I should clarify this last.  What I mean is that people who are coding as part of a team usually use comments to explain the code they're writing to the other members of the team.  So-called "lone wolf" programmers making something all by themselves usually are in the habit of not needing to explain anything to anyone so they don't.

Speaking as someone who reviewed some of his code in late 2008, I think I can express a pretty strong opinion that it was probably written by one person.

Every coder has his or her "fist" -- a set of quirks of indentation, delimiter placement, commenting style and placement, use of/familiarity with libraries, thinking style, and etc...  A lot of companies try to enforce a "standard style" but they never completely eradicate all bits'n'pieces of individual style.  

The early bitcoin sources had no identifiable influences of any "company style."  

The author clearly did not trust himself to manage c++'s notoriously finicky memory issues and completely defend against buffer attacks, so he made heavy use of STL and Boost to do that - at times going through contortions specifically to avoid having raw buffers anywhere.  He was very clearly a C programmer before he was a C++ programmer, judging by his iteration style.  And his placement of opening and closing braces around blocks of code and indentation relative to those braces was kind of a minority choice -- not strange enough to be peculiar, but unusual enough that it would be surprising if a project written by multiple people used it completely consistently.   The earliest code also uses no 'tab' characters, which tends to indicate that the files were written in the same editor or with the same editor macros - again not peculiar in itself, but it would be unusual for it to be completely consistent in a project by more than one person.  

As for comments, he rarely used one word where none would do.    His comments were mostly limited to notes to himself to do stuff later or resolve design issues, not explanations. In itself, not unusual, but again, you wouldn't find it completely consistent across a project by multiple people.

Go ahead and shut it down mid sync.  It won't cause it to lose track of anything.

While downloading, it saves every received block, so even if you shut it down in the middle it can never lose more than one block.  Which I think is about 100K on Litecoin these days? 

Honestly, I don't know what the best nodes on the Litecoin network are, so I can't help so much there.  I just know it uses the same code for that stuff that Bitcoin does. 

As for the method, you usually have the addnode list in your conf file, and you fix it by adding the IP addresses of some fast well-connected nodes.  Alternatively you can also give an '--addnode=[IP address]' argument on the command line (or batch file, or whatever you use) where you start the Litecoin client. 

It's a race, for sure. 

The next generation of cryptocurrencies is going to have much harder anonymity. 

Anoncoin is optimized for use by Tor -- in fact IIRC requires it.  There is not and never will be linking via IP address there.  StableCoin keeps talking about an 'automatic decentralized coin tumbling service' - which, if implemented, will make it impossible to link transactions via the blockchain.  Several people are talking about 'decentralized exchanges', envisioning single commodity transactions having literally hundreds of buyers and sellers. Even without any efforts toward privacy, that'd make it pretty impossible to track the transactions of individuals by keeping track of which txouts belong to them.   When somebody puts $10 into an exchange transaction with $1M of other buyers' money, and then that same transaction pays out to a thousand sellers?  If you want to keep track of that somebody, he now has some small part of $1M worth of the exchange commodity, and you cannot know which part.  If you're keeping track of the commodity, the person you're interested in now has 1 / 100K of the commodity that you can link to his money.  If he then turns around and sells his $10 worth of commodity in the next exchange transaction, he gets his $10 back (more or less) but if you're trying to track it through the blockchain, the guy you're interested in now has $10, which is only one part in ten trillion linkable to the money you were trying to track.

And the next generation of snoops is going to take advantage of an increasingly rigged infrastructure to try to break it.

Lots and lots of crooks, plus various commercial enterprises and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of various nations, will be trying to de-anonymize people, and as we've recently seen, the people whom we trust for privacy, can't be trusted.  They can be bribed, they can be blackmailed, they can be served with subpeonas requiring them to reveal secrets and gag orders to prevent them from talking about it, they can succumb to extortion, they can owe far too much money to the mob, they can be tricked into buying bugged routers and switches, they can have electronic bugs planted in their buildings, they can have wayward employees walk out the door with a million people's private data on their thumb drives,  they can be subject to MITM and Sybil attacks, they can even directly attack the security of their customers and try to install rootkits.  They can be tricked into using "standards" that have backdoors built in, the people who know about the backdoors can be tricked into revealing them to crooks, and even nations that have privacy laws find it nearly impossible to prevent trades in customer data.

