--snip--

I meanth searching for the term "extension word" in the page i posted a link to: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase
The idear behind bitcoin is being your own bank. You're free to do whatever you want to do, it's your money after all. We're not going to stop you, but we still want to give you some advice... It's up to you wether you take it or not (i, for one, won't be offended if you decide not to follow any advice i give you).

This being said, i really don't know which aspect of an extension word would be harder than a complete self-invented encoding scheme. It would be best if you used a unique, long, random passphrase (from a security point of view), but you might aswell pick a password you use quite often since the only function of the extension word (or passphrase, both terms are used as a synonym quite often) is to slow a brute force attack down for a couple of days untill you moved your funds out of your wallet. The upside of using a password like that is that you probably don't have to write it down, it's already commited to your long term memory.

The big difference is: an extension word is supported and described by the community, by (hardware) wallet vendors, by software wallets.... If you forget about bitcoin and stumble upon your seed phrase in 10 years, odds are you'll still be able to remember the password you use all the time compared to remembering what kind of shennanigans you did in order to encode your seed phrase.

But like i said: the only we can offer is advice. It's up to you wether you take it or not!

Good luck!

If you create a 2 out of 3 multisig wallet, create 2 copy's of each seed phrase and hide them in 6 completely different houses (or banksafes), there is nothing a robber can do... He would need to rob 2 completely different houses in order to "crack" it.

But why don't you just extend your seed with a passphrase (this has already been said)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase
just search for "extension word".

The function of the password is delaying the thiefs just long enough so you can move your funds out.... Sure, they can brute force an extension word, but as long as they cannot brute force it in the timeframe you'll need to empty out your wallet, it's fine.

21.000?

You mean 21.000.000?
(21 million instead of 21 thousand).

At this moment, the smallest unit is the satoshi (0.00000001 BTC), but nothing is stopping the devs from making one microsatoshi the smallest unit if it ever comes to this.
With some sidechains (like lightning), we're already talking about millisatoshi... So it's not even that far fetched.

To set the record 100% straight: the network is not generating your seed phrase...

The network doesn't know you exist, your wallet does not have to contact the network to generate a seed, it generates the seed by itself... You can (and should) even do this on an airgapped offline machine, so you're sure the network doesn't know your seed!

Theoretically you could potentially pick your own (bip39) seed phrase, except the checksum... So you could potentially pick the seed by hand and use (or write) a small tool to know which checksum needs to be added... However, this is a horrible idear... Really... The human mind isn't good at randomness. If you pick a seed phrase by hand, you can rest assured others will have the same idear sooner or later, and you'll lose your funds!

Everybody has to learn
All in all, this will probably be a rather cheap lesson for you, since it'll probably cost you 11 sat/vbyte for a couple hundred vbytes in tx's...

Whatever you do, don't create yet another "child pays for parent" transaction, cause you'll end up with 3 unconfirmed transactions, whilst the initial transaction is long confirmed. Offcourse, it's hindsight now, but if you hadn't done anything, the funds would already have been available to you a while ago... It's those CPFP transactions you created that are currently holding you back.

My advice would be to wait it out... You could bump the fee, but stay faaaaaaaaar away from the "child pays for parent" menu!!!

Something must have gone horribly wrong. If you withdrew from the exchange, you are the receiver, and only the sender can bump the fee (in this case: the exchange)... The receiver could do a Child pays for parent tough (a CPFP).
I assume the transaction from 10:53 was the transaction from the exchange. In the screenshot you have shown, this transaction was already confirmed.
It is my best guess that you might have used the wrong menu inside electrum, and started to do CPFP's, and maybe even tried to bump those children afterwards, getting you in one big ugly mess.

At this point, you could always try to bump the fee of the most recent transaction, 11 sat/vbyte is probably fine since your parent transaction also included *some* fees, so the 11 sat/vbyte of the child + the 3,5 sat/vbyte of the parent should be more than 5 sat/vbyte for the child+ parent.

I've been looking at the screenshots you posted, and i start to wonder: are these self transfers?

You have a transaction funding one of your addresses with an electrum timestamp of today, 10:53 AM, which was confirmed VERY recently. Before this incoming transaction, your wallet seems to have been empty (according to the screenshot)

Then you have a transaction with a value of -0.00000381 sat's, with a fee of 3.5 sat/vbyte... This amount is just enough to cover the fee, and since there's a dust limit, i can only assume you're moving funds inside your wallet. Since 3.5 sat/vbyte is lower than the current "optimal" fee of ~>5sat/vbyte, it remained unconfirmed. Since the wallet was empty before today, i can only assume this transaction is using the unspent output you received @10:53 AM as an input.

