Apologies for the slow reply.  Catching up here a bit out of order:


I didn’t mention, my “vanity” generator sort of started as a bulk Segwit address generator which grew a regex loop.  It can rapidly output however many hundreds or thousands of addresses you may desire, “3” nested or Bech32, in a shell script friendly format with each line containing an address and the corresponding private key WIF.  It’s made for piping to something else, for specialized use cases only.  I didn’t mention this, because I strongly encourage users to use only HD wallets (other than for vanity addresses, of course).

See below re easyseed.


Mine probably does similarly to what I presume ChipMixer’s would do:  Fast bulk generation of pairs of addresses and WIFs.


It’s not hard—at least, up to that point, it isn’t.  Mine started as an afternoon project.  There’s no need to implement Bech32 itself:  I just use sipa’s Bech32 reference code, the same as I used in my bech32 shell utility (Github).

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Kakmakr, for safe paper wallet use:  I’ve considered adding BIP 32 derivation to easyseed (Github).  That would do what you want, in an HD wallet you could back up with a mnemonic phrase in your choice from eight languages.  easyseed’s creation was motivated by my own need for secure, simple code to use on an airgap machine—no saved webpage junk!  Much if not most of its development process has been testing; and in that process, I caught a bug in the BIP 39 French wordlist.  But as of now, the most it will give you is a BIP 39 mnemonic phrase and the corresponding BIP 32 master extended private key.

This is solid, working code.  If I were to add BIP 32 derivation so it could generate addresses, would that suit your needs for airgap/paper wallet use?

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I could add that; but first, I should work on getting code published.

Also, I think a higher priority is thread support.  Right now, I simply run one instance per CPU core; this is a probabilistic process, so there is no need for synchronization of state.  Threads should be simple here, but may have problems cross-platform—what do you think, RGBKey?

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Thanks.  I will initially put something Unix-only on Github, then work on making ready for some sort of Windows version.  What is your Windows development environment?  I think I need to try going the mingw route, due to use of POSIX getopt(), POSIX regex, etc.

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It doesn’t have to do with hard drives, so much as with how the computer finds the OS on boot media and hands off control to it (roughly speaking).  My favoured OS (FreeBSD) packages two different sets of install images; and if you use the new-stuff-only one with an older computer, it will behave much as you described.  That’s why I thought of it.  (Side note:  I spoke imprecisely:  It’s really MBR vs. GPT and BIOS vs. EFI; but all these issues are related.  Setting the record straight for other readers/searchers. </offtopic>)

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I should probably spend less time on the forum and more time on code.

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Edit:  Added a hyperlink to sipa’s reference C code.

That’s a real insult to those of us newer users who have been working hard, and having our hard work recognized with merit.

But at least you more or less openly admit that your objection to the merit system is medical:  You have an allergy to hard work.  Dirtball.

Tor user here.  Cypherpunk who remembers that it took an excruciatingly long time to generate 4096-bit RSA PGP keys on 90s hardware.  I am strictly pseudonymous.  I am so dedicated to encrypting everything, everywhere, all the time, that I even encrypt all my forum posts with the military-grade ROT26 cipher.  I am not fodder for your dragnet.

I’ve never submitted to any “KYC” identity-rape doxing for anything whatsoever even remotely related to Bitcoin.  On principle, I never will.  Why the hell would I?  In principle, my finances are private—mine, and mine alone.  As a practical matter, I don’t need to worry so much about history repeating in some fashion the time that gold was banned for four decades in the country which ignorant twerps call “the land of the free”.  I also don’t need to worry about the kinds of kidnappers and armed robbers who run from laws instead of making laws.  My literal and metaphorical gold is immune to all criminals, whereas nobody knows who I am, where I am, or what I have.

I know that theymos would never even consider doxing people.  I also know that if he did, this forum would be promptly reduced to a small circle-jerk in the alt speculation subforum, hyping how Govecoin With Anti Four Horsemen KYC/AML Cavity Search Technology is going to the MOON.

So, you want my dox?  “...from my cold, dead fingers.”

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For my part, it doesn’t matter where I happen to be located at any particular moment.  Nobody “grants” me the right to speak freely:  I grant that to myself.  If you wanted to shut me up, you’d need to find me first.

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Me, too.

...you were saying?

Happy to help.  If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.


