Historically, the NSA has published, promoted and standardized their own broken cryptography, most notably Dual_EC_DRBG, a random number generator. Since Dual_EC_DRBG is a broken RNG, any algorithm using it for random numbers is thus broken, which happened to on of RSA Security's products. The NSA had paid RSA a lot of money to use the broken Dual_EC_DRBG in their flagship encryption products so that the NSA could decrypt the information. However, Dual_EC_DRBG's flaws were discovered very quickly, and attacks were developed in a short amount of time. The cryptography community discovered the flaw within a year of its publishing.

Now, if the NSA did backdoor SHA-256, they must have done it extraordinarily well since no working flaws and attacks have been found against SHA-2 in the past 14 years. Furthermore, they must have hidden the backdooring from the docs that Snowden took since those docs also revealed and proved that the NSA did backdoor Dual_EC_DRBG and did pay RSA to use that RNG in one of their products. Since no flaw has been found nor any docs revealed backdooring so far, it is highly unlikely, though not impossible, that the NSA backdoored SHA-2.

The ASICs don't have algorithms per se to hash SHA256d. From what I understand, the ASIC chips are just a bunch of physical circuits that perform a SHA256 hash. These are mostly not public domain.
I also thought that the nonces were determined by the software from the computer that the miner is connected to e.g. cgminer or bfgminer. These software are open source.

Possibly because it is one of the biggest pools located in China, which has many miners. With the Great Firewall of China, a Bitcoin miner is limited to the pools within the country, and thus join Discus Fish since it is one of the largest pools.

While someone who claims to be the inventor makes fun of Satoshi by saying he was a fourteen year old, clueless kid who created bitcoin for a school assignment that required anonymity. Furthermore, he claims that all of the big names in Bitcoin, and others, including Snowden, were at his school, at the same time in 1998 as either students or instructors. Sounds a lot like this troll is making fun of Satoshi.

Now, if you really want to know who Eastfist is, just go to his website, www.eastfist.com. It's in his profile.

It's Eastfist trolling you.

You could also use a raspberry pi, provided that it does not connect to the internet after you generate the private keys on it.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

- -----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Comment: Signed by Bitcoin Armory v0.93.1

I am staking my address: 1At6EhbjN8BLCJz4pVAjsFcNzhzxQmXrwZ on 5/2/2015
Signed with BTC address and PGP key.
- -----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNATURE-----


G1YHnMarLK8osJmpmp6/cZpsuYPY3TP4XjT0f3S+GxhiLJbpIwuEG28SEpsEM/jg
GDEcjzwwbmJH75EcHUfNmzs=
=EAd6
- -----END BITCOIN SIGNATURE-----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1

iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJVRW1bAAoJEDAhW7E3JH8p830H/1Qlu+YPIMBVzV0hstOdfsDg
Ei7CJvuZ8v/kTx8IrpSJtt1YGbMgABEaGQDIUZynTgEokCng6i6n3NNduFUTlRMW
n1zPv/HUh23nEnB43HQq45omZn+OOD/ja2q01IemxFJP8go51gVL9RkeRMQ3nE0f
k9ujDPGWYIoSMqFV+k6/egGPF7IzdYs51agIioF1nCQb1CirUVv+LlRDEn6t0vnt
tPxmDlwYNtr/Efj3kgXswzuE5PNizy1tIu8NlPPdjYs9RvkUbDapqIkY9aBju/17
3hjhjz6GXcoZWi0hvLvNmUYWkrO0IhnDL0Vr/OEq66JVvhrDiFKUV0Vtq5hU+BE=
=64n0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Edit: PGP key is in Signature. The entire Bitcoin signature block (from Begin Bitcoin Signed Message to End Bitcoin Signature) is the PGP signed message.

Using logic, these people would know of Bitcoin because they were on the original mailing list where Satoshi published the whitepaper.

Enough to know that you're just spouting bullshit and making stuff up. Stop spreading FUD, both here, and wherever else you post this dumbass story and BS (e.g. the comments of this article: http://cointelegraph.com/news/113710/satoshi-was-not-a-cryptographer-says-gavin-andresen)

What you claim about all the big names and early adopters of Bitcoin being at Harding in one place at the same time during 1998 is BS. At that point you're just name dropping to get attention.

And thus, I can now call BULLSHIT!! (Of course, I should and could have done this much earlier)
what high school would allow you to turn in an assignment anonymously, how would you get a grade?

Snowden did not go to high school at Harding.

Seriously, name dropping? Complete and absolute BS

Stop trolling, Mr. Saelee.

So where can I find the original protocol? From what I understand, the first publicly available thing that described the protocol is the Bitcoin whitepaper posted on some mailing list.

