I don't necessarily think you are wrong, but we simply don't have the data or statistics to say one way or another if bitcoin is predominantly being used for speculation, spending, or whatever. I'm certainly not disagreeing that large numbers of people have never used bitcoin as a currency and only use it as an asset, speculation, store of value, trading, whatever, but I am disagreeing when you say you that you would not recommend using it as a currency. If nobody used bitcoin as a currency, then it would have no inherent value and we would be nowhere near the price point in fiat that we are today. Using it as a currency is the only thing which encourages it adoption, spread, and growth. Without its use as a currency, then all you have are people trading a useless asset back and forth, which cannot be used for anything other than being traded back and forth, not dissimilar to 99% of the shitcoins currently in existence.

Yes, many large companies buy and hold bitcoin solely as an asset, but at the end of the day it is people using bitcoin to buy goods and services which gives it real value.

I have to disagree with you here. Bitcoin is about being a currency. Yes, everyone wants the price gains and everyone wants to accumulate more, but bitcoin is first and foremost a currency. If no one ever used it as a currency, then we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure, if I had never spent a single satoshi then my bitcoin stack would be bigger than it is now, but I'm happy that every satoshi I've spent has helped to grow the bitcoin ecosystem and lead to further adoption, and I'm happy that I've had several years of financial autonomy, holding my own money securely, and not requiring any approval from any third party to spend my own money where I want and when I want. Even Laszlo Hanyecz has said he has no regrets spending 10,000 bitcoin on two pizzas.

The only transaction which is instant is physical cash traded face to face. Every other fiat method is slower than bitcoin.

Diversification means putting money in to different sectors, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, property, etc., that aren't intrinsically linked to one another. It does not mean buying a bunch of shitcoins which if bitcoin dumps, they all dump even harder. That does absolutely nothing to reduce the risk of your portfolio.

The error with the Ledger? No, that wouldn't be caused by an incorrect derivation path. If the derivation path was wrong, Electrum should still detect the Ledger, but just show a different wallet or be unable to sign transactions using it. That is more likely a problem with hardware, drivers, some other software accessing the Ledger at the same time, etc.

The error with the Trezor? Yes, potentially. If he has the wrong derivation path then he is opening a different wallet, which will obviously fail to detect the input in question from the original wallet and therefore return an error.

Why don't you use your real name when posting on this forum? Why don't you post your bank statement on Facebook? Why don't you publish every email you receive on Twitter? Why don't you share your browsing history with your friends, family, and employer?

There are a thousand reasons that everyone, you included, protects their privacy or wants anonymity in some part of their life every single day. Privacy when it comes to your finances is no different. In fact, the reverse question is more pertinent. Why would you want anyone in the world to be able to stick their nose in to your financial history and all your transactions?

If you use a platform such as Bisq or LocalCryptos, then you will deposit the crypto in question to a non-custodial escrow before meeting your trading partner, so you are not carrying the crypto in a hot wallet. Similarly, you could always meet at a bank (or even an ATM depending on your country's daily ATM limits) and take cash out immediately prior to the trade. I've done this before, and it also removes the risk of counterfeit cash being used.

There is nothing anonymous about using a centralized exchange. Sure, if you pass your coins through ChipMixer then the exchange will not be able to see where they end up, what you spend them on, who you send them to, etc., but they will still have a complete record of every single satoshi you have bought, when you bought it, how much you paid for it, and when you withdrew it, and they will link all that against your real name and identity and share it with who knows how many third parties or government agencies.

Right. So just to confirm you've got your three seed phrases, imported them no problem in to a new 2-of-3 multi-sig wallet (you didn't get any warnings like "checksum failed" or "unknown wordlist"?), generated a new wallet, and you've generated different addresses than you were expecting? (Note as above that if you do this on an airgapped device the balance will always be zero - you'll need to manually check if the addresses match.)

Can I also check what character do the addresses in your original multi-sig wallet start with? "1", "3", to "bc1"? What about the addresses in that new multi-sig wallet you just recovered using your seed phrases?

I think the issue here is likely going to be derivation path related. That guide you linked to has you using m/49'/0'/0'. This is the standard derivation path for single sig P2WPKH-P2SH, but this is not the derivation path Electrum uses for multi-sig wallets. What are the first four character of your public keys from your hardware wallets (include capitalization if it is there please)?

Have you ever been able to spend coins from this wallet? Did you test you could recreate it at any time before sending coins to it?

Ok. This is essentially the same advice as I gave on the first page of this thread but using an airgapped phone instead of an airgapped computer. An airgapped phone is not as secure as a computer, so do so at your own risk. To be as safe as possible, you should reset the phone to factory settings, turn off all connectivity and turn on flight mode, download and verify the Electrum .apk from https://electrum.org/#download on your computer before transferring it to the phone via a clean and formatted SD card or similar.

