If you want something that isn't as complex, you can implement a database systems which doesn't require much computational power at all, ie. Visa. That hardly helps with decentralization or security at all.

Mining in the context of PoW offers a way for the network to achieve consensus and at the same time having huge amount of costs being incurred. In Bitcoin and other similar cryptos, mining is a necessity in the system. I find the issue pretty much discussed to death. There are obviously various solutions that probably require less resource consumption... Is Bitcoin going to switch to that? Probably not. That is the end of discussion.

Same argument can be made against most activities that produces huge amounts of emissions on a daily basis yet providing less utility than Bitcoin.

Sure, PoW does result in quite a lot of environmental impact. That is a feature, where it is necessary to incur large costs to provide security for the network. There has been plenty of arguments made against PoW but it doesn't really make sense to change. Bitcoin doesn't produce any emission, mining does. If anything, the responsibility of this lies on the government to reduce the electrical consumption through regulatory measures. Don't really understand why RBF is in this conversation.

There are plenty of other ways to try to ensure consensus but none of them incurs as much costs as Bitcoin which is what we're looking for. Even if there is a better method, changing the algorithm involves getting the approval of the various stakeholders which is practically impossible.

No. The probability of anyone generating a private key that corresponds to those address is so astronomically small, which is the same as trying to break any other address given sufficiently random entropy. There is simply no reason for people to doubt whether you're generating an address that is in fact not intended to be a burn address.

Inclusion of OP_return is quite trivial, wallets like Electrum and Bitcoin Core all supports it. By parsing the blockchain for matching strings in the OP_return, you will be able to identify those which were burned for your purpose. That is not difficult and should be pursued if you don't want to contribute to blockchain bloat.

It is finite.

Bitcoin's block rewards follows a geometric progression where the rewards halves every 210,000 blocks. If you were to take the sum of the geometric progression, it would be 21 million. This means that in a scenario whereby you have infinite number of blocks, the total supply cannot exceed 21 million no matter how divisible it gets. Making something more divisible doesn't change the fact that the total supply is the same. The value of each denomination is still proportionally smaller.

It shouldn't happen. After the user clicks Max, Electrum will send all the remainder after the fees when the user adjusts the fees in the advanced preview and should never send anything back to the change address. I'm unable to replicate this. When you adjust the fees in the advanced preview, did Electrum add another change address at that point?

There isn't anything when you run Bitcoin Core with CMD. It'll only run Bitcoin Core and not display anything else.

Anyhow OP, if that is all you get from the debug.log. It is an ungraceful shutdown, debug.log will have several lines about shutting down Bitcoin Core instead of just stopping there abruptly. Is there any antivirus or any administration programs that blocks Bitcoin Core from running? Inter-Logic seems like some company that is involved in IT management, is it a company device?

An example here: https://twitter.com/bittlecat/status/1207621591820951552. They resolved it by returning the funds and here is their official response: https://www.binance.com/en/blog/414733786553217024/CZ-on-Regulations-Exchanges--Privacy. To a larger extent, Coinbase has always been known to block accounts that were sending to/from gambling site, that is much more common. Also, another example here: https://twitter.com/McHodled/status/1222172084610027523. Examples are non exhaustive.

I've never been banned while using ChipMixer on Binance, not saying that it is immune just that CoinJoins are a lot more obvious.

Exchanges (and governments) want to track their users and don't like it when their users attempts to evade it.

It only works assuming that the both the blocks and the rate of transactions are approximately constant. Most fees estimation takes into the fee rates for the previous blocks and use the data points to build out their own fee estimation. This is by far the most accurate way to eliminate volatility of the block intervals as it takes into account a much larger history. If the block were to be mined 10 seconds before and you choose a 1vMB from tip, it would at the very least take 2 blocks to confirm or perhaps even longer.

If you think estimatesmartfees has too conservative of an estimate, then you can change the parameters if you're using Bitcoin Core for a more economical one. While it is by no means perfect, it is a far better estimation than what we can do by looking at the mempool distribution.

Thanks.. I misinterpreted the BIP and thought it was referring to a single transaction chain.

Instead of spamming useless posts like this, do try to use Google. There are plenty of information on this, either on Bitcointalk or elsewhere and there is really no need for another one.

Bitcoin mining will be subsidized by the transaction fees with the equilibrium on the revenue/cost maintained by the difficulty.

Depends on how you're making use of it. If there are certain heuristics that can identify the correct traits (round outputs, 1 to 1 transactions), then there is little to no taint being removed as there is still a fairly high certainty that people would assume that both addresses are linked in some way. Though obviously you're still able to tell the exchange that you do not control those addresses in the chain, I wouldn't bet on it.

You can replicate whatever Samourai does yourself; send your coins through multiple hops, adding a change address for each, different time intervals, fees, etc. Basically just making it seem as if each of the transactions were sent by different people in different wallets. Benefit of Samourai is that it's done automatically and thus prevents user's incompetence from ruining their privacy.

So, most exchanges will and should give the benefit of doubt to their user. Unless proven by a direct link, there is no basis for an exchange to assume that the transaction path was initiated by the same person. There is a reason why (or at least what I've seen) that exchanges only take action with direct CoinJoin transactions or transactions from gambling sites.