So...  Just saying, the competition is stiff. 

This problem happens when the node that you are trying to download the blockchain from is low-bandwidth.

The way the client works, it picks one node to be the source for the blockchain, and then as long as that node remains on line it will never try to download from anything else.  So if you run into a node that's way out between the boondocks and the sky on a 19.2k/second connection, or if you run into someone who's throttling the upload bandwidth, You get to wait.  A Long Time.

The recommended fix is to shut down your client, fix your 'addnode' list to get a different set of peers, and try again. You won't lose the stuff you have already downloaded, so it's pretty painless.

The arguments that worry me most, in order from most to least worry:  

1.  Scalability.  Right now we're configured to do a maximum of 7 and a half transactions a second.  In practice, most miners refuse to build blocks bigger than 250K because the slower propagation time of larger blocks means they risk losing the 25BTC block reward if another block spreads faster.  So in most blocks we can get less than 3 transactions per second.  Occasionally a miner willing to build a 1M block wins the race and we get up to 7 and a half -- for that block.  So far it's been enough to clear backlogs.  

Assuming they figure out how to handle more transactions, there is still a scalability problem with the data.  As the number of transactions per second grows, the rate at which the blockchain gets larger also grows.  The blockchain can already take more than a week to download and more than 15GB to store.  Multiply the current transaction rate by 100 (which is still nowhere near visa scale) and it will become literally impossible for ordinary people (read: in a P2P network that isn't centralized by being limited to a few servers with massive bandwidth) to download the blockchain faster than it grows.  At the same time, the space required to store 2 years worth of transactions would be growing to about 1TByte.  In the future faster hardware and bigger bandwidth may help -- but it may not happen in time, and by the time it happens the need may be even greater than we suppose now.

Finally, the size of the stored blockchain affects the startup time of a full client.  Not badly unless your machine is very slow, but in the very long run, it's hard to imagine going through 20, 50, or 100 years of transaction history every time you start up.

2.  Security.  People who keep gold or large amounts of cash in a safe in their homes don't live inside the safes. People who use secure computers to send and receive Bitcoin should not do their email and web browsing and GUI crap and insecure OS and gaming and automatic software updates and cell phone syncing and passwordless logins and file sharing and etc, on the secure computer.  Yes, that limits a secure computer a lot -- just like the living space inside of a safe is very limited.  

I despair of explaining this to Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife, but using Bitcoin requires having some kind of digital device that you treat just like a safe.  You don't live your day-to-day life inside of a safe. Also, OS support for being used as a 'safe' is increasingly hard to come by.

3. Transaction fee roulette.  It is flatly impossible to anticipate what you will need to spend on fees in a given bitcoin transaction.  Not only are the fees different depending on features of your own txout set that most people have no clue about, but they are also different depending on the semi-randomized selection of *which* txouts you'll be spending and how busy the network is.  With no way to anticipate fees, merchants can't set prices accurately.  And the fees are still too small to motivate miners (by comparison with the block award) while already too high to permit small (vending machine size) transactions.

12 pack of beer for a 750ml bottle of really awful wine. 

Hey, that works too, and doesn't even require customer cooperation.  But it means you can't publish a merchant address in the normal way (ie, same address for everybody because you put it in a magazine ad or something).

Y'all are not answering OP's question.

The issue is linking information.  In principle, when a retailer gets a BTC payment from an unknown BTC address, and has no other information, he does not know who has sent it, so he cannot know which of his known accounts to credit.

In practice, if he knows the IP address of his customer, he can look at the IP address the BTC payment originated from and link the payment to the customer.  But that's not 100% reliable because IP addresses change often. And you cannot do it after the fact; none of the IP details are recorded in the block chain, for example, so you have to be monitoring packets as they arrive to know where a BTC payment comes from.

