Well, as long as you're moving the ".dat" file from one PC to another, I'd have to guess you're using an USB stick. That is a high risk: your USB stick or computer may be infected and the ".dat" file may move not only from one PC to another but also to some unknown malicious party's device. If I were you, I would just create a brand new wallet on the new PC and transfer the old balance to your new wallet.

Try to avoid moving files from one PC to another as USB sticks are a potential risk. Also, if you're using Bitcoin Core as your new wallet, I would personally wait for it to sync completely before sweeping the wallet - but I don't think there is any particular issue if you'd import it before the full sync, besides the fact that your wallet's balance will not be up-to-date. If you're using Electrum in light SPV mode, the synchronization takes literally a few seconds and it doesn't matter if you import/sweep it before/after the sync.

Edit: also, try to write the private key on a piece of paper and never store it on online storage or text files. Move your private key around as least often as you can. Google Drive, Gmail or ProtonMail are not safe ways to store your key. I usually write it down on a piece of paper multiple times, verify one of the lines I've written character by character to make sure I wrote the right thing and then just get rid of the electronically-saved one. I feel much safer having a piece of paper with a privkey on it than a Notepad file.

To import the private key into your new wallet,

• If you're using Electrum, you can either:
  
  • Create a new seed and sweep the private key (Wallet -> Private keys -> Sweep) into one of your new seed's addresses
  • Import the private key straight from the initial Electrum setup (choose "Import Bitcoin addresses or private keys" instead of Standard wallet) and then transfer the funds wherever you'd like
• If you're still using Bitcoin Core as your new PC's wallet: unlock the new wallet (if you've encrypted it) through the "walletpassphrase" command, followed by the "importprivkey" one. Here's the two commands you need:

I would not think this way. If there's no difference if they'll ask for KYC or not because we have no privacy, we may as well let Google take random pictures from our front & back phone cameras while we're sitting on the toilet - or anything else that involves them intruding our private life. There's no privacy anyway, right?

When you see there's no privacy anymore, you have to fight for it. You don't let yourself be defeated. This is how I take it. I can't let Google just get more and more into my private life with every little step they make just because they've shown they truly don't give a fuck about our personal lives.

Or it's just the old "request KYC -> steal coins" strat a lot of platforms abused back when KYC was freshly introduced and nobody knew about it. If you request everyone a KYC all of a sudden, they will not expect it and so there will be a lot of people who would rather lose their mined coins than complete such stupid forms. Hence, all that money (considering it's a centralized coin as KYC is mandatory to withdraw) goes just straight into Pi founder's wallet. The other way around is just requesting KYC and selling the info later on. Personal information from a large database of users is quite expensive.

Well, it depends on how you want to get that BTC. You could purchase, trade, mine, do tasks (or provide some service) or play with some faucets.

Currently, 0.000001 is worth around $0.018 which would be just "dust" (an amount so small it's basically useless). Before actually owning a significant amount of Bitcoin though, it's okay to start from low amounts just to play with it.

I'd advise you to care about your privacy straight from the start. Hence, no matter what you do, try to avoid giving out personal information and completing Know-Your-Customer (KYC) forms. You do not need to prove someone your identity to use Bitcoin. With BTC, you're your own bank. One more thing I'd advise you not to do is use centralized/custodial services. If there is a decentralized option, while it may cost more money and/or time, it is worth it in the end. Your personal information is worth a lot of money. I would say it's actually priceless.

Now the first thing you can do is read. Try to gather as much information as possible from many sources, because the more you know, the better you will be. You can start off by reading the original whitepaper, exploring the Bitcoin Wiki and Bitcoin.org's Getting Started page with the documentation for newcomers. Another website I particularly love is Bitcoin Privacy Guide. If after these two you find privacy an interesting subject, you may find Wasabi Wallet's documentation interesting as well. They offer a ton of very helpful information - especially for protecting your digital identity - which is easy to understand for anyone .. even newbies.

If you want to start using a wallet, I'd suggest you use Electrum as it's non-custodial and has a lot of functions you can play with. Remember to always save your seed when creating your first wallet. The seed is a backup phrase for your funds. If you don't have it, there's nobody who can help you with the recovery of your funds. Storing seed properly means storing it offline, such as on a piece of paper. When you'll have more money in a wallet, you may consider storing your seed on a metal to protect it from fire and other risks paper storage comes with over time.

