So although the wallet you have downloaded is indeed the official one, and therefore you are almost certainly completely fine, there is still a potential attack vector. It is the same as when people recommend only downloading from https://electrum.org/#download. Although that is the official site, and they are correct you shouldn't download Electrum from anywhere else, simply using the official site to download from is not enough to guarantee your security. Sites can be compromised or hacked and have malicious pieces of software uploaded to them. That is why you must verify your Electrum download has been signed by ThomasV (the lead developer) by using the signature files provided at https://electrum.org/#download and his public key, which I have put at the bottom of this post (although you should also verify this key from other sources to ensure that I am not trying to trick you in to using a fake key).

There are good instructions on how to verify Electrum here: https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/
You can download the mobile app and its signature file to your desktop computer, verify it there, and then transfer it to your mobile device for installation (you'll need to allow installation of apps from unknown sources in your phone's security settings).

ThomasV's public key fingerprint:
Same key available on OpenPGP Keyserver: http://keys.gnupg.net/pks/lookup?op=vindex&fingerprint=on&search=0x2BD5824B7F9470E6
Same key available on Electrum GitHub: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-docs/blob/master/gpg-check.rst
Same key available on Electrum Documentation: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gpg-check.html

The answer is probably no, but it depends a little bit on what device and what wallet software you have used.

If you have deleted your wallet file or it has otherwise become lost, corrupted, etc., then the easiest way to recover is using your seed phrase. If you have irretrievably lost your seed phrase, then the only other option would be to try to restore your wallet file. If you create regular back ups (you should) then you could restore from there, or you may be able to use some file recovery software or service to attempt to un-delete your wallet. All of this is very dependent on what platform you are using, what OS you are using, and what wallet software you are using.

If you ever do lose your seed phrase, then you should transfer all your funds out of that wallet immediately, to a new wallet with a new seed phrase, to prevent this exact kind of situation from arising.

By deleting the persistent storage, you will have deleted the Electrum wallet file you initially created, and so yes, you deleted your wallet.

However, the 12 words you wrote down on paper (and hopefully did not store on any electronic device) allow you to recover the exact same wallet that you deleted, and therefore, recover all your bitcoin.

Follow Loyce's instructions above to recreate the wallet. If you want to save the wallet file again after you have restored it, you'll need to set up a new persistent storage. It is also possible to not use persistent storage and just enter your 12 words every time you boot up Tails. You'll have to judge whether you feel you are at a bigger risk of someone discovering your USB which holds the persistent storage, or a bigger risk of a keylogger or other malware stealing your 12 word phrase every time you enter it.

There are only three things certain in life: Death, taxes, and Coinbase going down whenever bitcoin moves by >5%. I've lost track of just how many times I see people complaining about Coinbase crashing when there is a bullrun. As much as I dislike all centralized exchanges, I don't ever remember seeing a post about the same thing from Binance, or Kraken, or Kucoin, or so on. Coinbase have had billions of dollars and years of time to fix these crashes. The fact that they are still happening means they are either 100% intentional, or they could not give a single fuck about any of their customers. I'm not sure which is worse. With all the unethical and shady shit that Coinbase pulls, I'm pretty much convinced that 90% of Coinbase users have Stockholm Syndrome at this point.

Money. The US government pays Coinbase for details of their customers and for their de-anonymizing technology. Coinbase are more than happy to provide it. They do not care about their customers. They care about their profits, and only their profits.

The US government wants control, and the easiest way to achieve that is through mass surveillance.

Even if you don't complete KYC on those exchanges, you still need to transfer fiat money to them via a bank account, a credit card, PayPal, or some other electronic method, all of which come attached with the minimum of your name and phone number, but potentially also your address, account number, etc., and so are in no way anonymous. Furthermore, pretty much all centralized exchanges track your bitcoin deposits and withdrawals to report to various governments and third parties, and all centralized exchanges can freeze or lock your account at any time and demand that you complete KYC, holding your coins hostage unless you do.

Any centralized exchange is an incredibly poor choice if you are interested in maintaining privacy, and it is utterly impossible to be anonymous when using them.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean here. You want to use a decentralized exchange to mix your coins? Why would you not just use a tried and tested mixer such as ChipMixer instead? Or do you mean a decentralized exchange which will not discriminate against you for trading mixed coins or mixing your withdrawals?

