Everything you have written is correct, but I wanted to expand on this last point. The probability of the next 2 minutes is always the same, but the probability of a specific 2 minutes changes.

For example. Let's say I am interested in a block being mined between minutes 10 and 12. I calculate the probability of mining a block in the next 12 minutes, and I calculate the probability of mining a block in the next 10 minutes, and I subtract the two. The probability, then, of finding a block between minutes 10 and 12 works out to 6.7%.

However, by the time we get to the 10 minute mark, that probability is now 18.1%. Obviously this makes sense when you think about it, as every 2 minute bracket can't have a probability of 18.1%, or else we would rapidly end up with >100% chance.

Bitcoin mining is a memoryless process. It doesn't matter what came before - it is always 10 minutes on average until the next block.

If you choose an OS which is filled with bloatware and start installing games on your airgapped computer, then yes, it is much less secure.

Yes, smartphones are far less secure, which is why they are classed as hot wallets. A smartphone is poor benchmark for comparing a hardware wallet to, though.

If you want a wallet which can play games, store arbitrary data, display pictures, whatever, then that's absolutely your choice. There are plenty of devices on the market to choose from. But you can't possibly argue that putting games on a hardware wallet is a good use of time nor that doing so is 100% risk free.

Might also help to get the price down a but if they weren't paying devs to code, test, and implement games.

Which falls under their one purpose of securely storing and allowing you to safely interact with private keys, passwords, or codes. Not for playing games.

I don't disagree that adding altcoin support is risky too. Every new piece of code you put on the device poses a security risk. But altcoin code at least serves a purpose (even if it is a purpose I don't care for), and even better if it is entirely optional to install it in the first place. Pre-installed games are risky bloatware.

This is not accurate.

The constraint set by the protocol is that if you sum all the outputs in a block (including the coinbase transaction), that number must be less than or equal to the sum of all the inputs in a block plus the block reward. This effectively sets an upper limit on how much a miner can reward themselves for finding a block, being the block reward plus the total fees. However, there is no lower limit. Miners are free to claim 1 satoshi less, 1 bitcoin less, or indeed, no reward at all, if they so choose. This has happened many times in the past, usually by mistake, but has resulted in the irreversible loss of a few dozen bitcoin.

Further correction:

WIF keys can be either 51 or 52 characters long. The ones which are 51 characters long are for uncompressed private keys and start with a "5". The ones which are 52 characters long are for compressed private keys and start with either a "K" or a "L". They are in Base58 and are case sensitive. The compressed keys include an extra 0x01 byte prior to the checksum, which tells your wallet software to generate the compressed public key rather than the full public key when imported.

Standard private keys are 64 characters long. They are in Base16 (hexadecimal) and are not case sensitive.

This is bad advice. The majority of online wallets are either woefully inadequate and horrendously insecure, or are outright scams. You are gambling with every coin you store in an online wallet.

This is also bad advice. Email authentication and 2FA is not foolproof and can be bypassed. And even then, they only protect you from attacks against your individual account. They do nothing to protect the security of the actual wallet and system where your coins are stored. 2FA does nothing if the online wallet in question is hacked and their wallets emptied. It does nothing to protect against scams, poor security, wallets being lost, and so on.

Also, Google Authenticator is a bad choice. Better to choose an open source alternative.

The average block time over the entirety of bitcoin's existence is actually 9 minutes 32 seconds. If you replace 600 with 572 in my equations above, they come very close to the observed rates.

If every transaction was opted-in to RBF, then the only situation in which it would reasonable to accept zero confirmation transactions in my opinion would be situations where you trust the other party to make good on a promise. If you wouldn't accept an "IOU" or someone verbally telling you that they'll pay you at a later date, then you shouldn't accept a zero confirmation transaction from that person.

Completely agree. If you want to accept payments instantly or make payments instantly, then just open a Lightning channel. There are plenty of wallets out there now which will do all the heavy lifting so to speak for you if you really can't be bothered to open a channel yourself.

Bitcoin has never been "broken into by hackers".

