Here are a couple of stupid plots of block chain length against time. This one clearly shows we're on target for a late November reward halving:  And this one shows it's definitely late December:  Hope that helps! |
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I received an email from Bradley Elmi, a WBX customer who's unable to post here for himself on account of not having enough posts on this forum. He asked that I post it here, so here it is: Hi Chris, i dont know if you remember speaking with me, helping me out with my WBX account just before it was "frozen" I had problems locating the BTC that i had purchased and it turned out i had made two separate accounts; in which you were extremely helpful. I've written countless emails to Andre with no reply and with further investigation i found the forum thread that he made when it was frozen. Since i'm a new member to the forum site it won't allow me to make a post in the said forum so i thought i'd turn to you for some help as you seem like you just want to have the funds returned to their rightful owners.
Now, when i deposited the AUD ($770) into Andre's account, i traded it for BTC (128.2934BTC). I had uploaded my identification just days before the site was frozen and he hadn't yet approved them rendering me unable to withdraw funds. I don't understand fully what permission you have been granted regarding this matter but wondering if you could help me out?
I can provide you with countless documents to prove my identity or any other information regarding the legitimateness of my case. Below is some proof of trading activity.
[proof deleted]
I replied: Hi Bradley. This seems to be the relevant communication from Andre: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65867.msg812382#msg812382"i would like for everyone to receive a full refund of there funds but unfortunately i cannot guarantee it at this stage, as soon as i get a clear conformation from my bank what is returned then the process of distributing assets will commence, I will keep you updated here."
So he's waiting until he works out what funds the exchange has, and how much it owes its clients, and I'm holding the BTC until he does. I think you can ask to get whitelisted on the forums if you post in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911 - give the URL of the thread you want to be able to post in, and say that you're a client of WBX who wants to say his piece. If that doesn't work for you, I can post something in the thread for you if you like, and say it's what you emailed to me. Let me know if you want me to do that. I'm trying to keep communication out there in the open so everyone can see what's going on, as much as possible. I think it would be good to get your numbers out there at least, so people can get an idea of how much is owed to WBX clients. |
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Any chance of getting the relative block count progress bar added back in as a configurable display option for the majority who liked it  v0.6.1 perhaps. How about this? https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1030Show the number of blocks left to download, instead of a percentage. The reason the display was changed back to being absolute rather than relative was for new users. Suppose a new user installs the client, downloads half the blocks, sees it take hours to go from 0% to 50%, then quits and restarts. With the relative scheme, the display would start back to 0% again, and the user may well think that it was starting from the beginning, and give up on the whole idea. See the discussion here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/753 |
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"A shock Sun investigation discovered the secret internet zone"?
Hardly.
Wired magazine did a piece on silk road on 1st June 2011, titled "Underground Website Lets You Buy Any Drug Imaginable", and there has been a wikipedia page about it since 11th June 2011, titled "Silk Road (marketplace)".
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What's the next level? Some kind of hot girl delivery service?
get me two more girls and you'll find out 8D Is it like a chain letter? I get you 2 more girls and within 30 days I get 25,000 girls in the mail? Do they come with their own supply of food and contraception? |
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Yup! I just sent out about 10 more requests to some new GW posters I saw. I hope you guys are following suite and privately asking girls to come model for us... I think that's why we're maintaining the quality of attractions throughout this endeavour...
I'm excited. I have some plans to take this to the next level after this bounty is executed.
What's the next level? Some kind of hot girl delivery service? |
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now I was trying to get confirmation that deposits are exclusively from donations and they don't use user accounts to shuffle change. Well, looks like that would be the simplest behaviour to implement so I guess that's the case.
They would have to go out of their way to use specific user addresses for change, and it would serve no purpose to do so. The client makes up a new change address for every transaction, so it's reasonable to think that instawallet isn't using user deposit addresses for change. |
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You put a dollar in your bank account. Someone withdraws a dollar after you and gets your dollar bill. You still have a dollar in your account even though someone withdrew "your" dollar.
The bank doesn't have a separate cash drawer for every customer. Neither does instawallet.
But my account balance wouldn't show a dollar being sent elsewhere from my account. My account doesn't show individual dollars as entities, they only show balances. Equivalently in Bitcoin, there is no such thing as individual bitcoins with their own entity, there's just transactions. So what is instawallet doing there? Still confused. Looking at LadyBytes' second account: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1J7T1xQk2mdEEb5wkP73EtXTox6vWvE7MLThere's a 1BTC "Sent" tx right before my 1.23 donation. Apparently it wasn't her. So what's going on? If she checks her instawallet balance, the 1BTC will still be there. What blockexplorer is doing is the equivalent of reporting on the movement of individual chunks of bitcoins. Your bank doesn't keep track of where the individual dollar bills go, so there's no equivalent of the blockexplorer report available from the bank. What instawallet is doing is giving each user their own bitcoin address to deposit to, so that they know which instawallet account to credit when people send coins. But all the coins end up in one big bitcoin wallet at instawallet. When someone else comes along and makes a withdrawal from instawallet, they will make the withdrawal from their bitcoin client, which has access to everyone's funds. The client will decide which coins to use, and will probably use coins deposited by someone else, just like the bank give people dollar bills they got from other customers. Instawallet keeps track of how much is in each user's account, much like the bank does, but neither the bank nor instawallet makes any effort to make sure that they keep each users funds separate. Basically, the bottom line is don't look at blockexplorer and expect to see anything meaningful about account balances. All your seeing is details about the movements in and out of individual bitcoin addresses, which don't correspond very closely to instawallet accounts. |
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You put a dollar in your bank account. Someone withdraws a dollar after you and gets your dollar bill. You still have a dollar in your account even though someone withdrew "your" dollar. The bank doesn't have a separate cash drawer for every customer. Neither does instawallet. Every 'deposit' you see in blockexplorer is a real donation. Not every 'withdrawal' you see is a withdrawal by the owner of that instawallet. |
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Yes, it's possible, but not secure enough.
