Surely the campaigns could pay out using Lightning to reduce fees. Have Lightning fees increased too much to make this a viable option?

You need to remember that I'm in England, and England is a special case. The current world order that evolved from the Knights Templar and the subsequent British Empire, is under threat. The UK is ruled through a different "country", and that is the City of London. This isn't the London controlled by the Mayor of London, but the financial empire known as the square mile. It has a public figurehead who is The Lord Mayor of London. It is estimated that up to 60% of the western world's assets are managed through the "Veil of Tiers" trusts administered by the City of London. This includes the banks, and they feel threatened by crypto that is outside their control. They are also weaponising banking. This evident in the way that they are destroying the dollar, and political punishments such as the de-banking of Nigel Farage and other political figures. The current restrictions are causing crypto exchanges to emigrate from the UK, and thus the government will lose the tax revenue from these businesses. Banks are closing accounts where payment are made to or from crypto exchanges. Tor doesn't help, as the banks will need full details to make the payments. Any attempts to conceal this will probably give rise to a charge of money laundering, and the subsequent confiscation of funds. Whilst I do not agree with much of the current UK government expenditure, I have no desire to attempt to evade the payment of legitimate taxes. However, I do want to keep my current bank accounts and payment services.

If I sell a domain name, then I can accept a peer to peer payment, and push the name via my registrar. I understand that there will be taxes due on the sale, but at no time does the transaction involve any banks if the purchaser already owns Bitcoin. I feel fairly safe when making a cash purchase in a Supermarket cafe. They all have massive numbers of video recording and facial recognition these days, so any attempted robbery would be recorded on video. That raises the question of government access to those video tapes, and that may be something to consider for the future.

I keep reading about bank accounts in the UK, US and EU being frozen due to crypto associations. This is concerning me, and I am reluctant now to use any exchanges to purchase Bitcoin. However, I am happy to purchase crypto via P2P transactions. These can be either cash payments in a face-to-face meeting, or by bank transfer to a trusted person's personal account. Will this be the future of Bitcoin for us mere mortals, or will sanity prevail and allow us to return to using exchanges?

Now, what about crypto-to-crypto exchanges? Will government oversight and intervention restrict those. This could lead to decentralised swop services, and surely this is contrary to the wishes of the banking puppet masters?

I guess I don't "need" merits, but I use the merits awarded for my posts to determine the popularity and usefulness of my posts. No merits means that I shouldn't make post like that.

Thanks guys.

I've got a spare VPN hosting plan, and I was contemplating running a lightning node on it. However, it looks as if I will have to run a full Bitcoin node alongside it, so the storage cost would rule that out.

I've tried search, and looked through some boards, but there doesn't seem to be much since 2017.

During my days of a more conventional life style, I was quite friendly with the managing director of a large international fire and security alarm corporation. During a period of frank honesty, he stated that it was not possible to protect property from determined thieves. All you could do was to spend more to make it harder, and buy time before they could achieve success. There is a point where the perceived time involved, and the risk of being detected is not worth the rewards. It seems to me that the more diverse and obscure ones investment structure, the less likely one is to lose many assets.  This is a policy that was adopted by the knights templar when they created their veil of tiers trusts to preserve their wealth. It has been so successful, that their descendants and associates still control over half of the wealth in the western world.
Multiple wallets and drives in various locations is one easy way to utilise this concept. There have been many suggestions in this thread, and, of course, they are all good and practical solutions to include in the mix. I just though that the inclusion of a testnet wallet could be one additional method to add to the mix.

I keep thinking that as the bankers and financiers are investing heavily in Bitcoin, it is moving away from the "common man". The concept and software is brilliant, and doesn't really need changing. The difficulty in creating a cloned Bitcoin would be avoiding a 51% attack until it became established. I keep trying to sthink of ways to do this, and three possible methods are -

- Miners will need to have a mining account, and an account is only able to create five blocks ( say ) in any 24 hour period. I haven't thought of a way to stop banks having multiple mining accounts though.

