Compact integer in Scripts I've been looking at the compact representation of integers for integer operations in the Script language. It seems that most operations produce or push byte arrays, but when integer operations are performed those arrays are interpreted using a signed compact format.  Is this format actually defined anywhere, or is it strictly bitcoin specific?

As I understand it you can process up to 4 bytes as a integer, the negative of an integer is binary or'd with 0x80. I'm having trouble decoding 1-4 byte negative integers into the correct bit string encoding.

Does anyone have any examples, or can point me in the right direction?

generic big endian MPI format
bitcoin-specific little endian format, with implicit size

python implementation

https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib/blob/master/bitcoin/core/_bignum.py

I am not sure where you found negative integers. But in most places in bitcoin protocol a compact variable length is used for integers. See reference here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Variable_length_integer


Do USA-based miners need to register with FinCEN? As seen in recent news, FinCEN has issued a statement on its classification of virtual currencies: http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

Hypothetically suppose I mine BTC and sell it on MtGox for USD. Do I need to register with FinCEN as a Money Transmitter(MT)? My interpretation of the above document indicates yes, I do; but I could also see MtGox (which is registered with FinCEN) maintaining my regulatory compliance, via proxy.

No, the fincen guidance you posted has it in plain english that you do not. A miner is simply a user.

 c. De-Centralized Virtual Currencies

        A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a
de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central
repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain
by their own computing or manufacturing effort.

        A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and
uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the
convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter.
By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells
those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is
engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter....

On the exchange you are buying/selling bitcoins. The exchange carries the burden of giving you legal tender or a different cryptocurrency. The exchange carries the burden of regulation, according to the FinCen regulations. In the US, the equivalent of real currency is only treasury bonds.

Also, Fincen regulations only take affect at certain dollar amounts, if you feel you need to be concerned about them.

You can also try to get even further clarification from the Treasury yourself, because on this matter it doesn't matter what kind of legal counsel you ask, nobody knows all the semantics until an issue comes up that is actually decided in the courts.

Why do you think all this volatility happened? NSA is watching and all you who traded BTC for Dollars are in a heap of crap. You have to file and get a Money Transmitter license at a cost of around 1 million dollars in California. If you try to license in all the states it is around 10 million dollars for the licenses. It's the same licensing Visa or Mastercard needs to transmit money in America. I predict all mining will go off shore to avoid this taxation. They are serious about cleaning up this industry and they will come after Dwolla and a host of others that don't have the proper licenses. Fincen has a list of all the unlicensed brokers that it is going to go after on it's site. They will do anything to slow this effort down. They don't want free banking, this is a capitalist society and everyone wants to make a profit on everything.


Will ripple automagically use the ordebook when finding a path? I have a question regarding this scenario.

A (test-gateway)

28000 XRP in balance

B (user1)

trust line with A for 1000 USD
400 XRP in balance

C (user2)

trust line with bitstamp for 100 BTC
400 XRP in balance

A issues 100 USD/A to B

B now holds 100 USD/A in the balance

A open a trade giving 10 XRP for 1 USD/A
B wants to send 0.1 BTC/bitstamp to C using his USD/A IOUs as source.

Will ripple do this?
  USD/A => XRP => BTC/bitstamp

Because i can't make it work.

C has a trust line to bitstamp.
B has no trust line with bitstamp, should it have one?

(there's a lot liquidity XRP<=>BTC/bitstamp in the order book)

There is a missing piece in your picture, the trade offers selling BTC/Bitstamp for XRP. The values you give won't work currently since the best offers in the order book are in the range of 8300 XRP/BTC or 830 XRP for the 0.1 BTC you mention.

If the values you give were adjusted or if we assumed an alternate reality where 10 XRP could buy 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp then the following should (see note at bottom*) be what a user would see if they were to go to the client's "send" page (sorry no picture):

Recipient: C
Recipient will receive: 0.1 BTC
You can send:
    10.000 XRP  <Send XRP button>
    1.00 USD    <Send USD button>

Since User B has no BTC there is no BTC option given. If the user selects "Send XRP" then a payment path such as the following would be used:

User B 10.000 XRP
   --> trade offer for 10XRP to 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp
   --> Bitstamp
   --> User C

User B's balance goes down by 10.000 XRP. The unknown person making the trade offer has their balance go up by 10 XRP and down by 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp. Bitstamp's balances are adjusted so that 0.1 BTC less is "owed" to the trader and 0.1 BTC more is "owed" to User C. User C's balance goes up by 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp.

If instead User A selects "Send USD" then a payment path such as the following would be used:

User B 1.00 USD/A
    --> User A's offer giving 10.000 XRP for 1.00 USD
    [then as above]
   --> trade offer for 10XRP to 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp
   --> Bitstamp
   --> User C

User B's balance goes down by 1.00 USD/A. User A's balance goes up by 1.00 USD/A (they owe one less USD to User B) and User A's balance goes down by 10.000 XRP. Then it's as in the previous case: The unknown person making the trade offer has their balance go up by 10 XRP and down by 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp. Bitstamp's balances are adjusted so that 0.1 BTC less is "owed" to the trader and 0.1 BTC more is "owed" to User C. User C's balance goes up by 0.1 BTC/Bitstamp.

In both cases User C considers the payment from User A complete by ending up with a larger balance with Bitstamp. All of these balance changes happen atomically within a single transaction, either all the balances change or none of them do (e.g. if the transaction fails because a required trade offer is consumed or canceled before this transaction can be processed). User B never ends up holding something they didn't want to hold (e.g. BTC/Bitstamp).

Note that path finding in Ripple is not exhaustive, not all valid paths are found. As David Schwartz says above, pathfinding is an area they are constantly improving. If the option to pay with USD as shown above is not presented currently then it's likely it will be as the pathfinding is improved.

Short answer is: Yes. For longer detailed explanation please see http://ripple.com/wiki


What is miner supposed to do when waiting for longpoll i am coding simple miner.
I succesfully implemented Getwork in basic form. Next thing is gonna be Longpolling.
If i understand correctly longpoll is just connection that is waiting for next block. So, what happens when I am waiting for longpoll and submit share ? I am supposed to mine further(increase nonce and continue) or simply wait for longpoll. Using only getwork and SSE2 optimized scrypt I was able to get 5kHash/s on my i5-4670K on single thread.

If you run out of work while waiting for longpoll to finish, then what you should do is submit another getwork request.

Note that just because you find a share in a particular piece of work, doesn't mean that you're done with that piece of work. There still might be shares or even a block solution in there somewhere.

Getwork (GWK) is a dieing protocol with the advent of ASICs. STM and GBT adequately support ASIC technologies. Dig into GBT some that has details about long polling, but first read.

With the hash rates of 5KH/s and the mentioning scrypt you must be mining a little LTC, and GWK is quite adequate for that purpose.


How do you create a planet-specific cryptocurrency that will ignore longer block chains from other planets? I'm sure that cryptocurrencies will play a huge part of the economy across the solar system, when we have colonized many different planets, moons, and asteroids. But there are problems with using a single coin for the entire solar system. Let's just start with the example of a Mars colony. Long distances mean long delays in communication so it would take a very long time to get confirmations of Bitcoin transactions that originate on Mars. That could be problematic. Additionally, people on Mars could never hope to mine bitcoins because the average communications delay between Earth and Mars is 20 minutes one way, which is twice as long as the ten-minute blocks of Bitcoin. So I believe that a different coin would be best for each planet. But here's the crazy part. Even if Mars had its own coin (let's call it Marscoin), Earth would most likely have more computer processing power, so miners on Earth could download Marscoin's block chain and extend it faster than the miners on Mars. Then the miners on Mars would no longer be able to mine Marscoin. Then we would be back to the same problem of using Bitcoin on Mars. So, I think someone would have to create a coin that can somehow be planet-specific, so that longer block chains from other planets will always be rejected.

Simply limit the block target (i.e. 10 minutes) to the speed of light (300,000 km/s).

Unless there is some wormhole or other unknown to reduce this limit, Bitcoin is safe from honest mining from any planet outside of 180,000,000 kilometers away (300000km/s * 60 sec * 10 minutes) since any miner can't keep up with the blockchain and would get any block at about the time the next block comes out.

Someone with more advanced technology / more hashing power could create a 51% attack and submit it to disrupt the Bitcoin economy even outside of this radius.

This came from bubfranks on reddit:

"Oh fun! Let me try.
Given a random stream of bits that was impossible to predict, but agreed upon by local miners, reject blocks that do not include a valid bitstream. The probability of getting scooped by a cooperation between external hashpower and an internal node would be a function of the speed of light, distance between the attackers, and length of a valid bitstream."


Seems I was spending the output of the previous tx thats why the transaction was rejected


Lost Exchange Account I transferred some bitcoin from my coinbase account to another exchange to purchase some ethereum.  At that time coinbase did not have ethereum.  However, I do not remember the exchange that I used.  I have the exchange password written down in a secure location so if I can track which exchange I sent it to I can recover the ETH.  The transfer from coinbase is listed on the coinbase website.  Is there a way for me to use the wallet ID which I sent the BTC to to find out which exchange is holding my ETH?

Thanks in advance for your assistance in helping me overcome my own disorganization.

Man, maybe the answer will shock you, but... your amount of crypto is probably lost.
I say ''probably'' and not for sure.
the options may be 2:
1. the transaction was too small, so miners didn't pick it
2. it's fault of the exchange
I don't suggest you to use coinbase, I suggest you buy on spectrocoin -> https://spectrocoin.com/en/
And to trade from crypto to crypto using Binance -> https://www.binance.com/?ref=16821839
Anyway here's a guide to choose the best exchange -> https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/coinbase-insider-trading-litecoin-edition-be64ead3facc


Lost Bitcoin-qt password I have a friend (yes it's actually a friend and not me) who lost his password for their Bitcoin-qt wallet and can't access is Bitcoin.  The wallet is installed on the hard drive of a MacBook and he doesn't know any of the characters   Does anyone know how we can get this coin back without his wallet password?