The Wasabi Wallet I linked you to above is amazing, but in my opinion it's too advanced for a newbie. Hence, just go for Electrum. Electrum has its own documentation page as well.

Mining is quite hard to start with today without a huge load of money to spend on mining equipment, because it requires a lot of money to invest and re-invest and in the end you may end up earning as much Bitcoin as you'd pay for electricity used to mine it - or even less than that.

I'll help you out with your first transaction.

Try downloading Electrum, launch it and create a wallet. To make it easier for you, choose the following upon the initial launch:
  1. Auto connect
  2. Give your wallet a name
  3. Standard wallet
  4. Create a new seed
  5. Segwit
  6. Write down the given seed on a piece of paper and push Next
  6. Write the seed you now have on paper in the empty box and push Next
  7. Enter (if you want) a password to secure your wallet and you're done!

Now go to the Receive tab and get yourself a receiving address by pushing the "Request" button. Post your address here as a reply (should be in the right side of Electrum, starting with "bc1"), and I will give you a thousand satoshis (0.00001). Your next task will be sending it back to me, so that you know both how receiving and spending works.

If the key to success is finding out whether Satoshi is/was an uneducated alcoholic or not, then you need to reconsider the choices and plans you've made. At this point, you're just trolling and spamming.

I'm starting to believe you're intentionally just trying to spam the heck out of this forum. Seriously now, your questions have been answered a gazillion times before. Satoshi's identity is unknown. We don't know anything about him besides the fact that he's most likely British, according to his writing skills. Might very well be a deceiving thing he's intentionally done though, in order to further confuse us about his identity.

Why do you care? Why is it important to know what education he had if Bitcoin is a community-driven project?

Well, I think this is as worse as combining all of my inputs together (or maybe I didn't get it right). The exchange/wallet would literally have the information that one single customer/user has deposited all of those amounts, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid - especially as a lot of exchanges probably hand out their customers' data to authorities every now and then.

I would use CoinJoin, but I can't even use 10 addresses with it and the minimum amount is .1BTC. Hence, the best thing I can do is just keep them inside my wallet and join them with other addresses worth ~0.1BTC, but there's one issue: as long as it's not exactly the same minimum amount Wasabi requires for queue, it'd only result in yet another change.

That's a kinda selfish way of thinking, honestly. I would obviously lie if I said I don't need/want a profit, but I'm here more for the freedom I get from Bitcoin than for the idea of earning a few bucks. I feel like Bitcoin is a safehouse from the disgusting enslavement we're all stuck into.

Putin, Nazarov and whoever else have nothing to do with Bitcoin's price. The best thing Putin can do is praise Bitcoin, which would only result in a short hype ending as bad as any other hype has ever ended. Even if Kim Jong-Un invented it, all we should really care about is that it still exists, we can still use it the decentralized way and upgrades only make it more worth the investment.

Seized coins are usually being auctioned. The US government selling Bitcoin on the dark web is the shadiest thing they could do - and would make their arguments against Tor/Bitcoin/privacy worth nothing. They're worth nothing anyway, but talking crap about dark web markets only to sell something on them afterwards makes no sense.

At the time of writing this post, it is not less likely to sell a "stained" coin than it is to sell a non-stained one.. unless it comes straight from a coinjoin/whirlpool/mixer. But in the far future, it seems like it's likely stained coins will be less worth than "virgin" ones (coming straight from mining).

No, they're not the same thing. When you enter a seed into a wallet, you generate multiple addresses as per your need. A private key gives you access to only one address.

Well, if the seed was the private key and the Ledger never showed it to you, you'd never have a way to recover your funds.

Private keys are a string of alphanumeric characters (a-Z and 0-9) giving you access to one specific address. This is why it's advisable to sweep a paper wallet: if you import the private key into Electrum and spend part of the paper wallet directly from it without coin control, chances are your change will go into an address you don't own because you only own one address (the one you're spending from).

Example of private key: 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF
Example of seed: witch collapse practice feed shame open despair creek road again ice least
(source: Bitcoin Wiki)

You have to assume a risk in any case. You could cash out in BTC right before a bear run. You can make these comparisons because you have historical records, but can't predict if in the near/long term it'll work the same way.

