I have a ccode saved in order to bypass the time waste that is filling a captcha, specially with Tor where you have to cycle through endless circuits in order to find one that works, but I was trying to log in in another computer where I didn't have the ccode saved. It was impossible, I couldn't log in until I went to the other computer where I had the ccode saved. When I click on the captcha it just does the loading circular animation indefinitely and does nothing else.

Would it be possible to fix it somehow, or has Google found a way to completely nuke captchas on Tor? I have tried on another sites, I thought it was the forum, but it's the captcha. I can't no longer register an account on Reddit since the captcha does the same, as well as in other forums. I don't want to rely on VPNs so this sucks. If anyone knows a way to bypass it let me know.

It seems more common these days that a bank will request a sort of an audit on your funds before they ever touch their records. However, I can think of many ways how that would go wrong. Namely, you send them your transaction history in the form of a text file (not them directly, but through your accountant/lawyer) but then you happen to hold some coins that were used to buy weed or whatever else, as you cannot know who paid you and where the coins came from if you just accept BTC payments in general. So what would be the implications? In order to operate with coins that do not come through your average Coinbase purchase you are going to need to pass these audits. It just seems risky to me considering you have no control over previous transactions and you'll be adding your dox next to your addresses, not great for privacy but otherwise you cannot do anything relevant with BTC besides smaller payments. Has anyone gone through these audits to use your capital in a company, to reinvest etc? If anyone has experience dealing with these firms I would be interested to know your experience.

Should a mining company focus on increasing a stack of Bitcoin that they can display in public as a way to showcase ability to save in BTC and as well as show confidence in trusting BTC as a way to keep your treassury by hodling it instead of cash, or should a company in the mining field just focus on mining as much BTC as possible, including selling the BTC you mine at any rate in order to keep expanding your hashrate and do not even hold any?

Im not sure about this. Some people like to see how a miner can hold onto a lot of BTC like MARA, but others seem to not care that much and just want max efficiency. For a public miner I guess whatever increases shareholders value the most is what works. Anyone has studied this?

Im looking for a tutorial that explains step by step how to do a setup with 2 Bitcoin Core. One in an airgapped laptop that always remains offline and has the wallet.dat with the private keys, another laptop that is online and has a watch-only wallet. The wallet is from Bitcoin v0.8.0 era, so it may require that the wallet file is also updated? Please provide details.

The tutorial has to explain how to set it up and how to do transactions safely using Coin Control. OS is Debian. Finally, some extra privacy, explain how to run it through a VPN or Tor. This should cover it all.

If anyone has a video or at least written format please let me know.

If anyone holds miner stocks then you may be aware of the recent crash in the markets. My favorite mining stocks are MARA, CLSK and BITF. Those are the ones I would bet to survive the halving. Either way all of them crashed. I thought it was a MARA thing because they disappointed on earnings when I looked at the chart when I was waking up but man what the hell was that when I saw all of them tanking? looks like they are taking profits because they may be predicting a crash on the Bitcoin price? they may want to sell before the halving or something to have cash on hand. A lot of miners are going to get wrecked. So far CLSK is the only one in profit for the past few weeks vs BTC but the rest got crushed. I still believe the stocks will fly but the entry point is not to easy as just to buy before the halving and run. We may have another scare on the market before things start running to ATH, if not then they go the timing wrong if they sold BTC.

Im just going to keep adding to my positions if MARA goes below 20, BITF below 3 and CLSK below 15. If there is a big correction on BTC these price targets may get wrecked tho so good luck to wall.

I wanted to post some stuff about CLSK, BITF, MARA, which are my favorite Bitcoin miner picks that I like to hold. Would the "Mining speculation" be a forum for this or is this out of place? most threads are about mining gear but I don't see people talking about buying call/put options on Cleanspark or whatever other good stuff for speculators that are into this thing. I was also looking at the speculation subforum but that is too broad. There should be a community of people here that are into mining stocks but its widespread all over the forum and maybe don't talk about it much because it's a bit of a niche thing.

It's not clear to me how to go about this.

Say I want to meet with someone that sells an item or service, how do I pay this person without revealing your funds?

I want to use a phone to pay, so I need to send my coins into an Android software of choice. From my research I think I could just use Electrum or mycellium. The question is, how to send the coins on Bitcoin Core into the portable software, in a way that when you pay from your phone you do not reveal your funds?