"Creative solution" would be to forget about his wallet and to join Large Bitcoin Collider project, he might "recover" another lost wallet one day.

Also, if he had 1000 BTC or more in his wallet, some hypnosis-guru might help him to remember his password.


How to get Bitcoin historical data from Bitcoin-Core? I installed Bitcoin-Core Wallet and downloaded the whole 130gigs BlockChain. Now I'd like to read the BlockChain Data to know all bitcoin values since the beginning. Not sure how to start. I need that data for making my own graphs in Excel

How can I read data from the whole BlockChain? Thanks.

It sounds like you are asking how to build a block explorer. Basically you would activate the full transaction index by adding txindex=1 to your bitcoin.conf. Parse all the history data and dump it into a database. Then keep track of all the new transaction data on your own database as blocks come in with blocknotify or real-time with ZMQ notifications.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/zmq.md#usage

There's also options like bitpay's bitcore that pretty much does the work for you. It does require a lot more HD space though.

Checkout this API:
https://blockchain.info/api

Specifically look at "Transactions & Blocks Data" & "Market Data".

With PHP you can use that API and work with the data. PHP also allows you to create and export to Excel sheets: http://www.the-art-of-web.com/php/dataexport/

For me, because I know PHP, this would be the easiest route to go.


If Bitcoins aren't tied to a conventional currency, how did they get so valuable? I would appreciate it if  someone could provide me with some insightful information.

At first it was simply because a decent amount of people accepted the fact that it had a value and used it as a currency even if it was not backed by gold or oil like conventional currency (that still does not have intrinsic value), if you mean how it achieved such an insanely high value the answer is even simpler: speculation; people started buying the currency not to use it for transactions of goods but to simply make a profit from the fluctuating value, buying low and selling high.


How to test bitcoin distribution mechanism Now I'm developing a bitcoin distribution mechanism (according to users' submitted shares count). The complete workflow is: Users submitted shares to my pool, then my pool submitted these shares to another famous pool (e.g. btcguild). When my pool received bitcoins from the remote pool, it will distribute these received coins to users (according to their submitted shares count)

The problem is that everytime I test this mechanism, I will create many transactions, but each transaction will take 0.005 btc as transaction fee for bitcoin network. Then after paying 200  users, I will pay 1 btc to bitcoin network, The cost is high. Is there any way to simulate the bitcoin network, so I can create transaction without paying transaction fee?

As Nate Eldredge suggest, you could use the Bitcoin Testnet. This is a separate Bitcoin fork that exists especially for testing purposes.
You can easily get some testnet coins from testnet faucets.

Besides that, do you know that it is possible to create a transaction with multiple inputs and multiple outputs? So instead of creating many transactions, you could combine them into one transaction and only pay the fee once.

If you grab a copy of the Bitcoin-qt wallet from the Coin Control fork, you can get some very good information about how the transaction fees work. The transaction fees are explained in the post in that link, and the compiled Coin Control fork is also linked so you can play around with it too.

Once downloaded and installed, open settings -> options, then under the display tab enable the "Display Coin Control Features (experts only!)" option.

Now, when you go to send funds, you have the option of exactly where the funds will come from, what priority they will have in entering blocks, what fees will be required (if any), and the option of adding multiple recipients in the transaction.

This extra functionality will be standard in the coming 0.9 release of Bitcoin-qt and bitcoind.

As has already been said, it would be best to trial it out on the Bitcoin Testnet, currently Testnet3 - simply run the wallet with the command:

bitcoin-qt -testnet

which will enter the wallet onto Testnet3 rather than the main network. You can get some free testnet bitcoins from some faucets (check the links at the bottom of the Bitcoin Testnet wiki article), and play around with sending bitcoins in one transaction from multiple wallet addresses to multiple other wallet addresses. This should give you a fair idea of how to structure a payment without incurring any transaction fees.


Why are there always some unconfirmed transactions? As far as I know, a miner begins creating a new block as soon as it receives a valid block from another miner. It then begins to construct and hash the next block on top of the block it just received by using all the transactions it has in its memory pool.

However, there are still some transactions that are not easily confirmed (or not confirmed at all), in the BitCoin.

Can anyone explain to me why this can happen? Is it because of some transaction selection mechanism that the miners use? or is it because of the unreliability of the connecitivity between the nodes? or something else?

Transactions selected in mining blocks is not like a queue, where you wait your time and get to the front eventually.

Fees are not mandatory, but should be included in every transaction, if you have sent none, or low fees, you can still be selected (although it's highly unlikely), but the miner would be silly as they could just take the higher fee offered by someone else. Remember when you post a transaction you offer a fee.

If you owned a bakery and made 1000 loaves of bread a day, but had 1500 customers, would you sell them to someone offering $0.10 when other people are offering $1.00+.

if you dont give enough fee, you can wait a loot of time for the transaction to be completet.

i did yesterday 1000€ transaktion and i gived the fee´s for 100€ - it was in 3-4 hours done and accepted.

.. it gives a queue - if your fee is 0.10 cent
and from another guys 1-2-3 euro or more.

they will be first placed befor you !..

so if you are unlucky will be all transaction befor you placed..

i think so becouse since 1 month i bought anythink for 200 euro and it was 2 months unconfirmed transaktion....

i hope i can help you--

do this trick like me - give everytime 3x more fee than normal.
and all is okay :)


Transaction unconfirmed over 30 hours! I've bought bitcoin through bitcoin ATM machine several times, and this time was different that the transaction has unconfirmed for over 30 hours, usually transactions through the bitcoin ATM machine was just few minutes.

Can you guys please me and have a look at the transaction ID?Thanks!

https://blockchain.info/tx/41d3d5b80a912a566c5f842dc4e945f40c8b99291f1bf9e777616673dc7186a8

brother -
you are transacting almost SIX BTCS with a measly fee of .0002

THAT is why its taking such a long time and will continue to take a long time


The value of Quarkcoin knowing that big amount was preminted Few hours ago I was looking at bitcoin.stackexchange and found a question about quarkcoin. I was curious to know what is this. Reading a little bit I have found that it does not provide anything new except of:

combining a lot of cryptofunctions in a big ball of mud and calling it super secure
quick block generation 30 secs
more coins to mint
Total of 247 million QRK will be mined in ~ 6 months, after that ~ 1 million QRK p.a. (~ 0.5% p.a inflation)
other small tweaks

And from wiki page it is written:

  Of the 247 million QRK the developers own roughly 85-90% of them.

I am just curious what value does it bring to the table and why someone would like to mint it, if it sounds like it was created just for developers to dump it for some other crypto.

It really depends on what happens to that original 85%-90%. If the developers really own that large an amount, they will always be able to corner the market if they work together.

That idea troubles me, but I still buy Quarks because I see the value in the multiple hashing algorithms.

I think perhaps 85%-90% is quite clever as it puts Quarks on the map a lot quicker. Right? I think this has helped them gain press attention to their increased security meassures, by becoming the 5th largest crypto-currency available. I'm thinking that's an effect of generating so much currency so quickly.

I would expect value to continue to come into Quark, especially after Bill Still and Max Keiser talk about it on the 19th, then again as the new financial year starts around the world and everyone has another panic attack about the state of the world economy.

My point is, after the value has increased for a while and flattened out (if it does), I would expect Quarks to be used as currency earlier than Bitcoin. If quarks go to a dollar in 2014, then that's a lot of currency already out there, and it's not so expensive for people to invest, and not such a big deal when you spend a Quark.

The original holders of that 80%-90% would be more insentivized to spend that currency into the market than if they held Bitcoin (assuming it does not rise too fast).

One thing I really want to know, is how people arrive at the idea that the "the developers" own that much, and how they 80%-90% figure is arrived at. Are they meaning 3 developers, or do they mean 100 developers, 1000? It makes a big difference.

I guess we will have to wait and see if those original developers will put their Quarks where they mouths are and spend enough Quarks into the market on real goods and services, that they begin to circulate and become useful to everyone as a currency.

The way I see it, and I may be crazy, but those original developers would do themselves a huge favor if they got together and re-distributed a good portion of their monopoly as a PR exercise.

It would say a lot. And it would do a lot for Quarks as a currency to have a smooth distribution across the market.

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260031.0

There is no proof anywhere that the developers owns 85-90% of Quark.
In case anyone have such evidence i would like to know the details.
So far as i know, the release was fair and no pre mining was done before the release.
Check here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260031.0

Compare the first mined block with the day of QRK's release.
Look at the number of unique addresses too.


Why don't people buy at one exchange and sell at another? Bitcoinity.org shows that for the past 30 days, bitstamp's price is high at 101.00, low at 77.00, and current price is 98.04. On contrast, mtgox's price for the past 30 days is high at 115.00, low at 86.20, and current price is 110.50.

In other words, someone or anyone can just buy from bitstamp and sell to mtgox to make profit.

What's stopping people from doing so? What's the catch?

It can't be that people aren't aware that they could do it right?

Many people already do this with bitcoin. In finance, this is called arbitrage trading, or simply arbitrage, sometimes even abbreviated arb.

The reason for the price differences are fees for transferring between the bitcoin exchanges (you have to transfer both, bitcoins and fiat currency for a complete cycle) and fees for trading bitcoins against fiat currencies.

Because of the arbitrage traders, who make profits as long as the price difference is big enough, the prices on different exchanges quickly adjust to be right at the border between where the fees eat up the earning and where you make profits.

There is an excellent page, http://bitcoin-analytics.com , which can tell you where there currently are arbitrage oppurtunities. Simply go to the website and click on "Arbitrage".

Its not possible due to various settlement mechanisms.Each exchange have their own settlement period and their transaction and transfer fees.


How the Bitcoin community will handle attacks on a Client's code? I have some thoughts about the following scenario.

The brightest future.

The Bitcoin becomes a very popular and liquid currency all over the world. Some serious financial or political parties may become unhappy with this fact - they may have no influence on an Internet or may be unable to publish new laws. Since the major support of the Bitcoin infrastructure comes from the logic of its official client. And the easiest way to shutdown the network, as I can see, is to compromise the client itself. Someone may:

Buy the Github at once and quickly release new malformed version of the official Bitcoin client.
Bribe one of the trusted developers to sabotage the client code.
etc.

It doesn't seem so impossible, if someone with a big money would really want to stop the Bitcoin, even if everybody else will like it.

The question is

Is it possible to technically shutdown the whole Bitcoin network - with reasonable efforts and abilities to replace official client?
Are there any Central Trusted Authorities, that may verify any arbitrary client out there for it's correctness about the Bitcoin Protocol and, thus, prevent my scenario?

Note: I don't mean the situation, when someone will accidentally place an untrusted line in the client's code, and this fact will be overplayed to weaken the trust in the Bitcoin. I mean the situation, when the compromised client will irreversibly destroy all the system - leaving no viable ways to recover it.

FYI since BTC mining became so prohibitively expensive due to use of ASICs 1 51% attack could be pulled off at any time by BTC Guild. Their listed % is just under 50% at ~48% but I find it hard to believe they aren't sitting on >51% mining power. See the problem is every client is meant to be able to mine making large conglomerates like BTC Guild impossible.
This could very well be the end of BTC since you've got no change at all of mining BTC using anything but an ASIC pool.


What will happen when all bitcoins are issued? In 50 years or more from now, what will happen with bitcoins when all of them are issued? Will mining stop and will there only be a limited amount of bitcoins in circulation?

As far as the stopping of mining, no. Even when all 21 million bitcoins have been created there will still be transaction fees which will be given as rewards to miners. It has yet to be seen if this will lead to a reduction in miners or an increase in transaction fees, or both.

Once all the bitcoins have been mined, or even close to it, the situation will become more interesting.  The more people continue to adopt it the price will continue to rise.  Hopefully bitcoin, or some other crypto currency will become accepted world-wide.  Since rising population means more and more people adopting it, the amount 1 bitcoin is worth will continue to rise, leaving more people using fractions of bit coins that will be worth what one bit coin was worth a few years before.

What this means:

1.)  Poor people, who are able to save very little will find themselves much wealthier as populations increase just by saving a little (poverty will not be permanent for anyone).  Instead of there being inflation, rising population will cause deflation.  Anyone who saves money, including those who are already wealthy, will grow wealthier with each person born.

2.)  Research in maintaining the health and increasing the lifespan of a population will become more important.  It would be in the "Power Elite's" own selfish interested to keep individuals alive and healthy for as long as possible to ensure the highest possible number of transactions to maintain and increase the amount their own bitcoins value.  There are roughly 0.003 bitcoins for every person on the planet.  If this form of money or payment were to be accepted by all, this number would decrease with each person, causing it to become more scarce, leading to higher value.

3.)  War would become unprofitable since the value of bitcoin depends on the number of people who possess it.  If a country goes to war with another and decimates a population, those leading the charge would find their wallets smaller when the war was over.  Fewer people=Fewer people with wallets=Lower value... End of war?

4.) The way people invest would change:  more people would invest in live saving, prolonging, technology to increase value of the cryptocurrancy instead of war.

5.)  New Language would develop; we are seeing this already with phrases like "mBTC" or "millibitcoin".  If it is successful we could hear phrases like "nano-bit" to explain the price of a product since the price of one bitcoin would be such a high value, it would be as common as someone claiming to have a million dollar bill.

6.)  hundreds of years from now people will look back at our paper currency system and think one of two things.  1.) They will see how the world descended into wars as the nations of the world started to go bankrupt, like hungry animals backed into a corner or 2.) our paper currency will seem as strange to them as Native Americans trading beads.  And the pioneers of cryptocurrancy will look like the settlers of that new world, trading those beads for their land, leading to a revolution and changing the world... minus the genocide ;)


Is there a standard procedure for refunding Bitcoin transactions? I work for an online retailer, and we're currently testing a Coinbase payment implementation for our checkout. One of our big concerns is being able to send a refund in the event that we're unable to ship an item on time, or if a customer cancels an order, or for whatever other reason.

There are a few things that I've managed to find out, but I'm still confused.

Coinbase's API (relevant docs here and here) doesn't seem to have a way for us to find the address of the wallet or account that the payment for an order was sent from.
Even if it did have a "Sender Address" response, this question/answer makes it pretty clear that using that would probably not be a good idea.

So what options do we have for issuing a refund? I can think of at least a few... each has its own downsides though.

If an order can't be delivered on time, contact them and ask for an address to send BTC to.

We do get contact information (Phone, Email, and Address) when they check out - but we can't perfectly verify it.
We may be stuck in limbo if we can't get in touch with the customer.

At checkout, ask for an address to send any refunds to with a "just in case" note explaining why we're asking for that.

As far as I know, nobody does this.
Some users may have privacy concerns when they see us asking for a wallet address.

Mail a check for dollar value of the transaction to the address provided at checkout.

Again, we do get a customer's address - but we can't verify it to be 100% accurate.
Let's be honest, this really doesn't seem like a good idea at all.

Are there better ways? Is there, universe willing, a standard way of refunding transactions?

As of right now, there is not a standard way to return other than to ask the returnee for an address to which the returner can send. You could ask for them to verify the address by signing some text with its private key, however, users of web wallets are at a disadvantage because not all wallets provide this functionality.

It is too onerous to ask for a return address at the time of sale, because a conscientious user would have to create a new address for each sale's return address. Managing these would grow difficult over time.

Issuing store credit with the option to cash it out via a variety of methods is probably worth consideration, as it prioritizes consumer choice. If I'm ordering from a company from which I order frequently (e.g. Amazon) or I know that I'm going to reorder later, I'll take the store credit and save the management time. Otherwise, I'll cash out the bitcoin and find another vendor who can meet my needs.

Update 21 Feb 2014: Bitpay announced today that Bitpay is now supporting BIP70-73 payment protocol, which includes refund addresses.

No,  but there is talk about it in the future.

With google / bing   there are just "talks" about it.   Nothing concrete so I cannot provide a answer with solid information.    So no standard as of yet.   Many will pop up as middle men for the purchase.   Many will fail, but it is bound to happen.

Currently Overstock.com has this statement:

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/09/bitcoin-payments-live-overstock/

King of Bitcoin    http://letstalkbitcoin.com/author/andreas/#.UuksmxBdV9k


Are there alternatives to Bitcoin which take a different approach? Are there any alternative approaches to decentralized, electronic currencies?

Bitcoin was built with certain technical characteristics in mind. I'm hoping to see if there are alternative approaches. I don't mean things like Namecoin or other adaptations of the blockchain concept.

There are "digital bearer certificate" systems, which are an older concept.  They require a centralized issuer in order to prevent double-spending.  You can think of the certificates as electronic IOUs for a commodity (such as gold) held by the issuer.

Some DBC systems implement Chaumian blinding to anonymize transactions.

Open Transactions is a recent DBC system that has gained some interest.  It could be used with Bitcoin as a backing commodity, taking advantage of the properties of both systems.

Yes, there are other alternatives to Bitcoin with overall different approach but with different results such as zCoin, Monero, ... which provides more privacy


BitMinter gpu mining error I have recently gotten BitMinter on Linux, and was hoping to try GPU mining. However, as soon as BitMinter starts, it gives the following messages:

BitMinter Client v1.6.1 started
No OpenCl-compatible GPUs detected
Probing all ports for external devices
Probe failed: No serial ports found
No external devices detected.

If I then click the play button to run, it tells me:

Error: null
scala.runtime.NonLocalReturnControl$mcV$sp

As well, the engine start button is not showing now, however the previous issues existed before this

You have no ASICs and no OpenCL-compatible GPU. Note that noone mines on GPU anymore anyway, it's completely useless.

Buy an ASIC miner, 1 TH/s (1000 GH/s) or faster. It will be a stand-alone machine, and you don't need to use your PC at all.

It's also possible that he started Bitminter from an RDP-Session, there comes the same error.


How do I know how many confirmations a transaction has? This is my first transaction and it's been since yesterday that I sent it. The website said wait for 4 confirmations then check email, but I haven't gotten any email so I don't know if it's gone through or not. Here's the transaction number and a screenshot of the transaction:
  2daf1bea238137e5db00cd12074a93f181bf86a759f1963fd92197671f32a463

As you can see at the bottom of your screenshot, or on any block explorer similar
(https://blockchain.info/tx/2daf1bea238137e5db00cd12074a93f181bf86a759f1963fd92197671f32a463),
you can see that it has 84 confirmations as of the time of writing, well over the 4 you said was needed.

Because of the size of the transaction and the exceptionally low fee amount, you can expect significant delays in such small transactions. This post covers it very well : What's the minimum transaction with bitcoin?


Bread wallet iOS app I am new to bit coin and the bread wallet app, so please excuse me if this is a really obvious question.

I have read a lot of information saying that it is vital to use a new address every time I receive a payment. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse)
The bread app presents me with a qr code with my address below it to receive money, but no apparent way to create a new address.

Am I missing something really obvious, or is it ok to use this same qr/address over and over?

Breadwallet creates a new address every time you use the one displayed.

There is no manual way of creating a new one manually.

There are no problems with using the same address over and over. I started trading more than a year ago and my 'main'-purse has still the same address.

I've taken a look for you and I didn't find the possibility to add more addresses. This application can be used for one address at a time only.


