It isn't that much of a concern. Miners cannot be concerned with fluctuating prices, so at the prices, we can estimate an electrical consumption of roughly 60Twh per year and that is excluding all the miners that are currently in the midst of being redeployed. Since fees in a block are quite variable, there is no point trying to estimate that. At current electrical consumption levels, the annualized consumption is more than Kuwait's which is quite significant. For each halving, which is every 4 years, for the sustained profits, we expect either a doubling of total transaction fees or price of Bitcoin just to maintain the profit margins.

Not out of the realm of possibility, 4 years is quite a long time. Even if we were to calculate using a far lower bound of computational power, it still wouldn't make sense or neither is it very feasible for anyone to attack it. The effects of halving is most significant at the start, with the transaction fees being more important in the later parts.

Yes, that is correct.

Binding that address will make your Core instance to only listen on that address so that connections from others to your node can only be done through the address that you've specified but connections to other nodes are already routed through the proxy.

Which is the problem. In the scenario where a drastic drop in hashrate occurs, the block interval rises quite substantially and making the difficulty epoch even longer, thus prolonging the situation. The caveat being that difficulty lags behind the actual situation quite a bit, which isn't the best for the network. Some altcoins did adopt KGW previously to deal with wild fluctuation from Multipools switching to them. Schemes like that are far more responsive but with some security tradeoff.

Ideally, the difficulty adjustment should be long enough that variance is eliminated sufficiently while still making it prohibitively expensive or difficult for possible partition attacks. Bitcoin doesn't need to change from the seemingly arbitrary number of blocks that Satoshi decided on. While we've had quite a few instances where the block interval was prolonged quite a bit, it isn't that big of an issue, mainly due to its rarity and would be more complicated to change the retargeting parameters.

It does. If you're using any proxy, Tor for example, peers can still connect to you via your clearnet address. This can happen even if you specify oniononly, which only ensures outgoing connections to onion address but doesn't restrict your incoming connections.

If your IP has previously been used with a clearnet address and you didn't bind your Core to your proxy, then incoming peers can still establish a connection without going through your proxy or Tor instance.

Using the proxy already routes the connections to the peers over the proxy that is specified.

OP, if you really prefer Electrum over other wallets, then you can probably use an older APK to generate a legacy seed. Electrum stores the historical releases here: https://download.electrum.org/4.0.9/. Together with the signatures but I'm not sure how to verify PGP signatures on a mobile with a file. It shouldn't present much risks as long as you can validate the authenticity of a download, certainly more secure than Google Play anyways.

First of all, let's acknowledge that ASICs gets continually eliminated by the competition naturally as the rewards decreases. The network doesn't suddenly gets substantially insecure after the various halvings.

If the cost of executing such an attack gets low enough, that will probably mean Bitcoin isn't doing so well. Attacking it is pretty meaningless, we'll just fork it into another algorithm and the attackers don't earn anything and life goes on. ASICs are highly specialized and aren't that easy to manufacture and get your hands on. Both the electrical constraints, space constraints, hardware constraints will almost definitely persist in the future. These are legitimate hindrance to a successful attack. Purchasing so much ASICs and expending resources just to attack something that is half dead (if the network gets less secure) isn't very smart.

Try scaling the current stater of Bitcoin to any possible attacks, including the resources required, difficulty of obtaining them and the opportunity costs incurred by a state sponsored adversary or a very rich person. You can also scale it down to estimate what happens if a certain percentage of the miners gets eliminated.

Partially true, actually. The decrease in the block rewards are far more impactful at the start, 50 -> 25 -> 12.5 -> 6.25, etc. As we go through more halvings, the transaction fees becomes the major composition of the revenue for the miners. By the 10th halving, the block rewards will dwindle down to 0.1BTC per block. Miners who can't afford to mine will probably exit by then.

The game theory isn't affected. The same logic applies, if the miners or attackers stand to gain more from contributing honestly to the network, then there is no concern.

Depends. I don't foresee it being much more desirable to attack Bitcoin, even if the hashrate of the network drops significantly. The profits gained from an attack is far lower than the cost and the complexity of its execution and double spent Bitcoins can potentially just be worthless still. If it remains as a store of value but the value is still fairly high, then there isn't any problems.

There are tons of factors to Bitcoin's survival. If the block rewards were to be reduced exponentially right now, it won't survive. There isn't any time for the market and the miners to adapt to the far lower profits. If we were to stretch out the decrease in the block rewards, there is far lesser shock for the miners to bear. Important to note that the fees are starting to form a more significant part of the miner's income. If no one uses Bitcoin, then I wouldn't think that there is a point to keep Bitcoin afloat anyways.