I want this thread to be specifically about privacy on your transactions. When you pay someone, they can just browse your address in an explorer and see how much that address holds, and potentially derive more addresses you own. This is insane. Imagine someone being able to do this with your bank account.

So what I would need to do is to mix the coins I want to spend, then send them into a portable Android software. This has 2 problems:

1) Even if 99% of people use mixers with good intentions to just have some reasonable privacy, you never know what was sent there. What if you pay someone after mixing these funds, this someone goes into an exchange, deposits the coins and the exchange is triggered due some flagged coins? This person will then point at you as the source of the funds and now you are in trouble. How do you avoid this? Btw this includes privacy wallets, not only mixing sites, I've seen people report about this.

2) In order to send the coins into the Android software, you have to transact from Bitcoin Core, into the mixer, then into the Android software address. This is a lot wasted in fees. There is no way to save some money in this process?

I think this makes Bitcoin so annoying to use for payments to be honest. Bitcoin is great to just buy and hold, but dealing with it to transact stuff is just so inconvenient. I would really like to know how to do this. It's just for small amounts, like 200 bucks or whatnot, I just don't want to get people in trouble from mixing funds, seeing how many false positives there are on exchanges and so on.

2 simple questions I would like to make:

1) I known in practice this is probably pointless, but in theory, is a non-HD wallet safer than an HD-wallet given that if the enemy somehow bruteforced your seed of an HD-wallet he could derive all possible addresses generated throught this seed, vs an old non-HD which would only be able to derive a limited amount? (afaik non-HD wallets pre-generated a limited amount of addresses, but beyond that you required to backup your wallet, so he couldn't get any addresses that were generated after the first backup was required, isn't this again, in theory, extra security by not having a single point of failure?)

1) In HD wallets, is anything beyond 12 words pointless? In theory, more words more security, but in practice, doesn't this lower security? you may accidentally type a word the wrong way if you manually type or, or it just creates more lenght of bits in the material word to store

Im trying to find a deleted post that was accidentally deleted, that may contain a specific text you are looking for. For instance, an email address, btc address, url. That is, to search for strings on deleted posts, so I can find this information. It would be really useful. I know someone here maintains a sort of an archive of the website, not sure where I saw this. Could it be possible to search for something specific on such archive? Thanks.

If you get paid in BTC address you have on an Electrum wallet, and you want to pay for someone that sells a good or service in exchange of BTC, but for obvious reasons you don't want to disclose how much BTC is your address holding to the person/entity that sells such good or service because they could easily look up your public address after you pay them on a blockchain explorer and see the funds... then how would you do this?

For example, you get paid in address A which has 0.1 BTC

You don't want to disclose you own 0.1 BTC to this person/entity, so you want to spend 200 USD on this good or service, which are like 0.004855 BTC at current rate.

How do you do this?

Should one download some of these "privacy wallets", create an address there and make a transaction with the funds you want to spend (0.004855 in this case) and then pay from that wallet's address? but the wallet has to have Android support for handheld usage then since I will pay once I arrive on the spot, not in advance.

Also, what about the fees? you lose money each time you send to the address that you want to spend from. This is problem. Also, exchange rate varies. You may send 0.004855 BTC to the new address you want to spend from, but this may be less than USD by the time you arrive (or more, but less imagine it's less)

I just don't know how to go about this, too many moving parts.

Im trying to find someone with experience on Bisq as I would like to give this a try. I would need to have some cash disposable each month without KYC. From all the options that Bisq offers, the only one I see as viable is cash by mail. Since the alternatives are to do bank transfers, which would leave a record for the taxman to ask about in x years, or meeting with random people, which is dangerous for obvious reason, the only alternative I see is to receive some cash bills on an envelope. Of course, this presents many concers from security and privacy pov, namely:

1) How do you find a seller you could trust?
2) How do you request a reasonable amount? what one should expect with this method?
3) How do you keep yourself safe from being tracked as the person that received the cash?
4) If you can use alternative addresses that aren't your home for obvious reasons, then what would these be?
5) What are some realistic fees to expect in this method?
6) How much time should you wait for the cash to arrive before you start to worry and what if it doesn't arrive?

Im just trying to understand how process works. Would be really handy to be able to sell a discrete amount each month for physical cash usage. Unfortunately the people accepting BTC are still a tiny %, and with current fees, it is too slow and expensive for cash usage anyway, I prefer to have the physical cash.