Then you have a thirth transaction using the funds you have moved to your own wallet and uses the unconfirmed unspent output as an input to create a transaction with an unconfirmed parent, with a fee of 2 sat/vbyte and a value transfer of -0.00000221. Now, at 2 sat/vbyte, 221 satoshi's is again barely enough to cover the fee, so i wonder if this is a second transaction inside your own wallet.

https://imgur.com/a/hLpqg2s

There's hardly ever a need to move funds to a different address generated by the same wallet... Unless it's for consolidation reasons (which isn't the case here, since you only have one unspent output, so you cannot consolidate it).
Might i ask what you are trying to accomplish here? Are you trying to learn, are you trying to gain some anonymity (if you try to gain some anonimity this way, you're not going to like the outcome), or are you geniunly confused (in this case, take a step back, wait a while, you're doing more harm by panicking than by figuring everything out before doing something else).

I was still updating my reply (one of my bad habits is that i tend to add a lot of stuff to a post after initially posting it).

You should take the size of the first transaction PLUS the size of the second transaction, then bump the fee of the second transaction (the one telling you has an unconfirmed parent), so the fee is > 5*(size of tx1 + size of tx2).

The problem here is that the transaction with the unconfirmed parent can NEVER be confirmed as long as it's parent isn't confirmed (it's parent probably being the first unconfirmed transaction). If you want to second transaction to become confirmed, you need to add a fee that's sufficient to cover the low fee of both transactions...

An other option would be to just "wait it out". Especially if there's no need to get your transaction in the next couple of blocks, waiting might be easyer than messing with RBF or CPFP.

What i can see is two unconfirmed transactions, the second unconfirmed transaction probably uses the change from the first unconfirmed transaction, hence the term "unconfirmed parent".

The problem you're describing, tough, probably has something to do with bumping the fee... And as LoyceV already said: there's a minimum amount to increase the fee by in order to make the rbf transaction valid.

In other words: i think you're getting quite confused because you have 2 problems: the first one is that you only payed 2 sats/vbyte for your initial transaction's fee (while >5 sat/vbyte is advisable), the second problem is that you used the unspent output funding your change address as an input for a second transaction, thus created a transaction with an unconfirmed parent.

When you bump the fee, it should be sufficient to bump the fee of the second transaction (the one with the unconfirmed parent) to a level where you pay more than 5 sats/vbyte for BOTH stuck transactions (it's a form of CPFP => child pays for parent).

Good luck!

Do realise that finishing this challenge does not prove that a 12 word seed is insecure. The last word should even be easyer to brute-force since it contains a checksum...

Back to your initial post... I don't think a 12 word seed is insecure, there are 2048^12 possible combinations. If you substract the fact that there's a 4 bit checksum, that's still very secure (128 bit).
The problem might arise if to much of your seed phrase is known to an attacker. But i'm not completely sure how often an attacker has 8 out of 12 words AND their correct sequence in the seed phrase. I guess usually he/she will either have your complete seed, or nothing at all. I guess most of the times people would try to bruteforce 4 out of 12 words, they're the legitimate owner of the wallet, but they didn't backup their seed phrase, and the paper it was written on got damaged.

Don't get me wrong: i completely agree that one should take precautions against getting robbed, and creating an offline wallet on an airgapped device is defenately a good idear.

Fair enough...
Why don't i generate a new 12 word seed phrase and publicly post 8 of the 12 words,  the first derived address and the derivation path? If you can brute force the 4 missing words, you'd have proven that you have a method that could potentially a thread in real world situations...

EDIT:
SEED: radio blame wonder double before indoor cancel hawk ? ? ? ?
DERIVATION PATH: m/44'/0'/0'/0/0
ADDRESS: 1LU8dS3raRxx2yuGFyVNUJyQPoGHb72Qbz

Good luck!

PS: i wouldn't consider brute forcing 4 out of 12 words of a seed phrase a real "thread" yet, but at least you could prove to us you have the ability to do this, making your video at least plausible.

I fell for the clickbait and watched your video... It shows nothing but you using a (what looks like a) clone of iancoleman's site where you show a seed phrase and a derived ETH address. Then you proceed to lookup the balance on two explorers.
And then, the video stops.