As of now, blocks has consistently been filled, less some blocks in the recent weeks. Thus, it isn't a stretch to assume that if the capacity were to be somehow increased, then the transactions and subsequently the fees would be greater as well.

Yes. The compensation for the miners comes in the fees within the blocks. I'm assuming that the volume of transactions by then or the derived fee as a result of off-chain transactions would be sufficient to compensate for it.

It is highly unlikely that Bitcoin would insecure by then. The way the block rewards are reduced gradually pads any impact on the miner's income and we're most likely going to see the impact far sooner than the 2140 timeline.

This only affects 4.1.0 and above. I would classify it as a feature rather than the issue. The password is supposed to be used for every wallet on the device, whether it gets created before or after the password is set. Preventing people from creating new wallets without knowing their current password would preserve the behavior.

Bitpay used to have a risk management system for their payments and often didn't require any confirmations for their small ticket items. Bitpay simply just needed to verify that the transaction is propagated well enough and had sufficient fees. Fee market was less volatile then as well. ​Note that those were the days when opt-in RBF didn't exist, replacing unconfirmed transactions were far harder than it is now. Attackers mostly had to rely on the participation of the miners or in at least once instance take advantage of differing transaction policy across different mining pools.

Those days are over. Fee market is far more volatile, there isn't any good certainty that a reasonable fee would get you a confirmation, unless you're overpaying it. Opt-in RBF is almost always recommended and people should always use it. Don't use on-chain transactions, that won't be cost effective or efficient enough.

Yes it is different.

Regarding your sentiments, someone has tried asking before and they seem to be pretty adamant on not going back on that. In fact they've been trying to make a single password for unlocking for a while now and 4.1.0 was their chance.

Edit: Found it https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/7208.

Electrum probably won't revert back to the previous behavior.

@hosseinimr93: Behavior seems to be related to the password system implemented after 4.1.0. I just tested it out and versions before the unified password works fine. Seems less of a bug to me.

I reproduced this earlier. Looks like a bug, could you open a Github issue on this?

Edit: Anyways I forgot to mention. Kivy uses the same unified password across each of the wallets. It would make some sense if you can't create a new wallet. It is designed for all the wallets to be using the same password.

Sure. If you are thinking of holding Bitcoin, you're thinking that it'll rise in the long term and you're able to sell it at the correct time. Depends on how good you're with market trends, holding could turn out worse than actively trading it. But the topic is about whether people should sell their Bitcoins or hold it for the long term, NOT trading it.


It is not luck. I'm sure there are certain countries that are considered to be tax havens. Again, topic is about insisting to hold it for an extended period of time, instead of each user deciding on their own risk appetite and the profit they're willing to accept.

Sometimes, I feel like people gets over optimistic about certain things and turns it into something that is based on completely irrational fantasy.

Sure, some small (and arguably) quite an insignificant country just recognized Bitcoin. Great! The rest of the corporations and countries are still into greenwashing, sometimes perhaps as a distraction from their true motives. Bitcoin at it's current form is incapable of supporting massive adoption, that is a fact. Fees are high, LN is insufficient. Those are great improvements but it isn't enough right now. Sure, those are unrealized potential but logic should tell you that after the initial hype, those who are truly interested in Bitcoin would've bought it already. Any further increase in price has to be spurred on by massive adoptions and Tesla, given the nature of the company is about as good as it gets.

It is difficult to measure whether Bitcoin is intrinsically underpriced or overpriced. Those who believe Bitcoin is underpriced are probably long term investors; good for them. Go buy more.

That isn't supposed to happen. Electrum doesn't convert their user's wallet, that would be kind of dumb. Considering that they've tried so hard to differentiate different kinds of wallets using their seeds. You might've opened the wrong wallet or something.

Aggregated data doesn't reveal anything sensitive about their users. It is perfectly fine for them to do so and I believe this would be covered under their privacy policy as well. They aren't dumb and this isn't a betrayal.

But yes, 3 of the larger mining pools agreed to share the data.

No. I believe the poster is referring to aggregate data obtained through the mining pools. From the locations of the IP, you can sample and determine the range of miners that are located within China. There is a decent margin of error but since the hashrate was excessively concentrated within China, the margin of error is reduced further. Data appears to be accurate till April, hasn't been updated since. Peak average hashrate (or an estimate of that) is roughly 180EH, it is currently avg of 90 EH right now. Sounds about right.

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China just doesn't want to deal with Bitcoin anymore. Bitcoin mining was a cash cow for them but apparently, it doesn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things.

Yes. As long as you're not accessing or writing to the files at the same time with different instances.