McDonald:s founder said: McDonalds real business is in REAL ESTATE, not fast food 

They own lots of valuable real estate all over the world. In great places, in most big cities.

I guess he just meant that the private keys are not in any device or wallet.  Of-course the address and its balance has to be in the blockchain.

Encryption does not need a wallet. there are lots of encryption programs, that have nothing to do with bitcoin, out there.

Maybe he just created the private keys in an offline computer eg. in an offline version of bitaddress.org and never loaded the keys anywhere. Just keeps them encrypted in an USB disk or paper wallet or something.

Edit:  You can create an encrypted paper walled in (offline) bitaddress.org. That could be it

Edit2: corrected the address. Had a typo in the address and it pointed to a scam site
Very sorry for the mistake. And thanks to LoyceV for pointing it out.
This just proofs that it is very important to check every bitcoin related address very carefully.

There are less private keys than 2^256. That is because the order (= number of points) of the curve bitcoin uses is less than 2^256

2^256=
115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936
order n=
115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494337

So there are 2^256 - n = 432420386565659656852420866394968145599 less points than 2^256

But you CAN choose any of the 2^256 numbers to be your private key and you will get a valid public key from it.
If you choose a number bigger than the max value (no matter how much bigger), the max value will automatically be subtracted from your number, until your chosen number will be smaller than the max value.

PS. remember that there are only 2^160 bitcoin addresses, which is a lot less than 2^256, which means there are many public keys, that will produce same address
The graph is continuous, And all the numbers exist in the graph, the limiting factor is P=2^256-2^32-2^9-2^8-2^7-2^6-2^4-1
that is chosen for curve secp256k1, which is what bitcoin uses.

I just sent you a PM with a private key to a testnet address cointaining 1BTC. Have fun.

This is the address:
mvwXQY1FAm9BsVdUZ7YaZhpCBnJwT17D5v

I have spend (too) much time in learning everything about bitcoin, but I had completely missed this bug.   I did notice in September that you  should update bitcoin core, but did not realise the bug made it  possible to "illegally" create new coins.

Thanks for posting the links. Makes it much easier to understand what we are talking about

You certainly can install a system with just cli (command line interface) and it will work just fine.

For example Debian would be a good choice.

The biggest problem with cli system is configuring wifi. I do not know any easy way for a cli system to connect to wlan, doing it manually is HARD. So if you need that, then windowed system just might be easier.

Of course it is possible.
You are basically just making a copy of the code, and change few small things, like the amount of coins.

Should be easy.

PS. That is why many altcoins have very low value. They are easy to make. And if there is nothing new or original, where would the value come from? 

An old thread, but since it is up again, I will reply.

In my country we also need to use FIFO when selling stocks, but that is only if you can't show exactly which stocks you sold.

SO if we can show that we sold the most recently bought stocks and not the first ones, then we can just report the last stocks instead of the first ones.

This can be done, if you have different stock accounts. One for old HODL stocks and a different account for eg. day trading.

With bitcoin, showing exactly which coins you are selling should be easy, because you can have coins bought at different times in different addresses. AND you can also have a proof of which coins you sold. Eg. I bought 1BTC at this price, moved it to this address and now moved it back to an exchange and sold it with this price.

IF you can prove you sold exactly those coins, I bet you do not have to use FIFO in any country.

Its completely different, if you keep all your coins in one address, or in an exchange, when you cannot prove witch coins you sold. Then FIFO is the only logical way.

You are contradicting yourself. First you say moving genesis coins would be enough, and then you say it wouldn't be

In my opinion it would not have to be genesis coins. Many of his first addresses are known, so any of them would do.

Besides, genesis coins can't be moved. Bitcoin core would not accept it.

Your randomly typed phrase does not look very random. You have only letters in it. Where are all the /&%")?#@*^Ä- characters? A good random string is a string that cannot be compressed. Your string can be compressed, because it uses only a part of all characters.