1. If your block becomes orphaned, someone will pick this TX and take fees.
2. Big miners can cooperate and intentionally invalidate blocks with unusually high fees to pick them up and split profits.
Otherwise the idea is good.
And what's the difference between this big miners cooperation an the cooperation needed for a 51 % attack? None. But point 1 doesn't need cooperation at all. |
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She is saying that someone is stealing her Bitcoin from instawallet, possibilities:
- She is lying
- She shared her personal instawallet link with someone else by mistake
- Instawallet isn't secure
I hope that someone will find what it's happening, because Instawallet is used my many people!
I've not been able to read to the end of the thread because I've been busy 'researching' the photos, but it turns out that Bitcoins will be taken from your instawallet address without it affecting your instawallet balance. Like when you deposit coins to MtGox, if you check in blockexplorer you'll see the coins disappearing shortly afterwards even though they're still in your MtGox account. See the question and answer here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3320/when-i-use-instawallet-org-do-i-get-my-own-bitcoin-addressSo it's possible the coins weren't stolen, if it's just the blockexplorer view that she's looking at. |
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Yes, it's possible, but not secure enough.
1. If your block becomes orphaned, someone will pick this TX and take fees.
2. Big miners can cooperate and intentionally invalidate blocks with unusually high fees to pick them up and split profits.
Otherwise the idea is good.
Good points. Guess there's no point implementing it then... |
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One related question. Is it possible to have bitcoind create a tx but not broadcast it? If so is it then part of the memorypool? If not could bitcoind be modified to make it part of the memorypool? Essentially I want the ability to include a tx in a block that hasn't been broadcasted (coin melting).
A problem with this would be what to do if you create one of these 'melt' transactions, but don't manage to mine a block before shutting down bitcoind. The transaction is stored in the wallet along with any other pending transactions. The wallet format doesn't currently store whether a transaction is "secret" or not. It could do, but that would make the wallet format incompatible with standard client wallet files. A simple solution would be for the client never to broadcast any transactions that you create on the client while in the new mode. The wallet already has a field for each transaction which says whether you created it or not. Another would be to have a threshold, and never broadcast any of your transactions which have a fee over a certain amount. Given this, do you have any further thoughts on how you want this feature to work? |
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This is correct. If you create a transaction but don't broadcast it, it doesn't exist. The same is true for a block.
He wants to mine it himself, not broadcast it to other miners. I'm guessing it's a transaction with tainted coins as input, and much less (or zero, if that's allowed) output value. The difference between input value and output value goes to whoever mines the transaction, which D&T wants to be himself. That way the tainted coins lose their taint (unless the taint calculation takes fees into account, of course). |
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I see it sending 500 requests for blocks at a time, and then receiving 500 blocks back, very quickly: askfor block 00000000839a8e6886ab 0
[498 lines deleted]
askfor block 000000004ff664bfa7d2 0
sending getdata: block 00000000839a8e6886ab
[498 lines deleted]
sending getdata: block 000000004ff664bfa7d2
received block 00000000839a8e6886ab
SetBestChain: new best=00000000839a8e6886ab height=1 work=8590065666
ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED
[1494 lines deleted]
received block 000000004ff664bfa7d2
SetBestChain: new best=000000004ff664bfa7d2 height=500 work=2151811449333
ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED
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I think maybe it's an issue of network latency. I send a request for a block, it takes a while to reach the server, the server sends the block, it takes a while to reach me. Everything's spending lots of short amounts of time waiting for things to go through the network.
I say this because I see about half the download speed when connecting to the LAN wirelessly than I do when using an ethernet cable, even though in neither case is the network connection anywhere near saturated. Maybe it's a question of ping time.
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Seems there are still a lot space of improvement.
Yes, but where? If no network, CPU, or hard drive is the bottleneck, what is? |
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Yes, the networking now is the bottleneck!
I ran the test again, only this time I set the client to connect to a machine on the LAN which has the whole blockchain already. I got the same shaped graph again, but faster again. The bandwidth used was around 500 to 700kB/s constantly, which is about a 20th of what's available. The CPU wasn't maxed out on either machine, and neither was the disk access. So I've no idea what the bottleneck is now. Once it got to block 168000 the CPU on the local computer started getting maxed out, and the download slowed considerably, because at that point it runs out of known checkpoints, and starts actually validating the signatures in every new transaction. I also found that while downloading the blockchain, my client never flushes its database logs, and so using a ram disk as the data directory doesn't work unless the ram disk is huge. When the qt client runs out of disk space, it sometimes crashes, and always shuts down. I made an emergency bug report here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/999Instead of plotting blocks against time, I tried plotting blk00001.dat size against time, and got pretty much a straight line. It's slow to get started (lots of tiny blocks) and slows down a lot once we hit block 168000 at around 32 minutes, where we run out of checkpoints and have to start checking signatures:  |
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Trying a 4th time with a bigger ram disk is getting speeds somewhere between rc4 and rc5 writing to disk. So in this case it seems that the speed of the peers I'm connected to does make a big difference. It could be the major contributing factor to the difference in slope of the lines in the above graph in fact - it just so happened that the first time I used a ram disk I connected to a very fast peer.
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