Slight correction - it's been known that walletexplorer is run by Chainalysis for years. Indeed, most block explorers are probably sharing information with blockchain analysis companies.

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I'm not one to praise or even agree with Ted Cruz on pretty much anything, but his speech in defense of crypto was a good one and he made some very good points, notably that the vast majority of Senators have absolutely no idea what it is they are trying to regulate, how it functions, or what the outcome of these regulations will be. Unfortunately, despite that speech the bill already made it through the Senate, and now rests with the House, and I've yet to see enough Representatives speak out about it to really give me any hope that it will be amended or voted down.

Yes, it will work. Its password recovery function works with a large array of wallets:


It also supports both BIP39 and Electrum seed phrase descrambling, brute forcing, etc., both with and without additional passphrases, BIP38 paper wallets, and a bunch of altcoin wallets too, including Coinomi and Metamask.

I agree, which is why I said to use an anonymous account to store it.

I could use Tor to sign up to a brand new ProtonMail account, and then upload an encrypted PSBT and save it as a draft. When I arrive at my destination, I use Tor to access the ProtonMail account, download and then decrypt the PSBT.

Again, I completely agree, and would never advocate storing any sensitive data online in any manner. But the goal here is not "prevent all access to this data" (which is near impossible to achieve once you upload something to any cloud storage or similar), but rather "prevent this data from being linked to me", which is far more realistic.

btcrecover is the software you are looking for.
You can find it here: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover
And its documentation here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You will essentially want to create a tokens file specifying the various strings which could be a part of the password and what combination of said strings to try, and then run it against your wallet.dat file. The instructions for how to do this are here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/

If you run in to any problems, let us know.

Then don't carry it through customs. As achow has said, it is going to be publicly viewable to the entire world once you broadcast it, so you can store it on the cloud, email it to someone else or yourself, post it on a blog, any method of digital storage which you can access later once you arrive at your destination. If you do all this with a brand new and otherwise anonymous cloud/email/whatever account, then there is minimal additional risk to your privacy.

If border agents are interested enough in you to force you to decrypt your entire disk, then they are going to be interested enough in individual encrypted files or containers to force you to decrypt them too. If you really want to hide something from border agents, then don't take it across the border with you. If you must, then a hidden volume with some "decoy" encrypted data is probably the way to do it, which is far outside the scope of Bitcoin Core.

Ahh yes, a random grainy and anonymous sound file. The pinnacle of the scientific process!

This is the kind of thing you base your life on. Honestly, I just feel sorry for anti-vaxxers at this point. How embarrassing.

Right here:

Presenting these data as unquestionable facts is stupid at best.

Guess we'll have to take you at your word on that, since once again, you provide absolutely zero evidence. Seems like you aren't so up to speed with the "scientific process" as you think.

The two are not mutually exclusive though. No reason an exchange couldn't do both, and indeed, only doing something if they think it will bring them good PR is even worse, but that's pretty much Coinbase's ethos through and through.

Sure, but neither metal nor cash have a publicly viewable blockchain or multi-million dollar contracts from the US government to various companies to link individuals to specific pieces of metal. If you use centralized exchanges, then you won't really have an option but to start doing this since the government will already know all your addresses. I'm sure some people will try to avoid it as they do for other >$10,000 trades as you point out, but there will be a lot more government investigation of bitcoin trades than there will be of other cash trades.

I think it's worth expanding on this a little. ProtonMail received a legally binding request from Swiss federal authorities which they were unable to challenge. They had no IP logs to provide, but were forced to start collecting IP logs after receiving the request or shutdown completely and face criminal charges themselves for acting illegally. It has always been spelled out quite clearly in their Transparency Report that they would have to comply with legally binding requests from Swiss law enforcement, which is exactly what happened here. Here is an archived copy of their Transparency Report from way before this incident that says all that: https://archive.is/pCZ03


If the user in question had used Tor, they would not be in this situation. Interestingly, also a VPN would have been sufficient in this scenario since Swiss law does not permit VPN providers to log IP addresses in the same way it allows email providers to log IP addresses.

So yeah, it's shit for the individual in question, but ProtonMail were only behaving in the way they said they would. But having said all that, I still wouldn't trust a third party provider not to decrypt your information (or at least try to) if they were forced to. Tor and PGP should be a must.

This has been pointed out to BADecker several times before. But like all anti-vaxxers, he doesn't care about facts or logic.

Such is the beauty of bitcoin - nothing can be liquidated unless the owners allow it to be, by handing over their private keys to a third party such as law enforcement or a centralized exchange. Keep the coins in your own wallet with a secure password, and good luck to anyone who wants to try to brute force it to liquidate your coins against your will. If you are storing your coins on a centralized exchange then you are already taking the risk of having all your coins liquidated, frozen, or seized, against your will. Who exactly the third party who is doing that liquidation is more or less irrelevant. Don't want your coins to be liquidated against your will? Hold them in your own wallet.

Even better, stop using the centralized exchanges altogether, and trade exclusively peer to peer while holding your own private keys at all times. No forced liquidation, no ridiculous privacy invasion. Win-win.

Because having your coins forcibly liquidated is wrong? And sending bailiffs to your house to presumably search for and seize cryptocurrency wallets is just ridiculous.

How far along in the process are you? Do you have a bitcoin wallet yet?

