Two suggestions OP.

First of all, try filling in the rest of the fields (specifically the address field) and seeing if the "available" box changes. I've seen some wallets in the past which won't update fees properly until you put in an address, since different output addresses can result in different transaction sizes.

Second, check that all incoming transactions are confirmed. The mempool is pretty backed up at the moment, so perhaps you have a transaction or two which are still unconfirmed and not available to be spent, which would explain the discrepancy.

You will receive the coin normally. The "expires" function does not expire your addresses or prevent people from sending coins to them.

Do you mean is the sender prevented from seeing the address after it expires? No. They can still see the address and scan the QR code, but they might receive a warning that the request has expired depending on which wallet they are using.

Electrum documentation is here: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/
The "expires" function is described in BIP70: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawiki

I've not used LocalBitcoins in years since they started asking for KYC, but who is still using them? What niche are they filling? From what I can tell they are incorporating all the negatives of centralized exchanges - centralized control, KYC, keeping their users under surveillance, and now performing blockchain analysis to control how their users spend their own money - with all the negatives of decentralized exchanges - manually having to generate and accept trades, finding reputable traders, long fiat transfer times.

If you are fine using a centralized exchange and completing KYC, then use one which will complete your trade instantly. If you aren't fine with that, then use a DEX to avoid KYC. Why take the worst of both worlds? Am I totally missing something here?

An interesting read. I don't agree with your conclusion that an individual needs $91 million to move the price by >1% though. At any given time there are thousands of bitcoin locked up in various bots and orders. As we've seen in the past, a relatively small move is enough to start off a chain reaction of orders being filled, positions being opened and closed, and bots trading, which can result in very sudden price movements. You still need a significant initial amount, and the right conditions, but you certainly don't need the entire $91 million yourself.

It does highlight the folly of trading low market cap altcoins though. It doesn't take much to be able to wildly manipulate the prices of these coins.

Whale Alert on Twitter being temporarily shut down was great, but unfortunately they were re-instated. I'll always remember back in 2018 when Coinbase announced weeks in advance they were upgrading their cold storage, made several blog and Twitter posts about it, posted a running commentary of what they were doing, and Whale Alert and low value crypto "media" sites still manufactured a panic when some ~850,000 bitcoin were moved.

In addition to the suggestions above, if you are making a transaction with inputs which have not yet confirmed, then you need to pay a higher fee to cover both transactions.

In the transaction you posted above, you had a size of 371 vbytes with a fee of 40,000 sats, for a rate of 107.8 sats/vbyte. However, one of the inputs to that transaction was not yet confirmed. That transaction had a size of 226 vbytes with a fee of only 4,000 sats, for a rate of 17.7 sats/vbyte. Any miner that wanted to mine your high fee transaction would also have to mine your low fee transaction, and so both transactions can be considered as one for calculating fees. With a combined size of 597 vbytes and a combined fee of 44,000 sats, the combined fee rate worked out to 73.7 sats/vbyte.

So although the fee for your second transaction put you very close to the tip of the mempool, the combined fee put you a few megabytes away from the tip, which is why you had to wait for your transaction to be confirmed.

I can't find any more details about this, but to me this sounds like Coinbase (for example) will list all the addresses used by all their customers, and if another exchange detects a match with an address used by one of their customers, then the two exchanges share all the details of said customer with each other? Surely this can't be right?

This is an incredible invasion of privacy and an incredible security risk, and I'm going to assume there will be no way to opt out of it.

Not necessarily, and ideally this isn't the case.

Although it is possible to set up a single receiving address to receive payments to, it causes a number of issues. First of all, it greatly reduces your privacy, since every knows that address belongs to you and can see exactly how much money you have received on it. Secondly, it makes automating payments near impossible, since there is no way to reliably tell which customer made which payment without them manually sending you details of it, and even then, they could simply send details of someone else's transaction.

Almost all payment processors, merchants, exchanges, and so on, will generate at least a unique address for each customer, and ideally a unique address for each transaction.

