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July 14, 2025, 07:14:35 PM *
News: Latest Bitcoin Core release: 29.0 [Torrent]
 
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1  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: BTC Offline Layer on: July 04, 2025, 07:26:29 AM
What you are describing is called a "physical bitcoin". The idea has been around since the beginning, but it never really gained acceptance. One of the reasons might be that the cost of manufacturing is high.

If you are using multi-sig to prevent either party from knowing the other key, then you need a process that prevents the manufacturer of the notes from knowing the keys.
2  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Verified BTC Payments and Reviews on: July 03, 2025, 07:00:31 AM
The straightforward solution is for the customer to sign a message with the private key used to sign one of the inputs in the transaction paying the bill. However, getting the wallet to provide the key is typically not straightforward, and I don't think any wallet provides an automated signing feature, which would be ideal for you.
3  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Cosign Consensus on: July 01, 2025, 08:28:49 PM
2. A typical transaction has one input and two outputs. This implies a shortage of inputs available to cosign. How do you ensure that cosigners are available for each input and inputs are available for each cosigner?
It's only typical for consumers to create transactions that split coins. Merchants typically create transactions that merge coins. Sometimes the number of inputs will be less than the number of outputs, which will delay cosigners, and sometimes the number of inputs will be greater than the number of outputs, which will delay confirmations, but there will always be a natural average of 1:1.

I have to disagree with your assessment. The number of Bitcoin UTXOs has been climbing consistently, which means that the number of outputs has been consistently greater than the number of inputs.

A possible solution might be to require a transaction to cosign only one input for all of its outputs. However, that might create the reverse problem of not having enough transactions to cosign all the inputs (because there are more inputs than transactions). Perhaps the solution is to require a transaction to cosign a number of other inputs equal to the number of its inputs.
4  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Cosign Consensus on: June 30, 2025, 05:01:20 PM
I think it's an interesting idea. I like your insight about validation through cosigning.

I have some questions. Forgive me if they have already been answered.

1. How do you prove that the cosigners were chosen randomly?
2. How do you ensure that cosigners are available for each transaction and transactions are available to be cosigned? It seems like there is a balance that must be maintained. For example, a typical transaction has one input and two outputs. This implies a shortage of inputs available to cosign.
3. An attack seems possible in which the attacker creates transactions but refuses to cosign their assigned inputs. I think this was already suggested, but your reply was not clear to me.
5  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Simple quiz to help people select a self-custody model on: June 30, 2025, 04:28:39 PM
In my opinion, it is not a good idea to pre-select the answers to the questions based on the respondent's self-classification.

It introduces a bias because the respondent is likely to choose the answers that you have already chosen for them.

Without the bias, you would have the opportunity to compare the answers with the self-classification to gain more insight and to improve the analysis.
6  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: is Bitcoin really a hedge against inflation? on: June 28, 2025, 02:07:33 AM
Many people describe it as a hedge against inflation, but with its frequent price fluctuations, I sometimes wonder how reliable that claim is.

Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation because it has a fixed supply, or at least currently a supply growing less than the rate of inflation. In fact, most assets can be considered as hedges against inflation because their values are not dependent on the value of the currency. Debt is an example of something that is clearly not an inflation hedge.

A hedge is something that is not correlated (or at least not positively correlated), so price fluctuations are not relevant. What you are really asking is whether Bitcoin is a good hedge, considering it's volatility. In my opinion, if you are looking for something that is only a hedge, then Bitcoin is probably not the best. I think a better choice would be land or housing.

7  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Technical Support / Re: Please, I need help for converting a very old btc private key to WIF. on: June 26, 2025, 04:08:34 AM
Ok, I think it's clear. So, it's much better and more accurate to say compressed public key and uncompressed public key without the word "master" when there's only one private key.

I feel that the terms "master private key" and "master public key" were poorly chosen, because they are not keys. The traditional "master key" is a key that can open a series of locks, and that is not what a "master private key" or "master public key" does. I think more appropriate terms would be "private key master" and "public key master" because a "key master" is used to create keys, but it is too late for that now.
8  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Terms to learn about bitcoin for newbies :for better understanding on: June 24, 2025, 09:53:01 PM
Newbies seem to love posting glossaries, but they are typically full of errors and misunderstandings. I encourage newbies to avoid the practice.

