As soon as you opened a wallet with them, you were shown their addresses, not yours. They just moved your funds between their wallets...
So, if you complied, you have following options left:


But, THEY are the ones who hold the private keys, the only ones that can give you access to your funds are THEM... So, unless they decide to give you your own money, or untill you force them (by getting a lawyer or giving them bad publicity) nothing will happen.
None of these steps give any guarantee...

I'm afraid the only things you can do are:

• Comply with them, and hope they finally give you access to your funds
• Keep bugging them by creating a thread on bitcointalk and other forums, by leaving reviews on review sites, by publicly asking them updates on twitter and facebook and other social media platforms
• Find a lawyer that wants to go after them
• If you ever get your funds back, move them away from freewallet as soon as possible

The bottom line is: you used a custodial "wallet" (in fact, a custodial exchange with a very random, selective, over-the-top KYC procedure) to hold your funds. They are the only one on this planet that are able to return your money to you... They build a TOS that allows??? them to selectively close accounts and hold the funds hostage untill over the top KYC procedures are followed (if the victim succeeds in doing this offcourse, otherwise i guess they can keep the funds... at least, that seems to be their logic). I have no idear if what they're doing is legal in the country where their headquarter is located, i'm not a lawyer... It seems illogical to me that their procedure is following every aspect of the law, but as a layman i have no clue wether or not this is true.

I think LoyceV already offers something similar

Well, i don't think it has anything to do with fees... You shouldn't mix transaction fees with exchange fees...

If an exchange charges a withdrawal fee, they usually use part of said fee to pay the transaction fee, and they keep the rest. Nothing is stopping them from slightly lowering the withdrawal fee for LN withdrawals, so they keep the same profit margin.

Same for deposits: for deposits, 100% of the deposit fee is "profit" for the exchange (eventough, many small deposits will increase the fee they have to use to spend those funds afterwards), so nothing is stopping them from keeping said fee in place for lightning deposits.

To be honest, i have no idear why they're not adopting the LN... Maybe because it's to new, or because it would cost them a lot of money to change their code, or because they have to give extra training to the support staff, or because they don't think the network is mature enough, or because they believe some of the FUD going around, or because they think not enough open channels will exist, or because the current market share is to small, or because an on-chain transaction with loads of confirmations is still safer than a lightning transaction,... Plenty of reasons, but which one is the real one: only exchange owners can tell you...

Looks a lot like this issue i had about a year ago
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262327.msg54799647#msg54799647

The strange this was that i saw this "glitch", i documented it with screenshots, but when i tried to replicate the issue one day after raising it, i was unable to reproduce it myself... For some strange reason, it seems like a complete reboot did solve my issue... No idear why... No idear if it was restarting electrum or my os that did the trick, or maybe it was something i did before or during the initial transaction creation.

I'm just posting the link here to see if there are any similarity's between this situation and the situation i documented about a year ago.

Sending missions to mars has nothing to do with being trustworthy... I'd never send coins to an address that was generated by anybody, but i would blindly trust that nobody had the private key to an address like 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend8MUo1T.

Why? Simply because i've generated vanity addresses in the past...
Here's a post by somebody else about the topic:
https://crates.io/crates/stellar_vanity/0.6.0

If it's TL;DR;, it would take 33000000000000000000000000000000 years to bruteforce the private key belonging to above vanity address... I'd rather trust an address that was so impossible to bruteforce over trusting somebody that has basically trolled the bitcoin community.

Why would you ask *any* celeb to do this? I mean, if he posted some address and said it was a burn address, you'd have to take his word for it...

In this case, you're asking somebody who has flipflopped between a bitcoin believer and a bitcoin hater repeatedly... I'd never believe him if he told us he posted an address but destroyed the key...

Bottom line, an address like:
1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr => 99,9999999999%? certain to be a burn address
1/x/bc1[whatever Elon Musk posted] => 70%? certain to be a burn address

Creating burn addresses is something you should do yourself... It's not about trusting some celeb, it's about creating an address that's provably sooooo specific it's allmost impossible you actually have the private key.

btw: out of sheer curiosity, i clicked the link in your footer... To tell you the truth, i haven't completely read everything, i immediately went for the "green" paper... It looks like the white (green) paper you posted is merely a commercial for your coin, i couldn't find any technical detail herein.
So, i decided to visit your github repo (linked in your "green" paper), but it was empty...

