Thank you, everyone, for the replies. I appreciate it. As a software developer I consider myself reasonably smart, but discussions like this break my brain 

A follow-up, if I may: Given what you know about the math behind this: How confident do you feel having your entire Bitcoin wealth in a single wallet? (Assume you have perfect OPSEC and the only "risk" is an accidental or brute-force collision with your wallet address.) Just curious.

Thanks again!

I'm curious about the wallet "address space".

We all know that with a 12, 18, or 24 word seed one can generate a Bitcoin wallet in an "address space" that is so large that it would be, essentially, impossible to guess. Right?

A few questions:

Does a 24 word seed phrase fully cover the entire "address space" such that if all combinations of seed words are used, all possible wallet addresses will be mapped / addressed?

What about passphrases? Does the use of a passphrase open up new "address space" or does it map to an address in the original address space, such at seed phrase X without a passphrase may map to (be equivalent to) seed phrase Y with passphrase Z? Or seed phrase M with passphrase N maps to seed phrase O with passphrase P?

And what about the following BIPs which talk about various forms of creating sub-accounts/sub-wallets based on a primary wallet seed? Do these result in "overlap" with the original 24 word "address space"?
   https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawiki
   https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0084.mediawiki
   https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0085.mediawiki

Sorry if I'm not technically precise in how I'm asking these questions, but hopefully the general idea comes across.

Thanks.

I ended up buying another webcam, a "Logitech 1080p Pro Stream", and it works well. I have the set the Passport wallet to 5% screen brightness (which is still bright enough for my needs) and put it against a white background (rather than the darker background I was using before), and the webcam is able to focus on the QR code and pair with relative ease. (I again tested my original webcam under the same conditions and it is still completely unable to get a clear image.)

https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Stream-Webcam-Streaming-Recording/dp/B07661NX9M

So I guess it all came down to this: I just needed a better webcam.

Thanks again for the replies and suggestions!

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I don't have a solution yet, but I'm going to keep working on it. I think the main issue has to do with the brightness of the Passport screen overwhelming the camera. It's not handling it well. I may end up needing to buy another web cam.


Thanks for the info. That's a very good point. In my case, though, I'm not concerned. I have every intention of doing a firmware reset and generating a new key from dice, so this seed -- even if it can be recovered from the image -- is throw-away. The wallet is empty.

I have been having problems scanning QR codes generated from my new Foundation "Passport" air-gapped wallet on my PC (in order to pair the wallet with Sparrow on the desktop).

I am running Linux Mint 21.1 and have an external USB web cam. Whenever I try to scan QR codes form the wallet they show up very bright, "washed out", and blurry. As a result, the scanning fails.

https://imgbox.com/QTJUEynI

I have borrowed two other web cams from friends to test. The first of these web cams has the exact same problem, but the second does *not*. The second scans just fine as the QR codes are *not* bright, "washed out", and blurry.

Can anyone give me some guidance on what is causing this issue for 2 of the 3 web cams? Is there anything I can do to fix it? If not, I will need to buy another web cam. Suggestions on what to look for?

Thanks!

Something else occurred to me as a possible work-around to this issue. I don't know a lot about it yet, but there seem to be various Bitcoin "cash" (not BCH!) projects like "Cashu" that seem to offer privacy benefits:

https://cashu.space/

https://twitter.com/callebtc/status/1644618535593824257
(Calle is the creator of Cashu.)

This is pretty scary! To suddenly lose one's coins to seizure by an over-zealous exchange simply due to the history of those coins.

Thanks for the various replies!

It seems that, in the case of KYC Bitcoin, keeping good records of the UTXOs sent to others or received from others would be important. Say I buy a used car off Craigslist. If I keep a careful record of the UTXOs involved in the purchase, and possibly also "KYC" on the person I bought it from, then I could always provide that as "proof" if the Bitcoin were ever to be used for something illegal and traced back to me. Hopefully it's an unlikely scenario, but at least keeping records would make it easier to put up a defense if there were to be an issue down the road.

I think it's starting to make more sense to me now. I appreciate the insights.

Thanks. But though I may conceptually be "signing full ownership to a new recipient wallet", from a chain analysis perspective, there may be no way to know that that new wallet is associated with someone else. It could just as easily be another wallet I created. (Of course if the new wallet has KYC Bitcoin associated with the new owner, that would presumably associate the Bitcoin transferred from me with their KYC. Right?)

Thanks for the reply. And for the pointer to kycnot.me (and others).

I'm curious if coins obtained from all non-KYC sources of Bitcoin are equally at risk of being "flagged". Say I buy some Bitcoin off Bisq. Is there a risk I might never be able to send it to a CEX or other "government compliant" entity as it's flagged? In an ideal world everything would be P2P, and this would be a non-issue, but that's not the reality at this stage. Maybe I'm being unnecessarily paranoid, but these are the questions that come up as I'm trying to learn. Thanks again.

Hi all,

Sorry for the confusing title. I'll try to explain:

What if I buy some KYC Bitcoin through an exchange and then move it to a wallet. And then, let's say I either give some of that Bitcoin to someone else (maybe a charity or a friend), or use it to buy something (maybe a used car off Craigslist). At this point, from my perspective, I no longer own that Bitcoin (i.e. it is "beyond my ownership"). But now what if the person who now "owns" that Bitcoin uses it for some illegal purpose? I would have no knowledge of that transaction, but my KYC has "propagated" to the new owner. If that transaction were to be traced, assuming it hadn't been linked with KYC transactions with the new owner's identity, I would be still be the last owner of the transaction from a chain analysis perspective, right? This is not something I've heard discussed before (but admittedly I'm new hear). Seems like a risk.

Thoughts?

Thanks.