But there is a way to do it 100% reliably with the customers' cooperation.  Each bitcoin transaction has a message field, and if your customers are cooperating with your efforts to link their accounts to their payments, then they can just stick their account number in the message field to make sure that the merchant can credit the correct account.

Look at post 131 in this thread.  That was my basic idea. 

Long time Unix programmer in C, sometimes in C++, and often in Lisp. Longtime AI, Language, and Cryptography pro, mostly in software architecture and design but with lots of coding too.   

Currently wrestling with the Bitcoin source code and coming up to speed on boost, qt, and C++ template programming.  It is my intention to launch a Proof-of-Stake altcoin with a ridiculously wide initial distribution, colored coin support, and automatic distributed coin mixing.

But I have all the understanding of how to make a graphically appealing site that you'd expect of a blind man, no in-depth knowledge of Windows, and no Windows machine for development. 

--- unless you manage to do it in such a way as to distribute it *WIDELY* right from the start.  Seriously, like to at least tens of thousands of people. Way more than you could ever get to answer a thread on this forum.

I'm not on anybody's case because I don't get that it's a joke.

I'm on peoples' case because this particular *KIND* of joke keeps some of the best people away.  These are people I'm friends with, and whom I would like to see here.  A couple of them are even among the sharpest programmers I know, and if they got enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies they'd be an asset in terms of possible contributions.  

But, if they come on here and among the first things they see is a thread that starts off like this one?  Nope, bye.  You'll never hear from them even once, and they'll never be here again.  

So yes, I'm upset.  Every time I'm about to mention this place to someone who otherwise might like it, these clowns start another thread with one of these big steaming turds.  

I call this a pure white hat move.  The newscaster accidentally put the QR code on the air, so anybody could have taken that money.  It is *STUNNING* that the first guy who did was the one guy out of a thousand or so who would give the money back. 

Applause all around, folks.  That's a class act of protecting the idiot from himself, as opposed to a thief taking advantage of an idiot.

Yeah, someone's been sending 'dust' to old addresses all along the blockchain.  If I understand it correctly, it's an attempt to link the owners of those accounts to purchases being made today. 

The automatic coin selection in the client picks up the extra txOut and may spend it along with other txOuts next time you buy some alpaca socks.   And then somebody somewhere knows that the same person who owns that older txout is the person who bought those alpaca socks.

This is when they can't figure it out just by looking at the transaction history, of course.  But that little bit of dust is someone trying to figure out who owns the account.

I'm in a post-ironic phase these days.

IIRC, Satoshi never used the same IP address twice. 

I think I may know who ... at least, I know someone who could have written the code (in terms of expertise) and had a good reason to, and who would have, for very good reasons having nothing to do with Bitcoin, disappeared from active development at about the same time as Satoshi did, and who has enough money that he wouldn't need to spend all those coins that Satoshi mined just the same way Satoshi hasn't.

But, y'know, that isn't proof.     It's all circumstantial.  And I won't name names, because I respect the guy (whether he is or isn't who I think) and he didn't want his name known.

And besides, even if I'm right, nobody's really gonna know until his will is read, and that's more or less as it should be.

As long as we entertain the idea that nothing is going to be "fair" while some people get some and others do not... 

I'd take all the non-coinbase transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain having at least one unspent txout,

Then take one unspent txout from each such transaction, take the pubkey, and add it to a list.

Then create an ex nihilo transaction in the genesis block of your new coin awarding an equal amount of the altcoin to each key - allowing people with bitcoin keys to use the same keys to spend their altcoin.

Wait a year for people who haven't lost the key to their bitcoin utxo's to claim their coins, and if they don't then delete those coins from the altcoin blockchain.

It would still be 'unfair' insofar as some would randomly get more than others and might favor early bitcoin adopters, but it would be 'fair-er' in that the coins would be spread out to a large number of holders and in that no matter how much or how little bitcoin you have you get "approximately" the same amount of the new coin -- ie, it depends on number of utxo's not amount in coins.