Your project could have potential as an altcoin, but you really need to start by adding a real whitepaper and start publishing some of your code if you want people to latch on.

Sure, you have those examples, but still, i see very little difference between full length and 7/8 length (especially if it's just the pants that are being shown). Same for 7/8th and capri.
Same for capri and below the knee.

It's not rare for me to have to retry the captcha 2 or 3 times....

All in all, i'm not mad about this... It's a free site, it does it's job, it's fun, i have nothing to complain since i get to use it for free... That being said, i still think that a captcha for fashionista's might not be pointed at the right target audience for a site like freebitco.in.

@LTU_btc: i'll have a look if i find something in the settings about the captcha... I did look briefly, but maybe i overlooked (this happens quite often with me).

I've been a long-time happy player... Using the faucet, sometimes making some bets, sometimes rolling the dice, sometimes buying/selling some FUN tokens.

I'm happy with this site, but lately i've been struggeling with those captcha's... Maybe it's time to switch captcha provider, cause i doubt this one is actually targetted to your audience

My wife buys 99% of my clothes... I have no idear what "cropped" or "capri" means... 7/8ths are probably meaning they cover 7/8ths of your leg, but i'm not a fashion designer...
Switch back to google captcha, i know how to tell what is a fire hydrant, a bus or a cyclist  

that's the current economical smart fee with a target of 6 blocks in BTC/kB... So, with a 3 sat/vbyte fee you should have a decent chance of getting in on of the ~6 next blocks...
A one input, one output tx from a segwit wallet has a size of ~140 vbytes, so a fee of 420-500 sat's should be sufficient if you spend your unspent output all at once RIGHT NOW (as we speak)... That's 18 cents, not $15...

The fee isn't a fixed thing... It's an incentive for the miner to put your transaction into the block he's trying to solve. It fluctuates (heavily). It's not because you had to spend a hundredfold of the current fee last week, that this remains true forever . Bottom line: if you get 10 pounds worth of BTC, and you're fine with waiting a couple of weeks, you'll probably have the chance to spend it without paying half (or more) of the value in fees...

The premise of this question is that you're new to bitcoin... This changes quite a bit... It also depends on the fact if these people were actually interested in bitcoin and searching information about it before you gave them 10 pounds worth of BTC or if you were "cold-calling" them (more or less) by advertising on non-crypto related webpages or spamming their inbox, or handing out physical flyers on the road.

Truth be told, if somebody i didn't know would walk up to me on the street and give me a handfull of magic beans right now, and a couple meters down the road there was a guy shouting: "i'll buy your magic beans for 10€", i'd sell them without giving it a single tought...
If i was actively investigating magic beans, and i was already interested in purchasing some to HODL, and somebody would walk up to me and give me some for free, i'd put them in my pocket in case and HODL even if there was a guy shouting he'd buy them from me for FIAT.

The thing is, by asking this question on this forum, you might get an extremely biased result... Most people in here are not new to bitcoin... Most of them are active in the community for years... It's very hard for us to imagine being new to bitcoin, and being confronted with it for the very first time.

Well... If those funds didn't move, that's a good sign... But i'd never have piece of mind untill my funds were moved over to a new, clean wallet... Once your wallet.dat is out there, there might be people distributing it, and others might be trying to bruteforce your passphrase as we speak...

So, my advice would be not to rush things to the point you start making mistakes, but still, you should probably not leave this be... Take action to move those funds to a clean wallet, and don't make the mistake of storing it in the cloud a second time

or, you can run a node and use "estimatesmartfee" via the json-rpc interface... That way you don't have to trust some other service..

But like it's been said before: there is no foolproof method, and no "instant" confirmation...

Tor, VPN, throwaway accounts... They mean very little if YOU are the weakest link...

