You are mixing up two different classification systems here.

Bech32 refers to the format of the address. The other option is Base58Check.

P2PKH and P2SH refer to the ScriptPubKey, or the type of transaction. There are far more than just P2PKH and P2SH, such as P2PK, P2MS, P2WPKH, P2WSH, and now P2TR.

I'm pretty sure I've still got some French francs tucked away at the bottom of a box somewhere. Never felt right to just throw a currency in the trash. I guess I'll hold on to them in case suddenly they become valuable again.

Interesting. It's probably too soon to know, but have any countries expressed any objections to a CBDC so far? And on what basis? Surely when they get fed the usual nonsense of "but think of the children" and/or increased tax revenues through less tax evasion, they'll be quite happy to comply.

A fixed term staking is exactly that - fixed term. There is no option to withdraw early. The coins you have staked will be lent out or tied up in other investments and so crypto.com are unlikely even to have access to them at the moment. That is how they make their profits. Any staking vehicles which allow closure at any time likely offer far lower returns than fixed term periods. These are the risks you take when you lock your coins up in a fixed term product.

According to their Terms, even if you try to close your account they will still make you wait out the staking period before doing so:

There's probably not much you can do here other than wait out the staking period and then transfer the coins out after that period is over.

My understanding was that the ECB could pass down decisions based on "consensus" or "majority" rulings, rather than requiring complete agreement from all its members, but I'm not from Europe so someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

I doubt developing countries are considering a CBDC in an effort to stop bitcoin. Rather, they are being forced to consider it due to developed countries considering it. There are lots of developing nations which already use USD or some other major currency as a surrogate for their own currency, due to inflation, counterfeiting, easier trade, wider acceptance, etc. Should we end up with a digital dollar, then it would likely become incredibly easy for citizens of these countries to use it for all purposes, rending the country's own currency less valuable and pushing the country towards dollarization, which is something that the government may not want.

I agree with ranochigo. If done perfectly, then yes, a seed generated using /dev/urandom or fair and random coin flips on a clean airgapped and encrypted device is going to be just as secure as a seed phrase generated on a hardware wallet (perhaps even more so if your hardware wallet is not fully open source). The issue is the level of complexity in doing that. Almost everyone can plug in a hardware wallet, follow the easily laid out instructions, and generate a seed phrase securely, whereas even fairly tech savvy people can mess up when trying to create an airgapped device and generate a seed phrase themselves. If you don't trust the seed phrase that the hardware wallet has generated for you, then why are you trusting the hardware wallet at all? If you want to generate your own seed phrase, then you might as well just set up an Electrum cold wallet or similar.

I use both hardware wallets and airgapped and paper wallets with seed phrases I have generated myself, but I spent a long time testing my set up to be sure I was happy with the security of the seed phrases I was generating.

Should we be updating our signatures with the new v3 Tor link?

Bitcoin mining, by its very nature of being able to be set up anywhere, can actually subsidize and promote green energy projects in remote locations which would otherwise be uneconomical. It can act as a "buyer of last resort" for electricity which would otherwise be wasted:

You think the environmental impact of recycling old solar panels or wind turbines is higher than the environmental impact of burning billions of tons of coal and oil? Never mind the environmental impact of recycling all the coal and oil mining, transport, and burning machinery and equipment?

What about putting the fully functioning clearnet site behind Cloudflare, but simply displaying large warnings all over it that it is using Cloudflare along with links and recommendations to use the Tor site and explanations why, rather than just having a landing page with no mixing functions on the clearnet site? That way people who might just want to test it out, or are using some public computer without Tor, or for whom Tor is difficult to run due to ISP or government restrictions,* or just want to break the blockchain link and aren't worried about Cloudflare, etc., can still mix their coins while still being aware of the reduced privacy and increased risks they are taking?

*Yes, I know about Tor bridges, but not everyone does or knows how to set them up.

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I've also tested the new v3 site and I've tried my hardest to break something, but to no avail. It all worked very smoothly, bar the brief moment when I though I'd been given an empty private key because I imported it as legacy (force of habit!) instead of segwit. Also very nice that you can split deposits up in to multiple different vouchers.

I would wager that when you kept >1 BTC on a hot wallet, it was worth a lot less than it is worth today.

