I know few things about mining, besides the theory of PoW. When you solo-mine, you're trying to find a hash that is below a certain target and you're proving it by providing its preimage, which is the message that has been hashed. But what are you proving when you're mining to a pool? How will the pool owner ensure that you've worked? What do you provide him as a proof?

Hodling bitcoins seems a pretty profitable business. You just earn/buy them and then you send them on your cold storage thinking that you'll spend them in the distant future. In the April Fools of 2020, bitcoin's price was around €6k and today it has jumped to €50k. I didn't even catch it up, it just happened from one moment to the next one!

I then realize that if I keep on hodling until the late '20s I'll most likely have a sufficient fortune, assuming that it'll reach €1M, which doesn't seem that impossible. What is the problem:  I'm not sure that I'll be strong enough to withstand my feelings and thus, in the last days I have been thinking of time locking my funds. If you rethink it, it's like inheriting your own funds.

Thoughts?

I wanted to check something on the rewarded address of the genesis block, so I imported it as a watch-only wallet. There were too many transactions and it took a while until it was fully synced. While it has around 68.3 BTC, it only showed me those that he/she had received after the block reward (~18.3 BTC). I then thought that it could be an exception, only for the genesis block, because the coins cannot be spent or maybe because there was no proof of work on that block and thus, they excluded it from the others.

But then I tried importing a rewarded address from a random block. For example, I imported this one: 1M311YjWBuHbZhLDynBKFCTXosJe7d2Boi (rewarded address for block 23231)

Its balance is 50.00001094 BTC (3 unspent outputs including the block reward). This is what it'll show you if you import it on electrum:

I just noticed that every address starts with a capital letter or with a number (after its prefix) and I want to understand why. I'll take a p2pkh address as an example. We add a version byte in front of the RIPEMD-160 hash and it becomes:

Code:

00f54a5851e9372b87810a8e60cdd2e7cfd80b6e31

Then we add a checksum from a SHA-256 hash and it will be:

Code:

00f54a5851e9372b87810a8e60cdd2e7cfd80b6e31c7f18fe8

These two zeroes in the front define "1" when we convert the above to base58. Why every address starts with a capital/number since we encode a hash?

I've never seen this phenomenon again on any other site/forum. People actually beg for money and it seems more disappointing than scammy. Some of them create new threads and explain a non-sense story, that is clearly meaningless to us, and then they provide a bitcoin address to "help" them with their "life problem". But it gets worse! They create off-topic replies on some already discussed topics. Do they believe that we'll take them^[1] seriously?

Is there anyone that believes them and sends money to strangers? Is there anyone that doesn't have enough problems in his/her life and wants to give a part of his fortune to strangers? Just saying, because I've never felt that happy in my life.  

I wonder, because they haven't stopped doin' it. They keep begging money months now and I assume that they've received some satoshis, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

[1] If we assume that they are more than one person that just wants to make easy money.

[Coin Flipped Seed]

Coin Flipped Seed

This program may be considered as "useless" by some people. In a way, it doesn't provide anything different rather than a strong proof of the randomness. I got inspired by MrFreeDragon on his visual private key generator. Flipping a coin 256 times is a little too much, but the problem was that you could only create one address at a time. Instead of tossing a coin for one address, it'd better to do it for the seed's entropy. Thus, you can now derive a nearly unlimited number of addresses by only tossing a coin 128 times. Without having to worry about RNGs and their strength.
[Concern about RNG]

Introducing: Coin Flipped Seed.



Release (v0.3) • Source code

By default, I've set to derive the first 20 addresses and at the moment you can only create a mnemonic that is twelve words long.

Is it possible to get the public key by only having the encrypted message? I want to somehow verify that the unencrypted message can only be read from the person that has the given public key. The algorithm I'm talking about is ECIES and an example of an encrypted message is:

Code:

QklFMQKz5dc3hpCY5qRDHi0WUIJd45ejY2hDQWn8DlZJMQXxWhTjuBWXS5wJE7oj3fWMYp8Y1Yw+Ty0HbFUwW3V2rBKu+nVRa/IctNQl+Jp7Wmdvbg==

"Locked" on this public key:

Code:

02d124037a06126960644eaf515113b0bd69ca9f93d93f01f223b864e50f530b9a

In other words, is it possible to somehow derive the public key given only the encrypted message?

