What about in penguins?

Asking for a friend-uin.

Privacy isn't just difficult when using centralized exchanges - it is nearly impossible. Centralized exchanges are increasingly giving in to various governments' demands to track and de-anonymize as many transactions and addresses as they can. Every satoshi you deposit to a centralized exchange is investigated through blockchain analysis in an attempt to ascertain where it came from, and every satoshi you withdraw is similarly investigated to ascertain where it goes. All the addresses you use to interact with a centralized exchange are linked to your account, and from there probably to your real life identity since you have probably completed KYC at the exchange in question. If you are very determined you might be able to hide the final destination of your coins via things like coinjoin transactions and mixers, but the exchange (and your government) will still know how much you bought and when you bought it.

In terms of your wallet choice, if you want privacy then run your own node over Tor. Anything else is a sub-optimal solution. If you need to use an SPV wallet (such as when traveling), then set up your own node and server at home you can point your SPV wallet at. If you can't do that either, then you need to pick an SPV wallet designed for privacy such as Wasabi, run it over Tor if it doesn't do this by default, keep coins that you don't want linked segregated in to different wallets, coinjoin and mix your coins, and be careful not to link addresses (especially change addresses) together in the same transaction.

You might find this to be a useful resource: https://blockchair.com/api/docs#link_M6

This is a list of all the heuristics that blockchair.com use to generate a number for their privacy-o-meter. While there are a number of their heuristics I don't think are as useful as they do, it gives you a good idea of things that someone might look for to link transactions as belonging to the same wallet.

For example, nLockTime is usually either 0 or the most recent block height. An unusual value repeated across 2 transactions would be an indicator they came from the same wallet or same person. In terms of something like RBF, rather than just if it is enabled or disabled it would be more useful to look specifically at the nSequence, since again, an unusual value could be an indicator of two or more transactions coming from the same wallet.

In any of these situations with homes losing power, did they also lose internet connectivity via cellular or satellite signals?

If people still have cellular or satellite connectivity, then bitcoin can still function just fine. They can use their phones to make transactions and run light wallets, and charge up from power banks, solar panels, batteries, whatever. If people lose all internet connectivity, then bitcoin is probably far very down on their list of things they are concerned about. Almost everyone will be more interested in re-establishing wider internet connectivity (which will obviously include bitcoin) for things like communication and managing supply chains than they would about setting up some mesh network which is only designed to allow bitcoin to work.

Yes. It should be as simple as hooking up the correct Trezor device which recovered the segwit wallet, and using either the Trezor software to re-add the legacy account or using Electrum to open a new wallet using P2PKH at m/44'/0'/0'.

It sounds like OP is trying to restore from a seed phrase which is the wrong seed phrase for the Trezor in question.

Perhaps this is a better comparison.

Any money in dead/abandoned/forgotten about exchange accounts is not lost and will eventually re-enter circulation. The coins deposited to exchange accounts have already been swept in to the exchange's central wallets and are still accessible by the exchange in question. All exchanges will eventually close inactive accounts, whether after 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, and any balance left over in those accounts will simply be erased, with the exchange claiming any coins for themselves.

Forgotten addresses are another thing, and if the address has never been spent from and the public key is unknown, then these coins are unlikely to ever re-enter circulation. However, it is impossible to ascertain for sure how many coins are actually in forgotten addresses, as even addresses which have been dormant for 10+ years have then woken up and sent coins, and it is impossible to prove an address has been forgotten. Even if the owner claims the private keys are lost forever, there is no way for anyone to verify that claim.

Here's the post in question: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5343858.msg57236745#msg57236745

There is some good discussion on that thread regarding future developments such as Eltoo and Channel Factories in the first couple of pages before it gets derailed. My general feeling is that obviously Lightning could not support global adoption yet because of onboarding/offborading reasons, but also, it does not need to yet. There are a number of things currently in development, and I'm sure more far more to be proposed over the next 10 years, that can make opening and closing channels more efficient or less necessary. Whether or not we also need some changes to the base layer to support this is yet to be seen I guess.

It is not difficult to obfuscate your bitcoin and transaction from all but the most determined of attackers. If the US government were to start using bitcoin, they would have no problem doing so. Take a look at Coinbase, for example. They used to have all the cold storage on a small handful of address, but they have now split their cold storage across thousands of addresses, so much so that no one except Coinbase themselves really know how much they are holding in their reserves. The US government would absolutely do the same kind of thing.

They get to make the rules. If they want to be able to hide bitcoin without it being illegal, then they would simply make it not illegal for the government to hide bitcoin, while still making it illegal for everyone else to hide bitcoin.

And how exactly do you propose seizing someone's bitcoin if it is held in their own wallet?

One more thing to note:

Next to any one address, instead of specifying an exact amount, you can instead insert the character ! on its own. This will tell Electrum to send all remaining funds from your specified inputs to this address after allocating the necessary amounts to all the other outputs you have specified. This is useful if you want to redirect your change somewhere else, or if you want to eliminate the change output and just "round up" everything that's left over in to one of your outputs.

