Yes. Blockchain.com's wallet is notorious for having poor fees estimate as well as poor support in general. I don't think they offer Segwit? I'm not too sure about that. Please stop using Blockchain's wallet.

Using a Segwit compatible wallet would decrease the fees needed substantially. You can try Bitcoin Core, or SPV wallets like Electrum and Wasabi wallet. Having no transaction fees is impossible. You could have some centralised services offering that but they usually have some catch as well.

Using your task manager. Check your disk usage as well.

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Have you by any chance shut down your computer before the (shutting down...) dialog disappears after closing Bitcoin Core? I think your debug.log will provide more insight. In your Bitcoin Core, go to Window>Information and click (Open) below the debug log file. After that, scroll to the bottom and see if there's any information indicating block corrupted or connection timeout. Anything that indicates an error of some sort.

Untrue. Reference client do not rebroadcast any transactions to their peers. Nodes tends to purge transactions after a specified amount of time of it being in their mempool. They will not attempt to rebroadcast the transaction. The responsibility of that lies with the client you're running.

It'll be useful to use a service which will rebroadcast it for you periodically if you want it to be confirmed and not dropped.

Using onlynet=onion flags ensures that the connections made to other nodes are onion nodes as well.

My understanding is that the flag cannot prevent non-onion nodes to be connecting to your clearnet address as the client will listen through both clearnet and Tor. Try specifying the address for the node to be listening to?

Ah, the explanation you need is here[1]. It helps you to propagate your transaction better so more nodes are aware of it. Not very helpful to help you confirm your transactions, just helps to let more nodes know, if your transaction was propagated poorly or a long time ago. Which shouldn't be the case of your transaction.

Since it's mined 2 hours ago (combined with the fact that the previous block was mined ~5mins before), the mempool was getting progressively less congested which means your transaction was most likely paying enough fee to be mined. Blockchain.com does not display the fees in vbyte so I can't determine the exact fees but yeah, that's most likely the case.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5288307.0

It think it works similarly to a Greenaddress wallet. They will generate a transaction with a pre-signed nLocktime transction so you can use it to recover your funds.

That being said, I would never touch anything like this. This feature essentially turns it into a custodial wallet if they ever refuse to issue you the pre-signed nlocktime transaction and even if they do, they can refuse to sign the transactions that you can and force you to wait the pre-determined time before you can recover your funds.

It has decreased to about 15MB right now. If the mempool continues to clear at this rate [1], your transaction has a fairly decent chance of confirming within a few days. That is, unless the price of Bitcoin changes drastically and more people starts to sell again.


[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h

It's quite hard to tell whether the accelerator did something but generally the only working ones are from BTC.com and ViaBTC, both of which are paid and are related to mining pools. It might've been a stroke of luck, which block was your transaction included in?

The way I see it, the only thing you'll really sacrifice is the privacy when you use a free accelerator, assuming that the site doesn't contain any malicious content. I always signal RBF so I'll be able to increase the fee as needed.

The very basis of Bitcoin is to provide a peer-to-peer system where centralised system are out of reach of the government and this just proves that. If such regulations ever comes a reality, the only thing it'll probably affect are US exchanges. Does it harm Bitcoin? Definitely not. Plenty of P2P exchanges and those based overseas as well.

For those who care less about privacy, they probably won't care. For those that want to steer away from government surveillance, there are plenty of easy and accessible ways to transact.

I would think using a floating fee would be more appropriate for OP for which that can be specified in sendtoaddress, together with how conservative the fee rates should be. If it's a fixed fee rate, consolidating all the UTXOs would be better. The fees can also be deducted from the send amount, AFAIK so no math has to be done.

Most people have the misconception that the wallet has to be online for the addresses to be generated. This is untrue as the address doesn't interact with anything online during the generation process. Addresses are a representation of your ECDSA public key for which it's corresponding private key is just a random 256bit integer.

Generating it offline does not completely mitigate all the risks and the benefits that an offline airgapped cold storage should provide. It will only protect you if a malware is present after the generation and that the funds within the address is used on a separate computer. It is fairly hard to secure a paper wallet to the level of a cold storage without some technical knowledge. Try exploring desktop wallets like Electrum and Bitcoin Core instead.

Perhaps just unnecessary paranoia but there is a way to mitigate this. Some pretty cheap printers has no capabilities to connect to the internet and would thus not be able to transmit any information other than through the cable. Printers do store cache so I imagine that'll be an issue. If you really are that paranoid, you can destroy the printer after use/use it exclusively for paper wallets.