Around a year ago I had earnt some bitcoins which I sent them to a cold storage address with the mindset of keeping them long term. I recently read about RNG and its weaknesses and I'd like you to tell me your opinion about the way I did it.

• I formatted a laptop and installed windows 7.
• I downloaded the iancoleman website as an html file.
• I opened it with firefox and then clicked generate.
• Then I wrote the mnemonic on a piece of paper and closed the browser.

I could have done the same with electrum, but I chose iancoleman. Is RNG strong enough with a site's javascript? How should I be aware of RNG? I mean, how can I know if it's strong or weak?

[It'd be a consensus dead end.]

Since 2009, some consensus rules have been added, for example SegWit. It surely does good, it's a solution for the block size limit, but I want to know how did that occur. In wikipedia it says that SegWit was activated on block 477120, but who begun that? Changes on consensus rules, as good as they are, are changes. If the majority of its users, change a consensus rule, they immediately stop being the majority. The follow their "Bitcoin".

The forum itself says on a quote that miners don't vote on changing consensus rules, only the order of the transactions. Seeing a change like that makes me wonder what else can the developers change. Should they have an impact on bitcoin? Whether if it's for good reason or not.

How did miners accept that change? They were not forced to update their bitcoin client.

-But why did you enter that title?
Well, I'm a little afraid of bitcoin's future and thus, my funds'. On the long term, one of these may occur:

• Public key to private key reversal. (I've heard that it may be possible to do that with quantum computing and pollards kangaroo method)
• Finding collisions for RIPEMD-160 hashes. Are we sure that 2¹⁶⁰ is strong enough? What if it becomes weak in the next 20-30 years?

Even if the first one can be faced pretty easily by simply creating outputs on addresses that have never spent, the second one requires consensus change. I don't know what they can change in that case, probably use of stronger cryptography, but they will have to change something! Otherwise, bitcoin will be useless. Changing a consensus rule, that important, would sour lots of people. And that's because that moment, the developers would have to "touch" people's money. It'd be a consensus dead end.

The pandemic surely helped Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies be more widespread and I like seeing that there are many people that have understood the main benefits of it and they're keeping it as a store of value. Last year, 22% of the circulating USD was printed which was around $9 trillion. This clearly shows that the economy was f*cked up last year. The debts are now even bigger.

This is when Bitcoin was seen as a solution. Its deflationary and safe-heaven characteristics were recognized and everyone became abruptly bullish. Now I wonder, what will happen to Bitcoin once the pandemic is over? Once we'll live just like we did in 2019? It will surely have a big impact on the market, but I don't know if it'll be a negative or a positive for Bitcoin.

Satoshi's code included GetMyExternalIP, a boolean function on net.cpp. What seems curious to me is that he/she used one IP address. This creates me the following queries:

• Did this server manage to distribute the information of all nodes? Like their IP addresses? RPC didn't exist on that early release, it was added later so you couldn't add a node with addnode. In a way, if it did, bitcoin's information was distributed from a server. The distribution was centralized. Once you connected with 72.233.89.199:80, it wouldn't matter, but you've have to connect with Satoshi's IP first. Since RPC did not exist, it was like vSeeds.
• Isn't this Satoshi's IP? Couldn't he/she be located that way? It is a mainnet IP address.

Code:

bool GetMyExternalIP(unsigned int& ipRet)
{
    CAddress addrConnect("72.233.89.199:80"); // whatismyip.com 198-200

    SOCKET hSocket;
    if (!ConnectSocket(addrConnect, hSocket))
        return error("GetMyExternalIP() : connection to %s failed\n", addrConnect.ToString().c_str());

    char* pszGet =
        "GET /automation/n09230945.asp HTTP/1.1\r\n"
        "Host: www.whatismyip.com\r\n"
        "User-Agent: Bitcoin/0.1\r\n"
        "Connection: close\r\n"
        "\r\n";
    send(hSocket, pszGet, strlen(pszGet), 0);

    string strLine;
    while (RecvLine(hSocket, strLine))
    {
        if (strLine.empty())
        {
            if (!RecvLine(hSocket, strLine))
            {
                closesocket(hSocket);
                return false;
            }
            closesocket(hSocket);
            CAddress addr(strLine.c_str());
            printf("GetMyExternalIP() received [%s] %s\n", strLine.c_str(), addr.ToString().c_str());
            if (addr.ip == 0)
                return false;
            ipRet = addr.ip;
            return true;
        }
    }
    closesocket(hSocket);
    return error("GetMyExternalIP() : connection closed\n");
}

