Which is why I was suggesting to install Electrum on the same device that has Bitcoin Core installed and is already housing his private keys. Sure, the system is not set up as a true airgapped device, and may be compromised, but his private keys are already on it and he is going to have to extract them one way or another. Far better to keep them on the device with no internet connection than to put them on a USB and transfer them to another device, especially if you are transferring them to another device which will be alternating between an online and an offline mode.

I would much rather keep the private keys on a potentially compromised but airgapped device which they had already been stored on without issue for 4+ years, than transfer them to a hot wallet, however briefly.

They will charge you a small fee to cover the network transaction fee. This fee will be disclosed to you prior to making your withdrawal. You can minimize this fee by waiting until such a time that the bitcoin mempool is empty and transactions are cheaper. Use a site such as https://mempool.space/, and when the mempool has less than 1 vMB of transactions, then that's generally a good time to make a transaction.

Coinbase is fine, and since you are already registered and verified on it, then you have very little reason to consider moving to a new exchange and repeating the whole verification process.

Personally I use decentralized exchanges, which are less newbie friendly but are more secure and more private than a centralized exchange such as Coinbase.

Would you give a guy a foot massage? Cause I could use a foot massage myself.

As nc50lc has said, check if you can recreate the missing addresses. Have you also checked under the "Used Addresses" section? Have you also checked any other wallets within your blockchain.com wallet?

I have seen issues in the past with blockchain.com reportedly generating addresses which are not covered by the user's seed phrase. You can try their support, but from previous experience they seem almost entirely useless. I think your best bet is going to be to use Ian Coleman or Electrum offline and just trawl through dozens of derivation paths until you hopefully find the right one.

Not true. With a true DEX, your coins remain in your control until you trade them and are never deposited to a centralized wallet. There is no possibility of your exchange account being hacked for coins because your coins are never on the exchange. If your DEX requires you to deposit coins to a central wallet, then it's not really a DEX.

The same can be said of any exchange which runs via a centralized website, as law enforcement can simply shut down the website. Bisq is the only exchange which runs on peer to peer software, and so is completely resistant to censorship.

I wasn't thinking so much of a government legalizing and enforcing bitcoin, as opposed to being forced to adopt it because their own money has become worthless and all their citizens are already using it. When counties like Zimbabwe or Argentina experience hyperinflation, they start using the US dollar. When the US dollar starts experiencing hyperinflation, where do they turn instead?

Kind of, but banks do not need deposits or a set amount of deposits before they hand out loans. Bank loans create new money out of thin air.

Not only did they pay $0 in federal taxes, but they actually took advantage of a number of tax incentives, credits, and deductions, which ended up with them receiving over $100 million in refunds from the government in more than one year.

Privacy - I don't have to send my KYC details to some anonymous stranger who will send it to a bunch of third parties for verification from where it will likely be sold or stolen and end up on the black market, and I don't have a centralized exchange analyzing all my deposits and withdrawals and sharing all that information with blockchain analysis companies, governments, and other third parties.
Security - I don't have give up control of my coins to a centralized third party who could be hacked or could choose to scam me, freeze my account, or seize my coins at any time.
Censorship resistant - I can trade with who I want when I want without requiring a third party to give me permission first.

The first version of Bisq was released in 2014 - https://github.com/bisq-network/bisq/releases/tag/v0.1.0. Bisq has been around longer than most centralized exchanges.

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppix&pkglist=true&version=9.1 lists Electrum 4.0.9.

A couple of questions just for my own education.

Given that OP has Bitcoin Core already installed on an airgapped computer, why recommend that he switches between going online and offline multiple times on a different computer? Why not (after backing up his Bitcoin Core wallets) just download, verify, and transfer Electrum over to his already airgapped computer and import the private keys from his already airgapped Bitcoin Core wallets to a new airgapped Electrum wallet?

Given that you want your Linux distro to be as private and secure as possible, why not use one specifically designed for that purpose such as Tails over Knoppix?

You know what I mean. Still, where are the huge mining farms in New Mexico? Why does Texas have so many, and NM, AZ, OK have almost nothing?

