The same principles apply. If you don't take steps to maintain your privacy, then pretty much all your transactions can be linked to your real name and address. Any coins which go to or from an exchange where you have completed KYC are extensively tracked and thoroughly investigated by multiple blockchain analysis companies. They then link these to your other addresses, other services you use, when and where you spend your coins, how much you are holding, and so on. Even if you are doing nothing illegal, do you really want a bunch of complete strangers (and anyone they sell their data to - governments, marketing agencies, political groups, social media companies, etc.) knowing exactly how much bitcoin you own, knowing that you use a gambling site and how much you win from it, knowing where you spend your coins, knowing that you regularly send coins to a family member in another country, etc.

Correction: m/84'/0'/0'

The ' symbols are important. They signal that that level of the derivation path uses hardened derivation instead of non-hardened derivation. If you miss any one of them out, you will derive completely different private keys and addresses.

For segwit in Electrum, it is m/0'.

No - that's different to buying cryptocurrency with fiat.

All the information required for US citizens is on this page: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/frequently-asked-questions-on-virtual-currency-transactions

Question 9 would be what the IRS would apply to signature campaign earnings, and expect them to be declared as ordinary income. Question 5 makes the point I made above - if all you have done is buy bitcoin with fiat, then you do not need to declare it.

God, I'm getting so tired of seeing this argument parroted about on this forum.

There's nothing you want to keep private? You are that certain you aren't doing anything wrong? In that case you'll have absolutely no problem sharing your real name, links to all your social media profiles, and all your email addresses and their passwords so we can take a good look at all your communications and publicly share with your friends and relatives anything we find interesting. While you are at it, could you also share your entire browsing history, all your chat logs from Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal/Facebook Messenger/etc., your bank statements, your phone records, and a list of everything you've ever bought online. After all, you are not doing anything wrong so you don't care about privacy, right?

You are absolutely certain that in among all that information there is nothing your government or any other government which spies on people around the world (See 5-, 9-, 14-eyes for examples) might take an interest in? What about the next government in those countries? What about the governments in 40 years? You are absolutely certain that none of them will find nothing of interest in all your data?

If you give away your privacy, then you are resigning yourself to a life of servitude:

You sound like someone who has never actually traded P2P before. I am far less likely to lose my coins by using an open source and trustless mechanism such as Bisq's non-custodial 2-of-2 escrow than I am by depositing them to a centralized exchange and having an arbitrary algorithm decide to lock my account for unspecified reasons.

Your updated link is from March. Some countries elected to stop using the AstraZeneca vaccine in March while the suspected link between it and some certain types of blood clots were investigated. Now that it has been established that the increased risk of these type of blood clots is tiny, and far less than the risk of blood clots if you actually contract COVID, most of these countries have since started using the AstraZeneca vaccine again. A small number secured an adequate supply of different vaccines in the meantime and so had no need to buy or administer the AstraZeneca one again.

No big mystery and no big conspiracy.

I can't speak as to the accuracy of your other statements, but you can see for yourself the contracts the US government and associated agencies are taking out with various Blockchain Analysis companies:

Chainalysis - https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22CHAINALYSIS+INC.%22
Elliptic - https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22ELLIPTIC+INC.%22
Ciphertrace - https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22CIPHERTRACE%2C+INC.%22
Coinbase Analytics - https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=VENDOR_FULL_NAME%3A%22COINBASE%2C+INC.%22

All in all, hundreds of contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. They aren't paying all that if they could just do it themselves, I'm sure.

They are really starting to feel threatened by bitcoin, going in all guns blazing to either bring it under their control or essentially make it illegal to use in any but the most superficial of ways. They want their CBDC to be the only digital currency anyone uses, so they can retain their power to monitor you, censor you, seize your assets, and print more when it suits.

Yup. We see it all the time with exchanges which have hundreds if not thousands of complaints against them for arbitrarily freezing accounts or locking up coins, and you see an endless stream of users saying "Well, nothing's happened to me, so I think they are still fine/good/trustworthy/etc." Until next week when their account is locked and then the join the chorus of people complaining, and someone else tells them "Well, nothing's happened to me".

Wishful thinking. Most people most even change exchange when confronted with hundreds of complaints as I outlined above. And even if they do, they just hop from one centralized surveillance exchange to another.