Exactly. However, it is important to note that monopoly will exist in most systems, if it is fundamentally based on the virtue of whoever having more resources being in an advantage.

The problem with PoS mainly lies with how it doesn't require consumption of resources during the mining process. If the process doesn't cost the miners any resources, then there is lesser incentives for a miner to be honest. PoW functions with the fact that there is so much resources being consumed during the process and it would undoubtedly cost the miners a lot if they were to try to attack Bitcoin. The resource consumption is what keeps Bitcoin secure, if you can't come to terms with it, you should probably criticize the financial systems around the world for their electrical consumption as well.

This: https://github.com/jonasschnelli/bips/blob/master/bip-0324.mediawiki actually.

It isn't designated as a BIP yet in the main repository.
ISPs can do whatever a sybil attack can do, as they have MITM abilities. That and since they monitor both incoming and outgoing traffic, they will be able to determine the transactions that are related to the user, with a fairly high certainty.

Yes, if you need to hide the fact that you're using Bitcoin, you need Tor.

AFAIK, Samourai actually charges a fee for that feature as well. I think 0.002BTC per ricochet?

No vulnerability, or at least any important one that I am aware of.

First of all, "taint" is a concept that isn't always accurately interpreted. Taint often has different measurements across various exchanges or blockchain analysis companies and it is impossible to tell how they actually determine the taint. Using historical data will not always be accurate. Samurai's method introduces the hops which can help the user provide plausible deniability by claiming that they were not directly involved in said illegal activities. Exchanges has often disregarded taint due to its inaccuracy but rather take actions solely based on the transaction that is sent to their exchange, be it a CoinJoin sent directly or from a gambling site. In this respect, having multiple hops will help.

It is not a guarantee for the service that you're using to assume that the coins are clean just because they've been through multiple hops. There can be tell tale signs, eg. having the hops within a short period of time, 1 to 1 transaction, etc. It is far better for the user to be using a service like that if they don't know what they're trying to achieve here. Electrum should definitely not be used; the server will know that you're just sending your funds to yourself, unless you assume multiple identities for each transfer.

Right click on the transaction, select 'Copy raw transaction'. Go to Help > Console and type in the following:

sendrawtransaction [Paste the string here]

The raw transaction is copied to your clipboard, you'll have to replace the field accordingly.

This is unfortunately a side effect of PoW, where miners will always flock to places which gives them the greatest profit margin. There is nothing you can do about this.

The government needs to control at least 51% of the network's hashrate to effectively enact any censorship or attacks. That comes at quite a huge cost, especially since ASICs are fairly proprietary and you have to specifically buy Bitcoin ASICs. While it is certainly possible for government to try to seize as many mining farms as possible, I highly doubt that it would reach an extent where they can get that much hashrate. There is currently little incentive for government to do so.

Actually, since Bitcoin Core limit the number of ancestor transactions in an unconfirmed chain to 25, the 99 child transaction is quite redundant. You wouldn't be able to do RBF with anything longer than that as the transactions simply wouldn't have even been relayed.

I think the BIP is a bit outdated and the limit was changed after the BIP was drafted.

You don't. It will send the addresses to the server and the downside being you're exposing your privacy to whichever server you're using. The process can be slightly complicated as well.
You can dump your private keys in its entirety. Install the latest Bitcoin Core and go to Help>Console and type in :
Replace D:/ with the directory you want. The output will be a file named wallet with all of the private keys in it, you can open it with a text editor. Since you're downloading Bitcoin Core anyways, just synchronize it fully and transfer your funds elsewhere.

If you are not familiar with Linux or running a dual boot, I really recommend you to not do so. It'll probably end up complicating things more than it needs to be. You can prune the blockchain as well, if size is of any concern.

There is next to no point. The unsigned binary is as safe if you can use certutil to check the SHA256 sum of the file, and if it matches with the signed PGP message (which you can verify), then it would be safe. Electrum's binaries are signed but it doesn't mean that it is safe, you still have to validate it using PGP. I'm hoping your helper knows what he is doing.

Remember to validate your installation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0

Traffic analysis as a deanonymizing attack works best for sybil attacks but not particularly useful for individual transactions.

It is mostly not feasible for mass surveillance as the size of a transaction is so small and there is definitely some delay before it reaches one of their monitoring nodes. Traffic is constantly being used most of the time a 300 byte spike gives little to no indication unless you're specifically being targeted. At which point, traffic analysis would be the least of your worries.


Legality is not in the question here. The user doesn't have to know.

Without being sure that the connection is authentic with no MITM, an encrypted connection is practically useless.

MITM attacks can happen and has already happened with certificates, self-signed or not. Self-signed is outright insecure, CA-signed is merely as useful if the ISP/government doesn't have the means to coerce some trusted CA to make one for them. Being sure of the stream being encrypted with no MITM requires the user to specifically verify that the certificate is correct with the owner of the other node, or trust the CA to be certifying them correctly.

There is little point when you're generating the wallet on an online computer and making it a watch-only wallet afterwards. It'll only protect you if your computer gets compromised afterwards (assuming you deleted the wallet properly without any means to recover it). It does nothing if the malware is already in your computer, which is more often than not the case.