The most handy way would be to run the software in a virtual machine.
The more safer way would be to run it on a second dedicated PC.


Generally, yes.
But VirtualBox [1] (from Oracle) and VMware [2] are the most reputable.
You should also keep in mind that this is not 100% safe. There also has been found exploits to escape the safe environment of a virtual machine.
For example: Pown2own hacking contest in march, this year: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3182816/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-ends-with-two-virtual-machine-escapes.html
These exploits arleady have been fixed. But the possibility of breaking out does exist.
Of course, there isn't a high risk. Most of the malware trying to steal private keys, wallets are coded extremely bad. But you should be aware of the possibility.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/
[2] https://www.vmware.com/

Segwit (not 2x) already inceased the block size from 1MB to 4MB (non-witness-part) in a soft fork earlier this year.
Currently blocks have the size of about 2-2,5 MB. If everyone would use segwit already, this could increase to 4MB.
Doubling (resp. increasing) the block size again is contra productive in terms of centralisation. Additionally its just a short-term solution to the scalability issue.

The Lightning network is no way more centralized.
Everyone will be able to open a payment channel. And payments will be distributed across different payment channels.
You will still be in control of your money, always. The LN is a second layer. It does not have to be used. Old on-chain transaction will still be possible.

Well.. this depends on the amount of time you are willing to invest to crack your password.

The time is basically depending on 2 factors:

• Amount of passwords to check (which itself depends on 1) password length and 2) the set of characters used)
• The amount of combinations your machine is able to test

For example:
If you were using 0-9, a-z and A-Z.. thats 10+26+26(=62) different characters.
If you only remember that your password was between 6 and 8 chars that would result in
62^6 + 62^7 + 62^8 (=221.918.520.000.000) possible combinations you would have to try.
On average you have to serach 1/2 of the search space to find your password (50% chance after 50% being tested).
Thats still quite tough.

The more you remember from your password, the easier it is to reconstruct it.
I'd say anything above 8 characters is not possible to crack in an appropiate amount of time (currently).

This will definetly be the lightning network.
The lightning network is an implementation of hashed timelock contracts (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashed_Timelock_Contracts).
The pro's of LN are pretty clear i think. The only contra argument (in my eyes) is that its not ready yet. It still takes some time until tests are done.
The first tests went successfull. But this hasn't been tested with massive amounts of transactions yet.
But once LN will get ready (and used) it will be able to process thousands to ten thousands of TX/s (with a 'very low' fee).
Theoretically 100k-1 million should be possible. But again.. there hasn't been any tests on this. And this (if posible to achieve) will take quite some time
until its smooth enough to process such a huge amount of transaction.

Doubling the blocksize on the other hand is just a short-term solution. And to be more precise: A bad one.
If increasing the blocksize is the only attempted solution to the scalability problem, this will fail in (probably) less than 10 years.
Blocks will get full again in a few years. Especially with such a high adoption rate as currently. Doubling the blocksize will seem to be a
solution again. But at some point, the time it takes for a nodes with non-high-tech-computing-machines to validate a block, will exceed
the amount it takes for big mining farms to mine a new block. This will lead to centralization and is exactly what bitcoin was not made for.
Additionally there hasn't been any tests on how the network would react to bigger blocks.
If you look at BCH for example: The blocks have an average size of 100kb. Thats far away from their double blocksize from BTC.

Segwit (not segwit2x) already increased the blocksize from 1mb to 4mb. Thats more than enough short-term solution until LN comes into play.

The transferring itself is just a simple transaction. From your legacy address to your segwit address.
There is no other way of 'changing' your address type. Depending on the amount of inputs this could cost quite a high fee.
If your btc's are composed of small inputs you may wait until the fees will settle down to not pay too much in fees.

But your wallet does have to support segwit. Not every wallet does support segwit yet.

Here is a summarized list of (the most used) wallets supporting segwit:

Unfortunately you can't recover your coins without the private keys (which are derived from the 12-word-seed).
Do you know why the one address containing money isn't part of your wallet?

If your wallet was a Hierarchical Deterministic (HD-)wallet, which it probably was, then you only have to back it up once.
Each address generated afterwards is still part of this HD-wallet (and therefore also from the same backup).

If you once imported the private key into a wallet thats a different thing. But some wallets still export those in their native backup files.
Sweeping, by the way, is not the same as importing. If you swept your btc's from a wallet they are indeed sitting in your wallet (and therefore contained in your backup).

I would definetly recommend to import your seed phrase into a wallet and check if an address contains any BTC. You may still have luck.
As already mentioned above, electrum (https://electrum.org/#home) is pretty suitable.
If there aren't any btc's in your imported wallet, you could still try to check the file-backup. It may be a backup containing other private keys.