Also, I checked out your profile. From the looks on your website, you don't have a background in cryptography, but you do have some in programming.

So are you suggesting that you did not write version 0.1 of the reference client and did not write the bitcoin whitepaper since that is technobabble?

So somehow the other "fake" Satoshi got a hold of the PGP key that you, the "original" satoshi destroyed.

Since you claim to have lost all of the keys, the only way for anyone to believe you is to get someone prominent in the Bitcoin community to vouch for you.

Also, I highly doubt that Satoshi would actually lose his keys.

Here's a question for you: Can you prove that you are Satoshi? If so, please do so.

Yes. It is based on the time it takes for 2016 blocks to be found and the target block time is about 10 minutes. This comes out to be a readjustment every 2 weeks to keep block times at 10 minutes.

As cr1776 said earlier, take the your address, go to blockchain.info or any simlar block explorer, and enter your address into the search bar. It will pull up any and all transactions to your address and you will be able to see when, how much, and from what address your friend sent the Bitcoins from.

As you have established earlier, SHA-2 is based on SHA-1 which is based on SHA-0 which is based on MD5 which has some known weaknesses. SHA-1, SHA-0, and MD5 all have known collision attacks, but reasearchers have not been able to get any of the attacks used in these algorithms to work on SHA-2. There has obviously been an evolution of the algorithms from MD5, as the attacks for each broken algorithm is different from the previous.

All cryptographic algorithms and such will at some point be broken, however, Bitcoin's developers can have the time to shift Bitcoin to another algorithm which will be more secure than SHA-256 once SHA-2 is broken. As stated earlier, algorithms are not broken overnight, and there is plenty of warning between the time that a paper is released announcing a successful attack and a working exploit which can damage things.

As for the NSA or other government agencies for having known exploits or vulnerabilities in SHA-2. These agencies, by having these exploits, would severly undermine entire industries as many many companies, organizations, other governments, and industries rely on SHA-2 for their security. Furthermore, SHA-2 is one of the most popular hashing algorithms, and has been studied by almost every cryptographer since its release in 2001. It has been more than a decade since its release, and no one has found a working attack against SHA-2.

Even if the NSA has broken SHA-2, why would they go after Bitcoin? Once people realize that SHA-2 is broken, Bitcoin would become unused, have no value, or be shifted to a new algorithm which would take the NSA more time to break. It would be a waste of time and money for them to break Bitcoin and for almost no gain whatsoever.

Now onto the technical aspect. As we know, SHA-1, SHA-0, and MD5 all have collision attacks but not preimage attacks. The collision attacks allows someone to find the same hash for different inputs. The current attacks on these three algorithms involve knowing the hash output for the attack to work. Now, if these could be applied to SHA-256, it still would be pointless. In order for this attack to be able to steal Bitcoin, the owner of the sign the transaction first in order for the hash to become available. The signature comprises of essentially the entire transaction, all of the inputs and the outputs, and the private key, in order for the transaction to verified and used in further transactions. In order to use a collision attack, you would need to have the owner of the transaction create and sign the transaction in order to get the hash. Thus, the attack would not work because the Bitcoins would already be spent and an attacker could not use a collision attack without first knowing the hash that would spend such bitcoins. A collision attack on SHA-256 would then not work to break Bitcoin or allow someone to steal Bitcoins.

As for a preimage attack, if one were to be found, Bitcoin would be screwed. However, its none of its predecessors have working preimage attacks. If one were to be found, an attacker could get the private key and use that to steal Bitcoins. It would then be possible to reverse a signature and find the private key from the input, take the key, import it and steal all of the Bitcoins associated with said key. This kind of theoretical attack would work to break Bitcoin, but a preimage attack has yet to be found in all of the aforementioned hash algorithms.

The preimage attack would also allow someone to mine Bitcoin much faster than the current miners do, and give said miner a massive advantage. At this point though, the developers could switch Bitcoin to another algorithm to make it secure.

Thus, your concern, though valid, is not yet applicable. At some point, SHA-256 will be broken, but it has not been broken yet. If a collision attack were found, it could not undermine Bitcoin. If a preimage attack were found, it could screw over Bitcoin. But, neither attack has been found and none of the previous attacks on older hash algorithms have been applied successfully to SHA-256

blkindex.dat is part of the blockchain database for whatever wallet you are using. You will have to rescan and reindex the entire blockchain which can take a few hours.

The behavior you see is actually what should happen. If you open task manager after you run the command, you should see bitcoind.exe in it. You can then open another command prompt and give commands to that instance of bitcoind you ran in the other command prompt.

The output you see when you hit Ctrl+C is what should happen since Ctrl+C is an interrupt and will cause the program to terminate.

Also, I don't think that -daemon is a valid option for bitcoind.