So build one. The correct solution to too many transactions and too high fees is to increase throughput or move more transactions to a second layer, not to exclude a whole bunch of transactions that some people subjectively consider to be spam.

How can it be peer to peer when third parties can ban your transactions?

I agree that ordinals are unproductive nuisance. However, I also think centralized exchanges are unproductive nuisance, and they spam the mempool with huge consolidation transactions all the time. Can we remove them? And what about dust attacks? Why haven't we removed them yet? Surely everyone agrees they are spam? What about things like Counterparty, Stacks, or RSK? Surely they are all spam as well? And should we ban OP_RETURN outputs while we are at it?

"Unproductive nuisance" is subjective. I complete agree ordinals are unproductive nuisance, but we should not be dictating how other people are and are not allowed to use bitcoin.

So let's say we eliminate this "exploit". There is nothing stopping the whole ordinals thing from moving to a different way to encode their data in the blockchain. You can encode data within public keys themselves, which makes it indistinguishable from random data. Here's a Counterparty based project transaction which encodes data as bare multi-sig outputs: https://mempool.space/tx/ee9ed76fa2318deb63a24082a8edc73e4ea39a5252bfb1c1e1c02bd02c52f95f. This method takes up even more space than the current method being used by ordinals, so this would make spam better, not worse.

Do we just keep banning "exploits" until only transactions we deem appropriate are allowed? That sounds like censorship to me.

This is already happening. There have been a whole bunch of centralized exchanges saying they will only allow deposits or withdrawals to other TRUST entities. TRUST stands for the Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology, and is essentially a list of fully centralized fully KYCed services which report everything to the US or other respective government. So not only can you not transact with non-KYCed services, but you can't even withdraw you coins to your own wallet.

Soon you will have government approved KYCed bitcoin which is bought, held, and sold only on centralized exchanges and used only to chase fiat gains, and then you will have all bitcoin which is held in your own wallets and not in the custody of a centralized exchange, which you can use for anything you like but which the government will treat as criminal and malicious. This split has already begun, and very few of us seem to care.

Wow. Just wow. Look at the multiple people in this thread cheering for censorship.

Ordinals are stupid. Inscriptions are stupid. NFTs are stupid. I consider all these things a method to move money from lots of gullible newbies to a small handful of people who successfully convinced these gullible newbies that such nonsense is worth anything. However, we absolutely should not be censoring transactions.

Spam is subjective. What if a bitcoin dev turns round tomorrow and declares all your signature payments spam and wants to censor those? Will you all still be cheering for censorship then?

Allowing individuals to start arbitrarily passing rules to censor some transactions is absolutely not what bitcoin was designed to be. If you want your transactions to need approval from third parties, then go and use fiat.

Why do you need a third Electrum? Create the transaction on Electrum (but don't sign it), sign it with your Ledger device, then the review the partially signed transaction on the same copy of Electrum to ensure it is correct before applying the second signature and broadcasting it.

Although as igor72 has pointed out, this affects the change address, not the payment address.

It is true that the mobile Electrum has a number of limitations as you've said, but these don't really apply here. Since the mobile Electrum would be one co-signer in a multi-sig wallet (which it is perfectly capable of), julerz12 can use his desktop Electrum to create the transaction, use coin control, set a custom fee, and so on, and then just use the mobile Electrum to sign the transaction he's already created.

I appreciate you are just asking a question, but for this to be a serious consideration of yours then your threat model is wrong.

There are multiple ways you can have your wallet hacked and your coins stolen. At the top of that list is using a hot wallet, especially a hot wallet on a device which you use daily for other things, such as general internet use. The chance of such a device contracting malware which will access your wallet is high. Also at the top of that list is storing your seed phrase electronically, be that on your own device, in the cloud, in an email, or whatever. Anything stored online is at constant risk of hacks and theft.

Very far down that list of risks is a seed phrase backed up securely and completely offline on paper or metal being stolen. By not having an offline back up you are reducing the risk of theft by an minuscule amount, while greatly increasing the risk of loss should your device fail/malfunction/corrupt/be damaged, should you lose your device, should you forget your wallet's password, and so on.

