There are lots of ways to de-anonymize someone who is using bitcoin. It you use any centralized exchange, even without completing KYC, then you should assume they will report your email address, IP address, and other identifying information to the government. If you pay anyone using a centralized payment processor such as BitPay, then they will also report the same information along with details of any transactions you make. Perhaps you gave out your real name and address as part of buying some goods online, and that bitcoin address can now be linked to your and then linked in turn to other addresses which you use. Perhaps you used your email address to sign up for a gambling site. Perhaps you left a bitcoin address somewhere on your social media profiles. Perhaps you shared a bitcoin address via a non-encrypted email provider. Perhaps you used a web wallet. The list is endless.

The US government also spend a lot of money hiring services such as Coinbase Analytics, CipherTrace, and Chainalysis, whose sole purpose is to use blockchain analysis combined with data obtained from other sources including exchange reporting, social media, database leaks, etc., to deanonymize users and addresses.

There are very specific phases of clinical trials which drugs must pass through before going in to general production. None of these involve random people buying a random drug and self administering it in random dosages for conditions with little to no data for said drug.

To get back on topic to BADecker here, I'm unclear as to why you are defending someone who any rational person would agree is spreading incorrect and dangerous information.

A study funded by a bank and written by Alex de Vries, who is employed by a bank and who has a long history of writing opinion pieces about how terrible bitcoin is. I'm absolutely positive that such an article will be completely neutral and not at all biased.

You should be able to download it from here: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0921344921005103-mmc1.docx

I've looked through the paper at length to try to figure out how they came up with this figure of "1.29 years" that they base their entire analysis on. They make a lot of references to "Supplementary Data Sheets", but these data sheets are nowhere to be found. I have full access to the Elsevier website and cannot find them there either. I downloaded the PDF of the article as well as the PDF of the entire Volume this article is published in, and can't find the reference data anywhere. So at least for the time being, a lot of their data is shrouded in mystery. Amazing that not a single one of the "news sites" which have reported this story have picked up on that. It's almost like they just spam anything for the clickbait headlines.

What they do say in the main paper is that all their assumptions regarding device lifespan are based upon it still being profitable at a cost of "USD 5 cents per kilowatt-hour" of electricity. Given that we know from other studies that the majority of bitcoin miners are using renewable energy supplies at prices far cheaper than this, and that some bitcoin miners are even being paid to use up electricity which would otherwise be wasted, this seems like a big assumption. They reference another paper for their $0.05/kWh figure (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3700822) which specifically states that this price is "comparatively higher" than others, with some regions reporting a median electricity price of only $0.025/kWh. So assuming that $0.05/kWh is a global average is incorrect, even by their own sources.

The data that they do share shows that reducing their incorrect assumption by a tiny amount to $0.045/kWh increases their predicted lifespan by a whopping 18.6%. Reducing further towards a true global average will increase the lifespan dramatically, and so the ridiculous comparison regarding 2 iPhones is complete nonsense.
 

If you have checked the faulty accounts on multiple devices and browsers, and you have created a new account on one of the same devices which is working normally, then you have effectively excluded a local issue with your device, browser, ISP, etc. The issue then must lie with your blockchain.com account. Since the account is owned and operated by blockchain.com, then contacting their support will likely be the only way to resolve this issue. Good luck - their support is utterly terrible, just like their wallet.

Do you have the seed phrase for these two wallets backed up? If not, can you access it by going to Security -> Backup funds? The direct link to the Security page in case you cannot click on it is: https://login.blockchain.com/en/#/security-center/basic. If you can access your seed phrase, then restore your two wallets somewhere else and transfer the funds out to a better wallet than blockchain.com.

Deliberately transacting specific amounts in an attempt to evade the threshold is known as "structuring". This is a crime in the fiat system, and will presumably also be a crime for bitcoin with this new legislation.

Harder to sneak things through in an unrelated bill when they make more major changes. Easier for them to sneak this through under the pretense of "just making it the same as fiat", and then sneak through lowering the threshold in some healthcare bill or something further down the line.

