and quickly learned that it has to be used with custom settings (default settings are no good at all, that still have read rights of everything important, like wallet.dat or browser user data) and then moved over to using multiple separate PCs.

You always think it won't be you and when you do lose some coins you tighten up your security and given time you start to feel safer than you actually are as you drop your previous security routines. At least most people do.

As I, and many others have said before, antivirus software doesn't help at all. Malware can be sophisticated enough to fly under it (encryption) or disable it or have its payload trigger without it detecting it. Just don't ever fully trust them on an important machine. Just think about how many times you trusted something with "false positives". Great malware mostly doesn't even give false positives.


Anyway, I'm 90% sure the phising wallet had no persistent parts and that my PC was fine but after I safely moved my coins to an offline machine I reinstalled it completely. Why risk that 10%? It's not a 10% tax, it's 0 or 100%.
It's a hassle and it takes days to get everything back to the way it was and it is a pain in the ass to deal with many transactions through a separate machine, it sure beats even just having to worry about one day waking up being emptied.

And you can always store some coins in a hot wallet. Risk and reward, or in this case risk versus lack of annoyance. Don't be lazy people.

@DireWolfM14 Yep, the payload could be encrypted or otherwise hidden so scanners are never a 100% reliable, we know that. I got used to verifying my download sources but I've never seen an Electrum broadcast message so it took my guard down. And after seeing how many people got fooled by it, in many waves and since how long ago since the first, I'm feeling pretty annoyed with how the Electrum devteam is handling it.

I moved my funds to an offline computer and will be formating this PC.

It's just people tend to become lazy with security until they get caught. Didn't lose anything but easily could have. Anyway, thank your for your help.

I'm late but I just got tricked into the fake, 4.0.0 version in a hurry and the moment I knew it was fake when it asked for my 2FA when I launched it. So I didn't give it to them.

Removed it, did a malware scan and did a search for all the files that were created/last accessed in the last 20 minutes and I didn't find any new or suspicious files or any extra running processes or msconfig service/startup entries so now I'm wondering if it had any persistent elements to it as I don't think so but I'm curious about others. Did it also target other wallets?

Why would anyone buy a big ass noisy and powerhungry server with 48GB RAM for staking?

Even a very old beaten up laptop with like 2GB RAM can run a couple wallets. You could even get a laptop with a broken screen or something nobody wants, setup remote access with a monitor plugged in, put it in the basement somewhere and forget about it while remotely connecting to it. It even has a built in UPS so even with poor batteries it will handle short power outages. It's really simple, no need to overcomplicate it with servers.

Well, it's not the end of the word, or even tree cutting.

I've tried to get Woodcoin to Yobit a year or so ago but they haven't even replied. But I'm sure there are exchanges that would have this coin.

Funny, that Bitcoin is still up compared to most of last year but everything is still basically frozen. That's partly because unfortunately the majority of crypto is now people who are new to crypto, attracted by a non-existing gold rush and they moved away from PoW coins and doesn't share the same views or appreciate the fundamentals of crypto, they mostly just want to get rich quick. If they can't/didn't then they just write cryptos off. But, we've been through many periods where prices were low and mining was not very appealing for various reasons but I'm sure it will change again - even though this one is by far the biggest.

What's clear to me is that we need at least one exchange, the rest is not that important. If anyone has an idea, I'm curious (I'm not familiar with current exchanges much).

You need to unlock it for staking so it's not safe.

You sort of nailed it. It almost always matters a lot how many blocks a coin have. Coins with 2-3-4 million coins are almost always way slower. But there are also some coins with awful wallets, regardless of block numbers. They might look pretty and whatnot but they might be either crashing a lot or be resource hogs or just be generally annoying (dropping nodes, losing sync/forking off, frequent mandatory manual upgrade, etc).

Pwpwpw's experience also isn't unwarranted. PIVX used to lose all sync after each crash (and for a long time it forked off very frequently) but that has been fixed a while ago so it's better.