I was looking for some ETF news and apparently the VanEck one will pledge 5% of earnings to "Bitcoin core developers" during the next 10 years from the money they'll make on fees.

I imagined an hypothetical scenario where there is a massive hack or some sort of a disaster scenario where there are massive losses, and now those same good samaritans that are funding developers start pushing a campaign to engineer a rollback of the blockchain Vitalik style. What would happen? If in the future ETF holders become the 99% and 1% are self-custodians, then it will be on their interest to push this agenda. What if they have enough % of developers under their payroll, and enough people supporting it because they lost their money, and start pushing for a hard fork? What would be the game theory outcome scenarios at play here?

This could be applied to any other narrative to come up with a hardfork. Like, BTC pollutes the environment, let's go to PoS, or this and that. But the one I could see coming, is seeing a massive loss and then angry people wanting a rollback and start campaigning to pass laws that force developers to do this and so on. Most custodians are using Coinbase, but some will be self-custodians, Fidelity being one of them. I expect their efforts to pass such hardfork to fail, but who knows if like I said, most people in the future depend on ETFs and start pushing for laws to "protect investors" that force developers and miners to do rollback plans and so on. This sounds ridiculous now but you never know.

Most people would have 2 laptops using linux with a distro of choice. The laptop that signs transactions (cold wallet) wouldn't even have wifi card, bluetooth or anything wireless installed. This laptop does not have an updated blockchain. If you use Bitcoin Core I asume you would just install Bitcoin Core, open it, and basically leave it as if it wast trying to synch, but since there is no internet, it never synchs, and you just generate PSBT file and put it on the other Bitcoin Core laptop that has a watch only wallet with a synched blockchain, then broadcast it into the network.

Thing is, I always thought he hot wallet laptop looks kinda "ugly" or offputing, it just looks like you have 0 funds, and its trying to synch, but since there is no internet, it's just there doing nothing.

What if you save the blockchain files from the hot laptop and put them into the airgapped laptop? this way you would see your funds in your airgapped laptop too, it would be cooler than seeing 0 BTC. I know this is just all mental because what matters is that the hot laptop shows the correct funds, but if you have a lot of free space doing nothing, I thought maybe i would just put in there the blockchain files again, and you would have a backup of it just in case. The problem of this would be, how to send the blockchain files safely to the airgapped laptop's drive. An USB stick may be infected. There are some alternatives, like optical disks. There are some huge capacity disks available that may be a good idea to have for backups. Last time I checked, you would be able to write to these disks without closing the lesion, so you could just update them with newer blockchain files from time to time, and copy them on your airgapped device. This way you would have 3 backups of the blockchain, and being able to see your actual funds on the airgapped machine safely which is cool. And I say safely because I doubt you can put a virus on an optical disk from doing this.

Anyway let me know your views on this specially those that use 2 Bitcoin Core instances for this (one for airgap and other for broadcasting)

I want to use a portable HDD wallet for the airgapped laptop so I can bring it with me when needed. Does anyone know a good model that does not have any of the dodgy firmware stuff, that isnt a weird HDD/SSD hybrid, and that has decent performance?

I would like to have both cold and hot drives to be portable, so in case of an emergency or something, you can easily pick 2 small things and run, instead of having to carry 2 laptops.

The cold wallet I want an HDD in case full wipe is needed. See this for more context:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5479284.msg63393713#msg63393713

Also edited thread because I switched cold with hot wallet by mistake because I was posting after xmas dinner.

Given current events, I was wondering, how are previous campaigns that promoted mixers going to show up? I was thinking that when one does taxes and wants to cash out earnings made off mixer campaigns into fiat, and the accountant, taxman or both, request context on earnings, we are going to have to send them a link to the post that contained your address were you requested to be added, and I would appreciate if it isn't all replaced with something that's showing some text that makes you look dodgy, like "banned site" or something as I saw in another campaign.

I wonder how to go about this at all. As far as I know it's a perfectly legal activity of marketing, but if theymos is going to replace all previous links with some sort placeholder, I wonder what's going to happen from now on.

