I wouldn't call it a seed phrase though, in that it is not used to create a seed number for a HD wallet. You can convert any data you like in to a series of words from the BIP39 word list by converting it to binary and splitting in to 11 bit chunks. It is simply encoding the private key in different way.

MyMonero is not compatible with hardware wallets, as far as I am aware. For a desktop wallet you can use with a hardware wallet, you'll need to use the official Monero GUI wallet: https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/#windows

MoneroJu supports Ledger devices.

Ledger frequently email out discount codes to previous customers to share with their friends, usually in the region of around 10-20%. You can usually find people handing out spare codes on the Ledger subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/.

Alternatively, if you can wait a couple of months, the last two years Ledger have had a Black Friday sale. Last year it was 30% off, the year before that 50% off.

Is this showing up as "Pending" in the "History" tab on Electrum? If so, most likely it is just that the fee is too low.

If you go to the transaction, right click on it, and click on "View Transaction". Copy the "Transaction ID" from the top box and paste it in to this website: https://blockchair.com/

Does the transaction show up? If it does, what is the fee per vbyte?

I think you mean BIP39, not BIP44.

BIP39 describes a method for generating and using mnemonic phrases to create wallets known as "hierarchical deterministic wallets".
BIP44 describes the standard derivation path used in such wallets for legacy addresses, which is m/44'/0'/0'/0/0 for the first non-change address of the first account.

Despite Electrum not conforming to the BIP39 standard, it does conform to the BIP44 standard, and uses these standard derivation paths with its own seed phrases.

If a coin is not vulnerable to a 51% attack lasting 12 hours, then how can it be vulnerable to a 51% attack lasting months?

So you agree that coins which have to rely on checkpoints are seriously compromised. So why do we need them?

So what number do you pick then? Either you pick a large number, in which case your checkpoints are pointless, or you choose a small number, in which case the chain with the most PoW may not always win if there is a chain split or reorganization.

Satoshi also used P2PK and allowed anyone to spend anyone else's coins using OP_TRUE OP_RETURN. He was not infallible.

And just like if you have to rely on a seatbelt to save your life, if you have to rely on a checkpoint to prevent a massive chain reorganization, then your car/coin is ruined and you need to find a new one.

The vast majority of software and hardware wallets will support seed phrases.

Of these, the vast majority will use the BIP39 standard. You can therefore use the same BIP39 seed phrase in all BIP39 supporting wallets.

Electrum is an outlier which uses its own seed phrase algorithms. You can import BIP39 seed phrases from elsewhere to Electrum, but you can't import Electrum seed phrases in to most other wallets.

The fee estimator on Electrum is actually one of the best out there, in that it gives you different options to choose from (estimated number of blocks to wait, or position in the mempool), and for each option you can still choose a priority from next block to 25 blocks or within 0.1 MB to within 10 MB. This is far superior to most websites/wallets/exchanges which simply give a "suggested fee" which is the same for everyone, or maybe a high/low priority fee.

The problem Electrum's fee estimator suffers from is a problem that all fee estimators suffer from - it cannot predict the future. The fee it suggested in this case was probably entirely appropriate, but it is impossible to predict that the next block will take 90 minutes to be found. Even a transaction with a fee of 40 sats/vbyte, putting it 0.01 MB from the tip, was over 3 MB deep by the time the next block came around.

Even if OP had used https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h to choose a fee instead as you suggest (and I would usually agree) it wouldn't have made a difference in this case.

Huobi, the same exchange which uses clients funds to invest in high risk products for their own profit, passing all of the risk and none of the profit on to their customers? Huobi, the same exchange which were found to be running a fractional reserve system? Huobi, the same exchange which did all this without telling their users and then lied about it?

They want you to store your funds with them for the exact same reason a bank does - so they can invest and lend your funds out to make themselves profit. The difference here being that your funds aren't insured like they would be in a fiat bank. If Huobi make a bad investment decision, or a borrower doesn't pay up, then say goodbye to your coins.

You need to use Ledger Live to update the firmware on your device, and also to install and uninstall different coin apps. In terms of actually sending and receiving funds, you don't have to use Ledger Live at all (and in fact, I would recommend not using it since it is a privacy risk and has inferior functionality to other wallets). Ledger devices can be used with a variety of bitcoin wallets such as Electrum as discussed above, and also can be used with Monero's GUI wallet.

This is not a difficult or time consuming thing to do. In a good wallet you can generate that many addresses with a single command, and then a couple more commands to generate a few pay to many transactions to distribute 1 BTC to each address. Doable in 5 minutes.

A good mixer, like a good VPN, should not keep logs and so be unable to give any useful information to the authorities. If your mixer is handing over your transaction details to the authorities, then I would suggest that you find a new mixer.

Hence my statement, "provably lost".

However, given that the space of valid private keys is slightly less than 2²⁵⁶, and the range of valid addresses is "only" 2¹⁶⁰, then it is highly probable that there exists a private key which could spend coins on that address. It is also incredibly improbable that such a private key would ever be discovered.

Although these coins are not provably lost in the same way that unclaimed block rewards or OP_RETURN coins are provably lost, you can probably safely assume they will never be spent. Such coins are in the minority though - a few thousand at most - compared to the potentially millions of coins which could become active again if elliptic curve multiplication is broken.