Why not avoid potential problems by avoiding privacy invading exchanges instead? If you are worried about your privacy (which you should be), there are decentralized exchanges like Bisq and Hodl Hodl. The problem with using centralized exchanges like Binance or Kucoin which allow some users to not complete KYC, is that they can and do spring unannounced KYC on their users frequently, freezing your account and seizing your coins in the meantime. Your choice is then to either surrender your privacy or surrender you coins. Why not use mixers and decentralized exchanges, keep your privacy, and completely avoid the risk of some centralized exchange scamming you out of your coins.

I'm not sure how you reached that private key. Pasting either the uncompressed or compressed WIF from the first post in to the page you linked should give you the following private key, which happens to be the curve order n, plus or minus the added 01 byte at the end if it is compressed:

The key that you have arrived at:
Not only is not valid, but is 68 characters long and significantly larger than 2²⁵⁶.

He did test the CypherWheel. In fact, he tested it twice. Here's a link to the most recent review: https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/reviews/cypherwheel-2/

The summary is that the first device had some data loss due to the rotating mechanism reacting in the acid. The second device with different materials used did not experience this, but did experience some data loss due to crushing. All in all, not worth the expensive price tag for a non-optimal product, when you can use a simple piece of stainless steel for a tenth of the price and better protection.

Try putting in your two private keys as two very small numbers - say "2" and "5". The resulting private key are either "7" (2+5) or "A" (2*5 - in hex of course). Sure, it then uses elliptic curve multiplication to turn those private keys in to public keys, but the process it uses of multiplying the two private keys is just straight forward arithmetic multiplication.

Try using the numbers
and
as your two private keys.

You will see that One + Two gives you the curve order (n) which is invalid and therefore gives no public key, whereas One x Two gives the FFFF...4140 number above (n-1) which is the highest valid private key and does generate a public key.

Any number higher than n-1 is a non-valid private key. It is possible to generate such a key, but I never said it would be possible to use such a key. Some pieces of software will calculate the private key modulo n though, and so turn a non-valid private key in to a valid one. You can try this on the gobittest page by using the private keys
and

The private key generated from One + Two wraps back around and gives the private key "1".

First off, multiplying two private keys together is not elliptic curve multiplication. The gobittest vanity page literally just does arithmetic multiplication of two hexadecimal numbers.

Second, it is entirely possible to generate a non-valid private key. The uncompressed private key you have generated is:
This number is called n, and is known as the order of the base point G. This is the number of times you can add the base point G to itself. Therefore, the total number of valid private keys in bitcoin is n-1. Any number of n or greater is an invalid private key.

Download Electrum from this site only: https://electrum.org/#download

Important! Verify your download by following the instructions for your OS here: https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/. This is to ensure the Electrum file you have downloaded is authentic and has not been tampered with. There are a number of fake/malware versions being spread.

Install and launch Electrum.

Create a new wallet, select "Standard wallet", select "I already have a seed", enter your seed phrase, and then set a password for your wallet. Done.

Based on OP's older threads, it doesn't look like he checked the BIP39 box when restoring his wallets before, which means his seed phrase is an Electrum generated phrase rather than a BIP39 phrase. Electrum phrases automatically restore to either Legacy or SegWit, and so the wrong derivation path wouldn't be the case here.

On the chance that it is a BIP39 phrase, you can always hit the new "Detect existing accounts" button on Electrum when restoring the seed phrase to automatically find any used standard derivation paths.

There are more ways to transfer fiat anonymously to a third party so you can buy bitcoin from them. Cash can be sent through the mail, or can be dropped off at an agreed location. Some countries allow you to walk in to a bank and deposit cash to someone else's account. Some countries all you to send money orders anonymously to other people. Good peer to peer exchanges such as Bisq support all of these methods.

It's a function that is used if you are requesting payment in bitcoin which is calculated as a fiat price.

For example, you buy something from my webstore which costs $100, but you want to pay in bitcoin. At current prices, that would be somewhere in the region of 0.005658 BTC. I generate a request which I will send you to pay 0.005658 BTC to my address. However, if the price of bitcoin changes markedly, then I want you to change what you would pay, so I still receive the equivalent of $100. So I put an expiry time on the request I generate and send you. If you do not make a payment before the request expires, it flags up in my wallet, so I know that the price may need adjusted.