You will need to import all three seed phrases (not just two), and select BIP39 for the two hardware wallet seed phrases.

The wallet on your phone will show zero balance since it does not have internet connectivity. You will need to check if the actual addresses match those from your funded multi-sig wallet.

Again, not quite. (I swear I'm not just being pedantic for the sake of it!)

You do not need all three seed phrases to recreate a 2-of-3 multi-sig. You need at least two seed phrases or master private keys, but the information you obtain from the third share could be a seed phrase, master private key, or master public key. You only need the seed phrase/master private key for the threshold number of shares (2 in this case), but you need one of those or the master public key from every share (3 in this case).

This is important when backing up your multi-sig wallet, since if you have two seed phrases but no information at all from the third share you will not be able to recover the wallet and spend your coins.

Then those files are set up incorrectly. Every one of the three multi-sig files should show the same addresses and the same balance when you open them. This probably explains why you cannot currently spend your coins.

In the first instance, I would try creating a brand new Electrum wallet using your two hardware devices and your Electrum seed phrase, and without importing any master public keys/xpubs/ypubs/zpubs. This should create a new 2-of-3 multi-sig wallet which shows your coins, and which you can spend from. This is safe enough to do on your current computer since you are still protected by your hardware wallets. If doing this generates a different wallet with different addresses than your funded 2-of-3 multi-sig, then we have other issues to address before addressing any errors you are experiencing.

How long ago did you set up this multi-sig wallet? Do you remember how you did it? Have you reset either of the hardware wallets since you did it? Have you ever used a passphrase/13th word/25th word/seed extension?

This is not how multi-sig works. You cannot "convert" a 2-of-3 multi-sig in to a 2-of-2 multi-sig by recovering from only 2 out of the 3 seeds. You must use information from all 3 shares, be that hardware wallets, seed phrases, or master public keys.

Firstly, use Tor (or maybe Tor over VPN if you know what you are doing) and not a VPN on its own if you are looking for real privacy.

Secondly, I would never do anything on a KYC exchange if you want to be anonymous. Even if it is buying Monero, that exchange then knows your real name, address, and other information, knows your payment information, and knows how much Monero you bought and when. They might not be able to track what you do with your Monero, but they can still pass your details on to a variety of third parties.

I hope this is a typo and you meant to say to "buy Bitcoin directly from any non-KYC exchange". Buying from a KYC exchange, even if you then mix your coins, is bad for your privacy.

The two exchanges you gave might be peer to peer, but they both require KYC and are therefore bad choices.

Here is a better list of non-KYC exchanges you should check out: https://kycnot.me/

Not really, lol.

When you say you open the hardware wallet with Electrum, are you opening the 2-of-3 multi-sig wallet that we are discussing here? Or are you just opening a standard single sig wallet with your hardware wallet connected?

If you are opening Electrum on its own and seeing one balance, and opening Electrum with the hardware wallet attached and seeing a different balance, then you are opening two different wallets. You will never be able to sign a transaction from a multi-sig doing this. You should be opening the same wallet in both situations.

The problem of course with this is the custodial platform can see every coin you own and every transaction you make using their platform. You might be able to hide all your other transactions from a cursory look by your family member as in OP's example, but you have zero privacy overall.

I really wouldn't recommend this. If you are looking to hide your balance from a close family member, then likelihood is OP has a good reason for wanting to do so. A single intermediate address is trivial to see past for even a complete newbie with 10 minutes of time to read about how transactions work.

Maybe they are not yet, but what about in the future. Everything you do with bitcoin is an immutable record. If you compromise your privacy now, then you will find it very difficult if not impossible to reclaim it in the future.

Yes, that's exactly my point(s). As I pointed out my first reply in this thread here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5372469.msg58496931#msg58496931), two major exchanges have already been caught red handed doing exactly this, and using customers' deposits without their knowledge or consent to invest and try to make themselves more profit. I would wager that many other big exchanges also do similar things, using their large bitcoin holdings to fund loans, investments, expansions, etc., and therefore leaving them not holding 100% of their customers' deposits. Since the only time everyone tries to withdraw their coins from an exchange en masse is when they already know that exchange is having major liquidity problems, by which time it is already too late for the users in question, then most exchanges doing this will get away with doing this just fine right up to that moment it becomes too late.

There really is no reason to leave you coins long term on an exchange or other centralized service, and you very well might find your coins aren't really there when you come to withdraw them.

Where's my airdrop?

Where are you buying it from?

