As I mentioned above, his doctoral thesis was mostly plagiarized: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5468951.msg62938501#msg62938501

The account is locked, so no one can log in to it unless theymos manually unlocks it (or they hack the forum).

Disagree. Signing a message from an early Satoshi-linked private key is necessary but not sufficient to prove you are Satoshi. That is to say, anyone who can't sign a message (such as CSW) can be ignored, but even if someone can sign a message it does not prove they are Satoshi. Signing a message would be enough to start a wider discussion and examination of the individual in question to see if they have the same knowledge, ability, ethics, etc., as Satoshi did (which CSW has none of).

Even if CSW managed to sign a message today, I still wouldn't think he is Satoshi, given the years of proven lies, forgeries, fraud, basic technical incompetence, contradictions, and outright stupidity. It would be far more likely he had somehow stumbled upon or stolen a private key.

See above from dkbit98:


Personally I like Debian, but for brand new Linux users migrating from Windows, I always recommend Mint. It is far more newbie friendly than some other Linux distros, the GUI is the most similar to Windows, and there is an extensive online community which can assist with troubleshooting.

There are comprehensive and step by step download and installation guides here: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
And for any problems, the online community is here: https://forums.linuxmint.com/

Inbound/outbound connections won't make a difference here, provided both nodes have a good number of connections. Your nodes will receive unconfirmed transactions over both types of connection just the same.

Note that nodes won't try to fetch any transactions missing from their mempool. Once they drop a transaction, they won't learn about it again unless it is rebroadcast. If they receive a transaction which they do not add to their mempool due to it exceeding the size limit, then again, they won't learn about it unless it is rebroadcast. Given that the mempool has only recently come back down below the 300 MB default limit, if there was a delta between your nodes then this delta will persist until the backlog of transactions is cleared. Transactions which one node knows about but the other doesn't won't propagate between your nodes unless they are manually rebroadcast.

If one of your nodes has lost connection, had poor connections, been temporarily offline, hit the default limits before the other one, and so on, then any transactions not added to its mempool during this time will simply not be known about and the deficit will persist.

It is absolutely subjective, as I've talked about before:


Even Chainalysis themselves admit that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence underpinning any of their blockchain analysis bullshit: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5464886.msg62875591#msg62875591

The satoshi is just a satoshi. It is not anything else. If some centralized entity decides that they don't want to accept that satoshi, fine. Their loss. It makes absolutely zero different to me owning that satoshi or spending that satoshi with entities which are not anti-bitcoin.

They are partly succeeding only because they are convincing people like 1miau's friend that taint isn't made up bullshit and that he needs to spy on any coins he's buying.

Worse than that. Coins from hacks and scams have 100% passed through the hot wallets of Binance, Coinbase, and every other major exchange in existence. By the exact same logic that say mixed coins are tainted, then any and all coins withdrawn from a centralized exchange are also tainted. In fact, pretty much every bitcoin in active circulation is tainted. And as my little experiment above shows, coins from one centralized exchange may not necessarily be accepted by another centralized exchange.

The more we accept this bullshit and modify our behavior to comply with it, the more strength we give it and the more we weaken bitcoin as a currency and as a concept.

Apologies. Fixed.

Perhaps some kind of system which would minimize the work involved in swapping lower fee transactions out of the candidate block and replacing them with newer higher fee transactions? But even then, splitting up packages or sorting by absolute fee instead of fee rate still doesn't make sense.

This "experiment" of theirs was an experiment on how they construct their candidate blocks. The hashrate is irrelevant. As long as there are transaction to order, this could be done on testnet. (And indeed, it was done on testnet. They just either didn't notice they were mining invalid blocks, or they couldn't figure out what was going wrong so deployed it to mainnet to have other people tell them why their block was invalid.)

That email from Ayre that CAH has leaked is pretty damning. Especially since Ayre now seems to have confirmed that it is indeed real: https://nitter.cz/CalvinAyre/status/1708715551999074457#m

Another interesting tweet: https://nitter.cz/agerhanssen/status/1708995452551446751#m. Wonder how CSW will continue to fund all his sham trials now that Ayre has pulled all his funding?

Let's hope this really is the beginning of the end for this serial fraudster.

He has a doctorate, but given the whole thing is plagiarized, he shouldn't be called doctor: https://medium.com/@paintedfrog/craig-wright-plagiarized-significant-portions-of-his-phd-thesis-and-tried-to-hide-it-80cd8f01459

Yup. The same thing on testnet, and then just deployed their flawed software to production without actually addressing the fact it was creating multiple invalid blocks. Super smart!

