User: BitcoinerExpert73

Plagiarized post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5295785.0

Plagiarized from: https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/it59c2/fun_facts_about_bitcoin/

Here's my take: let the old man speak his mind but don't let yourself controlled by his thoughts. His existence and thoughts don't just magically influence the markets or so.

While I respect his heavy support of precious metals and understand his choice of not investing (or at least not publically doing so) in digital assets, I think people should care less about his opinions. The main issue is that a lot of people just act based on what he posts, which is quite naive to say the least. I don't think he "helps" the Bitcoin pump in any way, but he surely does help publicly pronounce his irritated attitude against BTC.

AFAIK, what WalletExplorer does is it links addresses that have been used together before to consolidate inputs. If you have ADDR1 and ADDR2, although you may have always used coin control correctly, if you consolidate their balances as a single transaction into ADDR3, it's likely that ADDR1 and ADDR2 is owned by the same wallet. This is the simplest blockchain analysis one can do, but considering the level of knowledge needed to avoid address links, a lot of wallets can be easily traced this way.

Neither CoinJoin or Mixers solve all the anonymity/privacy problems though. You can easily use CoinJoin or Mixers to consolidate inputs the wrong way and link 2 addresses together.

This wasn't what OP was asking tho - they were asking whether these multiple addresses could be linked to the same owner..

As long as you practice coin control correctly and you do not link those addresses together in any way, there is I believe only one way left through which someone could figure out the addresses are connected: the fact that Electrum communicates with other servers to figure out the balance of your addresses.

If you open up Electrum with all those 10 addresses in the same wallet and you are not running your own full node, then the Electrum software will have to ask other servers for your balance and history. The easiest fix for that is running a full node through Bitcoin Core (make sure you connect it to Tor for even more privacy) and using coin control over there instead. Light wallets may be fast, but that comes with a few privacy compromises.

So I've taken a closer look at bitcoind since the sync is taking an awfully lot of time, and I find there is an error popping up every ~30-90sec:

Not sure if this is Tor-related (although Socket5 should be the 127.0.0.1:9050 proxy I set up), but there are other errors popping up every now and then as well, such as:

It takes around half a day to sync only one day of blocks from 2018, so something should be wrong. The sync was very fast for the first ~48% of the blocks, but now it takes an eternity. Should I open up a new thread for this issue?

Edit: could this be due to the "-listen=0" option I've placed in the bitcoin.conf file?

To be honest, I'm surprised to hear that Pizza Hut is not out-of-business in Venezuela yet considering their incredibly terrible financial situation. I guess resorting to alternative currencies is the best thing they can do to protect their business while they still can. I would surely not cash in the local currency anymore if I knew it was slowly becoming completely worthless and had the possibility to take other currencies instead.

There are some currently existing working software, although most of them are not newbie-friendly. The only one I worked with is Komodo's, which is also easy to use, although they introduced KYC a while ago (and I think it was not truly 100% decentralized before either).

AFAIK, they had to implement KYC to be able to continue their works but the code is fully auditable, so their product can be forked to allow atomic swaps without KYC as well. Here's their GitHub repo for their Desktop DEX if you're interested.

Other Atomic Swap working products that I haven't used but know about are Blocknet's, Decred's, and BEAM's.

La multi ani!

Could we just stop caring about every single large wallet holder and let the authorities and analysts do their job? I mean, the thieves are doing what they probably long ago planned to do. It's not like we can do anything about it besides being desperate of a so-called possible dump.

There have been lots of dirty millions (probably billions actually) that have been sold along the way since Bitcoin's inception. It's never going to end, so just stop caring because nobody will dump a bag of $100M within a day unless they're stupid.

Moreover, the faster they sell, the better distributed they'll be rather than being held by 1 single person. If dumps are your fear, stock/crypto trading isn't for you because it's all a continuous cycle of bulls and bears..

Where exactly did you read that Monero's security has been compromised? Are you talking about the news that the IRS is looking to break Monero's privacy features?

Monero can be traced if people don't use the privacy features accordingly. You could use one of CIA's computers with the best security possible - if you leak personal information or fingerprints, that's the end of your anonymity.

