Stake a Bitcoin address, and preferably, a PGP key.  (But n.b. that Segwit addresses cannot yet be used for this purpose.)

I think that current options for securing one’s account are inadequate.⁰  However, there do exist ad hoc ways to help protect your account.  If your account has any value to you, make the effort to do that—and also to improve your own security!  I’m sick of hearing about “accounts hacked” when, as far as I can tell, most or all (recent) such instances are matters of users being hacked.  I am not aware of any evidence that accounts are ever hacked, nowadays.


What about people who lose access to an e-mail address, but legitimately know their own password?

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0. For account recovery purposes, users should be able to somehow bind a PGP key fingerprint to an account—either permanently, or with a long timelock.  I mean this as a forum feature with a form widget on the user profile page, not the ad hoc “post your key here” threads.  I would also add Bitcoin keys, but for the aforestated problem with Segwit addresses.

I also want some means of public-key auth login.  I began writing a long post for Meta about that more than two months ago, when I was more or less brand-new.  However, browser makers have made this infeasible by effectually deprecating functionality required for TLS client certificate usage by websites; and there are other problems with TLS client certs.  I also considered SSH tunnels, etc.; but I know realistically that has negligible probability of actually happening.

“Elders” reward people who answer questions and help others.  At least, it is so in Development & Technical Discussion; I have not been in Beginners & Help.  In Dev & Tech, I have been awarded much merit by experts (including the mod) who themselves certainly did not need the answers I gave, but evidently appreciated that I was providing correct answers which helped others.  I would expect Beginners & Help to work similarly on this particular point.

Thanks; I know, and I do intend to report to admin.  But of course, I will also red-tag; and I want a place to collect them in public, in case any DT members may deem that useful.

Since there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate topic, I will make a new one for merit-related spam by PM, e-mail (which I have also received), and other means of private contact.

Is there a thread which tracks merit-begging PM spam, or appropriate for that purpose?  Out of the numerous merit-related threads, I haven’t seen one where that would be on-topic; but I don’t want to create yet another, if an appropriate thread exists.

There is no such thing as “deletion” of a Bitcoin address.  The page you link apparently pertains to the number of addresses whose associated private keys or scripts can spend outputs in the current UTXO set.  In colloquial terms:  All the addresses which can spend money right now.  When an address spends all the money it can, then it would disappear from that list.

(I can’t be certain of what the page contains, because it requires Javascript; and I’m not enabling that for this.  But that’s what it seems to be, from what I can see.)

I found the following amidst discussion of your very own clone of directory.io (!):



So, this was from randomly entering numbers by hand into the URL bar of your browser?  (Allegedly.)

Uh-huh.

By the way, I see that you run LBC (and vehemently defend it).  Have you seen rico666’s trust feedback?  I wouldn’t trust anything executable from that guy on my machines.  Just saying.


How it actually works:  If you want to prove your own positive assertion, that’s up to you, not me.  Exponentiate this rule when you literally claim to have done the impossible, and thus proved its possibility (with your web browser URL bar, no less).

(I might speculate on how the biases involved in mashing numbers into a URL bar could find you a key which was produced nonrandomly.  I had been leaning toward DannyHamilton’s hypothesis #1.  But the following (plus much of the context) conclusively persuaded me that #2, you’re lying.)



Thanks, got it.  I have my own cult; I don’t need yours.

We are now far outside technical discussion and deep in kook territory.  I’m not interested in that, and neither am I interested in (further) derailing the Vanitygen thread.  Please leave this thread to discussion of Vanitygen and the generation of vanity addresses.

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Edit to add—somehow, I’d missed this post:


Really, “all the time”?  You “believe”?  Without numbers, that’s an empty (and wildly absurd) proposition; and the numbers will not support you there.  2¹⁶⁰ is so much bigger than you think (or “believe”) it is, that what I just said is an understatement.

Anyway, this is still off-topic for the Vanitygen thread.  If (if) you can demonstrate that “address collisions happen all the time and are more common then [sic] people think” using numbers rather than beliefs, please open a new topic in Development & Technical Discussion.  I’d be fascinated to see that.  I won’t hold my breath.

That’s not a new question to me.