 

You can 'look' at your BCH in a block explorer (e.g. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks).
Just paste in your addresses which had BTC on it at the time the fork/snapshot happened.



What kind of wallet backup do you have?
Just a wallet file? Or private keys in plain/encrypted text?
Do you have a mnemonic seed? (not sure if those already existed back in 1.x versions).

Usually it should work if you just move the wallet file into the folder of your updated electrum version.
But make sure to back it up! Always.



Your BCH are 'sitting on your private keys' which had BTC at the time of the fork.
You can move you BTC's without any risk to your BCH. Actually you should move your BTC before importing your private keys into a BCH wallet - for security reasons.

There is no reason why the lighting network should be dead on arrival 
When lightning comes into play there won't be such high transaction fees... At least not after it all settled down.
Transactions are still being sent.. even with a fee of 20-40$. No reason why 'the first' user of lighting network wouldn't pay such a fee.
And if the adoption works fairly well the fees 'on the lighting network' will be very low. Transactions on the main chain will still be higher than in
payment channels, but they will definitely go down.




BTG is a scam. I think this should be clear to everyone.
BCH is just a short-term solution. Doubling block size is basically just retarded. Thats the way my grandma would address the problem.
You can't just double the block size everytime the fees are going to rise. This won't work and will lead to extreme centralization.
BCH is currently handling a small small fraction of the transaction on the BTC. Noone knows how the BCH network will react to nearly full blocks.

Segwit is way more than enough short-term solution. But if people aren't ready to use segwit, there will be no improvement of the TX/s rate.
People shouln't really complain about the transaction fees without at least trying to use segwit addresses.

If you want to get 'back to normal' i assume you mean that every transaction should be confirmed?
If this is the case you can do a child-pays-for-parent as others already mentioned.
You have to use the change-output of your unconfirmed transaction as a new input for a new transaction (to yourself).
The fee of this transaction has to be high enough to cover the fee for both of your transactions.
Unfortunately you can't explicitely do this in ledgers chrome app. But you can use electrum (https://electrum.org/#home) together with your nano s
to create such a transaction.

Your money is never lost.
You are still in control of your btc's until the transaction gets confirmed.
You can either wait until the transaction gets dropped out of the nodes mempool or perform a child-pays-for-parent.
A double-spending would be another options. But this would require to get this TX relayed to a miner who accepts 'conflicting' transactions.

Bitcoin is not the same as Bitcoin cash.
Since your TX only exists on the BTC network i assume you are talking about BTC, not BCH.



You probably didn't import a private key, but rather sweeped the balance?
Sweeping means to send all funds from one address to another address of yours, where importing imports a private key into your wallet client.



Confirmtx seems to be not working anymore. You can still submit transactions, but they simply don't accelerate them at all.
This also applies to most (if not all) of the free accelerator around at the moment.
viabtc (https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/) seems to be the only working at the moment. Unfortunately they only speed up 100 tx's / hour.

1. Download an IOTA wallet/client: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases
2. Open your IOTA wallet
3. Paste your seed from your paperwallet into the 'Seed'-box

Afterwards you can easily send your coins to bitfinex, etc..

However.. this does not belong into Bitcoin Technical Support..

Is 'File not found' the only output? Or additionally something like No such file or directory - C:\\Users\\USERNAME\\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin ?
Did you install bitcoin core in the standard path? If not you have to add this parameter: --datadir=YOUR_PATH

In this case your command would look like this:

You can also dump your wallet from core itself:


Edit: Just found out that its not possible to dump encrypted wallets using pywallet without the --passphrase=PASSPHRASE command.
But you could try btcrecover (https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover) to crack the password of your wallet.dat
Please note that cracking a 10+ character password without knowing what it could be, is pretty desperate.

The whole point in confirmations is to have a proof-of-work accomplished.
The work accomplished in a specific timeframe stays the same. Whether you have 1 block / 10 mins or 5 blocks / 10 mins.
If, for example, there are now 5 blocks / 10 mins instead of 1, those 5 blocks would have 20% of the 'work' of a current block, each.

Satoshi recommended to wait for 6 confirmations until regarding a transactions as securely finished.
If there would be 5 x more block sin the same timeframe, you would have to wait for 30 confirmations until the same level of security is reached.

The only advantage would be to have the 1st confirmation faster.. but again.. this first confirmation would be 'less worth' (in terms of security) than currently.

