This.

There are many reasons why people mine, other than the price of electricity. An exchange or a retailer might choose to mine to keep their transactions flowing smoothly; and there will always be altruists and idealists who will mine regardless of the price of electricity.

Also, there are plenty of people other than botnet operators who pay zero marginal price for their electricity.

Sorry, rokj and I got this mixed up. It's the EFF that stopped accepting donations, and they still don't accept them. The FSF has continued to accept them without interruption.

This is the same address as used previously. The funny thing is, donations to that address didn't stop (or even slow down much) when the FSF announced that they were not accepting Bitcoin donations.

Anyway, this is great news.

Which government has ever weaned itself off debt? On the other hand, plenty have defaulted and later recovered.

A short, sharp, shock is the least painful way out of Greece's mess. Anything else is just delaying the solution and storing up even bigger problems for the future.

True, but you can easily have a currency union without political union. For example, many countries use the US dollar or peg to the US dollar.

Greece could stay in the Eurozone, but the Greek government could default on its debt repayments. Of course, no-one would lend any more money to the Greek government. The government would immediately have to start spending within its means, and is that a bad thing?

But this crisis isn't about that. This crisis is about finding ways to keep Europe chugging along without exposing the folly of exponentially-increasing government debt.

Even now that they just accidentally leaked the email addresses of all their users?

The quantities bought and sold are always equal, but there IS a difference in market sentiment between people selling into asks that are already sitting on the order book, and buying into offers that are sitting on the order book.

Of course they can. For example, the statements were made in the formulation of this poll, yet no-one thinks the pollster was trying to form a contract.

You can go to any pub in my city on a Friday or Saturday night, and you will hear statements such as these, and it's obvious that it's rhetoric rather than an offer to contract.

It's very different. In your example we're probably talking about a contractual undertaking rather than "speech".

Just submit the jpg files, sergio, and see what happens.

You have to pick your battles. The battle between zip and jpg file formats is not the one you need to be fighting at the moment.

Making a big scene here is not going to help if you're not already doing whatever you can to resolve the problem.

Also, the poll is asking whether speaking should be responded to with violence. Real, physical violence. No matter how abhorrent someone might consider speaking words to be, they might consider a violent response to be even more abhorrent.

If someone in my community were to offer to pay money for blue-eyed people to be killed, I would not want that person violently attacked. But I would certainly wish and hope that my community would want to address the problem in non-violent ways. For example: find out why the person hates blue eyes and see if the issue can be resolved, or find a way to prevent the killing.

In any case, a violent response is counter-productive. It just makes the haters of blue-eyed people more resolute in their ambition to kill them. Much better to back off from escalating the violence, defuse the situation and attempt to resolve it, and let the whole idea of hatred towards blue-eyes come to be seen as moronic rather than heroic.

That option was not in the poll. The poll option was for uttering the statement, not for paying someone to kill blue-eyed people.

In this poll, do you mean "should be banned by the state, enforced by violence", or do you mean "should be banned by a forum owner, by revoking access to the forum"?

There's a big difference. In the second case, only the forum owner's vote is relevant.

Thanks mintymark, that makes sense.

It's not going to be easy to talk him through this remotely, when he has never used unix, dd, format, etc but I think it's the best way forwards.

Yes. This is what the "--recover" option of jackjack's version of pywallet does. It scans the disk at the sector level, looking for keys.

But the owner of the wallet runs Windows, which I haven't used since 1998. I have no idea how to install python on it, or even how to name the raw drive (as opposed to the formatted volume). Nor do I have physical access to the machine, or I'd just boot up a Linux rescue disk and scan from there.

If anyone does know how to do this on Windows, and is willing to patiently talk the guy through it by skype, I'll pay for their time in BTC whether successful or not.

Or maybe there's a simpler tool with fewer dependencies that will just scan the disk for a magic bitcoin pattern such as "30 82 01 13 02 01 01 04 20" (as posted by dayfall). If that's not present, I guess all hope of recovery is gone.

Thanks, but I searched with a hex editor, and that string (i.e. CONST 1) does not occur anywhere in the wallet file, nor does CONST 2. So it looks like wallet.dat is completely corrupt.

It seems the only remaining possibility is to run the "--recover" option of jackjack's pywallet tool on the original hard disk. However, the guy who lost the wallet runs Windows, which I haven't used since about 1998, so I wouldn't know where to begin.

Is there a trusted member who is familiar with pywallet's "--recover" option AND is prepared to talk the wallet owner through the process of installing python and scanning his hard disk (probably by skype)?

I'm prepared to pay a reasonable reward for the successful recovery of the wallet, based on time taken.

Thanks for the offer joulesbeef, but I prefer to wait a little while to see if I get an offer from someone with a visible track record of wallet support or troubleshooting. If no-one responds, I'll take you up on it in a day or two.

My own encrypted wallet still has lots of NUL characters at the beginning. It's the database content that is encrypted, rather than the database file, so I don't think accidental wallet encryption would produce the observed symptoms (unless it works differently under Windows).

I have been asked to recover a corrupted wallet. The wallet is owned by an influential blogger, so I'd really like to help him get it sorted out, for the benefit of Bitcoin. The wallet has been used to receive over 250 BTC to two donation addresses. There are no outgoing transactions.

He has emailed me the wallet.dat file. Here's what I've tried so far:

1. Copied wallet.dat into a fresh install of bitcoin-qt 5.2
2. Tried to dump the wallet using Gavin's bitcointools
3. Tried to dump the wallet using joric's and jackjack's pywallet tool

None of those tools can open the database within the wallet file.

So I tried the "--recover" option of jackjack's pywallet. It finds zero keys.

When I look at wallet.dat in a hex editor, the start of the file looks like binary data, unlike a regular wallet.dat which has lots of NUL characters at the start of the file. Furthermore, the unix command "strings" doesn't  return anything recognisable, whereas there are lots of instances of the string "key" in an uncorrupted wallet file.

Can anything more be done with this file? If so, I'll send it to any trusted member of the forum who is willing to work on it.

Otherwise, it seems the only remaining possibility is to run the "--recover" option of jackjack's pywallet tool on the original hard disk. However, the guy who lost the wallet runs Windows, which I haven't used since about 1998, so I wouldn't know where to begin.

Is there a trusted member who is familiar with pywallet's "--recover" option AND is prepared to talk the wallet owner through the process of installing python and scanning his hard disk (probably by skype)?

I'm prepared to pay a reasonable reward for the successful recovery of the wallet, based on time taken.

And yes, before anyone asks, he does know he should have had a backup system in place. Everyone who has lost a wallet knows that. The trick, however, is to know it *before* you lose the wallet...