Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't believe that this is accurate. Are mining pools really sending out a fresh candidate block to all connected miners several times per second? Perhaps the pool coordinator is constantly updating their candidate block with higher paying transactions, but surely they are only broadcasting a new candidate block to miners once every few seconds, or maybe several times per minute? Ideally, they should probably only be broadcasting a new candidate block once their updated candidate block has reached some threshold of a larger fee than the old candidate block currently being worked on.

It's a really nice implementation.

I created a test 3-of-5 SLIP39 set up using Ian Coleman's tool, and then tried to recover it on Electrum. As soon as you enter the first share, Electrum shows you how many shares you have entered, how many you need to enter in total, how many you have to choose from, and also shows you the first words from each of the remaining shares so you don't get mixed up and enter the same share twice. This is what it looks like:



Note the warning as discussed above: It allows recovery of SLIP39 phrases, but not generation of them. But the more implementations of something the better, as it gives users more options for recovery and provides more redundancy should Trezor suddenly disappear. Although I also agree that once Taproot is implemented, meaning multi-sig transactions are small and indistinguishable, then SLIP39 offers no real benefits over multi-sig.

Citation needed. There is no evidence organic food is better/healthier/more nutritious than its non-organic equivalent.

As Cnut237 has correctly pointed out, everything in our world is already genetically modified, from crops to pets to working animals. Go and Google "wild banana". The banana we have now is thanks to hundreds of years of genetic selection by humans.

If you want natural, then I would invite you to go live in the jungle, forage for your own food, and die in your 30s from being eaten by predators or by catching some vaccine preventable disease like tetanus. The fact that artificial manipulation of our environment means that we no longer live like that is a triumph of science.

Absolutely. Provided you have a working copy of Electrum saved somewhere, or can source a copy from someone else online (which will almost certainly be possible outside of the situation of a global catastrophe), you can restore you multi-sig wallet offline, move the address to an online computer and use it to create an unsigned transaction, move that transaction back to your offline wallet to be signed, and then move the signed transaction back to your online computer to be broadcast. You can use a service such as https://www.coinb.in/#newTransaction to create your transaction for signing, and you can use the broadcast function on the same site or pretty much any block explorer.

That was my question above. Electrum seed phrases are not the same as BIP39 seed phrases. Almost all wallets use BIP39, and so you would not be able to just import your Electrum seed phrases in to another wallet. You could extract the extended private and public keys from your Electrum seed phrases and import those in to another wallet, but I'm not sure which other wallets support generating multi-sig wallets from imported keys.

They are offering their clients access to four products from Greyscale - Bitcoin Trust, Bitcoin Cash Trust, Ethereum Trust, and Ethereum Classic Trust - and one from Osprey - their Bitcoin Trust. All are products which can be thought of as like ETFs. Shares in these trusts can be bought and sold on the open market without the buyer having to think about coins, keys, wallets, seed phrases, etc., with the obvious disadvantages of the fact that you don't actually own any bitcoin, and you must pay the trust's fees. You can buy and hold them in tax advantaged accounts though.

So in the same way you can buy exposure to the price of gold without ever actually buying gold, JPMorgan clients can buy exposure to the price of bitcoin without ever actually buying bitcoin.

Money. Profits. Greed.

A brief timeline of Dimon's statements on bitcoin:

They ignore you:
2013 - Bitcoin developers are going to try and eat our lunch and that’s fine

Then they laugh at you:
2014 - Bitcoin is a terrible store of value
2015 - Bitcoin will not survive

Then they fight you:
2016 - Bitcoin is going nowhere
2017 - Bitcoin is a fraud, I will fire anyone trading bitcoin

Then you win:
2018 - I regret calling bitcoin a fraud
2019 - We will create our own cryptocurrency
2020 - We will offer banking services to Coinbase and Gemini
2021 - We will offer bitcoin to our clients

Quite a turn around in 8 years. Wonder what will happen in the next 8.

Which other wallets out there support setting up a multi-sig wallet by importing raw extended private/public keys, rather than importing seed phrases?

If, in the future, OP could not find any working copy of Electrum (incredibly unlikely, I know), he could still extract the xprvs/Zprvs and xpubs/Zpubs from his Electrum seed phrases, for example by using a modified Ian Coleman's tool. Then he would just need to import the minimum required combination of private and public keys in to any wallet which supports it to recover his multi-sig wallet.

Which is why storing your coins offline in a hardware wallet, airgapped computer, paper wallet, or similar set up, is the best option.

You definitely shouldn't assume that all your data is safe just because you are running some sort of internet security software or anti-virus. This is a recipe for disaster.

