Leaving out the tinfoil hat wearing paranoia that some people have about the government censoring transactions, just due to the locations that pools operate in. There is no way to do this. Do you really think if North Korea, Russia or any of those governments want to move what the US would think should be a censored transaction that the mining pools in Kazakhstan care.

Or if the CIA got the private key for one of the addresses that North Korea has moved their ransomware funds to that Foundry Digital would not happily mine it for them?

With nodes, as o_e_l_e_o said, there are so many out there that it's not a real worry.

-Dave

PayPal is offering the same 4.15 rate and there are a bunch of banks offering better rates here in the US.

Much like not your keys, not your coins. Do you want 1 monolithic company like apple controlling a credit card, a savings account, your crypto info and all that other data that they collect when using their devices?

And lets not forget this thread started with a discussion about Coinbase, who closes accounts for 'their own internal reasons' So you linked your Apple pay to coinbase, who close you for their own reasons. Does Goldman Sachs who is running the savings account find out about it through some internal API communications that we don't know about?

-Dave

Although that article did mention a lot of cuts, if you look at a lot of them, there are a lot that were not going to generate a profit any time soon.

But...What I find interesting is that as part of intel's business plan (IDM 2.0) they are going to produce chips for others. Since as of now Intel has some of the most advanced fab plants in the world.

Even now Bitmain and Canaan and the other players do not produce their own chips. BUT, I can't see them gong to intel to make them if they have a competing product.
Did someone do the numbers and figure out that making chips for miners is going to bring in more money then designing and making their own? Not something you say in public but could be one of the reasons why.

-Dave

Electrum was one of the earlier, perhaps earliest light wallets. So it also has that going for it's popularity. The old school bitcoin users have been using it for over a decade so it just has that kind of traction.
Yes there are a lot of other ones out there, but inertia is a big thing. How many people start using something and even if something better comes along, they keep with what they know.
Perhaps not even bothering to look at other wallets that are out there.

-Dave

Cannot stress this enough if there is a 'real' amount of funds involved. If you are talking about going out to dinner money that's one thing. But treat any funds on your phone as cash and be prepared to loose it at any time. Not to mention, if something does happen, now you have to figure out is it the desktop PC or the phone that caused the funds loss.
Who had access to what and when, and so on.

Better off keeping them separate.

-Dave

-

What wallet are you using?
Are you running LND or C-Lightning yourself?

Ride The Lightning will do it one way, LNbits will do it another and so on.

-Dave

Last time someone was looking the answer was none without talking to them 1st and setting something up with them.

Is this something you can use testnet for? If you are just testing things that's what it's supposed to be done.
If you want to do it all internally there is also regtest.

-Dave

Depending on the speed of the machine & drive & a lot of other things this could take a VERY long time.

Although @nc50lc said minutes/hours I have seen it take a lot longer on an older PC with a wallet with a large number of transactions it really can take a while and even if it does look like the GUI is frozen it is working in the background. Don't force close it or it will start from the beginning again.

OTOH, with a fast PC and a small wallet it is fairly quick.

-Dave

Yeah, keeping the machine running was a big negative for the non tech people out there. Hopefully this time they either set something up that can allow others to host / mirror your store.
Or a plugin for something like Umbrel / MynodeBTC where you just click a button and it does the rest.

And having some other coins would be nice too.

Along with a UI that was not from the early 2000s

So, they do have a lot to do, but at least they are doing something.

-Dave

As has been discussed, these numbers are mostly pointless. You should not care about their assets. Without knowing what they are supposed to have.
Having $100 is great, unless you owe 4 people $100. Then it's....not great.

Having a lot of funds leave your exchange is bad. Unless is was a planned separation of a large client, then it's not important at all.

Spitting out numbers without context and *all* the other data is pointless.

-Dave

Having used custodial LN wallets like WoS and running several of my own nodes too I can see a need for both.
There are some nodes that no matter what I do, short of opening my own channel to them I can't send them funds.^*
Using WoS or Blue Wallet before they shut down worked every time.

