You're not requesting everything. You'll be asking for the entire blockchain and thereby validating it yourself and thus not having to trust anyone; SPV clients trusts their peers are feeding them accurate information. It is unlikely that it would be an attack vector for OP though, I don't think SPV clients are inherently unsafe or anything to that degree. Having a full node is definitely not only for privacy but also for your own security as well.

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Did you import the PGP key of ThomasV? Did you download the correct signature file?

Try parsing it with ASCII and you should be able to see the message decodes correctly.
80 bytes, but I think there is a few bytes of overhead.
No. That isn't a very smart way of encoding messages, though it has been done using a similar method but not with an address that would be obvious to the eye. It'll be inefficient and creates unnecessary UTXOs though.

A better example would be the million Bitcoins that Satoshi has (presumably) mined and never moved.

It is secure, for now. If you can get to a sufficient qubit, you would reduce the complexity of the operations to 128^3. It'll be secure if quantum computing doesn't get any more advanced, but that simply won't be the case.

While a mempool estimate can be used as a reasonably accurate estimate most of the time, the mempool will appear to be fairly uncongested usually after a block and it would slowly start to accumulate again. It happened a few days ago when consecutively blocks were mined and the mempool diminished quite a bit before slowly going back to its usual levels. If you're not in a hurry or if you understand the caveats of relying solely on that, then mempool estimate is better than ETAs as it is far more conservative.

That's where Multisig comes in. You can try making a 3-of-4 Multisig and give two of your children one of the keys each and a lawyer the other, making a total of 3. You can include it in your will so they'll be able to spend if after your death.

An automated system to automatically do so is insecure by nature and would be difficult to implement in the first place. Using Multisig for something like this would be simpler.

You need an interface for communication between Electrum on Android and your hardware wallet it is not as straightforward as porting it from Windows to Android. Most of the hardware wallets uses USB and you'll have to use the phone's USB C port for communication which could be difficult.

No. I was talking about the Electrum servers.

Your client sends the list of addresses in your wallet to the server that you're connected to and thus links that group of addresses to each other as well as to a specific IP address. Regardless, it doesn't have to be done in Electrum as well, Bitcoin Core would be fine too.

Yeah I found it.

The privacy policy seems to indicate that they are able and will store certain personal identifiable information. While they *probably* won't have access to your private keys, you cannot assume that they are not actively tracking their users as well. Their privacy policy allows them to collect certain information and also share them to law enforcement if necessary.

The inputs for that transaction was spent in 4b483d81bcfadc62278fb456d7ead952639b052075cde3c156ee5314d4e039f8 to a different address. It is possible to create different transactions that spends the same inputs but are spending to different addresses. As it is confirmed, the transaction that you have referenced is now invalid.

UTXOs cannot be spent twice, in the event of two competing transaction, the transaction which confirms first wins and the the other will be invalid.

Bitcoin Core requires OSX 10.12 and above. If you're able to upgrade to that version, you're fine though the synchronization process would be very slow.

I wouldn't buy a dedicated node for this, you'll probably be trying to run a node to help the network instead of using it as a wallet and they are still not that powerful. If you're able to get a new computer, it'll work just fine.

Opposite of what you are saying. If you're using this, then everyone will be able to see whatever you've included as a message in the transaction.

You'll probably see a whole lot of Accepts but those are merely hashes which meets the predefined difficulty that is dictated by the client. If you're mining with a pool, having a hash above the current difficulty won't net you the whole block rewards but would be proportional to your contributions to the pool.

The current difficulty is at 23,137,439,666,472 so you'll need to find something at that difficulty for it to be a potentially valid block. If it is anything less than that, you'll be awarded proportionally by the pool or if you're solo mining, net you nothing.

Tor will prevent people from linking the group of addresses to your IP but it will not disassociate the addresses from each other. Tor is not a solution for privacy with Electrum. If you want privacy, don't use Electrum.

OP_Return on mainnet has a restriction of 80 bytes but the standardness rules on Testnet are disabled so your transaction will still be standard if it exceeds that limit. Reduce the message size if you want to send it on mainnet. I second the sentiment, OP_return encourages blockchain spam and is expensive as well.