Can you mine your own transactions yourself? If no, why not? And is it you physically/theoretically or practically cannot?

If yes, is this ever practical and does anyone do it?
As I see it now, no matter what you are taking a fraction/subset of bitcoins entire hashing power so the difficulty of finding a nonce would take longer than 10 minutes to confirm.

As I see it, for this to be practical...
Block reward + saved fees > mining costs * time

Where saved fees are the result of not having to pay other miners fees since you are doing it yourself and time is the time it takes to find the nonce.
note: this miner wouldnt have to be running full time

Theoretically, if you can mine blocks then you can certainly include your own transactions in the block.

Practically, you are competing with every other miner on the planet to find the next block. If you "win", you get the block reward plus you get to choose which transactions are included in your block. If somebody else wins, you get no say in the matter. Unless you have a very large mining operation, the chance of you winning is so small that it's never going to happen.

Miners who do make new blocks today (somebody has to, after all) may choose to include their own transactions in their blocks.

i was looking at it from the purpose of trying to figure out how https://app.originstamp.org/home does free trusted timestamping based on sending bitcoins to i assume their own accounts, with a hash.

So the use case of being able to mine your own transactions is for an app that requires secured time stamping, like if users needed to timestamp legal documents.

1) no transaction fee
  2) you put your miner in your same network, so no network fee and lower latency
  3) You dont have to wait forever for the transaction to be processed if you are trying to reduce fees. I dont know anything about fees vs time for minimum sum BTC transfers to happen, and if running a small miner server to perform this within my network is what it takes to not have to worry about it... it's something to be explored


Is the "double geometric" payout method for pooled mining fair to part time miners? The "double geometric" payout method as used on the Ozco.in pool is supposed to be fair and prevent pool hopping, but is this method fair to miners that only mine for a few hours per day, as opposed to miners that mine 24/7?

Yes. If you mine at a given point in time, you do not know when a block will be found, and thus your reward for shares you submit is a random variable. DGM is constructed so that the average reward for a submitted share is always equal to what you would get from it in PPS (assuming equal fees). The total reward for all shares you submit is additive - so it follows that the average reward you get in DGM is equal to what you would get in PPS, no matter what is your mining pattern.

However, the reward you will get is random and has some variance, and the variance is greater if your mining is intermittent. The exact degree of this depends on the parameters used by the pool.

More background information about mining pool reward methods can be found in Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems.

I find it interesting that the creator of DGM is here, claiming user statements are incorrect. As with any "hop-proof" payout schema...

It has the net effect of punishing miners who don't mine for an entire round. DGM greatly reduced the risk to the pool op by transferring those losses to the miners. PPS is exactly the opposite, pool ops take all the risk & variance instead of miners.

DGM is for pool ops who can't manage their business well enough to keep correct reserves. Miners will quickly find their earnings decreased and start looking for other more favorable payout schemas.


Withdraw from bitcoin ATM bitcoin noob but here goes. I have a bitcoin address (obviously) and someone has sent me bitcoins. Now I don't have a wallet just the address (public and private) in order to withdraw from an ATM or maybe even purchase stuff? Do
I have to create a bitcoin wallet as well? Sorry if that is a REALLY dumb question but I don't know too much about this stuff. Thanks guys

By having the private key you can sweep the wallet using a desktop or mobile wallet, I recommend electrum.

If you are new to the bitcoin world, visit https://bitcoin.org that has a lot of information so you can get up to date and get out of duduas


What happens to my bitcoins if lose my wallet file e.g. I suffer data loss and my computer is unrecoverable? You run bitcoin as a service on your local computer.  What happens if this computer is compromised?  A corrupt/failed hard drive or theft leads to the machine being lost and unrecoverable, and my bitcoin details (addresses etc) are gone.  Do my bitcoins disappear into the ether?

i.e. What happens to my bitcoins if my wallet file is compromised/lost?

If a wallet file is truly lost with zero ability to recover it, then the coins it contained are lost forever.  Think of it as cash left in a burning house.

Be sure to periodically backup your wallet.dat file.  It is best to also encrypt those backups lest they be compromised giving someone else access to your wallet.

If bitcoin continues without a solution to this little problem, it will be the undoing of the system.  If enough people loose their wallets, bye-bye bitcoin.  It's gone.  It's a ledger of transactions recording anonymous losses.

Bitcoin is not as durable as everyone is claiming.  If a paper dollar gets torn, the banks take it out of circulation and replace it.  If it gets lost in a landfill, the money pool is expanding and it's no great loss.  With Bitcoin, the only thing to do to compensate for a loss is to further divide the currency.  I love the sound of buying something for a femto-bit.


What exactly is "privatekeys.pw"? Today, I stumbled upon this bizarre website: https://privatekeys.pw/

Bitcoin Private Keys Directory

The FAQ makes no sense at all and doesn't explain what it is about whatsoever.
What could they be referring to? Private keys? Are they listing compromised private keys to Bitcoin wallets? Why do that in public? And if so, of course whoever runs that site must've already nabbed any coins from the wallet anyway? So what possible use is that information to the world?
As so often is the case, I have to ask: "What am I missing here?"

The site is a joke, or at best a confusing attempt to educate.
It literally lists all private keys, from low to high, as private keys are just numbers. There are of course way more than can be reasonably computed and stored, so the pages are just generated on the fly. If you ask for private keys starting at number N, it on the fly computes the public keys corresponding to private keys N through N+43, and looks up their balance on public block explorers.
But it doesn't let you search by public key, so it is useless for cracking things. Real private keys are randomly generated, and just scrolling through a near-infinite list of pages to look for a given public keys won't give you anything.

If you look at the features of the site, there are a few notable ones:
First, it allows the conversion of private key formats on a web interface, between decimal, hex, WIF, old Electrum seeds, mini, and brainwallet passphrase. This would likely enable someone who isn't particularly familiar with programming to nevertheless validate strings to see if they are indeed private keys.
It also can convert from keys of one coin to another. While the underlying private key remains the same, different coins have different network prefixes. If someone has a wallet dump but is unsure of the actual coin the wallet is supposed to contain, the site can provide a way to convert the existing WIF private key into a myriad of different private keys on different chains, which may be helpful in identification. It can also create bech32 and segwit addresses from WIF keys where relevant.
Granted, these are pretty niche uses, but use cases nonetheless, whatever the intent of the makers of the site.


Why are the majority of miners not voting on on P2SH? Link (via reddit)

Currently the vast majority of miners just don't vote. Was there a mistake made in organizing the voting process (maybe most miners haven't heard about this vote?), or perhaps most miners really don't like either proposals?

Here is my personal opinion as to why:

1) There are no release binaries available for the new client, so it must be compiled from source. Some of the smaller pools and P2Pool users may not have the technical knowledge how to do this.

2) If you are running a modified client merging the changes from the latest P2SH code is not straight forward. Nobody wants to spend time upgrading when the changes might have to be reverted if the vote doesn't get past.

3) Downtime during the upgrade process is bad for business, particularly for large pools.

4) No votes ultimately count as votes against, as you say perhaps they don't like either proposals enough to care.

5) Voting hasn't officially started yet - It is based on the last 1000 blocks so should begin sometime on the 24th Jan.

The big set-back is that the original P2SH proposal (BIP 12 aka OP_EVAL) was Withdrawn by its author, Gavin. In its place, he proposed a new, much inferior system that is broken by design. Despite a sanitized P2SH being proposed in BIP 17, however, he continues to promote and push for the broken BIP 16. Hopefully once BIP 16's voting date has come and gone, he and those who follow his command will adopt BIP 17 (or propose something even better?).


Trying to understand why hash value is more secure from hash algorithm I am currently studying in college in the US and was actually curious about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. I started looking on free university sites like Stanford university and New York University and even attempted to do questions of their past papers. I answered most of the questions, but I am stuck on one of the questions:

Suppose your professor wants to award each student in the class a random priority for office hours help by giving them a number H(studentID||Bi)
where Bi is the ith block header in the Bitcoin blockchain.Would the scheme be me more secure if you instead used H(studentID||Bi-1|| Bi)? (https://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall17/CSCI-GA.3033-019/assignments/practice_final.pdf)

I get that it maybe more secure if you use the Bi-1 because you have more inputs to generate an output, but I feel like that is not the reason.

giving them a number H(studentID||Bi) where Bi is the ith block header in the Bitcoin blockchain.Would the scheme be me more secure if you instead used H(studentID||Bi-1|| Bi)?

For this purposes of this question, the bitcoin header Bi = H(Bi-1 || other stuff).  Under a black box assumption of H()'s behavior, the two schemes are practically equivalent.

You can't really argue that H(id || Bi-1 || H(bi-1||stuff)) is more secure than H(id || H(Bi-1||stuff)) on the basis of 'more data' because H() might well have an internally bottleneck E.g. it could be implemented H(bytes[0 .. n]) = H(H(...H(H(H(bytes[0])||bytes[1])||bytes[2])...||bytes[n])  (and, in fact, sha256 does work kind of like this, though not one byte at a time).

Without out a more formal definition of "security" I don't think it's possible to just answer the question.  But guessing at a meaning "could someone more easily rig their office hours under one instead of the other"-- the answer would be no.

A hash is just a way to summarize things into an unique ID.

The more elements the hashing contains the harder it is to break it, if you reverse a hash it would cause a preimage attack and the algorithm  of the hash would be useless because you would’ve broken its main concept which is hashing (not encrypting)

If everyone knows the way the hash is computed then everyone could fake the hash (In bitcoin, everyone knows the way it is computed because that’s how the nodes can verify whether a hash is valid or not and thus know whether the blockchain was modified). Having said that, you might want to consider the secret of the order for the hashing in order to make it “secure”.

