Topic: 10 recent posts that might deserve a merit (Read 258 times)

Well... you asked.

I did not look at your other selections.

Any comment welcome. Thanks.

One issue that I think is a serious challenge for crypto, as far as wide spread adaptation is concerned, is some type of error-correction. Not necessarily an error in the system, but human-error.

Its one of the things that conventional systems have in place that bitcoin really lacks. I've only been using bitcoin since 2013, and to be honest I still get a bit of a panicky feeling every time I send coins out. "What if I used the wrong address? What if I'm being ripped off? What if the transaction gets stuck? What if there's a new zero-day exploit which drains my cold addresses (yes... I even worry about my cold addresses [ https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies ])?"

People make mistakes. I am fully aware, and really support the 'non-reversibility' of bitcoin, but this issue has been in the back of my mind for quite some time.

I've sent coins to an incorrect address. I think those of us that use bitcoin willingly accept these risks because we understand the alternatives, but I don't think I could live with it if it was inherent in every financial transaction I made. I would hate to worry about my whether my utility payment was successful every month. Or my car payment, or mortgage. The concept of mis-sending, coupled with irreversablity is really quite unnerving.

I have lost coins in exchange melt-downs, and have also come to expect a certain amount of successful theft in crypto. If something is wrong with a product I've purchased, I am left to the judgement and honesty of the vendor. The concept of purchasing with bitcoin but having no way to recover coins if I have been a victim of fraud is also quite unnerving.

Over the years I have noticed this problem attempting to be addressed, but what I'm seeing is yet another form of banking. Escrow providers were one of the earliest that I saw. We are already experiencing the horrors of mining power becoming concentrated. What would the landscape look like if escrow became big business? What if "bitcoin insurance" came into being (sort of an FDIC for bitcoin)? Coinbase wallets are very popular, with many users of it unaware that they don't control the coins in that wallet.

I've spent a good deal of brain-power ( of what little I have ) thinking about this issue, and every scenario I think of involves some entity wielding huge amounts of power and trust, which rarely continues with both surviving. I am sure this can be addressed in some fashion, but I really am concerned about what that solution would look like. I have a fear that the solutions that actually get adopted (by a huge number of people missing the whole point of bitcoin) could kill the very strengths of bitcoin as a system.

Can the system be safe for people that are non-tech, non-crypto savvy?

do NOT do this!

first of all i am skeptical about validity of this claim by OP because "accidents" don't happen with bitcoin, it is not like changing one character of an address to another character and ending up with someone else's address.

but if we assume it is true, you should never send back what you have received because the sender may NOT have access to that address anymore and you practically will burn those coins. it may be an exchange address that they sent it from, maybe a web wallet like Coinbase which sends from random addresses not the address sender owns. or it may be a sweep of a paper wallet that the owner threw away after sweeping and no longer has the private key.

instead, to send back you first ask for a signed message from the address that sent you the coins then ask for an address to send the coins back to. it can be the same address or a new one but you have to ask and also check that signature first.

What exactly did you try? And why did you try this already if you still need to move your Bitcoin to a new safe address?

These are the basic steps:
-move all your Bitcoins to a new address
-export the private keys to the Bitcoin addresses that held your coins at the moment of the fork
-sweep the private keys into Coinomi, do this for Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcore

That type of user won't likely be sitting on any blockchain bitcoins at all.

They will get an account at an exchange to purchase bitcoins.  The exchange will open a channel with them, with the exchange funding the channel with some amount of bitcoins and the user funding the channel with 0 bitcoins.

When the user requests to "withdraw" funds from the exchange, the "withdrawal will just be a lightning channel transaction to the user.  Those funds will be in the refund transaction INSTEAD of being on the blockchain.  This makes the funds no more or less "out of circulation" than if the exchange had sent the funds to the user with an on chain transaction.

The merchant wants to be able to sell bitcoins when they receive them.  Therefore they will open an account at an exchange. The exchange will open a channel with them, with the exchange funding the channel with some amount of bitcoins and the merchant funding the channel with 0 bitcoins.

If the exchange used by the merchant and the exchange used by the user are two different exchanges, then the exchanges will all most likely have channels open between each other funded on both sides with amounts that are calculated based on the net daily transfers between them.

Now when the user wants to pay the merchant, a route is established from the user back to the exchange where  they got the coins and from an exchange out to the merchant.  The user doesn't need to open a channel directly with the merchant. That would be a hassle for the merchant, opening individual channels with EVERY user that wants to buy something from them.

Now the merchant wants to sell those bitcoins, they don't need to close ANY channels. They just send the bitcoins that they JUST received form the merchant channel and send them back to the merchant over the same channel.

Thats completely against the purpose of a hardware wallet.
Once your private keys were on an device connected to the internet (your current pc), those should be considered as possibly compromised.
The only way to guarantee a safe storage is to let the private keys be generated by your hardware wallet (which will never leave the device) and send your funds over.



Not directly.
You can export the private keys / the master private key (starting with xprv..) and import them into another wallet (e.g. electrum: https://electrum.org/#home).
To export your master private key in core. Go to 'Help' -> 'Debug Window' -> 'Console'.
Then type in walletpassphrase YOUR_PASSWORD to unlock your wallet and dumpwallet FILE_NAME to dump your allet into a file.
Afterwards you can open this file with an editor and serach for 'xprv'. This master private key can be then imported into any BIP44-compatible wallet.

As far as i know, blockchain don't have capability to do that since all blockchain based cryptocurrency have block generation time to prevent double-spending (unless the merchant/receiver accept 0-conf) and fee is needed to combat spam which could bloat the blockchain itself (even though some cryptocurrency which block isn't full still allow zero tx fee).

Unless you can find blockchain based cryptocurrency which allow zero tx fee and their block isn't full (which means 0-conf is safe), i suggest you to use DAG based cryptocurrency such as IOTA, byteball and RaiBlocks.

If you already know how the system works (blockchain, transactions, mining, addresses, fees, etc) you already have a good starting point. The best way to learn the software aspects of the bitcoin network would be to look it up on the internet imho. Here's the Bitcoin Core (official Bitcoin Wallet) GitHub code page. This wallet is open source so you can read their code and try to understand how it works: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.

However if you are a beginner in the BTC world I suggest you learn the basics of the system first. There are numerous sources you can use to your advantage, the first being the official bitcoin website: https://bitcoin.org.

Also check their "Developer Documentation" section: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation.