EVERY country in the world has (and/or will) bomb civilians if need to. You think Americans didn't? Google the Yokohama air raid in WW2. They bombed an entire city with no military nor industrial targets, mostly built on bamboo and rice paper, with INCENDIARY (mostly Napalm and white phosphorus) BOMBS. Does that sound like a country that respects civilians to you? How about the firebombings of Tokio, Osaka, a,d many other Japanese cities? Or what about Dresden, Hamburg (again, both entirely civilian cities), and the virtual leveling of Berlin? Are German civilians somehow "less human" than others?
And finally, what about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Have you heard about them?
But that was in WW2, and people like you have a tendency to believe (or try to make others believe) that the dead are less dead if they were murdered a long time ago. What about Viet Nam? Or Afghanistan? There are countless reports about bombings of entire villages by American troops.
Wake up. Being an idiot is bad enough, you don't need to broadcast it.

Thank you. You think? I feel like I don't have the first clue about it. 


You should assume I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Every time I learn something new, a new gazillion of things I don't know open up. I followed 5 courses on crypto already, and I feel I'm just getting started. This whole thing is humongous...

Thank you all for the replies.
Now I know shorting is a much wider term than I thought, and I definitely have to learn a whole lot more on it.
Thanks Rhomelmabini for that link, I'm gonna keep reading on it.

Nope. I'm starting to think I know even less than I thought I knew.
Does that mean you can trade with no money at all?

I haven't posted on this board so far, so for those that don't know me, I'm a newbie, and as green as can be expected. I've been trying to learn as much as I can, watching videos, and reading anything I can get my hands on. As of late, I watched a video on short selling a gazillion times, but I just can't wrap my mind around it. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

So here's what I know (or I think I know):

Short selling is betting that an asset is gonna go down in price.
You have the certainty a given asset is gonna drop, so you borrow that asset, sell it high, wait for it to drop, and then buy it back low and give it back. Great. Except it doesn't make any sense.

Let's see. For example, BTC is now scraping 45K. You got tipped that's gonna go down to 30K tomorrow. So...

Scenario #1

You borrow 1 BTC. Both the lender and the exchange charge you a fee for it. You do your thing, and you get a good chunk of money in return.
But what if BTC doesn't go down? You need to have enough money in your account, so as to pay the BTC back, plus the fees, plus some extra cash in case BTC goes up. If it gets yo the point that you're not gonna be able to cover your obligation, you'll get margin called.

Scenario #2

You do have the money already in your account, so you liquidate your BTC if you have it, and wait. When BTC does go down, you buy it cheap, and get the same profit you got on scenario #1, plus the fees you don't have to pay. 

Scenario # 3

This is the only scenario that would make any sense to me:
The lender agrees to share the risk (meaning he agrees to get less money than he lent you, in case things go south). That's the only way I can see this would work (not for the lender, though), and only if the top price the borrower has to pay (including fees) is less than the value of the BTC he starts with.

So, how does it work? The way I see it, scenario #1 doesn't make any sense, scenario #2 is not short selling, and the only one that makes sense (to a point) is scenario #3. That is, if the lender is willing to share the risk with you (I personally wouldn't consider it).

Now, I'm pretty sure I'm missing something, and I'm pretty sure itś dangling right in front of my nose, and I'm gonna feel like an idiot when yoou guys tell me. But, How does it work?

Thank you all in advance. 

That's a different animal. Security is the enemy of convenience, we all know that.


Thank you, I just did. there's  no spaces whatsoever in the whole string.

Ok, so I commented on another thread that I was working on a method to secure seed words, and soon enough I got some replies telling me about a gazillion times this had been attempted before, which always ended on somebody losing their funds because they couldn't remember their "encryption method". That was to be expected, and I appreciate them saving me the time to post something useless for the benefit of... well, nobody.
But on the other hand that got a different set of gears turning. The benefits of encrypting your seed words are undeniable, yet you should do so in a way that's hard for others but easy for you. That's the real challenge.

So here's a bit of a challenge for you guys: I did come up with a way to encrypt (kinda) my seed words, that is indeed very easy for me, I want to know how easy (or hard, hopefully) it is for people knowing a whole lot more than I do (doesn't take much) on the matter. I don't want to end up calling it "unhackable", and have a 12 year old make me look like an idiot...

So here it is:



That's the seed phrase.

Here's a few hints:
   

• 12 words. All in English.
• None of them are capitalized.
• Each word is 5 characters long.
• No encryption algorithm has been used.

   
So there it is, what do you guys say? Can you  crack it?
I will post the actual words when you guys are ready.

Anything is a better choice than Windows (though I might come through as a Windows hater for saying this, which I am  ). First, as said before, any Linux distro is open source, which automatically makes it better than Windows.
The bests phrase I read about it is: "With Windows you can work on your PC. With Linux you own it".