One thing has been certain along Bitcoin's history: Bitcoin is almost always more profitable than any other asset. While a $50 to $500 run may look insane, it's not as insane as Bitcoin's $1k to $20k bull run. While at a first glance it may seem too expensive to get in the game, if you take a step back you'd notice it's almost always the exact opposite.

Here's how I've seen it work out: Alts are great for bullish alt runs. You have to play it smart and cash out at the right time. Seek BTC profit instead of USD and multiply your BTC during bullish alt seasons.

But again, I'm no expert/crystal ball so it's all about risk assessment. If you want, you could split and go 50/50: cash out half BTC, half USDT. Experiment by yourself and find the strat that works out for you while still making you feel somewhat secure/safe with the decisions you're taking.

Seems more like it's a move of theirs towards a specific goal rather than a problem with their servers. When you have one of the top exchanges in the world, you can't make these kind of excuses. It's not like you've never had the issue before, and it's not like it'd cost you a fortune to prepare for even larger surges of users/txs..

Usually when large exchanges suddenly go down, it causes a little panic hence the price of Bitcoin not being allowed to push even more upwards. Doesn't look like an unexpected thing to me, so it should be just a little strat of Armstrong's.

You're not criticizing it; you're trying to give BSV a little advertisement over here. Your username checks out.

As long as the new updates provide something new and better without compromising stability, decentralization and security, I'm fine with them. Forks are inevitable at some point, yet that doesn't make Bitcoin a better coin. Alts are mostly testing grounds for BTC, as someone said a while ago over here. Bitcoin doesn't get day-one upgrades unlike other coins; an untested tech is a risky thing.

How and why do you think a 51% is coming?

I'm intrigued to find out whether those who answered "yes" will really end up purchasing cryptocurrencies or not. I have a lot of friends who've been wanting to purchase crypto for years, yet they have never owned a single satoshi.

That sounds quite bad for a distant future, honestly. With millionaires and billionaires joining in, expect heavy price manipulation by the rich. The situation will get to a similar point where precious metals currently are today. If the wealthy don't want a bull run, it doesn't happen.

Does the full node act as an explorer though? As far as I'm concerned, it does not act as one and to do that, I have to get my own server instead. I'm a bit concerned that as soon as I enter my wallet with all those addresses, a malicious node finds out that all of them are owned by one person. I may be very well wrong about it though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

It's not necessarily time dependent, so I could wait. I could simply transfer them one by one rather than in bulk. I have enough patience to do that, but the only difference would be that I'd have a lot of txs rather than a bulky one - they'd still basically link together upon a blockchain analysis.

---

Thanks for the long answer, I appreciate it. I care about the pre-coinjoined coins being linked together because that'd be crucial to linking a large part of my history together. Say I had 10 different accounts under pseudonymous names on different websites I've always used through Tor without JS. If I ever link the BTC txs I made through these accounts together, that'd make it easy for a bad actor to link all the accounts as well.

There obviously are some inputs I wouldn't care about, but they're mixed up. Hence, finding a way to privately consolidate all of them is my only hope.

I have a few hundreds of small inputs that I'm looking to join together. By "small", I'm talking about $10 and under. Most of them are older change addresses.

My question is.. how can I join all those small inputs together without sacrificing my privacy? I've used Coin Control on all of those specifically not to link them together, so linking them now means linking all my entire BTC history together.

---

Now about Wasabi and CoinJoins.. I was wondering something: doesn't the server I connect to see all the UTXOs I own? As in, say I have 5 different addresses in my offline Electrum I have never linked together before. Now I want to move these coins to 5 different addresses I generated on the same Wasabi seed.. doesn't the server see that my Tor IP owns all those 5 addresses basically, or is there 1 separate IP generated for each address balance request?

I was thinking about creating my own server with its own blockchain explorer so that I don't need to connect to external servers anymore for balance retrieval, but I can't seem to find a good tutorial for that to also work with Wasabi while still maintaining the same level of security.

Do segwit txs really have higher fees than non-segwit ones? Isn't it the exact opposite?