The following terms have descriptions that are inaccurate or not applicable to Bitcoin:

13. Wallet Backup -- It says to update the backup every time a new address is generated. That is unnecessary and risky for a bitcoin wallet.
20. Wallet Address -- A Bitcoin wallet does not have an address. It contains addresses.
23. Decentralization -- The description applies to business management. It does not apply to Bitcoin, networks, or protocols.
35. WIF -- The link you posted is a description of WIFcoin. Clearly, you have no understanding of what WIF means.
37. Ransomware -- The term has no place in a glossary about Bitcoin.
9  Economy / Speculation / Re: BTC Movement: Is It Just Market Activity or Now Fundamentally Driven? on: June 24, 2025, 09:28:31 PM
Until Bitcoin demonstrates clearly that it has broad utility, the price will always be based on market speculation about the potential for utility.
10  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Institutional investors lower the price of Bitcoin,so that they can get it cheap on: June 18, 2025, 02:10:28 AM
You have made a lot of claims that are backed up by nothing. You might want to adjust your tinfoil hat and try again.
11  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: An approach to recover change addresses from old wallet.dat backups on: June 10, 2025, 10:28:36 PM
If change addresses are not automatically recovered from a backup, that seems like a serious bug/shortcoming in Bitcoin Core to me.

A couple of questions.

Quote
Remember you MUST have the public keys available to you (you can find this in the explorer, ...

You write that you need the public keys, but the instructions never use them. When you wrote "public key", did you mean "address"?

How do you find the public keys (or perhaps addresses) generated by the wallet in an explorer?
12  Bitcoin / Hardware wallets / Re: TANGEM WALLET: An Innovative Seedles Cold Wallet Setup on: June 10, 2025, 10:16:25 PM
2. Losing a Single Card
The lost card by itself cannot be used to drain your assets, because any transaction still requires scanning one of the remaining genuine cards plus your PIN.

That statement is confusing to me. How is the lost card protected? It can't be used because 2 of 3 cards are necessary, or because a PIN is required? Can you clarify?
13  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: FDE while running a node on SSD on: June 08, 2025, 05:37:47 AM
If you do a full disk encryption setup while running a full Bitcoin Core node on an SSD drive, does the very demanding i/o activity while downloading+verifying the blockchain do too much wear and tear on the drive?

Sorry for being late to the conversation. I'm curious why you would want to encrypt the drive. You might want to put your wallet and perhaps bitcoin.conf on an encrypted drive, but I can't think of a reason to encrypt anything else. If you only have a single storage device, I bet there is a way that you can split it into two drives and make one of them encrypted.
14  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Steps from Seed Phrase to Master Private Key on: June 08, 2025, 05:13:50 AM
No like you assumed The seedphrase is not passed directly into PBKDF2 as a string of words. Instead, the mnemonic phrase is first converted back to its binary bits using the BIP39 wordlist not by the function but wallet software.
So the password input to PBKDF2 is this binary string i.e entropy and checksum, not the text of the mnemonic words themselves.

You are incorrect. The text of the mnemonic phrase is passed to the PBKDF2 function. The mnemonic phrase is not decoded back to the entropy it encodes. As such, anything can be passed to the PBKDF2 function. It does not have to be valid BIP-39.

From BIP-39:
Quote
To create a binary seed from the mnemonic, we use the PBKDF2 function with a mnemonic sentence (in UTF-8 NFKD) used as the password and the string "mnemonic" + passphrase (again in UTF-8 NFKD) used as the salt. The iteration count is set to 2048 and HMAC-SHA512 is used as the pseudo-random function. The length of the derived key is 512 bits (= 64 bytes).
...
Although using a mnemonic not generated by the algorithm described in "Generating the mnemonic" section is possible, ...

The only reason for decoding the phrase to its original binary is to validate the checksum.
15  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Tail emission ideas that retain the 21 million limit on: June 02, 2025, 08:05:53 AM
There is also a greater benefit in moving millions of dollars worth of bitcoin overseas cheaply, when you compare it with dust transactions.  Yet, both can pay the same.  According to your reasoning, an added fee that is respective to the amount transacted is reasonable, because why would a person who moves $1 billion worth of bitcoin pay the same as I do, when I'm only moving $100?

That is not my reasoning, but your point has merit.

The answer is that these are the rules set in stone since 2009.  If you want to opt-in to bitcoin, you should acknowledge and accept them.  Otherwise, you're free to use one of the many altcoins that operate under different consensus rules.  

Every hard and soft fork is an example of "rules that were set in stone since 2009" that are no longer followed. More importantly, are you advocating that changes to the Bitcoin protocol should not be discussed?
16  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Tail emission ideas that retain the 21 million limit on: May 28, 2025, 04:46:07 PM
That being said, I don't see why I should pay more than someone else because I am a good little holder. For me, you are confiscating part of my holdings by forcing me to pay more over people who just started using Bitcoin. Is there any difference in practice if you take away 5% of coins from each address that has unmoved coins from 2010, or if you make them pay a 5% fee to move them? No.

Whether it is done by actually taking them away or forcing me to pay a huge fee to use them, is again just semantics.

