Pretty much.

As far as I am concerned, the price of Monero is even less relevant than the price of bitcoin - it addresses a specific need, and it has been proven over years to work and work well. When Bitcoin fell ~80% I didn't care because the fundamentals hadn't changed. If Monero falls ~80%, the same applies.

A much easier option than that in the short term is just to close all your KYCed accounts and use bitcoin peer to peer as it was intended in the first place. Long term I would say leaving the US is a good plan for a whole host of reasons, given the mass surveillance machine the US government has turned in to.

They are doing it so all bitcoin transactions can be easily monitored and surveilled. A population under constant surveillance is a population which is easy to manipulate and control, a population which will never dare to step out of line.

I was sure today was Tuesday and was mightily confused with what was going on. Clearly need to recharge my flux capacitor...

Who knows? Maybe because it doesn't promise 1000% returns like most of the scam shitcoins people buy. There are no shitty ICOs or tokens or ordinals or other nonsense built on Monero. Or maybe because people who use Monero aren't super vocal about it. And there is zero media presence for Monero - governments and blockchain analysis companies don't like it, so centralized exchanges won't advertise it and the big sponsored crypto sites don't talk about it. And there was no pre-mine for the creators to splash on advertising campaigns or similar.

Personally, it's the only coin other than bitcoin I own and use.

The easiest way to prevent such losses is just not to use such a technique in the first place.

Whenever someone comes up with their own system, one of two things happen. They either end up with something which adds absolutely no extra security at all, or they end up locking themselves out of their wallets. A prime example is when people swap words around. They either swap two or three words which is absolutely trivial to brute force and is not secure at all, or they scramble their entire phrase, forget the order, and can't figure out their back up.

There are standardized processes for a reason. Just use them.

Yes. The US government posted bounties of $625,000 for cracking Monero, which were not claimed, and no blockchain analysis company advertises Monero breaking services. The government (so far) are unable to break Monero, provided you use it properly.

Yes and nothing, but they are still required to respond to negative comments, particularly any that can cite relevant laws explaining why this proposal is a crazy overreach.

The price on a DEX is what you make it. The price usually favors the maker, because the maker posts an offer for other people to accept. If you don't see a price you like, then post your own offer and wait for other people to accept it. You'll potentially get lower trading fees as well depending on the platform by being the maker rather than the taker.

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Looks like the first couple of comments are now starting to show up:

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Any further nonsense from franky1 will be deleted. Please keep this on-topic.

Let's say you have a biased coin, or you flip a coin in biased way, such that you have a 60% chance of heads and a 40% chance of tails.

The combinations HT or TH are exactly as equal as each other. HT has a probability of 0.6*0.4 = 0.24. TH has a probability of 0.4*0.6 = 0.24. They are exactly equal, and so if you treat one of these combinations as 0 and the other combination as 1, you will be guaranteed to have a random result. This holds true regardless of how biased your coin is, and crucially, it also holds true even if you don't know the bias. Flipping HT or TH will always have identical probabilities.

You exclude HH and TT exactly because the probabilities of these will not be equal, leaving you with only two possible results for each pair of flips with an identical probability and therefore a random result.

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Talking of generating a seed phrase with dice, I just stumbled across this post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/coldcard/comments/17epqk8/040_bitcoin_taken_instantly_from_my_coldcard/

OP used a single dice roll to generate his seed phrase. He rolled a 5, used that as his entropy, and had his funds immediately stolen. Obviously it's a failure on OP's part to understand what is going on, but it's also a massive failure on Coldcard's part that it let him proceed to generate a seed phrase using a single dice roll.

It's standard protocol. No way the US government is going to let unmoderated comments be posted live to one of their websites. They should be posted once they've been checked for inappropriate content.

And because the majority of people complete KYC without a second though. Bitcoin wasn't designed so you can just comply with the same old fiat rules and regulations you've been complying with your entire life. The whole point of bitcoin is to remove the ability of faceless third parties to control you.

Because bitcoin takes power away from the government and gives it to the people, and the government will never accept that.

If FinCEN are able to enact this, many countries will follow suit with their own such bullshit regulations. Don't think you are safe from this just because you aren't American.

