My username is loosely based on a figure from an early children book by Tomi Ungerer which I likely had to read many many times for my children when they were young. They didn't get tired to get the same book read over and over again. Wasn't my choice to repeatedly read a book multiple times, they asked me for it.

The book is about a lovely Boa Constrictor which an elderly teacher, Madame Bodot, got from her son. The large and intelligent snake called "Crictor" saves the day against some evil guy in the story. I like Tomi Ungerer as book author and illustrator and somehow this particular book and the Boa's name, slightly modified, stuck with me.

The mnemonic recovery words, most commonly as defined by BIP-39, are a human readable backup representation of the initial secret entropy from which all else is derived for a HD wallet. This initial secret, be it commonly 128 or 256 random bits long, is what defines your personal HD wallet. DO NOT store your mnemonic recovery words unencrypted on any online device. Keep them offline and preferably analog on paper and additionally for hazard protection stamped in metal.

You're not wrong how you express it, but beginners should understand the basics more clearly in my opinion. Maybe this graph helps a little bit (it's not easy to digest if you aren't familiar with some of the technical details though):


Found the source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EAWF/BTC-Toolbox/3938785f186c76598989cc0aa017ad351483d3b1/Images/KeyDerivationTechnicalOverview.png
It was added to the repository with this commit: https://github.com/EAWF/BTC-Toolbox/commit/3938785f186c76598989cc0aa017ad351483d3b1 -- But it was removed by the uploader for a slightly insignificant reason, some surviving image copies in Reddit show that it's uploaded by the same user. Link to the commit that deleted it: https://github.com/EAWF/BTC-Toolbox/commit/f75e2b352ec9facc8d2da52b5ec303fb280c3298


The key points to take away are that software or hardware wallets that commonly understand the BIP-39 standard can reproduce a HD wallet from those mnemonic recovery words. Most wallets also follow pretty standard derivation paths to derive address types and private keys, public keys and public addresses accordingly.

Ich hab' 2011 aus Spaß und Technologieinteresse mit einer Mittelklasse-GPU mehr mühsam als fluffig Bitcoin gemined. Aber immerhin ging das noch damals so halbwegs mit einer GPU, wenn man nicht so hohe Ansprüche hatte.

Einen Account habe ich erst gegen Ende 2013 in diesem Forum erstellt, der dann auch nach einem Forenhack gesperrt und später für mich nicht mehr erreichbar war, weil ich den Zeitpunkt für eine "einfache" Reaktivierung verpasst habe. (Ich hab' die Details vergessen, ist mir auch nicht mehr wichtig.)

Ich hatte damals auch überlegt, mir irgendein FPGA-Teil und später ggf. auch einen ASIC-Miner anzuschaffen, aber gefühlt war das damals irgendwie Vaporware. Bei den Ankündigungen waren die Hersteller schnell, bei einer zuverlässigen und schnellen Lieferung dann eher nicht mehr.

Da damals meine Finanzen eher mau waren und ich mir das Geld für einen Miner hätte leihen müssen, ist es vermutlich gut, daß ich es habe sein lassen. Ich hätte besser einfach Bitcoins für Geld kaufen (und das Schwierigste!) und hodlen sollen.

Für Konjunktive kann man sich nix kaufen... 

Im Zweifelsfall sind "alte Hasen" fast immer eine Bereicherung, daher auch von mir ein willkommen zurück!

There seems to be currently a problem with the docs.ninjastic.space site. (I tried different browsers and cleared cache and cookies, but the issue still persists on multiple browsers.)

Accessing https://docs.ninjastic.space gives me (in Firefox as an example):

Accessing http://docs.ninjastic.space gives me (in Firefox as an example):
It might be that accessing the site via non-encrypted http is not supported by the site. I don't therefore know if the http error code 503 Service Unavailable is intentional or hints to another issue of the site.

If you have the resources to run a full (non-pruned) node and want to keep it that way, why would you want to switch to a pruned one? The mentioned Bitcoin node challenge doesn't require to use a pruned node, this is optional.

Many participants of the node challenge simply use a pruned node because this is less storage space hungry, especially when their main interest are likely the merit points and not so much running a Bitcoin node permanently.

See this thread by user maxirosson if you don't know it already: 56 Hardware Wallets, compared feature by feature

The comparison website he created is awesome and e.g. lists for hardware wallets details like "Secure boot", "Source-available", "Free & open-source (FOSS)", "Reproducible builds" and many more valuable things.

I didn't count how many hardware wallets are "open-source" or not. It's not quite my perception that a majority of devices are closed-source, but I repeat, I didn't count.

I wouldn't consider a hardware wallet at all if it's not open-source. For me it's mandatory that the firmware is open-source and it's a not negotiable property, period!

His comparison website also lists software wallets, definitely worth a visit.