Any fee could be considered "confiscation", so the hyperbole is not helpful. And, the fee I am suggesting, 1 satoshi/bitcoin/block, is not "huge". It is very small. It is not 5% over 15 years. It is only 1% every 20 years.

The system has to pay for itself, so fees are necessary. In my view, if some use of Bitcoin has a benefit, then a fee related to that use seems appropriate. You make it clear that there is a benefit to holding bitcoins, so wouldn't it be reasonable to pay a fee for that benefit? Why should others pay for your benefit?
17  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Tail emission ideas that retain the 21 million limit on: May 28, 2025, 08:44:42 AM
This solution requires fractional satoshis. To make things simple, I propose dividing a satoshi into 100 million parts (because the demurrage cost is 1/100 million).
More complexity and more units is not desirable. Anyhow, if I understood you correctly your proposal will punish the best holders for simply holding? That is a terrible and radical change of incentives.

2. Lost coins and dust are eventually recovered.
Replace one type of confiscation with another? How do you know that my coins are lost, because I am not using them actively?  Roll Eyes

There are simpler ways to approach this, and I will give one example. You can introduce a primary flat miner fee, and retain the variable fee from the fee market on top of it. Let's say that we introduce a a flat fee of 100 satoshi, which as of today would be $0.11. At 3000 transactions per block, that is an extra 300 000 sats.

More complexity may be necessary, even though it is not desirable. Are you saying that none of the protocol changes currently being considered increase complexity?

My suggestion does not confiscate coins. Like yours, it imposes an additional transaction fee, but based on the age of the coins. There is no need to determine whether coins are "lost".

The purpose of "tail emission" is to guarantee revenue per block. Your suggestion of a flat fee does not accomplish that.

Also, consider the steady state -- the amount burned during the current period is the same as the amount paid to you from the previous period. The two cancel each other.
Yes, but that's exactly the idea Smiley

But that is a problem. If blocks are empty for 4 years, then there would be no tail emission for the next 4 years.


If you want to guarantee revenue from a block, but you don't want inflation, then you must pay it from the current supply. That requires some form of demurrage in the end as far as I can tell.
18  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Tail emission ideas that retain the 21 million limit on: May 27, 2025, 07:22:31 PM
I have another solution -- a fixed tail emission paid for by demurrage. The result is that the value of each person's holdings decreases similarly to inflation, but there is no inflation.

Here is how I would implement it:

1. A number of satoshis in each input UTXO are burned in a transaction and cannot be spent. The amount burned for each input UTXO is equal to its age (in blocks) times its value divided by 100 million (1 satoshi/bitcoin/block).
2. In addition to the subsidy and fees, the block reward now also includes a fixed amount of 21 million satoshis. Transaction fees are still necessary, and the subsidy would continue to halve as normal.
3. Any UTXO with a value less than or equal to its 100 million times its age (in blocks) become unspendable.

The effect is:
1. Bitcoin becomes slightly more of a medium-of-exchange than a store-of-value.
2. Lost coins and dust are eventually recovered.
3. The number of bitcoins in circulation varies, but always tends toward 21 million.

This solution requires fractional satoshis. To make things simple, I propose dividing a satoshi into 100 million parts (because the demurrage cost is 1/100 million).

The number of bitcoins in circulation would vary because they increase at a fixed rate but are burned only as they are spent. However, the number would always tend toward exactly 21 million.

The cost due to demurrage would be about 52600 satoshis per bitcoin per year, or about 0.05% per year.

All bitcoins would be completely replaced every 100 million blocks, or approximately every 1900 years.

The demurrage cost is arbitrary. I picked 1 satoshi/bitcoin/block because it is simple and low. In contrast, a 10 satoshi/bitcoin/block would result in a cost of 0.5% per year, which I feel would be burdensome.
19  Bitcoin / Development & Technical Discussion / Re: Tail emission ideas that retain the 21 million limit on: May 27, 2025, 05:54:34 PM
1) Burn a part of the transaction fees and distribute them later (e.g. in the next halving period) in the form of a tail emission. This means that the supply will not be touched at all.

Imagine that your employer says to you, "In order to motivate you, we are going to hold half of your salary for 4 years." Also, consider the steady state -- the amount burned during the current period is the same as the amount paid to you from the previous period. The two cancel each other.


2) Create a second official Bitcoin token which is distributed in an infinite manner, e.g. 1 per block, to miners, from a specific block on.

This will only work if the token retains value. First, I don't see why it would hold any more value than any other alt-coin. Second, the value of an inflationary currency always moves toward 0.

Also, if the coin does somehow retain value, then it would be competing with Bitcoin.
20  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Exploring Royalty Rights on Bitcoin:Fair Compensation or Against Core Principle? on: May 23, 2025, 08:37:54 AM
A result of your scheme would be blocks full of transactions with people sending bitcoins to themselves just to get that perpetual royalty.
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