• Connect over Tor, a GOOD VPN (or both) and keep connected trough the rest of these steps
• Use a random name generator to generate a random pseudonym... IF you pick a pseudonym yourself, odds are pretty big it might tell the governement something about you... That's why you should use a random generator
• Generate one or more free email addresses with email providers that care about your privacy (for example, protonmail)
• Write your articles, but run them trough an article spinner... Find some synonyms you'd never use for some keywords, make sure you don't give away any identifying information (check twice, or even more... LE can learn a lot from ANY info you give them: don't talk about your kids, don't talk about your job, don't talk about your pets, don't talk about your medical conditions, don't talk about your favorite niche software, don't talk about your village,...), replace your original punctuation and formatting by formatting that's still correct but not "natural" to you
• Post your articles
• Shut up about what you did to EVERYBODY.... Don't tell your friends, don't tell your drinking buddy's, don't talk about on any forum (unless you're connected over Tor/VPN AND using your pseudonym), don't tell your siblings, don't tell your spouse,...

The last step is the hardest... The silkroad admin was caught by failing in this last step... All the other steps are just technical, if you know what you're doing they're not very hard... The last step is the real problem for most people.

Good luck

PS: i'm not a lawyer, and i'm defenately NOT telling you to do something illegal... don't post anything that's against the law in your country... use your due diligence, if you get caught it's not our fault...

Correct, my point was merely that even *if* (and that's a big IF) 60% of the mining gear would dissapear over a couple of months, it would probably be hardly noticeably by us (from a technical point of view that is, i have no idear what something like that would do to the exchange rate)

If 60% of the hashrate would "dissapear" all at once (eventough i seriously doubt it'll ever come to that), you can expect the average time between 2 blocks to be ~16 minutes for a maximum of 2016 blocks. After this, the difficulty will be adjusted so the average time between 2 blocks is once again ~10 minutes.

At this point, for normal users, it'll be like nothing happened... The only thing that will be visible is there might a bit of a backlog in unconfirmed transactions, and the chinese miners make no more money... The coinbase rewards they would have collected now goes to the leftover miners.

Coinbase rewards are not calculated based on the number of miners, or the network's hashrate... Even better: there is no way to conclusively know how many miners are currently turned on, and what the exact hashrate of all miners combined is... You can calculate how much the total hashrate approximates because you know the difficulty, but that's about it. The difficulty gets adjusted every 2016 blocks if the average time between 2 blocks wasn't exactly 10 minutes.

In reality, if China is serious this time (it isn't the first time they "attacked" bitcoin), you'll probably see a couple of miners turn their gear off each week... You'll probably won't even notice this... The average time between 2 blocks will be slightly more than 10 minutes for a couple of months, and each diff adjustment, the difficulty will decrease a little bit... At least, that's what i think would happen if China outlawed bitcoin mining...

@Welsh and @bob123
You're both right, the biggest "attack vector" is indeed the user... I certainly agree with that, but when i wrote my post, for some reason, i was thinking about the semi-technical attackvectors instead of the PICNIC "vectors" . (for those who don't know this acronym: i picked it up in one of my first jobs where i had to man the helpdesk for 1 day a week => PICNIC = Problem In Chair, Not In Computer..... aka 90% of the helpdesk calls)

But yeah, most of the cases i've seen over the years were because users where phished, gave away their private keys, clicked links they weren't supposed to, didn't verify signatures, saved seedphrases (or walletfiles) in the cloud, didn't encrypt their wallet (or encrypted it with a very weak password), gave away their seedphrase, were running aged versions of wallet software, ...

Offcourse, this isn't very wallet-specific... It doesn't matter if you made the (in my opinion wrong) choice to use an online custodial wallet or if you use an airgapped setup: if the user's opsec isn't good, he's a prime target for scammers and thieves

Well, starting with threatening their users makes them a**holes, but what they're doing is not illegal. I just checked the laws in my country (aswell as some other european country's), and the law seems pretty clear to me (eventough i'm not a lawyer): you can NOT keep money that has been credited to you by accident. Period.

Sure, they should have asked nicely and explained that the money belonged to them... That they accidentally sent it out, but that they need it for their business: it's theirs, they've worked for it, the receiver has little or no right to keep any of it.

