You have it exactly backwards. If the price goes up (doubles), then the miners are sustained. If it doesn't go up, then some miners will have to shut down some or all of their equipment.

Transaction fees are not determined by the amount of mining (in the short term) because the amount of space in the block chain is held roughly constant by adjusting the difficulty every 2016 blocks. The block chain throughput is temporarily lower now because of the halving and that may be affecting fees, but that will change in a couple days when the difficulty is adjusted.

... according to people that pretend to know what they are talking about.

I apologize for repeating what others have already written ...


When you use the word "decimal", it is very confusing. The word you should be using is "digit". "Decimal" is the name of the base-10 number system, just as "hexadecimal" is base-16 and "binary" is base-2.



An easier way to come up with the result: because there are 64 digits and each digit can have 16 values, the number of possible values is 16⁶⁴, or, 1.158x10⁷⁷.



That is not how a quantum computer works. Regardless, machine learning works by identifying patterns. In theory, SHA-256 hashes have no patterns, so machine learning is not likely to do very well. On the other hand, if there are any patterns, ML might be able to find them.



The number is limited, but even the entire bitcoin network, which currently generates 2.4x10¹⁷ hashes per second, would take 4.8x10⁵⁹ seconds, or 1.5x10⁵⁰ centuries to go through all possible values. That is 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times the age of the universe.

And reiterating what @pooya87 wrote, where would you store the event record? There aren't enough atoms on the Earth to store that much information.

In the end, computational power and clever algorithms are not going to do it. You will need to find major exploits in the hash algorithm.

Emails and forum posts: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/

Yes. That is a special transaction. It is the first transaction in a block, called the "coinbase transaction". That is how bitcoins are created.

No summing is necessary. Bitcoin doesn't track addresses. It tracks outputs. When a transaction spends from an address, it spends an entire output, and the excess is sent to a "change" address. If a node sees two transactions spending the same output, it will reject one of them.

One way to create two conflicting transactions might be to create the transactions using two separate copies of the same wallet.

You simply create the standard coinbase transaction with multiple outputs instead of just one. BTCC (now Ballet) does that for its physical bitcoins. Here is one of their coinbase transactions: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/ced9ec9201e161f2625ecb21e81a9a29d25c992aea83ee6af707ee31cbd172d1

Assuming you want to mine bitcoins (because this is a Bitcoin forum and the upcoming halving), ... A simple at-home operation would be an ASIC in shed away from the home and neighbors (because of the noise) with adequate power and ventilation.

Others may disagree, but hardware wallets are expensive, and I feel that paper wallets (and your steps for making them) are reasonably secure. The main risks to a password-protected paper wallet are loss or damage and forgetting the password. You must take extra care to protect your paper wallet against those risks.

As for withdrawal, since you have no intention to spend the bitcoins in the near future, there is no point in discussing which wallet to use now. Most wallets support sweeping a private key, so there will probably be no issue.

When you write "wallet", do you mean "address"?

I'm not an expert on segwit, but you might start here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segregated_Witness

There are 144 blocks each day, not 1440. So the difficulty changes every 14 days.


The issue is the the halving may cause an large abrupt drop in the total hash rate, and blocks would take longer until the difficulty adjusts.

This year, the difficulty is nominally scheduled to adjust a week after the halving. Suppose that the hash rate drops by half (not likely, but not impossible). In that case, blocks will each take 20 minutes and the difficulty won't change for two weeks. Cutting Bitcoin's transaction rate by half for two weeks could have a major impact.

First, addresses and private keys may be called "compressed" or "uncompressed", but they are not themselves compressed or uncompressed. It is the public key that is actually compressed or uncompressed.

When an address is described as "compressed" or "uncompressed", it means that it was derived from the compressed or uncompressed form of the public key.

When a private key is described as "compressed" or "uncompressed", it means that its public key is intended to be used in the compressed or uncompressed form.

1. There is nothing about an address that tells you if it is compressed or uncompressed. You can only tell by the pubic key or a flag in a WIF-encoded private key.

2. That is a 256-bit value in hexadecimal (base-16) form. I assume it is a private key.

3. Those are both WIF-encoded 256-bit private keys. An uncompressed private key begins with a "5", and a compressed private key begins with a "K" or "L". The uncompressed private key is encoded with an additional byte so it is typically one character longer.


Read this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format

Thanks. There can never be enough pump-and-dump.

I don't know what you mean by "includes no third party", but this might be what you are looking for: https://bitcoin.org/en/wallets/desktop/windows/armory/

I believe that other wallets have offline modes, but I don't which ones -- maybe Electrum?

Not a BIP, but the Edge wallet (formally known as Airbitz) uses a username and password to encrypt the seed, which is stores on its servers.

My point is that you appear to understand less than you think. It would be ore helpful to others if you could understand more before trying to explain it to others.

I recommend that you read a lot more before you start posting stuff like that. It's all wrong.

Beyond encrypting wallet data, I don't think there is much use of encryption in Bitcoin.

BIP-39 doesn't use encryption but it specifies an optional passphrase for the key derivation.

Lightning uses encryption.

1. Nearly all cloud mining sites are scams. The one that aren't are rip-offs. I'm not exaggerating.

2. While mining bitcoins on a computer is possible, it is not practical because the difficulty is so high. You might earn $1 after mining for year.

3. Mining with an ASIC is the only reasonable option, but it is not profitable for everyone.

You don't need permission. Just fork the repo. Make your changes. Start mining the new block chain. I recommend that you call it something other than "Bitcoin", though.

1. Why? Can you explain why you think that 2100000000000000 satoshis is limiting, and why changing it to 3000000000000000 satoshis is so much better?

2. In the long run, the amount that any individual miner earns depends more on their operational efficiency than the size of the block reward. That may seem counter-intuitive, but that's how the economics of mining work. If anything, the halvings should be more frequent so that they are less of a shock on the economy.