Given they coded a bug on their testnet software, it threw off multiple invalid blocks, and then they ported it across to mainnet without addressing the invalid blocks - yes, probably. This is also the same mining pool who wanted to censor the entire network by only mining OFAC compliant blocks, before abandoning the whole idea a few weeks later when they finally realized it would never work. I wouldn't expect much in the way of competence.

It makes no sense. Their sorting algorithm is simply lowest to highest absolute fee. If they were picking transaction from the mempool based on absolute fee, then many of the transaction in their invalid block wouldn't have been included at all. These low fee transactions were included precisely because they had a higher fee paying child, and some of their transactions with low absolute fees paid high fee rates. So they've followed the usual Bitcoin Core method of grouping parent and child transactions together in to packages, ordering all transactions/packages by fee rate, and selecting the highest rate paying transactions. And then after using the normal method to construct their candidate block, they've then resorted all the transactions for no reason.

This is only possible if the parent transaction creating the output comes earlier in the block than the child transaction which is spending that output.

Nodes will verify the transactions in the order they appear in the block, and update their UTXO set in that order as well. The child transaction will refer to the output being spent by the TXID of the parent transaction. If that parent transaction does not come before the child transaction in the block, then the nodes will not yet have the output in their UTXO set and so the child transaction will be invalid. (This actually happened very recently with a mining pool messing up the order of transactions in a block, and the block therefore being rejected as invalid.)

So by the same logic that a parent transaction cannot come later in a block than the child transaction, the same transaction cannot spend a UTXO it creates. When nodes come to verify that transaction they will look for the output in their UTXO set, and since it does not yet exist the transaction will be invalid.

Where available, it would be very worthwhile adding links to Jameson Lopp's stress tests for each device he has tested: https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/

I would also be very cautious with your "water-proof" and "fire-proof" claims. All manufacturers claim these things, but they are often not true. For example, the Billfodl and Keystone which you have listed as fire-proof, are no such thing, with fire exposure resulting in catastrophic data loss:
https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/reviews/billfodl/
https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/reviews/keystone-tablet-plus/

That's kind of my point. Looking at the history of the coins being sold doesn't tell you anything about the person selling them.

Do you know the history of every satoshi you own? I very much doubt anyone knows this.

Yes, but that's different. If someone is trading with me, then of course they will see the address I sent coins from (although those coins will be either mixed or coinjoined, so they will learn nothing anyway). But someone who I might not be trading with asking me to reveal to them my address(es) so they can perform some kind of rudimentary blockchain analysis on them and then maybe not trade with me at all? I've just lost some privacy for absolutely no benefit to me. So I would pass and find a different buyer.

But that's exactly what it is. He wants to spy on the coins he is going to receive to see if they are "good enough" for him.

If you are that worried about the history of coins you buy P2P, then just mix or coinjoin everything you receive. Simple.

The history of the coins being sold is not correlated with the legitimacy of the seller. As I said, I'm certain I've bought and sold plenty of coins which would be classed as "tainted", but I have never scammed anyone.

Why would the seller even know the history of the coins being sold? I don't know the history of any of my coins, nor do I care.

If I was doing a trade and the other party said "Send me your address/UTXO before we trade so I can spy on your coins", I'd simply end the chat and find another person to trade with.

Then he will be at fault for failing to complete the trade. He'll either lose his security deposit or be banned from the platform, depending on the P2P platform being used.

You can also freeze them preemptively, OP. Open Electrum, go to the addresses tab, and right click on each change addresses and select "Freeze". When you make a transaction, Electrum will still send your change back to the next unused change address, even if it is frozen. You'll have to unfreeze specific change addresses in order to spend those outputs.

A good habit to get in to is to never make a transaction without using coin control. You will never be in the situation of your wallet including UTXOs you didn't want included if you select precisely which UTXOs to include 100% of the time. It's also a good habit to label your change output to remind you exactly where each one came from and so you can decide which ones it would be acceptable to consolidate together in one transaction. Or even better, avoid creating change altogether if possible.

It doesn't really matter how private your browser is when your OS is spying on everything you do. Using Tor is still better than using any other browser, but if you are using Windows 11 you should assume your privacy is roughly zero.

Your browser fingerprint includes your window size, down to the pixel. If you maximize your Tor window, then you greatly reduce your anonymity set to the set of all users running Tor maximized with the same screen resolution as you are. If you make the Tor window bigger but not maximized, then you probably end up with a completely unique window size which no one else is using, and therefore a unique fingerprint.

Can you briefly describe what your set up is? What is your airgapped device? How is it airgapped?