However. Even if that is not truly random, I believe no-one could crack your key currently. Just make your "random" string longer. You can give SHA256 algorithm much longer strings.



That is a brilliant idea, I have never heard before  nice layer of extra security.

Tor is the easiest solution. But you can go a step further. Use tor when using a public WLAN, or a prepaid sim-card, if you can buy those anonymically in your country, then even if someone cracks your tor connection all they would get is the public WLAN or prepaid phone location, and maybe your computers wlan-chip serial number.

If you use tails-linux booted from a USB stick, all your internet traffic goes through tor. Tails is good, but sometimes it has programs that are not completely up to date.

Even tor is not 100% secure. SIlk-road boss was caught even though he used tor, that happened because he was too big a criminal. Enough resources were made available to track him and they succeeded. He was not careful enough.


Mixers are not completely anonymous any longer. sometimes coins can be tracked even through mixers.
I don't know about ProtonVPN, but some VPN services save trafic-data and give it to authorities if required. It safer to use VPN+tor rather than just VPN.

Yes. And it is very easy. This is a web page with all possible addresses and private keys
https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/dio/1
Just search the private key to your address from there (it is there) and that is it.

LOL

Exactly!
It was actually tried once in the past with stolen coins. It ended up with many innocent people having "blacklisted" coins and exchanges blocking them.
It ended quickly when it just did not work.

If you have 1000BTC and receive 0.01 blaclisted BTC, and consolidate your inputs, then your whole 1000.001 BTC wallet has to be blacklisted. Soon the whole network has to be "blaklisted" and then what.

Also. If you move your coins to new address (without using mixers) it could mean that you moved them to a new address of yours OR that you sold them to a new owner. When tracking coins you can newer be 100% certain if/when ownership has changed.

Good luck finding someone, who will sell you bitcoins with paypal  

It is not recommended to sell bitcoins to anyone paying with paypal. Paypal transactions can be CANCELLED and bitcoin transactions can't.

Of course buying with paypal is safe. It is just that no-one will sell coins that way. Atleast no-one should do that.

No, the value is same everywhere.
But if you buy from a person who needs money quickly and is in an unstable country, where selling could be slow or difficult. Then yes.

That is what their add says.
But I would not use ledger in an infected machine.
Yes, you have to accept the payment, but a clever program could wait for you to make a bitcoin transaction and change it before it is send to ledger for confirmation.

And then you just might confirm the payment. Particularly if the output address looks similar than the real output address. 

In some countries it would be possible. Eg. Spain has lots of sunshine, so solar power would work.

But it does not. Spanish politicians decided people have to be PUNISHED for being ecological and owning solar panels. And that is why (free) solar power, after counting solar power tax, is more expensive than bought electricity (which is about 22 c/kWh)

Otherwise Spanish electric companies would lose profits and they would not be able to invest in their electric grid and power plants etc...  Talk about corruption

It seems you always have to take politicians into your calculations. They can be quite surprising.

There is a hidden flaw. It is called a "Quantum Computer" that can be used to crack the ECDSA algorithm that bitcoin uses.

There is no easy solution to the threat QC creates.
Yes, we can make a new address format that is quantum safe, but we CANNOT protect the coins in old "lost" addresses, because to protect them, the owner would have to move the coins to a new kind of address, and it cant be done, because those coins are lost.

The price started from 0. It is quite pointless to count how many %:s the value has risen from 0. You would be at infinity.

You should instead estimate the value of the whole bitcoin system, including how much money has been poured to it, and compare the estimated value to the current value.

It is hard to make any good estimates, and that is why we often see it compared to 0.

PS. in the beginning the value was 0, because it had no use cases, and it was just an idea

You are not worried of inflation then?

US and EU have both been printing HUGE amounts of money out of nothing. That kind of behaviour should lead to high inflation, even hyperinflation.

I would not dare to keep everything in cash. Cash can collapse.

How about dividing them to different assets: cash, gold, real-estate, land, stable stocks (eg. food industry), bitcoin etc...