Look at the resources needed to attack Bitcoin, a PoW coin. Attacking a PoW coin entails huge costs and resources. Given how you are constantly expending resources with PoW, there is a certain security through expending the resources.

PoS incurs no actual costs. In the event of multiple fork on the chain, attacker can choose to follow any chain without any real costs being incurred. Conversely, miners have to make a conscious decisions about the forks to follow with PoW coin. Following the wrong fork expends resources for nothing.

Bitcoin will not shift over to PoS. There is no reason why it has to.

It is designed to do so. If you want to base your fees using the position in the mempool, then there is a mempool option as well and that is approximately the same as any other mempool histograms.

IIRC, Electrum takes the ETA data from the server but can build the mempool histogram. I found it to be quite consistent with Bitcoin Core's which tracks the time it takes for transactions in their mempool to be included in a block and is calculated based on that. While this can resulted in a very conservative fees, it'll take into account block times, intervals, etc and give the user a better chance to hit the estimate.

Mempool.space's priority estimation, I think (maybe I'll take a look at their code in the future, not now) uses the mempool and the estimated transactions that is included in each block. Does it take into account the time elapsed from which the previous block was mined? This results in a far more responsive target but also doesn't average out the irregularities in block intervals. This will strictly be cheaper but it is definitely not as accurate.

What wallet were you using? Any well-designed wallet will not provide any estimates without a reasonable certainty that the confirmation would be met within the target. Floating fees in the wallets are fairly well-designed and users shouldn't face a problem using it. In fact, I would recommend for newbies to be using Electrum's ETA if they have no idea what they're doing. Simply looking at the mempool graph doesn't take into account all of the factors that would affect the time it takes for a transaction that it takes to get a confirmation. Floating fees are designed to be dummy-proof and we wouldn't include it if we can't consistently meet the target.

Mempool.space's estimation is quite vague, as compared to both Bitcoin Core and Electrum's which gives you the estimated number of blocks it should take.

Bitaddress does this for you, if you don't want to hassle yourself with the headaches if you do it incorrectly. You'll have to get the correct WIF as well, by the way.

Download the github repo: https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org. Validate it with the PGP signature file and open the HTML with your browser. Go to Wallet Details and Enter your private keys > View details. You should see both uncompressed and compressed addresses derived from the priv key. Run it on a clean computer with a clean browser (ie. no extensions).

No if you don't have your private key or ECDSA public key.

Do you think the community wouldn't react in a way in a timely manner to counter any potential malicious re-orgs and negate the impacts caused by them? The reason why 51% attack is so dangerous is mainly due to the financial motivation, where there might not be enough time for people to react in a timely manner. If you kill off Bitcoin, great! Another crypto takes it's place. So what now?

I believe that the costs for an attack like this, if it is currently on-going has ballooned to the neighbourhood of about 287 million dollars. I've already mentioned it quite a few times, you don't want to do a 51% silently. Proving that you can consistently annoy the hell out of the community by re-organizing blocks every now and then rather than doing a very expensive block re-org achieves the same thing.

Don't use static. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to pay fees that are either too high or too low.

ETA is very conservative and nets you a confirmation within the specified number of blocks almost all the time. This also means it tends to overpay for the fees.

Mempool, is only indicative of the fee rates at current X MB from the tip of the mempool. It gives a spot reading and does not actually reflect the current network conditions. However, if you aim for 1vMB from the tip of the mempool, you should get a confirmation within the next block or in a few hours. That varies depending on the circumstances.

When you use a slider, there should be a box which is displayed and that tells you how many blocks before you can get a confirmation or X vMB from the tip.

Sliding to the right means that you will pay more for the fees and a potentially faster confirmation.

Oops. I was thinking of using Grover's which works for both. Point stands, the security of addresses isn't reduced more by quantum computers through the possibility of collisions as opposed to cracking the ECDSA directly. Finding collisions of RIPEMD-160 is still difficult enough, combined with the fact that there is SHA256 hashing prior to it and that you're finding a very small set of keys.

You might be able to find a collision of two addresses far in the future but it still probably wouldn't be worth the time

Exchanges are a service, they are not representative of the security of Bitcoin unless everyone only uses them when they're using Bitcoin. The security comes from whoever is holding the keys for their funds, which is ideally themselves.

Banks are more like your wallet, where you can park your coins while those exchanges are solely meant for users who wants to exchange their coins for another currency. The security of their platform is this largely dependent on their competency. It's not like banks hasn't been hacked before, see Bangladesh SWIFT hack. You don't see banks getting bankrupt because their activities are often fairly low risks and if something goes wrong, the government would probably bail them out anyways.

Use quantum computers to crack the ECDSA keys for those. Collision is quite a lot harder.

That would never happen. Satoshi probably won't appear again nor touch those coins.

Speed up for symmetric algorithms are far smaller and probably wouldn't be sufficient to find specific keys. It's not like there is a huge portion of known Satoshi keys.

I think you meant using QC to directly crack the public keys.