Although you can absolutely combined a hardware wallet with an airgapped device, the benefit from doing so is fairly marginal. If you have a truly airgapped and permanently airgapped computer, then using a software wallet such as Electrum or Sparrow is usually sufficient. If not, then an airgapped hardware wallet such as Passport will be the way to go instead.

I wouldn't recommend that thread anymore. It is three years out of date, and will only get worse as time goes on given Lauda is no longer active. It suggests wallets which no longer exist (such as Jaxx and Bread), it suggests wallets which are no longer recommended (such as Wasabi, Ledger, and Trezor), and it misses out some of the best wallets available (such as Sparrow and Passport).

This could be more related to your devices rather than the mempools themselves.

Use getmempoolinfo on your two nodes and compare the outputs. "Size" is the number of transactions in your mempool, and "bytes" is the raw size of these transactions. I would expect these numbers to be fairly similar if your nodes are both running with similar mempool settings and similar uptimes.

"Usage" on the other hand, which is the 158 MB and 195 MB you are referring to, is the amount of RAM those unconfirmed transactions are using after they have been deserialized. This is also what the default 300 MB limit refers to, and not to the raw size of the transactions. The deserialized RAM usage will vary due to a number of factors external to the size of the mempool, such as the version of Core, the hardware of the system, the OS, and so on.

Solution: Don't use Coinbase! Aside from being anti-bitcoin, anti-privacy, anti-fungibility, and pro-censorship, they are deeply unethical, support attacks on bitcoin, sell your data, report you to your government, work with a variety of government agencies, insider trade against you, employ literal human rights' abusers, and will arbitrarily freeze your account and seize your coins with no warning and no recourse. Why anyone would voluntarily use them is far beyond me.

Taint from Coinbase's view is real. Don't use Coinbase and whatever they classify as tainted does not matter to you in the slightest. I have a bunch of coins which I'm sure various centralized exchanges would class as tainted, but I don't give it a moment's thought and it doesn't affect me in the slightest because I choose not to support such anti-bitcoin and anti-freedom businesses. There are more privacy respecting alternatives available than ever before.

We have been discussing some of this in another thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5464886.0;dt

In summary, Chainalysis is complete bullshit. They have admitted multiple times in court that they have absolutely zero evidence for anything that they do. Their reports make a plethora of very basic mistakes, such as not knowing what a segwit address is, mixing up bits and bytes, and apparently not understanding that multiple users can have the same IP address when using a VPN server. They are using every legal avenue possible to prevent anyone from reviewing their black box source code, because they know that it is complete bullshit. They are making claims such as long time bitcoin contributors are not qualified enough to assess their source code, or that other people are too qualified and will end up stealing their source code.

The whole of blockchain analysis basically boils down to "Trust us, bro", with absolute zero evidence that any of it is any more than complete guesswork. But this is apparently enough to put potentially innocent people in jail indefinitely.

This is absolutely not what bitcoin was designed to be - to have a bunch of untouchable third party companies ruining people's lives based on made up nonsense pulled from the blockchain. Any and all companies or services which support or fund blockchain analysis are anti-bitcoin and should be boycotted.

I don't see how using block explorer websites is going to help here. Is he going to ask the seller to identify the specific UTXOs they are going to trade with prior to the trade? And then what happens if the seller uses other UTXOs instead? He's not going to be able to reverse the trade because he doesn't like where those UTXOs come from.

I would also say that I have traded bitcoin peer to peer, a lot, and never once cared in the slightest where the bitcoin I am buying comes from, just as I do not care in the slightest where the cash I receive comes from. I'm not going to spend my cash anywhere that looks at the serial numbers of the bills and decides to refuse my cash because it was once used to commit a crime, and I'm not going to spend my bitcoin anywhere that looks at the on chain history of that bitcoin and decides to refuse it.

The solution to your friend's problem is not to start attempting to investigate specific UTXOs before he has even bought them. The solution is to identify why he wants to do this and which services he is using which are placing artificial and arbitrary restrictions on his coins, and find and use alternatives instead. Alternatively, everything he buys P2P goes straight in to Whirlpool or JoinMarket to completely obfuscate its history.

An air-gapped computer is permanently disconnected, not "disconnected for a while". If your computer is "disconnected for a while" and then reconnects, then it is not airgapped. What you have in your set up - a computer which never connects to the internet against - is exactly what is meant by an airgapped device.

And as Loyce says, you don't need to destroy it. Remove all permanent storage before you start and use a live OS, and then after you shut the computer down all traces of everything you have done disappear within a few minutes.