Unlikely. Electrum is incredibly widely used, and so if it had a critical flaw in it we would expect to see hundreds if not thousands of reports from users losing their funds.

You made several mistakes I'm afraid OP. First, you stored more than you were willing to lose in a hot wallet. Then you ignored the warnings in Electrum which say "Please save these 12 words on paper" and "Do not store it electronically". By far the most likely way in which your coins were stolen is from malware or similar accessing the text file containing your seed phrase. It does not matter where on your hard drive it is (since malware can just scan your entire drive for words from the public word list), nor does it matter what order they are stored in since descrambling 12 words is incredibly easy and quick on even cheap hardware.

The password you remembered is irrelevant - your seed phrase is all that is needed to access your coins. The password only encrypts your local Electrum file.

What you need to do now is consider your computer compromised. At a minimum scan with antivirus and antimalware software, but ideally format it and reinstall your OS. Assume any other wallets or sensitive data on that computer are also compromised, including any saved website logins and passwords.

Yes, of course. As Z-tight points out on the previous page, if you aren't using your Ledger device exclusively via your own node, then someone is spying on you, whether that is Ledger themselves or the owner of whichever third party server you are connecting to.

There is no need for Ledger to keep this data for 5 years though (which is what the Privacy Policy states), nor for them to share it with a bunch of third parties.

Because if you use Ledger Live, then Ledger are spying on you.

Here's a quote from their Privacy Policy about what data Ledger Live collects:

"Amount and status of transactions" therefore includes all your transactions and balances.

But also shows terrible management.

Bitcoin has booms and busts. There are bull markets where hundreds of thousands of people are scrambling to buy hardware wallets for the first time, and bear markets with a tiny fraction of that kind of action. This has been the case since before Ledger existed. To fail to see this coming is just another decision to add to the growing list of terrible decisions made by Ledger management, such as Ledger Stax, Ledger Recover, poor security practices and database leaks, lying to your users for a decade, trying to redefine open source, and so on.

Since the current management took over at Ledger, it's been constantly downhill. They are riding on the coattails and the money of the original management and the devices they created, while making bad decision after bad decision.

This is not unique to Ledger. Every good wallet will use a new address for each incoming transaction. It makes absolutely no difference to the fees you have to pay whether each UTXO you receive is on the same address or on different addresses, and using different addresses is better for privacy. I don't want a colleague to pay me $5 for a coffee I bought them to the same address I hold every single satoshi I own and therefore reveal to them my entire holdings.

Most of CSW's bullshit lawsuits so far have been in the UK. The big case moving through the UK courts at the moment which involves several bitcoin devs is the case of COPA v CSW.

Exactly my point. He doesn't need to win. Holdonaut's legal defense cost over $2 million, even though he won the case. Hodlonaut is/was a teacher, who had nowhere near that kind of money. Cobra has been served with a bill of $640,000 despite not even mounting a defense. And these were relatively short and straightforward trials. The COPA trail referenced above has been going on for years, will be going on for several more years, and involves a lot more time, effort, money, paperwork, stress, etc, for all involved than his other sham lawsuits, even if he eventually loses.

That's not how it works. If we all ignore him en masse, then he can run more and more bullshit lawsuits. These lawsuits can do things like prevent certain websites from hosting the whitepaper or letting users download Bitcoin Core, which isn't exactly great for the community. And even if he loses these lawsuits, they can be financially devastating for the other party, which at the moment include a whole host of Bitcoin Core devs. We don't want people to be scared to contribute to Bitcoin for fear of being sued by a scammer.

Rather than ignore him, we need to be loud and vocal in showing the world just how much of a fraud he is, and supporting those who are fighting him in court.

Also, it hasn't exactly taken long for this most recent forgery to be exposed: https://nitter.cz/Arthur_van_Pelt/status/1710144384899932574#m 

As pooya says, everything CSW has ever said or done is at complete odds with the knowledge and ethos that Satoshi expressed via their emails, mailing list posts, and forum posts.

