From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

Watching this vid made my blood boil!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4

I have never used bitcoin yet but if I ever do, and I might just try it exclusively to get my feet wet in this respect, is it available for
linux desktop or only for android (my smartphone familiarity ain't up to scratch yet, and I wouln't wanna do any financial transactions with a
phone anyway)?


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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Mon, 1/5/2026 8:56 AM, bad sector wrote:

Watching this vid made my blood boil!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4

I have never used bitcoin yet but if I ever do, and I might just try it exclusively to get my feet wet in this respect, is it available for linux desktop or only for android (my smartphone familiarity ain't up to scratch yet, and I wouln't wanna do any financial transactions with a phone anyway)?

Are you planning on mining Bitcoins, or buying and selling Bitcoins ?

There is a tax consideration for Bitcoins. If you "make" them, you
have to keep track of the materials (vid card price, electricity consumption) while mining. Sell price minus commission minus input costs, is your
capital gain.

If you use a video card and are a solo miner, your odds
are 900 billion to 1 of instantly earning $100,000. The odds are still ridiculous if you buy a used ASIC miner box (~1KW), but the hash rate
could be 6000x greater. You might buy a used miner from China (from
some of the shut-down sheds there), for a portion of the original $3000-$4000 price. It might require a new power supply, just in case the old one is
getting tired, or the miner doesn't come with a PSU.

if you join a mining pool, you will be swamped out by people with shedfulls
of ASIC miners. When one of the pool members earns a coin, the proceeds are split among members according to the pool contribution on hash rate. You might earn $1.52 every day (with random fluctuation when the pool does not mint
any coins at all), while you could be using a steady $3.00 in electricity
every day. If you do it in summer, you either need a big air conditioner,
or, the room gets really hot (one apartment dweller measured 50C in the
kitchen from the miner heat! Imagine the beads of sweat). ASIC miners are
more of a winter activity. Like, in Finland, you would "open a window".

If speculating on Bitcoins, there would be a slip for
your buy and for your sell, and the difference between those is
your capital gain or capital loss. There is a processing fee for
conversion back and forth. The processing fees are generally
inconsequential if your investment went up 1600x, but for normal
levels of market fluctuation, the fee might take a big bite
out of your winnings. The sales slip would have the sell price
and the fee charged, which would go into your tax spreadsheet.

It's a hobby where you have to like spreadsheets, and you have to be
good at bookkeeping in cases of significant amounts of transactions
going on. Does BTC "attract audits" ? Dunno.

*******

Note that ASIC miners only mine one coin. The SHA256 chips can mine
Bitcoins. The Ethereum miner boxes, each chip had a stash of RAM on it
(a different hardware design than the other box).

Whereas a video card, is programmable, and faster than your CPU.
It can handle brand new or arcane coins. If a "proof of work" existed
for a DOGEcoin, then you could mine it with the video card. This is why
video cards aren't entirely dead. But then, an obscure coin can be
worthless (right now), with little reason for the value to rise.
Monero are valued for their anonymity, which is why for a while,
vid card people pissed off about Bitcoin, would mint Monero. I do not
know if the privacy of Monero has been compromised since then, and whether
it's just as easy to trace as Bitcoin is.

And wallets, of course they're dangerous. You read enough stories about compromises, it's hard to say what the risk level is on a daily basis.
The wallets have their own terminology -- ask an LLM-AI for details
about hot and cold wallets.

Paul
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 1/5/26 4:53 PM, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 1/5/2026 8:56 AM, bad sector wrote:

Watching this vid made my blood boil!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4

I have never used bitcoin yet but if I ever do, and I might just try it exclusively to get my feet wet in this respect, is it available for linux desktop or only for android (my smartphone familiarity ain't up to scratch yet, and I wouln't wanna do any financial transactions with a phone anyway)?

Are you planning on mining Bitcoins, or buying and selling Bitcoins ?

No mining.

I suppose you have to first buy them, and then spend them, not having
even tried to understand the system yet (ZERO trust). How do you find
the bitcoins of someone who passed away and whose computer was partly encrypted (no passwords found)? Tomorrow will be one year that my
younger son passed away suddenly and I'm pretty sure he had some modest bitcoin stash but I could never crack his computer (except enough to
recover pictures and videos for his survivors). Pro data-recovery was
too expensive to try. The system seems to be lacking in this respect.

The youtube about the Samurai Wallet cought my eye; usually when someone generates that much reaction from deep state that's a good reference :-)

There is a tax consideration for Bitcoins. If you "make" them, you
have to keep track of the materials (vid card price, electricity consumption) while mining. Sell price minus commission minus input costs, is your
capital gain.

If you use a video card and are a solo miner, your odds
are 900 billion to 1 of instantly earning $100,000. The odds are still ridiculous if you buy a used ASIC miner box (~1KW), but the hash rate
could be 6000x greater. You might buy a used miner from China (from
some of the shut-down sheds there), for a portion of the original $3000-$4000 price. It might require a new power supply, just in case the old one is getting tired, or the miner doesn't come with a PSU.

if you join a mining pool, you will be swamped out by people with shedfulls of ASIC miners. When one of the pool members earns a coin, the proceeds are split among members according to the pool contribution on hash rate. You might
earn $1.52 every day (with random fluctuation when the pool does not mint
any coins at all), while you could be using a steady $3.00 in electricity every day. If you do it in summer, you either need a big air conditioner,
or, the room gets really hot (one apartment dweller measured 50C in the kitchen from the miner heat! Imagine the beads of sweat). ASIC miners are more of a winter activity. Like, in Finland, you would "open a window".

If speculating on Bitcoins, there would be a slip for
your buy and for your sell, and the difference between those is
your capital gain or capital loss. There is a processing fee for
conversion back and forth. The processing fees are generally
inconsequential if your investment went up 1600x, but for normal
levels of market fluctuation, the fee might take a big bite
out of your winnings. The sales slip would have the sell price
and the fee charged, which would go into your tax spreadsheet.

It's a hobby where you have to like spreadsheets, and you have to be
good at bookkeeping in cases of significant amounts of transactions
going on. Does BTC "attract audits" ? Dunno.

*******

Note that ASIC miners only mine one coin. The SHA256 chips can mine
Bitcoins. The Ethereum miner boxes, each chip had a stash of RAM on it
(a different hardware design than the other box).

Whereas a video card, is programmable, and faster than your CPU.
It can handle brand new or arcane coins. If a "proof of work" existed
for a DOGEcoin, then you could mine it with the video card. This is why
video cards aren't entirely dead. But then, an obscure coin can be
worthless (right now), with little reason for the value to rise.
Monero are valued for their anonymity, which is why for a while,
vid card people pissed off about Bitcoin, would mint Monero. I do not
know if the privacy of Monero has been compromised since then, and whether it's just as easy to trace as Bitcoin is.

And wallets, of course they're dangerous. You read enough stories about compromises, it's hard to say what the risk level is on a daily basis.
The wallets have their own terminology -- ask an LLM-AI for details
about hot and cold wallets.

Paul

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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> writes:

I suppose you have to first buy them, and then spend them, not having
even tried to understand the system yet (ZERO trust). How do you find
the bitcoins of someone who passed away and whose computer was partly encrypted (no passwords found)?

You donrCOt.

Tomorrow will be one year that my younger son passed away suddenly and
I'm pretty sure he had some modest bitcoin stash but I could never
crack his computer (except enough to recover pictures and videos for
his survivors). Pro data-recovery was too expensive to try. The system
seems to be lacking in this respect.

ItrCOs a general issue with cryptographic systems. If you lose a key, passphrase, physical token, etc then you can no longer use whatever it
was they protected. Sometimes thatrCOs a risk yourCOre willing to take, sometimes it isnrCOt. Personally I wouldnrCOt take that risk with savings
and investments.
--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Thu, 1/8/2026 6:11 AM, bad sector wrote:

On 1/5/26 4:53 PM, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 1/5/2026 8:56 AM, bad sector wrote:

Watching this vid made my blood boil!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4

I have never used bitcoin yet but if I ever do, and I might just try it exclusively
to get my feet wet in this respect, is it available for linux desktop or only for android
(my smartphone familiarity ain't up to scratch yet, and I wouln't wanna do any financial
transactions with a phone anyway)?

Are you planning on mining Bitcoins, or buying and selling Bitcoins ?

No mining.

I suppose you have to first buy them, and then spend them, not having even tried to understand the system yet (ZERO trust). How do you find the bitcoins of someone who passed away and whose computer was partly encrypted (no passwords found)? Tomorrow will be one year that my younger son passed away suddenly and I'm pretty sure he had some modest bitcoin stash but I could never crack his computer (except enough to recover pictures and videos for his survivors). Pro data-recovery was too expensive to try. The system seems to be lacking in this respect.

The youtube about the Samurai Wallet cought my eye; usually when someone generates that much reaction from deep state that's a good reference :-)

"Partly encrypted"

This sounds like you cannot get the machine to boot because
it is password protected at one or more levels.

You connected the HDD to another computer, and discovered
"plaintext content". There was no TrueCrypt converting the
disk into random binary bytes for your hex editor to example.

So now you're looking for a wallet, on a plaintext disk drive.

Google:

detecting a bitcoin wallet on a hard drive

And that gives

The fastest way to find a lost wallet.dat file is to look
in the default data directory used by Bitcoin wallet software.
You can also search your storage for the file;

For any reasonable wallet software, it should be able to make
an empty wallet for demo purposes. Using such, you would use
the Linux "file" command and see if wallets are recognized by Linux.

A wallet could be protected by any other level of crypto. As
a non-expert in crypto, I could for example, use 7ZIP and the
AES password-protected encryption, place that around the wallet
and call it "kittens.jpg" and an observer might never know
that there were not any kittens in there :-) Only a wallet
sitting dead-open for all to see, could be spotted by a
naive scan.

But first you'd want to make an empty wallet "just for the practice".

A software which is tied into a particular exchange, might not
make an empty wallet for you. But a software written with
nobody in mind for the business end of it, should allow an
empty wallet to be made.

Paul

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