While it is true that linux systems are less targeted by malware (about 95%+ of malware is written for windows) it is wrong to assume
that there are un- and/or secured operating systems.

Each operating system is just as secure as you construct it.
Each system can be exploited. But the measurements you take to secure your network defines the overall security of your system.

Well, i am fine with them supporting segwit because of their own incentives.
It is a win-win situation. They get good marketing, whatever.. and the whole community gains wider segwit adoption.

One can't simply expect everyone to support segwit because of an overall improvement of the whole network.
People often need an incentive for themselves. They need to have benefits from it. As long as no party loses (in any way) i think thats fine.

Cash is not the same as an electronic payment system.

Efficiency is a relative term. And those systems are by far not free.
You might not always have to pay a fee in $ to transfer money. But you pay with your privacy.

Those services (hello paypal) track every activity. From IP you login from to amount of time it takes you to click a button on their website.

A centralized system has a huge amount of contras. Each system has its pros and cons.
For people who care about their privacy and don't want 3rd parties to have more information about them than anyone else,
such a centralized payment system is a no-go.

Instead of creating a (very) simple encryption by yourself, which is not just unsafe but also easy to 'crack', you might consider using an known (and trusted) algorithm.
Encryption through substitution and a few linear(!) functions can always be reversed without to much effort.

If you are not trusting windows, why not simply switch to linux? You don't even have to switch completely. You can just use a dual boot system.

Even if you want to stay on windows, it would be way easier and safer to just use an open source implementation of a well tested encryption algorithm.
You can even implement an encryption yourself. But you should really use an known (and tested) encryption algorithm.

This eliminates the risk of any closed source software / malicious implementations without exposing yourself to the risk of an easily reverted encryption.

Segwit is not only for lower transaction fees.
It fixed transaction malleability and enabled HTLC's (was necessary for implementations like the LN).

 


Thats not true.
Hardware and paper wallets are way safer than desktop wallets itself.

Wether electrum is safer than other desktop wallets can also not be said for sure.




Every transaction has to be signed with private key.
This is not a feature tied to electrum...




bech32 is not an 'additional version'. It is like a 'default' segwit, or 'native' segwit.
Nested P2SH (segwit addresses starting with 3.. ) are made for transition from legacy to segwit and for full backwards compatibility.




There is a mobile version of electrum.
While i think there are better mobile wallets, it is still a considerable option to choose from.

You don't have to enter the amount you want to receive.
This is an additional feature.
Did you only rely on this to check wether you received your amount?

Did you check the total balance and tansaction history? Is it completely 'ignoring' your transaction?




Try the following:
Open electrum, goto the console ('View' -> 'Show console') and type in:

This should return true if the address was generated within your wallet.

The most has already been answered correctly.
So i am going to keep this one short:

Anyone can claim/use/spend outputs from address X if he can prove that he is the owner of the address.
This is a cryptographical process. There are private- and public- keys.
A simplified explanation would be: Anyone can send coins to an address ('hash of public key').
To spend those coins someone has to prove the ownership by signing an transaction using the corresponding private key.

The same 'principle' is used in asymmetric encryption and certificates.

The litcoin application (on your nano s) communicates with the Bitcoin chrome application.
To access your litecoin wallet, simply open the bitcoin chrome application and connect your ledger nano s.
Afterwards scroll to your litecoin app (on your nano s) and open it with pressing both buttons.

Then, you should be able to access your litecoin wallet.

The people working/optimizing the bitcoin network/protocol/software are smart people.
I am confident we will see a lot of improvements to BTC in the coming years.




There are several approaches possible to handle this kind of situations.
For example, monero has a very smart way of handling this: private view keys.

Those can be handed out to the government to prove when/where your coins came from.

To be honestly, in my opinion it is a very good sign for crypto when all those ads get banned.

Do you guys realize which types of ICOS/tokens/websites buy googles adspace to keywords like blockchain, bitcoin, wallet?
I would say 70% are some poor phishing attempts (which sadly do work because there are people who always click the link at the top, wether
it is a google ad or not seems to be completely irrelevant to them).

The other 30% are different scam sites, which also live from baiting people into pasting any sensitive information / downloading malware.


So, if a ton of (stupid) people get scammed through those sites, this will hurt cryptos reputation.
As stupid as it sounds.. but the retarded people have to be guarded from those scams.
If not, bitcoin (or any other crypto) won't be able to rise as fast as they 'deserve'.