"Forever" is a long time. At some point in the future (maybe in few decades, maybe in a few centuries), quantum computing will effectively "break" elliptic curve multiplication. At this point, any "lost coins" held in an address with a known public key become hackable and therefore can re-enter circulation. This will include all very early coins stored on "Pay to Pubkey" addresses prior to the implementation of "Pay to Pubkey Hash". It will also include any inactive coins stored on addresses which have made an outgoing transaction, as the public key is revealed when a transaction is made. (Presumably at some point before that happens we will fork to quantum resistant addresses, and all coins in active use will be moved to these addresses, but a lot of old inactive coins could suddenly become active again).

Because of this, it is premature to call any coins "lost" unless they have been provably lost.

It gained no traction because it was more-or-less pointless.

Withdrawing all your coins from an exchange for one day, and then depositing them back the next day and thinking that that somehow makes them "safer" for the next 364 days is meaningless.

Only if you got a significant proportion of users (>50%) to engage in it would it be able to reveal exchanges which were insolvent or faking volumes, and that was never going to happen. If you can't get through to a newbie why leaving their coins on an exchange permanently is a terrible idea, then there is no way you are going to be able to convince them to take part in "proof of keys".

And as you say, even although some exchanges did delay or freeze withdrawals in the lead up to it, it made not a blind bit of difference to those exchanges. Instead of everyone saying "Hey, this exchange is probably insolvent" (Quadriga) like they should have done, they all just kept on using it and lost a combined millions of dollars worth of bitcoin a few months later.

Much better to just teach everyone to take their coins off the damned exchange.

Theoretically, if the block included a single P2WSH transaction with an enormous script which took up the entirety of the block with witness data, then you could get within a few hundred bytes of the 4 MB limit (but not actually hit the 4 MB limit). In reality though, a block which is filled with SegWit transactions would be somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 MB.

OP, have a look at the last graph here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h

Judging by the timing of your post and you waiting 3 hours, you presumably made the transaction somewhere around 12.30 UTC. Electrum gave you a fee to be confirmed within 2 blocks. A couple of things then happened:

First of all, there was a 27 minute block time, followed immediately by a 90 minute block time (between blocks 649370 and 649371).
Secondly, Bitmex dumped 4 MB of transactions in to the mempool at 13.00 UTC.

The fee Electrum gave you for a 2 block confirmation would have been accurate, provided the next two blocks were found in the average time of 10 minutes. It is impossible to predict that a 90 minute block time would hit, which led to the mempool filling up greatly and your transaction being pushed way lower.

This is not Electrum's fault - this is simply bad luck.

Slight correction: There exists an unfixable vulnerability with Trezor devices which allows an attacker with physical access to the device to extract the seed phrase. If you are using a Trezor device, you must use a long an complex passphrase (or ideally, multiple passphrases) to protect against this.

Even if you are using an online wallet which allows you to extract your private keys or seed phrase, you have no way of knowing that you are the only person who can extract your private keys or seed phrase. The provider could very well have given you pre-generated keys/seeds which they have stored somewhere else, or they can access your account and view them, or their encryption method is poor so they can be intercepted when being transferred, and so on.

All web wallets are a bad idea.

I still do not understand why people put up with this. They use a centralized exchange and say "Oh well, KYC is the price I have to pay". Then the exchange gets hacked and leaks personal information and they say "Oh well, if my info has already been compromised, then I might as well just keep using the exchange". Then the exchange starts locking accounts and they say "Well, they haven't locked my account yet so I'll just keep using them". And then the exchange starts dictating how they can spend their coins, or selling their data, or working with governments, and they come up with some other excuse.

When does it end? What does an exchange actually have to do for 99% of crypto users to say "Enough is enough"? How much control over their bitcoin and their lives will they let the exchange take before they look elsewhere?

Then it is pointless. A 51% attack which can reverse 129 blocks is more than enough for an attacker to double spend huge amounts multiple times, as well as causing 29 block rewards and their subsequent transactions to become invalidated. Such an attack would be catastrophic for bitcoin regardless of checkpoints. The security comes from the hashrate making such an attack near impossible, not from unnecessary checkpoints.

If your coin is so insecure it has to rely on hardcoded checkpoints to prevent an attacker reversing a full day of blocks, then it has failed in being decentralized.

These attacks weren't prevented by data obtained via mass surveillance, but rather by focused and targeted monitoring of suspect individuals. In fact, the two attacks mentioned in the first paragraph - the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber - were prevented by the other passengers on the plane, not via intelligence data at all.

I am not saying the government shouldn't watch certain individuals. If someone is a member of ISIS, by all means keep them under surveillance. What I am firmly against is blanket mass surveillance of the entire population.

If you downloaded from electrum.org, then you probably have nothing to worry about. Electrum often flags up as a false positive in various anti-virus programs.

For example:

The above text also appears at the bottom of the download page: https://electrum.org/#download

Other users have also had the exact same "Coinminer Activity" notification with Norton and Electrum. See this thread for example: Norton Security alert on Electrum node.ispol.sk