Remember that this isn't the first time China has tried to ban Bitcoin. When it happened previously the value dropped quite sharply from 1K to $300. The regulations didn't really work then, people still used Bitcoin in China, nothing much really changed.

People have to realize that Bitcoin is designed to be intrinsically bad for the government. Thinking that any government would be favourable to Bitcoin is just plain fantasy.

Your second post is actually off-topic, would be more suited for altcoin discussion.

Regardless, your assertions are quite absurd. Jack Ma doesn't own 90% of Bitcoin in China. Majority of his net worth comes from his holdings within the companies, and the remainder that he has is definitely not enough to control such a significant amount. China doesn't run Bitcoin, US in particular is very careful about foreign interference, especially from Chinese. It's kind of dumb to say China is trying to distant themselves from those cryptography, Chinese sites still uses AES as a cipher suite for their TLS. Can you please back your statements up with some stats?

You have to check your sources: https://taproot.watch/.

There is also a BIP proposed for mandatory activation in the event that miners don't signal support. There really isn't much politics that should involve the miners and favour them into hindering the activation.

They're not.
Debatable. To any newbies, don't go throw your 6 sided dice 32 times and expect to not get hacked. That is not sufficient entropy. Humans are mostly worse than computers at generating anything with sufficient entropy and considering that you've been preaching about your magical private key cracker, I would think that you would have emphasize for people to generate their keys with more entropy

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I believe the rest has been addressed enough. Your paranoia is unfounded; Trezor gives you the full schematics to build your own, so does ColdCard and various other HW wallet operators. You can just as easily supply your own entropy to them or use your own generated seed. If you cannot trust any wallets, then I really don't see how you're going to use Bitcoin at all.

We're talking about seeds here, so talking about the derived private keys would be totally offtopic.

Private keys are the same, BIP39 and Electrum, and also pretty much any other wallets will generate private keys of the same format, ECDSA private and public key pairs are the same for Bitcoin's curve. WIF is adopted by most if not all wallets as well.

The key difference lies with the limitations of BIP39 seeds, reliance on wordlist for checksum is not ideal, lacking versioning and contributing to any user's confusion, and as BlackHatCoiner mentioned, better checksum by lowering risks of false positive. I don't think there is any argument to be made here, you can refer to Electrum's docs on their seed system and you'll realised that it doesn't lack anything that BIP39 has but improves on many of the shortcomings

In the history tab, select your unconfirmed transactions, you should have an option to see the Details and there should be an option called Bump Fee. Click on it and adjust your fees accordingly.

Hmm, not really sure if that really matters actually. I don't recommend people to start mixing seeds or start to use seeds interchangably. Perhaps there could be some utility to help people recover Electrum seeds? Definitely not a deal breaker but the point is, if you're going to use Electrum, just might as well generate a seed that uses Electrum's standards. Even if it were to be abandoned in the future, I'm confident to say that there will either be a utility to convert it to a BIP32 seed or users can just transfer it out somehow.

I would definitely be sure that BIP39 will eventually be abandoned (probably still have some support) at some point in time, or at least wallets will start adopting a different standards for mnemonic.

Yes they have. I think it has been like this since 4.1.0.

Press the "Target (mempool)" and it should toggle.
Make sure "Final" is left unchecked.

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With reference to the above, UTXO selection only works to segregate your identity. It helps the user to maintain multiple identities but it also makes it easy for someone to track a user through its individual identities and make connections using one way or another. This provides at most a mediocre privacy improvement and is by no means a high level of privacy.

Electrum's method is fully transparent and it is only a difference with generating the seed for use with BIP32. You can always derive your private keys with Electrum seeds and there really isn't any obvious disadvantages.

Conversely, would you rather continue using a standard that is "Unanimously Discourage for implementation"? BIP39 is only used because it is proposed in a BIP. Just because there is a proposal for it, doesn't mean everyone should use it. It's almost like having a BIP for increased block size... It got rejected at the end.



What version of Electrum are you using?

It is frankly quite absurd to be so obsessed with what either of them have said. The statistics are there and there is no reason why people would value either of their opinion over the statistics.