Although I don't know of any service which doesn't show the full transaction, Blockchair highlights the address you are looking up so it is easy to see only the amount that address has received from any given transaction. Here's an example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/39dk7jM6HzQ8aYr8CwC4XSTNke8kXDJaQY. I would also suggest that a recipient would absolutely want to see how many confirmations a transaction has - such knowledge is vital to the safe running of any exchange, service, merchant, business, etc.

You would presumably have to identify in some way which outputs are going to which recipients, so if someone looks up the transaction the other outputs they are not interested in can be filtered out. There are huge privacy downsides to this. The easiest way, I would have thought, would be to have something like Blockchair above when looking up your own address, but instead of highlight your address it simply removes all other outputs.

Did you log in to the same account on each browser? The board descriptions is a setting which can be toggled on and off in your profile settings. It doesn't show up if you aren't logged in, and its default is setting is off, I believe.

Profile -> Look and Layout Preferences -> "Show board descriptions inside boards"

Since I've been tagged by OP I'll chime in, but I am not going to get sucked in to the back and forth drama.

---

In terms of the actual case:

There was a similar case a few weeks ago with bitcasino.io, where a user was not allowed to withdraw his winnings, and bitcasino.io stated that the user was using multiple accounts. They clearly spelt out their reasoning behind this statement in this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5260832.msg54754514#msg54754514. They also said something quite relevant to this case:


Given that Bitcasino.io and Sportsbet.io are owned by the same company, I see no reason why one arm would be willing to spell out how they came to a match, while the other says they cannot expose their methodology.

As far as I am concerned, although I do not believe Sportsbet.io are scammers in this situation based on the evidence presented so far, it does not paint them in a good light that they are unwilling to offer any proof for their side of the story.

---

In terms of LFC_Bitcoin:

I did not receive any PM, and I have not seen its contents, but from what I can surmise based on this thread, then I have no issue with it.

Given what theymos has said here, coupled with the fact that theymos himself sent out PMs asking other users to exclude a user from their trust lists, I see no issue with sending a PM asking other users to review a flag.

Have a read of this example on the Privacy page on the Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy#Example_-_A_perfectly_private_donation

This was certainly the case in the past when one could mine a block using their home computer or a couple of graphics cards. Now, even with a handful of ASICs, it would take you years on average to successfully solo mine a block. This option would only be viable for people with large enough mining farms that they could successfully solo mine within a reasonable time frame, which significant decreases their anonymity set.

That's where we disagree then. Changing IPs and even changing countries should not be seen as suspicious activity, as far as I am concerned. As I said above, if you use Tor your exit node can and will jump all over the world. Exchanges should not be punishing users for taking their privacy seriously.

If, as in your example, I logged in from Japan, made a deposit in Japanese Yen, traded it to bitcoin, and then the next day logged in from the UK, sold that bitcoin for Great British Pounds, and tried to withdraw it, then sure, that's an argument for suspecting money laundering and completing KYC. A simple IP change is not.

Can I suggest that if this proposed topic is meant to be a guide, a summary of the information, or to otherwise educate others, that you do not make it? If you do not have a firm grasp on the material yourself, trying to educate others on it only leads to incorrect information and more confusion. Much better to start a thread like this one asking questions so the correct information can be given.

That Stack Exchange answer was written by Pieter Wuille, one of the top Bitcoin Core developers. You can trust that it is accurate.

That formula is also saying the same thing that nc50lc has said above, just in a different way. It is taking the the non-witness data ("base_size"), multiplying it by 3, and adding it to the combined non-witness and witness data ("total_size"). This results in the non-witness data being counted 4 times in total, and the witness data being counted once, which gives you the weight of the transaction. Divide everything by 4 to get the virtual size in vbytes.

A couple of things I would add to your post.

I wouldn't call exchanges "wallets", but rather "accounts", since as you rightly point out, you have no control and no ownership over your coins or your keys.

I trade more-or-less exclusively directly from my hardware wallet by using decentralized and peer-to-peer exchanges. It takes a little bit of time to become familiar with, but I definitely wouldn't say you "can't really" do it.

Full nodes are more important than that. In fact, running your own node and validating transactions yourself is the only way to trustlessly use bitcoin. Every other lightweight wallet, SPV wallet, software wallet, mobile wallet, etc., is trusting someone else's full node to relay the correct information.

