Interesting...


It was a Toshiba laptop. Will that help in the process of retrieving the private keys? On a second thought, maybe it was a Dell. OP said in a different topic that he likes peanut butter and it is possible that some of the stuff is still glued to the keyboard. Now you have two of the most significant pieces of information to retrieve the private key. You have a Toshiba, actually Dell computer + peanut butter stains on the keyboard. How long until you have the private key?

Doesn't really matter what happened in the past. How would you feel losing your coins tomorrow because you couldn't bother taking 2 minutes out of your time to verify the authenticity of the software you are using? It wouldn't change a thing if you were the first person that happened to or the millionth. 

There is a reason that upgrades are issued for computer software. Bug fixes, stability and performance increases, the introduction of new features, code modifications, vulnerability fixes, etc.

I have considered physical coins like a Casascius coin. Satori chip would also be an option, but I feel that's a gift more appropriate for people who like Bitcoin. Giving them that is like buying a football for someone who doesn't watch sport and prefers the theatre. You are probably thinking, why do it all then? I am hoping it will intrigue him a little and get him interested.

These coins aren't exactly cheap to gift to someone who might never ever care about them. Or about Bitcoin for that matter.   

I have a friend who is purchasing his own home next month together with his wife. As a gift to them, I would like to give them some Bitcoin. They don’t know much about crypto. He has heard of it but never owned any.

There are various ways to do that, so I don’t need any advice on that front. But it made me think: How cool would it be if there was a way to safely generate a Bitcoin wallet/address for someone else. But without seeing the recovery phrase or private key. The recovery phrase would only be accessible by the person the wallet is created for.

I am complicating a straightforward process of generating wallets, but here is why:

• My friend knows very little about Bitcoin.
• I don’t trust that he can create a decent wallet himself because he uses his PC and phone for all kinds of crap. There could be malware there that could lead to the loss of coins.
• I want to do the work for him, but I don’t want to have access to the seed, only an address to deposit the coins to.

One possible way would be if some kind of service would allow me to sign a message and encrypt the seed phrase/private key with his public key. Then, once the encrypted message is sent to him, he could decrypt it with his private key. But we are now again in territories that he knows nothing about. And If I am the one creating his public/private key pair, it defeats the whole process.

Another way could be having the seed sent to him in an encrypted form via email or online service, but sending or saving the seed in a digital way is really not something I want to do.

Casascius coins and similar collectibles are not an option.
I considered leaving a backup for myself, but I don’t want a way to access the coins. Once I hand it to them, it’s their responsibility to keep them safe. 


Any ideas?

He can't blame Electrum either way. OP should have made sure he was using the genuine version of the Electrum wallet and that the address he sent the coins to match the one from his Electrum wallet. Apparently, he only noticed the difference when he started investigating why the coins weren't delivered to his wallet. Unfortunately, that's too late.

They actually don't do that anymore for at least half a year. If you visit the site now, and click on "Buy/Sell Bitcoin" it will automatically fill up the fields for you to purchase the real Bitcoin. And they don't call it "Bitcoin Core" anymore, it's just "Bitcoin" now. If you want Bitcoin Cash, you have to manually find it in the dropdown menu.

True, but that's not an on-chain transaction. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase or Binance allow users to transfer "balances" from one account to the other, but those transactions don't move any bitcoins around. The bitcoins were and remain in the wallet of the centralized party, only balances sheets are changed and updated.   

It doesn't necessarily have to be shilling for that site, but you are right, it could be. It could also be just a scam site he found that is looking to take advantage of people who lost money in an attempt to profit from their ignorance.

PayPal wouldn't be responsible that I sent a transaction to the wrong place, but they would be responsible for not reverting it because they can do that. Having said that, bitcoin is significantly different due to the immutability factor. But the non-custodial argument doesn't help in this case because bitcoin transactions are equally final and irreversible no matter the type of wallet they were sent from. If OP sent the coins from a custodial wallet and the transaction was confirmed on the blockchain, can it be reversed? If he sent it from Binance, can it be reversed? That's all I am saying.

Another point which proves that OP has absolutely no case against Electrum. Not that he would have any if the license agreement were to be different. You can't sue Bitcoin or Electrum for having a feature (immutability) you don't understand.

I guess that OP only registered on Bitcointalk to get help with this issue of his stolen bitcoins. Seeing that most of the comments are about Bitcoin being irreversible and that the coins are unlikely to be returned, he probably doesn't feel like continuing the discussion and answering other people's questions. 

