I'm not sure they would really be much use here. Sure, they might let you bypass any IP or country restrictions to connect to foreign exchanges, but that doesn't really matter if it is a centralized exchange which is enforcing KYC anyway. Either they ban you as soon as you sign up with your US passport or whatever, or they hand over all your information to the US government anyway. The only way to avoid the government spying on you is to not complete KYC in the first place.

I've been hoping that for years, but it is unlikely to happen. I've said before on this forum, but I am endlessly astounded by the amount of shit centralized exchanges will force on their users and the users just accept it. Coins and KYC being hacked, lost, stolen is one thing. Ridiculous KYC and spying on you is another. But then add in freezing accounts for no reason, their ridiculous fees, insider trading, market manipulation, using your deposits as investments, fractional reserve, and all the other shady stuff they do. Any sane person would have stopped using centralized exchanges years ago. If you are willing to put up with all that already, then you probably don't care about a bit more government control over you and your money.

You are importing the wrong derivation path to Electrum. As I said in my earlier post, your derivation path for Electrum should be m/84'/0'/1'. The change addresses Electrum displays at this derivation path will match the receiving addresses you have generated on Ian Coleman. I have just tested this myself.

Whatever BIP39 derivation path you import in to Electrum, Electrum will add /x/y on the end.
Whatever BIP32 derivation path you have on Ian Coleman, Ian Coleman will add /y on the end.
This is the reason for your confusion.

The derivation path m/84'/0'/3'/2 is non-standard and does not follow BIP39. The 4th number should only ever be 0 or 1 (corresponding to receiving or change addresses respectively), and there should be 5 numbers in total, not 4. How and with which wallet did you generate a key at this path?

Which hardware wallet are you trying to connect with Electrum? You shouldn't be importing external seeds to hardware wallets since it negates the whole point of the seed being generated on a secure environment (the hardware wallet itself). I would set up a brand new wallet using your hardware device, and then sweep all the funds from that individual private key to your new hardware protected wallet.

I'd be very surprised if some degree of this wasn't already happening. Hell, knowing the US government, they would probably attempt to strong-arm any foreign exchange or government that they wanted in to handing over the details of US citizens without offering any information in return.

And so can you! And what's more, it isn't even difficult. Go to Bisq or LocalCryptos, download the software or sign up for an account, and start trading peer to peer completely decentralized without handing over any personal information whatsoever.

If you use centralized exchanges, then the government will track you. It's that simple. It doesn't matter if the exchange is overseas, or they totally promise not to hand over you details (), or you only use their non-KYCed accounts, or whatever.

No, it's not a bug.

Any BIP39 derivation path you enter in to Electrum will have /x/y appended to the end as it generates addresses. x will be 0 or 1 depending if the address is receiving or change respectively, and y will start at 0 and increment by 1 with each subsequent address. If you import m/84'/0'/0' to Electrum, then:

The first receiving address will be at path m/84'/0'/0'/0/0
The second receiving address will be at path m/84'/0'/0'/0/1
The third receiving address will be at path m/84'/0'/0'/0/2

The first change address will be at path m/84'/0'/0'/1/0
The second change address will be at path m/84'/0'/0'/1/1

And so on. Therefore, if you import m/84'/0'/1'/1 to Electrum, the first address Electrum generates will be at m/84'/0'/1'/1/0/0.

If you want the first address Ian Coleman generates at m/84'/0'/1'/1 to show up in Electrum (which will be at m/84'/0'/1'/1/0), then import m/84'/0'/1' and look at the first change address.

If OP is accurate when he says he doesn't know "the first three" words, then it is only 2048³ possibilities, which is solvable in hours to days, rather than years.

Good thinking. Check this first OP, since it will save you a huge amount of time.

I have quite a bit of experience with the program, so happy to help out if you get stuck. Just be sure not to share any of your seed words on the forum (or with anybody else, for that matter). If you are certain it is the first three words you are missing, then your tokens file would look something like this:


Replace the last three lines with the entire BIP39 wordlist three times. This tells btcrecover the 9 words you know in their fixed positions, and then tells it to try every possible word from the wordlist as the first three missing words.

I swear I'm not being antagonistic just for the sake of it, but I think I'd actually like that even less. Part of the great thing about Bisq is that it remains open source, free, and free from outside influence. I have no doubt that if Twitter decided to start funding its development or similar, then some decisions about its future would be influenced in ways we didn't want them to. A good comparison would be BitTorrent, which has gone steadily downhill since being bought out by Justin Sun.

