Make that one of four then! My recollection was it was theymos, myself, and TryNinja who were offered (and turned down) the prize.

Yeah, this quote is particularly hilarious. The future of privacy, according to Wasabi, is for every single bitcoin user to KYC themselves to a blockchain analysis company and then pay the blockchain analysis company for information on every UTXO they interact with. Much private! Such fungible! Wow!

To me, that doesn't read like government pressure:


Sounds like journalists were asking questions, and there was a fear of future regulations, so they started blacklisting preemptively. At no point then or since has anyone from Wasabi ever pointed to a piece of legislation and said "This is why we are now pro-censorship". Indeed, such legislation is only now starting to come out, long after Wasabi started censoring their users (and hilariously, such legislation is discriminating against Wasabi all the same despite their censorship).

Here are a few quotes from Max Hillebrand in an interview a couple of weeks after they started censoring:

Note that your example will only hold true if both parent and child transaction are the exact same size, which is often not the case.

To work out what fee you need to use for the child transaction, you first have to calculate the size your child transaction will be, add that to the size of your parent transaction, multiply by the final fee rate you want to achieve, subtract the fee the parent has already paid, and then use that fee for your child.

So let's say your parent transaction is 500 vbytes, paying 10 sats/vbyte. Your child transaction will be 200 vbytes, and you want the final fee to be 20 sats/vbyte. So your total transaction size will be 700 vbytes, your total fee will be 700*20 = 14,000 sats, you've already paid 5,000 sats, so your child transaction needs to pay 9,000 sats. This will work out to 45 sats/vbyte for your child.

This obviously becomes more complicated when you start considering multiple unconfirmed parents, bringing in additional inputs to the child transaction, and so forth.

But a quick internet search shows that North Korea are continuing to steal coins through various "hacks". And then there are the cases like Atomic wallet, which has been around for years, suddenly losing millions of dollars worth of coins. Just because something hasn't been hacked yet doesn't mean it's secure indefinitely. If I generated a private key with 50 bits of entropy, then it might last long enough to fund and and then spend from within a day or two, but if you store coins on it long term then they will be stolen eventually.

You will still see lots of people on this forum "recommend" that people download bitaddress or iancoleman and run it on an airgapped machine in order to generate a private key or seed phrase. While these tools should obviously be ran on an airgapped when using them to interact with pre-existing private keys or seed phrases, I've long argued against using any website, airgapped or not, to generate entropy from scratch.

Looking at previous prize winners, the majority of them are long time users of this forum who will be well aware of the dangerous of custodial wallets and all probably own one or more hardware wallets already.

For the newbies who win a prize, giving them a hardware wallet teaches them to accept and use hardware wallets which have been handled by an unknown number of third parties, which is not good practice, in addition to requiring them to dox themselves to another forum user. Further, different people are going to want different things from a hardware wallet. You mentioned Trezor, for example, whereas I will never use a Trezor advice again given their anti-privacy stance and their partnership with blockchain analysis. Far better to give bitcoin as a prize and let people buy their own hardware wallet of their choosing directly from the manufacturer if they wish. This is safer and more secure.

Doesn't really matter, considering they aren't open source: https://github.com/ngraveio/zero-firmware

And given that their secure element and OS are going to remain closed source (https://support.ngrave.io/hc/en-us/articles/4409555395217-Is-the-ZERO-open-source-), then we will just have to take them at their word. Note that their word includes calling their device "100% offline" and "the coldest wallet", but also involves connecting it to a computer via USB in order to update it.

+1 to no physical prizes. In previously years I've very sadly had to turn down some very cool collectibles, a hardware wallet, and was one of three to also turn down a very generous all expenses paid trip to England to watch a live soccer game courtesy of Sportsbet.

Haha. Welcome to our broken government:


Senators attach completely unrelated pieces of legislation and completely unrelated amendments to bills all the time, as a way to sneak them through. Other senators will turn a blind eye to these unpopular pieces of legislation in return for their original legislation being passed without being vetoed. Which is why we end up with nonsense crypto legislation unless we agree to spend more and more of our tax money on bombing other countries.

We discussed this paper already in another thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5395587.msg62997786#msg62997786

And as I said in that thread, I think a far more accurate take away from that paper is that everyone has their own intrinsic bias. 10 of the 48 participants showed a bias to the opposite side, not the same side, and there was one individual who showed an extreme 60/40 bias.

This remains the gold standard, and simply start each flip from the same starting conditions (i.e. heads up) to completely eliminate any bias in your flipping technique.

I've noticed a slight decrease in the number of free remixes I've been getting with Whirlpool coinjoin during the last few days, but nothing major, and overall capacity continues to increase: https://nitter.cz/SamouraiDev/status/1725484162734256442#m. So I'm continuing to mix my coins despite the high fees, and I'm not paying a single sat for the privilege.

Your other option would be to perform a single swap from Bitcoin to Monero, and then transact with Monero as much as you want where fees are more reasonable.

I've read through the links you provided, and while there are some good things about their system, there are some bad things as well.