- On finding a block, a miner is prevented from registering another block until 10 new ones have been created. Again, I don't know how to police this.

- Vary the difficulty based on a miner's combined hash rate. The lower the hash rate, the easier the difficulty. This would help small miners, as long as there was a way to prevent mining collectives taking control.

Where money is involved, then human ingenuity seems to know no bounds, so I tend to think that a people's Bitcoin is just a pipe dream.

Has anyone tried using the Testnet to conceal their Bitcoin wallets? It seems to me that using the Testnet as an apparent primary Bitcoin wallet, and switching to a mainnet wallet for real transactions, would introduce a level of obfuscation that may fool some less sophisticated attackers or investigators. You could also maintain a variety of wallets on external drives to increase complexity.

I think your mistake was to measure your success in Fiat. If you used your bot to build a Bitcoin holding via trading, and measured its success in Bitcoin, then you would have very different results. I did some scalping on Coinbase to build a few Satoshi, and I've kept those. I ended up with more Satoshi than just a simple buy and HODL. It's a bit harder now with new government regulations and taxes, so you will have to factor in those.

This is one of the difficulties I find in using public WiFi. Yesterday it said I needed just 3 hours to completion, this morning the network speed is down to 1K Kb/s, and it wants 9 hours.
I'm not too worried about security, well I am, but I'm taking precautions. I've removed Chromium from the Netbook, and I haven't enabled bluetooth. This means I will have to do everything through the terminal. I guess the machine has become focused on crypto recovery, and hard drive exploration. I can also disconnect the WiFi when I don't need it.

The Netbook is very underpowered with 2Gb of RAM and a celeron processor. The SSD is pretty small as well. I want to install Bitcoin Core, and link it to the directories on the various drives. These will be in USB cases. I'm assuming that with no WiFi, Core will not be updating anything, but it will allow me to perform various recovery functions through its command line, This will be a great way to bring my knowledge of Bitcoin up to current standards. Once I've gained access to a funded wallet, I can move the addresses into the new main node. This will  give me a chance to assess my current holdings, and decide on a future savings plan.

I believe the new laws will allow Police and other state entities to lock wallets, seize coins, and burn them if they want to. It seems they don't even have to claim they are the proceeds of crime. This new law comes into force at the end of this month.

I'm more interested in exploring the hard drives I've got to find what I own. I think I have some BAT as well, but that wallet has probably been closed, if it hasn't I'll try to transfer it into Bitcoin. That's one transaction that will need some care, as I needed to provide KYC to Uphold to open the wallet. Transferring the coins to an address that didn't have any KYC transactions would compromise the address. That raises another caution, if I am consolidating micro-transactions, then I don't want to mix addresses if one of them had a KYC transaction. I'm not so worried about $5 wrenches, as I could set up a multi-sig wallet. I'm a Gemini, so I could use both personalities.

I'm more interested in the possibilities of installing core on another machine, copying the blockchain and associated files from my new node, and adding the wallet data from one of the old hard drives. If I can then access any coins in the wallet, I can send them to an address on the master node, or just import the address to save fees.

That was more or less what I was thinking. I plan to use this node to maintain a full blockchain, and then I can create a wallet on a pruned node on another machine. I was thinking of doing that on the netbook with a removable ssd to hold the blockchain and wallet info. It's probably not wise to talk about it too much, although I'm not so bothered about paying taxes on my earnings, as long as I can keep the balance after I've paid the taxes.

I'm a few hours away from finalising the synchronisation of my new node, and I need to decide how far to push it. I'm in the same situation as many other members with several wallets, and multiple addresses. Some are empty, and some have many small transactions. I've got one old wallet on a notebook that died, and I want to remove the hard drive, and recover the coins in the wallet. I've got a pruned node on an external HDD that I don't use, and a variety of backups on external drives and usb sticks. My idea is to use the new node as a central hub, and copy the blockchain and add various wallet files to a new drive to try to recover coins. I can the send those to an address on the new node wallet. This will consolidate micro payments as well as collecting my coins in a manageable wallet.