From early on, I had inquiries with some friendly speculation that I was an alt for such-and-such well-known forum personage.  I will state very clearly that I’m not.  I’m not the Duke playing Friar.  I don’t even have any pre-existing connections here.  I’m just me, an outsider getting to know you folks.  I can stand on my own merits, so to speak.

That being said, in a section so oft subjected to crazy x=y accusations, I wonder which of you I’ll be accused of being someday.  I will know that I’ve achieved true forum greatness if I’m accused of being resident crackpot theory target Lauda—in which case, my only response to Quickseller is that his accusations are baseless and so outrageous I will not dignify them with a reply, save to make fun of his basement-dwelling ways.

As for the question of whether I’m really new, I don’t deny it; therefore by QS logic, I must be.  Q.E.D.

Base58check-decode the WIF private key, change the version byte from 0x81 (for Bech32 P2WPKH) or 0x82 (for P2WPKH nested in P2SH) to 0x80 (or whatever your fork coin uses), then base58check-encode the result.  Note that I am only describing the conversion of the WIF.  I make no statement whatsoever about what may or may not work for attempts to claim forked coins.

Here is the full set of values Electrum uses, copied from the source of some unreleased software of mine:


Do you know any programming, or do you need a tool for this?

There needn’t be any material motive.  Some people enjoy claiming to have done things declared impossible by mathematicians or physicists, as an end in itself.  A few of them put on hoaxes so elaborate, so meticulously executed, that one wonders what they might have achieved if their energies were otherwise spent.  But most are varying degrees of stupid and/or cracked.

Anyway, you seem to have missed that DannyHamilton conjectured another possibility—here put in boldface:


It is not too unlikely that you made the same mistake in executing your “random” search as someone else did in generating keys to produce a “random” address—that you both introduced the same bias or nonuniformity.  There do tend to be both common conceptual errors in implementation, and common use of specific erroneous implementations.  Randomness is hard to get right.

I note you said upthread:


So, maybe you made a mistake somewhere.

I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened here.  But as DannyHamilton said, it is a “possibility”.  By contrast, randomly hitting one of a relatively negligible number of targets uniformly distributed at random in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space may be safely excluded from the realm of all “possibility”.

It is true, however, that the likeliest possibility is lying.  Some guy on an Internet forum makes extraordinary claims which he freely admits he cannot prove “without trust” per below—what is the likeliest possibility?  Lying.  Of course.


It has nothing to do with “the majority”.  I don’t heed majorities.  The content of my brain is not a democracy, and not subject to a vote.

I am confident I know what the sum of 2+2 is.  I would not change my “opinion” of that sum even if I were the only person on Earth to have that “opinion”, or even if it were declared illegal.  So much for majorities.  Although I’m by no means a mathematical expert, I am also confident in my understanding of just how big a 2¹⁶⁰ search space is.  Even if you were to randomly scatter a seemingly large number of potential targets (keys for all addresses controlling funds) throughout that space, the space itself is so vast that it would swallow them without a trace.  Unless, that is, a bunch of targets wound up clumped in a tiny portion of that space.  There are various ways to severely restrict the search space, directly or indirectly or both:  Bad randomness generators, brainwallets, etc., etc.

(N.b. that this is a problem very different than that of finding vanity addresses.  It’s really offtopic in this thread.)


Well, if you can’t prove it, then don’t expect for anybody to believe you.  Is that a problem?  Do you believe extraordinary claims posted on Internet forums, just because some guy said so?  —Just because he seemed to sincerely believe what he was saying, and even explicitly said that he had “no reason to lie about it”?  If you do, I could easily find you a forum loaded with alien abduction experiences, religious miracle testimony, Bigfoot sightings, etc.  Soon, you would believe all sorts of fascinating claims.

What it really boils down to is this:


You made a positive assertion, which you readily admit you can’t prove “without trust” (as quoted above).  This is a scientific question, not a religious topic or a matter of personal taste.  The burden is on you to provide extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim, if you want for anybody to take it seriously.  I don’t need to explain and explore possibilities of what might really have happened; I have done these things because up to a limited point, I find the discussion to be interesting to me and an educational opportunity for readers (you and otherwise).  Absent any new and extraordinary information, I think that limited point has now been reached.