So why aren't neighboring states doing this? If Texas are seeing such a profit from miners relocating there that they will offer tax and other incentives, why aren't other states doing the same? Are their officials just not as clued up regarding bitcoin? Do the energy companies not want them there?

It is no secret that we spend a ridiculous amount of money on our military. We spent around $800 billion this year, more than the next 11 countries combined. If we had instead spent the same as the next biggest spender, which is China at $250 billion, then not only would the debt have grown at $550 billion less a year, we would actually have turned a surplus during the last years of the Obama presidency. But despite all this, Senators are still trying to  secure another $50 billion for the military in the current spending bills going through Congress.

No country or government is going to come out and say "The US dollar is trash!", because their currency is unlikely to be faring much better right now. Instead what will happen is that there will be less foreign investment and fewer foreign business buying, holding, and using USD. No amount of military presence will change that.

Well, the obvious huge difference is that the government can't create or borrow money which didn't exist a second ago in order to continue to pay off its debts and keep functioning. When it runs out of money, then it runs out of money. It could be a great lesson in fiscal responsibility, but more likely what would happen is that they would come up with some new fractional reserve system between various governments and central banks which would allow them to spend 100 BTC for everyone 1 they actually hold.

Sure, but what is the likelihood of such a scenario? In such a case where there is a city wide black out, but enough internet coverage via cellular or satellite for multiple connections throughout the city in question, then how necessary is a mesh network? If some people can still get online via cellular or satellite, then surely most people can still get online? And the few who can't are much more likely to simply use someone else's connection or some public hotspot than they are to set up a mesh network. If there was a mesh network already functioning, then sure, but there is pretty much zero incentive for people to set one up or maintain it for some very hypothetical situation in which not trading bitcoin would be the least of your concerns.

The term you are looking for is skywave propagation, as opposed to ground wave propagation.

I would agree with the feeling that mesh networks are not really a workable long-term solution. In the event of a city or country wide black out or similar, then your mesh network still requires someone to be connected to the internet to relay information back and forth to the rest of the network. It's one thing to trust that person to broadcast a transaction for you, but it's another altogether for an entire town or city to be relying on one person's internet connected node to relay all the information through the mesh network. I suppose you could partly mitigate this by also running your own node via Blockstream Satellite.

I thought the same, but I didn't realize New York generated such a large amount of hydroelectric power as the article states. A combination of cheap renewable energy and lower cooling costs is obviously very attractive to large miners.

What I find more surprising is how Texas has such a dominance on crypto-mining in the US, but neighboring states like Arizona - which have access to the same solar and wind potential - have very little. I suppose it has to do with infrastructure and electricity costs as well, although I am starting to hear about Oklahoma getting some skin in the game - https://www.greenbiz.com/article/could-one-americas-reddest-states-be-next-green-crypto-capital.

No.

Also no.

It is impossible to take only the private key at one derivation path and move upwards to a parent key, or move sideways to a sibling key. You can only move down a level to a child key. The only way to generate siblings keys is with knowledge of the parent extended private key. If you do not know this key, then your options would be to either derive it from the seed phrase, or to calculate it based on knowledge of the child private key you already have and the parent extended public key. If you know neither the seed phrase nor the parent extended public key, then there is nothing else you can do.

When considering the US national debt, then there are only two possibilities for the long term: It increases or it decreases.

The last time the US government turned a surplus and the debt decreased was in 2001. We were in a relatively small deficit until causing a constant small increase in the debt until the financial crash of 2008, when the deficit hit record levels. The deficit decreased from ~$1.5 trillion to ~$0.5 trillion between 2008 and 2016, before increasing every year under Trump up to $1 trillion again. Then COVID hit and the deficit surged to over $3 trillion. The fall out from COVID and associated spending, as well as the legacy of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, means that the deficit is projected to come back down to $1.5 trillion and slowly increase to $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years. But then all we need is another financial crisis or other major event and the deficit will be even higher.

Knowing all this, I can't see how the debt is going to be brought under control any time soon. To even just eliminate the deficit and break even, the US government would have to decrease spending massively on everything from education to healthcare to infrastructure to salaries to pensions to social security to the military... you name it, probably associated with increase taxes. Every sector would take a massive hit, and with lower disposable incomes and widespread job losses the economy take yet another hit. And that would just be to stop the debt growing. To actually start reducing the debt would be another thing altogether.

