If you are using that script to generate a mnemonic, then you can import it in to Electrum and check the box labelled "BIP39 seed" under "Options" on the page you enter the seed phrase. Electrum will then generate the same addresses (given the same derivation path) as your script.

The passphrase (or an empty string) is appended to "mnemonic"/"electrum", not the other way around.

The first four bits.

Your wallet can't possible search every possible derivation path to look for funds. The process of doing so is just the same process as you would go through with your proposal to generate vanity addresses. It is time consuming, and the sheer number of possible paths means your wallet would still be going (and would barely have scratched the surface) when the sun engulfs the Earth in ~5 billion years' time. You need to remember the specific derivation path you used or you will likely never find it again.

Some wallets use what is known as a "gap limit", which is usually set at around 10-20. When you import a seed phrase, your wallet will scan the first 20 (for example) addresses. If it finds one which has been used, it will scan the next 20 from that address. Once it finds 20 in a row which haven't been used, it stops scanning.

A seed phrase, yes, but not individual private keys as you would have if you generated vanity address in the traditional manner.

It's a trade off between durability and cost. Stainless steel isn't quite as good as titanium, but it is more than enough for almost everything we care about and it is significantly cheaper. All common alloys of stainless steel have melting points >1400 Celsius, while titanium is around 1650 Celsius. Building fires are generally in the range of around 800-1100 Celsius, so both will hold up fine. Titanium is only a couple of places below 304 stainless steel on the galvanic scale (the lower it is the less reactive it is), so in terms of corrosion although Titanium is slightly better the difference will again be negligible for our purposes. The difference in yield strength equates to something like 13 tons of pressure per square inch for stainless steel and 16 tons of pressure per square inch for titanium, both which will withstand almost all building collapses or similar.

So yeah, if you can afford titanium then go for it, but you'll also be fine using a thick enough piece of stainless steel.

Everything you say is correct, but that news article is over a year old.

I was just discussing this in another thread so I've got the links handy, but through public records you can see just how many contracts Coinbase Analytics and other blockchain analysis companies have received from the DEA, IRS, and other government agencies:


The most recent contract for Coinbase Analytics was signed just 5 days ago for a nice $455,000 by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's probably also worth noting that the IRS were already hiring out Neutrino before Coinbase acquired them and changed their name to Coinbase Analytics, so it's no surprise that these contracts have been ongoing: https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22NEUTRINO+SRL%22&x=0&y=0.

Given that Coinbase have admitted to illegally selling customer information to third parties, and suffered literally no repercussions from it, then of course they will be monetizing their user data as part of these contracts.

You have a very naive view about how the majority of the world live. Losing a job or job opportunity is not an "inconvenience" for the vast majority of people. "Taking some time off" is simply not an option for billions of people. Many times there is no father or partner for support. An unwanted child can very quickly lead to loss of income, poverty, and homelessness.

Again, it's always peculiar that pro-lifers don't seem to care about the homeless mothers and children who are starving on our streets. Force the mother to have a child she knows she can't support, vote to cut aid and support for them, and then ignore them both when they are homeless and starving.

Insulting individual employees isn't exactly the best way to get them to help you recover your funds. Most employees at a customer support level are just doing their jobs and are feeding you the only lines they are allowed to. It's not their fault Coinbase as a company is completely amoral, and their customer support employees certainly don't have access to the necessary private keys to refund your coins.

Usually what happens is that they say they can't recover individual coins sent to the wrong address, usually because it will cost them more to do than your future business is worth if they lose you as a customer over such an issue, and it does bring security risks to use private keys to make transactions on chains they weren't meant for. So they blow off anyone who contacts them with such an issue with the standard "We cannot be held responsible for your mistakes" type email. Then, at some point down the line, the higher-ups in Coinbase sweep en masse all the funds which various users and sent to the wrong address, as can be seen by the 50-input transaction which swept yours. Most users have long forgotten about their lost coins, and so Coinbase just keeps them for themselves. You'll need to ask a customer support employee nicely to escalate it up the chain to someone who can help. Insulting them will likely just earn you more canned responses.

Coinbase did.

The only people who can access Coinbase's private keys and Coinbase's addresses is Coinbase. They have swept coins sent to the wrong addresses in the past, despite claiming that they cant recover them, not told the users in question and just pocketed the difference. I would suggest you contact them with the proof of transaction (provided that address really does belong to them) and threaten legal action if they do not return your coins.

They don't care about their users. They care about profits, even if that means literally stealing.

I wouldn't recommend splitting your seed phrase up and I wouldn't recommend using Shamir's system either. With the former you are decreasing the security of your seed phrase. With the latter you are completely reliant on the particular implementation you used for recovery, and are completely trusting that that implementation contains no bugs or vulnerabilities. With both, you have a single point of failure in the device you used to generate the seed phrase or the device you will use to restore the seed phrase.

Whatever you are looking to achieve by splitting up your seed in either of these manners can be achieved more securely by using a multi-sig wallet.

Then you download and verify a reputable open source wallet such as Electrum and import your seed phrase or private keys in to it. It will then generate the same addresses you had on your hardware wallet and give you access to the same coins. This just isn't very secure since you are exposing your keys to an online environment.

If you can't acquire a new hardware wallet and you want to maintain a similar level of security, then you would import your seed phrase or private keys to a wallet such as Electrum on a permanently airgapped (i.e. no internet connection ever) computer. You can then take the addresses or xpub from that airgapped wallet and use them to create a watch only wallet on your main online computer.

Of course not. The media, banks, Wall Street, etc., are all owned by people who have little to gain and a lot to lose from bitcoin's growing dominance. They will never portray it in a good light.