It's all down to your own risk profile, but I would guess that for the majority of people on this forum, they shouldn't be storing anywhere near 1 BTC on a hot wallet. Different story if 1 BTC to you is just chump change, but for most people 1 BTC will represent a not-insignificant amount of money. I use hot wallets every day, and have never been hacked or lost any money from them, but I'm still only storing "daily spending" money on them - a couple of hundred dollars worth, at most, unless I am specifically planning to make a larger purchase in the near future and top them up with more for this reason. Anything approaching 1 BTC is either on a hardware wallet, airgapped wallet, paper wallet, or some other much more secure solution.

Assuming 1 BTC isn't chump change for OP, then he should only be storing it in an Electrum wallet if that wallet is airgapped. Storing an amount of money which is significant for you in a hot wallet is too risky. Even if you are 100% confident that there are no more bugs or vulnerabilities in Electrum, your computer itself could still be infected by clipboard malware, keyloggers, have the wallet file stolen from it, and so on.

They do still provide the 12 word seed phrase, which is a standard BIP39 seed phrase and can be used in any BIP39 compatible wallet to recover access to the private keys and coins stored by that blockchain.com account. This will not help in OP's case, though. If his account has been hacked and all the coins stolen, then his seed phrase will simply recover access his now empty account. It cannot reverse any transactions which have been made nor recover any coins which have been stolen.

Blockchain.com have become less and less reliable (not that they were exactly reliable to begin with) and more and more shady as time has gone on. Even if they were at fault for any loss, I would expect them either to completely ignore the user's complaints, or brush them off with some weak excuse.

The correct course of action here is to stop using web wallets.

Electrum seed phrases do not include a checksum in the same way as BIP39 seed phrases. Rather, Electrum generates a 12 word seed phrase, hashes it, and checks if the first 8-12 bits of the hash match the correct version number (01 for legacy, 100 for segwit, 101 for 2FA). If the version number is correct, then the seed phrase is displayed to the user. If the version number is incorrect, then the entropy is increased by 1 and the new seed phrase is hashed and checked as above, until a seed phrase with the correct version number is found.

For this reason, there is no checksum encoded in the words themselves, and so the phrase has 12*11 = 132 bits of entropy, but at the same time, since the hash of the phrase has to meet certain criteria, then not every seed phrase is valid. This is also how Electrum will automatically identify whether one of its own seed phrases is legacy, segwit, or 2FA, and not ask for any derivation paths like it would when restoring BIP39 seed phrases, since each seed phrase already encodes the type of wallet it is used to generate.

You can read more about the process here: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html

Electrum 12 word seed phrases have 132 bits of entropy, not 128 bits like BIP39 seed phrases. I was using 21 characters as a "catch-all" for both Electrum and BIP39 seed phrases, since we are on the Electrum sub-board. You are also correct, however, and if considering only BIP39 12 word seed phrases, then 20 characters are sufficient.

You would hope, given that the entire currency is both digital and centralized, they could also finally figure out how to make transfers between bank accounts in less than the 3 to 5 days we have to wait at the moment for some wire transfers.

Perhaps, as an EU citizen, you can provide your opinion on the following: Are the stakes that bit higher in the EU compared to the US? Should there be a complete collapse of our monetary system and USD becomes worthless, then obviously the fallout will be massive, but at the end of it, I would still expect the United States to exist with all 50 states. However, if the Euro collapses, can we say the same about the fate of the EU itself? Would the collapse of the Euro lead to the collapse of the EU?

In what way is Trezor's software suite more secure than Ledger's? Regardless, if you have any concern about the proprietary software, then you can just pair either of those wallets with some open source software such as Electrum, which also gives you more control over your keys and advanced options such as coin control, RBF, and partially signed transactions.

All good hardware wallets provide a seed phrase which can be used to restore access to your coins in an emergency, such as failure of your hardware device.

Before buying either device make sure to head to the subreddit of the one you choose and see if you can find a discount or referral code there. Usually there are a few kicking about which will net you a discount of between 10-20%.

Maybe they've realized they can't. They can regulate centralized exchanges as much as they want, but they can't stop people trading peer to peer. They can force KYC on every online exchange, service, and web wallet, but they can't stop people from mixing their coins and holding them themselves. They can force some mining pools to exclude certain "blacklisted" transactions, but they can't force every mining pool to do that (not least of all the ones in other jurisdictions). They can force payment processors like BitPay to collect KYC and track their customers, but they can't stop merchants from just accepting bitcoin directly. I'm sure they will continue to pass ever more ridiculous regulations, but nothing they do can stop me from holding bitcoin myself and sending it directly to another party in exchange for goods or services.

