This is correct. In addition, fiat banks have been known to reverse transfers to Coinbase once they realize it is a cryptocurrency exchange. OP, check with your bank. Did a card transaction decline? Did a payment get reversed? Either way, if Coinbase are not allowing you to top the account back up to come out of the red, then their support are the only people who can help right now.

Coinbase are an awful exchange, and their support is no different. In the past, other users have had to wait weeks or months to get simple things resolved. The best you can do is keep your issue on their radar. Keep sending tickets. Try PMing some of their staff who are active on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/coinbasesupport and https://www.reddit.com/user/justin_coinbase. Make some Twitter posts about it. Usually they are only actually motivated to help customers recover locked funds or accounts if it looks like there will be community backlash - they don't actually care about helping you get your money back.

So, to be frankly honest, I paid very little attention to this competition (other than the notifications I kept getting when my name was mentioned) since, like others, I figured it would simply be a popularity contest as opposed to based on actual contributions or merit in the various categories. This seems to be proven by the fact I don't even appear on the SpamBuster category, despite knowing for a fact I have thousands (sometimes >10 thousand) more good reports than some of the people who did, because I'm not very vocal with my reporting statistics.

Because of this, I was unsure how I felt about winning Bitcoin Geek. In my opinion it should have gone to one of the core devs who are active on the forum - gmaxwell or achow101 - or to satoshi himself, no questions asked. I expressed as much in the Discord chat, and webtricks pointed out that it the voting wasn't actually based on the most technical knowledge but rather the person who is most passionate about bitcoin and most helpful in answering questions. In that case, I'll humbly accept, although it still feels wrong to me to be beating people with far more technical knowledge in such a category.

---

Here's the post you guys are looking for regarding Satoshi's PMs:

Most people use 2FA completely incorrectly across the board.

Having both the wallet file and the email account username/password or logged-in session stored on the same computer completely negates the point of 2FA, as you say. However, people do the same thing with exchanges and web wallets (for example), with the log ins for both their exchange account and their email account which they use for 2FA both saved in the same browser on the same device. Or they use an authenticator app on the same device as the exchange app they are logging in to, or an SMS sent to the same phone they are logging in to the web wallet from, or so on. The majority of uses of 2FA are not 2FA at all. Most people simply use 2FA to protect themselves from the fact that they have chosen a short, non-random password which they have likely used across multiple accounts as opposed to providing real protection from a compromised device.

When it comes to Electrum, using 2FA in this manner makes even less sense since your wallet cannot be hacked in the same way an online account can be. The only benefit I can think of is it would have protected against the malicious Electrum 4.0.0 malware provided the 2FA was already in place, and it would offer some protection to anyone stupid enough to back up their wallet file on some cloud server.

Every single bitcoin address which will ever exist (excluding new address types which may be created in the future) already exists. Anyone can send bitcoin to any address they please at any time, whether or not someone controls it or it has ever been generated by a piece of software before. When you generate a new address using bitaddress, you simply generate a random number between 1 and (just less than) 2²⁵⁶ which is your private key and allows you to "unlock" one specific address.

Being pedantic, but this isn't strictly true. All you need is a way of knowing which UTXOs are present at that address. The most obvious non-internet way of doing this is via Blockstream Satellite (https://blockstream.com/satellite/), which will allow you to sync a full node without an internet connection, but you could also receive blockchain data over a local network, via a USB drive, or any other way of communicating data. You don't even necessarily need the latest blockchain data - provided you know the relevant UTXOs, then you could create a transaction manually and sign it with a private key, all without having an internet connection. There are also a couple of ways you can broadcast transactions without an internet connection, although these are more difficult to achieve than creating transactions without an internet connection.

I think it is more likely that this Wallet ID leads to the correct wallet and addresses, rather than the correct addresses have somehow disappeared from your current Wallet ID. You are absolutely sure there were no other email addresses you used 7 years ago which you may have used to sign up to blockchain.com? And have you checked all your spam folders to ensure their email isn't being automatically filtered?

If this is the correct wallet ID and you no longer have access to the relevant email address, then again, their support are going to be the only people who can help you.

And you are absolutely sure the Wallet ID you have is the correct one for the wallet you mined coins to? It would be highly unusual for the correct wallet to just "delete" or otherwise remove addresses from it, but all things are possible when it comes to the technical incompetence of blockchain.com.