We haven't used the longest chain since version 0.3.3 in July of 2010. You can see the change here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/40cd0369419323f8d7385950e20342e998c994e1#diff-623e3fd6da1a45222eeec71496747b31R420

The main chain is decided by the chain with the most accumulated chainwork, not the most number of blocks, to protect against an attack where a malicious miner could manipulate the timestamps of their blocks to rapidly drop the difficulty to one and then mine a much longer chain than the main chain.

This is also incorrect. Blocks are not mined and then linked to a chain - rather the exact opposite. Miners will all have already chosen which chain they will attempt to mine on top of, and any block that they find will only ever be valid on that chain since it will include the previous block hash in its header.

Usually when there is a one block re-org like this, the majority of transactions which were in the now stale block are already included in either the replacement block at the same height or the next block which has just been mined.

Yes.

For a simple explanation of how seed phrases and passphrases are combined in your wallet, take a look at the following links:
https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch05.asciidoc#from-mnemonic-to-seed
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mnemonic#mnemonic-to-seed

If you want a more complex explanation of how PBKDF2 works and the role of the salt in the calculation, then see here:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2898#section-5.2

Also completely unnecessary. You can buy a sheet of titanium metal around 10cm x 10cm x 0.5cm for less than $30 online or at a hardware store, which is easily large and thick enough to securely store a seed phrase.

That's to do with its thermal conductivity being much lower than that of aluminum, which is not really relevant to our purposes here.

Anything that would destroy a paper back up will probably destroy an aluminum back up. It melts at temperatures well below an average house fire, is highly reactive and susceptible to corrosion, and is very weak and easily deformed. It is a very poor choice, not to mention not really any cheaper than stainless steel.

Well, that's already covered under this proposal. This would be classified as "splitting CVC for transmittal and transmitting the CVC through a series of independent transactions", which by their new definition counts as mixing. And I know you are speaking about EUR, but this legislation will absolutely spread beyond the US and affect the whole world soon enough.

Spread the word.

Well yes, but that is missing the point. This bill will not affected me directly since I have never and will never use any KYC platform. But it will absolutely force more service providers down the KYC route, it will massively increase the barriers for new small businesses and service providers to start accepting bitcoin, it will turn many people off of bitcoin altogether, and it will create a two tiered system between "government approved bitcoin" and "free bitcoin". All of this is terrible for bitcoin on the whole.

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Comments on the proposal are now open, and remain so until January 22nd: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23449/proposal-of-special-measure-regarding-convertible-virtual-currency-mixing-as-a-class-of-transactions#

Simply noticing a pattern is insufficient to exclude bias. If you roll your die 60 times and get 15 ones, is that biased, or is that random chance? As I mentioned above, you need to use proper statistical testing, and even then you can only approach a confidence limit and never exclude a bias 100%. I've outlined one possible approach more in this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5395587.msg59967945#msg59967945.

You need to decide how much bias is acceptable to you, and how sure you want to be you have excluded it. The number of rolls required exponentially increases as you want to be more certain you have excluded smaller biases.

Maybe. Maybe not. The numbers given so far in this thread discuss the Shannon entropy, but have you calculated the min-entropy you would achieve from doing this? What randomness extractor algorithm are you planning to use to turn those dice rolls in to usable entropy? How are you converting those dice rolls to binary without introducing modulo bias? It's not as simple as just "roll the dice more" - it's a very complex topic which most people do not fully understand (and I do not profess to either), which is why whenever the topic of manually generating entropy comes up, I always suggest von Neumann's coin flips to simply, quickly, and most importantly verifiably generate 128 or 256 bits of provably unbiased entropy.

Lol. You think the government only take action against things which are illegal? The government works exclusively for themselves, and will take action against anyone or anything which threatens them, illegal or not. They'll take action against someone who did nothing except write open source code under the guise of tErRoRiSm, but they will ignore fiat banks laundering literally hundreds of billions of dollars for actual terrorist organizations.

And the internet is a tool or instrument in money laundering, and fraud, and terrorism, and lots more. Should be ban the internet as well?

Using centralized exchanges is no longer just detrimental to your privacy and your security as it always has been - it's now detrimental to even owning bitcoin at all. If we don't fight against this you won't be allowed to own bitcoin at all. All you will be allowed to own is an IOU on the centralized spreadsheet of some centralized exchange, and we've seen plenty of times over the last few years that such a thing is completely worthless.

This proposal is disastrous for bitcoin on the whole, but even if you don't care about bitcoin at all and are only here to make fiat profits, this bill should worry you.

