I'm afraid I've got some bad news.

Of course, the purpose of AI in games is usually not to beat the player, but to simulate a human opponent, making it a sort of Turing test. If the human players don't realise the AI isn't playing to win, it passes.

And the government does a good job of backing it, right?



Never mind.

Of course it does. The blockchain's currently about 16GB. You think Bitcoin-Qt reads the entire blockchain every time it needs to display a transaction? Try this: close Bitcoin-Qt, remove everything from the data directory except wallet.dat, then restart. All your transactions are still there (albeit unconfirmed), even though the blockchain is gone. So how does it know?

Wait a minute. You said you removed the empty wallet.dat that was created by the new Bitcoin-Qt installation? So how could you have been using the wrong folder the whole time? That doesn't... ah, never mind. Glad you fixed it in the end.

A single transaction won't make much difference to the file size, but in either case if Bitcoin-Qt is 15 weeks behind and the transaction was made more than 15 weeks ago, it definitely should be displayed. So I'm guessing something's gone horribly wrong somewhere... Don't panic, wait for it to finish synchronising, then close and restart with -rescan (wallet backups are supposed to work without a rescan, but in this case it doesn't seem to be doing what it's supposed to), and if it still doesn't work, resume panicking, I guess.

So, it didn't actually contain any transactions at the time you made the backup? That explains a few things... Nothing to do but wait until it finishes synchronising and (hopefully) your transactions will start appearing one by one. If not... didn't you say you have multiple backups? You really ought to be trying the most recent (or largest) file first.

Clarify: does it say it's "rescanning", or "synchronising"? It can't continue scanning if you swapped the wallet files. It can only resume a rescan if it's still using the same wallet file. And if it's synchronising, a rescan is not useful anyway.

The wallet.dat file stores the height of the most recent block, and blocks beyond that (if any) are automatically scanned for new transactions on startup. A full rescan is normally unnecessary and pointless.

That's damned unusual. Are you sure you renamed the file correctly? How large is the wallet.dat file?

The last part is incorrect. It is not necessary to even have any blocks at all for your balance to be displayed (though it will be displayed as "unconfirmed" in that case).

Why is everybody making this more complicated than it needs to be?

This not necessary, because neither was the rescan. Close Bitcoin-Qt if it's still running (and be sure to wait for it to fully shut down), delete (or rename, if you're paranoid) the empty wallet.dat created by Bitcoin-Qt when you first attempted to start it, rename wolverine.dat back to wallet.dat, and restart Bitcoin-Qt. Your balance should be displayed immediately; there is normally absolutely no need for a rescan when restoring a wallet backup.

Bitcoin transaction fees are not "a tiny percentage", as they're not a percentage of anything. The fee is independent of the amount transacted. Also remember that Bitcoin is a global payment network that does not distinguish between domestic and international transactions. I guarantee that your bank will not let you send $0.05 by international wire for less than $0.11 in fees.

What kind of idiot describes an unproven candidate algorithm as "unassailable"? That's not a rhetorical question, either: the article doesn't actually quote anybody as saying any such thing. Unproven algorithms are broken all the time; that's how they're tested. How is this even news?

All spiders are venomous, though generally no more so than bees and wasps; with most spiders, a bite is just a minor annoyance unless you're allergic. Though spiders rarely bite humans in the first place. They're simply nowhere near as dangerous as most people imagine.

Actually, that's exactly why they make their scams so obvious. If the scam is more subtle, they'll get many more responses, but most of those people will figure out it's a scam before it's too late, wasting the scammer's time. With ridiculously obvious scams, however, the few people who do respond are the ones who are guaranteed to fall for it. It's much more efficient to scam a small number of really gullible people than a large number of not-so-gullible ones.

A new house? For a million dollars? A tiny house in the middle of nowhere, maybe, but even that doesn't leave much change. Fucking real estate bubble.

My prediction, on the other hand, is based on my having paid the entry fee for the contest. Please refrain from spreading your nonsense in this thread until you're willing to put your money where your mouth is.

Source? In every version I've seen until 0.9, it's always been 250kB. It was never 500kB as far as I know.

Specifically, the reason is that Bitcoin versions prior to 0.9 do not produce blocks larger than 250kB unless there are transactions paying more than double the minimum required fee (which is almost never the case). Some pools (notably Eligius) removed this restriction, but most kept the default policy. Miners using Bitcoin 0.9 should only be producing small blocks if there are absolutely no more fee-paying transactions in the memory pool (unless they've modified their clients to restore the old behaviour).

Looks like we're on track for $0.447 - $0.501, just as I predicted.

Increasing the max block size especially isn't going to do much if most miners don't upgrade. Bitcoin 0.9 no longer produces such blocks (I think).

Where'd you get this crazy idea? There is only one public key for a given private key, and only two ways that public key can be represented (compressed and uncompressed), giving two addresses. Not billions. Note also that private keys in wallet import format specify which of the two addresses should be used.