Presuming you have tried their various recovery tools and links which have been provided above with no luck, then the likelihood is that the only people who can help here are blockchain support. They will most likely try to palm you off with various generic emails. Often with awful crypto companies like these you have to make a fuss on social media, reddit, twitter, etc., before they finally pay attention to your case. They don't care about you or your coins, but they care about anything which might turn other people off and affect their profits.

Are they, though? I know this line is peddled by the media (the media which just happens to be bankrolled by the fiat banking system), but is there actually any hard evidence that vast sums of money are being laundered through bitcoin? The studies that I have seen regarding mixers have shown that a very small fraction of money passing through a mixer (somewhere in the region of 8%) is coming from darknet markets, hacks, or other illegal activity, which means that money laundering is only a fraction of a fraction of mixer traffic. Given that mixer traffic itself is only a fraction of bitcoin transactions, then money laundering truly is a tiny percentage. As always, the amount of money laundering being done through cash, or indeed, being done through the massive fiat banks we are trying to take back control from, dwarfs anything being done by bitcoin.

Not really. So for the sake of (hyperbolic) argument, let's say they coerce ThomasV in to forcing all new Electrum wallets to connect to a central server and refuse to allow users to create a wallet prior to creating KYC. One of two things would happen. Either someone else would simply fork the repo and continue developing Electrum without such ridiculous requirements, or the community would just abandon Electrum and use a different wallet.

The thing is, nothing about creating an address is top secret or even that complicated. A random number (your private key) and a few lines of code is sufficient to create an address. It is impossible to make KYC mandatory to create an address.

It's obviously far too late to do anything about these outputs now, but if you are still involved in mining then you should wait until you have accumulated a much larger mining reward before withdrawing. Once a week or a couple of times a month is far more appropriate than daily.

Not necessarily. The period surrounding Christmas in previous years hasn't shown any noticeable change to whatever the mempool was doing at the time - if it was empty it remained empty, if it was full it remained full. Since unlike stocks, bitcoin is tradable 24/7/365, and large amounts of volume come from places like China which only have a very small Christian population, then commonly observed holidays in America and Europe often don't make any difference to the mempool.

The mempool has fallen from about 62 MB to about 42 MB in the last 24 hours, and I would expect it to fall a bit more over the coming 24 hours, but with the ongoing price surge in bitcoin it is unlikely the mempool will clear down to as low as 1 sat/vbyte for the foreseeable future. You could bump the fee up to 10-15 sats/vbyte or so (which would be in the region of $35-50) and that might get you confirmed over the weekend, but it could also mean paying 10x the fee and still having to wait a week or more anyway. To be reasonably sure of getting confirmed today you are probably looking at a fee of 50 sats/vbyte, which is almost $200. If it were me I would just wait.

Obviously their intention is not for the good of all. Their intention is control the population and bring bitcoin under their control as much as possible, because it threatens the fiat banking system which is what their power depends on.

Which is an equally stupid position for them to try to enforce, since it is essentially impossible to prove if an address is custodial or non-custodial.

How? They want me to submit my master public key along with my ID documents so they know every address I generate? Fuck that. Anyone even considering allowing this to happen should just go back to fiat, since what you will be left with will be less private, more monitored, and depend on trusting more third parties than fiat will.

Not at the moment. The Bisq app isn't a standalone app at the moment - it simply links up to your computer software and provides notifications to your phone of trade activities, offers being accepted, etc.

Such a possibility would make the devices completely pointless, as well as making bitcoin itself obsolete. If you could recreate a private key from only having knowledge of the address, then anyone could steal anyone else's bitcoin at any time.

As above, your only option is to find that OpenDime device. In future, if you want a device in which you can recover the coins if you lose the device then you should look at a hardware wallet such as a Ledger or Trezor which provides you with a back up seed phrase which you can write down on paper.

So it's not quite as bad as your picture makes it out to be. The USD value showed in that picture is based on the price of the coins when OP received then, which was generally back in 2016. Those 10 cent outputs are now worth around $4.

While this is obviously true, it is probably not the most important thing for OP to focus on. Reducing the number of inputs he is using will provide a far greater fee saving than switching 100 inputs from Legacy to SegWit.