I've been experiencing CoinJoin in the last week, because it seems interesting, thus I test some transactions on the testnet using Wasabi. I'm trying to understand the differences between anonymity set 2 and set 50. The transaction below is being broadcasted using Anonymity set 2:

(6cb70e6019c47eb56ba2074e3721505095e930143775f331b22a224a67a6f8bb)

And this one with set 50:

(f95afe4e61c6f9d677d81bee3b5c89d2e735e5d4554fd1b62f3a0ea8341f2a29)

The problem is that while I've used anonymity set 50, in Wasabi it shows me that it's set 2:

Do you know why does that happen? Also, I observe that it sends the money to change addresses of index (around) 20-25. Can I access them somehow? Shouldn't they be on "Receive"? I can only see my inputs on "Send".

I've been searching a mnemonic for a hunt. I found out that it's been generated with Wasabi. To cut a long story short, I know 10 out of 12 words, but I don't know the derivation path. I just know that it was generated with Wasabi.

Here's my question: Could it be deeper than 76? Once I recover a seed with Wasabi, it writes the first 76 public keys on the Wallet.json. If I receive money on one of these, then It'll show it to me on the user interface. But if I receive funds on m/84'/0'/0'/10000 for example, I will never notice it.

I had a discussion with another player of the hunt, and he told me that due to coinjoin, once coins are sent to an address they can skip hundreds of addresses. Isn't coinjoin just for improving your privacy? I didn't understand that.

Knowing that the address won't be after a specific derivation path will save me a thousand hours of brute forcing.

This thread will be generally for problems with btcrecover, I'm sure I'll face more issues in the future.
I've trying to use btcrecover instead of FinderOuter since I heard that it goes extremely faster, maybe because it's not UI? I don't know. I haven't confirmed it yet. But I need to brute force too many combinations, and with FinderOuter it takes 2 hours each (I only have an address and 10 out of 12 words), so I'd like to give btcrecover a try.

2048² combinations should be checked, which is a little too much if I want to search among many derivation paths. So I downloaded btcrecover. The problem is the installation of course. It requires python 2.7.8 and coincurve 5.2.0.

As you can see, I've installed both, but it keeps returning me this error:

This is the error:

Code:

C:\Users\bymet\Pictures\btcrecover>C:\Python27\python.exe seedrecover.py --big-typos 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "seedrecover.py", line 30, in <module>
    from btcrecover import btcrseed
  File "C:\Users\bymet\Pictures\btcrecover\btcrecover\btcrseed.py", line 35, in <module>
    import sys, os, io, base64, hashlib, hmac, difflib, coincurve, itertools, \
ImportError: No module named coincurve

Have you any idea why does this happen? What should I fix?

I think I'll buy a trezor one, since I make many transactions daily and I can't open the laptop with electrum every single time I want to transact. I need to just connect a usb with my PC and be able to move bitcoins. Although, I have some questions to make before giving the 59 EUR.

• What happens if someone steals it? I assume that once you write the 24 words, anyone with the device and its PIN has access to your funds.
• I know that the firmware is open-source, but how can I verify that? Telling me that a software is open-source means that I can build it and ensure that the program is the binaries of the source code. But on firmware, how exactly can I build it?
• Is it necessary, for the mnemonic, to be 24 words? Can't it be 12 words? There's no reason to write 24 words, unless you want to brute force it sometime in the future.
• How's the electrum experience? Is it easy to use it? Is the LN also available?
• What are the dangers? AFAIK, the hardware wallet signs the transaction and sends it back to the computer, thus the private keys never "touch" your computer. But is there anything I should be afraid of? For example, should I connect my hardware wallet on a publicly shared computer, that is most probably virus/malware infected, or not?

Thank you.