So perhaps they hope that by launching CBDCs they can simply entice people away from bitcoin altogether, rather than regulate against it.

If you are drawing from the full set of 95 ASCII characters, and your password is truly random, then you only need 21 characters to have more entropy than both a BIP39 or Electrum 12 word seed phrase, and 39 characters to have more entropy than a BIP39 24 word seed phrase. The problem is that the majority of people (unlike you, by the sounds of things) don't do this, will limit themselves to letters, maybe numbers, maybe a few symbols, and most passphrases are based around words or phrases, and so the entropy of them are greatly reduced.

Because bitcoin threatens those in power. They don't care if industries such as video games or online pornography are orders of magnitude more wasteful than bitcoin. In fact, all the better! These are products we can tax and make a profit from, and so their environmental impact is irrelevant. But bitcoin comes along and is a direct threat to their monetary monopoly, so it gets disparaged with any little morsel of criticism blown way out of proportion.

Ahh yes, Elon Musk, that great environmental campaigner who launched a car in to space on a rocket just for the lulz.

Fiat is a few several hundred times worse according to this analysis, which is well worth a read: https://www.coindesk.com/whats-the-carbon-footprint-of-fiat-money. If bitcoin can become widespread enough to reduce the chances of the next global recession even a little bit, reduce its magnitude, or delay it, then bitcoin would become net carbon negative.

Not true. A few years ago, it became cheaper to build new renewables than it did to build new fossil fuel plants: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/renewable-energy-is-now-the-cheapest-option-even-without-subsidies/
And a report from last month shows that it is starting to become cheaper to build new renewables from scratch than it is to even continue to operate already existing fossil fuel plants: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/report-its-now-cheaper-to-build-new-solar-than-to-run-existing-coal-plants-in-china-india-and-most-of-europe/

Exactly this. Go and look at any of the heavily shilled coins from the 2017 ICO craze. Or any of the heavily shilled coins from the IEO/ITO craze. Most of them are dead or dying, down >99% from their peak, little to no ongoing development, no real world use. We can already see the same happening with some of the coins from the ongoing DeFi and NFT crazes. Let's check back in a couple of years and see where we are. I guarantee 99% of these projects will be dead, and bitcoin will still be doing just fine. "Diversifying" in to these coins brings huge amount of additional risks for the 1-in-a-million chance that the shitcoin you bought randomly pumps x10. And even if it does, is it enough to offset all your losses from all the other shitcoins you bought?

Buying any altcoin does not mean diversification because they are all in the same category - cryptocurrencies. Why take the risk with a random altcoin which is far more likely to drop to zero than it is to make any real gains, when you can just stick to bitcoin. If bitcoin dies, your altcoin dies too. If your altcoin dies, bitcoin doesn't care.

With hindsight, you could have got rich by buying and selling Bitconnect at the right time. That doesn't mean it was a good coin, or has good technology behind it, or has a good team behind it, or has ongoing development, or has a real world use, or belongs anywhere near a smart portfolio. Betting on random shitcoins like these is a gamble, not an investment strategy.

Because renewable energy can be cheaper.

Electricity is expensive to store. Imagine a giant wind farm. During the day, it churns out electricity which homes and business use to power lighting, AC, computers, TVs, kitchen appliances, etc. During the night, it churns out just as much electricity, but the demand is now tiny. They spend lots of money to build batteries to store some of this excess, but it's not enough. A lot goes to waste. Along comes a bitcoin miner and says "I'll move a bunch of my mining equipment here if you sell me your excess electricity cheaply." This is electricity which is being wasted and earning the renewable energy company nothing, so selling it at any price is good for them.

Because it is very easy to run your own solar panels. Buy some panels, hook them up to your mining equipment, off you go. No ongoing raw material requirement, no moving parts, very little maintenance or upkeep, very little ongoing costs.

Both would be fine for a newbie. Both have all the basic functions you would require, both support almost all the same coins, both are reputable companies, both have been extensively tested for security, both come with their own software with a nice UX, but both can also be paired with other software to provide more functionality.

Is there anything in particular you want from a hardware wallet? Some of the models have unique features, such as the Ledger Nano X supporting Bluetooth for use with mobile phones, or the Trezor T providing optional SD card encryption.