The escrow system that Satoshi mentioned here is not like the escrow system that we have here. Most of the escrow services has the intermediary holding full control of the funds and becoming a mediator in the event that something goes wrong. What Satoshi described was just a rough idea of how P2SH or by extension, Multisig currently works but in a 2-of-2 manner. A correct system would be whereby there is a 2-of-3 multisig where a trusted party holds onto the third key as a mediator if something goes wrong. This is only effective if the third party is trusted by both and also neutral to both of the parties involved in transaction.

Escrow existed before Bitcoin.

No and No. The secure element within those are designed to resist tempering attacks and you can't do all that much even if you were able to desolder and try to reverse engineer the secure element like in this case. It doesn't allow bruteforcing on the chip itself as it'll erase the contents after several attempts. This doesn't mean that secure elements are immune against them though. People were able to introduce faults into the secure element by using a laser fault injection which was fairly expensive to do.

It doesn't matter if it is open source or close source if the chip was poorly designed in the first place.

You enter the Bitcoin address so it should lookup your private key from your address.

The message is actually verified against your Bitcoin address as that is one of the three elements given to the person verifying it. Due to the unique characteristic of ECDSA, it is possible to derive the possible ECDSA public key from the signature itself. It is converted into the corresponding Bitcoin addresses during verification and then verified against the address given by the other party.

I don't think Blockchain.com is always at fault. Most of the losses actually results from user's negligence and there is nothing that they can do.

But, of all the online wallets out there, Blockchain.com is likely one of the worst coded ones. The incident for which they pushed an untested update and resulted in the R values reused inadvertently was an amateurish mistake and unforgivable. If you don't want to lose your funds or suffer any headaches, steer clear of Blockchain.com.

Blockchain.com does require their user to choose their fees but the way that it is labelled is potentially misleading, "Priority" and "Regular" for example. Without giving their users a clear timeframe for it to be confirmed, it usually causes much more confusion than the other wallets which gives a clear estimate. I'm not really sure about Coinbase though.

Its quite common for services to overcharge for their transactions; lesser loads for their support if the transaction gets stuck. Fees estimation algorithm tends to usually be more conservative with their estimates, depending on what client you're using. Referencing mempool directly either using an online UI or the wallet might be confusing for the user. At least ETAs would give a much clearer estimates on the timeframe.

You need to know the address to do so. On the paper wallet, is there any indication of the address? It starts with either 1, bc1 or 3. If there is, scan that QR code and key it into a blockexplorer like Blockchair.com to check the funds within that address.

I would highly recommend you to sweep the funds within to a new wallet that you control. It is never good to have someone else generate the keys for you, in this case the Bitcoin ATM I presume.

Hmm? I'm getting the idea that my post answers your topic subject as well as the general direction of your post.

The most accurate estimation of the maximum number as of now is less than 8 billion. It probably is exaggerated but as stated, it doesn't count those who don't store Bitcoins on their own addresses but rather on custodial wallets either for quicker trading or a higher perceived security. It's far more common than you think. I'm going out on a limb and say that each user probably doesn't have 10 addresses with funds at a given moment.

That is assuming that there is an insignificant amount of users holding their Bitcoins at exchanges and services.
No. You cannot assume that the active users on Reddit and Bitcointalk are all holding any amount of Bitcoins. Some users may very well just be participating in the discussion or are interested in holding coins other than Bitcoin.

There really isn't any way to calculate the number of unique Bitcoin users due to how its structured.

There isn't a requirement to maintain incoming connections nor can the node decide whether other nodes should connect to it. Outgoing connections is capped at 10 but can be lower as well. Incoming connection doesn't change with the discovery of other nodes but the knowledge of your node by others. 2 of the peers are reserved as block-relay only nodes which is read from anchors.dat.

Minimum 2GB if you prune it. ~ 370GB without.
OP is talking about the wallet.dat file.

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OP, the space occupied by the wallet.dat file is not an accurate representation of the number of transactions stored within. The size can be due to miscellaneous data being stored within. For reference, my empty wallet.dat occupies about 1392KB as well. If you want to be sure, just make sure you've loaded the correct wallet.dat and try to rescan again.

