But that's actually the problem, isn't it. The Cabal probably WANTS to start a hash war in order to make their fork "officially" the "real fork". They won't only need the miners, they will need the support of Bitcoin services like Coinbase, some influential community members, and the support of at least one Bitcoin Core developer.

- We should probably be suspicious if BlackRock starts donating money/giving grants for Bitcoin's development. Open source development of the biggest decentralized money network + donations/grants to the developers should probably not happen?

Who is "the Sponsor" in this?

Even if they act in good faith picking the correct chain, I'm missing details on what happens to the value in a possible Fork chain. When the BCH Fork happened, the value of the Forkcoin varied, but could have been sold for 10-20% of the Bitcoin value. If they keep that instead of sharing it with the ETF investors, it just adds to the list of reasons to keep your own keys.

Yes, I remember vaguely that Truecrypt offered such an option of cascaded hash algorithms, which means that you need to know this setup detail for a crack attack, too. It would slow down the process somewhat significantly, especially if you had to try different possibilities in this area, too. Sounds more and more like real pain in the ass.

I wouldn't waste my time and energy with such few hints in this particular case. No one knows if the OP keeps his word and especially if the wallet.dat actually has at least the private key for the mentioned publich address. Too many IFs...



wallet.dats for sale are very very likely 100% scams. You can wrap a pile of poop in fancy paper, it's still just poop. 

I'd like to clarify this a little, since the main question has already been answered.
Either you have a HD (hierarchical deterministic) Wallet or you don't. If you do, there is one 'single point of failure' seed, from which you can create tons of child keys, and you'll only ever need to back it up once.

If you don't have a HD wallet, you have a single private key with a single corresponding address. 'Deriving a limited amount' is not a thing. Some wallets may create a certain number of individual / unrelated private keys, 'throwing dice' for every key individually, so if you back those up, you can't 'derive' more keys later, of course, because there was absolutely no 'derivation' going on in the first place.

In practice though, as has been explained sufficiently, there is no reason not to use a HD wallet. User error is just so much more likely than facing an attacker with the capabilities assumed in the original post.

1) That point would be unfounded. Given that an attacker would require unrealistic amount of resources to be able to bruteforce your seed, it makes no sense to prefer one over the other. If both of them are, in theory infeasible to be bruteforced, then it isnt a concern.

2) It doesn’t lower your security. User error or negligence wouldn’t concern the security of the seed. However, the security is again sufficient at 12 words and anything beyond provides insignificant amount of additional security.

Not really.

Keeping a bunch of miscellaneous private keys around is more cumbersome than storing a seed, and having just a small seed makes it harder to steal data since there's less of it.

In order to back up an HD wallet, you don't have to copy all the private keys. You just need to save the seed phrase (or wallet file + password), derivation path, and receive and change gap limits, which are the number of generated addresses.



HD seeds are converted into bits and then passed through HMAC-SHA512 to create the master private key, so while 12 words give enough security now, the option to do 15, 18, 21, 24 words allows us to future-proof seed phrases from things like quantum computers.


This is not really true. The private keys may have the same bit-lengths, but the bit entropy from 24-word seed phrases is 2^12 larger than 12-word phrases (because 2^24 for 24 words / 2^12 for 12 words = 2^12 extra strength) which makes it harder to brute-force the master private key.

Address 1L8SqDEvaA3WnDinobai21ZbnyC79XuJGn has a current balance of 2.11752132 BTC and last outgoing transactions where UTXOs of this address were spent were in
2021-03-03: tx bdc3bc54a358301552c03eecb5c6994bc13066284f795211a2db6497f5692cd7
2021-01-09: tx d27a036c3d1acd27f7b57b3c3bc0e85cff1b03714e1b8b03274f161badac38c4

So in the first months of 2021 the owner of UTXOs of this address apparently had access to this address' private key and the other involved inputs in above transactions.



I'm not convinced because a Bitcoin Core wallet uses a lot of keys and public addresses, not just a single one. And naming a public address with a suitable balance isn't hard at all.

