I think the problem with that is that almost every wallet and website suggests inappropriate fees, especially those which you see newbies talking about the most, such as blockchain.com or bitcoinfees.earn. The only two fee algorithms I put any faith in are coinb.in and mempool.space. Even great wallets such as Electrum often result in newbies overspending on fees since they don't understand the ETA/mempool/static options.

Oh cool. All they need to do now is add the search features for blocks, transactions, and outputs which blockchair ruined on their recent update, and they'll be the perfect explorer.

Perhaps I should have been more specific with my terminology. My understanding was that a mutual close settlement transaction can have any fee you like, since you are negotiating it in real time with the other party, and so you would simply both agree on an appropriate fee. A forced closed settlement transaction will potentially have been signed well in advance, and so the fee is fixed at whatever you chose at the time, which may or may not still be an appropriate fee to pay. This is where anchor outputs come in, allowing you to set a low fee which you can later bump. Am I mistaken?

But maybe I want to analyze the chart.

In all seriousness though, as much as mempool.space is great for newbies, casual users, or anyone looking for a quick and reasonable fee estimation, you cannot get as much information from its charts as you can from Jochen's. Any time I want to accurately place my transaction somewhere in the mempool, then Jochen's site is a must. However, mempool.space does have the most accurate and reasonable fee estimations of any site I've seen.

Jochen's site doesn't show fee estimations at all. It simply shows the data from his node in a graph. It's up to the user what they do with that info.

So don't trust the third party with your keys. Encrypt your keys, give the encrypted copies to family/friends/heirs/whoever, and use the third party dead man's switch to send out the decryption key. Using an online service is risky though, as others have pointed out above, as you have no guarantees they will still exist or function properly when the times comes. If you want to go down a path like this, then better to store the decryption key in your will or with your lawyer.

I am partial to the locktime solution, since it requires no trust, no third parties, and (provided you set it up correctly) no amount of collusion from your heirs (or anybody else, for that matter) can circumvent the protections you have put in place. You just have to remember to periodically destroy/invalidate and then replace the locktime transactions, and your heir has to make sure they do not lose access to their receiving address.

Not to mention that BitPay are anti-bitcoin, anti-privacy, pro-KYC, and I wouldn't buy anything via them or support any merchant which uses them. https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/.

Bitrefill accept Lightning deposits, and also sell Steam gift cards for a variety of currencies and countries. I'm not sure about Steam because I've never bought a Steam card, but for a number of other cards you can buy any denomination you like. On more than one occasion I've bought a card of an exact value to exactly cover a particular transaction, e.g. $22.40. It's as close as you can get to buying directly with Lightning without having any left over bitcoin with a third party or fiat left on a gift card.

Every 10 minutes on average. Sometimes the block time is a few seconds, sometimes it is over an hour. You cannot assume a block comes every 10 minutes when considering a fee.

This is the wrong graph to use. This graph shows the number of transactions, but blocks don't include a maximum number of transactions; they include a maximum combined weight (or size) of transactions. A block could contain 1 transaction which is 4 vMB, or it could contain 10,000 transactions of 400 vMB each. If you choose a fee which puts you 50 transactions from the tip of the mempool, you have no idea if those 50 transactions represent 50,000 sats which means you will get confirmed in the next block, or if those 50 transactions represent 50 vMB which means it will be days until you get confirmed.

The graph you want is this one: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,2h,weight. It shows the mempool in terms of weight/size. Each block will take a maximum of 1 MB off the top of that graph.

I'm not sure about in Electrum, since I haven't used Electrum for Lightning yet, but yes, you can choose the fee your settlement transaction pays. The issue is that sometimes your settlement transaction may have been signed days, weeks, or even months, before it is broadcast, so whatever fee you pick could end up being very inaccurate. The solution to this is the use of anchor outputs: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/anchor-outputs/. These essentially allow you to sign a settlement transaction with a fee which is intentionally low and then to bump it if necessary after you have broadcast it.

I mean, not only is their coin obviously centralized trash, but they still have the audacity to charge a withdrawal fee on it, despite the fact they run the entire network and are literally just changing numbers on a spreadsheet? Who in their right mind falls for this trash?

If someone loses the 2FA to their account, then generally the only way to have the account unlocked is contact the exchange and go through their recovery process, which usually involves verifying your ID. If it were any easier than this to remove the 2FA without having access to the account, then the 2FA doesn't provide any additional security, since an attacker could just request for it to be disabled.

If your uncle's accounts are locked with 2FA, and no one can access the 2FA, then your only other option is to contact the exchange in question and provide the legal documents they request as I explained in an earlier post in this thread.