Any "donation" to the Genesis block can be spent but of course you need the private key that matches the corresponding known public key. Only the 50BTC of the coinbase reward of the Genesis block are unspendable which is a special case for this particular block.

But it's highly unlikely that any UTXO of the Genesis block will ever be spent. So, those UTXOs bloat the UTXO set and are practically taken out of circulation, which is kind of a shame in my opinion but who cares of that anyway.

Speaking of it, there's another larger "donation" coming in today...

Past March 14^th, 2025 large recent transfers to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa (more or equal to 500,000 sats):

Current balance at time of this post according to combo(PubKey of Genesis block's coinbase) descriptor, including the unspendable 50BTC of coinbase tx: 104.38797936BTC (the difference to previous post's value and newcomer transaction are a lot of smaller dust wastes or whatever their purpose is).

This may differ slightly from what mempool.space or bitcoindata.science displays because the combo() descriptor "sees" all address types (except Taproot, IIRC).

It took some time, almost two months, until there's another substantial waste of coins thrown at the Genesis block:

Past March 14^th, 2025 large recent transfers to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa (more or equal to 500,000 sats):

I didn't do any deeper analysis related to above transactions.

Current balance at time of this post according to combo(PubKey of Genesis block's coinbase) descriptor, including the unspendable 50BTC of coinbase tx: 104.37595725BTC (the difference to previous post's value and newcomer transaction are a lot of smaller dust wastes or whatever their purpose is).

This may differ slightly from what mempool.space or bitcoindata.science displays because the combo() descriptor "sees" all address types (except Taproot, IIRC).
[/quote]

In dem verlinkten Diskussionfaden schreibt Hhampuz allerdings auch, daß er vorher theymos um seine Einschätzung zur Unbedenklichkeit dieser Kampagne befragt hat. Nun ist theymos nicht unfehlbar, aber wenn er sein OK gegeben hat, dann nehme ich stark an, daß die Kampagne erstmal anläuft.

30 Plätze à potentiell max. $125 pro Woche ist natürlich auch ein ziemlich fettes Werbebudget. Da könnte man sich auch fragen, wie lange das durchhält. Aber die Konditionen klingen wirklich gut, kein Minimum, max. 10 lokale Posts werden gezählt und max. 25 werden in Summe bezahlt. Sowas möchte man öfter sehen...

Not at all, in my opinion. What you say implies that basically every hardware wallet would be connected to the internet, which is wrong.

I'm not trying to convince you, we both likely have a different interpretation of this matter. I'll just say this: if a hardware wallet's firmware and hardware components don't have code or in-built abilities to talk to a network, they're offline to the internet because there's no way the hardware wallet could interact with the network in any case. They can't connect to the internet and vice-versa. Period!

Their whatever connection to a watch-only software wallet part is commonly only used to exchange transaction data which is signed on user's consent by the hardware wallet. The only thing the online watch-only software wallet pulls from the hardware wallet is the signed transaction when the user has agreed to sign it (prior it pushed the unsigned transaction to the hardware wallet).

Usually there's no code in the firmware of a decent and secure hardware wallet that would allow the connected software wallet to pull any of the main secrets which are hopefully or provably kept secure in the hardware wallet, like wallet's initial entropy, derived seed, private keys or extended private keys in the context of BIP32 derivation.

For wallets with open-source firmware, we could check this. For wallets with closed-source firmware we can't. Nothing new on this front.


A cold wallet is by definition offline and has to stay offline for all time, otherwise it's not a cold wallet anymore. The moment a cold wallet becomes online, it looses its "cold" status forever by definition. Being online, the wallet becomes hot and can't get "cold" anymore.

Most likely total bullshit, otherwise show valid evidence that you're not blatantly lying and shilling another recovery scam. If you actually believe the crap you wrote, I'd suggest to seek medical help.

Hach ja, hat ja nicht viel gefehlt zum Club 3k, katsching und deutlich gerissen. Besten Dank an den wohlwollenden Verteiler!

Das hättest du wohl gerne... Kindergarten, Schweinebraten!

On OPs VPS Bitcoin Core seems to run fine with 4GiB RAM. I never had issues running Bitcoin Core on my Raspis which have 8GiB RAM, but more is better, especially to speed up initial blockchain download for which you want to raise dbcache value preferably to around 12 GiB. But if you're patient it works fine with less.

For a non-pruned, full archival node you need more space. Here's what one of my nodes consume as of right now (I've txindex=1 and the blockfilter stuff enabled:

I don't know if you deliberately fuse the hardware wallet part with the necessarily online software wallet part (which as I already wrote is usually watch-only).

