The problem with putting the device in any air tight container is that the humidity inside that container will be the same as the ambient humidity when you seal it. If the temperature then drops (such as over night), then the moisture in the air will condense out and form droplets as you say, even inside the container. You need a method to remove the moisture from the air inside the container once it has been sealed. The easiest way to do this is to throw in a dessicant, such as the silica gel packets that you sometimes see packaged with electronics.

I rate Brave browser pretty poorly at the best of times. Their claims of being the best browser for privacy and security are way overblown - they require KYC, they whitelist Facebook and Twitter trackers, they still serve you targeted ads, they let third parties embed code in to their browser, they hide referral links in their browser, etc., all in the name of profit. On top of that, as I said above, every browser on iOS is really just Safari with a different paint job. There isn't really a good way to browse securely and privately on Apple devices. You can stay secure but have no privacy using iOS, or increase your privacy at risk of security by jail breaking, as NotATether has explained.

The least worst option for iOS is either Firefox or Onion browser.

For reference, with a 12 word seed phrase and a word list of 2048 words, there is a 1 in 31 chance of two words being the same. For a 24 word seed phrase, there is a 1 in 8 chance.

Given that OP is currently using Electrum, there is no need for him to download it again from electrum.org. He can simply follow jack's instructions - open Electrum, enter a new wallet name, and select "I already have a seed".

Stop using iOS is the best solution, either by getting a different device or jail breaking your phone. You can never really be private using iOS, you cannot install the add ons you want (because Apple won't let you), and you can't even use the browser you want. Every browser on iOS is really just a re-skinned Safari, because Apple won't allow anything else.

Having said that Chrome will always be the worst possible choice.

Firefox is one of the least bad choices on iOS, and does have some built in privacy features to make up for the fact you cannot install add ons: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-ios. There's also Onion browser: https://onionbrowser.com/

A watch only wallet is a wallet which does as it says - it simply watches the address, but is unable to sign any transactions or spend any coin. It is highly unlikely the wallet simply "changed" on its own. It is more likely you have accidentally opened the incorrect wallet file.

Yeah, a watch only wallet is unable to sign transactions, so your transaction will never be broadcast.

Your PIN? Do you mean your wallet password?

It is entirely possible to have two identical words in a seed phrase. If the seed phrase was generated by Electrum then it is unlikely to be compatible with any other external wallet - Electrum uses their own method for creating and restoring seed phrases. You'll need to restore it to a new Electrum wallet.

You seem to have confused the development of bitcoin with the price of bitcoin. Bitcoin is absolutely moving forward - regular new core releases, Lightning in development, Taproot and Schnorr on the horizon, etc.

Is my 1 bitcoin still worth 1 bitcoin, though? If bitcoin suddenly went on sale at $5,000 again, I'd definitely be happy to be able to buy more at such a discount.

10 years ago gold was $1,800. Now it is $1,900. Can't have the ups without the downs. If you want something that barely beats inflation, then sure, go for gold.

The only issue with this is if you end up looking up one address which received coins ten minutes ago, and 20 addresses which have been dormant for months or years, then it remains entirely obvious which address you are actually interested in.

How difficult would it be to filter for addresses which have been used within the last couple of weeks and only use a subset of them for the 20 random addresses?

Again, we need to make a distinction here between megabytes and virtual megabytes. A block will be 1 megabyte in virtual size, but can be up to 4 megabytes in physical size.

If you use Jochen Hoenicke's graph, for example, then each block will take a maximum of 1 megabyte of transactions off the graph since the transaction sizes are displayed in virtual bytes.

On the other hand, if you use a site like https://mempool.space, blocks are displayed with their physical size, which is almost always greater than 1 megabyte unless the mempool is empty.

And yet, it will happen eventually. Mining oil was too expensive once. Solar panels were too expensive once. Launching satellites was too expensive once. Once elements such as gold, silver, platinum, copper, start running out on Earth, asteroid mining won't be too expensive any more (not to mention the advances in technology). A amount of materials that can be mined from a single small asteroid are estimated to be worth $20 trillion

We all heard the same story for the 5 months of this year, how bitcoin was going to die after the halving. And yet here we are, with the highest hashrate ever.

If you look at the tweet that the article references, it tells a somewhat different story: https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1313798073995325440

Yes, there was a slight decrease in the amount of bitcoin held on exchanges during the last bull run, but the price had been steadily climbing before that happened, and continued to steadily climb after the number of bitcoin on exchanges started increasing again. The number of bitcoin on exchanges also decreased during the bear market at the start of 2019, and again during the bear market at the start of this year. It's a big stretch to infer that fewer bitcoin on exchanges is directly related to the price, let alone price increases.

Secondly, the number of bitcoin currently on exchanges is more than double (more than triple if you look at the next tweet) than it was 2 years ago.

If you are not in a hurry, select "Static" and set it to the minimum - 1 sat/vbyte - to pay the smallest possible fee and save the most money.

If you are in a hurry, select "ETA" and choose how quickly you would like Electrum to aim for a confirmation, bearing in mind that at any time someone could drop a few megabytes of transactions in to the mempool, or there could be an hour long block time which pushes your transaction down the priority order.

I might be missing something obvious here, but how does SHA256 being compromised instantly compromise bitcoin?