None of that actually prevents you from making the payment after the request has expired though, and I will always receive any payment you make to my address. It is simply an internal function of Electrum which will display the request as expired. It makes no difference whatsoever at a protocol level.

Then I'm afraid your coins have been stolen and are irretrievable. You need to uninstall that version of Electrum immediately, and for safety I would always suggest doing a clean install of your OS after downloading malware on to your device.

You should only ever download Electrum from the following site: https://electrum.org/#download
More importantly, you should always verify the signature of the file you download before you run it to ensure it is the real copy and not malware, as it was in your case.

https://bitzuma.com/posts/how-to-verify-an-electrum-download-on-windows/
https://bitzuma.com/posts/how-to-verify-an-electrum-download-on-mac/
https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/

It looks like a phishing attack. Please answer each of the following:

What version of Electrum are you using?
Where did you download it from?
Did you get a pop-up inside Electrum telling you to follow link to download it?
Did you verify it?

The address your funds were sent to is bc1qjg4ax2h7gff0wszjq0jzmv2gwzgtfluzrelf59. This address has previously been implicated in the fake Electrum malware attack.

Here is a thread where the OP had funds stolen to this address: Target of transaction unknown. Possibly Phishing attack?
Here is a scam alert with the same address being linked to the Electrum malware: https://scam-alert.io/scam/bc1qjg4ax2h7gff0wszjq0jzmv2gwzgtfluzrelf59

Explains why I never saw it. It should categorically be across the top of their website as well, not some rip-off lending rubbish.

Maybe, but it runs in to all the same problems we have been discussing in this thread - how to get your hands on one without leaving your name and personal details in a database somewhere? I couldn't see anything on their website about official third party retailers you can buy from in person with cash?

So full add on support for Android Firefox is in the pipeline. However, you can use any add on you like right now on Android with a bit of a workaround.

First of all, you need to download Firefox Nightly, which is essentially the alpha developer version.
Direct link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/channel/desktop/
Google Play link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix

You then need to go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/, click "Log in to view your collections", create an account, and then create a new collection with a unique name. Search for all the add ons you want to use, and add them to your collection, BPIP included. Make a note of the unique name you gave the collection, and the 8 digit number in the URL.

Open your Firefox Nightly app, go to settings, scroll to the bottom and select "About Firefox Nightly", and tap the Firefox logo five times until you get a pop up saying "Debug menu enabled".
Go back to settings, scroll down to "Advanced" and select "Custom Add-on Collection".
Enter the 8 digit number from above in the "Collection owner (User ID)" field, and the name you gave your collection in the "Collection Name" field, and hit OK.
The app will apply the changes and then shut down.
Relaunch the app, go to add ons, and you will see all the add ons from your collection listed. Tap the plus sign next to each one to install.

I can confirm that the BPIP extension works just fine using the above steps.

Where did you see that banner? When I visit their website, the only banner I see is an advertisement for their new stablecoin lending service which is being integrated with Ledger Live.

Honestly, I think I'm done with Ledger at this point. Should we maybe work on securing out databases against hacks? Should we maybe work on finally allowing proper coin control or address management for bitcoin? Nah, let's first launch a shitcoin exchange service with ridiculous fees, and then launch a shitcoin lending service (with I'm sure more ridiculous fees). I haven't used Ledger Live with my Ledger devices in a long time, but it seems Ledger as a company are going the same way Brave did - start off with a good product and great intentions, and gradually pay less and less attention to what is important to their customers and more and more attention to whatever makes them the most profit. Such a shame.

I'm still hoping someone can recommend a secure and easy to use storage solution which we can recommend to newbies in lieu of hardware wallets. Software wallets are not secure enough, and airgapped wallets are not newbie friendly enough.

They simply use the fact that all the inputs are spent in the same transaction. And although the transaction looks like a consolidation transaction, it could equally be a sweep transaction where an attacker just clears everything in the wallet to their own address in one transaction.

Not necessarily. Often hacked funds sit dormant for some time until people forget about them and stop watching the address. As above, if the output address is not highlighted, then it is not part of your wallet, and the likelihood is that either your device has malware or your seed phrase was compromised.