Don't trust, verify. If the wallet you are downloading is not open source, avoid it. If it cannot be reproduced from its published source code, avoid it. If you cannot audit the code yourself, then you need to pick a wallet which has been extensively examined by the community. Trust is not good enough. There have been plenty of "trusted" wallets and "trusted" exchanges in the past which have scammed users.

I completely agree. You often see users on this forum, particularly newbies, talk about how risky cash in person transactions are, when it is blatantly clear they have never made such a transaction in their life. They just imagine the worst case scenario and assume therefore that all trades are like this. I've bought and sold cash in person on more occasions than I can count with multiple different people with zero major issues.

Are you at risk of robbery by meeting someone to trade? Sure. You also at risk of robbery every time you use an ATM, and I would argue sometimes much more so, since I have used ATMs on deserted streets at night when I'm the only person around, whereas all my bitcoin trades are in busy areas during daylight. Hell, you are at risk of robbery just leaving your house or walking down the street. Just your smart phone, the contents of your wallet, and any other electronics or valuables (laptop, tablet, watches, jewellery, etc.) you are carrying, are going to more valuable than probably 99% of cash in person bitcoin trades.

Your risk of robbery is far less about what you are doing (trading bitcoin, walking down the street), and far more about where and when you do it (busy shopping mall at noon, empty street in a sketchy neighborhood at midnight).

They say they want to do that - fine. Now, how to they propose enforcing that? If you complete KYC at a centralized exchange, then sure, it's easy to force you to complete KYC for your withdrawal addresses well. But what if you buy bitcoin peer to peer? How do they propose de-anonymizing mixed bitcoin being traded for cash to brand new addresses? And how do they plan to block transactions without forcing all miners to comply? I'm pretty sure US and Chinese miners aren't going to start blacklisting transactions because the EU tells them to.

When you compare to the fact that most people use Windows, which is pretty much spyware, almost any Linux distro is a step up.

You should always have more than one back up, so if you are going to split your seed phrase in to two or pieces, each piece needs to be backed up at least twice, leaving you with at least four separate back ups. At that point, it can become difficult to have enough separate secure locations to house all your back ups.

There is no such thing as a 100% safe apps. Even apps and software which are open source and well examined by the community can be found to have critical vulnerabilities, or could deploy a malicious patch, or something along those lines. The less software and fewer apps you download and install, the better. Ideally, your crypto wallets should be on an airgapped computer which runs an OS, your wallet software, and nothing else.

Glad to hear you were successful with minimal fees. Enjoy holding your bitcoin in your own wallet!

I don't use Coinbase, but can anyone confirm - is this standard practice for Coinbase for all withdrawals, or was it because OP's account was brand new? Surely Coinbase don't put a 7 day hold on all withdrawals!?

Unfortunately most crypto exchanges have terrible customer support, but Coinbase in particularly is ranked as one of the worst. Often people have only been able to get a response or even access to their coins by causing a public display on social media or other similar platforms. They just don't seem to care unless they are worried it might affect their reputation.

Simply put, there are not enough transactions to completely saturate every block at the moment. Even when the mempool is completely clogged up, you can still get empty blocks if there is a very short interval between two blocks as ranochigo pointed out. But at the moment, even when there is a longer block time then blocks might not be full. The last block for example, 692,415, was mined 7 minutes after the preceeding block but was still only ~400 vKB, or 40% full.

Using number of transactions is a poor way to judge block fullness - better to use virtual kilobytes or megabytes (vKB/vMB) or mega weight units (MWU). 6 blocks ago, block 692,410 only had 147 transactions and yet was completely full at 1 vMB, whereas the latest block I mentioned above had 1057 transactions (7.2x as many) despite only being 40% full.

Or maybe people have already panic sold, and that's what dropped us to sub-$30k levels. It would seem most newbies experience a drop of >5% and they panic and sell immediately. There won't be many newbies who bought in at $60k still holding at $30k, I would have thought. Maybe the majority of people holding now are the people like me who will hold until $1.

If you can't beat them, join them.

Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan actually deserve at least a little props here. There will be a lot of old money bankers who flat out refuse to get involved in bitcoin or crypto, and will lose a lot of customers and a lot of money along the way. At least Dimon had the insight to admit he was wrong and the foresight to see what is coming next. People want access to bitcoin, and they will take their investments to whoever is willing to offer that to them. The institutions which refuse to change are the ones which will lose out.

However, I have no doubt that as time goes on Dimon will continue to be an enemy of bitcoin. He can see where things are going, and so he's changed his mind for his own profits. They will give you access to bitcoin, but only if you store it with them. They will lobby for more regulations to benefit themselves. They will continue to be anti-bitcoin and anti-decentralization. They just want their profits.