This is all assuming those 16 digit "secret keys" are indeed his 2FA back up codes, but there is nothing else they really could be.

You cannot reset his 2FA or generate any new back up codes without first having access to his accounts.

Rather than use a tool which is 3 years out of date and forked from a version of Ian Coleman which is also 3 years out of date, better just to do it yourself with the latest version of the software, so you know you are not risking being subjected to any bugs or vulnerabilities. It takes 2 minutes to do.

Go to Ian Coleman's site and download the zip of the latest version. Extract and navigate to \src\js, and then open the file jsbip39.js with a text editor.

Navigate to line 118:
Change this line to the following:

Navigate to line 146:
Change this line to the following:

The first change tells it to ignore the checksum since you are using an Electrum seed phrase and not a BIP39 seed phrase. The second change fixes the salt that Electrum uses when turning seed phrases in to private keys. That's all you need to do. Then just go back in to the \src\ folder and run index.html, and you'll have a working Electrum seed checker.

Edit: Typo fixed, thanks.

That seems to be more a problem with your government than a problem with renewable energy. Most other Western nations are pushing ahead with the transition to renewable energy sources, many going further than Germany have gone, and yet have much lower fuel costs for the end consumer.

Probably wind. There are already bitcoin miners in Texas making use of the surplus of wind energy produced overnight which would otherwise be wasted since household and industrial usage is low and there is no means to store it:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/27/905626/how-texass-wind-boom-has-spawned-a-bitcoin-mining-rush/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-miner-is-scoring-700-profits-selling-energy-to-grid

I would either tape or disabled all your cameras at all times, since they are constantly being targeted by various mass surveillance programs around the world.

Who knows? No one who is careless enough to point a camera directly at their seed phrase will then go to forums and say "Hey, I took every possible precaution except pointing a camera my seed phrase and now my coins have been stolen!" The point is it is a potential risk and your coins could be stolen this way.

Again, this proves nothing. Your coins could be stolen this way. It's like saying "Well, I've driven without a seat belt for 10 years and I'm still alive to driving without a seat belt is perfectly safe." All these things could result in your coins being stolen. Just because they haven't yet resulted in your coins being stolen doesn't mean they are a good idea. I could write my seed phrase in huge letters in permanent ink on my bedroom wall and my coins would stay safe for quite some time - doesn't mean it's a good way to store my seed phrase.

If their passphrase is incorrect, then that is their fault for not backing it up properly. If their passphrase is "correct" but restores the wrong wallet, then it is actually incorrect and again it is their fault for not backing it up properly. There are no known cases of the correct seed phrase and the correct passphrase generating the wrong wallet.

There is absolutely no need to have two hardware devices to use a passphrase. On the Ledger Nano you are already using, simply navigate to Settings -> Passphrase -> Set temporary, and choose and confirm a passphrase. Hey presto, you have access to passphrased wallets. If you want to go back to your main wallets, simply disconnect and reconnect your device and enter your usual PIN. There is no risk to your main wallets by using a passphrase as long as you follow the instructions properly.

So? I've reset and restored hardware wallets multiple times, I've formatted cold storage devices and restored cold wallets multiple times, I've used probably about 20+ different seed phrases and 40+ different passphrases over the years, I've performed countless bitcoin transactions, and I've literally never made a mistake once. Just be meticulous with double or even triple checking everything as you go.

The problem is that most don't, and by the time they learn, they have already handed out KYC to a bunch of scammers and linked all their bitcoin and altcoin address to their real life identity.

Even if you assume the former, as you say, the security flaw is enormous. How did the developers not pick up on the fact that their app was sending every word of every seed phrase to a Google IP address? Do you trust people who make such a basic mistake to understand the intricacies or not reusing k values, for example? There are a thousand and one more subtle ways to have all your coins stolen from your wallet than Google spell checking your seed phrase. If they didn't even pick up on that, what makes you think they will pick up on anything else?

There was a discussion on here before with one of the developers from Coinomi, who essentially downplayed the entire incident and did not take it seriously at all, which is doubly concerning. Closed source is bad enough, but closed sourced with inadequate and irresponsible devs? No thanks.

Correct. Some OS's will use a cache which will continue to be written to the USB drive in the background even when you appear to have finished all your write operations, and some OS's will not use such a cache. In these scenarios, the concern is with unplugging the device when you think you are finished with it but actually the cache is still writing to it in the background, resulting in the write process being interrupted and corrupting the files. If your OS uses such a cache, then you need to safely "remove", "eject", "unmount", or whatever the drive prior to unplugging it. If your OS does not use such a cache, then it is safe to unplug any time you aren't actively writing to (so, in the case of hardware wallets, that would mean not upgrading the firmware or software).

