I'd say it's the emotionally driven choices. That was my biggest flaw in the beginning. If you get that one fixed, you may do very well. One more thing I've seen around a lot is that so many people make choices based on what other complete strangers think, which is so wrong. I've seen the "a friend told me <insert_shitcoin_name_here> will boom and make me rich" at least a few hundred times.

Another thing is that a lot of people just cannot be patient and experiment various things without considering the potential consequences. Like, if you want to try out various Bitcoin-related things, purchase Bitcoin worth $10 and do it. But don't invest all your lifetime savings in something you don't understand yet. It may be a bad choice to do so.

Little mistakes in the crypto sphere make for potentially large damages. Documenting yourself, being patient and not letting your emotions influence your choices are a must.

Tech and surveillance are advancing too much in too many ways not to be paranoid. I'd rather be overly-cautious than let anyone supervise me. I don't like being watched, so I'd rather take my time and eliminate all potential risks and sources of information leaks. Even if they don't watch me, I personally find these practices as a very interesting and fun hobby to have. And why not, as long as you aren't hurting anyone.

Doesn't that require having malicious hardware and software though? I mean, no matter what you do electronically, there still is some level of trust you require because you obviously can't begin creating your own efficient hardware components. For that, I'm still waiting for the possibility of owning fully auditable Open-Source hardware.

Or a sign that corporations and the other 1% (the wealthy) have found a way to potentially defeat us. If there's something I really don't trust, it's that the wealthy do stuff to supposedly help something. They do something they could benefit from the results themselves.

There is no way to enforce KYC on all wallets, but there is a way to make holding Bitcoin a nightmare: make it illegal to own a non-KYC-registered address. That way, if you ever have a Bitcoin on an old address of yours that you completely forgot about but want to use it immediately, you'd have to register it beforehand and to also expect questions from the authorities.

I think they're pretty close to setting this up for the crypto community. Although it may seem like they're starting to support us, I'm quite sure they despite us.

That's for sure. Here in Europe we're getting KYC for purchasing prepaid SIM cards or precious metals. The leash is starting to get shorter and shorter..

Depends on what your needs are and how you use the coins. If you've mixed some coins only to use them through exchanges, I don't think you've done anything to improve your privacy at all. You either go completely undercover or you don't. (personal opinion tho)

Coinomi is closed-source; Changelly is centralized. Switching from BTC to XMR doesn't help much if you don't take care of your privacy through XMR, although it's certainly harder to leak crucial information than it is through BTC.

If you use Changelly to get from BTC to XMR and back to BTC after a while, you'd use the same IP address for the exchange. Hence, you could do as many trades as you wish because your identity will still be leaked to Changelly - and I'm quite sure they do not allow Tor IPs (and even if they do, you may find your coins frozen for suspicious activity).

If I were you, I'd use solely open-source wallets with as least external connections as possible (for example, use full node rather than SPV) in combination with decentralized markets such as Bisq. Decentralized markets are slower and harder to use obviously, but it's worth it all in the end if you care about your privacy.

Other options include selling/purchasing from BitcoinTalk, although you should obviously take proper care and avoid scammers. I'd recommend using escrow.

One more thing I've heard about is BEAM. Their official wallet apparently has supposedly decentralized atomic swap ability. Never took my time to read some docs about it tho.

There are three outcomes from this thing:
 1. Never accept KYC anywhere and use BTC without it (so basically illegally)
 2. Accept KYC first and then move to a non-registered address once you find out privacy IS important (so moving to self-custody, which is illegal)
 3. Accept KYC since the law gets in

And now the questions are.. for the second case, what if your funds get scraped off into a hacker's wallet? How do you prove it's not you who moved the coins and the other address is not yours?

What happens if you want to send me, an European guy, part of your funds? My address is not KYC-registered.

I'm sure they'll find a way. And I kinda feel like if the "the government created Bitcoin" theory is true, then this is what they wanted from the start.

I personally don't think so. Most people don't even use Bitcoin properly, and most people don't care about privacy at all anyway. If they did, Google, Apple and all those other corporations wouldn't have been at the top as we speak.

If they adopt this law, then Bitcoin won't be screwed but we will. Basically, just a minority who do care about financial profits (obviously), but also care about their privacy.

But now the question is.. if this law comes true, what do we do with Monero? Do they plan to declare it illegal since the ledger is quite private?

To have peace, use open-source non-custodial wallets. The most popular and trusted one is Electrum for Bitcoin and, for alts, you should find their official wallets on the official websites/GitHub repos. Most "fancy-looking" wallets are custodial from what I've seen around. Anyway, it's better to trust something that's been around for so many years with many peer reviews and a lot of features.

Using custodial or closed-source wallets puts your funds under risks you can easily avoid by simply not using their closed-source wallets in the first place. Why hold your funds in a wallet that could seize or steal your funds under the excuse of suspicious activity (such as Freewallet) when you could just be your own bank instead?

I wonder how much support it's gonna get. This honestly seems like a rush in desperation after PayPal announced their crypto thing.