Every wallet and every back up system is a trade off between security against theft and security against loss. The trade off of not having a single offline back up (very small reduction in risk of theft versus very large increase in risk of loss) is simply not worth it. If your particular threat model places a large emphasis on an offline back up being compromised, then the correct solution is to use either passphrases or multi-sig, and not to abandon offline back ups altogether.

They don't have to acquire anything, though. Just force pool operators to obey their blacklists, and count on enough individual miners not caring enough to switch to a different pool. F2Pool started censoring transactions based on the US government OFAC blacklist, despite there being exactly zero laws requiring them to do so and despite them not even being based in the US.

This forum is full of people who welcome ETFs, welcome institutions, and welcome more regulations, all because it will make the price go up. And if the bitcoin forum founded by Satoshi is largely happy to sacrifice everything bitcoin was designed for in order to chase some short term fiat gains, then you can be damn sure the average Joe isn't going care.

Nothing, of course, except they might decide that doing so is illegal. The AOPP protocol wasn't designed to make every wallet undergo KYC at source though, but rather require that centralized exchanges attach your KYC to your withdrawal addresses by having you sign a message from it prior to withdrawal.

True, but as we've seen in this thread, bitcoin is not actually censorship resistant. If the government get 51% of mining power to comply with their blacklists, then they can simply censor any transaction paying to or from a non-KYCed address.

Both 12 and 24 word seed phrases are impossible to brute force from scratch. How impossible they are is irrelevant.

24 word seed phrases provide 256 bits of entropy. They both provide 128 bits of security.

Only for Electrum seed phrases. For BIP39 seed phrases its 128 bits of entropy. Either way, 12 words is perfectly safe.

This is a false analogy. Obviously a longer password is better, because when picking passwords most people will use a limited character set of somewhere between 26 characters (lowercase letters) and 95 characters (printable ASCII characters). A seed phrase picks from a set of 2,048 possibilities, and will always have a maximum security of 128 bits, since this is the maximum security of any private key on the secp256k1 curve that bitcoin uses.

That's always a smart idea. I would also recommend making a note of the first address in your multi-sig wallet, wiping your Electrum wallet, resetting your Ledger device, and checking you can recover the same multi-sig wallet using your back ups in order to verify that your back ups are accurate. Obviously you should back up your two seed phrases separately, and ideally, you want four back ups in total (two of each seed phrase) to provide protection against the accidental loss or damage of one back up.

Only that having the wallets on two completely separate devices (i.e. one computer with Electrum with one seed phrase, and another computer with Electrum with no seed phrases which is used to interact with your hardware wallet) is safer than only using one device, since an attacker would need to compromise an additional device in order to steal your coins. Further, your second Electrum wallet which holds no seed phrases and only interacts with your hardware wallet could be permanently airgapped for even more security.

Theoretically, yes. As far as I know, there are no known remote attacks against the most popular brands of hardware wallet where someone compromising your computer could remotely compromise your hardware wallet or make it sign transactions you didn't wish to sign. However, no one can guarantee 100% that such attacks do not exist. That is why the set up I described above is marginally safer, since the hardware wallet would only ever connect to a second (potentially permanently airgapped) device. The other option would be to swap out the Ledger for a permanently airgapped hardware wallet such as Passport.

That's not to say your set up is not secure. It's much more secure than a standard Electrum wallet, since as you say an attacker would probably need physical access to your hardware wallet as well as compromising your Electrum wallet in order to steal your funds.

Private keys don't specify a script type, but if you want to recover a P2PKH address beginning with "1", then just change from wpkh to pkh in nc50lc's instructions above.

Run getdescriptorinfo to get the checksum, then importdescriptors with the calculated checksum.

This is only the case if you are using two separate computers for your 2-of-2 multi-sig; one with an Electrum wallet storing the Electrum seed phrase, and another with an Electrum wallet storing no seed phrases but interacting with your hardware wallet.

