That's not what it says in the link, and in fact the devs have now made a change to the client. In effect, everyone now gets a bot. Whether you can buy or not now mostly depends on network delays. It's a lot fairer. Everyone has a chance now.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it's only a chance. This ICO is over-subscribed. In this evening's offering, there were over 800 people trying to buy. Most of them failed. You can expect to fail many more times before you succeed. At least now trying is easy. You just have to be running a node; you don't have to stay up yourself.

I still think a pro-rata system would be better - one where everybody who wants some, gets some, even if they don't get as many as they want. It would mean whales would get the most, but that's the nature of whales.

Surely the real test is when someone makes a SegWit transaction and then tries to spend its outputs as if it were a normal transaction. Non-SegWit nodes and miners will accept it, SegWit ones will reject it. Has this happened yet?

He might die, and his heirs might care more about having a couple of billion dollars than they care about Bitcoin.

Imagine if some relative you didn't know you had, died and left you all his stuff, and going through it you found pages of printed out private keys, 50 BTC in each address. Or if you found the printed sheets in a thrift store from when they cleared out his house. I wonder how many people reading this would be able to resist temptation.

The exact date isn't known. There will be an ICO first, which will last a month or so, and probably delay between the end of the ICO and the snapshot. The ICO hasn't started or even been properly announced yet, so my guess would be nearer September than July.

Thanks, that worked.

How do I change that? BitcoinQT says it is up to date, and Armory says it is connected, but the blocks number doesn't change. A recent log is here: https://pastebin.com/y4RHwDLZ. It has "blkfile dir: D:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks", which is what I have set Bitcoin-qt.exe to use, and when I go to that folder I can see files with recent timestamps, so I think Armory is using the same folder as Bitcoin.

I tried to send transaction 8f124355f16f6df69aa3985d464b817bcfa4190a95bedb96ecff6090dc29d2af back on 4th June, and it got zero confirmations. I figured my fee was too low and it would eventually either confirm or disappear, but it still shows as 0 confirmations now, with Armory claiming "Connected" and "(469262 blocks)". I checked on Blockchain Info which says is confirmed after 9 minutes. Why is Armory still saying it is unconfirmed?

I am using Armory 0.96.0.2 and Bitcoin Core v0.14.1. I recently updated both after a long period of not using Bitcoin, but my wallets and older transactions show up fine.

I am also a returning user upgrading from 0.93.3. My version of bitcoin core was of a similar vintage. I updated both. When I ran Armory it ran bitcoin-qt for me, but that process quit and Armory didn't seem to notice. From the core logs I found I had to run bitcoin-qt directly and tell it to re-index the database. I'm currently doing this, and it seems to be going OK, but I thought you might want to know the process wasn't as smooth and automatic as one might wish and required this manual intervention.

Eeek. Bitcoinarmory.com is what a Google search found for me. This post is what made me realise it was old.

Still, I'm very pleased to learn Armory is back under active development. I was actually Googling "Armory replacement" and expecting to have to find a new wallet to spend my coins. In other good news, my offline computer still boots.

The increase is effectively linear, not exponential. If you have twice as many NXT, you are twice as likely to forge the next block, not four times as likely.

The top 1,000 accounts have about 93% of the NXT. Most of them are small; only about 150 accounts have more than 100,000 NXT, and they account for 69% of the NXT. In NXT there's not much benefit to splitting accounts.

Basically, I think your claim that 72 people own 99% of NXT is way off, but the real distribution still isn't very healthy. From https://nxtportal.org/monitor/ we can see that 62% of blocks are forged by just 20 accounts. (Arguably better than Bitcoin's mining pools, though. And some of those accounts are exchanges, and some are leased pools, so the NXT are actually owned by diverse people.)

You can get the top balances by entering "select *, BALANCE / 100000000 as NXT from account where latest = true order by balance desc limit 1000" into http://localhost:7876/dbshell.

You should be aware that something like 400,000,000 NXT are forging, so with 1,000 NXT your chance of getting the next block is 1 in 400,000. So you should average 1 block every 278 days. I'm sorry, but 1,000 NXT isn't very much. You need around 300,000 NXT to average one block a day.