Given just how many altcoins/ICOs/DeFi projects etc. end up have some enormous critical bug in them, I would be very hesitant to trust some brand new and untested smart contract or similar with my KYC details.

I wasn't aware that number was so low. That is a real road block to adoption, although as discussed above, applies equally to any form of payment other than physical cash. Given that the same link says 66% of Salvadorans use social media, then you can only assume that many people still have internet access from public hotspots, schools, libraries, etc., even if they don't have their own connection, although that's not going to help them pay a merchant on the go.

I suppose if the number of people truly is that low, then perhaps businesses are incentivized to run a public WiFi point that customers can connect to in order to make payments, be they BTC or otherwise.

No, you're absolutely right. Given two passphrases of the same length, then random characters (including lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols) will have significantly more entropy than individual words. Two words would have around 150,000² = 34 bits of entropy, whereas 10 random characters would have around 95¹⁰ = 65 bits.

The difference comes because such passphrases are rarely of the same length. 8 words might have around 40-50 characters in total, but very few people would use a passphrase of 50 random characters. To achieve a passphrase of >128 bits of security, you would need 20 random characters or 8 random words. Given the two following passphrases then:

.ujG&Yb!zVs[E`qS8\7@

wrong spoil drawing bottle underline ear dictate division

Most people will find it easier to remember (even although you shouldn't), write down, back up, and re-enter the words rather than the random characters.

Punishment, yes, but I don't think it would be a disaster to make it mandatory for all merchants accept bitcoin.

The Salvadoran government have released an app called Chivo. Misgivings about using a government designed and sponsored wallet aside, from what I've read the app allows individuals and merchants to send or receive payments in both USD and BTC, and convert between the two. There is nothing stopping a bitcoin-sceptical merchant from using the app to accept bitcoin and then immediate convert it to USD, much the same as what happens already with many merchants and payment processors around the world. There are no additional taxes or commissions to pay for conversion, so it would literally be as ease as just downloading the app and displaying a QR code. If you don't want to keep the bitcoin that customers pay you, then you can convert immediately to USD and never have to worry about setting up your own wallet, cold storage, backing up seed phrases, etc.

Having said all that, given that every Salvadoran can now convert immediately between the two currencies with no taxes or commission, a bitcoin user can effectively spend their bitcoin anywhere in the country - it's just that the conversion to USD takes place on their wallet instead of 5 seconds later on the merchant's wallet.

3 words is relatively easily brute forcible, so you should be able to recover your funds.

The program I would recommend using would be: https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover/
There is documentation on how to use this here: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
You will need to first construct a token file with the words you do know.

An alternative approach would be to use this program: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214021.0

Are you certain about the other 9 words? Are you certain they are in the correct order? Are you certain it is the first 3 words you are missing?

Further, do you know an address from this wallet which has sent or received any bitcoin? Preferably the very first address in the wallet, if you know it.

Alternatively to the replies above, if you are only concerned about the seed phrase that your Ledger device is generating for you, then you have two other options available to you while continuing to use the Ledger device. You could extend your seed phrase with a custom passphrase while you choose yourself. If you make it long and complex enough, then even someone with full knowledge of your seed phrase would not be able to discover your wallet or steal your coins. Your other option is to generate your own seed phrase using a manual source of entropy such as flipping a coin 256 times, converting it in to the corresponding words, and then importing that in to your Ledger wallet.

If your Raspberry Pi is connected to the internet, then no, it would not be more secure.
If your Raspberry Pi is permanently airgapped, then it may be either more or less secure, depending on how you set it up and use it. Although I personally like airgapped cold storage, there are a lot more ways to go wrong and make fatal errors with them than there are with hardware wallets.

You've led me down a rabbit hole of Antonopoulos' YouTube videos now.

Here he is in 2018 suggesting using 8-10 words as a passphrase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAP2u6w_1-k&t=740s. So it seems in the last 3 years he has significantly reduced what he considers necessary for a passphrase.

For interest, if we take my number of ~150,000 words in the English language, then (assuming randomly chosen words) 4 words gives around 68.8 bits of entropy, whereas 10 words would give around 171.9 bits of entropy. I would say the former is too low, while the latter (although very secure) is probably unnecessarily high, given that bitcoin itself "only" has 128 bits of security. 7-8 words gives a range of around 120 - 137 bits of entropy, which is more in the region of being as secure as a 12 word seed phrase and incredibly difficult/impossible to brute force.

This is even more relevant when considering that most people using several words as a passphrase will not be using a truly random source of dictionary words. They will either be picking the "random" words manually and therefore not be random at all, or they will (even worse) be selecting words which have some meaning for them, are easy to remember, are linked in some way, etc.