Why is this not necessary? You should absolutely be using the built in encryption mechanisms on your software wallets. It protects you from both physical access to your computer as well as malware.

Telegram and Discord are a scammer's paradise. It is trivially easy to impersonate someone else, including a service or an admin or mod from that service, and direct people to fake websites, fake apps, fake bitcoin addresses, and so on. I definitely wouldn't be using either to try to find a genuine URL.

If you are manually checking whether or not the site you are connected to is using https or http, then you are doing it wrong. You should install HTTPS Everywhere, open its settings, and check the box "Encrypt All Sites Eligible", which will automatically block any unencrypted traffic and requests. Relying on yourself manually checking that every page you visit is using https will fail almost immediately.

However, this is one of the bare minimum things you should be doing to secure your browsing activities. As DdmrDdmr has pointed out above, this only protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and says nothing about the legitimacy or otherwise of the website you are connecting to.

I use/have used BISQ, LocalCryptos, and Hodl Hodl.

There is an enormous difference between a single individual you are trading with seeing your name and an exchange with an unknown number of employees, unknown security set up, and who shares data with an unknown number of third parties, receiving copies of your passport or ID, selfies, name, address, social security number, and so on.

Still, if even revealing a name is more than you like, then you can buy anonymously with cash in person, cash through the mail, cash paid in to someone else's bank account, anonymous money orders, etc.

There will always be someone willing to pay a bigger fee, sure, but rarely will that be enough people willing to pay a bigger fee to bump you out of a block entirely, I would have thought. If you're paying some ridiculous fee like 1000 sats/vbyte, then you are looking at 10 BTC worth of fees to fill a block with higher fee transactions to push yours out. Plus that 10 BTC worth of fees would need to be sustained for every block to keep your transaction unconfirmed.

If that's the case, then the issues regarding the falling mining reward would be solved.

Or, even more basic, who doesn't keep back ups? You can get a terabyte of external storage for less than 30 bucks. That's more than enough for most people to back up every file, every document, every photo, every video they have ever downloaded/written/produced/taken/filmed/etc. If you need more, it gets cheaper as you go up - 100 bucks will get you 5 or 6 terabytes. You need zero technical knowledge to plug in an external hard drive via USB and copy all your files to it, therefore rending ransomware inconvenient at worst, as it can be overcome in the few hours it takes to reinstall your OS and software and copy your files back across. Or, with a little bit of knowledge, you can create a complete disk or system image (encrypted, of course!) to make restoring from your back up take only a few minutes. In bitcoin there, is no excuse for not having offline back ups of your seed. In general life, there is no excuse for not having offline back ups of your important data.

The fact that big corporations keep getting hit by ransomware and keeping paying up is testament to how bad most corporate IT is.

And I do not understand why people are so blasé when it comes to KYC.

Pretty much every big exchange has either been caught selling user data or has been hacked and had user data stolen, and this data often ends up for sale to scammers and criminals. Identity theft can literally ruin your life. You can end up liable for thousands of dollars worth of credit or loans you didn't take out, and you can end up with a criminal record for crimes you did not commit.

Pretty much every big exchange is handing over your details and your trading activities to multiple governments. I don't know about you, but I don't exactly trust the government to have my best interests at heart, and I sure as hell don't see the need for them to be able to track exactly how much bitcoin I own and what I am spending it on. If I wanted to use a financial system based on complete surveillance by the state, I would use fiat.

I trade not infrequently peer-to-peer either on BISQ or on this forum. I've never been overly concerned where the coins I am receiving have come from for a number of reasons:

Firstly, I almost exclusively trade with established/trusted/highly rated users, who I think would be highly unlikely to be involved in such scams.
Secondly, I do not use any centralized services which would investigate where my coins have come from and potentially freeze them or lock my account.
Thirdly, if I am concerned, then I can just mix or CoinJoin them.

If people are concerned about the source of the coins they are trading, then it's entirely up to them whether or not they refuse to do the trade. I don't think we as a community should be encouraging the view that some bitcoin are more equal than others, though, and diminishing the fungibility of bitcoin.