There are no age restrictions to mining.  Of course, being under 18, you'll face other challenges - how to pay for the mining hardware for example.  I would refer you here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance for tax implications.

You can most certainly calculate your expected mining returns based upon a hash rate.  Many online calculators do exactly that.  For example, check out https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty to get an idea of how much you would expect to earn with a given hash rate at the current moment.  An Antminer S5 as of right now would expect to earn you 0.01176BTC a day.

The full synchronization takes a while because it verifies everything.  Depending on you CPU/HDD it can take days (as you're seeing).  Once it's done, and you're all caught up, the software loads up pretty much like any other application you run.

There are other wallet clients out there ... but with the recent switchover to version 3, because of the way they work (SPV), you'll have to wait for a recommended 30 confirmations before you actually trust a transaction.  These types of wallets sync up considerably faster because they don't verify the transactions.

Just a little bit of info for you, OP.  Even completely discounting the cost to power your ASIC, let's take a look at what you'd expect to make if you had that miner in hand right now.

The Antminer S5 will cost you about $378 new from Bitmain (you'll need to add in shipping and a PSU).  Let's call it $400 even and pretend you already have a PSU to drive the S5.

At the current difficulty and exchange rate, that S5 would expect to earn you ~$3.12 a day.  Even if everything stayed the same (which it won't) you're looking at ~128 days for you to mine back the cost of the miner.

As you factor in electricity costs and difficulty adjustments and exchange rates, that time will change.

LOL... I'm not so sure I'd call it extortion since nobody's actually forcing you to pay the extra fees.  I'd liken it more to the VIP line at a club.  Your regular club goers just want to pay the cover to get in.  They get to stand in line with everybody else.  The VIP paid more (either by getting bottle service, or throwing $100 at the bouncer) and so he gets to skip the line with the regular guys and get into the club.

Being able to sign a message proves that you indeed have ownership of the address in question.  For example, I can prove I own the BTC address in my profile by signing a message with it.  You can verify my ownership by comparing the message, signature and BTC address.

It's a useful way to tell somebody, "I am who I say I am."

Well why not... since the poster above me did not provide an address, I didn't feel the need to quote.  My BTC address is in my profile, and here's a nice little message to prove I own it:

That's the whole point of transaction fees in the first place: to incentivize the miners to put your transaction into their blocks.  If you pay the same fee as everyone else, you'll be in the same line as everyone else.  If you slip a $100 to the bouncer, you'll get priority entry into the club

I'm pretty sure if p2pool was causing core to crash every 30 minutes to 1 hour, somebody would have reported it before now.  I have never seen the behavior you describe, and I run p2pool servers on Ubuntu and OS X - sometimes for months on end without a restart of either bitcoind or p2pool.

Were you able to get it compiled and built on your system?  I had no problem updating and building.  Of course, the relay isn't actually responding to anything at this point...

So it appears the problems continue... my node has been effectively offline for the majority of the day today.  P2Pool is pegging my CPU at 100% and I'm consistently seeing the "lost contact with bitcoind" message in the logs.  Is this solely because of the ridiculous number of unconfirmed transactions that are still flooding the network (nearly 13k at this point)?  Granted, my VPS isn't exactly a monster (but not horrible as a dual core droplet).

I'm on the latest version of p2pool and bitcoin core 0.10.2 compiled from source.

To the miners who are on my node, I apologize for the inconvenience this is likely causing you.  On the bright side, my miners fall back to ck.'s solo pool, so maybe I'll be lucky and they'll solve a block for me .

EDIT: when my node does appear online, and the miners are connected, they're reporting huge rejected hash percentages (25% or more).

This was an example... not a real scenario.  It was concocted to show that there is money to be made by mining.  People who have access to decent startup capital, cheap electricity, cheap hardware, cheap land, cheap employees, cheap buildings, etc, make money.

You are welcome... and welcome to p2pool .

You're in the wrong forum for this.  This is about BTC mining pools... no scrypt here

Tom,

That is referring to those pools propagating V2 blocks.  Effectively, they mined on an incorrect chain because of it after BIP66 went into effect.  The amount of lost revenue is based on how many blocks they mined to the incorrect chain before switching back and working on the correct one.

No... if you truly want to get rid of the entire overlay directory:

That'll wipe the entire thing out recursively and forcibly.  Unlike Windows, there's no recovering from that.  There is no recycle bin or trash can from which you can restore things.  It's gone.

They've also got this horrible concept called VAT over there... adds a pretty hefty percentage to initial startup price as well.

What delete?

To delete a file in Linux, you "remove" it.  The command is "rm".  So, let's say I have a file in the current directory called "foo".  To get rid of it:

There are parameters and wildcards you can pass to the "rm" command as well.  For example, let's say you want to get rid of all files that end in "bar" from the current directory and all subdirectories:

Please be careful, though.  When you're logged into your S3, you've got root privileges.  Which means you can do some pretty harmful stuff if you're not careful

Downloaded and installed on my S3s.  Thanks again for your work, kano!

I didn't publish it... it's just something I wrote up for myself.  To be honest, it's not the cleanest Java code I've ever written.  For example, rather than handle Exceptions, I just throw them.  Everything is in one file - multiple defined private classes and inner classes.  Hardcoded bitcoin daemon connection parameters.  No comments.  No build system (like maven, etc).

I'll check it out.  Glad to help

That's not your posts, it's your activity.  It'll change tomorrow (every other Tuesday).  You want to see how many posts you have, check your profile .

Check your PM.  I generated 5 addresses for you starting with 1Nyau.  Once you let me know you've got them, I'll delete the PM.