Some OS's will let you configure whether or not you use such a cache. In terms of Windows as The Pharmacist asked, I understand that the default policy was changed at the end up last year to mean you can pull any USB device any time you are not writing to it without the need to "eject" it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/client-management/change-default-removal-policy-external-storage-media

That's kind of my point though. Many people do not understand just how valuable their data is or just how important their privacy is until it is too late and they have been the victim of fraud, theft, scams, identity theft, or something else. By the time many people figure this out, they have already splashed out their KYC information to multiple exchanges and have absolutely no way of undoing the damage they have already inflicted on themselves.

Again, it is exactly because most newbies don't understand the risks of KYC at exchanges that we shouldn't be recommending them to use exchanges as wallet. The vast majority of traditional financial institutions have vastly superior security to the vast majority of bitcoin exchanges. They also have much stricter rules and regulations about what they can and cannot do with your information, and who they can and cannot share it with, whereas most crypto exchanges have a Privacy Policy which is so intentional vague or wide reaching it essentially gives them carte blanche to do anything they like with your data and share or sell it to anyone else.

We shouldn't be encouraging newbies to use methods which result in near-irreversible compromise of their privacy until they are fully aware of the ramifications of such an action.

Have you tried using these new 6 digit codes generated by your second device to access the accounts in questions?

It shouldn't make a difference since they are Base32 strings, but I suppose it depends if you are using a buggy app. I have always seen them displayed as all uppercase, though. On Aegis, it doesn't matter if you enter lowercase or uppercase, they both generate the same 6 digit codes.

The reality is that even as subsidies are phased out, solar will remain the cheapest option for new energy development, and will continue to fall in price even without any ongoing subsidies. Not only will new solar be cheaper than new coal, but we are already reaching the stage where building new solar is cheaper than running already existing coal power plants. And we are also at the stage where coal power plants are looking for government subsidies because they are operating at a loss.

If you are paying so much for electricity in your country, then why not install a solar panel and generate your own?

Some, yes. Others are building vast new renewable infrastructure: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/biggest-renewable-powered-crypto-mining-194626579.html

I am referring to your 16 character, alphanumeric, 2FA back up codes. If they are incorrect, then your only option is to contact the exchange and explain the situation. If they are correct, but you are somehow importing them incorrectly or are out of sync and are generating the wrong 6 digit 2FA codes, then importing them with different software on a different device or asking someone else you trust to import them, and seeing if the 6 digit codes they generate match the 6 digit codes you generate, will reveal if you are doing something incorrect.

Of course the 200 year old technology is cheaper. Show me any technology which hasn't either reduced in price, got significantly better for the same price, or some balance between the two, as time has gone on. Everything from computers to cars to phones to AC to engines to generators to solar panels to gene therapy to vaccines.

Yes, there are physical limits, but we haven't hit them yet and we are still making steady improvements in existing technologies as well as discovering new ones. See the graph on this page for a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency. Similarly, there are physical limits to coal, and the efficiency of coal power plants is generally below 40%.

There is no doubt that solar has benefited heavily from subsidies and other incentives towards research, development, and production, but all the reports and studies in to the future show that due to the rapidly declining price, even once all these subsidies are phased out, solar will remain significantly cheaper as a source of new energy production than coal.

I don't see why it's a bad thing. Even if you are insane and reject all the science which proves human led climate change, coal, oil, and gas will all run out. No one can dispute that. We need renewable sources of energy. And if bitcoin is around to use and even support the development of these renewable sources, all the better.

Hi again. I remember all your previous threads. It seems like you have followed all the right steps but are still unable to access his accounts unfortunately. It sounds very much like you have the incorrect keys. Perhaps your uncle reset the 2FA on his accounts after making those back ups and failed to update his back ups.

There are two possibilities here. The first is back up codes are actually correct, but are generating out of sync 6 digit codes for you. Have you tried restoring them on different apps? Have you tried restoring them on different devices? If you like, you can PM me one of the back up codes and I can restore to see if the 6 digit codes I generate match the codes you are generating. (I can provide a PGP public key if you wish to encrypt them first if you know how to do this, although there is very little someone could do with the 2FA back up code only, not knowing your uncle's account name, email, or password).

The other possibility is as I said above: The codes are incorrect. If that is the case, then the only possibility you have for gaining access to the accounts is to email Bittrex and Coinbase, proving legal documentation that your uncle has passed away and you are the heir to his coins, and then complete KYC to prove your identity, and hope that they unlock his accounts for you.