Correct. You can't rule out anything in this aspect but they can only mitigate the possible attack vectors to a certain extent. Intrusive attacks like those are fortunately preventable the same way as you store your valuables; in a safe.
I'd say if you want to be safe, then that's probably the way to go. Most people probably can't afford to have both and have marginal benefits. If the common attack vectors for all(?) of the hardware wallet is through opening it up and glitching it, then there's an easy way to eliminate this. I'm not an expert so probably someone more knowledgeable in this field can correct me, I would assume that such attacks becomes harder with a secure element as similar attacks require the secure element to be compromised which is something it is designed to be resistant against.

No. There isn't any similar vulnerabilities affecting Ledger to the same effect.

There is also SD encryption available on Trezor as well and having one without the other would be useless. [1]

[1] https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual:SD_card_protection

I've used this before: https://www.pelock.com/products/hash-calculator.

Go to the page and input the values in hash hex bytes and scroll down for RIPEMD160.

Assuming that that address does indeed belongs to FBI, do you think they bought it legitimately or do you think they seized it from the criminals? From some people's perspective, seizing assets would probably be equivalent to theft, no matter what the crime is. Afterall, the proceeds from selling them would probably just be used to fund the law enforcement further and nothing changes from the taxpayer's contributions. So, would it really matter if it gets stolen yet again?

I don't know. Sounds like no one would really care.

I've ordered a lot of things to my PO box, hardware wallet included. Reshipper are companies which takes your mails parcels and ship them to you after or lets you collect it somewhere. It creates another hop in the shipping process.

Bitcoin Core's derivation paths are hardened so there's no extended public keys, if that's what you're looking for.

If you're looking for child private keys and extended master private key, then it's possible. In the console, run

Replace it with your own path to file.

It's an exe so it doesn't need any installation actually. Once installed, cd to the directory and start running Vanitysearch.exe bc1q.../3.. or 1...

Yup of course. Integrated graphics wouldn't be used anyways, or at least I don't think anything can utilize it. I just tested it out again with my Ryzen 5 5600X. I'm able to churn out 40MKeys/sec on Vanitygen and generated 1rano within a second. In comparison, the estimates in the first website puts it at 20 hours.


Anyhow, the second and third website uses split key and I'm too lazy to test it out. I would definitely feel safer generating it on my own rather than having someone else do it for me, split key or not.

Due to the contents of the block headers, it is quite near impossible for two miners to generate blocks containing different transactions but have the same block hash. Unless of course, there is a collision. I'm assuming you're talking about blocks at the same height.

Taking Block A and Block B as the block that gets generated at approximately the same time and nodes will see either of the blocks. Once the miner receives either of the block, they would start working on it. Miners will start building a block by referencing Block A or Block B, mostly depending on the block which it sees first. Once a miner that was mining ontop of Block A finds a Block (calling it Block C), the half of the network that didn't see Block A first would simply just request data of Block A and accept both Block A and Block C while discarding Block B and those that accepted Block A first would just simply verify and accept Block C.

Since the chain containing Block A has a larger proof of work, this means that the network follows the chain for which Block A and Block C is in but discards Block B. As a result, Block B doesn't get rewarded as it is not included in the longest chain and thus the Coinbase transaction that I have mentioned won't exist.

A block is valid if it meets the required target and doesn't violate any protocol rules. In the event that there are two or more competing blocks at the same height, the chain which gets lengthened first will win while the others will be discarded.


None. The miner is responsible to calculate the appropriate fees that they can receive as well as the block rewards. It is located in the Coinbase transaction[1] though a miner can choose to only claim none or parts of it as well. In a sense, the miner awards the fees + block rewards to themselves in the coinbase transaction.

[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/5474230016045376a7b6e9feabbfec4f413e48dcc9348abea6c1575bc3d6dabd

Split key generation is safe as long as you don't combine the keys on an online website, someone was tricked into combining their part private key as well IIRC. No one should ever trust any website when generating vanity keys in the first place, whether it runs locally in your browser or not. No one would probably waste their efforts to try to verify if the source code matches or if it doesn't generate the addresses randomly.

Vanitysearch is really not that hard to use. Download the exe and use command prompt to run it. If you have a half decent GPU, your speed would probably be a ton faster than these sites.