Here's a great example of some of CSW's stupidest moments, where he has outright contradicted things Satoshi has written: https://nitter.cz/Arthur_van_Pelt/status/1587117094130356232

The coinbase transaction of the genesis block and all Satoshi linked blocks pay to a single public key, so whoever owns that private key would be able to sign a message as "Satoshi". So unless a group of people had set up a system where they each hold a set of partial private keys which need to be combined in a trustless manner to form the final private key (which I think is highly unlikely), then only a single person is needed to sign.

It's wild. What exactly is he proposing? That he generated 1,000 pages of text/code related to bitcoin every day for 10 years?

Was this at the same time of his claims that he was enrolled in 19 universities simultaneously, writing 3 university papers in a single night, sleeping for 4 hours a night, and listening to audio books at triple speed while asleep: https://nitter.cz/CalvinAyre/status/1460349867340050436

Anything but signing a message, eh?

You're not missing anything, and that's my point.

Should CSW finally produce a signed message from the genesis block public key, then there is one of three possibilities - he has broken the ECDLP, he is Satoshi, or he has stumbled across or stolen one of Satoshi's key. Of those three possibilities, the first is essentially impossible, the second is only marginally more likely than the first, and the last is exponentially more likely than the other two.

Looks like CSW is doubling down with his usual bullshit:
https://nitter.cz/agerhanssen/status/1710026384326734324#m
https://nitter.cz/agerhanssen/status/1710031786145669512#m

What a coincidence he just so happened to find some more drives filled with proof he is Satoshi! Half of the proof is clearly forgeries and the other half is encrypted, but never mind that! No doubt the forgeries are because he is so smart he was deliberately making them seem fake or something and the password for the encrypted files is in a trust and he'll gain access to it in 10 years' time.

However, looks like CSW has threatened Ayre with something, and so Ayre is maybe still funding him for now?
https://nitter.cz/agerhanssen/status/1710035713394147582#m

There are other factors to consider. If printing money was directly proportional to inflation, then inflation for USD would be >10% rather than 3%. You need to consider where that printed money is going, who is benefiting from it, and what they are doing it with it. If we print $1 million and a bank just takes that a sits on it, then it has little effect on the economy and on inflation. If we print $1 million and a bank loans it to someone to start a business, who then uses that money to hire five people and pay their wages, who then use that money to pay their rent, and the landlords then use that money to buy their groceries, and the stores use that money to pay their suppliers, and the suppliers use that money to buy gas for their trucks, and the gas station uses that money to pay their employees, and so on, then that money has a much larger effect on the economy.

Exchange rate is based more on the strength of the economies (and future predictions about those economies) than on the total monetary supply.

Yes, this is also true, and many countries are printing at a faster rate than the US. Look at countries experiencing hyperinflation, such as Venezuela for example.

Have you personally reviewed the code of 7zip to ensure there are no flaws in its encryption algorithms?
Did you take steps to mitigate against known vulnerabilities such as this one: https://nitter.cz/3lbios/status/1087848040583626753?
Did you make sure to build the app yourself from the source code you reviewed to ensure you haven't downloaded a fake or malicious one?
How to you plan to do any of that for WinRAR given that it isn't even open source?
Did you only encrypt your data on a permanently airgapped device with a clean OS?
Did you make sure to delete all the temporary files it creates in the archiving process, and then write over those sections of your computer's memory with junk data?
Did you make sure to delete the unencrypted text file you would have first stored on your computer before encrypting it, and then write over that section of your computer's memory with junk data?

It isn't reliable. Here are 100 million reasons not to rely on your memory: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402270.msg60342177#msg60342177

Biometrics, especially fingerprints, can be very easily bypassed, even on high end 3D ultrasonic fingerprint scanners such as those on the latest flagship phones - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5281976.msg55391797#msg55391797. It will be trivially easy to fool a basic USB fingerprint scanner.

Do they also have a bridge to sell you? People will say anything to sell their product. How do you plan to verify this claim?

Will you only be decrypting them them on a permanently airgapped device? Will you be writing over the sections of the computer's memory which held those unencrypted files after you are done?

There is a reason that everyone here and every good wallet tells you to write down your seed phrase and store it offline. If you want to ignore all that advice and do your own thing then obviously we can't stop you, but you greatly increase the risk of loss.

