I agree with HCP, but also the old saying about learning to walk before you learn to run.

There is no denying that self custody of your bitcoin is a big step for many people, and will be more "technical" than anything they have ever done before. They already have enough to learn from scratch, from seed phrases, inputs, outputs, transactions, fees and how to calculate them, the mempool, coin control, and so on, without even touching on the technology underlying bitcoin and blockchain if they so choose. It's probably wise to keep things as simple as possible for newbies without throwing Lightning channels, HTLCs, watchtowers, etc. in to the mix as well.

Let them understand and use layer 1 first before you introduce them to layer 2.

"Finalize" essentially tells Electrum you are happy with the inputs, the outputs, their respective amounts, and the fee you have selected, and to "finalize" the transaction to stop it being edited any more. The transaction is saved locally as an unsigned transaction, but cannot be broadcast yet because it is yet to be signed.

"Sign" tells Electrum to use the private keys for the input address (provided you have them) to sign the transaction. If the private keys are on a hardware wallet you will need to connect it, and if the wallet file is password protected you will need to enter the password.

"Broadcast" is the final step, and tells Electrum to send your final and signed transaction out to the network. Once it has been broadcast, then it will be added to the mempool for the potential to be mined.

So in your case, now the transaction is finalized, you must sign it (and enter any password you have set up when prompted), at which point the "Broadcast" button will be enabled and you can broadcast it to the network.

It is instant. If it doesn't show up, then you have only created the transaction, but you have not yet broadcast it to the network.

This is fine. This just means you are spending from a non-change address.

This is also fine.

Open up the transaction and look for the "Finalize" button at the bottom left. Once the transaction has been finalized, it will generate a TXID. You can then use the new "Sign" and "Broadcast" buttons at the bottom right to, well, sign and then broadcast the transaction.

It depends massively on which thirty characters you have chosen. Something like 11111.... or abcdef.... could be brute forced very quickly. If your passphrase is the first name of all your immediate familiar members concatenated together, or something else which could potentially be guessed (or least, guessed enough to massively reduce the search space), then that is also potentially brute forcable. If, on the other hand, your passphrase is 30 random characters and looks something like 9&!hC)zR$x[.... then it will effectively never be brute forced.

As above, the seed phrase can be extracted from Trezor devices by a knowledgeable attacker with physical access to the device. After they have the seed phrase, they no longer need the Trezor device and certainly do not have to use it to try to brute force the passphrase and be subjected to its timeouts. They can set up a piece of software on any computer (or even, across multiple computers they own or even rent cloud computing) to start brute forcing various passphrases and looking for funds.

That is correct. "Cancel" is a bit of misnomer - there is no way to broadcast to the network that you wish a just transaction to be cancelled. The only way to effectively cancel a transaction is to render it invalid by spending at least one of the inputs which it spends. That is what this button does - it creates a new transaction which uses the same input(s) to the transaction you are "cancelling", and simply sends them back to yourself. It does this with a higher fee than the transaction you are replacing, so this second transaction is mined first and the first transaction becomes invalid.

Judging transactions by how much they are worth in fiat is misleading at best, and just plain incorrect at worst. A $20 transaction could be enormous if it spends 50 dust inputs, whereas a $435 transaction (or indeed, a $1,000,000 transaction) could be far smaller if it spends a single input, and that is without even considering number of outputs or differences between address types. It is also impossible for people to understand or compare if things are costly or not. If you say you had to spend $10 on a transaction, and I don't know if the transaction was 200 bytes or 200,000 bytes, I have no idea what kind of fee rate you paid or how quickly that transaction might confirm. Much better to talk about fees in terms of sats/vbyte.

I'm also not sure what you mean about making the option more visible. Even without Advanced Preview turned on, when you go to make a payment in Electrum you get an entire pop up box dedicated to selecting the fee with a slider and a drop down menu, which will tell you the fee rate, the total fee in BTC, and the total fee in USD (or your selected fiat currency). I'm not sure what else they could do.

I, obviously, would like more people to actually use bitcoin for what it was intended - a currency - rather than just buying some on an exchange, holding it there, and waiting for the price "to moon" (God, I hate that phrase). Having said that, as much as I encourage people to learn about bitcoin, to hold their own bitcoin, to use and spend bitcoin, I am never going to seek to limit or prevent people who are only here to speculate. Such is the beauty of bitcoin - you can use it how you want to.

However, I draw the line at when people like this want to force me to use bitcoin how they want me to. "Regulation is good for bitcoin!" Is it though? Or is it good for people who want to buy, hold, and sell, on a single platform for the sole reason of increasing the amount of fiat they have, without ever actually using, spending, or even understanding bitcoin.

LUKS for Linux and VeraCrypt if you are using non-Linux OS are my go to programs.

Just because something has been safe so far, doesn't mean it is a good way of storing your seed phrase. There is a reason that every serious bitcoin user, every good wallet, every bitcoin site, tells you to write down your seed on paper and never store it online.

The whole point of a back up is to store it separately from your main wallet so that a theft or disaster won't affect both equally.

You are placing complete trust in a data mining company who have had their servers hacked countless times and have had terrible security lapses, including storing passwords in plain text.

Security by obscurity is not a good choice.

There is actually an easier way, if you don't know which derivation path your account is under.

With the newest versions of Electrum, once you enter your seed phrase and select the "BIP39" box, on the next screen there is a button titled "Detect Existing Accounts". If you press it, Electrum will automatically search a variety of derivation paths, including the three standard 44/49/84 paths. You can see the full list of derivation paths searched here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/bip39_wallet_formats.json

If it detects an active account, it will automatically search for the next account up at that derivation path, and continue until it finds an inactive account. Once it has found them all, it will display a list of them for you and you can choose which ones you want to restore.