I'd say Libra's gotten too much hate in the past to be successful, but unfortunately too many people get fooled so easily by anything these days. I just wish it's going to be a failed attempt. We do not need a privately-controlled centralized currency. That's exactly what I am trying to avoid.

It was a very smartly planned operation for sure. I'd have to guess almost everyone kept their mouths shut due to quite heavy threats coming from either the OneCoin team or their affiliates.

I actually found the thread I was mentioning yesterday and it apparently was right here, on BTCTalk. I'll translate part of the original post below:

That's exactly what I wanted to know but had no idea how to ask more specifically. Thanks for the answer.

Edit: I have one more thing but I don't think it's worth creating a new thread..

Before actually moving my funds into those wallets, I want to make sure (although I did verify the packages with ThomasV's signature, I'd rather be extra-paranoid than be screwed up) that I have installed the legit, non-malicious version of Electrum.

Would creating a new random seed through RNG (using dice and the wordlist) and using that as a test seed on 3 different devices with Electrum installed be enough? I'd use it as a "disposable" seed to check whether all 3 devices show up the same addresses.

A little update: I've managed to get multiple devices set up different ways and so far I've played with small amounts of BTC to test out all of the previously mentioned ideas. Got to run Wasabi with Bitcoin Knots and the Core with Full Node as well (wanted to see how both work). I pretty much fell in love with Wasabi, but Electrum seems to give more user control (probably removed from Wasabi for privacy reasons) so I'll actually end up using both separately, depending on my needs.

One particular thing I'm a bit confused about is about broadcasting txs..: strictly from a privacy perspective, which one is better?
 1. Broadcasting from Wasabi (with Knots) through Tor
 2. Broadcasting from Bitcoin Core full node running through Tor
 3. Broadcasting through Whonix (Live Session, Read-Only Virtual Machine running Tor system-wide) from Electrum*

*I'd use the Whonix session strictly for broadcasting the transaction data, after which the session would close

If I'm running a Full Node (or Knots), I feel like it's not a good idea to broadcast my transactions from the same device but to use a dedicated live session to do so.. however, I wanted to hear someone else's opinion about this as well.

Well, what the guy said about the situation makes it even worse.

And that should be no one's problem but PayPal's. As long as they allowed their customers to purchase and sell cryptocurrencies, the fact that they did not take fees into account is NOT a valid reason to seize funds. Moreover, as I previously mentioned, they rose the limits from $10k to $15k per week. That's not something you do when you have too much trading to cover your fees.

Last time I checked, I was allowed to deposit and withdraw money from and to my bank account as many times as I wanted without having my money seized. Banks take fees for txs so this is, once again, PayPal's fault for not considering them before actually pushing out the "crypto purchasing" feature.

I'd just move on from their service and never go back again. Fuck them.

AFAIK, the scam was mostly done offline. It was mostly an affiliate thing - basically as soon as you joined, you'd have to gather other people to invest in it and you'd supposedly earn a commission, and the affiliates would also be tempted (obviously) to get a few people to join as well to their own benefit.

I remember reading somewhere on a Romanian forum a post from someone who's fallen into this scam (long time before Igor went missing) and was getting threats from the OneCoin team for not doing their part of the scam and willing to expose them IIRC, and the minimum sum to invest was around 5k EUR. Most people have done it offline because it's way harder to convince someone online to invest 5k EUR into something they've heard about for the first time ever.

Speaking from personal esperience and thoughts: when you want to hide something, you will try to do and think everything out well before you start actually hiding it. Satoshi more than likely knew people would be going heavily after him if Bitcoin ever became a successful project, and so he more than likely planned his entire Internet existence very well.

I'd imagine he even went for some stuff such as using prepaid disposable SIM cards as his Internet connection, which today is quite hard to do considering the new (at least European) restrictions on purchasing prepaid cards. Faking your timezone is quite easy to do (and mostly doesn't even require intentionally faking it). Each of us has a different daily schedule, so he may be a night owl just as well as being an "early bird". His time activity doesn't say much, or at least nothing to rely on as an information imo.

One particular thing I've thought about is that he might've even used one of his closest friends (or co-workers) to write the Internet  posts and BTC Whitepaper for him. That makes it very easy for me to pose as a native American, British or whatever on the Internet.

Let's not forget something: Satoshi has created the banking system's Enemy. I am pretty sure he went all in and looked for the best and safest ways to keep his identity anonymous before he even leaked a single word about his project on the web. Hence, I really think trying to find his real identity will only end up as a now-even-larger mystery with even more questions than we had before.

What if he specifically changed his working schedule just to fake his timezone?
What if he used the British news specifically to make us believe he's British?
What if someone else actually wrote all those posts instead of him, and he was just the mastermind behind them?

It's all a mystery. He created it, he launched it, he wanted his privacy. Let us give at least that much back to him as a reward.

Welcome to the centralized world where PayPal's shown up few weeks ago as a crypto savior only to be the actual devil. Their limits of up to $15k per week sucks - you can't even trade one Bitcoin per week.