He doesn't trust the Nxt devs, basically. Partly because they broke backwards compatibility so many times. Partly because he wasn't happy with 2.0 as it was originally presented, especially the fact that the devs were committed to doing it regardless of whatever he, or anyone else, said. At the time it was thought 2.0 would replace 1.0 and all the assets forcibly moved to the new network. He expressed a concern that splitting NXT into forging and transactional coins would affect the value of the transactional coin and thus cause problems for any asset priced in NXT. That's why he felt he had to "rescue" his assets.

Now the original plan has been revised, and I'm not sure if his objections still hold, but there's clearly a lot of instability on the horizon. All the above is my interpretation of what he wrote on the Nxt forums, so I may have misunderstood. He doesn't hang out there any more, so I've no idea about his current views. I doubt he'll come back for a long time, if ever. He's disgusted with us.

The total balance will be the same, 1 billion. The devs are keeping half back for community funds.

Well, it's kinda risky. It could lead to 2.0 failing. All the Digital Good Store goods, and Asset Exchange assets, will by default remain on the 1.0 chain. So by default that's where all the action is. With 1.0 continuing for at least a year, there's no particular reason to move. Basically, 2.0 will be a new alt-coin that competes with 1.0. Unlike most new alt-coins, it'll inherit many of the perceived problems of Nxt including the initial distribution. That the devs will be holding onto 50% of the transactional coin will be seen as a further distribution problem by some. 2.0 is supposed to be more scalable, but scalability has been only an academic problem so far because the relatively small number of users, so who really cares? God knows what will happen to prices. Each NXT will effectively split into three coins, and we have no idea how much of the value will go where.

Maybe, when 2.0 launches, a lot of people will decide to wait and see before moving their assets. If not enough people switch their activity to the new chain, 2.0 could fail.

(And in the mean time, the Nxt community is incurring a huge opportunity cost as man-years of effort are poured into 2.0 instead of into other features.)

It doesn't work like that. The system adjusts difficulty once a fortnight, so faster miners does not mean more blocks per hour once that has happened.

Yet we know he spent weeks of time setting this up. He got people to fly into London. He arranged meetings with journalists from 3 news outlets. He was committed. And Satoshi would know to expect scepticism. He invented Bitcoin, for Pete's sake: he's no fan of authority and he wouldn't expect to be believed just on the say-so of the BBC or Gavin. So it makes no sense for him to be so committed and then to change his mind over a reaction he would have expected from the start.

I don't understand that part. The Satoshi era is before my time, but I have gone back and read some of his old posts here, and he came across to me as someone with a good command of the English language. Where-as Wright comes across as not very articulate in his blog. Does anyone else feel the same way?

Care to put a number on it? It sounds like you are saying network hash power will drop. It looks to me like it dropped by 10% in Nov 2012. Will this year's drop be similar?

Sure. I'm not advocating PoS in Bitcoin, just correcting that specific piece of misinformation.

I'm surprised you think that. Nxt is an example of a PoS coin that does not use coin age, and does not have the problem you mention. It's been running successfully for over 2 years, and is not a clone of Peercoin. Qora is another. There are more.

With a public offering. Those 73 founders had to buy their initial NXT with bitcoin. The hope was that 73 people was large enough to avoid problems of being too few (eg, collusion, all apples in too few baskets), and small enough to avoid the problems of being too many (eg, bystander apathy). One problem with distributing to many more people is that they tend to sit back and let someone else make the coin valuable. If you give it to them for free, then they naturally consider it worthless. What's needed is people who will be active, in funding development, marketing etc.

Steps were taken to prevent that. (This wasn't publicised at the time, for obvious reasons.)

That said, I don't think anyone has ever done a taint analysis on the Bitcoin. It's not too late; the information is in the blockchain. It would be interesting to see whether the BTC used to buy initial NXT did come from related wallets.

Why? Nxt is unlike mining in that it has fewer economies of scale. You don't need big, expensive, deliberately wasteful mining rigs to forge. If it gets used a lot, you'll need some bandwidth and disk storage to store the block-chain, but those are relatively cheap (and getting cheaper). If it makes sense to have large stake pools, it will also make sense to have many smaller ones.

It sounds like you will know the postal address of the person selling bitcoins, but have no knowledge of the person selling gold. What is your position on "know your customer" and money laundering laws?