Looking at 1ml.com you could see they were only connected to a few smaller nodes and one of the larger ones. So if was tough to find a route, since for a while I only connected to smaller less connected nodes too.

^* Once I opened a channel to WoS and a few other larger ones everything worked great, but if I was locking up that much BTC in a channel I might as well just lock up less and use WoS.

-Dave

And if you go to https://openbazaar.org/ you get a black screen with the text openbazaar 3.0 - coming soon
So it looks like it's coming back.

I sold a few things on it back in the day, bought 1 or 2 things too just to play. It just never got that much traction for some reason.
With crypto becoming more mainstream it will probably do better this time, or at least we can hope.

-Dave

There was a discussion a few years about how the government / bank / whoever would not even have to buy all the miners.
All they would have to do is setup a phony PPS pool that paid some stupid amount of PPS say 120%.
All the miners would flock to that pool, and all they would have to do then is slowly wait till a few of the larger pools went bankrupt since everyone else is mining there.

You would have the pools like foundry that are using their own miners, but how long till the investors start to bail since they are not showing the numbers that other places are.

Yes, there are several flaws with this. But you bet it would cause enough disruption of mining to allow them to do other things.

All it all, a 51% attack from the government / big business is not a big worry for most people.

-Dave

Personally for that much I would go with a colcard https://coldcard.com/ hardware wallet since it supports PSBT https://coldcard.com/docs/glossary#psbt
It never has to connect to a computer and can sign transactions and move them with a SD card from itself to a PC that can transmit.

The PC never has the keys to sign and the hardware wallet never has to connect to an internet connected device.

Not, the easiest way to do it, but it is secure.

As with everything like this DYOR and make sure it will work for you and do what you want the way you want it.

-Dave

Outside of a few programmatic things (can't send due to the way the transaction was made) and some addresses there is no such thing as a lost wallet.
People can CLAIM that they don't have access, and that might even be true at the moment, but you never know what may turn up.
i.e., 'I lost my seed phrase' turns into, 8 years later. 'Oh there is is, it was in the file folder for the water heater, oops'

Attempting to find / create a list of lost or undependable wallets may be an interesting thought experiment. But it would be mostly pointless.

I have coins that I have not touched in more then a decade and am not even 100% the private key I have is good anymore. But it's such a small amount it's not worth the time to figure it out or destroy the collectable it's on.
Is that lost or unknown.

-Dave

There is no way for a LN transaction to be stuck. It either goes through almost instantly, a few seconds up to a minute or 2 at most. OR it's rejected and unable to complete.
No other options, there is no way for it to be pending.

As others have said, this is a scam. Stop wasting time, your money is gone.

-Dave

I know we all know it, but one more time.....
Not your keys, not your coins.
Any exchange can wake up tomorrow morning and ask for KYC. And once your coins are on it, you are stuck.

We like to think that all the places that we are talking about would never do that. We also know that the people running those exchanges can do whatever they want. You always have to keep that in mind.

-Dave

Minor but the # of @ week ending column is the post count more or less of now, not when then week ended (yesterday) unless you counted today's posts too.

-Dave

Due to the IPv4 exhaustion and the sale / transfer of IP space even between regions a lot of those services are best guesses.

Yes, the IP I have from my cable company is setup properly and the IP geolocation is accurate, BUT I have a friend using a small rural ISP who has an IP address that is still, as in YEARS later, linked back to an out of business ISP and their address & geolocation THAT IS NOT EVEN IN THE US. No matter what he does, a lot of places still think he is in Canada.

-Dave

Keep in mind the extra risk with that. Going through MRR if the operator cuts and runs you get your unused portion of the funds back.
If you go private and they run you are stuck. That is one of the only good things about paying the extra percentages to MRR (and nicehash).

Not your mom, not trying to tell you how to do things, but after being here for years I have seen a lot of things go bad and not always someones fault, just something happened and halfway through a deal fell apart.
For any 'real' amount of money, and that amount will vary person to person. Use one of the escrows here on the forum. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2439910.0

-Dave