The easiest fix for this is: don't use their platform anymore. The more people who leave them, the better. Same goes for all those other corporations sucking all the information from your devices and using it all to their own good. Find a replacement, because there are many.

Besides you writing a completely interpretable post that makes no sense, I'm not sure what is happening. Maybe put your question more into a context?

It's just close to proving yet another time that, with patience, nobody's ever lost with Bitcoin over the long term. We're literally getting new ATHs every few years, and that speaks loud and clear facts.

Fun to see how a lot of people I've talked to thought Bitcoin is too expensive to be worth an investment only a few months ago, especially since they're the same people who thought Bitcoin was expensive under $800. The current market feels like the bulls are only waiting for their perfect time to enter the heavy run.

The transaction fees are not fixed. You can pay 1 BTC in fees or just a few cents, depending on how urgent the transaction is. Tx fees are calculated based on the amount of satoshis you want to pay per byte.

If you want to pay one person 1 BTC and have the owned 1 BTC coming from a single transaction (input), as the number of outputs and inputs is small (1 input which is your funds and 1 output which is the person's address you're paying to), the transaction's size in bytes is small so will the fees be.

But if you received a total of 1 BTC in your wallet through many transactions separately (so have many inputs), the tx's size will increase and the fees will as well.

The Bitcoin miners mine transactions based on fees, in descending order. So the higher the fees are, the higher the chances are to get your tx confirmed faster. The sad thing is, a lot of people just choose the default fees calculated by their wallet which most of the time is an amount way higher than it should be.

To do this cheaper, all you have to do is literally set a smaller sat/byte fee. I'd go for a 2 sat/byte fee if the tx is not urgent, and a 3-4 sat/byte one if you want it to be confirmed within like a day max. Even with 5-7 sat/byte, you would not get even close to the $7.72 amount you've mentioned and your tx will likely be confirmed within hours.

While I'm quite paranoid about smartphones and cameras, imo if one gets to the point where they're so paranoid that they can't trust their smartphone at all anymore, it may be time to use a dumb phone instead. Like, I do this as a security and privacy practice - not necessarily because I'd be scared of someone monitoring my webcam activity.

For ambient sounds, if you're talking about microphones, it's quite hard to get the 3 microphones disconnected from a smartphone. I don't think there are any (or a lot of) smartphones out there that have modular microphones, they're usually soldered into the motherboard and requires micro-soldering skills to disconnect them. And that implies some very rough possible consequences: you'd have to only use headphones for microphone, so imagine having to call 911 in an emergency.

The thing is, even with your cameras and microphones removed, your phone's hardware and OS are the main issue. If you fear being spied through microphones and cameras, I'd have a much larger fear for the blobs and closed-source stuff the operating system has. At that point, Librem phones should be considered if you really need a smartphone (or a dumb phone, which is as cheap as a meal and can be disposed at any given time).

Another option is to use a Faraday cage to cut all external connections to the phone. Include a white noise generator next to it (or inside the cage) if you're afraid sounds are recorded offline only to be streamed once the phone reconnects to the internet.

I didn't mean to make it sound like it's likely to get it infected, but I generally avoid moving crypto-related stuff through removable storage devices such as USBs and MicroSD cards. At one point, it's possible that you may not wipe the USB correctly and plug it into an infected PC while still containing your .dat file.

I don't see it as a problem now, but for the longer-term. Once you get used to the convenience of moving files through USB from one device to another, you get to prefer doing that rather than safer methods.

That's great. The private key is enough for your backup, but it's certainly not bad to also have the wallet address written next to it.

By using that option, you'd only import the private key inside your wallet. As in, you'd only have an Electrum wallet with a single address in it that you can use.

No, importing the ".dat" file and importing the privkey are two different things. AFAIK, the privkey is part of the ".dat" file. It's the access to a single Bitcoin address that you've exported from your old Bitcoin Core wallet.

By the way, are you sure you only have a single address that you've used on your old Bitcoin Core wallet? You can generate multiple receiving addresses, so make sure you backed up the good one(s).

No. If you enter just the address, you will create a watch-only wallet. You can watch anyone's wallet - even mine. If you insert my Bitcoin address in there, you could see my txs, my balance etc. but you do not have access to spend from my address. It's like I'd show you a number of physical banknotes. You can see them, you can count them, but you can't use them because they're mine.

In there you only have to insert the private key. As I said above, the privkey is enough to recover your funds.

Assuming it's a new PC, the sync will not "continue" from the point your old PC's Bitcoin Core has reached. It would just start from zero instead. But as I mentioned, when you use Electrum, unless you're running a full node (downloading and syncing the entire blockchain, like you had to do with Bitcoin Core), the sync will only take a few seconds. It's running in light mode by default, which means you don't need a lot of storage and time to sync it.

But in all honesty, considering that you are quite new to this stuff, I would rather recommend either sweeping all the private key(s) or fully syncing the Bitcoin Core wallet as @HCP suggested above and having your entire balance be up-to-date before actually moving funds out. You may have other receiving addresses you've used before and still have balance in them. May take more time, but better be safe than sorry.