Conclusions
...
At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

When i add a new wallet to my blockchain, they just give me an address, they just give me another address, they dont give me the private key for it, if i lose my identifier and i cant login to blockchain,how do I get back my money? can i use the private key of the original address and import the details to another client?

Yes we can set a more accurate formula for monetary inflation on bitcoin:

 Yearly inflation from minting - Yearly bitcoins lost in blackholes = Actual yearly inflation.

I said in my previous post that if the blackholes swallow more bitcoins than it gets mined, then we will see a price increase.

However we dont necessarly have to wait until 90% mining completion, since bitcoin is getting more centralized, newbies lose all their coins to gambling sites or exchanges all the time, thus eventually the bitcoins will be held by less and less people.

It's easier for a gambling site to accidentally destroy 10.000 bitcoins by forgetting private key, than for 100.000 newbies who hold 0.1 BTC isn't it?

So the more centralized the ownership it becomes, the more bitcoin will be lost eventually.


Haha that is not true, that is Keynesian woodoo economics BS.

Price =  Demand / Supply.

While Supply is generally precise and measurable, Demand is more subjective and harder to measure, but demand is not always correlated with supply. In most cases it isnt.
The demand for a bread can be high, if the supply truck is stuck in the mud and it will delay 2 weeks, the price will still stay high and not move to equilibrium.
Demand and supply are in most cases not moving in parralel. That is some inefficiency of the markets.

Interesting. Would that be considered a multi signature wallet?

I just setup a wallet that I'm thinking is super-secure. Basically, I have Multibit and my wallet files/keys running off a usb drive. The drive is then encrypted using a piece of software called VeraCrypt. I'm thinking that this wallet is near impossible to crack. The password to the drive is ginormous and since Veracrypt takes about 10 seconds to verify the password is correct, it won't likely be bruteforce-able. The wallet is still easily accessible for me because I can get the usb drives password quickly using another app called 1Password.

The situations that I described, mostly the second one, are the primary reason for empty blocks. There are exceptions to this, obviously. Sometimes a miner may actually be consciously refusing to add transactions and mined an empty blocks. This could be for a variety of reasons, e.g. reduce bandwidth, but we won't know unless they tell us. Either way, it is not an attack on the blockchain (how would it be?).

yes

Possible, but unlikely. This happens nowadays because of randomness.

Let me explain. Miners are really only hashing the block header. The block header contains several fields, of relevance here are the merkle root and the nonce. The merkle root is the hash of all of the transactions included in the block. If there are no transactions except the coinbase, the merkle root will be the coinbase transaction's hash. The nonce is a 32 bit integer which the miner will iterate through all of its possibilities until the header's hash is below the target hash. Additionally, there is another field in the coinbase called the extranonce which some miners will also use. This is also iterated through to change the merkle root to find the hash that is less than the target. When mining, only these two fields will change in order to have on changing variable. Everything else, including the merkle root and thus the transactions in the block, stays constant while the miner iterates through the nonces and extranonces. If none of the nonces and extranonces produce a hash that is lower than the target, they will rebuild the entire header, a new timestamp, new merkle root by including transactions, and so on. Then the miner repeats the process again.

A miner begins mining on a block after the previous was found when there are no transactions of high enough priority. It will create the header with a merkle root that has only 1 transaction, the coinbase. It then goes through all of the nonces and extranonces to find the hash lower than the target. Sometimes it will find the hash without going through the entire set of nonces and extranonces and thus the merkle root and the transactions in the block will remain at 1 transaction. If it iterates the entire set and doesn't find the hash, which is very very likely, then it rebuilds as I said above and suddenly, there are now transactions included in the next block header it attempts to hash. Most empty blocks are found within a few seconds after the previous block because the miner was lucky enough to not have to change the merkle root to find the block.

Not really. With the exception of a two, those blocks were mined within a couple of seconds to about 2 minutes of the previous one before it. This means that the miner did not need to rebuild the block after they began mining on the previous block. When they began, there were no transactions with high enough priority in the mempool to put into the block, so that block had no transactions in it. Then, they were able to find the nonce without exceeding both the nonce and extranonce values so there was no reason to create a new block header with a merkle root that included more transactions.

Somewhere in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.0 someone created and published (I think) a script that looks for all of the empty blocks.

Sorry, I was wrong, the pool with IP 54.69.13.36 mined the block referred to in the OP and also block 361525 afterwards which contains 2149 transactions. It cannot be to do with a protest.

https://blockchain.info/block-height/361525

Are all the 0 transaction blocks that you have recently seen from the same pool? I heard a rumor that a pool might refuse to put any transactions in the blocks it mined as a protest over the block size debate that's been going on. It was only a rumor and probably fake but it would be interesting if all those blocks were from the same pool.

It has been going on since Bitcoin began and has always existed. Just look at the first hundred or thousand blocks. They are all empty blocks because Satoshi was both the only person mining and the only person on the Bitcoin network.

someone may be attacking the network by finding blocks but not publishing them immediately. then when they have found 3 blocks in a row they would publish them all at once to reverse the transactions of last 2 published blocks since the attacker has a longer block chain.

I just found out that you can't withdraw a designated amount of Bitcoin from paper wallets, you can only sweep or import them.

This seems kind of weird to me. What is the point of a paper wallet if its sole purpose is to later on be swept clean of its coins? If security is an issue, wouldn't it make more sense to have a software bitcoin wallet that runs off an encrypted usb drive?

That could be posted by some guy that is pretending to be Satoshi. Most of the people claiming to be Satoshi can't prove it and are pretending or trolling.

Why would he sign his message with "love"? That just seems odd.
And wasn't his latest message "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" posted in March 2014?
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor?user=0ye0gncqg772o

Mike & Gavin are desperate to get the full control of the source code by XT fork, so that they can implement address blacklisting to make the regulatory bodies happy.

You are right. There is massive mixing going on here.
You can never really know the truth since it could be mixed all over the place,
but I see a darknet market, a few exchanges, a gambling site and loads of deposits.

So I'm gonna guess and say its a dark market mixing their deposits/coins... but of course it could be anything/anyone.

Edit: added "be"

...
Last night I was browsing blockchain.info and I saw a much larger share of mixing transactions (SharedCoin) than I ever recall seeing before.  I only looked at trx over $30,000 (and also browsed a couple of blocks), and found that most of them were mixed.  Here is an example of a transaction I just found at blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/tx/6f964a43ce61e3a2a40982d57c3f4b1f0e1bf6e5d0f863fe7003bd4aaccc206c
I saw a couple of very large transactions, over $200,000.  But, since the largest amounts "out" matched the amounts going "in", I would guess that those transactions were not well hidden.
Is there any reason for such an increase in SharedCoin mixing transactions that any of you can comment on?
*   *   *
It is not easy to ID bitmixer transactions, at least for me.

One thing I've noticed is that the recent price surge in bitcoin has been accompanied by even larger surges with many of the alts. I awoke to see Litecoin had shot up 30% yesterday, and most of the rest have also been going up more strongly than bitcoin itself. Which implies that money is flowing into bitcoin, and from there into altcoins.

But why? Is the block size limit debate scaring people into hedging by buying altcoins just in case bitcoin starts suffering? If that were true I'd expect to see bitcoin's price deflate at the expense of the alts. Something else is going on here, on a fairly broad scale.