Combining their RNG with entropy from physical sources is good. Ambient light from a camera is good depending on how they extract the entropy from the picture (although the article does not go in to that). Fingerprints are bad, for the same reasons that all biometrics are bad - they are easily copied and easily faked. The user interaction section is utterly meaningless. Swapping around 8 substrings gives 8! = 40,320 combinations, which could be bruteforced in a second. This part is security theater rather than anything meaningful.

Their justification for their back up system makes a lot of incorrect statements:

Multi-sig.

You go to your second back up.

And their back up system is even weirder. They use two steel plates, one acting as a decryption key for the other. So if you lose one, you've lost your coins. So no different to a standard back up, except now you've got two separate single points of failure. But then they say if you lose the decryption plate, NGRAVE can recover it for you? And if you want, you can complete KYC and store the data on your other plate with them as well? All in all it is the worst of all systems - single points of failure, zero redundancy, and a trusted third party being involved as well.

It doesn't even need to be rebroadcast for some nodes to keep it for a year of more.

We know for a fact there are some nodes which run with much higher limits than the default. If you look at https://mempool.space/ for example, their node is showing over 1 GB of memory use, far beyond the 300 MB default, and the graph is still showing all transactions down to 1 sats/vbyte. If you look at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight,0, his node is keeping all transactions, even those paying less than 1 sat/vbyte in fees. There will be many other such nodes which will hold on to OP's transaction indefinitely.

Still, his transaction pays 12 sats/vbyte, so it won't take a year for fees to drop back down to that level.

Would love to see the IRS inundated with tax returns each consisting of a few thousand pages of trades, which ultimately end up with no tax owed but which they have to spend many man hours trawling through. You want to set ridiculous rules? You enforce them.

That's it exactly. Guilty until proven innocent. They will assume you owe them thousands based on erroneous or entirely absent data, and it is up to you to prove otherwise.

I mean, this has been blatantly obvious for quite some time.

You don't need to specify typos or wordswaps when simply descrambling if you are certain your words are correct.

Further, if you are getting the no such file error, then you haven't included the full path to the file. Either put the file in the base btcrecover directory, or add the full path.

I'd run the following command, assuming of course the address you have given is in fact the address at m/84'/0'/0'/0/0:


See this page for more help: https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usage_Examples/2020-05-02_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/Example_Descrambling_a_12_word_seed/

We won't, because the incentive does not change.

If a miner mines an empty block, it does not make them any less likely to mine a full block in the future. It's not a case of a guaranteed 6.25 or gambling for either 10 or 0. Rather, they can earn 6.25 and still have the exact same chance to earn 10 from a full block next.

They still have the exact same proportion of the hashrate and the exact same chance at mining the next full block, regardless of whether or not they broadcast their empty block.

That explanation is wrong. In general, mining pools do not send the entire block to miners, since that is unnecessary and wasteful. They only send the block header, which is the same size regardless of whether the block is empty or full. That is all the information the miners need in order to attempt to mine the block. The delay comes from the mining pool verifying the previous block, removing all the now confirmed transactions from their mempool, creating a new candidate block, and calculating the Merkle root for this new block.

You can read my post in the thread apogio has linked above for a more complete explanation.

There is no such thing as "the" mempool. Just because one block explorer's node has dropped the transaction from its mempool does not mean any other node has followed suit.

As nc50lc has said, OP's transaction is opted in to RBF so he can replace it any time he wants. And even if it wasn't opted in, full RBF is now widespread enough he could still replace it any time he wants with a little extra effort. He does not need to wait for any nodes to drop it.

There is nothing peer to peer about Binance's "P2P" platform.

Peer to peer means peer to peer. It doesn't mean peer to middle man to peer. If there is a middle man called Binance with which you have to register an account, complete KYC, deposit your coins or fiat, and who can spy on everything you do, block or reverse trades, close your account, confiscate your coins, etc., then that isn't peer to peer in the slightest. It is completely centralized in all but name.

There are plenty of exchanges out there which call themselves peer to peer or call themselves decentralized when they are no such thing. This has been the case for years:


How could a truly peer to peer exchange even collect KYC? For an exchange to collect KYC then there must be a centralized third party to do that collection in the first place, at which point you are no longer trading peer to peer but trading with permission of this centralized third party. There are very few truly peer to peer exchanges out there, and even fewer truly decentralized ones. Bisq remains the best option for both criteria.

Who knows. I'm certainly not going to bother wasting my time. Wasabi already has a critical flaw in that it directly funds blockchain analysis and lets them censor users based on secret criteria. You can see the code for this here: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/blob/24843a7840e05056077ad46664a48f62ffb70c4f/WalletWasabi.Tests/UnitTests/WabiSabi/Backend/CoinVerifierTests.cs#L209-L211. Nobody not associated with Wasabi is going to waste their time looking for any further flaws, when this one is already more than enough to mean no one should ever use Wasabi.

Maybe that explains why Wasabi had horrendous address reuse before they finally got round to patching it: https://nitter.cz/HillebrandMax/status/1586249382097088512#m

Don't take it personally. Kruw has been ignoring stuff he doesn't like or can't answer for the best part of a year now: