Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet: a distributed, worldwide, decentralized digital money. Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin. As such, it is more resistant to wild inflation and corrupt banks. With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank.
- Begging/asking for bitcoins is absolutely not allowed, no matter how badly you need the bitcoins. Only requests for donations to large, recognized charities are allowed, and only if there is good reason to believe that the person accepting bitcoins on behalf of the charity is trustworthy.
- News articles that do not contain the word "Bitcoin" are usually off-topic. This subreddit is not about general financial news.
- Submissions that are mostly about some other cryptocurrency belong elsewhere. For example, /r/CryptoCurrency is a good place to discuss all cryptocurrencies.
- Trades should usually not be advertised here. For example, submissions like "Buying 100 BTC" or "Selling my computer for bitcoins" do not belong here. /r/Bitcoin is primarily for news and discussion.
- Please avoid repetition — /r/bitcoin is a subreddit devoted to new information and discussion about Bitcoin and its ecosystem. New merchants are welcome to announce their services for Bitcoin, but after those have been announced they are no longer news and should not be re-posted. Aside from new merchant announcements, those interested in advertising to our audience should consider Reddit's self-serve advertising system.
Bitcoin Core is the the backbone of the Bitcoin network. Almost all Bitcoin wallets rely on Bitcoin Core in one way or another. If you have a fairly powerful computer that is almost always online, you can help the network by running Bitcoin Core. You can also use Bitcoin Core as a very secure Bitcoin wallet.
We previously collected donations to fund Bitcoin advertising efforts, but we no longer accept donations. The funds already donated will be spent on some sort of advertising, as intended. As of now, 10.35799117 BTC was spent out of 22.51357574.
Just for clarification, do you know what it means to generate a transaction offline?
Yes I'm aware.
Generating a transaction offline means that those private keys are are never on a device that has an internet connection.
Bear in mind there is little distinction to be made between some internet-connected machine with the ability to mandate an offline air-locked machine to sign (through some means) a message, with an internet-connected machine that holds private keys.
A cold wallet is not a cold wallet if it can be accessed by an automated system (such as an exchange's withdrawal mechanics).
When I say cold wallet here, I mean it can be accessed by humans, and humans only. That is, no exchange payout mechanics.
In addition, a cold wallet does not imply multisig.
I didn't make that implication. I implied a proper exchange would multisig their cold wallet funds.
Okay. Let's rewind to the (theorised) situation where some exchange is doing simple withdrawals using a (hot) wallet that's handling 1 UTXO of 10k BTC initially. Every time some user is withdrawing some (let's say 10) of his coins, the exchange will spend that UTXO into
10 BTC -> user a
9.99k BTC -> change/exchange
next guy, withdrawing 30 BTC
30 BTC -> user b
9.96k BTC -> change/exchange
And so on.
That right there is just about the worst practice you can employ. It's advertising to everyone doing a withdrawal that there is a hugely disproportionate amount of coin in a single one of an exchange's hot wallet. Zero attempts have been made here to even obfuscate the coin distribution or the method by which an exchange is handling withdrawals; an attacker knows exactly who to attack, and how much he will stand to gain should he succeed in his efforts of compromising that hot wallet.
Stories of an exchange's hot wallet being swept have existed since there have been exchanges - the track record of their hot wallets does not look pretty. Bitstamp's ~17k hot wallet theft being a notable recent one. The above practice of handling payouts certainly doesn't help their efforts of securing it.
News articles that do not contain the word "Bitcoin" are usually off-topic. This subreddit is not about general financial news.
Submissions that are mostly about some other cryptocurrency belong elsewhere. For example, /r/CryptoCurrency is a good place to discuss all cryptocurrencies.
Trades should usually not be advertised here. For example, submissions like "Buying 100 BTC" or "Selling my computer for bitcoins" do not belong here. /r/Bitcoin is primarily for news and discussion.
Please avoid repetition — /r/bitcoin is a subreddit devoted to new information and discussion about Bitcoin and its ecosystem. New merchants are welcome to announce their services for Bitcoin, but after those have been announced they are no longer news and should not be re-posted. Aside from new merchant announcements, those interested in advertising to our audience should consider Reddit’s self-serve advertising system .
Bitcoin Core is the the backbone of the Bitcoin network . Almost all Bitcoin wallets rely on Bitcoin Core in one way or another. If you have a fairly powerful computer that is almost always online, you can help the network by running Bitcoin Core. You can also use Bitcoin Core as a very secure […]