Yup, those ones you linked. They also hosted a presentation and Q&A regarding that report here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KbOXG0EMuY. If you don't want to watch the whole thing, the question as to how they came up with their final estimate is asked and answered at 22:23.

Then shut down all non-renewable energy production tomorrow, and see which industries are most affected. Most homes and businesses would cease to function almost immediately. Bitcoin would continue just fine, albeit with increased block times for a few weeks.

That's not a bad idea either, but it becomes increasingly difficult to do and increasingly likely you will make a mistake as time goes on. You have to be very sure of your set up to regularly use two sets of coins and never link them even via blockchain evidence, let alone via using the same servers, block explorers, IP addresses, accounts, etc. You ideally need two separate computers on two different internet connections hosting two different sets of wallets, and to be absolutely sure you never send coins from both sets to the same account or service.

If you are a day trader, then KYC is pretty much unavoidable. Such is the price you pay for day trading. But given that if you are day trading then you are storing your coins on a centralized exchange the majority of the time, you have already completed KYC on that exchange and that exchange is already reporting your activities to your government, then you have little more to lose by also linking your withdrawal address to your KYC details.

It's interesting that the general view of the UK differs so much from within Europe as opposed to from outside Europe. Certainly they seem pretty intent on building walls rather than bridges at the moment (metaphorically speaking). As the world becomes more and more interconnected, I'm not sure what they are looking to gain by isolating themselves from it. I've not been paying a huge amount of attention to it recently, but from what news does filter through to me it seems to be driven by some desire to regain the "glory" of the "empire" - Make Britain Great Again nonsense, if you will.

It's funny - the Bank of England used to be one of the most important central banks in the world. It's still important, obviously, but I would say I pay a lot less attention to what it is up to than I did in years gone by. Now the ECB is probably the foreign central bank I read about the most. If and when the BoE launch a CBDC, will anyone outside of the UK even care?

Perhaps it's driven by the point stompix made above. If the Fed comes out with a proposal for a CBDC, then they have to take it to Congress and get it to pass a vote. If the ECB comes out with a proposal for a CBDC, then it has to be disseminated to 19 (or is it all 27?) member states, any one of which could veto it. They need to be sure they get it right or it'll never pass.

That's not what she's saying at all. She's saying the people who are dying are predominantly unvaccinated.

It's called having compassion for your fellow humans. You should try it some time.

So conspiracy nuts who call themselves "doctors" on your beloved BitChute are totally fine, but anyone who disagrees with your made up bullshit is obviously a fake? Never mind that you can look up her registration online in 20 seconds. Don't let facts get in the way of a good scare story. Must be a conspiracy!

Usually, before we give someone an anesthetic to put them on a ventilator, knowing that they may never regain consciousness and this might be the last time they are aware of their surroundings, we speak to them, hold their hand, and take any messages for their loved ones. You know? Like basic compassion? But apparently, in your zero experience of working in intensive care, if we aren't intubating different patients with each hand simultaneously then we aren't really doing our jobs.

I've signed well over 100 death certificates which list COVID as a contributing factor. When can I expect my "big bucks" payout? I only ask cause you've said this multiple times but I haven't seen a cent yet. Do I need to register with BiG pHaRmA or something first?

It's so difficult to know who to trust though! The entire global scientific and medical communities, with decades of research and mountains of evidence supporting them, or people who failed high school science but watched a vlog saying VaCcInEs CaUsE aUtIsM!!!11! (/s)

There are different methodologies which different reports have used. The CoinShares reports for example, (https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-december-2019), estimated the hashrate present in each region of each country, and multiplied that by the green/dirty energy mix which was used on average in that region, to reach a figure of 74% renewables. The Bitcoin Mining Council, on the other hand, surveyed as many miners as would respond, and found 67% renewable usage among surveyed miners. When considering that miners with high renewable use may have self selected to respond to said survey, they reached an adjusted figure of 56% renewable.

No methodology will ever be exact, and numbers will vary, but the conclusions are always the same: On a global scale, bitcoin uses an insignificant amount of electricity, and significantly more than average of the electricity it does use is green.

Exactly, but the media doesn't report that. They just come out with nonsense statements comparing the electricity consumption per transaction to that of Visa or comparing the bitcoin network to that of a country, which get clicks and views but are completely meaningless. Energy consumption is just an easy stick to hit bitcoin with, because it's easy for the average person to comprehend and most people will just believe whatever is written without looking at the actual data behind it.

Bitcoin mining is an easy target. They can't limit electricity to homes, or else people would get angry and the government's polling numbers would suffer. They can't limit electricity to businesses without affecting economic output, which is the last thing any government wants to do on the back of COVID. So they look for easy targets for reducing electricity consumption, and bitcoin mining happens to be one of those targets.