Import of seed words for backward-compatible “3” addresses has two small extra steps in the middle for which non-Bitcoin-expert users should really have screenshots (selecting a BIP 39 mnemonic, and changing the derivation path to m/49'/0'/0').  That’s why I thought to make a guide with screenshots; I wouldn’t otherwise, given how userfriendly that program (mostly) is.  The process is neither complicated nor difficult; but I think visual instruction is warranted in a money-related matter, where users might be understandably nervous about potentially entering the wrong thing in the wrong box.

The major hold-up is a bit embarrassing, and totally off-topic here.  (Lack of free, Tor-friendly image hosting with a UI convenient to me for keeping a few dozen screenshots organized.)  If/when I get that together, for which forum do you suggest it would be most appropriate?  The Electrum subforum, Help, here, or somewhere else?  It’s a special case—not so much an Electrum thing as a “Segwit the easy way/reduce your fees” thing.


Good call.  The desire to use one’s own full node (without using JSON-RPC as the UI!) is probably the only good reason anybody could have for not using Segwit at this point.  Unfortunately, it is a good reason—until v0.16!

I know it must be difficult to be such a worthless moron as you are.  The reality of a bcash fool is unspeakably ugly; your plight is horrific.  But you should really stop projecting your own faults and assuming that others write posts the same way as you do.  It’s rude; and rudeness to your betters shan’t be tolerated.

Per policy:

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You must be psychic, or something.

Cheers.

Do you think this was a serious ICO proposal?  Maybe; I should never doubt the limits of human stupidity, and perhaps I am overthinking this.  (But why post in meta and not the altcoin forum which allows scams ICOs?)  Still—I’ve been questioning why this thread was really made.  The oh so busy OP probably put more effort into the post starting this thread than any other post he’s ever made (not that that says much).  I’d expect that spammers are now trying to figure out what to do—how to break the merit system, which is a very big problem for them.  I don’t care to speculate openly.

The important part is, I think both mods and the community reacted appropriately.  The message is loud and clear:  Attempts to undermine the merit system are NOT WELCOME.  Most responses were more or less outraged.  A number of users tagged OP with negative trust.  Mods redacted the post and the subject line.  Well done.

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Whence this notion that all users supposed to advance on a regular progression through all the ranks?  This “congestion” of which you speak isn’t a bug:  It’s a feature!  Well, congratulations, you’ve discovered the principal purpose of the merits system:  To slow down most users’ rank advancement, and stop many of them entirely.  People who aren’t capable of earning threshold merit for a rank should never attain that rank—what, do you think everybody deserves to be called “Hero” or “Legendary”?  Do you know what those words mean?

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Red colour added to “if” of facts not in evidence.  Boldface redoubling that.

Thanks, mods!

It’s good to see such action against a post openly advocating organized violation of forum rules.

Kudos to everybody who’s been tagging this creep.

This was not an ordinary whine job or garbage post.  It looks like somebody dipping a toe in the water.  I’d wager that spammers who see the merit system killing their business are watching the reaction to this thread.

That is why I urged so strongly:

If some brazen-faced scumbag openly suggested the creation of an organized system of vote-buying in your country, how would you react?

Imagine that somebody seeking election to a high community rank said he wanted to buy votes because, “I do not want to spend time for [doing stuff for the people I expect to vote for me].  Because I am busy.”  What would you do about that?

If somebody said to you, “I demand your respect, admiration, and friendship; but I’m too busy to earn those things from you.  Here’s some cash!  I’m buying your respect—buying you!” —Would you accept that?  Or would you punch him in the face?

I call on all decent people reading this thread to take community action against this outrage:  Paint
#1260407 “jdole” bleeding red until his trust page looks like that of this guy who was buying positive trust—a concept indistinguishable from buying merit.

Handy selection of archival links to use for the reference:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20180202100132/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2866843.0
• https://archive.is/pn8g8

Please let the world know just how much you trust somebody who advocates organized forum abuse—and don’t let him get away with it!

I’m not your “bro”.

The only people who could possibly be scared by this new rating system are illiterate one-line spam junk posters who have been treating this forum as their personal free money machine.  Of course they will want “the most easy way [sic]”!  Worthless parasites always do.  Nobody who gives value to receive value would ever be scared by (of all things) a merit system.

As I’ve mentioned in another thread, the word “merit” is derived from the Latin root meaning “to earn”.  The merit system requires that you earn your keep.  Earn your merit, and don’t beg for it; otherwise, in the end, you will beg on the street.  I hope the “scared” people understand that.