I'm not a fan of Ledger Live. I prefer using Electrum. Easier and has more useful features. Adding a full node bridge could make some difference but I wouldn't use it.

I know the 6 hours of uptime is from bitcoin.org but what's the point of them including that? The point of Bitcoin.org's article is centered on how full nodes can contribute to the network, which wouldn't be relevant for most users. Isn't the whole point of this allowing the Ledger user to use their own Bitcoin Core as a data source? Why do they need to include that? You can just spin it up whenever you want and it wouldn't make a difference. Definitely not a "Minimum requirements".

In other words, idiots always gets hacked.

It's the most skewed comparison I've seen. Of course crypto doesn't gets hacked, it can't get hacked per se but it's obviously susceptible to other forms of attacks. It's completely transparent so there's no reason why anyone needs to "hack" Bitcoin to get any information.

It's pretty important to note that it's easier to lose your funds if you don't take proper security precautions like what is happening in the article.

I would estimate with the worst case scenario which is the blocks being filled completely, ie. roughly ~2.3MB per block.

I think storage density has the potential to become bigger and flash based storage would become exponentially cheaper with improvement in technology. I think it'll come with the risk of centralisation but it'll happen sooner or later. It'll depend on how fast we can improve on the technology.

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I don't think using a prediction is pragmatic nor realistic. Unfortunately, certain miners could be driven by an agenda that would motivate them to stagnant the capacity and thus preventing any improvement in the scalability. It was what happened with Segwit and there was a bunch of drama but I don't like drama and shall not be elaborating too much on it, and also because it has been discussed again and again.

I wouldn't say that miners won't do what you described but it's hard to tell. Instead of trying to predict what's coming, I would instead argue in the point that there are solutions to scalability and huge progress has been made in that area. LN would enable a larger capacity and a smaller fees for the transaction and it's pretty useful right now already. I have no doubt that optimizations would come with Bitcoin, MAST, Taproot etc etc. But the part with miners reaching a consensus on scalability approach can be quite a stretch. There is no telling what that optimization can be or whether it'll benefit the miners, if at all and that will definitely come with some resistance.

I never thought of hosted servers as a worthwhile investment, their price to performance ratio is much more skewed than RPis and related equipment.

I think we have to break it down in terms of the cost of individual components:
RPi 4, 4GB - 57.99
Power supply - It's a bit iffy, I'll just grab my spare phone charger but for the sake of comparison, $10
SD card - $10, if you don't have one lying around
1TB WD Blue HDD - $39.99

I consider that the bare minimum needed for any LN nodes, considering that it actually doesn't output much heat and heat sinks are $5, max where I'm from. I think the price that OP listed can be slightly conservative and if you don't need so many features, it's possible to build one for relatively cheap. I salvaged loads of mine from old parts/laptops that I'm no longer using.

To be fair, a Raspberry Pi isn't particularly expensive considering it's sufficient computing power as compared to most VPSes. You can probably sell the RPi off for a decent amount if the $35/$45 really matters to you. Renting a cheap server just to run LN or a node is definitely a net loss and after awhile, the cost of it would definitely surpass RPi.

I don't think network/data is that big of an issue? You can easily limit it and I don't think it would consume that much bandwidth either.

Not profitable. IIRC, I read somewhere that one of the lightning node has a huge capacity (think 10s of Bitcoins) but merely earned cents or a few thousand satoshis only.

Lightning nodes are not profitable but I regard the expenses of setting one up as negligible and I would gain more insight into lightning network as a result. I'm setting one up alongside my primary RPi BTC node, when I get my RPi4 next week.

An alternative is RaspiBolt.

I think most hardware wallets needs a connection using a USB of some sorts to an online computer to generate and sign transactions, there are exceptions of course. They are designed specifically so that the security will not be compromised even if the computer itself has malware, so it makes airgapped computers redundant when used together.

Generally, phishing attacks are social engineering attack. Hardware wallets does protect against those non-physical attacks but it does nothing if the weakest link (which is the user) decides to leak their own seeds voluntarily after seeing and believing a seemingly [authentic] message from Trezor or other HW wallets. I wouldn't describe HW wallets as something that protects the users against phishing attack. Quite the contrary, phishing attacks are more believable if it is more personalised which is in the case of the database of Ledger being leaked. Nothing would be able to completely eliminate social engineering attacks as a threat.

That's disappointing. Would've loved to get an option to get Segwit on ChipMixer. The fees aren't helping with the added cost of mixing.