Reporting stuff like this without any investigation is pretty poor journalism, though. You expect it from all the trash that passes as crypto "news" sites, but you expect better from corporations like the BBC. It is an article funded by a bank and based on assumptions with no hard data. It is the equivalent of Philip Morris funding a study saying that if you smoke you look 30% cooler.

Don't forget that you are free though! Free to think like we want you to, to do what we allow, to spend your money where and when and on what we want you to. Just be a good little drone and you can be happy.

What if those laws are immoral, unjust, or corrupt?

So stop using that exchange. Most of these laws will be enforced via centralized exchanges. If everyone started trading peer to peer, then the government can pass whatever regulations on centralized exchanges they like, whatever KYC rules they like, whatever surveillance requirements they like, and it makes no difference.

If you want your vanity addresses' private keys to be stored on a hardware wallet, then yes, this is the only way to do it since hardware wallets will not allow you to import external private keys for obvious reasons. But a hardware wallet is not the only type of cold storage, and you can easily have airgapped vanity addresses using an airgapped computer.

As ranochigo explained, if you lose your derivation path then you may never find it again, given the absolutely enormous number of possible derivation paths. Further, if you make a mistake it will be much harder to fix than with a private key.

With a WIF private key, we know the number of characters and it includes a checksum. If we miss out, add, swap, or substitute a character or two it is easy to brute force. With a derivation path we have no idea. If it is wrong you may have missed out an entire level, which could be any number, in any location, could be hardened or unhardened. You might have added a level, missed out or added hardening, etc. You could end up with a derivation path with 30, 50, 100 levels in it. Far easier to make a mistake when trying to write it down as back up.

There would be no flood in supply.

The bitcoin source code is entirely open source. I can take it and launch a fake bitcoin clone, maybe called Bitcoin Scam Version (BSV) or Bitcoin Counterfeit Holdings (BCH), tomorrow. None of the bitcoin nodes will pay me any attention, none of the miners will care, no wallet or block explorer will support my coin, and none of my transactions will be compatible with bitcoin. I can try to "flood" 21 million new coins in to the market, and they will go nowhere because they are a different coin which is completely worthless.

If someone tried to create a real bitcoin transaction which created a flood of new bitcoin out of thin air, they would need to convince the majority of nodes and miners to accept their invalid transaction, which is obviously never going to happen.

I've always found this argument particularly disingenuous, since the majority of pro-lifers (in the US at least) are also pro-death penalty and don't seem to care at all about all the children we already have living in poverty. Most were also fine with immigrant children being locked in cages.

It was never about protecting human life or innocent children. It's always been about controlling women.

Why? What have they done to earn your trust? Binance have been hacked for coins on more than one occasion, and they've also been hacked for thousands of users' KYC information.

That's the beauty of real decentralized exchanges, and not the fake marketing ploy "DEX" that Binance runs; you don't need to entrust your funds to anyone. There are no central wallets or deposit addresses, and no one can freeze your account or seize your coins. Depending in the DEX, you put your coins in some kind of escrow - 2-of-2 between buyer and seller in the case of Bisq, decentralized smart contract-esque in the case of LocalCryptos. The exchange doesn't need to be trusted since they can't touch your coins and never request your data. Bonus points if they are open source as well.

In the scenario of the complete collapse of society, gold will have very little value. Collapse of supply chains means no fresh food and dry/canned food will rapidly disappear from every store. How many people do you think could hunt or grow their own food? Very few. If 90% of the world are starving to death and someone offers you a gold bar for your last remaining cans of food, are you going to say yes? So you can die happily knowing you own some gold? The same is true for fiat, bitcoin, etc.

If society collapses, the most valuable things will be things that keep you alive, fed, clothed, and safe. Every form of money or store of value will be worthless.

This was maybe true when comparing to fiat currencies 60+ years ago, when people were paid in physical cash, kept large amounts of cash at home, paid for everything in cash, wrote checks by hand for larger purchases, banked in person at a branch using paper records, and so on. Now, if the internet and power grid goes out, then fiat will be just as useless as bitcoin. Credit cards won't work. Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, etc., all down. No one can withdraw from an ATM. All online banking and telephone banking offline. Almost all merchants can't ring up your goods, accept payments, or even open the cash register.

That's without touching on the fact that in a scenario of global loss of internet and electricity for any significant length of time, no one will want money. Food, water, fuel, weapons, and medicine will quickly start being traded for each other.

If someone tries to broadcast a transaction which spends "fake" bitcoin (i.e. bitcoin which don't come from a valid UTXO), then every node on the network they try to broadcast it to will attempt to verify it, fail to verify it, and then reject it. It won't be shared between nodes, won't be placed in the mempool, and won't be mined.

If you are concerned about your wallet software showing you fake balances, then you can eliminate this possibility by running your own node instead of relying on other people's nodes for your information.

There are of course whole networks of fake bitcoin altcoins going by various names, which should be avoided by everyone.

Peer to peer trading is not the same as the black market, and is perfectly legal and very safe. Let's not perpetuate the nonsense that governments want us to think.

As someone who has only ever traded peer to peer, and has never be scammed, phished, hacked, or otherwise lost coins even once, i would argue that peer to peer is far safer than trusting a centralized third party completely with both your data and your coins.

Am I missing something here? It is trivially easy to use vanity addresses in a cold wallet without exposing the private keys using the more traditional methods of generating them.

Run your vanity generator on an airgapped computer, collect the private keys from all the addresses you want you use and import them in to an airgapped wallet such as Electrum. Then just take your addresses over to an online computer and create a watch only wallet with them.