Also I'm not sure about the Xiaomi parallel. Manjaro is German...



I do, and have been using Linux as my ONLY OS since 2009. I wouldn't touch Windows with a stick. About limits, sometimes it does, but most times it's quite the opposite. There are a lot of Linux apps to replace those found in Windows, in some cases even better than the Windows apps. And, contrarily to Windows, they're all free, which is never a bad thing. You just have to get used to a different method, that's it. For example, if I want a given Linux app, I do a search for best *** for linux, and I usually get dozens of apps to choose from.


True. And on Linux you have options. If you have a super-duper PC and you like the bling, you can run KDE, and it'll work great. I have an old one with a celeron, and don't like bling at all, so I run Openbox, and love it.


Yep. And you have the advantage (at least with VirtualBox) that you can limit the resources available to your guest OS, so you can protect your hardware. And some people claim (I haven't benchmarked it, nor would I know how to do it) that running it in seamless mode it runs even faster than natively.


I wouldn't. That's why I switched to Fedora. The best feature Linux has is it has plenty of choices. Some have drivers problems. Most don't.

No, you didn't do your best to invest, you did your best to get in her panties.

The real lessons:

Keep it in your pants while investing in crypto. That's not the "head" you should be using.

Don't invest on "trust", invest on "research".

Absolutely! More complexity usually means better efficiency for a given task or number of tasks, or, more often than not, just a way for the developers to show off their "neck-beards". I haven't come up to a distro specifically designed with crypto in mind (or else I'd be all over it), but short of it, security and complexity are two completely different things.


Yeah, I should've said "all else (or "the user")  being equal". Sorry.
True, the user is always the biggest variable in a computer system. You can't expect your system to be "secure" if you're not.


Let me tell you my experience: I had a 17" Hewlett-Packard laptop. Quad core, 16 gigs of ram, back in 2014.
It wasn't an old computer. In fact, it was so new that I got mad at Debian because they still didn't have free versions for its drivers, but they didn't allow the use of non-free drivers.
 Used it on Fedora without issue for a couple of years. Not once I saw CPU usage go over 3% (I always run conky on my computers), even when I was running 12 virtual workspaces.
Then I switched to Windows 8.1 because I needed to run Solidworks on it. Whithin a month it blew 2 hard drives.


Yeah, I've seen that, and to be honest, I have mixed feelings about it.
Some distros (like Manjaro, for example) made strides to become friendlier to newbie users, yet still  can't get rid of some of Arch's quirks, like their repo lists getting corrupted all the time, while others have become so bloated they're a nightmare to use (still better than Windows though).
I was first introduced to Fedora (then "Fedora Core"), I think in 2002 or 2003. Just couldn't use it at all. Then I started on Ubuntu (with Gnome, WITHOUT Unity) and loved it. Sure, it was different from Windows, but in no way was "difficult" to use.

I've been a Linux user for a bit more than a decade. I can tell you this:

1. Linux is not an OS, it's a kernel. There are,  as of today, over 1000 OS's (distributions) based on the Linux kernel.

2. Some Linux based distributions (or "distros", as they're called in the community) strive to be as close to Windows as possible, and some don't. At that, if you choose to use Ubuntu, or Linux Mint, or MX Linux, your experience is gonna be arguably much better than if you try to start using Arch, or LFS.

3. Linux is, as a rule, way safer than windows. Then, as it was pointed above, your OS will be as safe as you make it. A whole lot of people move BILLIONS of dollars a day on Windows without a problem. It's true that Linux based distros get no viruses, but it's also true, if you do get one, there is also no antivirus software for it (other than ClamAV, as far as I know), so it's a double edged sword.

4. It's also true there are very few viruses meant to work on Linux, but the real reason (again, as far as I know) is that Linux has a very strong admin policy, and nobody can act as an admin without a password. So, ultimately, Linux based distros are as safe as the password you use on them.

5. As a rule of thumb, Linux based distros are much less demanding on hardware than Windows, which allows you to run them on older PC's without a problem (the one I'm using now is 6 years old, and works beautifully).

6. As beginner friendly as they may be, all Linux based distros have a learning curve, and you have to be willing to learn how to use them.

7. Finally, as far as I know, there are no rehab programs for Linux, so if you get addicted (and chances are you will) you're on your own.  

Well, I won't, but I will... kinda. I'm thinking of a different approach. Stay tuned...
Either way, "just listening to you" (and many others) has been great so far.

Oops, sorry, I'll try it out.
I understand, and I do appreciate (honestly) the input. There's no telling how much I have learned from you guys since I joined. Right now I'm not disagreeing with you: I'm just brainstorming.


I'll get back to you on Monday on that one. 

Kinda expensive... You just have to buy 6 houses to protect your seeds... 


