I always snip entire posts when replying to them, since there is no need to clutter up a thread with the same text twice. Although I suppose it is completely predictable that anti-vaxxers would have such a difficult time understanding something so basic like quote links.

Nice dodging of the fact that you spout bullshit with no supporting evidence, though. You and BADecker are really good at this!

Why do you need to look up your own transactions on a block explorer, though? Since we are mostly talking about Electrum here, then just view your transactions in your own wallet which is hopefully connected to your own Electrum server, or at least connected to someone else's Electrum server over Tor. No need to involve yet another third party. I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I looked up one of my own transactions.

Just as you need to use a new Tor circuit with every different Electrum wallet you open, so the same server doesn't see the same IP address querying a bunch of different addresses within a few minutes, you need to use a new Tor circuit with every address or transaction you look up on a block explorer. Even better if you don't look up more than one address or transaction you are interested in at the same time, and if you must, then look them up on different explorers.

Props to Jack Dorsey. I've never really liked Twitter as a platform or their stance on free speech (or lack thereof), and I don't (and won't) have an account, but Twitter has over 300 million active users each month who can now tip each other instantly and for free. Other providers are going to have to get on board or start losing customers.

And then have a bunch of users complain that they lost/deleted their wallet or their wallet was hacked, and Twitter wouldn't let them change their address and so they lost a bunch of money which was sent to their old address. Although I suppose that is fixed by letting someone remove an address or invoice from their profile immediately, but require email confirmation and a delay to upload a new one.

You know, spouting bullshit with no basis in reality isn't exactly a great argument against the fact that you spout bullshit with no basis in reality. Nice try, though.

It's amazing how rapidly you can churn out bullshit when you don't care about facts, evidence, logic, or even being coherent. It's the intellectual equivalent of bounty spammers.

The problem is that once people understand that bitcoin is completely transparent and by completing KYC at a variety of centralized exchanges they effective have zero privacy from anyone these exchanges share or sell their data with, it is too late. Sure, they can stop using those exchanges and then start trading peer to peer, but those exchanges already have a record of all the bitcoin they own and all the addresses they have used and various blockchain analysis companies will continue to track them. It's far easier to maintain your privacy if you protect it from the start than it is (if not impossible) to regain it once it has been lost.

I would disagree. The two DEXs I have mentioned can be used for fiat/BTC trading, which is exactly what newbies are looking for. UniSwap is for trading a variety of tokens and altcoins. Given that >99% of tokens and altcoins are outright scams, I don't think steering newbies in that direction is beneficial.

You do realize that real scientists doing actual science publish their results in reputable peer-reviewed journals, and not on a site made for sharing videos of Janet Jackson's breast? I've linked you multiple times in the past to databases of literally hundreds of thousands complete genome sequencings and their methods from many different strains of COVID, but that's not good enough for you apparently because none of them started with "Hey, remember to share, like, and subscribe and a quick shout out to our sponsor, Raid: Shadow Legends!"

Nice dodging of the original question and not addressing the fact that all your sources are full of shit, though.

Nice site!

I've not been through your site in a huge amount of detail, but a quick scan through raises a few points from me:

The "Best exchanges" page only mentions centralized, custodial exchanges. It would be nice to have a few decentralized peer to peer exchanges on there such as Bisq and LocalCryptos, maybe with a brief explanation of the advantages to security and privacy that decentralized exchanges bring.

The "Storing cryptocurrencies" page makes no mention of software wallets such as Electrum or Wasabi, which are often the best choices for newbies. They eliminate the risks of storing your coins with a third party exchange or web wallet, while not having the purchase cost of the more secure hardware wallets.

Your "Jargon buster" page says "Our fish is responsibly caught from sustainable sources" at the bottom, presumably left over from your design template.

Also, stick up a donation address!

Yes, but they aren't comparable.

Electrum is open source software which you run yourself on your own computer. Provided your computer is not infected with malware, you can verify that the seed phrase and private keys are known only to you, no one else can spend your coins, and no one can lock you out of your wallet. Blockchain.com is a closed source website. You have no idea how they generate your seed phrase, who else might have access to it, or who else could potentially spend your coins. Your account is vulnerable to hacks, and their central wallets and servers are vulnerable to hacks. They can lock or shut down your account if they choose, and unless you have your seed phrase backed up somewhere, your coins will be lost.

All web wallets are the absolute lowest in the rankings for both security and privacy.

The real question is why you would want to do this? You are sacrificing all your privacy and all your security, giving unknown strangers the ability to prevent your transactions, freeze your account, or even steal your coins. The whole point of bitcoin is to not trust third parties with your money.