And so the only real outcome is the debt continues to increase. As a percentage of GDP, out debt is over 130%. During the Greek financial crisis back in 2010, their debt-to-GDP ratio was 150%. It will only be a couple of years before we surpass those levels. The question is how long will the rest of the world continue to have faith in a currency which, as you say, is turning in to monopoly money.

Big, popular, regulated, established, running for a long time, etc., all mean next to nothing when it comes to the security of your funds. Every big, reputable, longstanding exchange has been hacked for users' coins at some point. Every big, reputable, longstanding exchange has been hacked for users' data at some point. 6000 Coinbase users were hacked just a few months ago and had their coins stolen, and Coinbase have admitted to selling user data to third parties without their users' knowledge or consent.

Are you safer using Coinbase compared to some completely unknown exchange? Sure. But are you objectively safe using Coinbase? No.

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Lots of people in this thread are mentioning Electrum, but not a single person has given advice on how to use it safely. You should only download it from electrum.org, and you must verify your download against ThomasV's and SomberNight's public keys prior to installation to ensure you have downloaded a non-modified version.

I don't have any data on this, and it would be almost impossible to gather such data, but I would have thought that successful scams happening via standalone websites are in the minority.

The most common scams which we see people complaining about on this forum include things such as fake Twitter giveaways or "doublers", people posing on Telegram/Twitter/Reddit/etc as fake customer support agents, fake or malicious wallets uploaded to various app stores, fake or malicious browser extensions, fake escrow services, fake traders, etc. Sure, we occasionally see someone posting about some scam exchange website they have been suckered in to, but those are very much in the minority.

And speaking of these scam exchange websites, each one only usually lasts a few weeks at most before it has been reported enough to be taken down. Then an identical clone of the website with a different name pops up somewhere else.

I think you would essentially be playing an endless game of whac-a-mole for very marginal benefits, it any at all.

Because the majority of bank account hacks or people falling for scams involve them transferring money electronically to another bank account.

Very rarely are people being forced at gun point to go and empty their bank account in cash and hand it over to an attacker, and most ATMs have daily withdrawal limits in the region of $1000 on them. Sure, if you have cash stolen, then there is nothing the bank can or will do about it, but if you've had $50,000 transferred from your bank account to another bank account, then the bank can easily freeze that and reverse it. In fact, most banks wouldn't even let you make that transfer without demanding some kind of additional proof or paperwork.

As much as I much prefer bitcoin over fiat, I obviously still have to have a fiat bank account to live. And as much as I hate the zero privacy, zero ownership, and zero censorship resistance I get with my fiat bank account, I have almost no concerns about hacks or scams with my fiat bank account, whereas I wouldn't trust a crypto exchange to hold a single satoshi for me.

I think the opposite. I think mixers, tumblers, coinjoins, and other privacy enhancing techniques will both continue to be developed and improved upon, and will also become more and more in demand as blockchain analysis companies, centralized exchanges, governments, and many other third parties spy ever more heavily on bitcoin users.

Many of the mixers which use the "classical" technique of sending coins to a deposit address, the mixer bouncing them around with other users' coins, and then sending some other coins back after a delay, have already been broken to various degrees. There is a great document discussing this here: Breaking Mixing Services. This is why it is important to use a reputable mixer which cannot be broken in this manner and not just any old mixer you stumble across.

A bank is generally much safer than Coinbase or any other crypto exchange, though. If your bank account is hacked and emptied, or you fall victim to a scam and send money to a scammer, then there is a good chance your bank can reverse all the transactions and get your money bank. If the same thing happens with Coinbase, you can wave goodbye to your coins.

If you wait for a Black Friday, Christmas, or similar deal, you can get a good hardware wallet for $30. Most people will spend more than that on buying themselves lunch in a single working week. If you are only holding $30 worth of bitcoin, then sure, spending $30 on a hardware wallet might be too much. But as soon as you get to a few hundred dollars worth, then it is a smart investment.