 

Each hashfunction (which is considered to be 'safe') follows the avalanche effect [1].
This means: If you change 1 bit in your input to the hash function this will result in a probability of 50% for each bit to flip.
This makes it appear as it was a 'random' output when changing just one single bit.

And sha256 does utilize the avalanche effect.
There is no way to 'adjust' the input to 'modify' the probability of leading zero's in a sha256 hash.

I am not sure what the reason for double sha256 is, but im pretty sure its not this one.



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect

8 sat/B should be enough to get your transaction confirmed within the next few hours.

The mempool is relatively empty at the moment (look here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h).

There only has been 3 blocks in the last 60 minutes (average is 6 per hour). Thats the reason your transaction hasn't cleared yet.
If you are not in a hurry, you can simply just wait a few hours.

If you somehow need this TX to go through fast, you can either use an transaction accelerator or use RBF (does not work with every wallet).

0.0026 btc is quite a high fee.

Did you create an extremely large transaction? Or what is the reason you are trying to use such a high fee?

To answer your question properly we need to know which libary you are using.
It may be that this libary is communicating via an API and therefore the max fee is limited.
Or it is hardcoded into it.

A link to the libary would be helpful to find out why the maximum fee is limited.

SegWit itself didn't reduce the fees.
SegWit 'restructures' transactions and introduced a new unit (weight - instead of size).
Due to this changes the size of a transactions is lower compared to non-segwit tx's, resulting in lower fees.

You seem to missunderstand the term 'fee'.
There is just one fee. It is the transaction fee (which is required to get your TX included into a block, depending on the mempool).
This fee is also often called 'miner fee'. It is just another term for the transaction fee. Those are not two independent fees.

Actually asia is kind of a pioneer regarding accepting crypto currencies.
Asian countries were the first who set up regulations regarding cryptos.

Asia, btw is not only a pioneer regarding cryptos, but any other innovative technology.
The adoption/acceptance of cryptos start in asia, but will definetly take over onto other continents.

Cryptos are a completely new asset class. It has to prove itself. This is a long process. This is not done within a few years.

A fork occurs when nodes (not explicitely miner) disagree on whatever rule and a block is mined which does not fit both 'understandings' of consens rules.
Additionally it does not need a majority to perform a fork. One single node is enough to create a (in this case: very shitty) fork.

Addresses starting with 2.. are P2SH on tesnet.
So either 1) multisignature or 2) nested segwit.

Since getnewaddress returned this address i assume you use nested segwit and not multisig.
Unfortunately, as LoyceV already mentioned, you can't sign message from those yet.

Thats not because it is not technically achievable, it is due to the missing convention on how to exactly perform this.
This is on the 'to-do list'.

'better' is a relative term.
You can't call one better than the other without exactly comparing each properties (which do matter for your decision).




The speed of transactions (better: the timeframe between blocks are mined) has nothing to do with the consensus protocols PoW/PoS.
You are right with PoS using less energy than PoW.
Security is not that easy to guarantee. In PoW the security is 'guaranteed' through calculations (work).
PoS needs a different approach to make sure noone breaks the rules.




Im not sure about that.
Staking money seems not too much different from buying ASICS + electricity to me.
Big mining farms lead to to 'centralisation', just as masternodes or staking does.

Factorization of large numbers usually means 1024 bit (obsolte) or 2048 bit numbers (4096 bit would be recommended to be on the safe side).
Those numbers are incredibly big (about 600+ digits long).




Quite a few organisations have an incentive to find factoring algorithms with a better runtime.
Until now there hasn't been made any considerable progress in solving this problem.

There are already 'wallets' available which are made out from metal (e.g. ledger cryptosteel https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/ledger-cryptosteel)




They may be easy to store. But its not intuitive to spend from them.
Especially not for new members. A lot of people have lost funds because of a change address which they havn't backed up.




~60$ doesn't seem too much for me.
Especially if you consider all the pros it has. You get an isolated device.
The private key never leave the device. It is convinient and safe.

While it is true that vulnerabilities have found.. nothing is bulletproof safe.
Vulnerabilities will always be found. In each kind of wallet. This does not mean hardware wallets are bad.




Hardware wallets are initialized with a 12/18/24 word seed. This seed is used to restore all private keys.
This seed should be backed up in paper form. Not much different from a private key printed on paper?