If you can’t prove what you say, it’s no big deal; I will more or less just shrug and move on.  “Some guy on the Internet said X.”  I will not exactly “shit [my] pants” as you said, nor will I lose any sleep wondering about it or worrying about Bitcoin security.  I know the numbers.  Numbers don’t even know how to lie.  Numbers don’t make mistakes.

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Side note, mentioned for the sake of correctness:


An address can’t have a transaction fee in it.  Fees aren’t paid to an address; they’re the part of a transaction’s outputs not paid to an address, and spendable by the miner of a block.

...says somebody who sits online replying to every post within about nine seconds, trying with palpable desperation to assert some sense of superiority over people who busted him trying to cheat the merit system.

Got it.

We all have so much to learn from you.  You know everything.

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You stay classy.

Boldface supplied:

You are there replying directly to me, yet you failed to notice that I currently have lower forum rank than you do.  Between us, I will win the game of forum rank one-downsmanship in victimhood.  HELP, I’M BEING OPPRESSED BY THE LEGENDARIES!


I can see you consider cheating in school to be no big deal.  Figures—and I suppose you have experience, too, yes?

— Breaking news:  This came in while I was trying to post:


So...  Which school do you attend?  I’m sure you’d be proud to tell us.  Equally sure they’d be proud to know your views in minimizing the importance of school cheating.  Interesting.


Not only are you ungrammatical:  You are illiterate.  actmyname already told you his real age:


Now, show some respect to your elders (evidently).

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I will provide translations:


asapjoshyy is projecting...


...and has an inferiority complex...


...and delusions of persecution, a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.

At least if he can get himself to a doctor of the type he seems to know all about, he already knows where to find The Pharmacist.

I know that ibminer and LoyceV have already answered your substantive questions; but I thought you may find this interesting, as to deleted posts generally:  Somebody traded merit between alts and then deleted the posts, evidently hoping to cover his tracks.  The merit is still there, though I wonder why all three involved accounts are dripping red.

I think it’s one of those instances of any system necessarily being imperfect if it involves human beings.  On balance, I think it’s much more important that legitimate users keep their merit for deleted posts, for such reasons as noted by LoyceV.

asapjoshyy implicitly claims ignorance of the adage that “trust is hard to earn, easy to lose”.  I myself would add, “...and nigh impossible to repair”.

There are certain empirical facts about trust known by experience to anyone over the age of thirty.  E.g., that people who give implicitly self-interested elaborate speeches about the importance of trustworthiness (inevitably followed by proclamations of how trustworthy they are) are ipso facto untrustworthy in the extreme.  Also, the above-stated aphorism.

Moreover:  There are so very many two-legged creatures on this Earth who are for some reason deemed “people”.  If any of them violates my trust, why should I ever grant second chances?  There are too many others out there who are potentially untrustworthy, and too few who are actually trustworthy.  I will never have an opportunity to give a first chance to more than a negligible fraction of all those people.  Why waste my time with anybody who has proved untrustworthy even once?

More generally, I grant neither mercy nor forgiveness to people who did things they knew or should have known were wrong.  Those are not accounted virtues in my religion.  Here apropos, I still remember people whom I know to have cheated in school as teenagers.  I would not trust them in business, even decades later.  They were inferior in character then, and will be now.  I will instead try trusting people who never cheated on school tests.  There are plenty enough who, at least, where never that dishonest.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned.  No, wait—sorry, I forgot, I am 15 years old.  My bad, LOL.  Just prankin’ ya.

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LOL.

lauda doxxed by vod with pix lol

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So, Lauda, finally we get to see what you look like; and it is—awesome, in the proper sense of inspiring awe.  Let forum abusers shake in terror.

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Of course, he becomes either slippery or absent when pressed for evidence.  His objective is not to persuade regulars in Reputation.  I see signs that Quickseller is attempting something much more serious:  Deliberate sowing of the sorts of rumours which can corrode reputations like vitriol, if not handled properly.

I have recently observed Quickseller’s behaviour in high-readership threads in Meta.  He seems to have taken up the habit (so to speak) of always mentioning “Lauda” and “pill addiction” in the same sentence.  At first, I thought he was just being an Internet jerk.  Now, I realize what he may be doing quite methodically.  His objective cannot plausibly be to prove anything to cautious or well-informed people:  He could only do that with evidence; and if he had evidence, either he would publicize it to wreck Lauda, or he’d use it for blackmail (as to which I will note that Lauda displays no apparent fear of Quickseller).  Rather, it appears he wants to get people talking along the lines of, “I heard that Lauda...”

