Virtually all of those calculators are completely wrong.  You cannot simply calculate entropy of a human sourced password without a statistical model at least as powerful as a typical human mind. Advice like assuming uniform probability over the character set is provably bad (by virtue of people with ~60 character 'brainwallet' keys which have been compromised) and you should feel bad for suggesting it.

This is about the N-th time this bad idea has been brought up here. Please use the search.

I should direct you specific to my last rant on the subject: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311000.msg3345309#msg3345309

It's very hard to advance the art here, even with awesome strengthening because there is no salt (and cannot be really effectively— if there were place to store the salt, forget the brain nonsense and just use the salt as a strong random key) and because the data is constantly available to attackers. This means that even if a cracking farm goes slowly— maybe only 1000 attempts per second— once you have a million users using it you're getting an effective rate of a billion attempts per second.  Then you run into the really strong resistance people have had in having effective strengthening: Strengthening enough to be more than the smallest speedbump is just not usable implemented in Javascript and this is constantly used as an excuse to do weak things...

and then you multiply it by the surprisingly unreliability qualities of human memory. It's just a bad idea all around, and it's irresponsible engineering to suggest anyone use this sort of scheme.

Running?

I'm my experience Hashfast's definition of "running" is "running with your money".   I paid 98 BTC to Hashfast and have received absolutely nothing for it. After months of delays, empty promises, and — what now seems to be— outright lies HF is now not responding to me. I have been civil and professional in my communication, and have made offers of compromises beyond what I was obligated to accept under the contract.  To all this hashfast has been about as responsive as a brick wall.

Cointerra OTOH isn't a bunch of thieves, in my experience: they actually shipped me a product, and while it was a bit late they offered me a refund of additional product. I think most buyers would prefer Cointerra to "running".

But this is just my personal experience, but I thought it would be better to point this out and thereby bring it back on topic.

It's real but that doesn't mean it's correct.

We morn and continue on, we've done releases without Gavin. There is no part of the process which is dead in the water without him. Access and records are shared among multiple people.
Anyone with the alert key can send a maximum sequence alert which overrides all other alerts and plays a hard-coded message that the alert key has been compromised... though it's not like anyone really notices or pays attention to alerts.

By this you mean miners, since they can exclude from the consensus votes which they do not like. Bitcoin like systems, at least, are not jamming proof networks.

Eligius won't mine transactions which appear to be abusing the system to store data.

Data in an OP_RETURN should be a hash in any case. Bitcoin is not a distributed data storage, and the cost and risk associated with the data is an externality which you are not paying for.

Few people are independently wealthy enough that they can contribute large amounts of productive time to efforts which have no prospect of putting food on the table for their families. Effort in complicated systems is not a linear process: One man hour from each of ten-thousand people does not bring the same benefits as as a thousand man hours from each of ten people.  One man hour probably doesn't even get a new person through compiling the code, much less understanding it.

The selection of interested and qualified contributors is already thin enough that further limiting it exclusively to monks and millionaires would probably not be healthy for the system.  I too share concerns about distortion from commercial interests (in particular, modern western businesses are often incredibly short sighted and indifferent to non-monetizable rewards like privacy, personal autonomy, or social-cohesion), but when someone profits considerably from a work they have the capability, rational justification, and— arguably— the moral obligation to fund some of it. Commercial interests are an essential and completely legitimate part of the ecosystem and it's good that they be represented too, reservations aside.

In any case: I look forward to your patches.

Directing money to some particular set of pre-ordaned developers (or developer choosing people, or pre-miners) as part of the system is a point of centralization of the sort that Bitcoin seeks to eliminate.  People choosing personally, individually, and autonomously to fund work, contributors, or funding schemes they consider valuable is— I believe— the only method which is in accordance with the implicit principles of the system, though it may not work very well.  Sure, paying people with everyone elses funds is more attractive, but that isn't what infrastructure like Bitcoin is about.

I don't believe this notion of developers having oodles of coin and being somehow selfishly motivated to contribute to preserve their value makes any sense. For one— it has the freeloading problem, assuming someone has oodles of coin they can just sit back and let someone else do the work, or they can contribute and feel that a lot of other people with a lot more coin are unfairly benefiting from their efforts. For another, I don't believe that many / _any_ of us actually have the aforementioned oodles: Being around "early" by no means guaranteed ever having a large amount, nor did it grant magical foresight to not sell most of it at $7, and it makes it much easier to have given away thousands and thousands of it in bounties (which some of us are known to have done), or to have lost it in scams/heists.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that directly profiting by Bitcoin's future value is the best motivational structure in any case: It favors bubble forming activity (why make a profit only on the up when you can take risky actions which create volatility and make money both up and down, over and over again?)

My own motivations are essentially political: I favor a world where people have the option to choose to use trustless systems, and geeky: cryptographic protocols and high-risk embedded software development are exceptionally enjoyable mental puzzles. I'm certain I could get paid to work full time on Bitcoin, but such arrangements unavoidably come with strings attached— even if they're silk strings— which may not be very compatible with my motivations. Things like the foundation may help cut through that, but I think that unless we have multiple such organizations we risk creating dangerous points of centralization.

