just to make it 100% clear: you don't get pgp keys from some "random" website... You create them yourself on your own device.

If you like a gui, on windows you can use kleopatra. On linux there are gui tools included in most distro's directly. Personally, i wouldn't generate keypairs on my cellphone (it's a matter of convenience and security. But i guess it might be ok if you used an open source, vetted smartphone app to help you out).

I usually just create them from the terminal... Just make sure you don't download keypairs from the internet... If you download keypair generated by a thirth party, said thirth party can sign and decrypt in your name!!!

Sure... How much do you need? If it's just a couple hundred transactions with a fee of 1 sat/vbyte and some value... 0.01 tBTC sufficient?

AFAIK, the most popular LN node implementations implemented a mitigation against this latest attack vector, but i think it's undeniable that the lightning network isn't as mature as the bitcoin network. I ran a full node + a lightning node (c-lightning) for years. I had to shut it down because the price for my dedicated server had increased exponentially. Even whilst running a full node + a regularly patched version of c-lightning, i only kept 'spending change' inside my open channels.

My philosophy vs lightning is that we need an L2 sollution, and if we don't start using it, it will never truly mature. That being said, i still think it's a bad idea to keep more funds than you're comfortable losing inside open channels. Lacking a full node, i now use a custodial lightning wallet (i should really look into using electrum), but i only keep the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars inside this wallet.

I've googled around and found this nice graph: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-block-reward

At first glance, the numbers hereon seem to be plausible.

Miners are businesses, they have to pay employees, hardware, power, rackspace, taxes,... so i guess they'll think in FIAT terms.
At this moment, it seems like mining is still profitable, since the difficulty doesn't really make "big" jumps, indicating the global hashrate doesn't grow or drop very suddenly.
 
With the current preev rate of ~$43k /BTC, a miner makes $268.750 from the coinbase reward. https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-block-reward tells me the maximum income/block was around $400k at the end of 2021. Right now its ~$284k (so on average, the fees result in $16k/block).

The last 30 days, the average amount of transactions per block was ~3500 (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions-per-block)

Let's assume everything stays static from now on and see what kind of fees would be needed when the block reward goes close to 0 to keep our network "afloat" without a big outflux of miners... $284k (the amount needed to keep the miners interested) / 3500 transactions per block = $81/tx.

So, in order to keep the network "healthy" if everything stays status quo, we'd need a fee of ~$81/tx. That's the current equivalent of 0.00190 BTC.

Now, that's when we speak about a status quo...

• It's very possible technological advances make it interesting for some miners to mine way below the $284k/block income. At this point we might lose miners in countries with high power prices, and maybe the "gap" isn't completely filled by miners from low power price countries... We might be fine with that (the current diff is actually really high. It might be ok if it dropped a little bit).
• it's also possible the btc price rises (or drops). So the fiat value of $81/tx might be way less (or more) in BTC in the future
• protocol changes are also always possible. We had the segwit softfork a while ago that allowed us to move the witness data in the last 3Mb of a block. This increased the amount of transactions in a block. It's always possible something similar might happen in the future

Bottom line: if everything but the block reward stays the same, in a couple of halving we'll need to pay ~0.0019 as fee if we want the same level of network security. If the miners either use new tech, or we're willing to have a little less security, the fee will be lower. If the price rises, the fee will be lower (in BTC terms, not in FIAT terms offcourse).

Anyhow, if we're talking about FIAT, i would not be comfortable paying more than ~5% of the value of my transaction as a fee, so yeah, transactions with a value under 0.04 BTC ($1700 at current rate) would kind of defeat the purpose (at least, for me, and only if everything stays status quo).

So, yeah... I guess in the future we should rely on sidechains and altcoins a bit more than we did in the past... Use bitcoin for "larger" transactions (like opening or closing sidechains, or converting to altcoins, or making "big" transactions). But that's just if everything stays status-quo, and it's just my personal opinion

Eventough i wouldn't need such a function, so it doesn't really matter to me, it looks like it's on a per-address basis?
I have >10 wallets, some of them have hundreds of addresses... I guess the solution might not be all that elegant if applied to such a situation? Maybe a solution based on an xpub instead of an address might be more suitable (at least, if you don't mind giving up your privacy to the company providing those statements)?

I've heared this idear many times before... IIRC, previous times the mempool was completely full and a fee bidding "war" was plaguing the community, fingers were also pointed towards the miners... I guess they might try to do this, but it also comes at a risk (and a cost) to them...