A hash safety itself is measured by how hard it is to break it. Sha256 is one of the most powerful hashes because it’s almost impossible to generare a preimage attack, but if you need to make it safer, you could hash the hash, H(H1(H0))

Where H0 is the first hash.

That way it would get harder exponentially to break it, (the more rounds you use to hash information, the harder it gets by an exponent number).

I hope that works for you to understand.


Decentralized democratic voting Has the fundamental problem in cryptovoting, one person, one vote, in a completely decentralized or blockchain centric manner been solved?

In other words, how can votes be allocated in a decentralized manner?

The intent of this question presupposes that vote allocation is not delivered by a state, that a blockchain itself can at the very least implement a completely basic, pure democracy: truly one person, one vote.

How can this intent be implemented?

This problem is not solved by the blockchain or the Bitcoin protocol. By "cryptovoting" I'm assuming that you mean that an individual signs his or her vote with his or her private key. The problem is that anybody can generate a new private key on a whim. The private key would have to be verifiably tied to one individual's identity, and that individual's identity would have to be exclusive to all other entities in the voting network. (DNAcoin maybe? kinda cool, kinda scary)

Note: I just googled DNAcoin and obviously found a thread on Bitcoin talk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=187991.0

While a Bitcoin-based voting system could implement a "1 vote per 1 private key" rule, the pseudo-anonymous nature of the Bitcoin network makes it nearly impossible to know if an individual has generated two private keys (unless the transactions make it apparent that it is the same individual). Generating a private key is as easy as flipping a coin 256 times and recording the results as 1 or 0, then converting that into hex (or tonal if you're Luke-jr).

Except if a Voting Authority of the State assign the keys in the first place. Maybe it could issue VoteCoin e.g. where the price to buy it is not fluctuating, allowing it to fund referendums. It also allows for voting on whether to have a referendum or not, etc. Too many possibilities.


Where is a comprehensive list of websites for getting free bitcoins? Up till now I know two websites where one can get free bitcoins:

http://www.bitvisitor.com/
https://freebitcoins.appspot.com
http://freebitco.in
http://takefreebitcoin.com/

Is there a comprehensive list of all such websites available somewhere?

Constantly updated list: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90718.0

  Free Bitcoin sites:

The Bitcoin faucet.
One time payout per Google account. Explanation available at the site.

Daily Bitcoins.
Can be used once an hour now, and not just once a day.

CoinAd.com.
Can be used once an hour with registration.

Bitcoin Addict

Bitcoiner

Bunny Run.
See here for more info.

Free bitcoins - netlookup.se

Nakabot's Bitcoin Faucet
(Tor hidden service) NakaBot pays out a portion of its winnings in 0.001 increments.

Free BitCoin Daily Scratchcard

kickme.to/goxkeygen
MtGox account needed to redeem the code one receives.

bitcoinpixels.com
0.01 BTC free when signing up to betfair. See here for more info.

memorydealers
Learn how here.

Omnicoins
Learn how here.

cointicket.org

BitCrate *

bitcoins.so *
Roll dice : same numbers - win 0.01

Paperco.in faucet *
Scan a QR code to reveal a MtGox code for 0.0007 BTC.

Gambling sites that give out free bitcoins ( freerolls etc. ) after you join

Dragon's Tale
A casino site, but gives out small amounts for free that you can use to gamble with or withdraw to your own Bitcoin wallet.

Seals with Clubs
Seals has a free poker tournament every hour with a .05BTC prize. There are larger free tournaments from time to time.
See here for more info.

Strike Sapphire
See here for more info.

Not exactly Free but popular "earn" Bitcoin sites

BitVisitor
Earn Bitcoins for visiting websites

CoinTube.TV
Earn Bitcoins for watching TV

Most of those websites don't give free bitcoins anymore. The only updated daily list I've been able to find is at the end of any post of the blog http://thebitcoinmaster.blogspot.com


As of 2017 is it still possible to get a transaction confirmed without a fee? In the past it was possible to get a transaction without a fee confirmed if the inputs and outputs had a high enough priority and followed some rules. As of 2017 is a "free" transaction still possible if you don't care about how fast it will be confirmed? Several hours or even a day or two would be acceptable.

The Bitcoin consensus rules do not require transactions to have a fee, so it's still theoretically possible for a free transaction to be confirm.

It is, however, unlikely that any miners today will confirm free transactions.  You can test this by sending yourself a free transaction to see if it confirms (but be sure you use a quality wallet, such as Bitcoin Core, that has features for handling transactions that never confirm).

Yes. It is possible. But what exactly do you want to achive? Either you want to minimize the fees or you want to delay transaction confirmation. Difference in details...


How to verify Ripple is working? isup.me is a cool page that checks whether another page is "down for everyone, or just me". Today I found my access to https://ripple.com/client/ and https://ripple.com/graph/ didn't work at all, due to "network errors".

Ripple is p2p, so theoretically it should always be up ... however it's a young project so there might be bugs, and the server code isn't yet open sourced. What's a good way to verify the Ripple network is up, or rather "is Ripple down for everyone, or just me"?

There really isn't one yet. Currently there is only one access point into the Ripple system open to the public and there's no system monitoring on it that has public access.

There is actually a way:

Download this github repo as a zip arhive https://github.com/rippleFoundation/network-viewer
Open in your local chrome


How to send bitcoins without paying or with extreme low fees and without having to proove my identity? Of course, I know it’s no longer possible to get a transaction mined without a miner fee since 2011.

It’s for sending from a single address to a single output address. But I have to split the sending in a large amount of transactions.
I only knows about Gdax which pays the transaction fee for the user (thus making sending transaction free), but it requires sending identity document in order to use it.

This question isn’t about doing it… It’s about getting answer that might explain how to do it without knowing an e‑mail address !
Other questions aren’t asking this so that concern cannot be answered on other questions !

By a paper wallet from someone in person and wipe it with CoPay app.


Why does bitcoin not have something like nicknames? It would be much easier to exchange bitcoins if everyone could have one or more unique nicknames on the blockchain. Of course what should not be possible is that other people can check the balance by just using a nickname. Wouldn't there be any technical solution to achieve that?

In bitcoin, there are no usernames, just addresses that are derived from cryptographic keypairs. Since an address is derived mathematically, when each node hears about a new transaction, it can simply use the right math equation to independently verify that the rightful owner of an address is attempting to spend the address' funds. This is done via cryptography, using asymmetric keypairs and cryptographic signatures.

In your example, each user could claim a username, but now we have a problem: how will everyone know who owns each username? How can I confirm that you are the rightful owner of your username, and consider your transactions valid?

A website that has usernames/passwords keeps a central database with all of them stored, so when you sign in, their server can check your password and allow you online. But the bitcoin network does not have a centralized server on which to store usernames/passwords. Instead it is a decentralized network of individual users.

So, you could have every node store all of the usernames, but that could becomes really resource intensive! And also very bad for privacy (remember, all of the blockchain’s transaction are a public ledger). For these reasons (and probably some others), storing usernames requires a more complicated solution for a decentralized network, whereas the addressing scheme used in bitcoin works quite well, even if addresses are tough for humans to read.

It is worth noting, there have been 3rd party services that allow you to claim a username, and then if someone wants to pay you they can do something like visit a URL (eg. www.nicknamePay.com/sebbo) and be presented with a btc address. In that example, the website could manage you wallet for you, while you can just tell associates to visit an easy-to-remember URL.

I think it's bcos of the transaction hash code. Maybe the code algorithm is synchronized to the bitcoin wallets ( sender and receiver). So with your "unique nickname" the process will become more cumbersome. I'm not sure.


What's the difference between 12 word seed and 24 word seed? Why was the format switched to 24 words for some newer wallets?

The English-language wordlist for the BIP39 standard has 2048 words, so if the phrase contained only 12 random words, the number of possible combinations would be 2048^12 = 2^132, and the phrase would have 132 bits of security. However, some of the data in a BIP39 phrase is not random, so the actual security of a 12-word BIP39 mnemonic phrase is only 128 bits. This is approximately the same strength as all Bitcoin private keys, so most experts consider it to be sufficiently secure.

Well for starters that should exponentially increase the security of the password if anything else


How to get balance of tens of thousands of addresses? What is the best way to get balance of large amount of addresses?
I tried to use APIs from different providers, but they are limiting the requests. Is there any APIs that give premium service without limiting requests?

Or maybe should I run full node, and use it?
If yes, how I'm using the full node to get the addresses balances? I'm using Ruby on Rails.

Thanks.

I think your should consider that using an API could result in fakes, wrongly-validated data. Using an API means you fully trust the API service,... which is kind-of against bitcoin no-trust model.

I recommend you to run a full node (Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 during time of writing).

There is no address-index (there is a patch you can manually compile into Core).

Simplest way with standard Bitcoin-Core 0.13.2 is to import all your addresses as watch-only into a wallet.

import addresses

Use the RPC call importaddress <address> "" false to import a watch only address.

The 3rd argument false is required to not rescan the blockchain for each import (can take serval hours).

Once you have imported all addresses, stop bitcoind/qt and restart it with the startup argument -rescan.

The rescan may take a couple of minutes/hours (depending on your Disk/RAM/CPU). Once done, you can call getreceivedbyaddress <addr> for each address to get the balance.

This result in authentic, self-validated data.