Reminds me of when I got a Game Boy emulator running on my 1st or maybe 2nd generation (I can't really remember) iPod back in the day.

The Passport device has not been extensively pen tested like Ledger or Trezor devices have been, so there is no way as of yet of knowing if that is true.

Because that is what a smartphone is meant to do. The whole point of a smartphone is to be multi-purpose and do near enough anything you want it do. The whole point of a hardware wallet is to do one thing and one thing only.

Who knows? The device hasn't been tested yet. Airgapped cold storage is never connected with the internet in any way, and yet it is not invulnerable to attacks.

An unnecessary process. You can use the link I gave above and then order by ascending block number. The first non Coinbase transaction is in block 170. There is then a single transaction in blocks 181, 182, 183, 187, 221, 248, 496, 524, and 545. The first block with multiple transactions is 546. So feel free to jump to those block numbers and skip the endless clicking.

So all cash transactions are classed as laundering? Don't be ridiculous.

Absolutely not true. Only around 8% of coins sent to mixers are what you might term "dirty money". The majority of funds come directly from KYCed accounts on centralized exchanges from average users simply seeking to reclaim some privacy. Nothing illegal about that. Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/only-8-of-mixed-crypto-coins-tied-to-illicit-activity-report

If you've completed KYC on a centralized exchange, then your details have already been passed to your government. It's KYC you must avoid if you don't want the government knocking on your door, not mixers.

The charges in this case are because he conspired with darknet marketplaces to launder money, not simply because he offered a mixing service. Mixing your coins is not illegal and is done for a variety of completely legitimate reasons. The majority of coins sent to mixers come directly from centralized exchanges, usually from KYCed users, and so are simply individuals trying to stop these exchanges from spying on their transactions and financial dealings after they have withdrawn bitcoin from them, as all centralized exchanges do.

If "providing a service which criminals can use" is a crime, then you'll need to arrest damn near everyone on the planet, from Mark Zuckerberg to the guy who runs the hot dog stand on the corner. Just because a criminal can use a service doesn't mean running that service is a crime.

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This has been over the last 24 hours. Every one of his 12 threads is text spun plagiarism and zero value trash. This board needs a dedicated mod to stop users like this before they gain traction.

Perfect. Thanks for the verification.

We can use the formula I gave above to calculate the probability with a specific time frame as you have. So, for example, if we are interested in the 11 - 20s bracket, we would calculate the probability of finding a block within 20 seconds, the probability of finding a block within 10 seconds, and then subtract the two. Given this, then for the brackets you have used then numbers look like this:

Bracket	Calculated	Actual
------------	------------	------------
⩽5s	0.8%	0.6%
6-10s	0.8%	0.7%
11-20s	1.6%	1.6%
21-30s	1.6%	1.7%
31-60s	4.6%	5.0%
61-120s	8.6%	9.3%
121-300s	21.2%	22.3%
301-600s	23.9%	24.3%
⩾601s	36.8%	34.7%

There is a slight skew away from "greater than 10 minutes" towards blocks being a bit faster than 10 minutes. This is due to the fact that the average block time is almost always under 10 minutes due to the constantly increasing hash rate.

Similar, sure, but different enough to arouse suspicion. No phone from that era had a camera, and no phone is powered by 2x AAA batteries. It might pass a cursory glance, but a 5 second inspection will reveal to any thief the device is not a phone.

And I never said otherwise. I've made my feelings regarding Ledger and their database leak well known, but their mistakes don't given other hardware wallet companies a free pass to do what they like. The fact remains that including completely unnecessary code on a hardware wallet device poses unnecessary security risks.

If the device looked like a Nintendo Switch or a modern phone, then that idea might have some merit. But the device looks nothing like either of them, and says "Foundation" across the back, so any attacker can discover what it really is with 5 seconds and a Google search.