The most important thing to consider here is fees. If you are buying it somewhere which charges a flat rate fee, say $2 per trade for example, then you'll lose much more in fees making 7 trades instead of 1. Or you might find that you get charged 1% per trade for the $200 trades, but only 0.5% per trade for the $1400 trade.

Also consider how often you will withdraw your bitcoin to your own wallet and the associated withdrawal fees. On most platforms it will be far cheaper to pay for one withdrawal of $1400 than it will be to pay for 7 withdrawals of $200, and you'll also save yourself more money in the future by not having multiple small UTXOs which need consolidated.

Yes, they can see the address(es) which sent them bitcoin.

It depends. They can certainly see all the transactions you have made from that addresses, but not necessarily that wallet.

Most wallets are a collection of addresses. These addresses are not intrinsically linked to each other, and simply knowing one address in a wallet does not let someone deduce which other addresses belong to that wallet. If you use two or more addresses together in the same transaction, though, then that's a pretty strong indication that they are part of the same wallet.

For example. Let's say you send some coins from Address A and Address B to me in a single transaction. Most people seeing that transaction would rightly assume that Address A and Address B belonged to the same person. Next week, you send some other coins from Address A to a family member. That family member can see that Address A belongs to you, so can look back and see the other transactions which Address A has made, and be able to deduce that Address B also belongs to you. If next week you send some coins from a new address, Address C, to someone else, then your family member won't know about that address or transaction, unless you later link it back to either Address A or Address B.

The other possibility is that you make a transaction from Address D, and receive some coins back as change to Address E. If you later send those coins from Address E to your family member, then they might be able to work out that they were change from Address D, and link Address D back to you as well.

The simple answer is if you don't want anyone knowing about your other transactions, then never reuse addresses and be careful about spending change.

This is not at all how you create a watch only wallet. If you import a seed phrase in to Electrum, it will never create a watch only wallet. It also does not give you an option to create a watch only wallet or a standard wallet.

That imports the private key, which again, does not create a watch only wallet. That creates a non-HD wallet containing one or more private keys, which you can sign transactions from.

The only way to create a watch only wallet is to import one or more addresses (not private keys), or a master public key (xpub, ypub, zpub). If you import a seed phrase or a private key, it will never create a watch only wallet.

The three most common derivation paths are as RickDeckard has quoted above, for legacy (1), nested segwit (3), and native segwit (bc1) addresses respectively. Most wallets will use the encoding of m/44'/0'/0' however, rather than m/44h/0h/0h, although these mean the same thing (with the h or ' symbol meaning "hardened"). Note that the ' comes after each number, not before it, as you have typed in your reply above. The fact that two of these wallets don't even tell you what derivation paths they use and therefore make external recovery difficult if not impossible is enough of a red flag to mean you should never use them.

It could be that you have created more than one segwit account on some of the wallets, and so they are now deriving at m/84'/0'/1' or onwards, resulting in different addresses. Or it could be that they use a completely non-standard derivation path for segwit, although this would be unusual if they are all using BIP44 for legacy.

You could also use a tool such as https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39 to enter your seed phrase and play around with derivation path to see if you can find the correct one(s). Importantly, you should only ever do this on a downloaded and verified copy on an airgapped computer and never enter your seed phrase in to a live website or you risk losing all your coins.

How did you create this watch only wallet? You must have imported the address(es) or master public key from somewhere. Where did you get the address(es) or master public key from? Did someone or some website give them to you? Did you generate them yourself? How?

This is normal behavior for a watch only wallet. You will never be able to spend funds directly from it.

Each wallet you create is a brand new wallet and will have no link to your watch only wallet, so your coins will not show up in them.

Correct. Those are completely separate wallets and will not be able to spend the coins currently viewable on your watch only wallet.

It all comes down to how you created the watch only wallet. You need to access either the seed phrase or the private keys associated with the addresses in that wallet. How you do that depends on all the answers to the question I asked above.

If the role of the Press board is now "contain the spammers", then all the more reason to rename it as I originally suggested.

You have an exceptionally low bar for what constitutes "honest effort" if you are quite happy to include in that definition repeatedly copy and pasting someone else's work without a single original thought or comment.

Locking these threads doesn't make the Press board any more readable though, and you still have to search through all this trash to find meaningful threads. And it also does nothing to disincentivize the spammer in question, since he still gets paid for spamming for CoinTelegraph. And without any actual enforcement and bans from higher up, then you will eventually get bored of reporting the same user literally hundreds of times, as has happened to plenty of other people posting in this thread. I don't mean to discourage you, but this is not a long term solution.

---

I will be locking this thread in a couple of days. With still no response at all from theymos in this thread or via PM, it is clear nothing is going to change. There is no point wasting our time discussing changes which will never happen.