I'm late to post here, but here I am anyways.

It's important to understand your seed phrase (aka mnemonic phrase) is your bitcoin. If you have a zillion $ of bitcoin that piece of paper is worth a zillion $. Lose the piece of paper, lose a zillion $. I steal your piece of paper, I steal a zillion $.

I'm not sure in how bad a shape your old dying laptop is. Bit if it's not in too bad a shape, I would save the seed phrase somewhere safe and use the laptop as a hardware wallet. You just turn it off, and don't let it connect to anything. Done, your coin is almost 100% safe....unless I getbmy hands on your laptop or piece of paper.

Some purists here will interject and say that what I just told you is not safe. It is safe. Relative to what you were doing, it's a great deal safer if you do what I just advised.

If you really want to get very safe, write your words on steal instead of paper, and bury it somewhere in your backyard.

Holy cow! I forgot about this thread. And there was a lot of replies!

Okay, I was not looking for some rich bitcoiner to buy from, though that would be interesting.
I was looking for a local El Salvador source of bitcoin, such as a bank or local exchange. Or maybe some exchange like Kraken or Coinbase decided to have an OTC desk in El Salvador?

But all is good, I am now in San Salvador and I found one bank that can satisfy my needs. DitoBanx is a local bank that accepts exchanges between USD, BTC, and USDT.

They are a bit pricey for my liking with a 1-2% exchange fee, but it will do.

Here is essencially what I used to do.

 I charge my buyers for the miner fee. So if you are buying $100 worth of BTC, and the miner fee is $10, I treat it as a $90 trade.

Some of my buyers trusted me and did not require fast confirmation. They would tell me to take my time and go easy on miner fees. So long as they can see the trade in the mempool, they were happy. So I would charge them $5 for miner fee, instead of $10. They get more coin that way.

And if the next buyer also wants cheaper miner fee, I would batch them at with RBF at 0.2 sat/VB more than the previous trade.

And if the next buyer wants fast confirm, I charge him the full $10 fee, and Bach him with the other two, at a fee high enough to confirm on next block.

This way, they pay less in fees, and I often ended up paying slightly less in fees than I would charge them.

Or also, I would often get two buyers one behind the other. So that they both want fat confirm, but I'm able to batch them if the first one hasn't confirmed yet.

Or during high fee periods, I could have as many as 10 trades who were willing to wait a day for confirm. So I would tell them the tx will confirm at noon every day, and they only get charged half fee.

It all worked out pretty good. All this was automated with my software on HodlHodl. And I always increased fees by 0.2 sat/vB with each spend I added to the batch.

I looked up some of my old tx's from 2 years ago. Doesn't look like mempool.space logs in RBF history that far back.

Well, that makes no sense. The fee is in sat/vB so it should adjust with the size of the tx.
In any case, it wasn't like that before.
In the past, when I did an RBF, Electrum would send with the fee I specify. If my unconfirmed tx was at 10 sat/vB, it would only be rejected if I tried to do an RBF with less than 10 sat/vB.
If I submitted the second tx at 10.2 sat/vB, the batched tx would be around 10.2 sat/vB. Not double of the unconfirmed tx.

Here is the latest test I tried, which makes no sense at all.

I send one tx at 1.0 sat/vB. Somehow, that is the only transaction that sent with the fee I agree to pay.
Here is the mempool.space link to it:
https://mempool.space/tx/eb813d7d4ed2973cce907ee6e6055bc3d70498e37d67d17885d2b9604eabdd0d?mode=details

Than I sent a second on bactched with the first one. The specified miner fee I chose was 0.1 sat/vB, which normally would be rejected because it's below 1 sat/vB.

But it didn't reject it, and it also didn't send at all at my specified sat/vB. Instead, it doubled the miner fee for the batched tx's at 2.01 sat/vB. Which is essentially more exoensive than sending separately, without batching.

Seperately they would have been 0.15$ each. But batched, they were 0.36$. So at this point, in thus instance, RBF/batching is purely harmful.

So I decided to add an other one to the batch. I decided on a 1sat/vB fee for that third one. But dumb Electrum basically increased the miner fee from 2.01 sat/vB on this one. Basically not increasing the fee at a meaningful level.

So when I input 0.1 sat/vB, it doubles the fee from 1 to 2 sat/VB.
And when I input 1 sat/VB, it barely increases by only 0.01 sat/VB.

I don't like this one bit. I want the old Electrum I was using a year or two ago. This is regression.
/

What you are saying is now what I have experienced.

I'm a high volume p2p bitcoin trade with all my trades on HodlHodl fully automated with software I built.

In the past, maybe a year ago, I could use RBF to batch a new spend with unconfirned ones. And I would simply pay 0.1 or 0.2 sat/VB more than with the unconfirmed one.
By doing this, I could cut miner fee costs by half.
In trying to cut miner fees ever more, I tried to do it all without a change address. But Electrum would not allow batching when I didn't use a change address.

