The wallet is mostly just keys.  It keeps track of transactions and calculates your balance, but the money isn't in there.

If you expect less than 100 transactions while you are gone, this is pretty easy.  Stop your main client, copy the wallet.dat to the travel computer, edit your bitcoin.conf (on the travel computer) to set the keypoolsize=0, start the laptop (or whatever) and let it sync up.  Take your trip, when you get home, everything should already be shown on your home computer.  You should then be able to just delete the travel wallet.

Why this works is that your home computer has already generated 100 spare keys, and when you edit the keypoolsize on your laptop, you are telling it to NOT make any new keys, so every key it has available is still on your home computer (because you copied them over).  Each time you ask the client for a new key, or send a transaction, one key is used.  As long as you don't run out, you are fine.

It would be safer to save a copy of the travel wallet when you get home, by the way, just in case.

Heh, you don't trust me, or my posts.  In fact, I explicitly tell you not to.

If, for some strange reason, you did want to trust me, I'd tell you that if:
1) the SHASUMS.asc file you are looking at has the SHA256 hash d2f06aca782ae7bc1f0df13e2646ea3343f09048019aa3136832c11c04a08fc7
and
2) the 1FC730C1 key you've downloaded verifies the signature in that file
then according to me (or anyone that has access to the forum database or can intercept either my post or your loading of my post), you have the right key and file.

Torrent would ensure that the file you downloaded was the file described in the torrent, but it couldn't tell you that the torrent was legit.

One thing that you can do is check the hashes and signatures on several of the releases you've used in the past, and decide that you've already trusted that key, whoever it belongs to, without knowing it, and then sign it with your own key.  That way, you'd at least know that future releases were signed by the same key as before.

No, I got it, I understand what you are saying.  You want a script that knows what time it is (or some proxy for time), and can be valid or not valid based on that time.  It is a bad idea, and there are a whole bunch of threads that explain how and why it is a bad idea.  Don't take it personally, it is a very popular idea, but still a bad one. 


Your scheme probably won't help here.  If the recipient was hit by a bus, you might have a way to recall the transaction.  But if the recipient is planning to steal your money, they'll redeem the transaction first, making this pointless.

As Pieter points out, there are tools (nLockTime and P2SH) that will eventually be used to accomplish basically the same end goals, and they don't involve adding the idea of time to the script system.

The guys wearing tinfoil hats never consider that everyone thinks they are crazy because they are crazy; it is always part of some grand scheme to suppress them.  You seem to be assuming that because I disagree with you, I'm working for "the man" and trying to stifle legitimate dissent.  I'm not, I just point out crazy when I see it.

See, unlike some people, I made my judgments of those posts based on the contents of the posts, not on their support of the foundation, or lack thereof.  If it makes you feel any better, most of the support for the foundation is vague too, but those guys aren't crapping up the forums.

I personally have not seen even one single post that was anti-foundation that wasn't full of nonsense (gox is going to pay Gavin to steal all of our coins!), or vague claims (someday, in the future, the foundation might be so big that it may do or say something that isn't good for the community).  If I missed one, please do point it out to me.

Here is one of the validation files for 0.7.0.


Any changes to any of those files will change their hashes, and changes to any of the hashes will break the signature.  If you've verified the key, you can check them for each release.  By the way, the key they are signed with (currently) can be found here.  (But please don't take my word for it, verify the key yourself before you sign it or use it.)

Oh, I'm well aware of that.  I think I've read every single post on these boards regarding the foundation, including (I'm ashamed to admit) the ones from people that I have on my ignore list.  I didn't bother doing much more than laugh at the suggestions that the foundation would make the moon explode, or sterilize dissenters, but I read the posts.
Yes, that is humorous hyperbole, but with just about the right amount of insane to be representative, in my opinion.

The real danger is that the foundation will sputter and stall without getting much done, not that they will do too much, or do the wrong things.  I haven't seen even a single post about a meaningful threat that could possibly come from the foundation.  I've seen lots of handwaving, lots of vague insinuations, lots of paranoia.  Nothing else of note.

Well, in fairness, the EFF has a point that they need to avoid being their own test cases.

But... defending free use of technology by other people is kinda their whole reason for existing.