Several users are focusing on the non-custodial feature of Electrum:

That characteristic of Electrum doesn't matter in this particular case. The coins were not stolen, OP wasn't hacked, Electrum didn't misplace or lose the coins due to any fault of their own.

This is the most important detail of OPs message:
Whether the money was sent from Electrum, a casino, a centralized exchange, hot or cold wallet doesn't change anything because he initiated the transaction.

OK, so based on this last reply of yours, the last time affiliates like efialtis were paid is the last month that the program was still running, is that correct? Did you make a statement that the affiliate program will be shut down after the last payment was made? is there a post on the forum, email, or private message sent to affiliates informing them that the program will no longer be active and that the affiliates platform will be inaccessible/terminated from now on?

This might be it. We can already sign messages with legacy addresses. Developers probably think that's enough. Why bother and spend time creating an algorithm and contacting everyone to get aboard with it when there is already a standard with legacy addresses. It's not that I agree with it, but I understand if they don't consider it a feature that's really needed.

They have a negative rating due to an incident which took place back in 2019. I just read the entire scam accusation and they actually didn't scam the OP who wrote it. They have (or had at the time) a poorly designed site that caused OP to place a 0.03 BTC bet on blackjack, when he thought that he played with fun money. I don't think that's a scam and many people would agree with that.

Thanks for the feedback. I am not aware of what is happening on Telegram to be honest. I only take into account what is happening on this forum unless there are clear cases of scams elsewhere.   

YOU sent the money. You weren't even hacked or phished. But you still think Electrum should be responsible for something you did? I am sorry for your loss and if the story is true, but your claims make no sense.

If you download porn and torrents on your PC and it gets infected with malware, do you think you have a case against Dell because you lost your personal files?
If you get hit in the face by a guy wearing an Adidas hoodie, do you think Adidas should pay you compensation for the suffered injury and/or trauma?

You are asking a similar thing here.

I found another relatively old discussion on GitHub about the issues of message signing with Segwit addresses. The message was posted back in 2017, it doesn't clarify the situation any better for me, but @SFR10 maybe it answers your question.

Source:https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/10542#issuecomment-306576290

The first link that you posted explains some of the things they ask. According to the OP who wrote it, they will request that you send them one of the receiving or change addresses or that you tell them the total balance of the wallet, or maybe the amount on one of the UTXOs. I think that is OK.

The response I have have heard on Bitcointalk is always that there is no common standard for signing messages from segwit addresses. Common meaning that it's not used and implemented the same way by all wallets and service providers.

Trezor confirms that in this reddit post I found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/8vyenv/please_help_cannot_verify_trezor_signed_messages/e1s5tez/

Anyone can download Trezor Suite, but you can't open and run the software without a connected Trezor hardware wallet. I was curious about it, so I checked myself. It asks you to connect your wallet and there is no way around it. You have additional options to visit the official website or contact the support. This feature is therefore only available for those who own a Trezor wallet.

I have heard people mention that a few times on the forum, but do we have any stats or confirmations that TrustedCoin is willing to do that? If they do, getting access to someone's email could be enough to reset the 2FA feature. Luckily, that information alone is not enough to steal someone's coins.

We now have conflicting information. efialtis says that the affiliate portal was unavailable and that he couldn't check his stats. Is that true? He also claims he wasn't paid his commissions. But you are saying that you did pay everyone before the program ended. There can only be one truth. Everyone was either paid or they weren't.

@betnomi
Can you show actual proof that commissions were sent to efialtis and other users? 

@efialtis
If you weren't paid, have you or will you consider opening a scam accusation against betnomi?

That's good to know, thanks for confirming that. Your casino deducts no withdrawal fees, but what about the network or mining fees? Who pays for those? Is that deducted from the withdrawal amount or does Winz.io pay that out of their own pockets?

It seems that there won't be any changes there regarding the affiliate program. efialtis said that they ended the program without compensating their players but Betnomi claims that all users were compensated a month before the program was shut down. You can see my post here. I am gonna wait for replies from both parties and then make my decision. If players weren't compensated, that's a scam. If they were and they don't owe anyone anything anymore, I think the casino has the right to select whether to continue with its affiliate program or abandon it. I am not sure if there were similar cases like this in the past where a casino stopped some of their reward programs. I am sure there were.

The data has been updated for both casinos.

The old site still works but is now under the domain https://www.betnomi.bet/. I am going to change the address in OP to point to the .bet version for now.