The domain has not expired, instead it appears the site has been hacked. Thread about it here.

Nope. Look closer. It actually links to elg.de. I've just notified ELG Haniel Gruppe about it. If that email address is for real, obviously one of their employees is behind it. I'm not sure how dumb you have to be use your company-provided email to perpetrate a scam, though it wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

I just about to post this. Looks like they've been hacked. Oddly, ernährung-leicht-gemacht.de doesn't even exist and elg.de is a respectable steel recycling business that appears to be completely unrelated.

Who does this information belong to and what do want done to this person that you can't do yourself?

Why not? HTML itself only uses plain ASCII characters, and HTML entities allow any other character to be represented in ASCII text. You could encode a Chinese-Klingon dictionary in ASCII using HTML entities if you really wanted to, though it would take a whopping 8 bytes per character.

The forum does not use UTF-8, or any other flavour of Unicode. It uses ISO-8859-1, or at least, that's how it serves its pages. If it actually does store posts in UTF-8 (or any other encoding), it would have to perform the conversion every time a page is requested, which seems rather wasteful.

The forum doesn't use Unicode. All non-ASCII characters must be converted to the corresponding HTML entity (eg, "©" becomes "©" or "©") in order to be displayed correctly. Without conversion, "©" will actually be displayed as "©". You've probably seen this before on sites that don't perform this conversion correctly.

How many of them ever did? I don't recall there ever being that many.

Yes, really. You've actually been making fun of a straw man this whole time. We're not laughing with you, we're laughing at you. I'm sorry if it took you so long to figure that out.

Ah, now I get it. Is it users who have an odd number of vowels in their name who can be seen through the orange glass door?

Only users whose avatars are not predominantly blue can be seen through the orange glass door. (Orange glass blocks blue light, after all.)

18epGEsgCTHCmZxmyo4uJgJCA35NEaRkPn

On behalf of the Bitcoin community, I hereby present you this award in recognition of your highly valuable and exceptionally speedy service:

These groups are not representative of humanity at large. At least, I hope to Eris they aren't.

And David Hasselhoff is Germany's most-loved actor. If Canadians can be bothered to click on "About Us" instead of just assuming that if Canadians love it, it must be Canadian, this is what they'd see:
The fact that a supposedly Canadian company is headquartered in the United States is what's known as a "clue".

Who knew? Well, I guess everyone who knew that PayPal is based in the United States and as such has to comply with United States law. They might have known. But nobody else could have. It's not like that information is easy to find out, or anything.

The mining "difficulty" is automatically adjusted to compensate for increasing (or decreasing) mining power such that one "block" (currently worth BTC25) is mined every 10 minutes on average. If blocks are mined faster than that, the difficulty will increase to slow them down, and vice versa if block are mined slower.

Wrong. Trendon Shavers did not steal a single cent of fiat. His scam was conducted entirely in bitcoins. He took people's bitcoins, promised to pay them even more bitcoins, and absconded with their bitcoins. Fiat never even entered the picture until he sold his stolen bitcoins.

The solution to these problems are cold storage (storing keys offline) and backups, respectively. Anyone with a large amount of bitcoins would be crazy to not do both.

They'll have to do better than that. The combined computational power of current Bitcoin miners is the equivalent of 3 exaFLOPS.

Of course, both the U.S. government and other governments are free to mine bitcoins if they want (and can justify the expense to their taxpayers). Anyone who contributes their computing power to the network will be rewarded; Bitcoin doesn't discriminate.

Each bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places, providing a total of 2 quadrillion currency units (called "satoshis", in honour of Satoshi Nakamoto), enough for everyone on Earth to own about a quarter of a million satoshis each.

The goal of exchanges is the same as the goal of money itself: to allow people to trade things they have for things they want. When someone sells their coins for fiat, who do think is buying them? Obviously, it's someone else who wants to buy coins for fiat. And that's good, because how else would someone who has only fiat (which, incidentally, is most of the population of the world) acquire their first bitcoins?

The same thing that stops people from writing software to do anything and tricking other people into running it: not much. That's why malware is such a major problem in the world today.

Mining does do real work. Not just real work, but necessary work. It is the process of validating the record of all Bitcoin transactions, in such a way as to make fraudulent modification of this record next to impossible. If you were wondering what stops people from simply "copying" a bitcoin and spending it in more than one place (the so-called "double-spending problem"), this is it.

SHA256 is used for more than just Bitcoin. It is used in many, many other cryptographic applications including electronic banking, military intelligence, digital forensics, etc. If it were ever "cracked", we're not the only people who'll be in a world of shit. In any case, it's most unlikely to happen overnight. What's far more likely to happen is "weaknesses" will be discovered in the algorithm, which might theoretically lead to it being eventually cracked, say, several years afterwards. In that case, there'll be plenty of time to switch to a new algorithm.

Guess you haven't been reading the news lately.

Because nobody wants to explain to their insurance company how the burglar managed to unlock the door from the inside with nothing more than a length of hose attached to the exhaust of their getaway vehicle? But don't worry, I have a solution. It's a device that allows gases to escape through a tube that is too narrow for a person to fit through. I call it a "ventilation duct". Please give me $5M to develop this idea.

Every block contains a special transaction called a "generation" transaction, which is created by the miner and credits the miners address with coins produced out of "thin air". This is the only case where a transaction can credit an address without debiting another by the same amount, and there is a limit to how many coins the miner can give himself this way. That limit is the "block reward" (originally BTC50, currently BTC25, and decreasing by half every 4 years) plus the transaction fees of any other transactions the miner included in his block.

It is perfectly allowable for a block to contain absolutely no transactions other than the generation transaction (even if there are many other transactions waiting to be included), however the miner will not be able to collect any transaction fees in that case. The transaction fees give miners a financial incentive to include as many transactions as they can (assuming those transactions have transaction fees - miners have no incentive to include "free" transactions, which is why free transactions often take a very long time to be included in a block).

Impossible by definition. As I explained earlier, an address specifies what key(s) can be used to spend coins sent to that address. By definition, if a key cannot be used to spend coins sent to a particular address, then that key is not (and never can be) related to the address in any way. If a particular key is one of the keys associated with an address, then it is (and always will be) able to spend coins sent to that address. That's how the key-address relationship works. It is also not possible for one address to "control" another (whatever that means).

If you want to require that a different key be used for every transaction (and you still haven't explained why you want to do this), you must create a new address for every time you get paid, and tell your payers to only send coins to your newest address and not re-use your old addresses. (This is the recommended method of using Bitcoin, as it allows you to label each address with the reason you expect to be paid there, so you can more easily tell who is paying you for what.)

You can do this with a 1-of-n multisig address, though I can't imagine why you would want to. What exactly do you hope to achieve?

This is how change works normally. Though obviously if you want to spend your change with a different key or set of keys, it has to be sent to a different address. If you send change to the original address, or more coins are subsequently sent to your original address, they can only be spent with the same key you used originally (or any one of the original keys, if it is a 1-of-n address). That's inherent to the very definition of an address: an address specifies which key or keys may be used to spend coins sent to that address. Different key(s) == different address.