For some small amount, I may not even cash it out. But those people that participated for years and have staked a decent amount and want to a buy a house or whatnot, will have to explain the earnings from the signature campaigns and provide context, and this context will be marketing activities for casinos and mixers in most cases. Chipmixer comes to mind as one of the longest running campaigns, and this one ended up closed. This sucks because 99% of people just mix their coins to pay without having to reveal your BTC net worth in the process, which can easily be looked up if you stack considerable amounts on a single address, or if you have made payments that joined several of your addresses. This should be reasonable to anyone including the taxman. If we don't fight this false narrative of how mixing coins = criminal activity things will only get worse.

As far as cashing out earnings from sig campaigns, I wonder how that works in practice. If anyone has any experience with this please let me know.

If you look at a chart that puts the sp500 on top of the FED rates, you will notice a pattern that shows how whenever the FED has lowered rates, the sp500 has crashed pretty bigly. So im wondering, is this going to be different this time?

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/9/us-market-relative/91/interest-rate-sp500

Since the year 2000, when I believe the dynamics of the FED changed and the QE era started, the baseline for rates is basically near 0, with small pumps here and there whenever inflation was starting to go to high, or whenever government spending was needed (see the Covid incident)

So basically, why is people buying, if with 100% of certainty, this has been working since the 2000? Shouldn't you be considering a scenario where prices will be lower?

In that case, how would BTC perform? Will it successfully decouple from the markets, or is it going to mimick SP500 and just crash harder? Will the ETF hype + halving be enough to counteract these dynamics?

Anyone having problems with Tor for the past couple of days? It's going insanely slow for some reason, im trying rotating nodes but everything seems like there's no bandwidth or something, but it's specially slow when it comes to getting successfully logged in on here. Im tying to get the captcha to show up but I get an error. I would have been locked out of the account but luckily I had saved my captcha code, but if it wasn't for that I wouldn't have logged in at this rate.

If anyone knows if Tor is having any problems and how to improve this it would be great. Im assuming it's not something that has to do with the forum. I cannot try to access the forum without Tor so let me know.

Im definitely interested in buying shares of this thing if they went public. Looks like they've got some good tech going where they are aiming at really decentralizing mining unlike the current scenario in which we've seen miners can get compromised into censoring transactions. OCEAN is an effort by Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) and has the likes of Luke Dash-Jr collaborating with the project. If anyone has any news about this please let me know if there is going to be some sort of an IPO or something.

Has anyone studied how companies have performed in previous halvings? Im looking at some exposure on the mining industry and im considering the 3 following stocks:

-MARA
-BITF
-RIOT

What's going to happen with these post halving? I've read BITF is the most efficient in the game. MARA has got the #2 biggest stack of crypto so im assuming they are going to be pretty wealthy to reinvest on their business. 13,396 BTC by MARA vs 385 by BITF. RIOT got 6,974 BTC. Of course there are more things than holding BTC on a mining business. Apparently BITF got some cool proprietary technology.

I would like to hear the view of someone that actually has money in the game or is considering making an investment. Some of these are around 100 to 200% up this year already. How higher could they go before it becomes ridiculous to get in?

I would like to know if anyone has MSTR shares. Does it correlate well with BTC? I am considering using Michael Saylor's stock as a way to get into BTC with fiat without being blocked by banks. Trying to buy BTC with exchanges it's becoming annoying, banks block transactions, it's just annoying. Then there's the risk that the exchange fucks up somehow. If they get hacked, now some bastards will be able to buy your dox next to your BTC movements on the darknet, so I was looking at alternatives and only found GBTC, but I don't get how the whole premium stuff works. There's some sort of an ETF in Canada but I have no access to it.

The only alternative i've seen is the MSTR shares, I can buy this on my bank right now with no problem, any amount I want, and I would have BTC exposure without risks, other than having to trust Saylor with not screwing up on the custody side, but he seems to know what he is doing. From what I've seen correlation is not 1:1 but close to it. With 150k+ BTC bought, his company is almost a de-facto ETF. In fact I would trust Saylor more than an ETF, since this guy is an actual bitcoiner, unlike Blackrock and co.

I know the best thing to do is to be your self custodian, but sometimes you have to be realistic. If you sold a property for like 300k, and you want to buy 300k worth of BTC, you are going to face problems when buying on an exchange, because they'll block your transaction. With MSTR, I've already got the funds ready, just a click away and I've got the BTC exposure I want. It is also not a 10+ year move. I want exposure for like 1 to 2 years, hoping BTC does not disappoint as an hedge during a potential recession.

So my question is, does anyone own shares, and has anyone researched this at any serious level to recommend anything I should know before I buy in?