Since the price of Bitcoin price changes constantly, then any program which would fulfill that function would still require the user to input the exact price at which he/she traded Bitcoins for. There is also no way of automating such a process without giving a program unfiltered access to every single one of the user's exchange accounts, assuming that the user doesn't engage in any trades outside of exchanges. The good news is that you can easily emulate this capability in almost any spreadsheet software. Come to think of it, a spreadsheet software is exactly the program that you are thinking of.

Spreading FUD about an altcoin is not something which poses a risk for the forum. If anything, it lessens the risk that forum members take from believing in hype, which I'm sure is also present in your thread, as with every altcoin thread. The fact is, most moderators and a lot of reputable members don't care about altcoins nor the Altcoin subforum. If someone is spreading FUD, then spread more hype to counter it.

To put things in perspective, Bitcoin is FUD-ed daily by legal entities and a few well-known names. Your control your coin's future -- i.e., it's not ideologically decentralized -- so handle your business.

TLDR: Your issue is not a forum issue. Stop telling us that it is.

I'm not really sure how international law deals with license violators. If I remember correctly, all the UN countries are supposedly obligated to follow a set of official legislation dealing with copyright violation. In essence, that should apply directly to copyleft works as well. However, even if that was the case, some countries (China, for example) flagrantly protect pirates and copyright violators to a legal extent. Since it is difficult to establish which country's laws cover a particular company transacting over the Internet, posts bordering on GPL license violations would have to be arbitrarily decided on by Theymos (and maybe the staff).

You might want to consult with this site though. It looks legit, but I only found it via Google, so I would be a bit wary anyway.

Some altcoin exchanges have an auto-sell feature which, when enabled, automatically puts all deposited funds up on the market at a predetermined price range (highest buying price, highest selling price, etc.). Cryptsy does that, as far as I recall. I don't know of any exchange allowing automatic Bitcoin withdrawals though.

Apart from what I have mentioned, which you can use to emulate the service that you're asking about to some effect, no, there is no such service that does exactly that.

It will not make the blockchain smaller. In fact, it will make it much larger. There are 2^160 possible Bitcoin addresses, which means that keeping an account database rather than an account ledger would require maintaining an accurate representation of the balance contained in 2^160 Bitcoin addresses. If you do that per block, then you would need stacks of servers just to keep the blockchain running. It is also not secure to store exact balances instead of input-output transactions because it would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify if the indicated balance was maliciously altered.

Your idea is flawed.

1. How would a distributed time server generate a single, unique nonce per block? Either the nonce generator would have to be centralized, which is obviously not wanted in a decentralized currency, or a malicious entity can just recode the client to produce a timestamp and nonce combination which is already known to produce a very low hash value.

2. In order to check which hash has the lowest value, the network would have to store every submitted hash until the block is found. If each miner could produce at least 1000 hashes per second and there were at least 100 miners currently hashing, then at least 1 million hashes with their accompanying block contents would have to be stored by each node that verifies the hashes every couple of seconds. That's a lot of memory, not to mention a lot of overhead in time to verify each hash in case any malicious entity submits multiple fraudulent hashes with low hash values. 1000 hashes per second is not even a lot.

3. 2 second transaction times will create an extremely bloated blockchain, not to mention a ton of orphaned blocks. Who really needs such a quick transaction period?

Depending on the Bitcoin client that you're using, change from a sent transaction may be sent to a newly generated change address. For example, let's say that you have 1 whole Bitcoin as an unspent input. If you send 0.5 of that to someone else's address, then the remaining 0.5 will be sent back to an address in your Bitcoin wallet. I'm not familiar with all the Bitcoin clients that currently exist, but I know that some Bitcoin clients generate new change addresses on-the-fly. In those cases, your previous backup file would not contain the newly generated private-public key pairing, which would mean that your remaining 0.5 Bitcoin is inaccessible using that file. Ideally, you should make a new backup of your wallet.dat file after every time that you send out a new transaction.

I like this idea, but I wouldn't recommend using it as a primary safeguard of IP ownership. All it would take to invalidate your claim of ownership via this method is to lose control of your private key. You might argue that that's not a very common scenario, but the endless stream of people losing their keys everyday would beg to argue. Mailing yourself a legally verifiable timestamped envelope containing evidence of your ownership is still better, and definitely much simpler to execute. While I do plan on using this method myself one of these days, I would do so only as a matter of redundancy and not as a replacement for much more verifiable methods.

Like most files, your wallet.dat file will have its data corrupted if an application is currently writing to it (your Bitcoin client, for example) and it abruptly closes. Running out of hard drive and memory space also risks the possibility of corrupting your wallet.dat file if it is currently being processed during that time. And of course, there's always the self-inflicted case of improperly writing onto your wallet.dat file either intentionally or unintentionally.

Technically, if you reside in the US, then it is illegal under certain circumstances. Since Bitcoins are now subject to capital gains tax, then attempting to obscure your identity and/or your Bitcoin holdings with (or without) the intent of doing so in order to avoid paying tax is a legal, and possibly criminal, issue. According to the rumor mill, England and some parts of Europe might soon start taxing them as well. In the vein of this discussion, hiding one's wealth is indeed one of the primary reasons why people subscribe to coin mixing solutions, but saying that it's not illegal is not an acceptable defense if and when the government contests your reasoning.

Based on the information provided by the OP, I believe that he/she is referring to this thread. Truth be told, after reading through that whole thread, I am no closer to figuring out what either side is claiming foul against. It seems to be just another random episode of this corny dramedy that we know as Bitcointalk.

This thread does seem pointless though. Either provide the necessary information or stop whining in public about your unnamed offenders. The people who read these threads aren't psychics.

That depends on the mining pool. Generally though, Bitcoin mining pools allow the miner to change their withdrawal addresses at will. If the withdrawal process is scheduled and automated, then just change your listed address before the next scheduled withdrawal.

We can provide you with a more accurate response if you provide us with the name of your mining pool.



It's a backup. It will contain outdated information as opposed to your current data file, but it will never be obsolete. It will still contain some of your private keys, and it will certainly be useful if it's your latest backup.

As for the topic of advanced backups, all I can say is that a backup is a backup. It's a file. As long as it's a usable (as tested) copy and you have kept it private and secure, then it's a decent backup.

I don't recommend using a backup copy of a Blockchain.info wallet as a cold storage solution though. If you're going to keep a cold storage address in a USB drive, then get one that no other entity has ever had access to.

That's mostly face-value rhetoric. For most people, altcoin mining is more profitable than Bitcoin mining. For a few, it's the other way around. Mining profitability is largely dependent on the investment that one is willing to put into the endeavor. Unfortunately, the investment necessary to net any substantial profit from Bitcoin mining is phenomenal. Unless you are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars to purchase high-end mining ASICs, then you will always come out with a loss when mining Bitcoins. Altcoins, on the other hand, can be mined with regular computer components and at far lower difficulties. There are additional costs to consider, but some people are lucky enough to net at least a few cents worth of coins a day. The profit is not much, but it's much higher than what you would get from mining Bitcoin without a hefty investment.

If you're a beginner, start by mining more established coins with relatively low difficulties. You might be tempted to mine newer coins, but there are so many risks involved with those types of coins that are not worth the pittance that you'll get from mining them. Once you've mined a few coins, you can then decide if you want to make an investment towards mining Bitcoins.

As for what coin you should mine, you should do your own due diligence on them. Shills abound on this board, and they all want to make a quick buck at everyone else's expense.

The Altcoin subforum and its child forums really do need a lot of moderation though. Whether or not BitcoinEXpress is the right person to look over that subforum is a matter of extremely contrasting opinions though. Personally, I think his proactiveness is a good quality, but he tends to be a bit too aggressive about certain things, which may affect his/her partiality in deciding what stays and what goes. He/She is also quite vocal, which can be good or bad depending on how one interprets his/her words. It shouldn't be too huge of a deal to give him/her a couple of days of "moderated moderation" though. In any case, the forum could do a lot worse.

Having said that, I think a better solution to solving the "wild west" crisis plaguing the Altcoin subforum would be to prevent anyone with less than 29 Activity from posting there. That would cut down on anonewbie devs posting ANN threads for new scam/crap/clone-coins, shill accounts spreading both hype and FUD, and Chinese accounts posting "good coin" on any thread with "coin" in its title. Why would you want to hear anything about altcoins from a newbie account anyway? Unless you can personally see someone typing the exact words being posted on a forum, then we are all essentially faceless entities behind a screen.

The OP has just recently indicated a desire to found a "Bitcoin High Rollers Club" on this thread. According to him/her, this "club" would converse amongst themselves of ways to further increase their Bitcoin holdings. However, the prevailing sentiment among those who have read that thread is that the OP is looking for a way to identify high value targets to scam. It really does seem dubious when you consider the idea and the OP's post history. This suggested feature is just the OP's way of trying to legitimize his/her already ridiculed ideas. Don't buy into it -- it has no merit.

Yes, that is secure enough. Remember to hide the hardcopy of the private key somewhere safe but easily accessible to you. Keep a duplicate hardcopy if you deem it necessary. For greater security, you might want to wipe and reformat the computer that you generated the private key on. A triple Gutmann reformat would certainly clear all doubts. Some printers keep a copy of printed files though, so you may want to look into that too.

In simplest terms, SHA256 is a hashing algorithm. Hashing is essentially changing the bits so that Message A translates easily to Message B but not the other way around. You can liken hashing to encryption in the sense that they are both aimed at securing communication between two parties, but hashing is NOT encryption. If you encrypt something, you can always get back the original message as long as you know the algorithm used. If you hash something, you will never get back the original message without cycling through a subset of all possibilities.

As for the actual algorithm used by SHA256, that's more of a technical explanation, which I'm assuming you've already read about. If not, Wikipedia lists the full algorithm, if I remember correctly.

The blockchain functions more like a ledger than a spreadsheet database. To put it simply, if you wanted to transcribe it to human-readable form, it would read something akin to "Jan 1, 2014, 00:00:00, Generated 50 BTC, 1BitcoinAddress001 sent 10 BTC to 1BitcoinAddress002". Clearly, you believe that the blockchain contains a collection of all generated Bitcoin addresses, which is simply not the case. That is why your proposed idea will not work at the protocol level.

You can always tweak the code of any Bitcoin client on your own to satisfy your need for extra security. However, a smart hacker would just bypass your client and steal your wallet directly.

Stick to using a cold storage solution. Even if they somehow work, clients with fancy features are still only as secure as the person using them.



Please quote the post that you are replying to, not just the last one on the thread because it's easier to get to. If you don't, then you look like a spambot scanning the last post for keywords and posting randomly generated replies. Although, judging from your post history, this recent post does seem highly suspect.

Bitcoin clients need to connect to a node in order to synch their copy of the blockchain. The more nodes there are, the easier it will be for someone synching to find a node to connect to. Also, since the blockchain is maintained via a consensus of majority of the network, then each additional "honest" node further adds to the security of the network.

You seem to be missing the point. Once your wallet.dat file is compromised, then your attacker can just load it in one of the many existing Bitcoin clients. And you can't hardcode those suggested "features" into the wallet.dat file itself without making it incompatible with other Bitcoin clients. Hackers can hack both wallet.dat files and Bitcoin clients. Those are 2 different things.