Note: If you are using Bitcoin Core 0.14, consider importing multiple addresses with importmulti

Have you tried blockonomics api . Their free plans allow 50 addresses at once and paid one upto 8000

If you want to run your own node. I would recommend running abe blockexplorer along with your node. Core wallet and other SPV wallets like electrum have known to become sluggish with large number of addresses


dogecoind won't read conf I'm having issues starting dogecoind after compiling in ubuntu 12.04 x64 running in VirtualBox on win 7 ultimate x64

here's what i've tried from inside dogecoin/src after make -f makefile.unix:

sudo su
./dogecoind -server -listen -daemon -rpcuser=dogerpc -rpcpassword=dogerpcpw -rpctimeout=30 -rpcport=8334 -rpcallowip=192.168.1.* -rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 -testnet

and i get:

Error: To use the "-server" option, you must set a secure rpcpassword in the configuration file:
/root/.dogecoin/dogecoin.conf

so i do:

cd ~/.dogecoin
emacs dogecoin.conf

i save the following parameters:

rpcuser=dogerpc
rpcpassword=dogerpcpw
rpcport=8334
rpcallowip=192.168.1.*
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
server=1
daemon=1
listen=1
testnet=1

i even chmod 777 dogecoin.conf to be sure everyone on God's green earth could access it so that wouldn't be a problem, but still the same error when trying to start up dogecoind

would much appreciate any help/tips!

It's unclear which version of dogecoind you are using. However, in the current 1.5 code on Github, there is a similar message:

if (mapArgs["-rpcuser"] == "" && mapArgs["-rpcpassword"] == "")
    throw runtime_error(strprintf(
        _("You must set rpcpassword=<password> in the configuration file:\n%s\n"
          "If the file does not exist, create it with owner-readable-only file permissions."),
            GetConfigFile().string().c_str()));

https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/blob/master-1.5/src/bitcoinrpc.cpp#L1080

This indicates that your attempt at working around the problem with chmod 777 would not have had the desired effect. Instead, try chmod 600 dogecoin.conf.

Your password is too short, make it longer and it should work.


Invalid public key was spent! How was this possible? From previous questions this bitcoin 1FYMZEHnszCHKTBdFZ2DLrUuk3dGwYKQxh address had an invalid public key of "00" and was unspendable but the coins are now spent?? The invalid key was generated by a bug in the wallet software the owner was using and should have been "locked" due to the invalid key

see link to the owners original query
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2t3vn0/i_cant_send_my_btc_a_triangle_apear_i_use_multibit/

also see link to a paper that lists that this is an invalid key
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/734.pdf?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fpubs%2F204914%2F734.pdf

see page 11

That address cannot be spent from and any such transaction that spends from it is invalid. However this does not prevent improperly written software from thinking its private key is a valid private and and performing the elliptic curve operations on it. So thus the address was created and a transaction was created that appears valid. But when validating the transaction with proper software, such software rejects it.

This transaction appears on blockchain.info likely because their software is either improperly implemented or simply not validating (or fully validating) transactions. This isn't the first time that's happened though.

Here is the information on the account you are looking for.

0x00:
Uncompressed private key:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141

Uncompressed WIF:
5Km2kuu7vtFDPpxywn4u3NLpbr5jKpTB3jsuDU2KYEqetwr388P

Uncompressed public key:
EMPTY

Uncompressed address: 1FYMZEHnszCHKTBdFZ2DLrUuk3dGwYKQxh

Compressed private key: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD036414101

Compressed WIF: L5oLkpV3aqBjhki6LmvChTCV6odsp4SXM6FfU2Gppt5kFqRzExJJ

Compressed public key:  EMPTY

Compressed address: 1FYMZEHnszCHKTBdFZ2DLrUuk3dGwYKQxh

~0xSkrypt


Storage exceeded in middle of synch A friend gave me a few bitcoins a number of years ago. Yesterday, I read an article about bitcoin and it reminded me I had some. I went online to check the value and to possibly spend them. I tried to access my wallet and since I haven't checked in a long time, it is taking forever to synchronize with the network. I left it on all night and now my macbook's storage is full. It's a real problem for me, as I need to work and don't want to a lot of other stuff at the moment. How do I get out of this mess? I have no sophistication whatsoever. I can't program or do anything fancy. I regret this situation and would rather just delete the app but I think there's some real value there and don't want to screw up my wallet. What do I do??? Help!

You may enable pruned mode on your blockchain storage by setting the following line in your bitcoin.conf

# Reduce storage requirements by only storing most recent N MiB of block. This mode is incompatible with -txindex and -rescan. WARNING: Reverting this setting requires re-downloading the entire blockchain. (default: 0 = disable pruning blocks, 1 = allow manual pruning via RPC, greater than 550 = automatically prune blocks to stay under target size in MiB).
prune=10237

Bitcoin Core will automatically prune the blockchain storage back to the amount specified.

Regardless, always keep a secure up-to-date backup of your wallet.dat

The answer is in sync with Natan... Looks like you are on a Mac. At first: make a copy and save it. When you open bitcoin client with this wallet.dat file, even if it not sync'd, you can see your address. Type this address (it usually starts with a 1 and is about 30 chars long) into blockchain.info, to see if there are funds on this address. If so, it is good to later on download the blockchain, and free up your space now to continue to work. Later on you have two options: either extend your HDD space, to download the whole blockchain (which takes a lot of time, better to have an SDD and a decent Mac, older Macs with Duo or i5 will take several days...), or better approach try to extract the privkey, and load it into another wallet. But then you are already at a sophisticated level, and I am not sure if you are willing (to invest time) to go this route. So a bit up to you, how to invest your time :-)


How can Bitcoin transactions be traced if you can change your address? I understand in Ethereum you can trace it because wallet address never changes. But in Bitcoin you can change your address, no? Thanks.

How can Bitcoin transactions be traced if you can change your address?

In Bitcoin you don't change your address. You create new receiving addresses.

This is normally done so that a new address is created for each new transaction with the intention to increase privacy.

However in each transaction there are inputs and outputs and if a transaction has one input and two outputs, if you can infer which output is change, you know that there is some connection between the input address and the output address. You may be able to then trace that connection further back through a series of transactions. This is approximately like tracing possession of a coin passing through a series of people or businesses in a series of transactions.

This becomes more difficult if transactions have much more than one input and much more than two outputs.

Transactions may have certain characteristics such as address-types, size, timing and so on that may make it possible to make inferences. Transactions with differing characteristics could be inferred as being different parties, those with similar characteristics might be potentially associated with a single party of interest.

For example, if you see a large transaction with hundreds of inputs and one high-value output occur every Friday at 19:00 UTC, you might suspect it was a large exchange moving funds into cold storage as part of it's regular operational procedures. The timing might suggest a specific timezone.

We know that organisations such as the FBI perform blockchain analysis to trace illegal activity. The details of their methods are not published, so far as I know.

See

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/search?q=blockchain+analysis which leads to
How can there exist businesses that "specialize in blockchain analysis looking for patterns of usage that reveal how money is being used"?
How can I find a digital forensics expert to help trace stolen bitcoins?
etc

ethereum addresses are interchangeable just like bitcoin addresses, you can track bitcoin for example at blockchair.com and ethereum addresses at etherscan.io


Blockchain. An economist's dream? Suppose I was an economist wanting full knowledge of the EBS and flows of the economy; I want to know who buys from who, for how much, and I want to see who has accumulated what funds at what time. In short, I want to trace each element of this complex system we call the economy. But I don't need to know who is IBM, who is Ford, and who is Google. I "simply" need to separate IBM from Google and Ford in my analysis.

Suppose the whole economy functioned using the Blockchain, how useful is the Blockchain for my goal? And if not very useful, are there alternatives that are?

Blockchain by structure is a decentralised, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers, As blockchain is public everyone is able to see the blockchain content.

Your analysis could be my analysis and I will be able to separate IBM from Google..

You can't separate them if you don't know them. But with cryptography world
nothing impossible, i'm pretty sure someone with a "Big" cup of coffee will be able do it. But i'm talking about blockchain structure not programming skills.


Can I send bitcoin from paper wallet directly to hardware wallet? Can I send bitcoin from my paper wallet to my hardware Ledger wallet without using blockchain wallet?

Paper wallets give you direct control of your funds and a single private key.
Some wallets have an import private key feature. Check if your Hardware wallet allows importing or sweeping.
What you want to do is sign a transaction for all of the unspent outputs that sends funds to one of the addresses on your Hardware wallet. This is often known as "sweeping", when you take all available funds under an address and send them to a different address.
Most wallets will sweep funds to itself, as opposed to letting you enter any address to sweep to. Creating a sweep transaction on your own is an advanced technique for programmers and command-line junkies. You should be comfortable creating these types of transactions in a test environment before ever attempting to do so with real sums of money.
There are also tools and libraries available that will help you with this, just be very careful to only use a reputable source -- there are many scams that want to steal your private key(s).
Recommendations on this site are strongly discouraged, so here are three (3) external examples that can help you sweep your funds.

Samourai Wallet can sweep funds from private keys and QR codes.

Electrum can sweep keys to any destination address. To sweep private keys, go to the Wallet menu -> Private Keys -> Sweep. Enter the private key in the appropriate field. By default the “Address” field is populated with an address from your existing electrum wallet. Change this to your one of your Hardware wallet addresses.

Sweepkey is an open-source tool I created using the bitcoin-js library for my own usage that sweeps funds from a private key to any specified address (again not a recommendation just an example).

I cannot stress enough, be very careful when interacting with private keys in a hot(online) environment. It is best to never expose them to an online environment, but if you have to, please practice on testnet or with small amounts until you feel comfortable you know what you are doing.

All you need is an address to send the money to. You could create an address with your hardware wallet, create a wallet here https://www.blockchain.com/wallet
Import your private key then generate a tx to your hardware wallet and send it, then discard the online wallet


Bitconnect balance not showing on my wallet I sent from Bitconnect platform to my QT wallet and still showing 0.00 BCC, even though the transactions is confirmed and sent since yesterday. Could anyone help me with this? This is all the info I have for the transaction in case it helps.

Bitconnect Wallet Address: 8QDhQ1vWkuR4L5h7E6vKm1tGVmsFzWUyW3
Transaction: 58066e3767dbc02c219d24ab2995723f88f552889c0e60385f607487c10b0acc
Block: 289640
Day/Time: 1/17/2018 14:06
Amount: 3.35790826

You need to fully sync the wallet for it to show your balance.