Plenty of us.

There are plenty of us who have been preaching "Not your keys, not your coins" since the dawn of centralized exchanges, and there are plenty of us who don't throw their money away on random shitcoins with no purpose other than to make their creators rich.

Here's a post I made in January of 2021 warning about the risks of BlockFi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5308457.msg56070076#msg56070076
And here's a post I made in February of 2021 warning about both BlockFi and Celsius: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5315224.msg56289293#msg56289293

I don't care if the "crypto industry" collapses. 99% of altcoins are outright scams. Centralized exchanges and lending platforms only care about their own profits, and will happily scam their customers, gamble their funds, run fractional reserve, and so on. ICOs, then DeFi, then NFTs, then Ordinals - all short lived pump and dump nonsense designed only to rip off average users and take their money.

Bitcoin worked long before any of this nonsense, and bitcoin will continue to work long after all these stupid fads and scammy centralized exchanges have collapsed.

And you've reviewed every line of code in Veracrypt to ensure there are no bugs or vulnerabilities? And you've reviewed every line of code in your chosen encryption algorithm to ensure there are no bugs or vulnerabilities? And you are 100% certain the machine you are using to do this is 100% free from all malware (you aren't, because no one is). And you are 100% certain the machine you are using is not being targeted by any attacks, or your traffic bring intercepted (again, no one is ever certain of this).

Regardless of how well you do everything electronically, you will never be as safe as a completely offline back up. This is why airgapped wallets are recommended, because they negate many of these vulnerabilities which you can otherwise never be certain you are protected against if using an online device.

This increase in federal debt has almost nothing to do with the migrant crisis.

The $12 billion figure for New York is over 3 years, and will not be reflected to the same level across the other states. But even so, we just added $275 billion to the debt in a single day. The money for migrants pales in comparison.

We've added another $33 billion since I made that last post ~24 hours ago.

"If you wish to make an apple pie seed phrase from scratch, you must first invent the universe buy a house with a garden."

- Carl Sagan LoyceV

I think you'll find my workmanship is perfect and all my fence posts are exactly equal in height.

In addition to Cricktor's answer above, simply because that's what happens in Bitcoin Core: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/058488276f8dc244fe534ba45ec8dd2b4b198a2e/src/node/miner.cpp#L283

But yes, it is also the most efficient way to order transactions when it comes to updating your candidate block and swapping in newer transactions with higher fees.

That's correct. Independent individual transaction which do not depend on any other transactions in that same block can be ordered in any order the miner likes. In reality, almost all miners simply order transactions from highest to lowest fee rates. You can see this in action if you open the most recent block here and simply start scrolling down the list of transactions. It starts at 413 sats/vbyte and decreases as you go down.

The only other stipulation on order of transactions is that the first transaction in the block must be the Coinbase transaction.

It sounds like you are misunderstanding the process.

All transactions in a block need to be valid. Miners don't put valid transactions "at the bottom of the block", nor does validating a transaction "take it down" the block or move it anywhere else in the block.

What usually happens is that a mining pool constructs a candidate block from transactions in their mempool. Transactions in their mempool will first be grouped in to "packages", where any child transactions with unconfirmed parents will be considered as a package, and the fee rate for the whole package calculated. The mining pool will then order individual transactions and packages by fee rate, and then pick the highest fee rate transactions/packages to fill their candidate block. They then attempt to mine that block. The order of the transactions does not change from this point on (unless they create a new candidate block), as it if did, it would invalidate the Merkle root and therefore invalidate their mining attempts. Any packages of multiple transactions will be ordered so the parent transaction comes before the child transaction. By doing this, the parent transaction is verified first, meaning the node now knows about the outputs it creates before those outputs are spent by the child transaction.

Government shutdown avoided for now, which can only mean one thing! Money printer goes BRRRRRR:


$1 trillion in a month is absolute insanity. Here's a post I made two years ago:


The debt is growing exponentially quickly. And check out this graph of the interest payments we are paying on that debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA
3 years ago it was $500 billion. Now we are about to hit $1 trillion a year, just on paying the interest.

Anyone who thinks this is sustainable is crazy.