But I also concur with the posters above - if you have restored your seed phrase from your Ledger to Electrum, then there is no point using the Ledger for that seed phrase anymore, as it has been exposed to the internet. Reset your Ledger, create a new seed phrase, and move all your coins to your new wallet(s).

So the amount of bitcoin which you spend in a transaction is largely irrelevant to the fee. What determines the fee is how much space the transaction takes up in terms of bytes. The space a transaction takes up is largely dependent on the number of different inputs and outputs in that transaction.

For example, let's say you have the following bills in your wallet: $20, $10, $5. If you want to give me $20, then you only need one input ($20) and one output ($20 to me). If you then want to give someone else $13, then you need two inputs ($10 and $5) and you need two outputs ($13 to them, and $2 back to yourself as change). The second transaction, although for less money, will be larger than the first in terms of bytes, and therefore require a larger fee.

Here's a good resource for more information: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/outputs

Glad you got it fixed so easily. As a nice side effect of this issue, you now have a spare Trezor to use as a backup in case your primary one ever does actually break, which will be particularly useful since you use it as a password manager and 2FA key as well.

Both Ledger and Trezor overprice their cables anyway. $7 for a single cable from Trezor, and $20 for a pack of three from Ledger. You can get these cables for $2-3 at Walmart, Amazon, etc. As you've discovered, there is nothing special about the cable - any data USB cable with the right connections will work.

A 12 word seed phrase has 128 bits of entropy. The final 4 bits are a checksum.

1 million years is an understatement. Even if you could try 1 trillion combinations every second, it would still take over 5 billion billion years to try 50% of the possibilities.

It's actually the square root as secure as a 24 word seed. (2²⁵⁶)/2 is equal to 2²⁵⁵. (2¹²⁸)*2 is equal to 2¹²⁹. It is 2¹²⁸ * 2¹²⁸ which is equal to 2²⁵⁶.

Ghostery is spyware. Their privacy policy allows them to track every website you visit and every search query you enter, track your fingerprint and IP, and put all that together to serve you targeted ads. It literally sells your info to advertisers. It makes privacy worse, not better. Avoid it.

If you just want to disable WebRTC altogether (which you should), then you can do that easily from about:config in Firefox. You don't need an extension for that. The extension just provides an easy way to toggle it on and off.

The set up guide I linked to above includes the steps required to verify the device is genuine, verify it hasn't been tampered with, and how to initialize it and set up your seed phrase. This page in particular (https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000613793-Set-up-as-new-device) tells users that the device is not safe to use if it immediately asks for a PIN, and never to use a device which is provided with an already set up seed phrase.

As long as OP follows the set up guide closely and doesn't skip any steps, they will be fine.

Or, in the case of the US, our taxes fund bombing civilians and buying lambos for health insurance middlemen.

What websites are you visiting? I cant remember the last time I used a website which wanted to know more than an email address (which of course would have been a disposable email).

All the more reason to fight back and challenge opinions which think government oversight of bitcoin is a good thing.

It's pretty good. The disposable CDs for updates is a nice idea. My airgapped device does not have a CD drive, so I use a USB drive with a hardware write protection switch on the outside, and I format it after each use just to be extra sure. I also transfer transactions back and forth using QR codes and cameras (which I unplug when I am not actively using them).

Provided you aren't leaking information in other ways, such as via your OS or your Tor session. It's best to use a dedicated session to broadcast your transaction and nothing else. Again, unless you are the target of a three letter agency who could potentially monitor your entry and exit nodes, this is probably the best balance of privacy and ease of use.

No problem, happy to help.

Ledger have pretty comprehensive set up instructions and user guides on their website, which is a great place to start when your device arrives. Link: https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000380313. Start there and simply work down the pages in the menu bar to the left. It will talk you through initializing the wallet, updating the firmware, creating a back up, and setting up your accounts and addresses. (That link is for the Nano S, but you can select the Nano X instructions from the sidebar if that is the device you bought).

This forum also has a dedicated Hardware Wallet board here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=261.0. You might find answers to any questions there, and it's probably the best place to ask any questions you can't find answers for.

Most important thing is just to take your time tomorrow, and if you are ever unsure, make a small test transaction first before moving the bulk of your coins.

All bitcoin transactions require a transaction fee to be paid. This fee is picked up by the miners who mine your transaction and add it the blockchain. When withdrawing from the Coinbase exchange, Coinbase cover the fee so you don't see it being paid, but from any other wallet you will be charged a transaction fee.

The default display unit in Electrum is mBTC, or milli-bitcoin. 0.28616 mBTC is equal to 0.00028616 BTC, which is indeed equal to $4. You can change the display unit by going to Tools -> Preferences -> Base unit.

Fees are quite expensive at the moment, so making unnecessary transactions probably isn't a great idea. Might as well just wait for your Ledger to arrive and then transfer from all the separate wallets to the Ledger.

Yes, absolutely.

I would recommend using whole disk encryption on your airgapped computer.

No, provided the seed phrase was created securely and you don't expose the seed phrase or private keys via any other means. The risk of leaking information from a permanently airgapped device is very small, and would likely require that you be a target of a three letter agency somewhere. As long as the airgapped software you are using can still sign transactions created by whatever software you are using for your watch only wallet, then there is no need to ever update it. I probably still would every so often though (by transferring the update on removable media - not by going online!)

Possibly, but if you use whole disk encryption using good open source software (LUKS or VeraCrypt, for example), then you would be largely protected against a physical attack by someone with some sort of backdoor in to the hardware.

Bitcoin.