So, out of curiosity, I tested Unicode characters on Electrum and Ian Coleman, both accepted them, and the resulting wallets were reproducible between the two pieces of software, for both Electrum seeds and BIP39 seeds. Are there any hardware wallet which support Unicode characters too? Perhaps Trezor might if you enter the passphrase on the attached device rather than on the hardware wallet itself?

95, if you include "space".

I have sympathy with this point of view and for the people involved, but the counterpoint would be "When will ever be a good time?". There will always be people complaining it was too soon, there will always be business that don't want to change and adapt, and there will always be the central banks telling everyone that it's a terrible idea. The president has put a number of things in place to ease the transition - every Salvadoran gets $30 of free Bitcoin in their wallet, a $150 million fund to provide liquidity for BTC/USD swaps, 200 new bitcoin ATMs across the country. I have respect for the "Let's just get things done" attitude which seems to missing in our government in the US, which will drag things on for months and months with no resolution.

The government of El Salvador have also just released a commercial explaining some of the changes: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pes59v/firstever_bitcoin_commercial_made_by_a_national/. You can find an English translation in the reddit comments. Notably:


So although it's legal tender, doesn't seem it is mandatory for people or business to actually accept it.

Call me cynical, but Twitter isn't exactly a bastion of free speech and will regularly censor or outright ban people who say things they don't like. Why should we believe that a crypto exchange ran by the same company would be any different? I wouldn't trust him not to censor me for a second. If they are demanding KYC then it means they are planning on complying with all the various AML legislation, which also means they must have some power to freeze your coins, trades, or account. I also don't care if the KYC process is decentralized, whatever that means - at some point, someone somewhere must look at your documents to confirm them, and someone somewhere must have the ability to hand your information over to the authorities, otherwise there is no point to the KYC process, so your information is just as much at risk.

From what I've read so far, it doesn't seem like this is bringing anything new to the table. It just seems like another LocalBitcoins clone.

At least with bitcoin you could instantly whip out your phone and look up a block explorer to see if the transaction went through, or even to create a second QR code payment request if it didn't. Good luck doing any of that with a credit card. Did the transaction go through? You'll find out in 3-5 days. You want to phone Visa to ask if a transaction for $5-10 went through? Haha, good luck with that. You want to accept a new transaction only using your phone? Not possible.

Some of the other quotes from the article are equally dumb. For example:

...said no one who knows anything about bitcoin, ever.

Do you have a link for the video in question? The errors I have discussed above are small errors, could be a simple mistake, and don't change the essence of the message he is delivering. This, on the other hand, is a significant error and terrible advice. Using a single English dictionary word limits your options to around 150,000, depending on the dictionary you are looking at. Looking at only 4-6 letter words and you are down below 50k. You only have to perform 2048 rounds of PBKDF2 and then a handful more hashes and EC multiplications to derive the first few addresses. A quick benchmark check on my not-very-powerful computer with btcrecover means I could brute force this in well under a minute.

I would be very surprised if he was giving out such poor advice. This isn't a simple slip up like the others - this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a good passphrase. Is there a possibility you perhaps misheard/misremember, and he actually said 4-6 words rather than a single word of 4-6 characters?

Huh, TIL. Thanks!

I've had everything turned up to max and JavaScript disabled unless I choose otherwise for so long that I couldn't remember what the default options were. I have the override option enabled so I can manually whitelist the few sites I need to allow JavaScript on. Keeping your Tor browser security settings on "Safest" to disable JavaScript by default plays in to what I was discussing above about revealing as little as possible via JavaScript to make yourself stand out.

Are you confusing NoScript with Tor's built in security features?

If you go to Options -> Privacy and Security in Tor, you do indeed get the Normal/Safer/Safest check boxes for Tor's own security features, with only the Safer and Safest options disabling JavaScript on non-HTTPS or all sites, respectively. NoScript's JavaScript blocking should override these, but I'm not sure if that option is enabled by default or if the user has to turn it on.

Looking in to it a bit more, it seems that Tor sets media.peerconnection.enabled to false by default, so WebRTC isn't actually a concern when using Tor (unless you choose to enable it for some reason). My original point still stands, though, that a fresh install of Tor which you do not then customize or make unique in any way is your best bet for avoiding browser fingerprinting or leaking other data.

All the points you have listed are on the curve.

Note that the two scam sites you have mentioned search/display/steal private keys. The coordinates you have listed are all public keys. Further, if you are concatenating the coordinates, you need to remove the two "0x" prefixes and instead prefix 04 since you are using the full uncompressed public keys.