You must be mistaken. There was never a version 0.3.666 of Bitcoin-Qt (the latest version 0.3.x was 0.3.24) and versions prior to 0.4.0 did not support encryption. If your wallet was encrypted, you were definitely not using version 0.3.something. Bitcoin-Qt certainly does not auto-update; you were most likely using 0.8.1 all along and got confused about the version number somehow.

Set Bitcoin-Qt back to SOCKS 5 and restart.

D'oh! Didn't see that. Delete SocksListenAddress. It's not supposed to be used in Tor 0.2.3, and setting it to 127.0.0.1 doesn't even do anything anyway.

Aha. On further investigation, it seems that recent versions of the Tor Browser Bundle on Windows and Mac use port 9150 instead of 9050 for some reason, causing every application that tries to use Tor (except for TBB itself) to break completely.

First of all, do not enter 9150 as your SOCKS Port in Bitcoin-Qt. Although this will appear to work, Bitcoin-Qt will not realise you are using Tor (since you're using a non-standard port) and will accept non-Tor connections, potentially compromising your anonymity.

Instead, you should add SocksPort 9050 (on a new line) to your torrc file. Leave ControlPort and the existing SocksPort line alone. eg:Do not do this from within Vidalia, as due to a (probably) unrelated bug Vidalia will not save the file correctly if you have multiple SocksPort lines, instead edit torrc in a text editor (be sure not to save it torrc.txt, as Windows tends to "helpfully" do), then restart Tor.

The Control Port is irrelevant. It is only used by Vidalia, not Bitcoin-Qt. If you mess it up, Vidalia will not function, and you will get an error when you try to run it (though I'm pretty sure you can't mess it up unless you've configured Tor from outside of Vidalia). The SOCKS Port is something completely different. Check your Tor configuration file (torrc) and verify that your SOCKS port is either 9050 or not set at all (if it's not set, Tor uses 9050 as the default).

...and other applications can connect over Tor without any problems, yes? If so, I'm all out of ideas.

You didn't hear about it because high CPU usage isn't a major problem. At worst it causes other applications to run a bit slower.

If high CPU usage cause your computer to overheat, your computer's cooling system is defective in some way. It is broken and it needs to be fixed. It's as simple as that.

No. The Control Port is what Vidalia (and other Tor controllers) use to configure Tor. Applications (including Bitcoin-Qt) using Tor to connect to the Internet anonymously do so through the SOCKS Port, which should be 9050 unless you've changed it. Assuming you haven't changed it, it should "just work", though it may be slow. It should eventually connect if you just leave it running for a while. If not, I don't really know what to suggest other than making sure you really are connected to the Tor network and that other applications (eg web browsers) can connect over Tor, though I assume (and probably shouldn't) that you've already tried that.

Your computer most definitely does not "work fine". If it's overheating with the CPU at 100% load, there's something seriously wrong. Note that most modern games don't use 100% of your CPU, since they do most of their processing on your graphics card, so just because you can run games fine does not mean your computer is working properly. Either the fans are defective, the heatsink is not properly attached, the case has no airflow, or either the fans or heatsink are extremely dirty. Blow out the fans and heatsink with compressed air, make sure the case has adequate airflow (not too close to a wall or something), and if it still doesn't work, take it back to the place you bought it (if it's still under warranty) or else pay someone to fix it, because your computer is defective.

There is nothing wrong with the software: it's just using your CPU in the way it was designed to be used, to process data. If your CPU overheats as a result of this completely normal usage, the problem is with your computer, not the software.

Good thing I don't think that, then. Yes, many corporation do bad things, just as many people do bad things. They can be corrupt, they can make mistakes, they even break laws sometimes if they think they can get away with it. But at the end of the day, their employees have a job and their customers can buy useful products at affordable prices. Look me straight in the eye and tell me that's not a good thing.

Exactly. To succeed in business you must constantly strive to provide better products at cheaper prices than your competitors, and if they can't compete, then tough luck! Wait a sec... better products at cheaper prices? That sounds like it could be helpful to people! Damn those evil companies, ruthlessly trying to out-help each other!