OP seems to have a set up a single wallet with contains the Electrum seed phrase and which he also connects to his hardware wallet. This is less secure than using completely separate devices, but still much more secure than a standard single sig hot Electrum wallet. With such a wallet, he does not need to interact with this xpubs since Electrum provides one seed phrase and the hardware wallet provides the other.

No offense, but as with all methods for storing your seed phrases electronically this is a terrible idea. Your explanations regarding how safe this system is assume perfect use from the user and zero leaks from the device. In reality, these two things rarely happen. People use weak passphrases, store them electronically as well, use devices filled with malware and viruses, download random apps and software, visit random webpages, and more. All of these put at risk any electronic back ups, even encrypted ones.

This is even worse! You should never store anything sensitive on the cloud. Why would you want your sensitive data copied across dozens of computers in dozens of countries, all with unknown physical and digital security, and all accessible by an unknown number of people? That's an enormous risk.

I've lost track of the number of times I've seen people lose everything because they stored their seed phrase electronically, in the cloud, or in a password manager. Just don't do it.

In your analogy, if you are in a situation of being physically coerced in to revealing a passphrase, why would the attackers not just physically coerce you in to revealing the decryption key to your encrypted seed phrase? Encryption is worse than a passphrase in such a situation. Encrypted data clearly has a decryption key, whereas using a passphrase allows you to use the base wallet generated from just the seed phrase as a decoy, and give that away to the attackers while keeping the passphrase secret. Even better if you use multiple passphrases.

The mRNA sequences used in the vaccines are publicly available. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/OK120841.1

Nope. Here's what I've actually said:


To anyone who actually knows anything about biology, they will know that pseudouridine (spelt properly) is incredibly common and present in almost every organism on the planet.

BIP39 actually specifies that any passphrase will be normalized to UTF-8 NFKD, so you can actually have a character set in the tens of thousands if you wanted, provided your wallet software supports these characters, and use any unicode character such as ½, Ü, or ←.

I wouldn't recommend going down this route, however, since there are a lot of unicode characters that look very similar or even identical, and would obviously lead to completely different wallets if confused. For example A, A and A are all different characters (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic).

No idea I'm afraid since I don't use third party servers. But if you try to broadcast a full RBF replacement through an Electrum server which does not accept it, it will simply return an error. At that point, you can easily switch to a different server via "Tools" -> "Network" and try again until you find one which accepts your replacement (and then probably check via mempool.space after a few seconds to ensure you got good propagation).

That is the PGP key of ThomasV, the lead dev of Electrum. You should import it in to Kleoparta by clicking on "Notepad", pasting it in, and then clicking on "Import Notepad".

You are almost there. You have confirmed that the Electrum file you have downloaded has been signed by three sets of keys. It is telling you the signatures cannot be verified because you have not yet told Kleopatra that you trust those three sets of keys as belonging to the Electrum devs.

---

Since you already have Kleopatra installed, the next step is to import the PGP keys of the three Electrum devs which sign the releases. As above, go to "Notepad", paste in the first key, and then click on "Import Notepad". Do this for each of three keys you will find here:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/pubkeys/ThomasV.asc
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/pubkeys/Emzy.asc
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/pubkeys/sombernight_releasekey.asc

Once you've done that, you should repeat what you did above to open the .asc file with Kleopatra. It should now show you that the three signatures are verified and you are safe to install.

Any centralized exchange you used will be passing your details to your relevant tax agency, even if your bank aren't. If you use a centralized exchange your privacy will always be zero.

If your bank has blocked your purchases via centralized exchanges, then the best option for you would be to choose a decentralized or peer to peer exchange such as Bisq or AgoraDesk.

Yes exactly, just pointing out that brute forcing a public key is pretty much beyond the realms of "theoretically" as well, given how much energy it would require.

This kind of thing is already well underway. There are protocols such as AOPP to support people KYCing their own wallets. This travesty even gained widespread support from entities which should really know better, like Trezor.

How do you propose we do this once the government succeeds in getting rid of cash and forcing everyone to move to a CBDC, where they have complete surveillance over every transaction?