Two suggestions for OP:

• These coins have sat dormant for 4 years. They can sit dormant for another few days until the mempool empties down to 1 sat/vbyte. Just be patient, otherwise you will lose hundreds of dollars worth of BTC in fees.
• Stop accepting such small outputs. I don't know where you were withdrawing such small amounts of coins from at the time (I assume faucets because the majority of exchanges, casinos, etc. have a minimum withdrawal amount), but it makes far more sense to wait until you have a reasonable amount of bitcoin and then withdraw it all at once. If you were spending 1 input here rather than 100, your transaction could have confirmed in minutes for a fraction of the fee you are paying.

So you can still log in to your wallet, but you just see a zero balance? And you were able to restore your wallet from scratch and log in successfully, but again you see a zero balance? If you click on settings and then go to "Wallets & Addresses", you can go in to any individual wallets you have created and view the individual addresses. Look these addresses up on a block explorer - are any of them your address which held the 15-16 BTC?

The most it has ever taken me is around 20 seconds, but I use it fairly frequency so I never have much data to sync. Very rarely it hangs on the startup screen for me even with latest version for reasons unknown - I suspect on these occasions it has connected to an out-of-date or otherwise faulty peer. I've never bothered to spend any time looking in to why since it is always solved by simply closing Bisq and relaunching.

It's about surveillance. America, and most other western nations, are surveillance states. None of this is about prevent terrorists, catches criminals, protects the children, or any of the other nonsense they feed you when they are invading your freedoms. This is about surveillance. Just as they don't like people being able to communicate with each other privately which is why they try to ban encryption or force back doors in to software, and just as they don't like people being able to browse the internet privately which is why they record all your traffic and try to attack Tor, they definitely don't like people being able to spend or transfer money and buy thing privately without them being able to stick their noses in. Knowledge is power. Surveillance is control.

Enter Bisq. It is open source and freely distributed, just like bitcoin. Short of taking control of 51% of the hashrate (which would render bitcoin useless anyway) and censoring my transactions, they can't stop me trading peer to peer with another user.

Does this recovered wallet show the same addresses as your 2FA wallet?
If yes, it means you new wallet is simply not syncing up properly.
If no, it means you have either used the wrong seed phrase, or you used a passphrase which you have not entered.

Are you 100% sure the seed phrase you have written down is for this wallet? Do you have any other seed phrases backed up anywhere? When you created the wallet, did you extend it with any custom words?

Yup, it's a simple vasovagal which happens to tens of thousands of people every day. The anti-vax morons are running low on straws to grasp at, it seems.

If you are converting bitcoin to any other coin and back again using the same app, then your privacy is still at risk. The owners and developers of that app can still see exactly what you have done, will likely have kept logs which are open to being leaked or hacked, and may share that information with any number of third parties. This is true regardless of what coin you are swapping in to, even if you are using a privacy focused coin like monero, and certainly when you are using a token based on a centralized coin. The coin's features are irrelevant when using the same exchange for both trades.

If you want to do something like this in a secure manner, then you need to trade from BTC to XMR, move the XMR to another wallet (preferably in a number of smaller transactions over several hops rather than just one transaction sending everything), and then use a different service to swap the XMR back to BTC and send to a bran new BTC Wallet, and do all this over Tor.

Yeah, agreed. I tend to only hold what I need for the near future in XMR, and buy more with BTC when I run low.

I use monero quite frequently, and the vast majority of the time it is the only coin I am holding other than bitcoin unless I need another one for a specific purpose or payment. I am under no illusion that it will most likely lose value in terms of bitcoin over time (although its price in USD has been increasing pretty steadily for the last 9 months or so), but that's not why I am holding it. I was spending bitcoin last year at $3k and I am spending it this year at $23k, as I am using it because of its technology, not because of its price. The same is true for my use of monero. If you are serious about looking to an altcoin for privacy technology then monero is the way to go, but its performance against bitcoin is the price you have to pay.

The other coins that have been mentioned are trash.

If only! Working in healthcare has meant I've had to let several things fall by the wayside this year, and reporting is one of them. I'll get back on it at some point. With the price surge I'm sure there will be more spammers than ever pretty soon.

Did you send it to the exchange BitBay? Did you send everything in your wallet, or do you still have some funds left?

I don't think BitPay wallets support RBF, but you could potentially do a CPFP transaction if you control the address thr coins were sent to, or if you have some change left over from the transaction. Your other option is simply to wait - your transaction will confirm eventually once the mempool settles down a bit.