I don't expect that such move would be profitable, since governments will probably give out the vaccines for free.
There's much more money into infiltrating into the supply chain and deliver the vaccines to the official institutions and getting paid for that.
Especially now, when every government is in a hurry to prove they care, mistakes or intentional (by bribery) infiltration can happen.

Also the dark web market, although I expect to be rather small (because the vaccine will come for free), it's still there. There are quite a number of desperate people(*), who want to go out and get back to "normal life" or their jobs/businesses and expect miracles from the vaccine. Those may try to buy in order to not have to wait and unfortunately those may get scammed big time.

(*) This is based on the news that in Japan, more people died from suicide last month than from Covid in all of 2020.

Heh, some 15 years ago I was maintaining/modifying some old code for Windows CE PDAs. I remember how truncated the API was.

For OP use case I think that C++ is not a bad option, but it would still require quite an amount of work and I am not convinced that so many PDA users would transform their PDAs into cold storage.
I mean if one has a lot of free time for hobby programming, yes, it can be a nice project, especially if he has a PDA for testing.

But for most users I think that's easier, faster and possibly better too to simply buy a HW.

I don't know if Electrum was around in 2014, but even if it was, it was certainly not popular yet (the website shows only the releases from 1.8 up, from Oct 2015).
The popular SPV wallet back in 2014 was Multibit; I was also using it.
However, OP was telling about wallet.dat; if he knows what he's saying then the answer is Bitcoin Core.



Now to the topic. I am not a specialist, but I think that somebody said at some point that recovering from SSD is basically impossible because of its structure.
However, I don't tell you this to disappoint you. I am telling you as an advice to wait for more answers before doing any step further.

That's why I said it's not feasible. Newbies may feel cheated by that bulk payment and move away from that solution exactly after they actually paid for it.
I know that people should read before opting in, but I also know that the vast majority doesn't... However people will then read their complaints.
However, I guess that we have to agree that's a topic we have different/opposite points of view and move forward. 

The price movement of Bitcoin and altcoins sometimes may be related, sometimes not, sometimes may look as related. People however always try to find a relation between the two in the same way they try to find a relation between Bitcoin and stocks' price.

All in all it's not a clear and easy to follow relation between those trends and you have to be very careful and not trust blindly everybody's suppositions.

Yes, I know, this makes learning more difficult and possibly confusing too. Read, check the history.. you'll see that all those sayings were true at least once but most probably they were at least once also false.

Impressive ... list of words. Is this person a politician? I think that it's a person since a bot would have made less mistakes and more sense, I guess...

We are waiting for many years for the institutional investors to come and buy into Bitcoin.
What I've learned over the years is that this ($600B) doesn't happen overnight and it could actually take years to happen.
Also keep in mind that the more money they have the better they can play some market manipulation to allow them buy cheaper and save a couple of millions here and there.

All in all, try to not have way too big expectations. The when element, when the big pumps would happen is still uncertain. It can be tomorrow or in years, with or without these news.

I wanted to write a longer post, but I didn't have time when I've seen this. And then I forgot. Apologies.
Now I've got a hopefully better idea: an image is better than 1000 words.  

All in all, it's the same query, I've done copy/paste. Now the results have changed a little, but smh.com is still not in the list.
I won't insert the image(s) here, but I'll put 2 links. If you can see good enough the first one, ignore the second since it's just at a different browser zoom. The first one contains more results, but maybe too small font.

https://imgur.com/JZe8Z7Q
https://imgur.com/GZYuw6n


That's correct and what @20kevin20 said is also correct. The pushing, the blacklists, .. depend on your location and the way Google identifies you/your browser.


I've done web search since the days of Altavista and Hotbot and believe me, with all these minuses, Google is still very good compared to that.

For Android I use Mycelium. It could be better, but it's far from bad. And it has one advantage over Electrum for Android: it also works with Hardware Wallets.
And this is important since I don't advise anyone keep more than 200-300$ worth of crypto on an Android wallet without the protection of a hardware wallet.

I was told not long ago that bluewallet.io may also be a good choice but I didn't get to try it out yet.

