13
What stops malware from being malicious?
Nothing
What can you do to ensure that the wallet you are using is a secure way to access your bitcoin?
Use an open source bitcoin wallet, download from the original source and verify authenticity before use. If you understand code, review and build it yourself.
Obviously, if a person creates a wallet to steal bitcoin ...
9
Hardware wallets are generally designed to securely store your private keys in an always-offline environment ("cold storage"). This allows the user to have confidence that their coins will not be stolen by malware/hacking/etc, since any attacker would need to have physical access to the device itself.
If nothing else, this is the main advantage of ...
6
The introduction of descriptor wallets presents an opportunity to introduce a new database backend as descriptor wallets are backwards incompatible. The following is taken from Andrew Chow's blog post on what's coming to the Bitcoin Core wallet in 0.21. (There was also discussion on this GitHub Issue.)
Why move from Berkeley DB?
Not designed to be used as ...
5
As @Prayank mentioned before: Nothing. As Ken Thompson said: "you can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself".
If you are paranoid, it's better that you use cold wallets and make them air-gap.
5
Can I “duplicate” a wallet using a backup phrase (12 words)?
Yes
Where is my balance stored?
Both wallets will scan the relevant parts of the public transaction-journal ("blockchain") to add up the amount of money controlled by the keys derived from your backup phrase - this total is your balance.
Wallets are very likely to store this total ...
4
An output descriptor (note that output descriptor and wallet descriptor refer to the same thing) is a human readable string that represents an output script (a scriptPubKey) and everything needed in order to solve¹ for that script. Descriptors also have a bech32-like checksum which allows for the descriptor to be given to others with less risk of ...
3
Technically speaking, is it possible to reuse a change address from a previous transaction and make it a receive address?
Technically that would be possible. The network rules have no concept of change or receive addresses - it's just a scriptPubKey that coins are sent to.
What are the pros and cons of doing so?
I see no reason why you'd want to do that. ...
2
Wallets contain your private keys and they obviously have to use them to be able to send coin.
That is indeed a very valid concern; you good sir have exercised thinking well.
Others have thought the same, and created hardware wallets to tackle exactly this threat!
Those are basically USB dongles with a button — which you have to physically press before it ...
2
Will it help to import that wallet to another client like electrum or blockchain?
It should help. Electrum is better than Bitpay wallet. You can import wallet using seed phrase in Electrum.
Mempool looks clear right now so low fee rate transactions should get confirmed soon.
Ensure that you select BIP 39 option while importing:
Select "legacy" ...
2
The migration tool will go through all the keys in the legacy wallet and create descriptors for them. This requires considering everything that IsMine matches on. From the Bitcoin Core release notes:
IsMine refers to the function used to determine whether a script belongs to the wallet. This is used to determine whether an output belongs to the wallet. ...
2
If you use hardware wallet in a computer that has some malware, it won't affect your transactions. So it is creating an isolation for you that can also be achieved with virtual machines or Qubes OS.
Humans feel safer using an external USB like stick with firmware instead of using software on their system/device.
Easier to use lot of things with hardware ...
1
Can a single wallet generate (and use) both SegWit and non-SegWit addresses?
Yes. Example: In Bitcoin Core you can can run getnewaddress with address_type in the argument
I intend to migrate their wallets to native Segwit, but they will also need legacy addresses so that they can receive coins from anywhere.
Most of the apps, websites, services etc. now ...
1
I am not familiar with the wallets generated by BitPay's Bitcore specifically, but there is no general issue preventing a wallet from generating addresses of various output formats. If BitPay's wallets can only either do one or the other that would be a local implementation quirk.
While it is possible to maintain separate wallets for each user, it is rather ...
1
There are lots of address types (P2PKH, P2SH, P2WSH etc), some are multisigs, some are BIP32. Descriptors help the wallet software figure out what the address string actually is. If this is abstracted away from the user then the user doesn’t need to know but they are really useful for the wallet software. They let the wallet software figure out how to spend ...
1
I CAN NOT For the life of me figure out or find that website I sent my coins to
Bitcoin is not sent to a website, it is generally sent¹ to a bitcoin-address, which is simply a random number² so far as the Bitcoin network is concerned. Nowadays the receiver of money will generate a new receiving address for each transaction in order to increase privacy and ...
1
That is very likely to be the "Bitcoin Wallet for Android" by "Bitcoin Wallet Developers" also sometimes known as the Schildbach wallet.
Other people on Reddit discuss having a file of that size created by this wallet.
Apparently the backup format changed from text-based Base-58 encoded private keys to a binary Protobuf wallet file.
It ...
1
Generally, I like the idea of giving away bitcoin as a gift.
So here's one approach for those who are still willing to give away cryptocurrency as a paper wallet, in spite of the disadvantages that Murch correctly mentions.
Here's what I did in similar situations (birthday presents to adults):
Using an offline wallet creation tool (bitaddress.org or similar)...
1
Gifting Bitcoin to novice users is difficult. First, your gift is tied to an obligation. In order to make use of it, they need to invest time to understand it and how to access it. This causes such gifts often to not properly connect. Secondly, the Bitcoin gift is often forgotten about because the recipient doesn't have an immediate use for it. Often Bitcoin ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