Your passphrase hints for the Truecrypt container are rather insufficient. My question would be: why didn't you document such an important secret?

As n0nce points out, having the hashes isn't quite enough. An attack to crack the Truecrypt container passphrase would also need details how Truecrypt processes the passphrase to get to hash digests. Well, likely hashcat or similar tools know how to deal with cracking Truecrypt containers.

And then if someone manages to crack the Truecrypt passphrase: what about the contained wallet.dat file? Is this protected by a passphrase, too? Is the Bitcoin Core wallet.dat passphrase known?

I know this is the Bitcoin Discussion Board but I feel like writing my input.

Speaking out of personal experience.  If you have multiple people you often send Bitcoin to, after only a few Transactions it becomes really hard to keep track of what is going on.  This is why I use Monero.  It sometimes costs me a lot more than just tracking my Bitcoin Transactions and UTXOs, but after making a few costly mistakes you realize it is worth the cost.

My personal advice for any body willing to maximize their Privacy is use Monero in parallel with Bitcoin.  I use my main Bitcoin Seed for Bitcoin only I know about and I use Monero as an intermediary to avoid linking my personal Bitcoin to the Bitcoin I have to spend.

If I link the two smallest Outputs, 0.0039 plus 0.0019 which is in total 0.0058 but only spend 0.005 out of it to pay OP, I now have an UTXO of 0.0008 labeled 'takuma sato' in my Electrum.  Then I spend 0.02 out of my 0.0301 on drinks and have an UTXO labeled 'liquor store' containing 0.0101 Bitcoin.  Then I decide to finally link my 0.0408 with my 0.0233 to spend 0.06 Bitcoin on a phone.  I now have three UTXOs.

0.0008 Bitcoin 'takuma sato'
0.0101 Bitcoin 'liquor store'
0.0041 Bitcoin 'phone store'

Now I have two options.  First is easiest.  I link the second and third UTXO because I do not care if two stores know I bought something off them.  But that is a Privacy concern to me and I would not want takuma sato to know I purchased any thing from the liquor store or the phone store either.  So what do I do?

First option is I continue to use my UTXOs separately.  I have 0.0149 Bitcoin left but I can not purchase something worth the entire Balance without compromising my Privacy.  If I want to purchase another phone worth 0.01 Bitcoin, I can not without linking UTXOs from the two stores.  Unless I get more Bitcoin and have an unused UTXO that I can use in combination with the UTXO labeled 'phone store'.

So here comes my second option.  Finding a way to remove my identity off the UTXOs I own.  The best way to do it is using Monero as an intermediary.  Exchange UTXOs from Bitcoin to Monero in chunks of each label category at random times in random separate days.  From 0.0149 Bitcoin you exchanged into X Monero.  Now return to Bitcoin and split it into multiple Addresses.  Say three.

Now you own three anonymized UTXOs of approximately 0.005 Bitcoin.  No more labels, no more worries.  Costs a little bit more, but it is the cost of Privacy unfortunately.  For someone as paranoid as me, it is worth the costs.

First of all, you should always use a new address for EVERY transaction you receive.

So, if that 0.1 BTC was received as 5 separate payments of:

• 0.0301 BTC
• 0.0039 BTC
• 0.0408 BTC
• 0.0019 BTC
• 0.0233 BTC

Then you can just use the two smallest outputs (0.0301 BTC + 0.0019 BTC = 0.0058 BTC) to fund your transaction. In this way, the entity will see no link at all to the three larger outputs under your control.

Or, if you prefer, you could use just the 0.0233 BTC output to fund the transaction, significantly reducing the visibility from the full 0.1 BTC to just 23% of your balance.

Now, if you have only ever received a single transaction, and the amount of that single transaction was 0.1 BTC, then maintaining privacy of that balance will be more difficult.

If you're willing to pay repeated transaction fees over many days/weeks/months/years to gain some privacy, one thing you could do to increase your privacy a bit would be to generate a random time and then after waiting that amount of time from receiving your initial transaction create a new transaction to split your balance by a random percentage and send each portion to a new addresses in your wallet. Then after another random time, chose one of the two outputs randomly, and split that to 2 new addresses. Then after another random amount of time, chose one of the three outputs in your wallet and split that to 2 new addresses, and so on until you have several random sized outputs all created at random different times from random earlier outputs.  This will make it much more difficult for the entity to distinguish between outputs that you still control.

If you're only trying to maintain privacy from one particular entity, and you don't mind another entity knowing about your larger single UTXO, you could briefly send your 0.1 BTC to a popular entity that pools the bitcoins they receive (such as an exchange or a gambling website). As an example, let's assume you use Coinbase. Then you could withdraw random percentages of the 0.1 BTC, each to a separate address in your wallet. It would become extremely difficult for the entity you are trying to maintain privacy from to determine which of the many, many outputs Coinbase sent were sent to addresses of yours vs. addresses of other people.

Another option might be to use an intermediary (friend?, family?, etc) that you aren't concerned about knowing how much BTC you have in the transaction you received.  You could make an arrangement for the intermediary to make the payment on your behalf, and then later you could send a payment amount to the intermediary at a new address compensating them for helping you.

There are probably more options, but those are the few that come immediately to mind.

Note: if the entity you are trying to maintain privacy from is a government entity, it's possible that some of these processes to hide the source of funds might be considered "money laundering" by some governments. This may be illegal in somme jurisdictions, and you may need to talk to a lawyer to make sure that you're not doing anything that could be charged as a crime.

You can use https://ninjastic.space/ for it.

In addition for finding bitcoin address on the site, click on the menu at the left corner at the upper side, you will see address. Click on address and put in the address that you are looking for and search for it.

To search for post instead of address, click on post instead of address and search for the post.

Do you only want to spend from your electrum down to the service provider wallet ? If yes then you need to do all the privacy stuff before you get to the place you want to buy your goods or you want to exchange your bitcoin for any service.

Just as few others have suggested I will add to it by saying you will need to move some of those your bitcoin with extra fee to a non KYC exchange address where you can withdraw from this exchange to a different address were you can use later at any place were you will send directly to the place wallet.

Or better still just use a mixing service and get the coin detach from your original wallet where only you and the mixer will know the new wallet and were the holdings are originally from.

There is no other way but to send that first to another wallet, that's how you're going to hide your address. So, before going to a restaurant, transfer it to a wallet where you'll use it for payments and leave the rest there. Only send the amount that you may want to spend for your ease. That's why if you're going to do this, you should have planned it before going out so that you're going to check the fees.

It's not ideal to do it at most times that you'll transfer here and there because the fees are not that worth it. But if they only cost some centavos, it's easier to do that and the fees won't matter at all.

This is also a good suggestion, Binance Pay. An off chain transaction but of course, you'll have to deal with KYC and verifications.

im not talking about the bitcoin side.. im talking about the functional business of microstrategies..
the functional business of microstrategies is under performing compared to its competitors. and if it got into trouble would then need to liquidate bitcoins to prop up the functional business (pay salaries and leases)

I understand that tax authorities in different countries are improving tax collection, but I don’t think that everything is so serious that they would waste resources on users who earn about $100 a week. I think that the spent resources of the tax authorities will not pay off. If my tax office required me to report for each payment, then I would receive bitcoins for the subscription campaign to an unofficial address, and then every quarter or year I would transfer bitcoins through an exchange for Monero from the unofficial address to the official one and pay taxes.
But sometimes it is better not to report coins, and you will not be asked questions.

So we have to be realistic with our expectations and look for KYC-less ways to convert crypto for cash. The real trouble will be when they introduce CBDCs and phase out cash. Then we will be living in a totalitarian dystopian society where it will be possible for the government to monitor anyone in almost reatime and "cancel" anyone just with a few clicks on the keyboard. Until then I think meeting a reliable acquaintance in person and trading crypto for cash is the method that works best. Then again your mileage may vary and cash by mail or other method might suit you better.