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Here's something else to keep an eye on, and I'll post updates here as relevant: https://nitter.cz/Bill_Fowler_/status/1716288705655083017#m

Once this proposal is formally published, there will be a 90 day window to submit comments as a first step to legally challenging this nonsense.

https://freedom.tech/patriot-act-comes-to-cryptocurrency/

A fantastic article authored by Seth For Privacy (https://nitter.cz/sethforprivacy), who is the Head of Strategy & Marketing for Foundation Devices, known for their Passport hardware wallet.

As I've mentioned in another thread, and as Seth explains in this article, this newest piece of legislation is an outright attack on bitcoin. It is clear the US government want the only way to use bitcoin to be through fully KYCed centralized exchanges. They are trying their hardest to absorb bitcoin in to the existing fiat system and surveillance state, and destroy the very thing that bitcoin is.

What can you do about it? Get your coins off of any centralized exchange and in to your own wallet. Close your KYCed accounts and refuse to ever complete KYC again. Use privacy tools. Anonymize your coins. Refuse to use any service or product which treats bitcoin as non-fungible and discriminates against or censors certain coins. Bitcoin was not made to become an off-shoot of the fiat system, to be another tool by which the government can can surveil, censor, and control. And if you happen to live in the US, start contacting your representatives about this draconian piece of legislation.

https://bitcoiner.guide/nokyconly/
https://kycnot.me/

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Spam will be deleted.

Without going too much off topic, if you use Windows and/or Chrome you should assume your privacy is zero.

On older versions of Windows I understand it is still possible to lock down much of the privacy invasion, but on Windows 11 it is absolutely staggering just how much telemetry and monitoring is going on behind the scenes and how often it is connecting to Microsoft and whole host of third parties and reporting on what you are doing. Chrome is even worse, and I've said before many times on this forum that Chrome is literally spyware with a browser slapped on top. If you use Chrome, Google know everything that you do online.

Not only are you not protecting it, but you are making things actively worse by allowing Google to track and record all your activity.

I don't think it is simply that they don't bother to check. Rather it is a deliberate decision.

Under "Motiviation" on the link you shared to the Electrum seed versioning system, it explains why the Electrum devs did not want to use a system which depended on a fixed wordlist and could instead be used with any wordlist, and more importantly could recover seed phrases without knowing the wordlist used. It uses the same wordlist as BIP39 as default I assume simply because it is well known and does have a number of advantageous features (such as each word having the first 4 characters be unique, excluding similar words, etc.), but they are quite clear they do not want to depend on any fixed wordlist, and therefore allow users to use their own custom wordlist of any length.

You will never know unless you actually test for the bias, which essentially no one does.

Are all the dice from a particular batch or from a particular manufacturer biased towards a certain number? Or perhaps all the dice are biased in their own way? Imagine how cheaply most dice are mass produced. Expecting them to be free from bias is very naive. Even casino grade dice are going to have some intrinsic bias.

Again, you will never know unless you actually test your dice. Perhaps all 10 dice are biased to the same number, and so you are just compounding the problem rather than addressing it.

If you produce a number with fewer bits of entropy then it is less secure, regardless of the bias which got you there.

Maybe. A better option would be to test the dice first using a Chi squared test. A better still option would be to use a debiasing approach which guarantees a completely random result regardless of how biased your dice are.

Correct, and actually it's impossible to prove there is no bias whatsoever. The best you can do is asymptotically approach 100% confidence, but you will never actually reach 100%. And as you want to become more and more sure, you need more and more rolls. I've not ran the numbers, but you could likely rule out a 10% bias with a few dozen rolls, but to exclude a 1% bias you will need hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls.

I would not be in the least bit surprised if it emerged that many of the most widely used blockchain explorers are owned and operated by blockchain surveillance companies or indeed governments themselves. We already know that such entities run various third party servers which are used by light wallets, so I imagine the same is also true for blockchain explorers.

The irony that you made this statement just the day before FinCEN posted legislation to do just that.

Depends. If you are not using Tor, then you are probably leaking enough information via just your browser to de-anonymize yourself. Not just your IP address, but your browser fingerprint is almost certainly unique, and can be linked to everything else you have done in that browser, including login in to social media profiles and whatnot. I've explained this in more depth in this reply here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5467665.msg62893651#msg62893651