Sorry, to bump up this thread but I have a question regarding stealth addresses. If you only have the stealth address and the nonce can you derive the "normal" bitcoin address to which the payment was made?

Using the accounts feature in bitcoin core is not recommended. Accounts can go negative. They don't work like a proper accounts system.

It supports old seeds. See the oldwallet class.


Electrum does key stretching because it allows you to enter your own seed which may be a human generated one. Because it has no way of knowing whether a seed is human generated or computer generated is stretches them all.

I am not sure what you mean by bitcoin does key stretching. If you are referring to bitcoin core software then it does key stretching for the wallet passphrase. That's all. It has nothing to do with the public blockchain or other wallets like electrum.

I'd just like to add that from 2.0 they'll be using PBKDF2. It's a standard that lots of wallets will support:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/41f9da1559f838fd191eb936359b911635010d2a/lib/bitcoin.py#L67

https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic/blob/master/mnemonic/mnemonic.py#L103

In the past you could enter your own seed to create an electrum wallet. Since human beings are not very good at producing random numbers these human generated seeds afforded poor security. To alleviate that they introduced key stretching. There is a whole sticky about this here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153990.0

Now most people are  using the computer generated seed that electrum creates on startup. That has 128 bits of entropy. But the key stretching is still applied to it. There is this thread where people are saying that key stretching reduces entropy:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330672.0

Is the above correct? Is it a bad idea to use key stretching on computer generated random seeds?

You can see the relevant code here:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/66e1e2707d4a82ecbe3f2bf7d532036d0a9651a8/lib/account.py#L101

I think he's charging people for explaining bitcoin to them rather than the actual paper wallet. But, yeah, that profit margin is too high. A fair price for micro amounts would be exchange +20%. Larger amounts can be sold at lower margins.

This looks good. Since you've asked for feedback here it is:

- What does validated mean when we look at a transaction's details? We are used to the idea of a confirmed transaction. Never heard of validated one.

- On the send tab the "Go to the next step" button appears greyed out. It is overshadowed by the two blue buttons above it (enter contact and select wallet).  I think it should be more prominent.

- The restore wallet option in the add wallet window talks about a seedphrase. Will this also accept extended public keys/master public key for a watch only wallet?

Thank you both for your opinion. So basically it gets pumped and dumped every now and then just like every other alt coin. The difference being that it is popular so it can count on some holders and therefore some "floor" value.


Very clever this. You need good social skills, though.

I think mintxfee only applies to the wallet i.e. users who are using bitcoin-qt and try to send low priority transactions through that. I don't think it applies to miners or users of other wallets.

Middle Eastern countries use their oil wealth to buy arms from western countries chiefly the US. They also hoard US treasuries. So most of the money flows back to the west.

Another difference is that you can't buy oil using any currency other than the US dollar. So this underwrites the US dollar. Iran tried to switch to the Euro but that has only led to sanctions.

I like PCs and I can understand why people like fax machines. It's interesting that fax machines are so much easier to use than  email. You don't need to be computer literate. Just enter a paper, punch in a number and the machine does the rest. The fact that email with all its clicking about and spam and malware made it gives me hope that bitcoin can make it too.

Why did dogecoin go up again? It was at 99 a while back and now it's 120+. The darn thing's inflationary and still goes up in price.

Yes, that's right. Also there was a bubble.

Greater merchant acceptance just means that early adopters dust off their paper wallets and bring coins out of cold storage to spend. That increases the supply of bitcoins while demand remains constant because no one is buying bitcoins to spend when other payment methods are more convenient.

This is good for what buyers there are. These old coins are now in the hands of newer speculators/investors. The price of a bitcoin has gone down so more people can afford to put their money in.

Greater merchant adoption also means that they start mentioning bitcoin in their marketing materials so that creates awareness. That could boost prices. Will it be enough to entice consumers to use bitcoin? Not by itself but it will help. Using bitcoin needs to get easier and safer before we see greater adoption by consumers.

Normally that's the case but the heartbleed bug meant that if you were using Linux and were connected to a malicious server it could read your seed. Most of the time the seed is encrypted but it's not designed to withstand bruteforcing. Then there are the times when you are sending bitcoins and seed is decrypted to sign the transaction.

What is your point? That section seems to agree with what I said.

0.01 is not a dust amount so first there's that.

Second, it will be a single transaction. It will have multiple inputs and 1 output.

Yes. The only thing you can do is wait. Transaction fee has been reduced to 0.00001 (4 zeroes) i.e. 1/10th of what medusa mentioned. This change has been made in the 0.9.0 version of bitcoin core. Because not everyone has upgraded to this version yet it takes a while to get your transaction confirmed. That will change in the future. Nevertheless if you want to try it you can do a transaction with this new fee and spend more of the bitcoins to an output address.

Walking around with a shiny glass phallus is asking to get jumped too.

Ah, but it's so pretty. If I bought it I would want to show it to everyone. What's the point of buying a shiny, expensive thing like this only to have it sit in a deposit box somewhere?