Google Play encourages phishing, they don't actively check for those apps but only does malware detection. Android does run each apps in their individual sandbox so it will limit the spillover effect quite a bit though I'm sure certain zero day exploits can bypass this. Google Play apps can still evade malware detection and it has happened before. If anything SolarWinds or CCleaner has taught us, even the more popular and well known apps can still be compromised.

Yep, you've got a point but that would be contributing marginally, even a smaller percentage when you're talking about the individuals. A single S9 would be worth 100s of those USB miners. Statistically speaking, most of the solo mining pools barely gets a block in a few months (I think CKPool only got a few blocks last year?). A single person cannot make that much difference, which is why I said it's negligible.

I think most people solo mine purely as a lottery for profits, there are much better ways if you want to actively contribute to Bitcoin.

If you need privacy, use an altcoin; Bitcoin is not designed to be anonymous in the first place. Satoshi made it clear in the whitepaper that the privacy aspect comes from the fact that it is not linked to any identity. Bitcoin cannot achieve perfect privacy without a radical protocol change, transparency is a core element of Bitcoin. If we've had so much resistance over block size, then I bet there'll be even more when it concerns privacy. Not sure if he didn't predict Blockchain analysis or if he didn't think there was an appropriate solution for it.

Unless you can:
1. Make a good proposal to change the network in a manner that preserves its privacy without radical protocol changes.
2. Convince everyone that this is a good idea.

I can't see how Bitcoin would improve on privacy especially when there are far more important things to focus on first. I don't think you can have any privacy without being conscious about it, Tor has integrated loads of features to improve on the privacy but there is really nothing that Tor can do if the user makes any mistakes. Privacy is far more of a users habit and being overly reliant on Bitcoin/altcoins to provide you with the said privacy gives most user a false sense of security.

So what if it is tainted. Most of your coins are infact tainted to some extent, either intentionally or inadvertently. If you want to restrict use of tainted coins, then I'll consider it as a form of government policy to discourage the adoption of Bitcoin. "Taint" is a fundamental concept that is flawed and any businesses who enforces that should be avoided (like Coinbase ), because obviously if they're willing to trace your deposits, then they probably don't care about your privacy at all.

Using a mixer does not mean that you're participating in illicit activities. If your exchange restrict this, then I would advise you to perhaps switch to another one.

Yes, Application Specific Integrated Chip. Low cost and low power consumption doesn't go in the same sentence when you're talking about a PC, most PCs would go up to 200Watts underload at least. My 2Pac runs on a USB port.
Mining does not incur significant bandwidth.

Negligible. If you don't find a block within the time that you're running the ASIC, you're not doing anything that is contributing to the network at all.

Doing a complete overhaul of the protocol to add privacy features is not easy and probably won't be well received, if anything politics would play a huge part in this other than the technical challenge. If you're able to, I think making a BIP with features specific to Bitcoin is possible.

I don't think Bitcoin should have to adapt to solve every single issue out there, it simply can't. Altcoins can be much more versatile in this aspect and Bitcoin should focus on its core ideas from when it was created in 2009.
I mean, if Binance blocks XMR, then they'll lose out on trading any of that currency pair right? What's the point with privacy if Binance already collects so much information on you?

If your exchange blocks transactions, then you probably shouldn't use it. Actual P2P exchange like Bisq doesn't have this issue. Bitcoin is fungible, 1 BTC = 1 BTC.

Isn't that privacy.

But that is why we don't reuse addresses. By sending the change to a new address, any outsider will have a harder time deducing which addresses are supposed to be the recipient address. With the inclusion of a mixer or CoinJoin, you can break the link and improve your privacy,
Bitcoin is fungible, 1 Bitcoin = 1 Bitcoin. No wallet/addresses/account should be blacklisted and there is a case to be argued that you aren't involved in illicit activities. Arresting someone solely based on the fact that they have tainted coins is absurd, innocent until proven guilty.