But, even though each wallet share some part of their codebase, they can be very different in terms of how they run. So realistically, the question isn't how many wallets you can run, but rather what coins? It's a weird mix and match but ignoring some really awful wallets (Verge, Ultracoin, Cryptonite (M7) are my most hated ones coming to mind) I think people way overestimate how much resources you need to stake. I mean the wallet might start slow and it might use the pagefile but once it's running, generally it's not using virtually any resources. There are some weird wallets though with frequent 100% CPU usage, regardless of what CPU you throw at it. Or wallets that have frequent high CPU usage so much they lag behind a few blocks with more than a few peers (I'm guessing someone syncing from you has some issues).

So anyway, I'd just run what I can if I were you and look at resource monitor or whatnot to see if there are any serious bottlenecks semi-long term.

It's safe to say that every single exchange will eventually get hacked. Most of them already were, probably many more times than they'd report it publicly if the losses weren't that great.


What do you mean here? Let's be honest, no centralized, closed source exchange could ever be really transparent at all.

Even some basic transparency would imply knowing how much coins were in hot and cold wallets. But exchanges don't even share that. And realistically, how could they had all those coins in hot wallets AND let the system withdraw it automatically (if that wasn't circumvented)? After all these years and so many hacks that's just either utter stupidity or a cover.

Many crypto services and tools were ended in the last few months, it's not impossible this is how they wanted to get out. Though we'll never know for sure.

Doing the same but I get 8-10x as many rejects than accepted shares with Nvidia cards.

Another one bites the dust. Though I think ERC20 tokens are a cancer to crypto anyway.

Still, that's a lot of money. Too much money in a hot wallet. And you can never be sure it wasn't an inside job.

It's the 3rd hottest coin now on their exchange yet it's on delisting queue.

They marked 24 coins for delisting and have 31 coins that are not marked. Compared to how many coins they once had I think they'll going out of business soon.

I store them in cold wallet.

It wouldn't be the worst thing as c-cex really let themselves go. Sometimes you can't even raise support tickets as they have the system disabled. And they take forever to update wallets. And there's the nonsense where every summer they go into holiday mode and you can't withdraw stuff like Bitcoin for months.

Anyway, I don't think they'll delist the coin though.

Oh no, one Bitcoin is now only worth five thousands dollars. Pack it up boys, it's clearly worthless and dead.

Don't use anything 3rd party tools when it comes to crypto. It's probably a scam to steal your private keys or something.


Edit: even if the extension is not connecting to a server to send data, they can change that anytime silently buy pushing an update through the store. You can edit the extension manifest to disable updates but if you can do that then you can also use copy paste and/or a text file to keep track of your public addresses.

Sad to hear they still don't package the cases properly. I had the same issue, cases arrived scratched and bent though it was fine for me as I bent it back and didn't mind the scratches. These were much cheaper than other solutions at the time.

These things are way too heavy to be packaged only in a couple layer of foil.

Don't use anything 3rd party when it comes to crypto. It was probably a scam to steal your private keys or something.

Could be but I don't know of any. Problem is, even if there was some, very likely they'd only need to use your cards for just a few hours at a time. And rendering usually comes with big filesizes not just tiny hashes so GPU mining rigs might require lots of disk space and high bandwidth connections. Profesisonal rendering or other professional uses of GPU arrays might also require secrecy and they might just invest the money into GPUs as well.

Anyway, I'm hoping something will pop up but it's hard to imagine that whatever would come up, it wouldn't be instantly oversaturated by all the GPU miners, essentially bringing down the profits to mining levels - which are not great these days.

I don't think so. Diff went down because of how many ASICs were shipped; there were so many of them that for many people by the time the got them, they weren't going to get their investment back.
In 2 years the difficulty is virtually guaranteed to go waaaay up. I'd bet on that. Who knows how many new ASICs will come by that time - but they will come.

Anyway, Genesis' offers are pretty terrible across the board.

Hey, heliumchain.info's staking reward estimates seem to be way off. Like in reality I get half to 1/3rd as much rewards as it suggests.
A user (unobt) told me he's using 50*staking_amount/difficulty for estimating HLM rewards per day which seems spot on to me. I think that should be the correct equation on heliumchain.info.

I don't have masternodes so I'm wondering, does the sites masternode reward estimates correct?