But now, it has changed. It's no longer letting me increase miner fees as I wish when adding new transactions to the batch. Whatever change was made, at the wallet level, or at the Mempool level, it sucks. Because it's forcing me to pay more in fees.

Unfortunately I can't just batch all the transactions in one tx. I built an automation software. And subsequent transactions may or may not cone at all.

I'm not fond at all of this new way of batching tx's. This needs to revert to the old way.

So I batched transactions in the past. And when I did, if the first transaction was at 1 sat/vB, I could just do 1.2 sat/vB for the second one, and I would save a considerable amount of money on fees.

But something has changed in the Electrum implementation of that.

Yesterday, I did some tests. I sent one tx at 1.2 sat/vB. And when I tried to send a second tx, I input 1.3 sat/vB. But the wallet batched the two transactions at 1.99 sat/vB. As you can see in the link below:
https://mempool.space/tx/044e97e73663dd351953b8c49d0a74ac8c35b38087d0aeb5b788ba91cd05d3ff?mode=details
But instead of batching the two txs into a single transactions at 1.3 sat/vB, it batched them at 1.99 sat/vB.

Than I tries adding some more sends into it at 0.1 sat/vB each. But each time, the total miner fees kept going up to 2.69, 3.34, and 3.95 sat/vB.
So in the end, I really don't save all that much in miner fees. Each transaction would have been at around 1 sat/vB each for around $0.20 USD if I were to send them separately. But batching 5 of them ended up costing $0.80 USD total. So I really didn't save much at all.

How can I increase miner fees with each added spend at around 0.1 or 0.2 sat/vB ? Is that no longer doable?

As soon as I saw the words "crypto" and "NFT" I new I was going to have to face a wall of MMT ignorance and shitcoin mindset, if I want to reply. So in the post, I'll be talking about bitcoin. I have no time for retarded shitcoinery.

Bitcoin in money, period. The hardest money there ever was created.

Money needs to have a few qualities. Namely, a good store of value, and a good means of exchange amonst other attributes we don't need to concern ourselves in relation to this thread.

Now imagine you lived on a island kingdow where gold is money. But the island king recalls all the gold, claiming he needs to remint it all with his updated portrait.
But the king is a crook. In order to finance his wastefu and corrupt bureaucracy and his destructive nation building wars, he dilutes the new gold. With half of the new coins made of tungsten.
So you have an old coin of pure gold, and a new coin of diluted gold. They both say $10 on them. They will both buy the same amount of stuff, and they are both legal tender for $10.
Which one will you save, and which one will you spend away?
Of course you will put the real gold under your mattress and spend away the scrap gold coin.

Well retarded Modern Monetary Theorists and fiaters will have you thinking that only means of exchange matters. That the worthless scrap gold is somehow more valuable real money because everyone is busy spending it and dumping it onto the next guy. MMT and fiat mind virus will surely convince you that if you are saving your real gold coin, you actually are not really using it. Because to fiaters, saving money is not only discouraged, it's also vilified. They don't allow you to sage your money for a rainy day. They don't say you are saving your money, they say you are "hording" it. Yeah, like an evil greedy little miserable grouch who refuses to share with the rest of us. You are not only stupid, because your fiat money will only keep losing value over time, but you are also a greedy evil capitalist for refusing to let other enjoy your money, by saving it for little Timmy's college fund, or your retirement, or for grandma's operation. How dare you? Have you no shame ?!?!

Never mind that if we had an honest banking system, it would be impossible for anyone to borrow a dollar unless someone else was saving a dollar. So literally, saving your money would be the only way for others to borrow money to build a factory and create new jobs.

MMT will gave you believe that you absolutely need to he dumping your currency into the next guy's lap as soon as you can. And that circulating your money actually is what promotes the economy, and helps others. In fact, once you are done spending your last dollar, you are highly encouraged to borrow more, drive yourself into debt, just so you can spend more, and promote the economy even more.

If circulating money really promoted anything and added value to anyone, you should sit in a circle jerk with your buddies, and pass around a $20 bill until you all become filthy rich. Somewhere around round 5 or 6, one of you will realize it's rather boring unless you make it into a drinking game. First one to become rich takes a shot!!!

The reality is that most bitcoiners don't really want to spend our bitcoin because we value our bitcoin more than we value our fiat. Just like a gold bug wouldn't be interested in selling their gold to buy something.

So if you ask the difference between store of value and means of exchange, they ate tie sides of the same coin. And this is likely to keep happening until we run out of people to accept our fiat. I'm not holding my breath.

If a contract is drawn, it will be for investors eyes only, not something I would publish to everyone.

Hi friend. A single investor is funding the whole thing now.
Unfortunately, there are some delays as the bank has frozen his funds after he send to me. But I expect to get down to El Salvador within a month or so.

Please PM me with your private contact info so I can add you to the list of interested people. I'll need an email, or phone #, or Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp handle.

Also, I'm a bit disconserted that so many people want to see a contract when it's really nothing more than legal virtue signalling. How much are you likely to drag any of it to court across different countries?

I'm really only planning to draw up a contract because so many people are asking for it. But it's really meaningless.