I am genuinely curious just how bad centralized exchanges have to get for the majority of people to finally stop using them. Given all the KYC, spying, reporting to governments, freezing or seizing coins or accounts, insider trading, fractional reserve, horrendous fees, dumping scam coins, the list is endless, I would have expected most rational people to abandon them by now, but they continue to attract more and more users. Centralized exchanges frequently just close accounts and keep the coins which were on them, so outright theft isn't the limit. Coinbase actively sold customer data to third parties, so that's not the limit either. Maybe they have to send someone to your house to slap your mother?

Come now. You've spent enough time on Politics and Society to know that we don't actually pay attention to links, sources, evidence, or even basic facts here.

The only advantage I can see is that you can back up a single seed phrase and one or more derivation paths, rather than individual private keys, although if your derivation paths are particularly long or complex then there is just as much risk as making a mistake with them as there would be with a private key (and probably harder to brute force a mistake than it is with individual private keys).

I suppose as well when spending from your vanity address you'll have a ready made supply of change addresses available to you, which you wouldn't have with individual private keys.

If we strip out the all the sarcasm and take a look at the actual arguments in that post:

The problem with this argument is that bitcoin is being held to a higher standard than literally every other payment method, and then is being denigrated when it fails to meet those standards. Bitcoin transactions can be seen immediately, the merchant can spend the funds immediately, and they are reversible (with difficulty) for somewhere in the region of 10-60 minutes, depending on the fee paid and the mempool. Compare that to credit cards, the most common electronic payment method. The payment can be seen immediately, the merchant cannot spend the funds for 3-5 working days, and they are reversible (extremely easily) for somewhere in the region of 180 days. People mistakenly think credit card transactions are "instant" because they show up on their mobile app or on the merchant's terminal instantly, whereas in reality this is just the same as broadcasting an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction - it is not finalized by any means. The difference is bitcoin is finalized within an hour, whereas credit card transaction can be reversed for 6 months. The same is true of PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, whatever.

All the payment methods I've just mentioned above also include fees, and often far more than bitcoin transaction fees. The difference here is that the merchant pays them (and they are therefore reflected in the price of the good or service being bought), and so the individual mistakenly views these payment methods as "free". I'll obviously concede that at times the mempool can become full and expensive, and that's where Lightning steps in, effectively allowing you to pay a fee to open a channel when the mempool is empty and cheap, and then make your future purchases instantly and with no fees.

Not sure why this is an argument at all? I'd much rather that than the constant (and accelerating) devaluation of my fiat.

Lightning and channel factories solves this.

Bitcoin isn't just some new piece of software. It is an entire industry, an entire sector, something never seen before, built from the ground up. ARPANET was first operational in 1969. 13 years later it was 1982. You tell me how the internet was doing in 1982. Might as well just have abandoned the whole thing there and then, right?

Show me any "credible" exchange and I will show you an instance of that exchange losing customer data through leaks, hacks, or selling it on.

There is very little evidence that KYC does anything to prevent money laundering. Criminals in general aren't stupid enough to send stolen coins to their own KYCed accounts.

There is no such thing. Any and every time you complete KYC at any exchange or service, you risk loss and/or theft of your data.

The idea would be that you broadcast a low fee transaction publicly which the other party would see via their wallet or block explorer, and then while it is sitting unconfirmed in the mempool you would pay a large miner privately to instead attempt to mine a conflicting transaction which your trading party is unaware of.

It depends on how you define "double spend". No, the same UTXO cannot be confirmed in two different transactions, but the same output can certainly be spent in two different transactions as long as those transaction remain unconfirmed. There have been a very small number of events when a transaction with 1 confirmation has been gone back to being unconfirmed and invalidated by a different transaction spending the same input due to stale blocks.

You can do this with Electrum.

Connect your Ledger to your computer, boot up Electrum, and create a new standard wallet using your hardware device. On the screen after you select your derivation path, you will be shown an option to "Encrypt wallet". If you uncheck that box, then it will allow you to open your wallet file without your Ledger connected, see all your addresses and view new transactions. You won't be able to use the wallet to do anything unless you plug in your hardware wallet.

The option to "Encrypt wallet" is simply encrypted the information stored on your PC - public keys, addresses, metadata, etc. The private keys are always stored on the hardware device and so even with the wallet file unencrypted, there is no risk of loss.

As do I, which is why I've never tried to have any of his posts deleted. There is a significant difference between defending free speech and defending the individuals which use that free speech to tell provable lies.