Fact is, the economics of mining at that time isn't like what it is now. I'm fairly sure when it was dominated by CPUs or perhaps GPU, the power consumption was far, far lower from how it is now. Your ASIC chips also contain gold and other metals, do you account for them during your estimation of environmental impact? Satoshi also probably didn't expect specialized chips (ASICs) to be produced for this as well. Frankly, we shouldn't really care about the narrative, the facts are out there. Bitcoin, even at its current capacity does what most banking systems and payment systems cannot, being decentralized and resistant to censorship.

Honestly, if you need a legacy wallet, there is simply no reason to choose BIP39 over Electrum seeds. Electrum seeds have obvious advantages over the former and generating it from some other sources raises some security concerns as well.

The story changes with nested Segwit wallet (which I think OP should use over legacy). There's no nested Segwit for Electrum seeds and for which BIP39 would be your only option.

You cannot achieve absolutely privacy with coin control. Doing so allows you to separate the UTXOs and avoid linking addresses together but it does not in anyway helps the user preserve their privacy. Transactions can still be linked, change addresses lowers the degree of confidence in terms of its association but in no way will it improve on privacy. CoinJoin and mixers are your best bet at it but there is always a chance of them compromising your privacy, either intentionally or unintentionally as well. Electrum is notorious for having mediocre privacy features and should not be used if you really care about it.

Having transactions that could be linked together defeats the purpose of having any privacy; any compromise along that chain of transaction will reveal your identity.

Depends on the mempool conditons. There should be a box for you to toggle between Static, ETA and mempool. ETA is the most conservative of them all and almost always guarantees a confirmation within X number of blocks. Mempool reflects the current state and doesn't necessarily guarantee a confirmation; putting it anywhere near 1vMB of the mempool should give you a confirmation within a few blocks, a block would probably shave 1vMB of transactions from the tip.

Fees are quite elevated right now; I would recommend you to just wait a day or two to see if it drops. Alternatively, you can still make a transaction as usual with a lower fee but make sure it is replaceable. Note that doing so would not allow you to lower the fees but would allow you to increase it instead. Be as conservative as you like and keep an eye out for the mempool conditions as well[1].

[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

There are no limits on how much you can send or receive in any Bitcoin wallets, unless they're custodial.

The limits that you're seeing is enforced by the exchanges as part of their KYC policy and validation should increase that. Keeping your Bitcoins on exchanges is not safe and you should not treat them as wallets.

I know Trezor actually overwrite the related sectors with random bits instead of just marking it as unused, which is acceptable. ColdCard, AFAIK has the seed encrypted in the secure element as well, ontop of the fact that it is prohibitively difficult to extract secrets out of it. Not sure about ColdCard's policy but it doesn't wipe the pin code.

Anyways, I'll really rather just microwave it rather than taking my chances when it comes to people with huge amount of resources at their disposal.

Yes. That is the block rewards, if an UTXO is not created for that, then you're not able to spend it at all. The value can be less than the block rewards + TX fees but can never exceed it.

The coinbase transaction doesn't require any reference to any UTXO, simply because there is nothing you have to reference.
OP_return is a kind of output that isn't stored inside the UTXO set of nodes and it allows the value to be 0. In most of the block generation transaction, the OP_return is mostly used to specify the merkle root of the witness tree.

Not necessarily.
Well, yes. Since you're running it on clearnet, whoever is monitoring your traffic (ISPs) would be aware that you're using Bitcoin. However, this doesn't necessarily leak any privacy as nothing sensitive is transferred over clearnet during IBD. Pruned mode or not, it'll download and verify all the blocks. There is no difference in the time taken. If you absolutely need privacy, I'll rather just run it through Tor.

No. It is far more dangerous for you to specify a preference of nodes for the client to connect. There is no reason why you should trust us, or any website to provide you with a list of non-malicious nodes. DNS seeds are used only when necessary and Bitcoin Core already attempts to diversify the nodes that the client connects to. Bitcoin Core does have countermeasures and should provide sufficient privacy unless you're ONLY connected to malicious nodes which is quite unlikely.

Perhaps that is why he went to such great lengths to attempt to conceal his identity?

Actually his identity matters, kind of. He's potentially in control of a million Bitcoins, imagine if one day we find out that Bitcoin was actually created by the North Korean Government .

Come on. That is called a burn address for a reason, it is practically impossible for someone to have a keypair that corresponds to that address. Not even Satoshi would know, it is mathematically improbable.