I strongly suggest you get a Bitcoin only wallet. If you want to play with s**tcoins, use a separate s**tcoin wallet for those.

I really like Electrum for both Androudvand Windows. I only hear good things about Sparrow.

That was for hot wallets. For cold wallet, I like the ColdCard together with CryptoSteel, or any other stamped seed wallet system.

But you don't have to overdo it. I think for most people, an old cellphone with Electrum installed on it, turned off when you are not using it, along with your seed phrase saved on paper. That should do the trick for most.

You need to understand that trading p2p and turning a profit is not nearly as easy as people think.

First, you have to respond right away. When someone opens a trade with you, they cancel within a few minutes if you don't respond. Meaning you have to stop whatever you are doing (driving, eating, sleeping, showering) to tend to the trade.

If the guy is buying $200 and you get a 5% profit while you are driving somewhere, you have to stop your car on the road side and do the trade for what usually lasts an hour. My automation software solves that. I would wake up in the morning while a few trades were completed at night.

And by far, the biggest problem is banks. They cause a great deal of problems. It's simply impossible for anyone around here in Canada to open a business account for a bitcoin business. Yes, the banks will gladly sell you a BTC ETF, but they keep both your fiat and your purchased coin. But anyone outside the bank selling actual BTC is treated by banks and frauds/money laundering/scams.

Yes, some guys sell at lower markup than 6%. And you can find them here:
https://hodlhodl.com/offers/buy?filters%5Bcurrency_code%5D=CAD&filters%5Bpayment_method_type%5D=Online+payment+system&pagination%5Boffset%5D=0

But they are inexperienced, they will likely accept a fraud fiat payment, the banks will blame it on him, and he will get kicked out of this bank account. I get tons of new traders all the time contacting me and asking me out to deal with fraud bank transfers.

I should also say I expect to sell way more than $100k/month.

When I first tried selling with Wise payments, I got was picking up new buyers every day. And after 5 weeks, I was already selling over $50k/week.
I want to say that within a year, I will likely sell over $1million/month.

Address is:
bc1q5h7mvald3u3w3cre5h00kakhhqhrsx2krqwv8a

Message is:
BitcoinTalk

Signature is:
IDRCopnz6Axp5Xja56OjoVCP02C/MsyQFLsxrvUxD5UTSXI0TE2K9ZDRDon7rbXIDzo2xQUlmxsRGCHfHOMX4Hk=

Honestly, I think whatever contract I draw up and you sign will likely be more of a meangless ritual. With any investment, there is a risk. And I don't see how anyone can sign away that risk. Especially when considering we likely will be in separate legal jurisdictions.


Last time I checked (a couple of years ago) Bisk was full of people looking to buy, and nobody really offering to sell. You get the odd seller from time to time, and he gets sold almost right away. There was no reliable repeat seller.
And Bisq is a great concept, but rather technical for most buyers. And I also found Bisq would be hard for me to automate, but not impossible.


Sorry for the error. I didn't catch that in edit when I changed my numbers.


There is no doubth the business would be profitable. It would be very profitable here in Canada if I could just get around the many hurdles banks keep putting up.
I'll look to sign a message today. It will just say "BitcoinTalk"

I'm not asking anyone to send any coin now. I'm only looking for people willing to commit at a later time. Once I get to El Salvador, create the company, website, and the legal stuff, a contract will be written by a law firm and send to investors. They sign and send the coin they invest at that time.

Albeit, I have to recognize a contract drawn across different countries might not offer a whole lot of protection for anyone. But if you have a better idea, I'm open for it.


A guaranty? Anyone who offers you a safe and profitable guarantied investment is likely scamming you. There is a risk to any investment like this.


I intend to sell at a 6% markup. Which is lower than most other traders on p2p exchanges.

Say I sell $100,000 per month. And say half of that 6% mark up goes to expenses, fees, and a meager wage I will give myself for $700/week. That gives us 3% profit for $100,000 per month, or $36,000/year of company profit.

Say you invest $1500 of coin. And at the time you invest it, the spot price is at $70,000 USD. That means you are investing 0.02142857 BTC.

That would entitle you to 1% of the company profit, or $700 per year. And this keep repeating every year until you want your 0.02142857 BTC back, or I buy you out and send you your 0.02142857 BTC back.


I already gave you links to my profiles on LocalCoinSwap and HodlHodl. I can leave a message of your choice on those profiles to prove I own them.

I can also provide you with my wallet address where all the coin goes in and out:

HodlHodl wallet:
mempool.space/address/bc1q5h7mvald3u3w3cre5h00kakhhqhrsx2krqwv8a

LocalCoinSwap wallet:
https://mempool.space/address/3LYHBygy2oAfkLur6Y4eTTXtnNh7ENzzg3

As for providing signatures, that is something I never had to do in the past. But I assume if I control the addresses above, I should be able to do that. Let me figure out how to sign things and I'll provide it in my next post.

At the very least, we need to figure out a way to kick out all the shitcoinery (runes, ordinals, brc-20...) from the blockchain.