If you do not receive merit, then yes, “your rank’s raise is kinda going to be frozen”.  That is the whole point of the merit system.  It is also a rule clearly explained in OP on this thread—a simple rule, which could be readily comprehended by the average five-year-old.

(P.S., how the heck did you reach “Hero” rank?  I am increasingly grateful for this new merit system.)

Protip:  Don’t reply to offtopic posts, spam, or anything else which really should not have been posted.  Instead, hit the “Report to moderator” link—as I just did as you were replying to that post.

Don’t feel bad about it.  We all make similar mistakes when newbies.

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Edit:  See, the post was deleted—as was a subsequent offtopic post, apparently related.  Thanks, mods!

Now, galkina, if you choose to delete your own post replying to the offtopic post, then I will delete this one, too (unless anybody replied to it).  That’s up to you.

Edit again:  I should mention, you do not lose merit for deleted posts.  (I can see that Kingxy #1079021 really wants for that quoted post to stay visible, for some reason.)

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That’s a feature, not a bug.


What is with this “we”?  Speak for yourself.  You admitted that you’re careless, socially irresponsible, and unappreciative of good posts.  Leech.  Don’t project your own ill characteristics onto others.

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Your saying this demonstrates ipso facto that you lack sufficient intelligence to earn merit.  The OP in this thread provides a clear explanation.  Several infographics have been published.  How could you fail to grasp the concept, let alone declare it to be “quite complicated”?

If you really need to see a TV version, then you are just not meritorious—and you should stay away from forums based on written words.

That is called begging for merit, a matter FOR SHAME.  It is now my active policy that posts begging for merit are reported to moderators for deletion, and users who make those posts are tagged with negative trust, like so:


Were it feasible, I would also have merit-beggars locked in the stocks and subjected to public humiliation whilst being pelted with rotten vegetables—then exiled from this forum forever.

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No, you won’t—evidently.

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Be somebody other than you.  You will not get more merit—evidently.

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I hope that nobody answers your question.  Not only did you not read the original post on this thread:  You also somehow failed to observe which posts and which types of posts receive merit; and that is a rather obvious thing which could only be missed either by a bot operator who doesn’t actually read the forum, or by an utter imbecile.  You are evidently the type who will not get merit anyway, so you have no reason to be instructed about it.

Your syllogism is soundly stated.

As for “some do not view it this way”, who cares?  Should the henhouse and its maintainers fret even a whit over the opinions of foxes?  (With apologies to foxes, who may be sly, but were never execrable sub-animals as are spammers and account traders.)

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s/her/his/  (Note:  I did not fill out the “Gender” field in my forum profile, because I have a sex, not a “gender”.  I have now filled it out anyway.)

Jet Cash is not responsible for my behaviour.  Whyever would you ask the recipient of merit and replies to answer for their author?

I should have stopped right there.  But in case you don’t understand the difference between begging for merit/trust/reputation and the socially innocuous, long-established custom of a tipjar for voluntary recompense of those who give freely, I began to spell it out for you.  It started something like this:  “Social rules and the like are neither mechanistic nor oversimplified in their derivations; and working backwards from a single disconnected abstraction never produces good results for anything....”  Then, it got long—very long.  At some point, it crossed paths with actmyname’s syllogism on untrustworthy behaviour, as quoted above; go reread that, then try to explain how a tipjar demonstrates untrustworthiness.

Whereas I am neglecting replies to other people, and I also doubt the productiveness of explaining the aforestated difference to someone who does not get it, or pretends not to.

I didn’t do anything!  The grey aliens did it—and by that, I mean the hive-mind of you/Lauda/theymos/et al.  ← [new excuse of next user caught merit-farming]

(The crypto-lover in me tried to find a hidden message spelt out in the sizing and capitalization of those letters.  Either there isn’t one, or I fail at quick mental codebreaking—or I missed something because I have webfont-loading disabled for security reasons.  On the plus side, the chip implanted in my head by you/Lauda/the CIA is now downloading the forum oligarchy’s directives for persecuting and oppressing poor, innocent users such as HALLASTERA/kinki32.  —Oh!  I just now received a directive to say, “Muahahaha!”)