What if a big miner decides to drop 1 Gb of transaction data (excluding witness data) into the mempool... They want to start a bidding war and profit big time, so they add 50 sat/byte tx data to these unconfirmed transactions... That's 1.073.741.824 bytes * 50 sat/byte =~ 537 bitcoin (at a current preev rate of $45k/btc, that's little over $24 million).

Offcourse, we (the users) have to outbid the transactions in the mempool, and we have to use a fee of >50 sat/byte to get our transaction into a block... Great profit for the miners... However, if on average we (the community) create less than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes over a prolonged amount of time, OTHER miners will start to add the transactions broadcasted by the miner that dropped the 1 Gb of transactions on the mempool... OTHER miners will start to confirm those transactions and claim the fee. In the end, the miner dropping the 1 Gb of unconfirmed spam transactions will be out of a big chunk of his $24.000.000. He'll only be able to recuperate the fees of the transactions he himself puts into a block which he succesfully solves.

Bottom line is that it would be a big risk for him (at least, that's my point of view). IF the community keeps on broadcasting more than 1 Mb of transaction data (excluding witness data) per 10 minutes for a very long time, he'll be able to push all our fees upwards and he might be able to make a nice profit... If we broadcast less that 1 Mb of tx data per 10 minutes, he might be at a (big) loss.

Who says there are 4 billion people that want to play games and 100 that want to buy coffee? As it stands now, it's possible there are 100 that want to play games and outbid 4 billion people that want to buy coffee, making the blockchain an ideal playground for those 100 whilst driving 4 billion people away causing long term damage to the ecosystem... What i'm saying is that IF a change was proposed, at least you'd know what the people want... Maybe a proposition would gain majority support, maybe it wouldn't... Maybe it would be dropped, maybe a fork would occur... Maybe 2 forks would live next to eachother, maybe one of the forks would dissapear. As it stands right now, nobody knows the ratio, we only know the "game players" have more money than the "coffee drinkers".

As for the miners: you do have a point... Nobody did care when they went out of business but when they're making a lot of money suddenly there's drama... Truth be told, i don't care either way (i don't care if they get rich or if they are forced to close their business), i just want to be able to be part of the ecosystem, and that includes not having to spend $30 to make a $100 purchase. I would be fine with paying more than i used to pay in the past in order to keep a reasonable amount of miners "in the green" so the blockchain remains safe, i would also think it would be ok if some miners decided to leave the ecosystem because they could not add 3000 transactions with an average fee of $30 to their blocks aswell.

The thing is that i've used bitcoin mostly as a form of payment, and not a store of value (i'm not saying i don't hold a little bit and hope the price rises). At the moment, it is completely impossible for me (and with me a lot of users) to use the main chain as a payment method for anything under the value of ~$250, since the fiat value of the average fee has been between $10 and $30 the last couple of weeks.

When you talk about a free market, i personally think this market would also need an alternative... Even if this means a fork... If you agree with the fact ordinals are abusing a vulnerabilty, use the "bitcoin" fork, mine on the bitcoin fork, have bitcoin fork wallet,... If you want to keep on pushing ordinal crap and nintendo games, by all means, switch to the bitcoin-ordinal fork, mine on said fork, have a bitcoin-ordinal wallet... I'm pretty sure the fork with the majority of the community behind it would be the fork that would make it big. It's all about freedom and choice.

Well there ARE rules, there is a protocol... It has been there since the start and it has changed in the past due to vulnerability's... I'm not saying it would be easy to change the protocol, but, IMHO with what's happening now it would be ok if the developers proposed a protocol change and see if there's a majority that would agree on this.

It would be tough to convince miners to give up part of their short term profits for the long term goal of keeping bitcoin attractive to new users tough... There probably would be (a lot of) drama... Short term it wouldn't do us any good... But for me, it's clear the blockchain's usecase wasn't to host nintento sourcecode or keep those ordinal guys happy... It was designed as an immutable ledger to store transaction data.

Just a heads up, importing your keys into a wallet that also has lightning support won't do you any good.

If you had moved your funds to a wallet supporting the lightning protocol BEFORE those ordinal guys started spamming, and you had opened some channels back then, you could have used your open lightning channels to send and receive funds right now... But since that's all hindsight, it won't do you any good now... The fact the fees are so high is probably due to the fact you're trying to consolidate a ton of very small valued unspent outputs, if you'd use those funds to open a lightning channel, the fee would probably be about the same...