The download links on bitcoin.org go to sourceforge.  Also, the binaries are hashed and the hashes are signed with a well known key, so anyone that bothers to check would notice.

No, it isn't.  He has a fully nuanced answer.  I will attempt to condense and summarize, but he explains it better, so it is worth the time to read it.

Basically, if you have a library that does something that everyone already does, using LGPL is the right way to go, as it allows people to use free libraries with their non-free software.  If they don't use the LGPL library, they will just use some other library that is worse (for the free software community).  It is better for the world to have free alternatives for common things, than not to.

But, if you have a library that does something that no one else does, it would be better (for the free software community) if the library was full GPL.  This way, developers that don't particularly support the free software ideals will have to decide if keeping their software non-free is worth the effort of duplicating the GPL library.  Some developers will choose to make their software free to avoid duplicating that effort, which increases the freedom in the world.

As far as transactions are concerned, there are no blocks, there is no chain, there is no height.  This is not an accident or an oversight.  Please search next time.

I would say that if the something you have against the BF is dumb, it means you're dumb, and most of the frothing I've seen has been dumb on an epic scale.  "Haters and trollers" doesn't seem to be an inaccurate term for most of them.

Maybe dumb is too harsh.  Maybe they are just too imaginative, and don't have any experience with organizations, or the governance structures they use.  Heh, I'm even nervous writing that, because I expect it to be quoted but not understood.  To be clear, all groups and organizations above the totally informal level have internal governance of some sort, it doesn't mean that they necessarily have or seek power over others.


Heh, that part is harder to do.  Avoiding biased language is much harder than spotting it.  For what it is worth, I don't think that "support" will cause much skew in the results, but the amount will probably be non-zero.  Maybe something more like "Do you think that the Bitcoin Foundation, as described by their initial bylaws (include the link), is a good idea?"  Potential answers could be along the lines of:

1) Yes.
2) There are some minor changes that I would like to see discussed, but they are within the capabilities of the bylaws.
3) There are some major changes that I think would need to be made before I could approve of it.
4) There are huge changes that need to be made, they should start over.
5) I don't think this is a good idea in the first place, they shouldn't do it.

This wouldn't be perfect, but I think it would be more useful than the current poll.  Note that nothing can prevent self-selection bias here on the forums.  You can't make people take polls, so those with stronger opinions would be over-represented to some unknown (but probably very large) extent.

Well, three or four people have suggested that "foundation" will be confused by people to mean "the part of a building that keeps it from sinking into the ground" rather than "organization".  Context makes that one abundantly clear, but context is not sufficient to completely disambiguate "support" meaning "endorse, approve" vs. "support" meaning "give funds to (by donating or joining)".

Ever hear of selection bias?  This poll is self selected.  Until you've done a valid random sampling with a neutral question, don't pretend that you have some valid insight into the moods of bitcoiners in bulk.

Unless I'm missing some big detail, it really is corrupt by design, just like it was when it was called communism a century ago.

Also, I very, very, very highly recommend that people stop referring to their fundraising efforts as "stocks", "shares", "bonds", etc.  If you are in the US and a judge decides that they really are stocks or bonds, you'll probably get fucked for violating SEC regulations.  And if the judge decides that they are not securities, you'll probably get fucked by the FTC for fraud.  Replace with other government agencies in other countries, of course.

Sole proprietor means that one person is doing it himself, there is no other entity to mix funds with.  There is no distinction between personal funds and company funds, because the person and the company are the same.

In the real world, mixing personal and corporate funds is called commingling.  It lands you in prison, typically.

Woah!  I didn't say that.  Please attribute that quote to the right person.  Here is the original reference:


For what it's worth, I think that we need a whole bunch of alternative clients.  The difference is that I think they'll just show up as bitcoin grows, and I've thought that way since way before the start of the foundation.

See, this is why we call you a troll.

In the case of the foundation, the decision about whether something is broken or not belongs to the members.  You don't get to decide that something in the foundation's bylaws is broken and needs to be fixed, the members do.  If the members don't think that something needs to be changed, it isn't broken, no matter how much you think it is.

It was, once.  But then people started posting about it here, and the bigger traders improved their bots to dispatch orders to multiple exchanges at the same time.  Since then, the opportunities have dried up.