You should move your coins out of your nano s ASAP if you don't have access to the backup seed anymore.
The next time an firmware update is pushed onto the nano s (or the next time it might crash,.. ) you will need to recover your nano s from your 24-word-seed.
If you are planning to keep your nano s laying around for 5 years without having access to the backup sheet, there will probably be quite a few new updates which will wipe your nano s,
forcing you to set it up again. Without your seed you won't be able to do so.

You don't have to buy a new ledger. Just create another wallet (e.g. paper wallet or desktop wallet (preferably on offline pc)) and send your funds from your nano s to this wallet.
Afterwards you can just reset your ledger, getting a new seed and transfer your funds back to your nano s. But with the current fees you might wait some time until performing this task.

Basically you have two options to 'get your money out of mycelium'.
You can either send your funds to another wallet/address of yours or you can import your 24-word-seed (which you hopefully backed up) into another BIP39-compatible wallet (e.g. electrum[1]).
To get your seed phrase out of mycelium you need to chose your HD-wallet -> Click on the 3 dots at the top right corner -> Backup -> write down your seed-phrase.
To get your seed into electrum you have to choose 'recover wallet' and then paste your 24 words in there.

[1] https://electrum.org/#home

There are a few people around here on this forum which have access to mining pools.
They may confirm your TX into their next block. But this will definetly cost 50$+.
You might also try to wait until the backlog of transaction has calmed down. Then you can try a child-pays-for-parent transaction.
In such a CPFP-transaction you are sending your (non-confirmed) output to another address of yourself with a fee which is big enough to cover both TX fees.
If a miner comes across your 2nd TX he will then confirm both of your TX's if its lucrative.
Currently this would exceed the amount of BTC in your transaction.. but after mempool has cleared its a viable option.
Until then you can either pay a huge amount to get your TX into a block by a miner or you just wait until the mempool has calmed down.
But definetly keep on contacting the support, with 50 sat/B it could take forever to get confirmed (or won't get confirmed at all..).

Your transaction already got confirmed. But for the next time:

If you don't remember what fee you set (or you are the recieving part in the transaction), you can check it on a blockexplorer online.
Blockexplorer are for example: https://live.blockcypher.com/, https://blockchain.info/, https://btc.com/.
Just paste your transaction id into the search bar.
And for estimating the amount it takes for your TX to get confirmed you can visit https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ and scroll down to the bottom
to see what fee is esimated to get a fast confirmation. The table shows you how much transaction with X fee has been confirmed/broadcasted.
At the right sight you see the estimated time the confirmation may take in blocks and minutes for each fee-range.

No, thats not true.
Transactions are limited to a weight of 400.000. Look it up here:
Defined as constant here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/3c098a8aa0780009c11b66b1a5d488a928629ebf/src/policy/policy.h#L24.
And validty-check here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/3c098a8aa0780009c11b66b1a5d488a928629ebf/src/net_processing.cpp#L661-L665
Since the weight of a non-segwit transaction is 4 times its size, this leads to a maximum size of 100.000 byte (100kb) for valid transactions.

Note the comment: (to be found in 2nd link).

The 'window of opportunity' is between ~10-30 minutes.
In these 10-30 mins the basic to-do list would be:

• Scrape/gather the public key as soon a transaction gets pushed
• Crack the private key with the public key known
• Create + broadcast a double-spend transaction
• Pray to god an unhonest miner discards the original transaction for your malicious one in his mempool
• Pray to god this one unhonest miner mines a block containing your TX before anyone else mines a block containing the original one

This is not doable in such a short amount of time. Even quantum computers are no magic machines... even tho quite a few people believe they are..
1) There are no algorithms to *crack* the ECDSA of bitcoin. Neither normal algorithms, nor qantum algorithms.
2) Even if there already were quantum computers working perfectly and if there were algorithms made for breaking ECDSA.. this would still not be possible in such a short amount of time.

Additionally you have to consider that it takes decades to create qantum computers + algorithms to approach such a 'crack' of BTC.
In these decades there is more than enough room for soft-/hardforks to stay quantum resistent for another 100+ years.

You have paid 0.002 btc to the exchange as a withdrawal fee. But the exchange paid 0.00045 btc transaction fees.
If the exchange would have paid the full 0.002 as a TX fee it would go through a lot faster, but exchanges always retain a percentage of the fee.
You could try to do child-pays-for-parent (CPFP: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fee_bumping), but with the current network status it would
probably eat up the biggest part of your withdrawn amount. So waiting / free accelerator is the most economic way to go.



I guess you mean viabtc (https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/) ? They have a limit of 1000 TX accelerations per hour.
Quite a lot people try to accelerate their stuck transactions these days.
You have to submit your transaction within the first few seconds of a new hour to get your TX confirmed within the next few blocks viabtc mines.