Indefinitely.

Then the transaction fails. C does not get his money from B and B does not get money from A.

No one knows; that requires predicting the future.

This thread is just Dorky and HCP flaming/trolling each other which is against the forum rules. Therefore this thread will be locked and potentially trashcanned.

Use a different api. Blockchain.info's api is not giving you the information that you want even though the previous transaction id and output index is included in the transaction itself.

You haven't demonstrated that you know what you are talking about.

There can be errors up in the log that get hidden by the verbosity of the sync that can indicate problems that cause a crash later on. In general, having more people looking at the issue makes it more likely that someone will find the problem. But not providing any information (e.g. debug.log file or crash logs or screenshots or whatever) makes that hard to do because then all people have to go off of is your word, and that may not necessarily be understood properly and will include your own biases as to what you think the problem is.

How about you provide some other information then? How about the Windows crash logs?

Then redact your IP address. Do a find and replace and replace your IP address with [redacted]. It isn't hard to do.

It's statements like these that tell me you don't know what you are talking about.

Don't use a bootstrap.dat. That's way slower than just resyncing the whole blockchain from scratch.

If you have an antivirus software, make sure that it isn't deleting anything in the Bitcoin Core data directory. Check Windows defender too.

No it is not. Clearly you do not understand how Proof of Stake and lightning works. Bitcoin being "locked up" is not a form of staking at all whatsoever (besides the fact that bitcoin is not locked up at all).

This guide is quite outdated now and no longer really accurate, thus I will be locking it as it is also attracting a lot of spam and off topic posts. Bitcoin Core Windows builds are cross compiled in an Ubuntu environment. Windows 10 has a feature called the Windows Subsystem for Linux which is essentially Ubuntu on Windows. Instructions for making Windows builds using the WSL are available here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-windows.md.

Locking this thread; it is just becoming full of spam now.

Blockchain forks effect lightning in the same way that transactions are effected. If you have an open payment channel before the fork, you will have the same open payment channel duplicated onto the other fork of the blockchain just like how you have your coins duplicated when a fork happens.

0.15.0.1 has significant performance improvements over 0.14.2. It introduces several new optimizations and features that makes it perform faster, estimate fees better, support multiple wallets (in RPCs only), etc. Read the release notes for the full explanation and list of changes.

If you have to ask these questions, I highly suggest that you NOT make an exchange. You will be handling people's money. Imagine you were a user, would you feel safe if the exchange you were using had to ask the questions you are asking? You should first learn about Bitcoin and the technical issues by doing something else that does not risk people's money before you make an exchange.

What block explorer was showing these?

These addresses are bech32 addresses. They are for the native segwit output type. They are specified in BIP 173

As you would with any other type of address. The wallet software will handle it for you. If the wallet software supports bech32 addresses, it will know how to decode them and create transactions with them. These addresses specifically tell the wallet what type segwit output to create.

Yes.

It depends.

First of all, addresses starting with a 3 do not necessarily have private keys associated with them, and not necessarily 2 or 3 private keys. Addresses starting with a 3 are P2SH addresses which means they have a script associated with them, and that script can be whatever you want so long as it is a valid script. This means that it can contain many public keys (and thus have many private keys) or no public keys (and thus be associated with no private keys).

bech32 addresses are for the P2WPKH and P2WSH output types. For P2WPKH, there is one private key. P2WSH is like P2SH; it is associated with an arbitrary script.

Also, there are no types of private keys. All private keys are the same "type"': a 256 bit integer.

How do you define "more secure"?

Bech32 addresses have built in error detection and correction (they can correct, but software should not be automatically correcting errors). I don't think they are any more or less secure than "normal" addresses.

Post all of it. The little snippet you posted is irrelevant.

The peer that Bitcoin Core tried to connect to that time did not respond to the version message. This is normal behavior; sometimes nodes just aren't online when you try to connect to them.

Yes.

Kind of. Having an open payment channel with one party is really only good for recurring payments. However the lightning network expands beyond the one channel. You can have a channel open with someone who has a channel open with other people, and they have channels open with other people and so on. One of the main ideas of LN is that you can send occasional transactions by routing a payment through multiple payment channels that people have open with each other.

Suppose Person A has a channel open with B, and B has one with C. If A wanted to pay C, they could send money to B and B sends money to C via their respective open payment channels. The transactions used for this sending are special and make it so that the money will only actually move under specific circumstances. These transactions are called Hashed Timelocked Contracts. They make it so that B can only get the money from A if they have forwarded the money to C.

No, it is not. When you "lock" your funds in a LN payment channel, you can still spend those coins, albeit only with the other party in the channel. However with LN, if that other party is connected to other people via payment channels, you can make payments to those other people and the people they are connected to and so on and so forth. So your funds aren't "locked"; you can still spend them and move coins to other people that have LN channels open. Furthermore you can choose to close a channel at any time that you want and be able to access your coins as soon as the channel closing transaction confirms. There is no set time limit on a channel and there is no minimum time required for a channel to be opened.

What do you mean by "fail transactions"?

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The lightning network is different from DASH and IOTA in that it itself is Bitcoin, not an altcoin. With LN, you are moving and using Bitcoin so the value you move is fixed and does not change. If you were to use an altcoin in the same manner, you would risk losing money as the altcoin's value compared to Bitcoin's changes. Furthermore, many of the security risks and potential attack vectors are fairly well known because LN uses Bitcoin and Bitcoin's security risks and potential attack vectors are well known. With an altcoin that uses some crazy cryptography that may not necessarily be secure (IOTA had some broken cryptography which were pointed out in a security review done by 3 MIT DCI researchers) does not have known security risks and potential attack vectors.

Lightning is neither a hard fork nor a soft fork. It will be deployed on the main network because Segwit has already activated. There is nothing to "pass". Lightning is not a consensus rule change; nothing needs to be activated or passed in order for it to be deployed. It just needs to be implemented. By deployed, I mean used.

Post the raw transactions, screenshots of what you entered, and the txids of any and all transactions involved (including the one you are bumping and the bumping tx).

First of all, please do not use or refer to the Bitcoin Core 0.8 codebase. It is extremely outdated and insecure.

It is just making a script to put in the scriptSig of the only transaction in the genesis block. The stuff in the script mean nothing and have no consensus meaning except for the fact that they must be there otherwise the genesis block's hash will not match what it is supposed to be.
Push this number to the scriptSig. It just happens to be the decimal version of the nBits of the genesis block.

Push the number 4 to the scriptSig.

Push the character array pszTimestamp to the scriptSig. This character array is just the string of "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

That is not a hash. That is a public key. It is a normal Pay to Public Key output.

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The forum is doing something weird with the code blocks here.

No, not the hashed transactions, the full transactions. And the block headers for the block that a transaction is in.

No, that is not how the blockchain started. The first block (known as the genesis block) was created by satoshi and hard coded it into the software (and it still is hard coded). You cannot receive something as payment if it does not yet exist; coins only exist because blocks exist. The linked list known as the blockchain is built off of the genesis block.

Yes.

Yes. They have to.

Bitcoin Core 0.13.0/.1 (0.13.0 had it implemented but had no deployment mechanism for segwit. 0.13.1 had the actual deployment parameters)

Block weight is a segwit specific thing and is only implemented and defined in segwit.

Read BIPs 141, 143, and 144

Set some hard coded seed nodes to be nodes that you know will be up for a long time.

Set up a DNS seeder and add that to the hard coded list of DNS seeders.