Actually if you copy yourself the link and then try to go there it doesn't work (sends you to wrong place).
I also thought at first that OP is mistaken, but also for me the link, even if I copy it myself, doesn't get me to the post.
Does it work for you?!

This "Proof of authentication" is not a forum related thing. Is something certain bounty manager ask. So there's no such thing as "Proof of authentication bug".
Now, this is a discussion forum and posts in a forum can get deleted. Probably this has happened in your case too. Some deleted posts shifted yours to another page.
So this is not a forum bug either.

Edit: the actual possible forum bug is that the link to your actual post doesn't go to your actual post.
So the actual bug is:
"If posts get deleted hence shifting my post to another page in a long topic, the direct link doesn't get me to my post."

It's not only the legitimacy.
I was just thinking: there's a good chance they may do development in the direction of making crypto easier to spend. Possibly hardware that'll make crypto as easy to use as today's cards, maybe without the need of scanning QR codes with your phone. It could be good and interesting.

Never did.
But newbies do use it and get in trouble. And I'm with @ranochigo here: it's rather unpleasant to find out suddenly that you've lost almost 50$ for this.
As a newbie you may even think that you got hacked.

If it would have costed a couple of cents per transaction (i.e. dust) and not paid in such big bulk then maybe it would worth it. But that's not feasible and as it is it may erode the actual reputation of the wallet.

I'm not sure it's so much related to Visa or it's a happy coincidence, but Monero was an obvious choice that was missing from the list.

Maybe some customers think that paying with Bitcoin is fine since not many know yet about Bitcoin, but I hope that they'll think twice and understand that in a few years it's be easy (it's already easy in many cases) to make a "map" of everything a person has bought with Bitcoin, including PonrnHub subscription and maybe they understand the real value of Monero.

I find it to this day overpriced and not really useful.
As already said, if the computer has malware on it from start 2FA will not help.

A simple math tells that if you plan to do at least 150 transactions you'll get a hardware wallet in the same money (and I didn't count the extra you'd pay in the tx fees because of multisig).

With all due respect for the brilliant piece of software Electrum is, this 2FA feature caused more troubles to newbies than helping them and now it's time to think seriously that it should be retired.

Bitcoin is (also?) a currency. Sooner or later I may have to use it again for whatever reasons.
Also I don't own enough bitcoin to allow me retire if I sell at 100k

So I guess that I'll stay in the game. I'll work more, I'll earn more and I'll wait for Bitcoin get much higher than 100k. Not much else I can do.

I think that the key of the problem is the 2FA.
That's a different, 3rd party service that imho brings you no benefit and which costs money.

Edit: I also found a link with the fees; with default settings I think that you'll pay 0.0025BTC for this service (and it covers the next 100 transactions).
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5279842.msg55310504#msg55310504
So your best choice is to learn how to re-create your wallet without 2FA.

Exactly. In a world where you can have NFC rings, i.e. probably same/similar tech without getting it inserted inside your body, what this people are doing is clearly an exaggeration.

Now to the topic: Since they already use their money only digitally, this move is an obvious step. For average Joe will most probably nothing change, while the companies will not have to pay fat fees to VISA/Mastercard.
It's about a lot of money that now leaves their country and can remain in there, maybe as some smaller fee the central bank could ask for keeping the system up and running.
And just imagine what power will the government have over the population's money...

BitPay is not fair play with bitcoiners and I don't trust them.
I don't know how far can they go, but I can easily expect them from selling KYC info and users' buying habits to going onto fractional reserve based banking-like services.
Although it may sound good, I see it as bad for the ecosystem.

Week-ends tend to be "unnatural" and the trends from week-ends can easily change when the working days start.
So although I expect to still have upward pressure, although I like to see it rise again (or recover, at least), I would not get too happy exactly because it's week-end.
Also with the holidays a slow down can also happen, so the most important 2 things for the remaining 3 weeks are to not go too far down from current levels and get back on a rise in January.

Let's wait and see what happens next week, which is for many (traders too) the last working week of this year.