I think I can do much better than that with just a few camping tricks combined. You take your seed words and write them backwards, combine them (letter by letter) with a known phrase, encode them in base 64 and write them in a grid, going vertically from bottom to top and from right to left. That's definitely gonna delay them a minute or two.
I did search "extension word". Got a bunch of links about Windows file extensions, and one from Merriam-Webster...


Hopefully, the function of any security measure is to make an attack so difficult it's not worth the effort. A password would be the bare minimum in terms of security, and it implies you know you're being attacked, and you're in a position to transfer your funds elsewhere. In any case it's much better than hiding your plain seed words under the mattress, but it's far from efficient.

O_e_l_e_o: alright, I'll drop it!  No extra security for seed words. I'm just gonna reply to the points you  made, because they picked my interest. But I'm not starting a thread on it.


That's the problem. The security of your whole system ultimately relies on the physical security of your seed words. Now, 99% of robberies are crimes of opportunity. Does it make sense to only rely on physical security when you have other options, especially when you can add those options to it?


Yeah, I watched that one, in a "Burn Notice" episode. He hid a credit card under a door hinge. Everybody knows it now. The floorboards thing has been shown in a gazillion movies and series, same with the "inside the walls" thing.


You keep pounding on multi-sig. I've been looking everywhere since last October, and couldn't find anything on how to use multi-sig. In any case, if you know multi-sig, chances are would be robbers also know about it, and sooner or later they will figure a way to crack it.


Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of them, but I don't know them. That's the problem.
In any case, if they're there is because somebody else knows about them.


Maybe. Maybe 999999 out of a million won't, and one will. In any case, the idea was to use something like base 64 together with another method.

Anyways, I'm not doing the thread. One of the reasons I posted is because I wanted feedback from guys like you, that know a whole lot about this stuff than me. Thank you for taking the time. 

The fact is writing them down (on paper, metal, whatever) offers no security at all. If the would be robber knows about crypto and seed words and he's looking for them, what do you think he'd be looking for, when he opens your safe, or when he finds the list, wherever you may have hidden it? Security is not about hiding something and hoping nobody will find it: it's about making it impossible (or as hard as you can) for them to use it. Then you hide it in your safe, and put it in other places, in case your place goes up in smoke. But the real security should be in your head, not in a safe.

O_e_l_e_o: my point is I don't know those algorithms, and I don't know how to encrypt the words with them. The best I can do (which I use for my passwords) is to encode the phrase in base 64, but that's about it, and I'm aware it's not encryption. So if I can use a way to somehow obfuscate those words (let's say, pig latin, to put a stupid example), it's not gonna be as secure as it could be, but it will still be more secure than leaving my words laying in a safe for anybody to find them.

I know you don't. In any case, additional information is always welcomed.
My problem with seed words is if they're found, all you need to do is read them. I'm sure there are other methods we (newbies) don't know about. I'm just trying to come up with a method to encrypt your seed words that doesn't require one to be an expert, that may not be as secure as other methods are, but it's more accessible to those of us who don't know what we're talking about. 


That's what's keeping me. You can go as complex and convoluted as you want, but afterwards you have to remember what you did.

I hope so. A few days ago, I got the news in the Coinmarketcap newsletter that a kid had drugged his stepdad, got his seed words, and stole his crypto. Almost killed him in the process.
That got me thinking that in the land of "encrypted", the seed words are there, just waiting for somebody to steal them.
But then I'm not a cryptographer, and many of us aren't, so I'm trying to come up with a method anybody can use. Hopefully I will have it finished soon.

Hell YEAH, Linux FTW!!!
Right now I'm using MX Linux, and I CHALLENGE you to make a mess with it. It's stable, easy to use, very forgiving. If not, I suggest Ubuntu or Linux mint.

Finally, about Norton...
Let me tell you my experience with it. This was back in 2005, so it's bound to have changed.
I accidentally opened an email instead of deleting it (on Windows XP) and got overrun with viruses, to a point I couldn't even turn the pc off. Finally used the power button, rebooted and ran Norton. It didn't find "anything". I booted up again in safe mode and ran Norton again. Same result.
So I searched online, and at the time the best free antivirus was Spybot S&D, so I got it. Ran it, and it found a bit over 1800 viruses. Disinfected, and ran it again in safe mode, and found another 200+ viruses. Disinfected them again, and never again had a single virus in the 4 years I kept using XP, even when I routinely checked it, not only with Spybot, but also with Ad Aware, Avast, and later on Kaspersky.

Then I switched to Linux in 2009. I ran ClamAV twice since. I wouldn't go back to Windows if they paid me to. 

I've been working on a way to protect the seed phrase, as I see it as the weakest link in the practice of crypto investing. I will start a thread on it, as soon as I can.