P.S., cultural cross-pollination:  Spamfighters on news.admin.net-abuse.email are all part of and/or on the payroll of a “lumber cartel”, which fears the competition of environmentally friendly e-mail advertising to deadtree spam direct marketing.  Of course, they all deny it with the acronym TINLC (“There Is No Lumber Cartel”).  Among others which are similar, this tradition dates back to the ’90s, when it grew from the seriously stated accusations of an actual spammer.  Spammers are so oft possessed of certain mental characteristics, which do not change with time or the medium being spammed.

n.a.n-a.e. was always one of the toughest newsgroups.  As you well know, spammers are nasty, self-entitled, mentally unstable morons with persecution complexes who impotently fantasize about revenge on anybody who interferes with their “marketing” efforts.  Most of the n.a.n-a.e. regulars did/do fight spam as part or all of their jobs, in the capacity of sysadmins, network consultants, or employees of companies developing antispam products.  They always had to be tough as nails, biting back hard when necessary.  You, Lauda, and a few others would fit right in there; given the nature of online pseudonymity, who knows if you did/do?  —Eureka!  I have another theory!  YOU ARE PAID BY THE LUMBER CARTEL!

This needs more precise numbers, dates, and times.  On the unverified assumption that theymos (uid 35) has the oldest consistently active, still-active account, I have calculated based on him.  In addition to the precise timestamp at or after which theymos may exceed 10k activity, I have also included that at which theymos will become eligible to exceed one million activity:  24 November 4748 (a Wednesday) at 12:40:00 UTC.  Rank:  The Mega-Activity Club!

(Dang.  Now, theymos will make garbage posts whining about how slow it is to rank up.)

The following states the timestamps at or after which theymos could instantly reach the stated activity level, if his post count exceeds his activity by not less than 14.  On that condition, his activity would actually reach the stated level upon his next post at or after that time.

1046	2010-02-08 20:13:20 (Monday)	Start of activity period 1046
	2010-02-09 12:49:38 (Tuesday)	theymos’ account registered:  uid 35 forum birthday!
	2010-02-10 06:31:40 (Wednesday)	theymos’ first post
1047	2010-02-22 20:20:00 (Monday)	Start of activity period 1047
...	...	...
1254	2018-01-30 19:20:00 (Tuesday)	theymos became elgible to reach 2926 activity, his actual current activity, at start of activity period 1254 (1046 + 209 - 1).  Calculated to confirm that he thus far has not missed nor underfilled any activity periods.
...	...	...
1760	2037-06-26 03:33:20 (Friday)	theymos may become eligible to reach 10010 activity at the start of activity period 1760 (1046+715-1).
...	...	...
72474	4748-11-24 12:40:00 (Wednesday)	theymos may become eligible to reach 1000006 activity at the start of activity period 72474 (1046 + 71429 - 1).

Activity epochs are as calculated using a little C program I whipped up.  All times are given in UTC.

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That’s setting the bar too low.

There are users such as theymos whose leadership status naturally draws (and deserves) floods of merit; theymos will probably reach 10k merit in a matter of months.

Even ignoring such special cases:  In my experience, an excellent poster who can devote huge amounts of time to the forum should conservatively expect to average about 20–25 merits per day.  That equates to 10k merits in 400–500 days.  Unless I need to reduce the time I spend on the forum (as is quite possible), I will be disappointed in myself if I fail to surpass 10k merit before I reach Hero rank.

(It is for this reason I advocate at least doubling or trebling the merit threshold to achieve Legendary rank.  Even for people who can’t devote so much time to posting, to earn 1000 merit in a few years is far too easy to be considered “Legendary”.)

To match the spirit of the original question about 10k activity, it is necessary to kick it up an order of magnitude:  Who will be the first user to achieve 100k merit?  Again excluding special cases such as theymos, estimating at the above-stated rate, and rounding very roughly, that should take about 11–14 years.

Bear in mind that theymos will reach his eighth forum-birthday next week, and there should be some other consistently active accounts of comparable age.  With that perspective—or really, an adult perspective, 11–14 years is not terribly long.

(I will be horrifically disappointed if I fail to achieve one megamerit by the year 2155!  —Well, actually not.  But it’s a fun thought.)

This is the Bitcoin Forum.  It is not the Altcoin Forum, and most particularly not the Bolt A Turing Complete VM Onto A Blockchain Security Nightmare With Centrally Controlled Promise-Breaking Via “Irregular State Change” Exploding Clown Car Cryptokitties Toy Coin Forum.

Expect for the official coin of the realm to be Bitcoin.