What the US tells people it is and what is actually is are two very different things. The US has been rapidly falling down the global rankings for individual freedom and civil liberties for years now.

These reviews are good, but they all point to the same thing - stamping or etching your seed phrase on to stainless steel or titanium is consistently the best way of doing it. With that knowledge, there is no need whatsoever to spend $50-100 on such a device, when you can walk in to any local hardware store and buy a small piece of 5mm+ stainless steel for a few bucks. This also keeps your name and address off the database of a company which only sells crypto backup devices, which is a security risk if their database is ever hacked or leaked.

In terms of backwards compatibility, I wouldn't be overly concerned with either Electrum or BIP39 seed phrases. Both are widely used and widely understood. It's not like the process of turning a seed phrase in to private keys is highly classified information. Even if every bitcoin wallet on the planet disappeared tomorrow, there are dozens of third party tools and tens of thousands of people who could create new ones to extract private keys from seed phrases. If I was going to opt for one or the other for long term storage, I'd probably choose BIP39 since it is more widespread than Electrum and would cause the least amount of issues with someone unfamiliar with bitcoin trying to restore from it in the future.

Further, unless one of your outputs is an even smaller dust output (which would defeat the whole purpose of trying to use up the dust in the first place), then your third dust input couldn't possibly pay any of the outputs and therefore must be linked to at least one of the other inputs. Combine that with other heuristics which could identify the change output, and you can probably tell that the dust input was entirely unnecessary and definitely not part of a coinjoin.

Which is exactly where a tamper-evident set up is useful. I don't want someone to be able to compromise one of my back up locations and for me to have no knowledge of it. Some of my back ups are for cold storage coins I haven't touched in years and don't plan to touch for years. Do I really want a period of 10+ years with an attacker knowing my seed phrase and attempting to brute force my passphrase, find its back up location, or both, and me having absolutely no knowledge that that is what is happening? Of course not. Even in your hypothetical situation of me only checking my back ups very rarely, a period of few months before I discover the breach is far better than not knowing about the breach at all.

Splitting addresses you want to keep separate between different wallets is the most important thing, but also using different Tor circuits and different Electrum servers are a necessary additional step. If an Electrum server sees a Tor exit node query all the addresses from one wallet, and then two minutes later that same Tor exit node queries all the addresses from a second wallet, then it is highly suspicious that those two wallets are owned by the same person, as the alternative scenario of two different people using the same Tor exit node and querying the same Electrum server at the same time is highly unlikely.

You should be willing to accept experimental treatments as part of a controlled trial, which have appropriate lab data to suggest their efficacy, which have been through appropriate safety studies, are produced in a controlled and safe manner, and are given by trained professionals at an appropriate dose in an appropriate setting to deal with any unknown or unforeseen side effects. You shouldn't experiment on yourself with random chemicals because a stranger on the internet told you to. Again, the two are not comparable.

Option 2 as explained by pooya.

Just to expand on what you suggested for option 1 - the outputs in a coinbase transaction have nothing to do with the other transactions which are included in that block. The majority of coinbase transactions now include a single output containing the block reward and all the fees they are claiming, plus a few additional OP_RETURN outputs, usually marking the name of the mining pool which found the block. If the miner chooses to split the subsidy between multiple addresses (even between several hundred addresses as we've seen here) instead of just sending it to a single one, then they are free to do so. This has no bearing on the other transactions included in the block. A block with 1000 transactions could send the whole block reward to a single address, and an empty block with no other transactions could split the block reward across 1000 addresses.

I would take the refund and then take your business elsewhere. Even if you complete KYC, it is unlikely to be enough for them and they will demand more and more information and potentially still deny your trade anyway (or just freeze your coins in the name of "compliance" or some other such nonsense).

Then name and shame this anti-bitcoin exchange so others know to avoid them.

I'd echo PN7 in saying this is a very cool concept. I'm not sure I have any use case for it, but I'm sure some people will. Quick question for anyone who can answer since I have no idea - how feasible would it be for someone to remove the bottom of the plastic container (I don't mean unscrew the lid which would obviously mess up the beads, but rather cut/melt/whatever just the bottom of the container), access the contents, and then attach a fresh piece? What about to do so in a way that it wasn't immediately obvious that it had been done?