[the incentive]

This forum is active mostly from signature campaign participants who want to earn their weekly payment, including me of course. These users have an additional incentive from making high quality posts and thus, they do. This forum is consisted of users that want to help each other, whether they actually want it or they just want to get paid from doing it.

In other words, this forum converts the greed of some (if not all) campaign participants to common good. The newbies that need your help, get it, you get paid from the campaign manager and he/she gets paid from the person that runs the business that you're wearing.

If we exclude the businessman, everyone is happy. Participants and campaign managers get paid and other users get the help they want (or whatever they want to discuss). Thus, new information circulates every single day on this forum and this is what keeps it so alive. This is a factor that keeps it one of biggest forums out there, the incentive.

There are businesses that are advertised on bitcointalk in the long term. For example, for more than 1-2 years. Usually, these are the businesses that run high-paying signature campaigns. It is clear that these businesses have a huge profit, from the entire process, otherwise they wouldn't pay that much.

Each of these businesses, whether they're here for the long or the short term, want to be on users' signatures. And not just any user, but those that contribute the most. The reason may be that other users might click on the signature. Or they may want to rank up on SEO, since bitcointalk traffic is significantly big.


But I'll focus on the first one. Since these businesses keep running, then the obvious answer to the title's question is yes. I have personally clicked on some signatures, especially those that are advertised from "Legendaries"/Forum experts. But I haven't moved further, I just visited their website. I'd like to read, though, if you tend to visit these exchanges/mixers/casinos/<everything else> that are advertised and if yes, if you go further than that.

Website: https://electrum-ltc.org/

Github: https://github.com/pooler/electrum-ltc

I would like to create this thread, because at this time I'll be busy with electrum-ltc that is a lightweight litecoin client and since there is no board   and topic, here it is. (I don't think that it should be created on Electrum)

There is no point of having a board, because this wallet doesn't require that much discussion, it's a small project. Electrum is in my opinion the simplest, user-friendly, non-custodian wallet out there. Unfortunately, not all cryptocurrencies that have forked the Bitcoin Core's source code have an SPV like electrum. Actually, only litecoin has its own electrum. Despite the fact that I would like to have a dogecoin electrum, I see the entire thing more generally. I took a look in the code, but I haven't worked with python in the past and it seems hard for me, so I would like to make some questions to the experts. Whether they are forum ones, python ones or even the developers/contributors of electrum.

• Does electrum broadcast the transaction to bitcoin nodes directly?
• Is there a handshake once you broadcast the transaction? I mean, can I simply change the default IP addresses of the litecoin nodes so I can put dogecoin nodes? Is it that simple?
• What other things do I have to change excluding the address' prefix?

[Disclaimer: I'm studying economics, I haven't entered the university yet, so please reply gently if this is considered a dumb question.]

Disclaimer: I'm studying economics, I haven't entered the university yet, so please reply gently if this is considered a dumb question.


I had this query of who defines the bitcoin price since I began reading about bitcoin and I found out it's demand & supply, which is considered a simple ecomonic rule for those that study economics. I never got an answer, though, of how exactly is that number calculated. Is there an equation that combines demand and supply?

As far as I know the price of a commodity can be understood if we see this curve:

We observe that as long as demand and quantity increase, the price does so. I checked wikipedia and it showed me:

Q(P) = 3*P - 6

Q(P) = 5P^0.5

Now, I'm not sure that I understand these. How can the first example be a curve since a*x - b is always a straight line?

I would also like to ask if these exchanges use this equation to calculate the price and if they intend to increase it intentionally to earn more.

I see a lot of them, especially on my board. Why do they have 1000 merits? I guess that once the merit system was introduced, lots of users' merit score was set to 1000 by default, I just don't get why. Probably, because they had already a high rank and it would not be good if they suddenly get lower?

Testnet bitcoins have no value, despite the fact that they're too expensive to mine. Since they don't have value and there is no profit from mining, what's the miner's incentive?

miner8VH6WPrsQ1Fxqb7MPgJEoFYX2RCkS right now has 1,654,132 TBTC. If we assume that they have no value, then they don't. But, since people want testnet bitcoins, why don't they have value? I don't get this. Isn't this a free market? Isn't there a demand and a supply for testnet bitcoins?