If you'r using Windows there is a tutorial on how to sync your wallet.


Did the Bitcoin fork resulting in the Bitcoin Cash created money from nothing? Since you can double-spend your old Bitcoin coins and the Bitcon Cash coins, independently---one on each side of the fork---it seems somehow that money was created for free. Isn't this a problem? What prevents people from creating more and more forks to the point of undermining the crypto-currencies value?

To answer the questions in the body of your posting:

Spending BTC "on one side of the fork" and BCH on the other cannot be called "double spending".
"Money created for free" is a misnomer. Yes, you have twice as many coins after a fork, but the combined value of both coins "right and left of the blockchain" is initially the same as just before the split, namely the coin with the former name has 100% and the one with the new ticker 0%. But from that point on price discovery on the market (exchanges) will determine the value of each strand individually.

"What prevents people from creating forks . . .?"
Among others the risk of loosing trust and competitiveness in regard to other crypto currencies.
If nevertheless a fork is triggered by some actors in a respective community, there must be important reasons why it couldn't be avoided. A fork is a declaration of war, after all efforts to compromise and reaching consensus failed.
But as we can see in case of Bitcoin, a fork does not necessarily undermine the value of that currency. The combined value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is now, 3 weeks after the fork, considerably higher than before.

(After getting 4  downvotes and a comment, I complied by removing the greater part of this answer, because it was considered polemic. Sorry for having been ignorant about the purpose of this list as Q&A site.)

A fork of a blockchain can be compared to splitting the shares of a company, e.g. by increasing the total no. of shares from 100 to 200.

The value of the company stays the same, but instead of 1 share, you now have 2, but they still only represent 1% of the value of the company.
The value of a company and its shares is determined at the stock exchange by monitoring at what price the shares are traded. Initially the 2 new shares will have about the same value as 1 old share. But that changes, depending on how the future development of the company is anticipated.

After the fork the prices of BTC, which has kept the legacy name, and  BCH are determined separately on the exchanges.

I don't think that this process can be called "creating money from nothing". Additonal tokens have been created and given value by people who are buying it for a reason.

When a government or central bank "prints" money it kind of taxes the people by diluting the value of the currency.

Crypto miners get coins as a reward to process transactions and maintaining the systemic process. The blockchain protocol is designed to release only relatively small amounts of new coins on a regular basis to not cause "inflation". Still the holders of coins are "taxed" that way, but it is a fair price to pay for being able to use a currency without "strings attached".


Settling offline transactions Use Case

My use case is around a scenario where both customer and merchant possess offline wallets with a balance that has had confirmation on the blockchain.

To begin with, let us say that, the merchant and the buyer's wallets show balances of 20 BTC and 10 BTC respectively. These balances are the one that are confirmed on the block-chain.
Then, let there be multiple transactions between the merchant and buyer such that the balance is always updated locally in the wallets only.
All of the transactions, in 2 above, happen in an offline mode; i.e. no access to network. The period of no access can run into days.
Sometime, in the future, when either/both of the wallets are online, all the offline transactions are published to blockchain and are confirmed.

Blockchain Sync

There are two things that can happen at this point.

First, the wallets are so secure that, all updates (credits and debits) happen locally without ever having to 'sync' up with the blockchain. The only time the wallets may sync with blockchain is to post the transactions and their sequence; and, also to update their wallet with the credits that happened since the last time the wallet went online. Or, regulatory pressure requires posting transaction data every set frequency.

Second, all credit updates are made to the wallets via the blockchain. This requirement is enough motivation to seek network connectivity; even if it is once in a week or fewer.

Question

In either case, we are looking at a scenario, where a value, confirmed by blockchain, is used in transactions offline to be confirmed online later. How do we implement this?

Analogy

Bus conductors may issue tickets with an offline machine to passengers who board the bus at various points throughout the journey. When the bus reaches its destination, the machine is used at the depot to arrive at a list of tickets sold and the amount collected thereof. Thus, this is an example of an offline transaction where transactions are 'settled' when 'connectivity' is eventually available.

Spawned off of: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/41356/6975

I'd say there are number of issues at play here. If the system is "offline" then the only update you'll have to balances is whatever was last stored. The assumption here is both sources are trusted, and the system in the middle is trusted. Might as well make it a centralized asynchronous system. You'd have far more control and less reliance on 3rd party tools at that point.

The system proposed would be "nice" but a solution in the meantime would be to develop an internal ledger. You know party A, and party B. You know their balances, and you trust their transactions. This system assumes you know their keys as well, or can obtain them as needed.

Based on the most recent balance store your transactions in a normal DB. Running balance, again based off most recent information. Whenever the node is able to connect, update the current balances (trust but verify), check any previous transactions you may have submitted for failures (lack of gas, improper transaction, lack of funds etc), then process the transactions.

If there are A -> B and B -> A transactions then you could resolve transaction balances internally (assuming that is legal for what's intended). Otherwise you can put in all kinds of logic to resolve each transaction. To summarize:

Use an internal system for tracking what's what. What's been paid, what needs to be paid.
When node connects, get as much info as you can. Current balance, confirmed transactions from previous submissions, transactions that are still waiting to be confirmed. Identify transactions that outright failed for whatever reason (this is assuming a short 'up time' for connection with the node. It wouldn't stay connected long enough to see transactions hit the first block), still sitting in mempool (not enough gas to be picked up and go stale), etc.
Process based off the information above. Transactions will ultimately be resolved or unresolved. A FIFO can be used to resolve the oldest transactions, or if the ideal situation is to resolve the greatest number of transactions first regardless of age then a large transaction may get backlogged while many other transactions get taken care of.

This is all a matter of striking a balance of "trust" vs "timing". If i own 2 wallets, and i'm the only one with the keys, i could run every transaction in a back end system tracking what "it should be" and resolving it whenever i want.

The provided suggestion is a balance between available technology(and circumstances), security, and accuracy.

This can be accomplished by using Bluetooth/NFC connectivity with a unique wallet (must be same for both ends) that is capable of storing encrypted offline transactions without actually syncing them with the Blockchain. However, as for the paying side, the initial funds must come from buying and syncing with the blockchain.

The Lightning network is still in concept stage as far as I know. There are still issues to be solved, especially regarding possibly misleading the system to believe that you received payment from someone that did NOT actually send it - by repeating a (real) previous transaction like in "man in the middle".


Did Bitcoin founders know Bitcoin is not scalable at Base Layer? Given Bitcoin takes 45 min per Transaction, and consumes lot of energy (around 1 million Visa transactions),  https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
This is more of a history question,
Did Bitcoin founders (Satoshi Nakamoto) know that Bitcoin would not be Scaleable?
Did they only create a Base Layer on purpose, and expect other people to create second derivative layers like Lightning Network?
Currently Bitcoin is not economic, without the key Lightning network, and certain provinces in China and other countries are attempting to shut down nodes. Lightning network has taken 10 years to release, since Bitcoin creation, and environmental politicians are starting to complain about power consumption. Just wondering if the founders, had foresight about this, and if they noted future goals for Bitcoin to work. I did not see it in their whitepaper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If you look at the announcement of bitcoin and the very first response to it, you can read James A. Donald pointing out that bitcoin (which we today call the base layer) "does not seem to scale to the required size".
Partial quote of James A. Donald's response:

We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your
proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size. [...] hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of
bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.

This response was sent more than two months before the genesis block was mined. Thus, it is fair to assume that Satoshi was well aware of the scalability concerns.

Given Bitcoin takes 45 min per Transaction

This is not true. Already explained in an answer to your previous question: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/105976/

and consumes lot of energy (around 1 million Visa transactions), https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

This is answered in your first question: Bitcoin Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint a good long term investment?

Did they only create a Base Layer on purpose, and expect other people to create second derivative layers like Lightning Network?

Satoshi's vision included payment channels where one on-chain transaction represented multiple logical payments: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/cc9psl/technical_a_brief_history_of_payment_channels/


Is the 12-word phrase app-specific? I'm new to Bitcoin and trying to understand it, step by step. I tried to make a wallet using Electrum. This gave me 12 words which seem to allow me to regenerate my wallet's private key. When trying to use this 12 words in Exodus (another wallet app) it says those 12 words are invalid. So, I figured these 12 words might be an app internal thing...
Seeing Chris Chen's comment here seems to confirm this.
So, the question would be: if I happen to get my 12-words compromised and someone gets to know them, would I then be still safe as long as this person does not figure out which wallet app I used?

No your funds would still be at risk. There are only a few popular wallets that use seed phrases.
Most wallets use BIP39(https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase) but there are some that use different versions or no seed words at all.
Electrum does not ouse BIP39, see their docs explaining why. https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html
It would be extremely easy for an attacker to try the most popular versions and steal your funds.

Definitely your funds would still be in danger. The word list isn't universal but the fact that even a few of the seeds were to be known cuts down drastically the amount of time it would take to crack a 12 word mnemonic seed phrase. With encryption it is more about how long it is going to take to crack something... not if. As it is now, if the wordlist is known.. and the user is using a 12 words  as opposed to 24, depending on the wordlist size it could be possible to crack with progression of the outrageous 256 core  cpu's and these cluster computers. Well here are some numbers to show

P(n,r) = {n!}\{(n - r)!}

100 word list with 12 words needed to crack it
P(n,r)=P(100,12)
= 503153364153791070720000 possible permutations
100 word list and 24 words needed to crack it
P(n,r)=P(100,24)
= 49496938581413018841693936714706785140736000000 possible permutation
100 word list and 6 words needed to crack it --> this is scary cause if half of your seed words get compromised...
P(n,r)=P(100,6)
 = 858277728000 granted if only solving one permutation a sec that's still impossible.. but what of those 256 core consumer cpus.. 256 cores solving 1 a second each and what if they had 10, 20 of them? what if a server farm clustered. So it doesn't matter the brand style or make of the mnemonic seed phrase generator or wallet...ANY time your password is even slightly compromised... it is compromised... period.  and you should be concerned.