Well, with all those upcoming upgrades, it's gonna be quite hard to make the entire community approve a new change - especially when we have BTC purists who have an influence (or people like Roger Ver who want to maliciously use their popularity and mass of sustainers). I expect a new BTC fork without Taproot to be pushed out as soon as BTC gets the new upgrade anyway. I think it's pretty inevitable.

You, or one of your friends surely have an original microUSB cable from some older (or even new) smartphone. Try to use that and see if it works. If not, then it's a faulty device/port.

Should've been the first thing you must've done before purchasing another USB cable directly from them. I doubt with multiple new cables it's still the quality of cables at fault tho. Contact them and see what they're saying, maybe the fix is free.

And it's certainly not the last. There's no perfect product in the world with zero negative reviews.

First of all, congrats for being so interested and preferring to rather invest your time to study Bitcoin than quickly rush the investments and have them easily go wrong. I like how you think and the "invest only what you can afford to lose" idea is as true as it can get. Keep on reading - it's something you should never stop doing, but also something a lot of people really don't do (unfortunately).

If I was to start again from zero, I'd honestly just keep purchasing whenever I have money to allocate for crypto investments. Besides the very beginning when I didn't know much about Bitcoin or other kind of investments at all, I've never had even a single Bitcoin investment go wrong as I've always had patience with it. Long term has always paid Bitcoin hodlers well, and I personally have high hopes for the future.

Purchasing a HW is a great idea. Another thing you could consider is purchasing a (or making your own) steel seed backup tablet/capsule for protection against really bad events such as strong house fires.

Altcoins are a very volatile and risky area. If Bitcoin is risky itself as an investment, altcoins are worse. Most of the time, it's only an illusion that you earn more money in the end - I mean, you do earn a profit with some of them.. but in the end, while an alt goes up twice (in USD) while other alts go down, Bitcoin usually increases way more than that in price and if you do a little calculus in the end, you'd find out that having invested everything in BTC from the start would've been way more profitable than investing in multiple coins.

As you said, everything is speculative about the price. If I was to tell you my own opinion, it'd be that even at $50k Bitcoin would still be very cheap for me on the longer term - and I'd still invest my time and money in it even if it ever gets up there. But that's a risk I take and assume - as you say, it could very well just drop at any given time (and there are quite a lot of historical drops I've been through myself). Emotionally, it makes you want to get out of the market.

Besides the first years of my crypto adventure, I've never let myself be emotionally driven again because I noticed that's the specific reason I kept messing up. Now for the investment strategy, I'll support the DCA as well. As long as you don't want to make quick wins, I think you'd be fine going for it. But again, I'm not a crystal ball and I really hope I am not wrong. However, investment equals risk and if you get to accept this idea, you should be fine.

E drept ce spui; eu as fi curios (si am sa incerc sa aflu) daca la aur sau alte metale pretioase exista specificata in lege impozitarea pentru achizitia de bunuri si, daca nu, atunci ar fi interesant sa aflu daca exista cazuri in care o persoana a avut probleme cu statul pentru astfel de tranzactii. Fiind metale pretioase, cred ca e mai mult probabil sa fie astfel de incidente decat cu BTC.

Oricum, problema nu cred ca este neaparat faptul ca ai cumparat ieftin si ai vandut scump pentru ca e putin greu sa dovedesti asta, dar te poti astepta oricand sa fi intrebat de unde ai bunurile respective. Cu siguranta ca iti poti cumpara lejer un Alienware fara sa fi intrebat ce si cum, insa daca ajungi sa cumperi bunuri mai "expuse" precum masini sau imobile, e cam usor sa o dai cotita.

Iti dai seama ca daca te intereseaza sa scapi de ei, procedezi astfel. Mai nasol e faptul ca e cam greu sa gasesti magazine care sa accepte BTC (si sa vanda si ceea ce te intereseaza) in proximitatea orasului tau, deci e mult mai la indemana sa comanzi online. Oricum, avand in vedere ca ATM-urile incep sa nu prea mai mearga fiind scoase cam dubios de des din functiune in ultimul timp si incep sa se perceapa taxe pentru plati ramburs, online-ul va fi la ordinea zilei pentru toata lumea curand, iar rambursul (unde macar poti folosi date fictive in afara de adresa, ceea ce e cu siguranta mai bine decat deloc) va fi ceva neobisnuit.