If you don't think that telling people to experiment on themselves with unstudied treatments or drink bleach isn't dangerous, then I don't really know that to say.

No, I don't.

For any transaction which does not need instant confirmation such as fast food, coffee, groceries, etc., then the merchant is going to wait for at least a few confirmations before handing over the goods or services, rendering double spending impossible. For any transaction which does need instant confirmation such as the examples I just gave, then the merchant can choose to accept zero confirmation transactions which are not opted in to RBF up to a certain value if they like, or they can opt to use Lightning instead.

Note that it is significantly easier to reverse a credit card transaction, and this can be done for months after the transaction, than it is to double spend an unconfirmed non-RBF bitcoin transaction, which can only be done for 10-20 minutes after the transaction, depending on fee and mempool.

You should never accept zero confirmation transactions which have unconfirmed parents, regardless of the parents' RBF status. Transaction malleability allows a node or miner to change a transaction in such a way that the signature remains valid and the transaction itself remains valid (and so can still be broadcast and mined), but the hash of the transaction will be changed, therefore invalidating any children based upon this unconfirmed transaction. Protecting against transaction malleability was the main reason behind segwit, and so if all the unconfirmed parents only spend native segwit inputs then this isn't a concern, but since the majority of inputs in circulation are not native segwit yet then it is safer to just not accept any unconfirmed transaction with any unconfirmed parents.

I doubt it. Coinbase admitted they were selling their customers' data to third parties and they employ a bunch of people who built surveillance systems for dictators and were complicit in torture and other human rights abuse around the world. The result? Literally nothing happened and they continue to be one of the biggest exchanges in the world. Binance have been hacked for thousands of users data and their response was "Well, it was one of our third parties and not us, so its not our fault." The result? Literally nothing happened and they continue to be one of the biggest exchanges in the world.

People don't care when there is money involved. They will give up any amount of personal freedoms or liberties for the opportunity to earn $2 of some shitcoin!

Depends what you mean by a hassle. I would view giving away my KYC information and spending the rest of my life having to be extra vigilant regarding identity theft and my information being used against me, to gain access to my accounts, to open credit in my name, etc., far more of hassle than using a peer to peer exchange.

Double spending unconfirmed transactions has always been possible, long before RBF was enabled, and once a transaction has a single confirmation its RBF status is largely irrelevant. The only way RBF enables fraud is if you find a merchant who understands very little about bitcoin but is also somehow running their own payment processor (and not using a hosted third party service) who then accepts zero confirmation transactions which are opted in to RBF.

No. You either don't accept transactions without confirmations regardless of its RBF status, or you state that RBF must be disabled to allow zero confirmation transactions (up to a certain value you are willing to accept). If someone pays with RBF, then you require at least 1 confirmation.

Could be an update, could be a bug, could be an issue connecting with their servers, could be a bunch of things. Did you update anything else last time you used it? Did you try enabling any new features (particularly experimental ones) via the settings? Have you moved or deleted any files or folders from the Ledger Live directory?

Accounts disappearing should not be a cause for concern though - it simply means your Ledger Live is misbehaving for some reason. Ledger Live does not contain any private keys and indeed can't even extract the private keys from your Ledger Nano; it can only pass transactions to your Ledger Nano to be signed within the secure element. A quick search of Reddit shows a handful of other users in your situation, but no obvious identified cause.

I'd agree with Charles-Tim though. If you are only using bitcoin, then just use Ledger Live to update firmware and use a better wallet such as Electrum to actually interact with your private keys and coins. In addition to solving this issue you can access to many more features, such as individual address balances and coin control.

That's it exactly. It's all based on assumptions.

IF we assume that every bitcoin miner draws power from the standard electricity grid of the country they are mining in, and
IF we assume that every bitcoin miner pays $0.05/kWh for that electricity, and
IF we assume a couple of arbitrary adjustment factors which we don't explain how we arrive at, and
IF we assume peak sales of each ASIC is within a month of release, and
IF we assume that the second an ASIC becomes unprofitable with these previous assumption it is immediately disposed of, and
IF we assume it is disposed of to a landfill and none of these devices are ever recycled, used to mine other coins, or any other purpose,
THEN we reach this conclusion.

Change any one of those largely unsubstantiated assumptions and their entire conclusion is moot.

Maybe also worth noting that in their paper, they use the word "assume" (and its derivatives) 20 times, and "estimate" (and its derivatives) 50 times.