Rumour-mongering through hit-and-run focused repetition of a “Big Lie” can be highly effective.  People don’t remember where they read it; they repeat it to others, who then don’t remember where they heard it.  The most disturbing part is that by such means, it can be feasible for a known swindler to harm the reputation of a community pillar.  Much though I hate to say this, that is one good reason why the concept of libel laws was developed.

I am not saying (and would not say) anything to give Quickseller ideas.  I am stating what I have observed he seems to be already doing, or at least attempting.

In this situation, on an Internet forum, I think a good defence is counter-repetition of the truth both as to Quickseller’s own credibility, and the baselessness of his accusations.  I’ve been lax about that, more inclined to laugh it off with a snide comment.  (And indeed, laughter is also effective; don’t stop it.)  But as concisely as possible, the facts should be made clear to people who never heard of Quickseller or Lauda.  This means repeating those facts briefly in each and every place where Quickseller repeats his rumour.  Don’t only take it as a joke:  Let the seeds of rumour fall on hardened rock, not fertile imaginations.

Experiential note:  Being new here, I had to do lengthy browsing in forum archives on my own initiative to be so sure of which side is right here; and I am still not so deeply familiar with the situation as most people posting in this thread.  Some sort of standard overview of objective historical facts should be summarized in a short paragraph, to be pasted in wherever QS pops up with this “Lauda pill addiction” rumour-mongering.  Then, add sarcastic comments.  I think this is just basic “PR”.

How rumours start, e.g.:

Those of you who have been here for some years may remember the time that Quickseller posted in a politics thread with an explicit defence of adult-child sexual relations.  I know, he deleted that quickly—I presume as soon as he realized what he’d done, and what the social and business consequences might be.  Perhaps he was drunk at the time.  But I know that some of you forum old-timers must have seen it.  I saw it.  XYZ saw it.  A friend-of-a-friend saw it...

(And he has never denied this!  Very interesting.)

I think that giving demerit power to ordinary users would be a terrible idea.  Much though I myself oft wish I could click a button and give a post a negative rating, I understand how it would chill the thoughtful expression of controversial opinions—not to mention demerit abuse for petty personal vendettas.

The merit system only works positively.  I strongly urge that it should stay that way.


If a post is really spam or otherwise absolute garbage, you already have available to you a means of not only “demeriting” it, but asking for it to be deleted:  That handy “Report to moderator” link you see in the lower right-hand corner of every post.  You have stats for that, too:  The number of posts you’ve reported, and the percentage of how often moderators have agreed with you.  My report stats currently say, “You have reported 254 posts with 100% accuracy”.  Those stats are not publicly visible, except when the most active and accurate reporters occasionally have their good work commended.

I sometimes dedicate an hour or three to reporting spam.  Usually, I just hit it when I see it.

I am surprised that Vod is the only one who clearly called out the textbook smear tactic Quickseller here applies—and applies with hamhanded transparency, I might add.  I have highlighted three of Vod’s above posts with merit, because they stated exactly what I had in mind when I read OP—and they are the only answer Quickseller should receive as to his stated questions.

Observe:



[...ad nauseam...]


Placing somebody in a position to deny a scandalous accusation (from a mysterious “I was told by” source!) is one of the best-known cheap smear tactics from the Book of Cheap Smear Tactics.

(Next standard twist:  Classic “begging the question”.  “Lauda, when did you stop leaving negative trust tags while in drug-fuelled rages?”)

Get this:  I am also “not interested in denying” that I have a drug addiction, that I just raped and murdered someone, or that I’m a Bcasher, because the accusations are outrageous on their face and there is no evidence whatsoever for them.

Quickseller, give EVIDENCE.  PUT UP OR SHUT UP.

Lauda, in the absence of evidence, you are under no obligation whatsoever to deny, to explain why you won’t deny, or to do anything other than ridicule Quickseller as the obscene buffoon he is.