There is no coin around that compares to Monero so far in terms of decentralization, security, privacy features and so on. Most other coins that want to conquer the privacy-crypto sphere have optional anonymity unlike Monero's on-and-permanent-by-default. Moreover, Monero is less prone to network attacks than smaller coins. The best thing these guys who accepted the IRS challenge can do is just try setting up something malicious such as nodes/miners in order to link up txs made by users who think Monero makes you private and anonymous no matter how you use it. If you use the anonymous features the way they're meant to be used, you'll still remain most likely anonymous and safe.

Other coins I've looked into are BEAM and Firo (Zcoin). I would still trust Monero more than those without a doubt. If you wonder why, the answer is simple: why did IRS not need to break Zcoin's privacy features as well?

I don't get why it makes more sense to earn in USD and then purchase BTC rather than just accept BTC directly instead. If you want to take the risk of owning Bitcoin, it doesn't matter whether you purchase it on the spot or you just accumulate all your earnings and invest in it.

It's not like Bitcoin transactions are predominant anyway. If you had Bitcoin accepted on your own store, you would probably have less Bitcoin earnings than the overall profit. One other option you have is accepting BTC through a third party which allows you to instantly convert the Bitcoin you accepted into USD, so that there's no loss on your side (although I would rather recommend eliminating 3rd parties whenever possible).

Feels like they're more interested in running a business to milk some crypto opportunity than being interested in helping with the adoption of cryptocurrencies. PayPal has demonstrated that with facts ever since they've announced their so-called "Bitcoin support".

We've had Bitcoin bull runs before, but we've never had such a strong and quick, almost-forced move towards Bitcoin support all of a sudden. This may only be a little step towards the cashless society they're looking forward to create ASAP, because their plan now meets a lot of conditions we did not have before: pandemic, pre-bull run of BTC, adoption rate at an ATH etc.

I looked up the link again, and I think I understood it the wrong way. Here's the source of the information (this is a tutorial for setting up a Tor hidden service on Bitcoin Core, which is a way to anonymously synchronize the wallet as well as anonymously help the network yourself as far as I can tell):

---

Great, thank you! I owe both of you a merit now.

Well, depends on how much you want to drag the situation to the extremes.

Seeds deeply engraved in metal could be stored under the ground somewhere in the middle of a garden and I'm quite sure no thief would start digging your garden. If there's anything they'd do (which is also extreme), it's that they'd start searching your ground using metal detectors. In that case, I'm quite sure some steel will not be of importance to them.

There's no perfect storage for your seeds. But now ask yourself, what are the chances a thief breaks into a home to look for a sheet of paper to steal? I'd honestly think putting the seed in between hundreds of other documents/pieces of paper lowers the chances of the seed being stolen drastically.

The thing is, it's hard to create some seed storage method that has no flaw. You could hide the seed in plain sight using steganography. You could hide the seed in some piece of art on a wall. But now ask yourself.. what if you ever have some problem trying to recover the seed using the piece of art you've created? This is where it may be way better and safer to store the seed using metal sheets.

I'd rather use a piece of paper to store my seed than encrypt it one way or another or hide it using something like art.

One thing you could do is placing 12 objects somewhere in your house in a specific order, the first 4 letters of each being the ones from your seed. Like, the first object could be a picture of a cave, resembling the word "cave" from your seed. But in case of a theft, an earthquake, a baby playing around, a cat jumping and messing the order up or simply you forgetting about the objects' meaning means you could lose the recovery of your funds at any point.

Everything has pros and cons. Depends on what kind of risks you want to assume. While basic storage (seed on paper) involves potential theft, the more complicated ones are prone to other disasters.

You said you don't think it's safe to store the plain seed text, so how would you be able to recover your seed from a memory loss if it's been hidden very well? I'm not sure how easily the family could help you out. Memory loss is a very, very bad thing to experience.

You could store an encrypted copy of your seed in a bank vault, but this method does come with its own risks as well - and the entire purpose of Bitcoin's existence is to remove trusted parties, right? As mentioned earlier, there's no perfect way to do it. You always have to assume a few risks that come with your method of storing it.

The best thing you could probably do is store it in multiple ways. Like, one encrypted copy of your seed at the bank vault, one metal sheet under the ground, one piece of paper somewhere between your docs and a hardware wallet just in case you urgently need to use the funds. But now you have multiple possibilities of being attacked, which is yet another risk to consider ..

If there are 50 participants, there are at least 50 inputs and 50 outputs. If you had a single tx for each input & output, it'd be easy to know who received the coins from who.

Consider the following:
where In = input and Ou = output.

