It is not mandatory, nothing is mandatory. You don't need to upgrade now. If more than 90% of the nodes and the last 1000 blocks mined follow the new rules, then there will be an official announcement from Gavin (probably) about the time and block number of the hard fork. It becomes recommended to change to Bitcoin XT if this happens, as the old chain will be left insecure and unused. However, a change to Bitcoin XT is not necessarily required; there is the possibility that Bitcoin Core will support the change. Unless you support the change, then there is currently no need to change to Bitcoin XT and it most certainly is not mandatory.

You should move this thread to the services sub-forum. You will probably get more people there who will help you. Also, you should post in this thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082066.0 where you may get more people who will help.

Why would you want money to smell? That means that it has passed through so many dirty hands, pockets, and who knows what. With Bitcoin, you don't need to touch it at all. It doesn't get nasty little germs that could kill me, and I like my money to be sterile. No germs for me.

A lot of what I have been seeing is to pay a bill or something periodic but the loanee doesn't receive his paycheck until after the bill's due date. I think that some of this is BS and that the real reason is to be taking out a rep loan to gain reputation and positive trust.

It should be re-validating and possibly reindexing the blocks, but not redownlading them. It might be rebuilding some of the databases. Also, if you are using another wallet, it needs to check the entire blockchain to see if there are any transactions for the addresses in the wallet.

You will need to be online to do this, so connect your computer to Wi-fi or ethernet. If you open settings, you can should find something about networks and wireless connections and then connect to a wifi network. Without internet, you won't be able to compile and run a Bitcoin full node.

So what you downloaded is the source code for Bitcoin Core. In order to install it, you will need to compile the code. I have posted the instructions below, but you can also find them under doc/build-unix.md.

First install all of the dependencies. Open a terminal and type all of this:
Then you need to get the db4.8 and miniupnpc packages from Bitcoin's ubuntu repository:
Then you need to install Qt to have Bitcoin-Qt:

Once all of the dependencies are installed, you must compile the code. Again in the terminal run:
This will compile and install Bitcoin Core to your system. You can now run it by typing in a terminal. It might also show up in the app drawer, but I'm not sure.

There were a couple of typos and spelling errors. Overall, it was OK, not that hard. However, some answers were vague or wrong i.e. "Who invented Bitcoin" should be "Satoshi Nakamoto", not "no one knows". Also, the question about which hash algorithm should have the answer be spelled out and capitalized like the other hash algos shown i.e. instead of "sha256" it should be "Secure Hash Algorithm 256 (SHA-256).

You should ask everyone who gave him trust to remove their trust both positive and negative. However, as erikalui said above, it is hard to tell if a loan or trade was faked (not saying that it was) and thus some users might refuse to remove their feedback. Since the account is under new ownership, you should ask Vod to remove the positive trust although he probably won't since he won't be back on this forum for a while. Also, Quickseller is no longer on default trust so this rating won't be seen by many members, although he does seem to shift on and off default trust quite frequently.

This is why a lot of lenders require some kind of collateral so that if the loaner runs away with the coins, the collateral can be sold to make up for the loss and usually interest.

It is possible that both branches persist, but unlikely because the fork only occurs when >90% or > 95% of nodes and blocks follow the new rules. Once that happens, the old chain is no longer secure due to decreased hash rate and very few people would be using it. Most exchanges would either switch chains or stop exchanging Bitcoin. Essentially, the old chain would no longer be of any value.

So this is basically email advertising, like what a lot of stuff in my spam box is. I think that this would be filtered by most email provider's spam filters.

Also, how would the winner be determined by the block hashes and what are the place numbers?

I personally don't think that these accounts would be worth more than 0.005 each. In fact, they are currently newbies (OP hasn't stated otherwise) so these accounts are worth less. It depends on the market really, and right now, I haven't seen much demand for Jr. Member accounts.

Exactly. Although some people and exchanges might still accept the old chain, since it has a significantly lower hashrate but still a high difficulty, the blockchain would become insecure and prone to attacks. This would prompt people to switch to the new chain if they hadn't already.

He probably is. 20 Jr. Member accounts can sell for somewhere between 0.05 and 0.1 BTC. I also don't think that they are valid collateral because all of those accounts are not worth 110% -120% of the amount he is asking for.

You should have Bitcoin Core installed running in server mode and accepting RPC calls. You can then use standard JSON RPC calls to the Bitcoin RPC Server to do whatever you want.

Large Bitcoin transactions like this can be confirmed quickly even with no fee. They have a higher priority because of the transacted amount.

That would require multiple hard forks of the blockchain and multiple software upgrades. The logistics of doing this would be too great, so it is much more effective to increase it by larger amounts. Right now, instead of 20 MB, the proposed size is 8 MB with the limit rising every couple years if necessary.

Those are some very very low fees, which should mean that your transactions won't be confirmed unless the Bitcoins are a very large amount. The default transaction fee and recommended fee is still 0.0001BTC.

I'm pretty sure that it is going to stay at 40 bytes and not change back. There is no reason to.

Why is it so difficult to download and install Bitcoin Core then just start the program and let it run? What is so hard about that. That is essentially what you are saying. It is quite easy to run a full node, albeit the wallet function of Bitcoin Core could use some UI work. There are also hardware nodes that you can just buy and works right out of the box.