So I can use a non-transparent bag. Or put the seed phrase inside an envelope - either they open the envelope inside the bag, in which case it is obvious my seed phrase has been accessed, or they have to open the bag to replace the envelope, which gives the same result.

Water purification tablets are marketed and sold as water purification tablets, are regulated by the FDA (or similar) to contain a pure substance prepared in a safe manner in a specific dose which has been studied and is known to be safe when mixed with the required amount of water. MMS is marketed and sold as a miracle cure for HIV, cancer, autism, and more, is regulated by no one, is prepared using unknown methods which often results in contamination with toxic byproducts such as sodium chlorite, is of variable and usually unknown strength and concentration, and is taken in various unstudied dosages. The two are not comparable.

Similarly, a very specific regime of chemotherapy, prescribed by a trained physician in a medical setting, with all the observations, monitoring, blood work, etc., to ensure efficacy and safety and permit dose titrations, switching to different agents, or stopping therapy altogether is not comparable to a conspiracy nut telling people to take horse dewormer on a bitcoin forum.

Sure, all pharmaceuticals can cause side effects. This dose not give lunatics carte blanche to tell people to poison themselves. Also feel free to Google "MMS deaths" or similar to see that this absolutely can be fatal.

That is exactly what it means. How less secure your wallet is depends on the exact behavior of that particular piece of wallet software. If your wallet still connects to a variety of nodes and downloads and verifies all the block headers, then you can still achieve a reasonable degree of certainty that you are not being fed incorrect information. If however, at the other extreme, your lightweight wallet downloads absolutely nothing and simply asks a single node it is connected to for up to date information regarding your addresses and transactions, then you have absolutely no idea if the information you are receiving is accurate or not. You are placing 100% trust in that single node and its operator, which is obviously not secure at all.

The last thing we need is more low topic threads being spammed in the name of "helping the forum".

They are not "lost" in the sense of coins being sent to a burn address with an unknown private key are "lost", in the way that they still exist but no one can spend them. Rather, they are permanently destroyed. The output(s) from these coinbase transactions, even if they were allowed to contain x amount of bitcoin, only contained x-y amount of bitcoin, and so there only exists x-y amount of bitcoin to be spent and used.

Of course, it would be possible in the future to change the code so future blocks could add on the lost coins to their own their own block reward, but I don't see there ever being consensus to do that, just as there would not be consensus to raise the 21 million cap or allow OP_RETURN coins to be reclaimed.

They provide zero protection, but they are not useless.

Take the situation where you have a seed phrase backed up in one location and a passphrase backed up in another. If you notice that your seed phrase's tamper evident bag/seal/whatever has been broken, then you will know that an attacker has your seed phrase and may be attempting to brute force your passphrase, and you will move your coins immediately to a new wallet. Without a tamper evident bag, you would not have this knowledge. You will also now know that that particular back up location is not secure and you will stop using it, information you wouldn't otherwise have.

No single back up I have is enough to steal any coins from me, but I definitely still want to know if any single back up has been accessed by someone who isn't me.

I would try brute forcing yourself first. In the event that you've simply misspelled a single word or swapped the location of two of your words, which are the most common errors people make, then the number of possibilities required to be brute forced is very low (24576 for a single incorrect word and only 132 for two swapped words) and could be done in a matter of seconds with the correct btcrecover set up. Even if all 12 words are in the wrong order you can descramble them in under an hour with reasonable hardware.

The readthedocs page I linked to earlier in this thread talks you through installing Python and btcrecover and is fairly comprehensive. If you run in to any problems, then let us know.

His recommendations of ivermectin, HCQ, suramin, and other pharmaceuticals are certainly not benign - all these drugs come with serious and potentially fatal side effects, and are not effective for any of the conditions he says they are.

But no, I was talking more about when he tells people to drink bleach or chlorine dioxide, which he calls "MMS".