Again, this is pure speculation. Bitcoin's reach is mostly bounded by the ability of the people to use it, given the high penetration of internet and internet connected devices, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that there isn't loads of growth to be made in that aspect. I mentioned in my previous post about the difference between adoption and investments; adopting entails actively using it as a currency to serve its purpose. I would argue that it doesn't really matter until bigger economies start to endorse and accept Bitcoin. Based on the resistance by the various government, I'm not so sure if it'll happen soon. Firms are largely also investing in Bitcoin in hopes for it to rise, which defeats the purpose of Bitcoin as a currency and making it a speculative asset as well.

In 10 years, anything can happen. Will Bitcoin finally be able to scale, with little conflict? Will the government or firms still be willing to endorse Bitcoin once the FOMO blows over? It's completely uncertain; everyone saw the true colors of Tesla after a couple of weeks, perhaps everything that has happened so far is a facade for a different agenda. It'll be a sweeping statement to assume that Bitcoin will rise in the long term; it can very well be but there are obviously various shortcomings of Bitcoin that are either innate or difficult to solve.


The price is not indicative of the adoption rates.

Actually, at the end of 2013, sites like Baidu started to adopt Bitcoin for a while so that gave rise to it's credibility.

The issues that you've highlighted, misconception of Bitcoin is largely due to the negative sentiments surrounding it as well as the userbase amplified by its properties. The lack of motivation to change the status quo results in the majority of the population being unwilling to research and understand Bitcoin. If you were to see the bigger picture, the investment into Bitcoin by certain companies could potentially carry various agenda. For the countries, perhaps a political one.

Do you consider people investing by purchasing Bitcoin, users or investors? They are very different terms and for the recent years the usage has largely stagnated due to increased fees and whatnot. It isn't a good sign for any "mass adoption".

I disagree. "Past performance is not indicative of future trends". There are very specific reasons why Bitcoin became more well-known, and that if you're interested in Bitcoin at all, then you probably would've considered adopting it already. Governments are not letting go of their stranglehold on the currency with their fiat and it is simply too difficult to push those people to adopt Bitcoin, especially not risk-takers. Mass adoption is not inevitable, at least not with the current network and/or the various issues that has plagued Bitcoin throughout. There is bound to be a point where Bitcoin's adoption will plateau, whether you consider that "mass adoption" depends on your threshold.

Yes. I assume you've backed up your seeds as well?
If you don't want to spend so much on fees, you can probably use mempool, adjust to 1vMB or more and expect a confirmation within a reasonable period of time as well. You won't overpay for your fees this way but it doesn't guarantee a confirmation within X blocks like what ETA does.

The fees are reasonable right now, so the option is entirely up to you. As long as the transaction is replaceable, you can bump the fee in the future.

Fiat is arguably far more conducive for money laundering and anonymous as well. You can't trace cash as effectively as you can with Bitcoin.

You really can't expect anyone to take care of your Bitcoins. You're responsible for them and any loss as a result of your negligence is your fault. There is no problem with non-reversibility.

Also to avoid volatility, just trade it for your fiat immediately after the transaction, if you really want.

Not ethical, the Bitcoins still belongs to the owner. I imagine anyone trying to run this doesnt really care.

It's the same. Brainflyer isn't bruteforce either, the user has to feed brainflyer with suitable strings for it to search. Which is also incidentally the same concept of yours; a dictionary attack, but in this case you're crawling websites. Brainflyer allows for the user to feed it information using another source, like a web crawler. If you're going to tell me your program somehow can reduce the complexity of the brainwallet, then it works on different principle. You're just changing the inputs to the bruteforce.

I believe brainflyer is the most efficient implementation out there and has already gone through the most significant keyspace and using a remotely weak passphrase would've resulted in an immediate compromise of your address nowadays.

There is no point trying to compete against others, those that are vulnerable has already been cracked and no one is using brainwallet as it is now.

Yes. It isn't impossible to mine without telling anyone. Bringing all those equipment online could take weeks. Every second that your equipment aren't running, you're incurring an opportunity cost. That could amount to a few billion, depending on how long you take to acquire the sufficient amount. No one would attack Bitcoin if you have to spend that much money, recouping some of the loss would make the most sense.

It is perfectly possible for them to slowly take them online, under the guise of actually mining them by using a company unaffiliated with the CCP. It is far more suspicious for that much equipment to be deployed in a few weeks than having it spread out over months.

Does it violate any of the restrictions in the link? For example the PSBT file size?

Limit of it is 2500 or 23%, as indicated in the docs. Unfortunately not very useful, because you need the entire peers list to be displayed or at least the relevant parts and not just a sampling. Thanks though!

Don't use seeds. It's not that there won't be a way to recover it in 20 years but it's just that the recipient wouldn't want to use the seed as his main wallet. They should sweep it to another wallet that they solely control, using a private key is fine.

Paper wallets are generally fine, they are a great form of storage if you're looking to make it a gift. OP_CLTV (OP_HODL) is something you might want to explore. Encompassing it in a script hash address is a way to make time the variable; ie. making sure that it cannot be spent before the specified timeframe. Note that this is still a novel way to store Bitcoins, where most wallets don't allow custom scripts and you might need much more research to be able to spend it, as opposed to just using Electrum or Bitcoin Core.

v2 onion service, or rather onion service in general doesn't pass through exit nodes it is contained within the onion network. The connection is encrypted end-to-end and there is no need for SSL in that case.

You have to use SSL for the clearnet website if you're running it through Tor though I would argue that just using the onion service is far safer.