I don't know what you intended to proof with this video, but it doesn't show you bruteforcing a seed phrase with 9 unknown words, so it has little or nothing to do with your post.

In other words: if you intended to proof anything, a video of a couple of seconds with no sound showing nothing but a page that has some text on it and a couple of addresses that were funded will not do the trick i'm afraid.

As far as i'm concerned, you're free to promote your project (at least, i think that's what you're doing), that being said, i personally think that this does not belong in the bitcoin discussion subforum.

All these tokens, wrapped coins,... As far as i'm concerned, they're altcoins that can be traded for bitcoin, so they belong in the altcoin subfora.

Indeed... It seems like those "out of the box" sollutions like to propose Tor so they don't have to help users with setting up port forewarding, firewalling and/or upnp

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5385939.msg59290003#msg59290003

They have a valid point... Tor doesn't need an open port. But in this case your node will only be reachable over the Tor network.

I agree with the above posters, but also wanted to add a keyword: timestamps.... (eventough that's more or less what DdmrDdmr is saying in his answer)

It's perfectly possible for a user to have an impeccable reputation for many, many years,... but then proceed to do an (exit) scam cashing out said reputation.
In this case, you might see loads and loads of positive ratings (from DT members) being added for many years, and then suddenly negative ratings begin piling up. It's not that more recent ratings carry more weight per se, but usually for me they do. It's not because you did something nice for somebody else in 2014 i can still trust you today, but if you have loads of +ve from DT members in the last couple of months, odds are you're still a good guy/girl (and the odds of the account having changed hands are lower aswell).

But yeah, reading reference links, forming your own opinion, have a custom trust list, using the ignore button, looking at timestamps,... it all helps... It's not foolproof tough.

The screenshot doesn't really show the original question, nor is their answer extensive. Odds are they mean that you can run their device, it'll open outbound connections, and that's enough for the device to function (since you don't really *need* inbound connections). The page he refers to doesn't really give any additional information either. But the thing is: no device will automagically initiate port forewarding and firewall rule creation... Unless it's using upnp (which we have already establed, is a protocol that isn't pre-installed on your device, nor do i find it wise to just rely on upnp).

I had to lookup MyNode, it seems to be a prebuilt image that you can either download or purchase an rPi loaded with said image. This being said, odds are you'll run into exactly the same problems as you're having now: you need to foreward the correct port on your home router and configure the firewall... This is something no plug and play device can ever do, it's always up to you to setup your own router and firewall i'm afraid.

I hear what you're saying, but eventough you haven't posted any output from the telnet commands, i think the problem lays in your network setup... And truth be told, the bitcoin core developers can't really do anything about this...

If you wanted to run a webserver on your LAN and make it available for the outside world, you'd be faced with exactly the same problems... Or if you wanted to access a network camera in your lan from the internet, you'd have exactly the same problems aswell.

The problem is that there isn't a "magic bullet" that completely solves this issue... There are dozens and dozens of active router manufacturers, there are hundreds of ISP's,... It's simply impossible to write a complete newbie-friendly walktrough for setting up your home network to run a bitcoin node on your lan wilst having it accessible from the WAN for every router/isp combination out there.

There's the upnp protocol that should make your life a bit easyer, but this protocol also makes sure that malware can abuse upnp so an intruder can access vulnerable device in your LAN pretty easily, that's why upnp is turned off quite often. And for example, it seems your router doesn't even include upnp in it's default feature set (it seems you have to download it seperately).

Now, don't get me wrong, i'm not blaming you for anything... Network setup is quite hard, that's why big company's have to hire network specialists . I do applaud you for trying tough!

unless you are paranoid... Personally, i will not let my hardware wallet's seed phrase touch any electronic device ever.
Offcourse there are ways of printing a seed *correctly* (in the opsec sense), but that would require you to use an offline machine, boot it using a live distro, type the seed in a file which you save on an usb stick, reboot the pc you used to write the seed down (maybe even use a tool to "test" the machine's memory).

Then you'd have to put your printer in offline mode, print from the usb stick, power cycle the printer and fill it's memory with big printjobs (or completely destroy the printer by fire).

Then you'd have to burn the usb stick, or at least overwrite it with random data several times... Also from an offline pc.

Yup... paranoid people exist And if you're serious about keeping loads of BTC @home, paranoia is good... Better to be paranoid than to be robbed...