The data is unverified, reportable by anyone, and proves no correlation. Reporting it as fact is the most basic confirmation bias, which even the most junior scientist or basic scientific study would control for. I'm not really surprised anti-vaxxers don't understand that, though.

Yes, right at the peak of Dunning-Kruger's Mount Stupid.

Just in case anyone was wondering, this site is pseudoscientific nonsense, just like all of BADecker's other links.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8mm3/this-woman-secretly-runs-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-anti-vax-websites-from-her-house

You should be careful with this. electrum.aantonop.com and electrum.jochen-hoenicke.de both belong to the respective person since they are hosted at their personal sites, but you have no way of knowing that Jochen Hoenicke isn't sharing data with third parties. Also, anyone (such as the NSA) could spin up a similar looking server, such as electrum.a-anton.com to trick people in to thinking it is trustworthy.

Even using Tor does not necessarily give you privacy in this scenario. The Electrum servers you connect to will still be able to link all the addresses in your wallet to each other, even if they cannot see your real IP address. If you open more than one wallet without changing Tor circuit, then again, those wallets (and all the addresses within each one) can be easily linked too.

I'm still not, but I'm hoping my third vaccine will at least reanimate my corpse or something.

Avoiding the vaccine is also literally making them stupider (if it doesn't kill them), and God knows they really can't afford for that to happen.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext

You said I would die 2 years after my first vaccine. Now it's 2-3 years from now? What about the third shot the FDA have now said I can get soon? Surely three shots speeds up the dying process compared to just one? Shouldn't I be dead already?

Just trying to figure out the best time to donate all my bitcoin to vaccine research, you know?

True, but the majority of people don't do this, and people who do maybe only check two or three random transactions which doesn't muddy the waters enough to be useful. The issue is also not only which transactions you check, but how you check them. Looking up some random transactions or addresses is one thing, but a lot of people use block explorers to check their own transactions until it gets its first confirmation. If you've searched for 50 transactions, and 49 of them you only loaded once, but 1 of them you refreshed the page 20 times, then that's a dead giveaway as well.

Either that, or people de-anonymizing themselves in ways which are unrelated to the Monero protocol, such as (as above) putting their hash and view key in to a blockchain explorer website or doing all their transactions via a honeypot node without using Tor.

Well, it depends. Perhaps you have enough budget to buy all the security measures you want. Perhaps your back up plan is to stamp your seed phrase on a piece of metal, and then screw that metal (face down) on to the concrete foundations of your house under your floor boards or in your basement, in which case there is nothing else to spend your budget on. Perhaps someone can source some scrap titanium for a very reasonable price, or even have some left over from one of their own projects. But yes, as I said above (and as has been shown by Jameson Lopp's stress tests), stamping or engraving on stainless steel will be more than enough for almost every situation.

When considering the cost of tamper evident bags or seals, these can be bought for less than 5 bucks, which is not enough to make a meaningful difference to the quality of a safe, the grade of metal you are using, a remote alert device, etc.

But also:

So we are to believe that out of all the blockchain analysis companies, some of which (such as Chainalysis) are larger than Coinbase Analytics, have been running for much longer, and have already received (and are continuing to receive) hundreds of contracts worth tens of millions of dollars from multiple US government agencies, Coinbase is the only one which can provide the information the government want in this case, but it definitely has nothing to do with the fact that they are the only blockchain analysis company attached to a major exchange.

Oh, and although Coinbase have admitted selling user data to a bunch of unknown external third parties without knowledge or consent of their users, they definitely aren't sharing user data between two branches of the same company.

I don't buy this nonsense for a second. Coinbase are absolutely selling out their users to the government.

Lesson one is to run your own node.
Lesson two is to not look up your own transactions on block explorers.
Lesson three is to do everything over Tor.

If you really need a block explorer, then you can run your own instance of mempool.space. All the code is open source, and they even give you instructions: https://github.com/mempool/mempool

I'm not sure I believe their statements regarding Monero until I see evidence to back it up. Of course Chainalysis will claim they've been able to provide some "meaningful leads" (which could mean almost anything) on Monero transactions, because that's what they want the US government to believe so that they will keep giving them expensive contracts.

37000%!? Your poor liver.

There is no system in the world which is 100% safe and secure and completely impervious to all attacks. However, this article makes it sound like stealing data from an air gapped machine is almost trivial, which it obviously is not. For any of these attacks to work, someone must first gain access to your airgapped computer, install malware on it, place some kind of microphone, radio receiver, or similar in the same room you would be using it, and do all this without it being noticeable. For most people who keep their airgapped device inside their locked house (as long as you are not silly enough to plug in a random USB drive someone gave you to your airgapped device), then that is next to impossible. Airgapped wallets set up properly remain very secure.