In isolation, it does not make knowing an address dangerous. You still can't reverse it to a public key, because there is also a RIPEMD160 function in the way, and even if you could, you still can't reverse a public key to a private key, as there is an elliptic curve multiplication in the way.

In terms of mining, even if it is broken in such a way which makes finding a suitable hash for a block very fast, then that still doesn't allow anyone to steal anyone else's coins. It allows whomever is using the exploit to take a bunch of the block reward for themselves, the devs would push a hard fork to a different PoW algorithm, and potentially rollback the chain to when the exploit was first used. It's not going to take a year when it is a critical bug like this - the value overflow bug was fixed and rollbacked via a fork within a few hours.

Once you've paid the upfront cost to buy and set up the miners, they only become obsolete when the electricity cost outweighs the bitcoin income they generate. Given that a lot of farms generate their own renewable energy, which essentially costs nothing (again, after the initial set up cost), then these miners will continue to run until they fail and are no longer economical to repair.

I never said anything about bitcoin reaching $100k quickly. It's got decades to reach that level.

And yet, hashrate continues to hit new all time highs every week.

In a decade the block reward will be 1.5625 BTC. Given what I said above, that just last year miners were quite happy to mine with a block reward of $37,500, we only need bitcoin to be $24,000 for the block reward in a decade to be higher then it was back then, and that's not even counting the profit from fees which will be 8x higher at $24k than they were at $3k. I don't think $24,000 in 10 years is at all unrealistic.

Ahh, that's interesting. I've never had an incoming transaction be replaced on Electrum before, so I wasn't aware the client did that.

A quick search of the GitHub reveals this: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5473

The explanation from SomberNight (one of the Electrum devs) is that your client received the transaction from the server it was connected to, saved it, and when the server dropped the transaction (because it was replaced in your case), it then shows up as "local" in your client.

He also confirms what I've said above though - you can simply delete it.

Usually on Electrum "Local" means transactions which you have created and saved, but have not yet been broadcast. It would seem in your case you did broadcast it, but it was later dropped, and so returns as "Local" to give you the option of broadcasting it again if you wanted (although obviously you can't if you've since spent those inputs). Electrum wallets always include local transactions when updating their balances. If you no longer need that transaction to be saved, then you can safely delete it and your wallet balance will return to normal.

My only real criticism is the graph is not particularly clear. The cut off lines between the fee rates need to be more visible, and it would be better to use different colors for different fee bands like on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h to make it easier to read. It would also be nice to still display the 1 Block cut off line at the bottom even when it is predicted that all the current unconfirmed transactions would be included in the next block.

I'd also include the line you have written above about the transaction size not being entirely accurate, particularly for P2SH/P2WSH addresses given the script size can be much larger than the size you use in your calculations.

Other than that, great work!

A quantum computer will not be able to bruteforce SHA256 collisions.

At best, a quantum computer can provide a quadratic speed up in this case, reducing the security of a SHA function from 2^x to 2^sqrt(x). So SHA256 would still require in the order of 2¹²⁸ operations, rather than 2²⁵⁶. 2¹²⁸ operations is still far too large for any current computer, and definitely far too large for the tiny quantum computers we have at the moment.

It is ECC which is vulnerable to quantum computers, not SHA, and would require bitcoin to transition to a quantum resistant signature scheme.

Miners are currently receiving about 6.25 BTC in block reward, which works out to around $65-70,000 at current prices. During the dip down to $3k last year, they were receiving 12.5 BTC, which was around half that at $37,500 per block. According to https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/fee_to_reward-btc-sma7.html#6m, for the last few months the money miners have received from fees is about 10% of the block reward, so around 0.6 BTC per block on average.

If everything else stays the same and the price of bitcoin hits $100,000 (which is certainly not impossible), then the reward from fees alone per block will be $60,000. Over time, this is likely to be higher for a couple of reasons - increasing SegWit adoption means more transactions and therefore more fees per block, and I suspect long term that fees will be higher as the majority of transactions will be on and off ramps to second layer solutions such as Lightning Network. I've got no real issue spending a couple of bucks on the fee for a transaction rather than a couple of cents, if that transaction opens a channel which I can use for months for essentially zero fee.

None of this is going to happen suddenly - we have over 100 years before the block reward disappears - so I'm sure miners will be able to adapt to the changing conditions without too much issue. There was a lot of concern that the last halving was going to kill the hashrate and lead to 51% attacks. Instead we saw a modest drop of less than 20% which lasted only a month, and have been hitting new peaks since.

Depends on what you mean by "safe". It's certainly safer, but it isn't 100% safe, because nothing is. Ideally you should never use a public WiFi. If you must use one, then a good VPN is a must and even then I would only use it for casual browsing and I would never log in to any accounts or enter any personal details in to any websites.

A VPN only protects you from the WiFi owner or another user connected to the hotspot from viewing your otherwise unencrypted internet traffic. It won't protect you from people trying to inject malware in to your device, or bugs or vulnerabilities in your OS or browser, or your phone or computer broadcasting other services (such as file sharing) to the local network, and so on. And you also have to have complete trust in your VPN provider, not just that they aren't monitoring your traffic, but that their encryption algorithms and software are doing what they claim.

Yeah, so after a poke around multiple different block explorers, I can't find any which still have the details of those old replaced transactions. Seems if you want to keep a record of these, you'll have to run your own node and specifically record them.