The basic process is that you would set up a bitcoin wallet and provide one of your addresses to the gambling site, which would then transfer your winnings to that address. Once the bitcoin are in your wallet, you can either spend them with any merchant who accepts bitcoin, or you can trade them for fiat such as USD using an online exchange or trading directly with another person.

This site would be a good place to start to get some more info: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/

This will be the same company which stopped its users from opening or closing stock positions to benefit themselves? The same company which colluded with Citadel to screw over its users and protect the hedge funds? The same company which has been lying to try to cover all this up? They've shown a complete and utter disregard for their users, and shown they will do anything (even if it is illegal) to protect their own profits and the profits of their hedge fund donors and friends. Why would you think their attitude would be any different when it comes to bitcoin?

Anyone who trusts Robinhood with your private keys and your crypto is just asking to lose everything.

Tether is an insolvent fractional reserve scam, is based on a fiat which continually loses value, and Tron and BSC are both centralized scams. The number of things which could go wrong holding this combination long term is huge, and even if everything goes right, all that will happen is you will continual lose value. I would gladly pay $22 in a withdrawal fee if it meant I could hold bitcoin instead of these trash coins. If you are talking about a total value of ~$2,000, then inflation only needs to be 1% over the next year (it will be  higher than this) for you to lose the value of Binance's ridiculous withdrawal fees if you choose to hold a stablecoin instead.

Further, given how much trouble you have had in the past doing fairly simple things involving your Ledger Nano, I would think you wouldn't want to install another altcoin app on it and manage additional accounts. Just stick to bitcoin and top up your bitcoin wallet.

It's all about building up a profile. Let's say I look up 20 transactions, one of which is mine and 19 of which are dummy transactions. Provided I am not doing something stupid such as continually refreshing the page only on my unconfirmed transaction, or looking up subsequent child transactions only from my transaction, then sure, that block explorer doesn't gain much information about me. Next week, I also look up 20 more transactions. One of the transactions in this second batch spends the change of one of the transactions from the first batch - the rest of the transactions are completely unlinked from each other. That is a very useful piece of information that the block explorer can now apply to me.

Further, the vast majority of people don't do this. They look up one transaction at a time, which is usually either one they have sent or one they are receiving.

I doubt it. We know using centralized exchanges are one of the worst things you can do for your privacy, and we also know that they often treat bitcoin as non-fungible, and yet they continue to grow and attract millions of users. People don't care enough about their privacy to move en masse to Monero.

This is meaningless. The government obviously recognize that bitcoin exists, since they already tax it as a property and already ask literally everyone about it as part of their 1040 tax form. Taxing it more or heaping more regulations on to it is not a good thing because the government will somehow recognize it more.

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Yes, it does. Have you read the wording of the bill itself?

You can read the text of the bill here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684/text. Please see Section 80603, Part (b) Reporting of Digital Assets, Part (3):

Now let's look at 6050i here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6050I. Anyone who makes a trade (or a series of related trades) worth more than $10,000, must file a return containing the name, address, and TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number) of the person they are trading with. The TIN is most commonly the other party's SSN.

So if you trade ~0.23 BTC with anyone, even if split over multiple trades, you need to collect their tax details and report it to the IRS.

It is of course impossible to prove the non-existence of anything. I can't prove that dragons aren't real, and I can't prove that I lost the only copy of all my private keys and seed phrases in a tragic boating accident. No reasonable court would say "Prove you have forgotten the password" or "Prove you don't have the seed phrase backed up somewhere", because it is impossible to do so.

In the US, loss of property (which is what bitcoin is classed as) can only be deducted from your taxes when it is caused by a federally declared disaster. So forgetting your wallet password or failure of your hard drive absolutely would not count. Now, the US doesn't have a wealth tax (at least, not yet!), but for the sake of capital gains taxes, losing your bitcoin wallet means nothing for the taxes you owe. It would seem particularly cruel to continually charge someone a wealth tax on money they can't access however, perhaps without which they would be well below the threshold and making them pay out from their regular income.

I did also find this document from the OECD:

If it's several million dollars worth you are talking about, then that is more than enough money to easily migrate to a country with more friendly bitcoin laws if you are concerned about a wealth tax.

I wonder what has happened in scenarios where people have lost access to their wallets or keys for a number of years (and therefore not paid wealth tax since they don't technically own that money) before managing to recover them, find an old back up, brute force them with newer technology, etc. Have tax authorities gone after them for historical wealth taxes?

Ahh right, fair enough. Yeah, we've long known that exchanges report all their users to various governments, and corporations such as Facebook and Google track everything you do online. Thinking block explorers wouldn't do the same is naive at best.

Yes, my jurisdiction has AML laws, but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to spy on innocent people such as myself. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Big Brother is everywhere, sure, but that doesn't mean it is right or moral or ethical or that we shouldn't do everything we can do fight against it.

Even without this bill in the US, other countries will start passing similar laws. It's the same underlying thing which is happening in China right now - they want people to use their upcoming CBDCs instead of bitcoin.

Partly because a lot of people don't know what is in the bill, partly because the bill hasn't actually passed yet, partly because it won't take effect for a few years if it does pass, and partly because there is still time to challenge or amend it during that time.

I'm more than a little disappointed we haven't seen big exchanges lobbying Senators or House Reps to amend this bill. More than happy to profit from the community, but don't stand up to defend that community when it counts. Hell, knowing Coinbase they are probably already working on the most efficient way to screw over their users by complying with all these new regulations.