Another reason that self-investment doesn't make sense as a development funding argument is that it currently appears to be a losing strategy when compared to some of these high profile altcoin efforts. Right now it appears that you can take a poorly substantiated bill of goods and sell the promise of future development to the market and receive thousands of Bitcoins and perhaps never create anything successful at all. The ideas don't even need to be technically sound, the applications don't need to be well defined, the whole thing can even be more or less completely redundant with Bitcoin...

In general I think we should do all the things: We should have developers on company payrolls, community and institution funded developers, freelance agents, academic researchers on grants, bounties for specific functionality, independently wealthy tinkerers, etc.  Though I doubt we'll have any self-investors: They'll chase altcoins and business schemes that have more near-term upside. Any one mechanism has its limitations, hopefully we can support many approaches and gain the advantages of all of them.

No it's not guaranteed— recently we've been talking some about removing this, reducing this, and will likely make it switchable. So far the initial commentary we've seen mostly appears to be people looking to use it abusively and in ways which will be detrimental to the Bitcoin currency.

No, withdraws are not happening.

MTGox has continually thorough the shutdown made a small number of what appear to be dust-cleanup transactions. Thats all these appear to be...

Ironically, someone of them like TXID: ed7ffa58fef651adaf1281ad10e98a4399eb2be40950345c7ccb7c8f76f067e1 in their liast are spending immature coinbases  (45d45286bac04311684ab7716ab170b50781cde6b094d9a644fb89ca07ae6888:31 is a coinbase with 67 confirms as I write this) and so it's not a valid transaction.  So even after all this time and weeks of outages for fixes MTGox is still producing invalid transactions.

The ntxid field is somewhat new, I first noticed it there a week-ish ago.

Thats nonsense, no one would run it regardless of what trumped up excuses were given.  And if you did— it would moot bitcoin, anyone who did run that would be stupid enough to deserve what they get.

BC.i knows the complete mapping of bitcoin addresses to accounts (and emails if provided).  With this information they technically have the capability to target specific users and replace their JS code at sign-on with new code that intercepts the private keys.  With the private keys in hand the coins could be diverted out of your control.

If you happen to not log in after such targeting begins and instead use an email backup of your wallet, then the only exposure is brute forcing the wallet encryption— though the encryption strengthening is not very strong, there are apparently GPU crackers that can test on the order of 1M keys per second, and most users are not capable of choosing keys which can withstand a strong attack (even— or especially— if they believe they are capable).

Hey, another ID could be useful to help with customer support—  really this is only because people are not using Bitcoin as intended: if all your withdraws were to unique scriptPubkeys then thats all the ID you need to know you've been paid.

Of course, there would be no reason to gate withdraws on being able to give people IDs to look up transactions:  For one, you could always have your own internal gox UUID (which they already issue) to list-of-txids. ... and even without _any_ improvements in that regard, an ID lookup is only relevant in some negligible number of odd transactions.  I'm pretty sure customers would understand "Withdraws are enabled and working fine, but if there is any issue with your transaction, you'll have to wait in a long support queue to get it sorted" and prefer that over the current situation.

What that additional ID has to do with the Bitcoin protocol I dunno— it would purely be a frontend feature, and it's not like bitcoin-qt is the most significant wallet frontend— esp since it doesn't normally index third party transactions at all. There is no place for something like that in the protocol itself, similar to how the protocol itself has no concept of addresses (only scriptpubkeys) or change.

There really was no premine and you can _trivially_ verify it for yourself. Please spend a few minutes actively investigating rather than believing charlatans on the forum, before wasting may more of ours.  This is the technical subforum, it's reasonable to expect you to be able to do a bit of your own homework.

There isn't currently a direct facility for it— because it's not generally something you're supposed to use.

OP_RETURN is like giving out clean needles to heroin addicts.  It's there as harm mitigation, but it isn't something thats generally good for the system.

When there is an actual application for using them in the software then that will be exposed— but just using it to cram data into transactions and externalize your storage costs onto the network? No.

... https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#Variable_length_integer

Correct, in fact because most pools charge a fee— and practically all except p2pool expose to to some risk of theft by the pool operator or to the pool being hacked— they reduce your income somewhat.

But they make payments more stable.  I strongly recommended p2pool— it eliminates the risk of theft and the centralization of network resources.  It doesn't provide as much variance reduction as other pools, though then again, if you're a very small miner you're not exactly counting on a payment every day to put food on the table.

Well, actually—

Zapwallet will fix these cases, in a kind of blunt way.

There is also a patch forthcoming that will release stuck coins (after, by default, something like 144 blocks).

The "free unit" (which is in a later patch) just brings the price to $7200/unit. People with December orders still paid $2400 more than January, which is a bit unfortunate.

Fwiw, CrazyRabbi  is a well known scammer on IRC who owes a lot of people a lot of Bitcoin: http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=SupaDupaJenkins  I've suggested some of his creditors contact Bitmain and ask to receive those funds.