It may, but not simply because of nodes connecting and disconnecting. By default a node will only relay a transaction when it first learns of it. If your node goes offline and comes back online, it doesn't rebroadcast its mempool. Your node will only rebroadcast your own transactions, not its entire mempool.

But yes, someone else could endlessly rebroadcast your transaction so it never drops from the majority of mempools. However, this doesn't matter. It can be replaced at any time regardless, especially now that full RBF is commonplace. Therefore although your original transaction is never dropped from the mempool, your coins are never frozen or stuck and you can still spend them at any time you like by making a higher fee transaction.

There is another thing to consider for Foundry specifically, and you've already mentioned it - they are the biggest pool.

Since they are the biggest pool, they are finding the largest proportion of blocks. Every time they mine a block themselves, they don't need to go through the process of receiving the block over the network and verifying every transaction in it, because they already did all that when they constructed the candidate block in the first place. So every time they mine a block themselves, there is zero time before they can create a new candidate block filled with transactions (and indeed, they probably already have it constructed and waiting in reserve, just requiring to insert the hash of the previous block).

The only caveat for Electrum seed phrases to hosseinimr93's answer above would be if it any point you used a passphrase in addition to your seed phrase. This shows up on Electrum as the option to "extend your seed with custom words". If you did use a passphrase, then your seed phrase alone will not recover the correct wallet.

If your seed phrase is BIP39 you'll also need to check different derivation paths.

If you know the wallet contains a significant amount of coins, do you know any of the addresses in the original wallet (or can you find out)? This would give you definitive proof you have recovered the same wallet. I assume the original wallet is fully encrypted, and it's not just the private keys which are password protected? If it's the latter, you can open the original wallet and view the addresses, although you cannot spend the coins without the password.

A few months ago it was leaked on Twitter that the Wasabi team were trying to sell shares or even sell the company entirely, and were "open to the idea of merger and acquisition": https://nitter.cz/SamouraiWallet/status/1708068554208117028#m

Does this mean they found some institutional buyer and so some of the devs are selling out and leaving?

And how do you verify that without running your own node?

If I connect to a single third party node, that node can feed me fake transactions and fake balances and I have no way of validating that information and discovering it is fake. Connecting to multiple nodes lessens this risk, but you still cannot completely verify that all these nodes aren't malicious and aren't all sending you fake data. Only by running your own node and validating everything yourself can you be certain.

If your current wallet does not support RBF at all as you say, then you should definitely change to a better wallet. Opt in RBF has been the standard for years. I would worry about what security updates your wallet software is missing if they have been unable to implement such a basic feature at any point in almost a decade.

The only caveat to this I would mention would be for the users who are not planning on leaving their node running 24/7, but are planning to shut down their computer overnight or at other times. When you shut down Core, the chainstate cache is flushed to disk. If you set a very high dbcache, and you are using older hardware (particularly a HDD instead of a SSD), this can take a not insignificant amount of time (upwards of 20-30 minutes).

This has been discussed on the mailing list since as far back as January last year, when the first wave of ordinal spam hit the network. And it was rightly pointed out on the mailing list that banning this kind of data is technically impossible, as I've also said many times in this thread, since the spammers can just move their data to other parts of the transaction which are impossible to ban, such as embedding it with public keys themselves.

Have you considered your biggest issue is using centralized exchanges from which you have to withdraw "your" money in the first place? Why should we start censoring transactions and adversely affect the future security of the network because you didn't use bitcoin peer to peer but instead let a third party take ownership of your money and dictate fees to you?

For 99.99% of altcoins, to make their creators rich.

Yes. Import your seed phrase to a good wallet like Sparrow or Electrum, connect to your own full RBF node or a server running full RBF, and broadcast a replacement.

Yes absolutely, although your client won't go back and download old blocks; rather it will just stop pruning until you hit your new limit.

So let's say you had set your prune limit to 50 GB. You have downloaded and verified the first 200 GB of the blockchain, meaning the first 150 GB has been pruned, and you are storing the next 50 GB. If you now change your prune limit to 100 GB, your client won't go back to redownload blocks you already downloaded and pruned, but will instead just not prune anything until you hit your new prune limit of 100 GB, which you will reach once you are 250 GB through the initial block download.

In the Core GUI you just click on Settings -> Options, and the option to change the prune limit is there.

Whom did you enter?

Exactly! Mandatory genetic testing for everyone!

Haha. I have always found the "estimated time left" on Core to be notoriously unreliable. Assuming you are downloading at least 1 MB/s (12 Mbps should give you 1.5 MB/s as a theoretical maximum), then it should take around 150 hours to download the ~540 GB blockchain, which is the equivalent of 6.25 days if you run non-stop (assuming as well that your hardware can keep up with its speed of verification).

Wait until you discover that every human on the planet produces both estrogen and testosterone! Shocking, I know.

Are we slowly becoming a single merit hoarding organism?

This is only getting worse with the addition of more members, particularly ones like BHC and apogio who frequent the technical boards as I do.

There is no such thing as frozen coins, unless you are using a custodial third party. OP can replace his transaction with a higher fee paying transaction any time he likes.

Because I'm not ready to give up on it quite yet. I do agree with the points about Monero though, and Monero now better encapsulates many of the reasons I got in to Bitcoin in the first place. I've said many times it's the only coin I own and use other than bitcoin and one of the very few alts which I consider to not be a shitcoin. It also remains a lot easier to spend Bitcoin nearly anywhere than it is to spend
Monero, but that is slowly shifting as time goes on.

Haha, classic franky1. I've had him on ignore for a long time. You and I disagree with each other, but can discuss that like adults and put forward our reasoning. franky1 is unable to do that - he is 100% right on all matters and anyone who disagrees with him on any topic is an idiot, as far as he is concerned.

Zero. Such a block would be invalid, since it spends the same coins twice.

The default behavior of a node is never have two or more conflicting transactions in its mempool. When it accepts a replacement, it evicts the original. As such, it would never create a candidate block which contains two conflicting transactions. Should some mining pool edit their software and accidentally mine a block containing conflicting transactions, all other nodes on the network would reject it as being invalid.

Provided you have not been rebroadcasting, some Electrum servers will already have dropped your transaction. Go to Tools -> Network and connect to different servers until your unconfirmed transaction changes to saying "Local". You can then right click on your transaction and delete it, and then make a new transaction spending those coins.

Note that if you delete the transaction but don't make a replacement paying a higher fee, the original may still confirm in weeks or even months if the mempool clears.

It defeats a large part of the reason to run your own node though. If you are going to download a snapshot from elsewhere and trust it completely, then just continue connecting to third party nodes and trust them completely. The whole point is to download and verify the data yourself.

You don't need to store the full 500 GB while performing the initial block download. If you set to prune at 50 GB, then it will only ever keep 50 GB on disk despite downloading the full 500 GB.

If you want to store the bulk of the data on your HDD, I would suggest installing Core on your SSD and then moving the blocks folder to your HDD. It will run much faster this way.

Nothing about RBF makes any of the transactions being replaced invalid.

When someone makes a replacement transaction, think of it as a brand new and completely separate transaction which just happens to spend (some of) the same coins. Because, well, it is. It is not the old transaction with a new signature - it is a completely different transaction. The old transaction is valid. The new transaction is also valid. Both remain completely valid and either can be mined, right up to the point where one of them is included in a block. Only at that point will the other transaction become invalid since (some of) the coins it spends will now have been spent elsewhere.