Or not seriously enough.

No, you're right. The coins tab shows all your individual UTXOs, whereas the addresses tabs just shows you the cumulative balance on each address. If you have received coins to the same address on more than occasion and you want to spend them separately, then you need to use the coins tabs to select which UTXOs to spend.

OP, use the coins table to manually select inputs which are below the size threshold, and send all the inputs to a new address you own using a fee of 1 sat/vbyte. Repeat this as many times as needed to consolidate all your coins. Then figure out why you have ended up with hundreds of inputs, because you will be losing loads of money in fees. Are you withdrawing these coins from an exchange or other service? Better to build up to a decent amount and withdraw it in one go rather the end up with hundreds of small inputs.

Well sure, but to implement any of this suggestion will require lots of new functionality to be added to Electrum servers, so there is no reason the DDoS protection couldn't be addressed too. Given that some people run Electrum wallets with >1000 addresses, asking a server for a one off batch of 1000 random addresses doesn't seem too onerous, especially since you wouldn't need a new batch of addresses everybtime you opened the wallet.

Surely the problem with this is if I send a query to a server asking for the balance of 1000 addresses last used in block X, 1000 addresses last used in block Y, and one address last used in block Z, then it is entirely obvious which address is mine.

Would a better option just be to connect to 20 different Electrum servers and ask each server to send you 1000 random addresses with a balance? (Change thr numbers as you see fit.)

Bitcoin is not a magic bullet which will instantly fix all the corruption and ridiculous monetary policy present in Washington. Theoretically, it would prevent the government (and banks) from lending money they don't have, but that's only if people hold their own bitcoin and don't rely on third parties. If I want to take out a loan and hold the bitcoin in my own wallet, then obviously the bank has to send me real bitcoin which they own. If I take out a loan and am happy to hold my bitcoin in a bank wallet or accept some fake wrapped bitcoin or pegged token, then there is nothing stopping them from continuing with the fractional reserve system.

The debt ceiling is a limit the US government has placed on itself which limits how much debt they are allowed to rack up. Since the US government has been in an annual deficit for the last 20 years (it brings in less money via tax, fines, remittances, etc., than it spends), then government spending has to be financed by taking out loans and accruing debt. If the government hits the debt ceiling, then they can not borrow any more money to pay their bills and fund government expenditure. The government then defaults on their debt. This would result in everything the government funds being subjected to huge spending cuts - things like education, healthcare, the military, social security, transportation, pensions, unemployment benefits, food stamps, veteran's benefits, the list is endless. There would be millions of job losses, trillions in lost revenue, and a massive financial crisis.

So every time the government approaches the debt ceiling, they simply vote to raise it. This happens frequently, and the debt ceiling has been raised over 90 times in the last 100 years. But sometimes one party will decide to delay the process to try to use it score political points over their opponents. But the outcome is always the same: Raise the ceiling and accumulate more debt.

The debt ceiling was created in 1917 to help fund the war effort. The government still had debt before that, but the difference was that Congress had to vote on each individual loan request prior to the debt ceiling being created.

Now that's a different question altogether. Storing a PSBT in the cloud, which only contains information which is going to become completely public as soon as you broadcast the transaction, is one thing. Storing a wallet.dat, seed phrase, private key, etc., is quite another thing altogether. I would never store anything which contains sensitive information in the cloud, certainly not information which could be used to steal my bitcoin, regardless of how well I thought it was encrypted or otherwise protected.

You've gotta send 69 BTC to 1FoxpupLoyceAndTheGimpVideoTMZ3aq first.

Note them down at least twice each on at least 4 separate pieces of paper. Noting them down together renders the passphrase pointless, as if someone compromises one of the two pieces of information then they have compromised them both. Noting each of them down only once gives you no redundancy and leaves you open to risk of total loss. Store all 4 pieces of paper separately.

You can still use Tails, and instead use /dev/urandom to generate your entropy and import that in to Ian Coleman to get around the issues discussed above of generating entropy in a browser.

Because https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Shamir_Secret_Snakeoil. If you want some sort of m-of-n system, then a better option is to use multi-sig.

It should, but if (and it's obviously a huge "if") the US government ever did adopt bitcoin, I am certain they would set up various agencies with the goal of attempting to rig the system in their favor or exert some sort of control over bitcoin. Whether or not it all worked would probably depend on whether or not people allowed them to do so. We already know some centralized exchanges run fractional reserve systems with their customers' deposited bitcoin and do not hold everything they should be holding. No reason the US government wouldn't do the same.

There is no concern because hardly anyone knows about it, and the people who do know about it don't understand it. As I said above - banks have always been able to print more money at will by creating new loans. Whether the fractional reserve rate is 10% or 0%, this doesn't change. Reserve requirements are (or were, before we moved to an "ample reserves" model) a way for the Fed to influence interest rates and liquidity by requiring banks to loan money from them at end of day to meet the stated requirements; they were never a method for the Feds to regulate banks' activities or dictate how much they were "allowed" to lend.