What are the chances of generating a valid seed phrase (or 24 mnemonic words) from the BIP39 wordlist of 2048 words?

I know the last word is a checksum generated from the first 23 words, but there's got to some % chance you correctly guess a valid working seed phrase just from manually randomly picking out 24 words...

The entirety of this piece will attempt to outline some broad methodologies to use in forming certain benchmarks of crypto wallets and its targeted users by certain characteristics. This is by no means exhaustive or exclusive, but rather a working exercise on examining certain unrealized characteristics to one of the more altruistic and overlooked, but important areas of the bitcoin/crypto space. There are tons of mathematical models that attempt to formulate tokenomics of different networks and measure network activity, but there aren’t any models to form some type of benchmark in the crypto wallet segment.

Perhaps this could be a starting point.

In this piece you'll read about:

- Categorizing crypto users by wallet usage behavior
- A proposed 3-axis categorization (Pillars) of a crypto wallet
- Quantifying a wallet’s elasticity from the eyes of its user

Welcoming feedback!

https://medium.com/tuoyuanresearch/examining-the-three-pillars-of-a-crypto-wallet-and-its-widening-usage-spectrum-d3924af0ea4a

"Your propensity to self-custody your private keys and hoard loads of hardware wallets might be an obsession, but that’s ok, because we know you wouldn’t want it any other way."

In time for Valentine's Day, enjoy this tongue-in-cheek Bitcoin piece I wrote about one's love for self-custody and the heart breaking scenario if you don't.

https://medium.com/tuoyuanresearch/256-xs-o-s-fef9a32b0791

[Access the Build It Yourself Bitcoin Transaction application below:]

I patched together a fun application tool that serves as an educational tool for users and newcomers to understand some of the mechanics behind a bitcoin transaction. These days, bitcoin transactions are sent via a simple click of a ‘send’ button in a wallet software app. To “build” one’s own transaction, one can go a layer down from merely clicking a “send” button.

Access the Build It Yourself Bitcoin Transaction application below:

https://build-it-yourself-bitcoin.herokuapp.com/

*If you are viewing the application on a small screen, it is suggested to zoom out in the browser for better viewing experience. This responsive design is part of the future improvement considerations listed below.

The application guides a user through some simple steps on building and broadcasting out a transaction.

It’s meant to be educational, informative, simple, and fun.

Some notes to point out before starting:

1.A proper security audit has not been ran on this application, therefore it is highly advised you use a private/public key pair that you do not intend to use in the future.
2.Due to the above’s recommendation for a private/public key one-time-use, this application will only accept 1 TXIN and 1 TXOUT output transaction. In other words, 1 UTXO in and 1 UTXO out. No change address option is provided.
3.This will only support P2PKH and P2WPKH transactions.
4.If you would like to create some private/public key pairs to use during the process, you can create your own at www.rawbitcoinkeys.com (this is another educational tool that teaches how a basic legacy (P2PKH) bitcoin address is made from a private key).

If you would like to improve this tool, feel free to add a pull request to the repository here:

https://github.com/jiamijiang/build-it-yourself-bitcoin

To view some screenshots of the application, check out this link below:

https://medium.com/tuoyuanresearch/build-your-own-bitcoin-transaction-8eb6f0117d2a

Hopefully this application can help you learn some of the nuts and bolts behind a bitcoin transaction. Because you never know, one of these days, you might need to send out bitcoin transactions the raw way.

From my understanding, BIP39/32/44 all use the secp256k1 elliptic curve standard from Bitcoin. But I noticed that cryptos such as Polkadot and Cardano have their own registered coin type path for BIP44, but those two cryptos use Ed25519 as their public key elliptic curve standard, so how is this possible?

Isn't those BIP39 mnemonic words all stemming from 256 bits originally? And Ed25519 uses a different private key size than 256 bits?

I am actually unfamiliar with how Ed25519 works exactly so much appreciated if someone can explain it in a high level overview, and then explain how it's compatible with BIP32/44/39. Thank you.

If you mask your node behind Tor for privacy purposes, does that mean you are not allowing your node to be discoverable, which inadvertently means you are not allowing others to retrieve network information from your node?

So in a way this is actually not really supporting the network right?

Can anyone suggest the best books related to topics such as crypto anarchy, cypherpunks, and digital currencies?

What are the positives and negatives of leaving a lightning payment channel open? How am I contributing to the lightning network and what are the risks if any?

Hello,

I am able to receive lightning payments from a buddy but i fail when i try to send lightning payments back to that same buddy. The error would say "Payment Failed, No Path Found". Any advice?

I am starting to use the lightning network feature in the electrum wallet for the first time. I've already funded and have opened a channel. great. but it only shows that I 'Can Send' at the moment. My 'Can Receive' is showing 0....why is that

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

ok i think i ran into a problem. i created a 2 of 2 multisig wallet in electrum with inputting the master public key from another co-signer as another electrum wallet (which was created as a normal wallet).

so now i have two wallets, one being the multisig wallet and the other co-signer being a normal wallet.

i tried to send a transaction but there was no option for me to sign or broadcast and i think i know the reason. because the co-signers of the multisig wallet also need to be multisig wallets?

Most bitcoin prices are tied to an average or a collection of what the top exchanges publish as the current bitcoin price. But who's actually moving their prices? From my understanding, retail users don't have the power to move prices in the short term. Whales supposedly are the ones who can make the price suddenly jump or drop...but they trade on OTC desks right? not on retail exchanges....so how are these Whale movements being reflected on retail exchanges to determine what the current bitcoin price is? Or are there actually some whales who use the exchanges to trade on?

Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node? Why was this never implemented from the start?

Does anyone have any tutorials out there to show the steps (an what functions to type in) on how to create and send a tx using the Python shell console of the Electrum wallet?

I've been testing out creating raw private keys by typing in 256 binary numbers. Then I would convert it to decimal format, then to hexadecimal format, which usually is 64 hexadecimal characters long. But I ran into an instance where only 63 hexadecimal characters were outputted from a random set of 256 binary numbers.

What happened and why is this? I am also not able to convert this 63 hexadecimal character private key into a WIF format either.

Hello, recently I've been interested in learning on how to run my own bitcoin full node. Downloading the Bitcoin Core client software from bitcoin.org seems a bit challenging and seems like it requires to understand how to use command line functions, which I don't have a good handle on. I've come across providers such as Umbrel and myNode which both requires some separate hardware to purchase, but the setup itself seems alot more user friendlier, and they both come with a friendly UI to use when accessing the node.

Does anyone have experience setting up a full node with Umbrel or myNode? What are the technical differences between using these providers versus directly downloading Bitcoin Core software?

Thank you

Not sure why but the fonts inside the Electrum desktop GUI are really really small. I dont think it has anything to do with my system layout options. It's just the Electrum GUI showing things as really really small. Any help to fix this?