I see many people saying they'll seek legal advice, but what will happen? They'll probably end up paying the lawyer AND sending the money back where it came from...
In life, you get confronted with rude people, bully's, a**holes,... The fact they're rude does not make them automatically wrong. I'd just give the money back and never, ever use them again because the way they immediately threaten with legal action without talking first... But it's their money, it does not belong to me (nor ethical, nor legal). I'd probably return everything, but i'd use a small portion of the funds as a transaction fee... I would not pay for the transaction fee out of my own pocket after a mail like that. Running to a lawyer would just be a nice extra for said lawyer, he'd be the only one that made a nice profit out of this situation.

Once again: i'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice... I'm not affiliated with the mentioned website and reading the way they treat others i'll likely never use them...

It's very hard to answer your question because the term "wallet" is very broad. Also, this isn't just an easy discussion... You can probably write a master thesis on this subject, and you still would not have covered every aspect.

In these matters, it might be a good idear to give a specific usecase and discuss it instead of making broad claims... For example, you could ask what the biggest potential vulnerability would be if you'd run electrum 4.1.0 on a dedicated linux box running centos 7.0 with firewall enabled, configured for running on Tor, wallet encrypted with a 30 character random password generated by keypass and stored on 2 usb sticks. The seed also stored in the same keypass db.
In such cases, it becomes much easyer to give you pointers as to which errors you might have made (for example: you're not running the latest electrum version and you did not verify electrum's signature....)

In an online custodial wallet, hacking might not be the biggest problem. They can lock your account, do an exit scam, or a company employee can rob you blind. Other than that, you can fall into a phising trap, you can lose your credentials (or they can get stolen), you can fall for a MITM, your credentials can be brute-forced, you can have spyware (or other malware) on your pc

In on online non-custodial wallet, the wallet company should not be able to lock your account, do an exit scam or employee thefth should also not happen (offcourse, this depends on the actual implementation, vulnerability's might still exist), but all the other attack vectors are the same for a custodial and non-custodial wallet.

In a desktop wallet, the main attack vectors are vulnerability's in the software wallet itself, the use of a weak password (so it can easily be brute-forced), physical access to the machine holding the wallet,... Also, the storage of the seed phrase and wallet files are potential vulnerability's

In a hardware wallet, usually physical access is required, but if somebody steals your seed phrase, you lose everything

In a paper wallet, the biggest potential vulnerability is probably the RNG... Unless you did not disconnect from the internet while creating your paper wallet (in this case, you might have exposed yourself to a bunch of potential attacks)

In an airgapped wallet, the biggest weakness is probably where you stored the backup of the wallet or the seed phrase... Unless you used some very old, vulnerable, wallet software with a buggy RNG


This list is far from exhaustive.. Like i said, you can probably write a master thesis on this subject, and still not cover every aspect.

I've never used this particular exchange... But an exchange provides you with an address controlled by them, not by you... Once you fund this address, you lose controll of your funds, and it's up to the exchange to keep track of you assets.

An exchange basically monitors the deposit addresses it generated for its users. As soon as a transaction funds one of their addresses, they insert the value it was funded  with in their internal relational database. When you exchange BTC for, let's say ETH, the exchange just happens in their internal database, not on the blockchain.

If you are certain you funded the correct address, but you cannot find this deposit in your exchange account, it's the exchange that either has a bug or is scamming you. In this case, their support dept is the only one that can help you.

Since this is kinda hard to understand, we'll give a FIAT equivalent:
you have 10x 10€  = 100€ notes, and you go to the bank to deposit them into your account. Once you hand over the notes to the bank teller, your physical money is now in controll of the bank. You could ask the teller in which box he'll put the physical notes, but they no longer belong to you.
Instead, the teller will update the bank's relational database that says you now have 100€ extra on your books.
If you decide to exchange your 100€ in your account to $120, the bank just updates their internal records: your euro account now shows 100€ less, and your dollar account shows $120 more. Note that the physical euro bills are still in the same drawer the teller put them in!
Only when you decide to withdraw the $120, the teller will give you 12x$10 bills (that used to belong to a completely different customer).

If you give the teller 100€ in physical money, but your account shows 50€ (which seems to be the crypto equivalent to your problem), the only way to look is your bank: either the teller made a mistake, he's stealing from you, or the money was fake or stolen. The only one that can tell you why they only credited 50€ is the bank.