Recovery after losing wallet.dat and formatting hard disk I have received the bitcoin way back in 2013 in Bitcoin Core. At that time I don't know about the importance of wallet.dat - I have formatted my hard disk and install Bitcoin Core again in 2017 but there it didn't show my Bitcoin in my balance. I have my Bitcoin Key.
I meant "Bitcoin Key" is my Public Key on which I got my bitcoin. Is there any other way to get my Bitcoin back if I didn't get my original wallet.dat of Bitcoin Core?
How can I get my bitcoin back?
How can I get to know my Private Key?

Your money is lost without at least one of

a backup of important data from the hard disk before it was formatted
a backup of the wallet.dat file
a note of the private key

There is no way to recover the private key from other information. If there was, Bitcoin would be completely unsafe and unusable.

How can I get to know my Private Key?

That's what your wallet.dat contained. You cannot get that back if you've lost your wallet.dat. Otherwise, Bitcoin would be worth $0 as anyone could just "make up" private keys with any amount of Bitcoin.
Since the wallet.dat was long deleted, re-installing Bitcoin Core is insufficient—there is nothing left for Bitcoin Core to guess your old key.


Why Are My Gridseed Blades Exploding? What Components Are Exploding? I'm wanting to get into mining not so much for the mining reward but because I support the idea of decentralised currency and the power of peer to peer transactions.

However I have a problem with getting some Gridseed Blades up and running. Something on them is exploding. Please see the below photos.

This is my power supply unit.

I live in the UK so the voltage is set to 220V mode.

This is the front of the PSU wired up. My multimeter reads 12v coming from the output.

I'm in the middle of building a stack of blades but I need to overcome the problem of something in them exploding.

In this photo you can see there are three components that have exploded. What are these components? What would cause them to explode?

This photo is for comparison, this is a good blade where the components haven't exploded.

I've tried to look for a datasheet or a gridseed blade board schematic but I can't find one.

Every time I connect a blade to my power supply these same components explode. What could be causing this to happen and what could I do to stop this from happening?

Also I would like to repair the Gridseed Blades that have already exploded, is there a schematic for this board, or at least what are the components that have been damaged?

So after asking elsewhere I got half of my question answered. The reason the boards exploded was because the polarity of output was backwards. For some reason Gridseed supply power cables with the typical colours of red for live and white for ground reversed!

My solution was to swap the white and red wires over and I got no more explosions.

Does any one know what components have been damaged? And where would I get replacements from?

I had A failed power supply unit from Bitman Sold by Bitman Ebay, they had A 100% feed back at the time & this was over A year ago, the power Supply was was running at more than the 10 amps they said the unit was rated for & the electric lines in my walls where hot, the cable they sent was under rated for the power draw, I used one rated for 45 amps for the power cable, their res once response was this is normal for are equipment, Ebay promptly gave A full refund after review, my advice is watch out what you are buying for mining or you can burn your place down


Do Electrum Wallets accept BCH? I bought BCH from Bitcoin.com and provided an Electrum Wallet Address. The money did not arrive and Simplex, who arranged the transaction, advised that Electrum Wallets are only BTC even though the app does not mention this. Simplex sent me a link comprised of a http address on Bitcoin.com's website and the wallet address I originally provided which takes me to where my BCH is sitting but I do not know how to regain control of it and send it to a new BCH wallet. Bitcoin.com do not respond to emails. Can anyone help?

Electrum is a Bitcoin only application. This is directly stated by Electrum where it says it is a Bitcoin wallet. It does not say that it is a wallet for any other cryptocurrency. You cannot use Electrum for Bitcoin Cash.

To get your Bitcoin Cash, you will need to export your private keys from your Electrum wallet and import them into a Bitcoin Cash wallet. This may be easiest to do with Electron Cash which is a fork of Electrum but modified to work with Bitcoin Cash.

Simple. Download electroncash on your PC. Make a duplicate of your current wallet file and save it on your desktop. Open electroncash  and when it asks for wallet file to open, click browse and choose the duplicate file. Your coins should show up.


Is mining the unfair part of bitcoin in the same way banks (or rather, fractionary reserve systems) are to current monetary system? I've been reading a lot about bitcoin lately and I'm very interested.

Especially, when it comes to making a currency that is way more fair, because it avoids a centralized control of it.

However, in the same way today's banks/centralbanks/FED/regulators benefit from how the current monetary system works, wouldn't an economy solely based on bitcoin make the big IT corporations take advantage of everyone due to their computing (mining) power?

Cannot we build a currency that is decentralized like bitcoin, but that doesn't have the "mining" part of it? (I know that mining concept is very tied to cryptography, but maybe a less cryptographic-centric system can be built, like one based on trust/untrust between nodes?)

Thanks very much, and sorry if this has already been asked, but it's difficult to look for a question like this.

Question: Cannot we build a currency that is decentralized like bitcoin, but that doesn't have the "mining" part of it?

No need to, one was already created years ago and is still up and running today. Bitcoin depends on currency creation to record transactions, you can't get around this because that is the design of it and how it works. The only one that approaches this in a different way is Timekoin. Transactions and Currency Creation are separate. Transactions can be processed like clockwork every 5 minutes with no currency being created, provided some currency already exist to spend. Currency Creation is also produced like clockwork in very small amounts. So anyone running the server software can create currency, but in a very gradual, controlled amounts as long as the strict rules are being followed.

The bitcoin is indeed unfair.  How are all to participate when the economically challemged do not have the resources to mine?   I suggested a virtual currency backed by the top 20 commodities excluding gold.  Gold only hold intrinsic value and can be manipulated very easily.  Silver however is is higher demand for manufacturing and would be acceptable.   I am planning on actually forming such a currency.  It will intially cost about 87 million dollars to initiate the network security and have the necessary holding facilities for such commodities as with any other commodity.  Paper contracts are just that paper.  they can worthless.  To physically have holdings is the only way.  Of course loans and other financial instruments will come into play to cover future costs and operations.  However.  Certain minimum levels must be kept in the 30 commodities although trading between them would be permitted so the realization of profits can be obtained.
  An oversight panel of shareholders will be in place and they will be charged with reviewing the financial records, along with professional accountants.  The panel of 12 will be drawn from the pool of shareholders and the only requirement is they are the age of 18.  Each year new oversight committees will be drawn.  This will help in avoiding any concerns of formations of lets say unwanted actors from taking any control or not stating facts.
  Since the United States Government does not allow the printing of money then it will all be virtual.  The security system to preveny hacking will ber contracted and most importantly insured by the same company.  They must have holdings in the new currency as the dollar will not be permitted in the overall theme of the currency.  They fail to do there job and system is hacked.  Whatever is lost must be replaced.  I believe that employers and consumers would swarm to be involved.  It would be global.  I am 53. unemployed.  Male, white and told by many a bit crazy.  I look around the globe and I am surrounded by the insane.  Shoot me an email and give me your feedback.  Trolls stay home.


I cannot see the expected OP_CODE in transactions According to different answers on this site the format of the standard TX claim script should be [OP_PUSH DER(R+S)+HashType OP_PUSH PubKey]

The OP_PUSH code is 4C, 4D or 4E depending on push length.

However in this transaction I cannot see the expected code. I could not even find the definition of the one there:
https://blockchain.info/rawtx/db320e85d8bef3895052d9bf002aeb185fa12eeef8445e3e45f31b9a0c90f9f6?format=hex

01 00 00 00 is txin index, 8C is the scriptin length and then comes 49.
Instead of 49 I would expect 4C.

Is it because you can leave out the OP_CODEs or what am I missing?


Transaction marked as "Newly generated coins" on Blockchain.info On blockchain.info I saw a transaction labeled as "No inputs (newly generated coins)". Are these new coins generated from mining?

How come that such a transaction can have 30 confirmations, while others only have six confirmations?

No inputs means that the coins are coming from a coinbase transaction, that is, they were only moved "once", when they were created.

Transactions will have different numbers of confirmations based on how recently the funds were moved.

Newly mined or generated coins are required to receive over 100 confirmations (I forget exactly how many) before they are recognized by the network. This is a safety factor to prevent Bitcoin 'counterfeiting' by a conspiracy of miners.


Who needs a copy of the entire blockchain these days? As discussed in this question there is a news report today saying that researchers have found illicit files and information stored in the blockchain.

In today's Bitcoin world, who needs the full block chain?  With mining pools and online wallets looking like the norm (is this true?), do many people at all download the entire chain, or at least large portions of it?  I'm sure that researchers will download it in full, but what are the other use cases?  Does it extend at all to any casual users?

Running a full node (downloading the blockchain) allows a user to interact with the network, without having to trust any other network participant.

For some users, this may not be important, but for many users it is very important. For example:

You are a business, and you need to ensure that txs you send and receive are in fact being communicated across the entire network.
You run an exchange, and want to make sure large deposits are not going to be double spent or orphaned
You hold a large amount of cryptocurrency, and want to maintain security and privacy of your funds
You live somewhere with heavy financial/economic restrictions, so access to webwallets, etc is banned outright. So to interact with the network you have to run your own node.
You are a believer in the philosophies behind cryptocurrency, and want to run a node just to help the network grow and remain robust.

This is not an exhaustive list, I'm sure there are more reasons than I have listed. In general it is important that users remain capable of running their own nodes, as otherwise they will have to trust someone else to do so for them.

Solo miners and pool operators need a copy of the entire blockchain in order to verify new transactions against the transaction history.