Don't know why you are bringing Ledger in to this, but none of that is in any Ledger firmware. Don't want to use any altcoins? Then don't install those apps. Don't want to use their exchanges service? Then don't use Ledger Live. None of that presents an attack surface to their hardware wallets. Hiding "features" on the device is a bad start. Hiding completely pointless features like Tetris on the device is just plain stupid.

My point is the same.

BIP39 was only proposed in 2013 and the 2048 iterations was still being debated in 2014, so this is only 7 years old, not 15. 2048 was weak then and it is weak now. As a result, the security of seed phrases against brute forcing comes largely from the entropy of the seed phrase.

There are certainly good technical reasons to increase the iteration count, but there are practical reasons not to. BIP39 is now so ubiquitous, that if you started introducing new iteration counts it was cause havoc. There are still plenty of people who think they have lost their coins because they don't know the difference between recovering a legacy wallet and a segwit wallet. Electrum seed phrases cause frequent problems as people do not realize they are different to BIP39 seed phrases. Having the same seed phrase able to recover multiple different wallets of the same type due to different iteration counts will only compound this even more.

Obviously the bulk of the savings comes from spending segwit inputs over spending legacy inputs, with segwit and legacy outputs only differing by about 3 vbytes, as opposed to segwit and legacy inputs which differ by about 80 vbytes. Very few average users are making transactions with more than a handful of outputs, though, and so segwit is still the obvious choice.

This effect will be much more noticeable with taproot transactions. Taproot inputs are even smaller than segwit inputs, but a taproot output is larger than both legacy and segwit outputs. Even a 1-input-2-output taproot transaction is larger (in terms of vbytes) than a similar segwit transaction, and once you get up to 10 or more outputs, then it becomes larger than a similar legacy transaction too. It will be a long time before taproot is so widespread that people are paying to 10+ different taproot outputs in the same transaction, though.

Unfortunately the new blockchair explorer redesign is utterly awful when compared to the old one, but you can still get some useful information from it. For example, try this link:

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?q=block_id(1..5000),is_coinbase(false)

This will list all transactions between blocks 1 and 5000 which are not Coinbase transactions (i.e. the transactions which create new coins as a reward for the block miner). There are 63 transactions in total. You can obviously adjust the numbers to expand or narrow your search as you require.

There is a way. It's called backing up your wallet file or seed phrase. If you don't create proper back ups, then that's a problem with you, not bitcoin.

If you know the address, then you can watch the coins to see if they are moved. If they are, you know the recovery company stole your keys. Good luck proving that to a judge though with zero other evidence.

Don't do that. You already say you write it down on paper. Just do that. Storing seed phrases on any device with an internet connection is a huge risk. If your computer is corrupted, lost, stolen, damaged, whatever, and you cannot access your wallet file, then your electronically backed up seed phrase will be lost anyway.

Your numbers are wrong and also irrelevant.

It doesn't matter who controls what hash power, as long as the total hash power is roughly the same as it was at the last difficulty retarget and so the average block time is still close to 600 seconds. If this is not the case, then you can adjust the numbers in the equation I gave above. We are considering the entire network here, not individual miners.

As I stated above, bitcoin mining is a Poisson process. You can read about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_point_process

You can model the distribution using the equation (as given on the linked page above):

P{N = n} = Λⁿ * e^-Λ / n!

If you take n to equal 0 (i.e. you won't find a block), and take lambda (Λ) to equal the number of blocks you would expect to find in a given time frame, then you can simplify that equation to

P = Λ⁰ * e^-Λ / 0!
P = 1 * e^-Λ / 1
P = e^-Λ

Therefore, the probability of not finding a block when you would expect to find Λ blocks is equal to e^-Λ. For example, the probability of not finding a block in 10 minutes, when you would ordinarily expect to find 1 block in 10 minutes, is e^-1 = 36.8%

Given the equation P = e^-Λ, then we can take the inverse to find the probability of finding a block: 1-P = 1-e^-Λ. So the probability of finding a block in 10 minutes is 1-e^-1 = 63.2%.

So, as I said above, the probability of finding a block in 2 minutes is therefore 1-e^-0.2 = 18.1%.