I personally think that those ordinals guys are abusing the blockchain... Sure, there's no central authority and the current protocol allows them to do what they're doing, it still doesn't mean that they're not abusing the blockchain.
The miners make some nice profit from the fact "real" users have to outbid those ordinal folks, but i've heared new users actually giving up on bitcoin due to the large fees and the unpredictability those ordinal guys are bringing in the average confirmation time. I think nobody realises this abuse might have negative results in the end.

Now they're thinking about using the blockchain to store this kind of data? I think that's preposterous...  Why would thousands of nodes want to use their disk capacity to store this kind of crap?

I personally hope the devs and the miners start to show at least a little bit of concern and close this "attack vector" (yes, i see this ordinal crap as an attack on the community)

It looks like you have the same problem as this user had in the past: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5398492.0

I can't see your screenshots (they seem to be broken, at least for me), and i don't have the tx id's, so i cannot be certain.

no, a transaction can have a lock_time, but even that is not mandatory. A lock_time is not equal to the current timestamp!

here's some extra documentation
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction

EDIT: typo... I meant to say that there's no obligation to add a lock_time (it can be zero), so i i forgot the word "not" in front of mandatory.... I'm not a native English speaker, so mistakes like this are bound to happen from time to time

The problem with a CPFP is that currently, the output of the transaction is 0.00192571 BTC, which equals about $80.

If you do a CPFP, you'll have to cough up the fee for the stuck transaction (about 0.00015) PLUS the fee for the CPFP transaction, witch will also be about 0.00015, so you'll have to pay about 0.0003 in fees (~$12 at current preev rate) just to get your $80 back. A transaction accelerator costs even more...

The sender (cashapp) has cheaped out on the fee and only added 6,6 sat/vbyte (basically 30 cents) instead of the 140 sat/byte they should have payed right now. For a transaction of 110 vbytes, that would have cost them 0.000154 BTC (about $6.4). If they would have done the correct thing, this problem simply wouldn't exist.

You should complain to them tbh... They're the ones that cheaped out on the fee and caused this problem. If the feerate was to high for them, they should have asked a higher fee to their clients, started batching and maybe switch to taproot... They should, in no circumstance, start sending transactions with such a low fee and pass the problem on to their clients. In some way or another, you payed cashapp to give you $80, it makes no sense to spend $12 on top of what you already payed them to get your money.

Nothing i'm afraid... If you don't have an already open lightning channel and you don't have any altcoins you can use, the only "real" sollution is to pay the large fee.

But if you do pay the fee, it might be a good idear to use it to make a swap to some altcoins or to invest in opening a lightning channel, so at least the next time you can enjoy a cheap fee (by paying with a sidechain or altcoin). Bitcoin isn't economical to make small purchases at the moment, the people moving/investing in ordinals are spamming us with transactions paying larger fees, and we have to outbid them in order to get our transactions in a block.

The only other thing you could do is use a free tx accelerator, but those are severely limited and offer no guarantee whatsoever. ViaBTC offers a free service, but your tx can have a maximum size of 500 bytes, a minimum fee of 10 sat/byte, cannot have unconfirmed parents,... Only 100 free accelerations/hour are accepted, and there's no guarantee whatsoever.
That's the only 'trick' i know to get a cheaper transaction. There are no other shortcuts or special tricks. Miners optimze their income by selecting transactions with the highest fee per vbyte of transaction data. Mining is a business, and there's little to nothing you can do to make a miner put a suboptimal transaction (feewise) in the block they're trying to solve.

There are tricks to get unconfirmed transactions confirmed, but they're allmost allways more expensive than paying the expensive fee in the first place, so they're not applicable to your case at the moment i'm afraid.

He said he's from Belgium... Being from west EU myself, i'm vaguely familiar with some of the general idears of the laws around here... AFAIK, Belgium only taxes you if you're a professional trader (but i could be wrong). I think if you're a "goede huisvader" you don't have to pay tax on investments ("goede huisvader" translated would mean something like doing the things a normal worker would do with his hard earned money... The problem is that there's always room for discussion...)

Not really... This attack vector doesn't need malware of any kind, so there's nothing to detect...
It's just a hacker generating an address that looks a lot like an active address, then using an unspent output funding said address to fund a "to attack" address with a couple of cents, hoping the victim will just copy/paste the bad address instead of the real one and send funds to the hacker... I cannot imagine an antivirus software being able to protect you against such an attack.