You don't know whether Input no. 1 sent Output no. 1 a certain number of coins or Input no. 26 was the one who did. They're all together so nobody knows who sent who and how much. There are people who join with more than 0.1BTC. If the coinjoin was done in separate txs for each, it'd be way easier to know who that person is because then, if you put together all the txs, this is how it'd look:

Here's what would happen if everything in your plan went as you imagined: I'd get a coin every heartbeat (or second) and at one point, I'll be giving it to someone else for something in exchange (food? money?). Someone, will wake up one day and say "hey, I want to do business with this coin!" and start selling goods to a bunch of people for your coins. In the end, you and a few dozen/hundred/thousand others will pay that guy and wealth inequality will still exist.

To have a fairly distributed supply means not allowing businesses or individuals to try hoarding coins. That means either everyone will have to reject the existence of exchanges as well or your coin will be centralized and never allow hoarding and exchanges to exist. And the latter means censorship or, if each of us should keep their own coins without ever selling/moving them, the coins would have zero value because they'd be useless. If a coin of yours is worth $1 and a multi-millionaires believe there's insane potential for investment, they may purchase a million coins from multiple people. Inequality. We'd only get back to your previous "crypto - fiat" link.

No matter how you take it, the human greed will never let fairness exist. Otherwise, today we'd be living in an utopian world. We could, but at one point there will still be someone who'll want to be in advantage against others and there goes the fairness you've been trying to form.

I've only tried netstat and Bitcoin Core does apparently use the 9050 port whenever it's launched (port 9050 is missing from netstat when Core is closed).

I am just not sure whether the wallet using port 9050 means it's working through Tor. Like, if I never had Tor on my PC but still mentioned this proxy in the Core's Network settings, would the wallet sync/connect at all?

I wouldn't say Bitcoin is "premined". If that's the case, then imagine how much gold has been "premined" already. Premine means being mined before (pre) its public launch.

So if a million people used your coin, there would be an inflation of 1 million coins per second or do I not get it right?

This would be more concerning imo than giving up my name/address. The address and name are information you can change if you ever really need to. Fingerprints, the IRIS and the DNA are completely unique and would pose a big risk from a privacy perspective.

Good luck creating complete fairness, because achieving it seems quite impossible tbh. If you can do that, props to you. But so far, it's all just fairy tales. Try bringing up a real project and see how that works out.

I wouldn't say so. Bitcoin is not "backed" by fiat. If you launched your own coin, it'd be simply impossible for it not to have a value in fiat. You could officially make it so that one coin of yours is worth 1 carrot all the time - but a carrot has a USD price as well. Get it? Like, almost anything out there can be valued in USD at this point. It's inevitable. Bitcoin had no USD value back in 2008-2009. It's just that the community wanted to have it worth something because it does provide some amazing features never seen before.

I've installed the Tor bundle before setting up a Bitcoin Core full node on a fresh Linux install and today, upon checking out the Network settings in the wallet, I noticed that it has not automatically checked the SOCKS5 option which, as far as I read, should be automatically done if it detects Tor on my PC.

Hence, I have manually done this (set up the 127.0.0.1:9050 proxy) and restarted the Core. Upon restart, I notice it does sync but it also gets around 10 peers connected. AFAIK, the Core connection through Tor only allows up to 7 (or 8?) peers at a time.

Therefore, I have closed the Core QT and launched bitcoind with the "-proxy=127.0.0.1:9050" option through terminal, and then closed it and re-launched Core QT with the same option. In the end, I get no different results. I created a bitcoin.conf file to force this proxy and no difference.

I tried purging all Tor-related packages and done a clean reinstall. Tried both from the package offered through the Tor official website and building from source - makes no difference. Hence, I'm afraid my Bitcoin Core is actually not running through Tor and I'd like to make sure it actually is. How can I verify?

10-20% adoption rate is a very optimistic and positive scenario. While I'm more than sure privacy and decentralization is something people will look after in the future, I'm not sure 1-2 out of 10 people will be looking for it. People seem to choose convenience over self-custody more than ever before. It's the age of technology where you literally ask a random server owned by a stranger to tell you what your To-Do list is for today.

We can barely predict an approximate price for the first day of 2021, let alone 30 years from now. If the governments only keep powering up their fetish for control and power, Bitcoin may have to go through some hard times before succeeding as a legal peer-to-peer currency to use. From what it looks, the govs only keep geting more and more annoyed by the idea of letting their citizens be under control of their own assets.