With closed-source firmware we don't and can't know what the firmware does and what functionality it provides. As I'm not particularly interested in the Ledger crap, I don't know if and how open-source Ledger Live is. My only perception is that this is crappy software with occasional sync issues and it tracks the shit of its users. Due to Ledger Recovery service subscription, we know Ledger Live contains code that can interact with Ledger hardware capable of this Recovery subscription to exfiltrate encrypted wallet seed shards and transmit them via the internet. No question, I consider this very bad.

Even an air-gapped hardware wallet needs an online software wallet part to transact and broadcast a transaction. Is such an air-gapped hardware wallet by your logic not offline?

Anyway, closed-source Ledger crap is evil and something to avoid based on what this company and its executive morons try to sell as their hottest shit.

I have no issue when a USB connected hardware wallet is not "offline" for you. For me it's offline when I can verify that the firmware code doesn't contain any code for networking and USB related code can't access or transmit main wallet secrets. Same goes for the software wallet part that talks to the hardware wallet. If there's no code to connect wallet secrets with the internet, I consider this as some sort of barrier like an air-gap. No important secrets can be exfiltrated from the hardware wallet. Offline enough for me.

I also observe annoyingly often that the site https://bitcoinexplorer.org/ is either very unresponsive or down like it is now (just checked myself and the cloudflare.com error page indicates the site is unresponsive for whatever reasons.

But I have my own local instance of bitcoinexplorer, so I don't mind if the real site is down. I just wonder why it's so sloppy maintained.

1. Why did you full quote my post? This is in most cases totally unnecessary.

2. There are enough threads about Ledger crap, it shouldn't be too hard for you to search and find them. You could start with a search for "Ledger" in topic's title. It's also a good exercise for a newbie to learn to search the forum, because a lot of things already have been posted, it's just the matter to search and find them.

3. So, no, I won't explain it here just because you're too lazy to search for answers. You can use the forum's search (as newbie you're a bit rate-limited there) or you can search at https://ninjastic.space/search where you're not rate-limited and can easily discard search hits that don't fit your needs.

Easy hits if you prefer to be spoon-fed 
Avoid Ledger and their Complies Sanction Crap!
Why I wouldn't buy Ledger Nano S ever again?
Ledger Recovery - Send your (encrypted) recovery phrase to 3rd parties entities

When it's only code, it can be changed. It's only if Bitcoiners would accept such a change and I doubt that so far.


The block subsidy (excluding transaction fees) is "cut in half" every 210,000 blocks which happens to be almost 4 years when blocks are generated at an average temporal distance of 10 minutes (it's actually a binary bit-shift because you can't cut an odd integer number of satoshis for block subsidy exactly in half).


And by the way the total number of emitted bitcoins is slightly less than 21 million, but that's pedantic nitpicking. But if someone wants to be accurate, it's at most 20,999,999.9769BTC and some coins have been deliberately burned out of existance, e.g. when a block miner didn't collect the full sum of block subsidy and transaction fees (this happened very rarely in the past). Additionally the 50BTC of the Genesis block are unspendable (new code to cover this edge case could make them spendable, but likely nobody wants that and Satoshi Nakamoto very likely won't spend them anyway).

Hardware wallets are usually signing devices and commonly don't work totally on their own. There's commonly a watch-only online software part which "talks" to the hardware wallet (hands over a transaction to be signed; takes the signed transaction from the hardware wallet to broadcast it). There should be no code in both parts to allow access to private keys at the barrier of the online computer/device and the hardware wallet.

When the firmware of the hardware wallet is open-source and preferably allows reproducible builds, you can check that there's usually no network stack, code or hardware components (smart chips) that can talk to the internet. Therefore I consider such signing devices as offline and basically cold storage,  YMMV, limited to devices that have no Bluetooth stack (often too complex and rarely bug-free) and where the private keys or similar main secrets of the wallet are not reachable from the connected computer/device (the latter e.g. doesn't really apply anymore to modern Ledger crap that allows their infamous Recovery service subscription).

Non air-gapped signing devices use mostly USB as hardware connection layer. The firmware of the signing device has to limit clearly what data can travel and what else is allowed to happen via  such a USB connection.

The internet can't talk directly to the signing device and vice-versa.

Malware on an online computer with the watch-only wallet can manipulate and compromise the software wallet part. A compromised software wallet can submit manipulated transactions to be signed by the signing device. That's why the signing device needs an independent own display where the user can easily check ALL transaction details before they allow the transaction to be signed. That's also why everybody has always to verify ALL transaction details, no exception whatsoever, unless they want to be reckless.

Vom Aufwand her ist es für mich klar als Liebhaberei und Hobby eingestuft, da mache ich mir keine Illusionen. Trotzdem nett, die Coins einsammeln zu können.

Auf der Suche nach interessanten Themen schaue ich auch ab zu an in Bereiche, die ich eher seltener frequentiere. Außerdem kann man immer mal wieder etwas Neues dazu lernen.

Add unnecessary pyramid quoting and other nonsense noise to that...