N.b. that early on here, I was so disgusted at one of this forum’s most odious trash threads that I made it excruciatingly clear how deeply I despise drug addicts (previously).  Even should Quickseller continue transparently applying textbook smear tactics (as I do expect) and direct them at me, I could not very well be accused of acting in sympathy to drug addiction.

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Those evidentiary photographs posted upthread by minerjones don’t look so good, Lauda.  Do you deny doing lines of catnip with your kitties while sitting atop a huge pile of Bitcoins and laughing maniacally?  Do you deny it?  Very interesting, you don’t deny it...

No.  (And if you ask a yes-or-no question...)


It’s not technically feasible, and it would be bad if it were.

Nodes “broadcast” transactions; and that word is used for a reason.  After the transaction has been passed along to other nodes, you have no way of knowing at any particular moment how many nodes have received it, or which.  You also have no way of knowing whether a miner is working it into a block.  All the same would apply as for a hypothetical “cancel” command.  Thus some nodes might get the transaction, some might get the cancellation, some might get neither, some might get both.  Over time, the situation would approach that last—but you have no way of knowing when.

Similar applies for RBF, but not the same:  Miners have an incentive to accept the replacement, due to the higher fee.  Nodes which never get the original but get the RBF have more or less simply received a transaction.  But RBF is not guaranteed; a miner could work the original into a block, and then the replacement would be rejected as a double-spend.

And all this is this way, because...


There is no such thing as the mempool.  Each node has its own mempool; there can be and often are significant differences between them.  (You probably know this; but most people don’t, and it’s easy to forget.)

How do you reliably give the cancellation to all the nodes who received the transaction?

And why would a miner accept a cancellation, and throw away the fee?  Unless the cancellation is itself a transaction which pays a fee; if RBF rules were different, an RBF replacement with zero outputs other than coinbase (fees) would de facto operate this way.

OP:  When a transaction is sent to the network, from this standpoint (if not others), it should be considered already irrevocable.

2¹⁶⁰ > 10⁴⁸


Theoreticians use terms such as “negligible probability” and dislike the term “impossible”.  This becomes a real problem when their words collide with non-theoreticians.  It has happened that a man was killed by a flying fire hydrant.  It has never happened that somebody got lucky in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space after trillions of tries, let alone one try—never happened, and for practical purposes, never will.  You should properly consider such a thing to be impossible.

Moreover, as I said, bruteforcing an address with a mismatch between the Hash160 and the checksum has a theoretical probability of zero.  Absolutely zero.  Because it’s an invalid address.  Would you say that the probability is nonzero of bruteforcing an address with a capital letter I, etc.?

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It takes all miners in the world together 10 minutes on average to find a block.  Back of the envelope, at a rate of 8 Eh/s, it should take all miners in the entire world together over five billion trillion years to do 2¹⁶⁰ work.  (That’s with ASICs which only do SHA-256.)  I’ve been talking in Dev & Tech about how 2¹²⁸ work is humanly impossible, and always will be—forever.  It’s what I call “boil the oceans” security, because the energy required would do that and worse.  2¹⁶⁰ is more than four billion times more work.

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Better idea.

I’m as yet unborn; so I guess that makes you the bum gang elder.

P.S., asapjoshyy, thanks for the retaliatory neg.  My Internet newbie guide tells me that the proper term is “LOL”.

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Edit:

You still have the opportunity to get younger in the future.  Simply start leaving negative trust for sleaze-dripping imbeciles.  See how it works:  actmyname and I are each getting younger with every passing moment.

Experience has shown that people send merit in extremely large amounts if either (0) they are randomly selecting a post which randomly happens to be in a junk thread for a test of the merit system, or (1) you are Lauda, or (2) you insult them so badly that they nearly have an aneurysm.

You did post in a thread which, though not itself spammy or scammy airdrop stuff, is filled with spammer wannabes.⁰  Thus either it was your lucky day, or “Vod” is a Lauda sock, or you made a grown man cry.

I cannot divine which, for that thread is writ in a language incomprehensible to me.  If you could kindly explain the subtleties, I would be most obliged to thank you sir my english not good sir sorry sir , i work to make forum happy with merit systm much improve sir . your a racist sir

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0. “Spammer wannabes” define the nadir of low aspirations, even for robots and Sibyls.