The only way to protect you is always being vigilant, making sure you always double check each address.

It's not THAT hard to produce an address with the first and last characters "fixed". I had to think long and hard which address to pick as an example, i decided to pick the genesis address since everybody should know that funds sent there will be "lost" anyways:

1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

 

edit: i redacted the name of the tool i used as not to inspire people to go and try this themselfs

Now, this was done on a simple machine with 4 vcpu's (and it only took 8 seconds), but imagine doing this on a small GPU cluster to create "fake" addresses with the 3 first and 3 last characters equal for the top-10.000 addresses... It would be feasible... Those generators just brute-force for valid keys, so it doesn't take them that much longer to find matches for 1 address as it does for 10.000 addresses... Finding fakes for the top 10.000 would probably just take a couple of days.

If you don't keep your funds on an exchange or online wallet, and you use a decent hardware, paper or airgapped wallet, there'll be no real difference between your wallet and your mother's. Nobody will be able to stop you moving your funds, even in 50 years, since you hold the private keys.

On the other hand, if you really get into trouble with the tax authorities, it might be a little unbelievable if you tell them: this hardware wallet is mine, it contains 0€ worth of BTC, this other hardware wallet i have in my desk drawer is my mother's, it contains €15.000 worth of BTC.

All in all, even the best advice here won't be as good as the advice of a tax lawyer or a good accountant in your country... If you really want to know if you'll get into trouble with the law, spend a couple hundred and get the advice from somebody with an actual degree who specialises in this stuff in your country. Don't risk things by getting advice from a couple unknown people on the internet!

No, a miner is creating a block header based on (amongst other things) the previous block's header, the merkle tree of the transactions in the block and a nonce. They loop trough the nonces and test if the sha256d hash of the header with the current nonce is under the current target. ON AVERAGE, this should take about 10 minutes. It's perfectly possible the time between two blocks is 30 minutes, an other times it'll only be a couple seconds/minutes... It's all random and average, there is no set maximum time.

It's perfectly possible to broadcast a transaction with a sufficient fee and have it confirmed in mere seconds... As long as aminer received your transaction, put it in the block he/she is trying to solve AND succeeded in finding a block header whose sha256d hash is under the current target. There is no set minimum time before getting a confirmation...

the retarget doesn't happen per block, it happens every 2016 blocks... If the last 2016 blocks have had an average time between two blocks of more than 10 minutes, the diff decreases (and vice versa)

I'm rephrasing the stuff  Charles-Tim and hosseinimr93 have already said (they are both correct), but i tried to make it a bit "simpler"...

My simplification is a bit "over the top", some aspects are oversimplified, but i'm trying to give an ELI13 explanation here

The bitcoin network re-adjusts the difficulty every 2016 blocks to make sure that, on average, one block gets found every 10 minutes. That's about ~6 blocks per hour. It doesn't matter if the hashrate climbs or plummets, the network re-adjusts every ~2 weeks to make sure that on average ~6 blocks are found per hour.

A block can only contain 1 Mb of transaction data, NOT including the witness data of a segwit transaction... A block can contain up to 4 Mb of data, but the first Mb is the "actual" transaction data, and the other 3 Mb is only witness data of segwit transaction. This means that only ~6 Mb of "actual" transaction data (not including witness data) can be added to the blockchain each hour. This is also the reason that, when the mempool is overflowing as it is now, a miner has a choice to optimize the block he/she is trying to solve... He/she can make any combination of unconfirmed transaction he/she wishes.

When people use legacy addresses, the complete transaction has to fit into the first Mb of the block. When people use segwit addresses, only a part of the transaction has to fit into the first Mb, and a big chunk of the transaction data can fit in the "extra" 3Mb. The first Mb is the actual bottleneck, a miner cares less about the witness data since he has 3Mb of blockspace to store said data.

Any transaction has a number of inputs (with a value) and a number of outputs (with a value). A miner solving a block can send the block reward to himself, but he can also add the sum of all the values of all inputs of all transactions in his block minus the sum of all the values of all the outputs of all transactions in his block to said block reward... SOOOOO for a miner, if there are plenty of transactions in the mempool to pick from, it's financially beneficial to add transactions with the highest fee per byte of transaction data (since the total size of the block is a limiting factor). Since a segwit transaction NOT including the witness data is much smaller than a legacy transaction, it needs less fee in order to become interesting for a miner to be added to the block he/she is trying to solve.

As soon as you get this, it's time to look at taproot