I appreciate the dangers of using on central wallet on an active notebook, especially when Internet connection are made over public WiFi. During my consolidation process, I can decide on some other storage options such as hard wallets and air gapped wallets. It would also be useful to have a wallet on my mobile.

We are entering a period of banking and financial turbulence. In the UK, we are facing an increase if government control and investigation of crypto holdings, and I understand that at the end of this month the new UK laws will be activated allowing the police and other government entities to seize crypto assets. In view of these changes, do you think I am taking a sensible approach to protect my long term Bitcoin holdings?

I believe there is a power management app, and I'll look at that when I've backed up the entire blockchain I still haven't decided if I want to back up onto a USB stick, or use an ssd through a USB port. I'm tending towards the latter. I could then experiment with it on the Netbook. I'm also still evaluating browsers to replace the default Chromium one. I looked at Thorium, but decided it needed a bit more development. I used to use Brave, but it looks as if it has gone downhill since it was taken over. I'm posting this using Libre Wolf, and it is tempting me.
I've also bought a 65 watt cigar lighter adapter for the car, and that might help with recharging and running the notebook. I'm probably going to update the wiring and fuse to use it though, or maybe I'm just being overcautious.

Core is running at around 5k again, but it still seems to think it will take 17 hours to sync.

I've just performed a sudo update and upgrade. It did warn me that it couldn't check Bitcoin, but I guess that is just as well. I've restarted Bitcoin, and it seems fine - which is what I would have expected. This system seems to be really stable, and I'm very pleased with it. I'm tempted to install Bodhi on the Netbook as a backup system. There isn't much on it, as I just used it to check mail, browse and look at YouTube videos. I wonder if I could airgap it, and use it to maintain a wallet. Trouble is, I might be tempted to use it for a bit of surfing, and that would kill security.

I'm enjoying these projects, and I'm tempted to try replacing the operating system on my phone and using the usb-c port to access an ssd to create an airgapped wallet. I guess I need to do some reading.

It's nearly 1700 hours, and the cafe is closing. I guess it's time to shut down and cook an evening meal. Van life makes one a jack of all trades.

Well the electricity would be free, but there is a hardware cost involved in setting up a rig. It wouldn't have to be Bitcoin oif course. Anyway, that won't happen this year, as I've still got too much to sort out. I enjoy restoring old cars, and I ought to start going to vintage meets again. My social life is crap at the moment.

I can't remember what I paid for it, but I think it was well under £500 brand new. I bought it from Argos ( a catalogue retailer with a pickup point near me ). It was when the Western world was vilifying Huawei, and trying to block sales.Argos dumped some stock ( the Ryzen ) and reduced others ( the Intel ones ) the i7 was a lot more expensive. In fact I ordered mine in the morning, and picked it up in the evening. The next day they raised to price by £200. For my purposes, it seemed like a great deal, and I haven't regretted buying it. I want to build a system into the van, and I may base it on something like a Raspberry Pi. I could then power it by solar panels. That's what I'm thinking of using for mining or some other revenue earning project. I'm still discovering the things that are essentials for living the van life. I haven't installed the diesel heater that I bought yet, and I could have done with that a few weeks ago. Damp destroyed my previous notebook, and that is why I had to buy the Huawei. It's a good job that I created multiple backups of my wallets.

It's the 5 9s requirement that would kill me. The whole point of becoming a digital nomad is to free oneself of any temporal ties.

Here is a review of the D16 - https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/huawei-matebook-d-16-2022
I've got the i5 version with 8Gb. I just missed getting a 16Gb Ryzon version for £40 more. I paid a lot less for a new computer than the price quoted. I found battery life was better than they stated as mine came with Windows 10. Things went bad when Microsoft installed Windows 11. Hence my move to Bodhi.

I've just ordered a case for the old drive, and I didn't realise I can use that to connect the drive to my mobile. Actually I ordered two cases, and I'll look around for another drive for the second case. I could try that on the HP netbook ( that's the one with the Celeron processor).

I take your point about the Lightning node, and it confirms what I suspected.