I feel like the people who will be most interested in your question will be in Dev&Tech, so I moved it there. It is rather off-topic there, so if someone complains then maybe it should be moved to Off-topic.

Sorry for your loss, but while account trades are tolerated here, they are strongly discouraged, in part because we do not enforce/broker account sales. In most cases, the original owner of the account is the legitimate owner forever as far as forum administration is concerned. (Though if we happen to come across some pretty clear evidence that an account is sold by its owner, we're not going to intentionally help the original owner scam the account back. But neither are we going to put much effort into preventing this.)

I restored Jude Austin to its original owner. I don't see any evidence for or against the original owner scamming the buyer out of 0.6 BTC. It's possible, but on the other hand the password hashes are known to have been leaked, so if Jude Austin's password was weak, it is possible for it to have been cracked.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Trademark complaint.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1117926.0

I probably couldn't support or vote for Trump. He seems extremely inconsistent, and what he says is often not well-thought-out.

As for whether Trump is better than the others, I'm not sure. Looking at his stated platform, I guess he might be OK. His platform is 75% terrible, but that's better than most, and he looks decent on the most important issues. It'd be especially good if he is incapable of effectively working with congress, since that'd slow down government action. But it's difficult to predict what exactly would happen if he was elected.


Yeah, I voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. But it's pretty unlikely that he could win. Maybe if it's Hillary vs some highly unpopular Republican nominee and the Libertarian Party really steps up its game.

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=<kept chain data in MB>. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/rand-paul-dropping-out-of-white-house-race-218675

Pretty sad. Very near the beginning of the presidential race he seemed to be doing quite well, but he ended up just not being good enough at politics.

I haven't been following the other candidates. Are any of them decent? IMO, the most important issue (especially for a president) is maintaining peace, and it seems like almost all of the candidates are way worse than Obama, ready to go recklessly into a deadly and expensive war.

You also can't rescan, which I suspect is what people will end up missing the most with pruning.

It's a good idea. Though perhaps it might be even better to hire someone whose job it would be just to effect communication between the Core devs and the Chinese miners. wangchun has been doing this to some extent, but I still feel like there is a severe lack of communication. I especially feel like the overall philosophy of Bitcoin which motivates everything Core does has not been adequately communicated to the Chinese Bitcoin community. In the Chinese->English translations I've read, I see a ton of misunderstandings.

Communication has become a problem in general, as well, though the language barrier makes it even worse. I really miss the days when all of the major miners, CEOs, etc. were quite often on IRC, directly talking with the Bitcoin experts and Core devs, and in the process becoming experts themselves.

Right. The location pointed-to by -datadir should always really contain your wallet-related files (wallet.dat, db.log, database directory, .lock) but in my experience it's totally fine to replace any of the other files/directories with symlinks.

I don't know whether mklink /j will create the right type of link, though. Isn't that for directories?

The exact algorithm is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1066857.0

cryptodevil is trusted by dooglus, who is trusted by DefaultTrust, who is trusted by you. You can see this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;full

You can remove him by adding ~cryptodevil or ~dooglus to your trust list (excluding them) or by removing DefaultTrust and replacing it with your own list. If you think that cryptodevil should not be on the default trust network, you should contact dooglus about it.

See my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3giend/citation_needed_satoshis_reason_for_blocksize/ctygzmi


The point of that block number was to show how to make this change with reasonable advance notice, not to suggest a particular block number for doing the change. That post was made on Oct 4, 2010 when the block height was about 83530. Probably how he got block #115000 was that he rounded this to 80000 and added the expected number of blocks in 9 months (~35000). If he was actually suggesting that the change be made at that block number, then he would've had to have actually put this code into Bitcoin very quickly after his post there for his statement "it can start being in versions way ahead" to make any sense at all. (And clearly he didn't do this.)

This "flag day" approach is in fact the preferred way of doing hard forks among the Bitcoin Core devs.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 12, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Probably the end time will be 7-12 days from the time of this post, though it could be anywhere between 4 and 22 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

What used to happen was that users with many ignores would have their ignore button highlighted orange. But I removed it because it was rather taxing on the database and I don't think very many people used it. Maybe I could try bringing it back sometime.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.25 gourl.io
3 2.20 victorhing
3 2.20 FortuneJack
2 2.20 idsb2b

There are no official backup sites for bitcointalk.org.

I think that most of these sites copy bitcointalk.org's content so that they can confuse Google into showing their results high-up sometimes, and then they either have ads to make money off of this, or they operate as phishing sites. I don't know. Don't enter your password into any other site.

It seems very unlikely to me that a QC will be created, then the tech will advance to the point that real-world keys can be broken in less than years, and all of this will be kept secret until it becomes an emergency. These government agencies are full of many people, and people are bad at keeping secrets. If this does happen, it can be survived due to the QC-resistance of Bitcoin addresses, but hurrying to plan for this seems like premature optimization. Especially when the current state-of-the-art in QC-proof signatures have massively larger signatures than ECDSA, and bandwidth is currently a pretty big bottleneck.

There is a flag for disabling the RBF policy, -permitrbf=0.

IIRC the Core devs do have code prepared for adding QC-proof signatures to Bitcoin as a softfork (using a variant of Lamport signatures optimized for minimal size, especially in the scriptPubKey), though AFAIK this code isn't public.

Exploiting policy differences is the easiest way, and I'm not sure that you can ever really eliminate it because people will always have different policies. But there are other ways:

I think that you'll have a pretty good success ratio if you send the transaction directly to the merchant and simultaneously send the double-spend directly to some miners. The merchant and the peers around him will have one version, but miners will have the other. If the merchant is not running several nodes, then he probably won't even see the the double-spend until it gets into a block, since his surrounding peers won't relay a transaction that they view as a double-spend.

And there's always the Finney attack. If you're a miner, you can (for no additional cost) continuously try to double-spend your 0-conf transactions. If you happen to mine a block while the transaction still has 0 confirmations, then you double-spend it, and nothing can stop this.


The Core GUI won't let you create conflicting transactions like that. You could do it by messing around with wallet backups or something, but again, it takes a fair bit of extra effort.

With Core's implementation of opt-in RBF, you can't (from the perspective of any given network node) replace an RBF-disabled transaction with an RBF-enabled transaction, and you can't replace a transaction with one having a lower fee. You can replace an RBF-enabled transaction with an RBF-disabled transaction.


Probably, but that can happen with non-RBF transactions as well.


AFAIK CPFP isn't ruled out for Core. It's in Luke's fork. I'm not sure why it's not in Core. Maybe there are some performance problems with the existing code or something.

I see them as being complementary. If the sender is taking responsibility for confirmation, then he should use RBF; otherwise, if the recipient is taking responsibility then the recipient can use CPFP and the sender can opt out of RBF.

Changes by admins aren't logged there.

The idea is that eventually most people will use it most of the time.

I don't know if this is actually exactly how it's planned, but how I imagine it working in the future is:
- By default, you'll send transactions with RBF. Then if the transaction doesn't confirm after a long time, RBF will allow you to easily increase the fee. You'll be taking responsibility for the transaction
- If a merchant requests that you not use RBF, you won't. Likely this request will be done via the Bitcoin Payment protocol (ie. bitcoin: URIs). So when you click "pay this" (or whatever it says) on a BitPay page, your wallet will automatically send the transaction without RBF. Then the merchant is taking responsibility for the payment, and they can adjust the fee later if necessary using the child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) mechanism. I'd expect most payment processors like BitPay to do this so that customers don't have to worry about fees and they can try to do fraud detection on 0-conf transactions.