You're not going to get very far if you don't care about your customers. Or your employees. Or your shareholders. In fact, it's not enough to merely care about them; you have to actually provide a tangible benefit to them. If you don't help all of these people, you're out of business. It's as simple as that.

That's actually exactly what rich people usually do with most of their money (if you think they spend most or even a significant fraction of it on mansions and fast cars, you're mistaken). They invest their money in promising businesses, giving these businesses the capital they need to get up and running, and in return the investor receives a share of the business's future profits. A new business is formed, the business owner makes money, the investor makes money, the business's employees make money; it's win-win.

Clicking "New Identity" in Tor usually helps if you have a bad connection. Also note that connecting over Tor can be very slow at times, so you have to be patient.

How can they afford to live in mansions? They'd need a ton of money, obviously. So how did they get a ton of money? Assuming they didn't steal it, they'd have to have produced something useful for the community, that someone else was willing to pay for. Most people make money by doing useful work for the benefit of other people. Businesspeople make money by creating and maintaining businesses, without which the workers would be unemployed. Ultimately, everyone who isn't a thief earns money by helping others in some way or another.

That's not to say there's no room for charity, but just making a ton of money by honest means is pretty charitable on it own.

I'm going to assume you mean when the block reward reaches 0 and all 21 million coins have been mined, in which case transaction fees continue to go to the miners just as they always have. Good thing too, since that's what motivates miners to continue mining past that point. Note that the purpose of mining is to secure the network, not to produce new coins; new coins are just a (temporary) side benefit to bootstrap the whole process. Once all coins have been mined, miners will be paid purely in transaction fees, ie, Bitcoin will be supported on a pure "user pays" basis.

Any peers connected to you can see your IP address, though they can't easily prove that your transaction was really from you or if you were just relaying someone else's transaction. If you're worried about your IP address being logged, use Tor.

Turbo-Blowmeister 3000D, 38 ft³/min, Taiwan

Because if you keep your ASICs to yourself, you're betting that your competitors won't develop their own ASICs and drive the difficulty way up, because if they do, you suddenly can't make a profit anymore. But simply selling your ASICs immediately is a guaranteed way to make a profit, and the potential for a future difficulty rise is your customers' problem, not yours. Sure, there's a good chance you could make more money mining than by selling, but it's still only a chance, and when you spend millions on design and manufacturing equipment, you just can't afford to take chances.

This is just plain wrong. This is probably the riskiest thing you can do with Bitcoin (besides use an unencrypted wallet with no backups). If you do this, you almost certainly will lose money, one way or another. There are two different ways you can lose money by doing this. First, and most obviously, anyone who gains access to one of your unencrypted backups will be able to steal your bitcoins.

Second, if you create a new address in your encrypted wallet (which, for technical reasons, also happens every time you send bitcoins), this new address will not be present in your backup wallet. Normally it would be, as the wallet generates 100 addresses in advance for exactly this reason (you can create up to 100 new addresses and they'll all be present in your backup, so you don't have to worry if your backup is a little bit out of date), but encrypting your wallet deletes these unused addresses and creates 100 new ones, to minimise the amount of money you stand to lose if a previous unencrypted backup gets stolen (ideally, it would delete all your address and replace them with new ones, but it can't delete the ones you're already using, because, well, you're using them). If you send bitcoins using your encrypted wallet, or create new addresses in your encrypted wallet, your unencrypted backup will not be able to recover all your bitcoins.

You have been warned.

Micropayments can't work. Ever. No matter what system you use, there is going to be some fixed cost to process each transaction. A 10 cent transaction will always cost just as much as 10 million dollar transaction. There's always going to be a point at which the transaction is sufficiently worthless that it costs more to process it than it's worth. Bitcoin is far cheaper than any other electronic payment system on the planet, and as such has a lower limit on what constitutes a micropayment than other systems (eg, Visa defines a micropayment as anything under $20; for Bitcoin, it's currently anything under BTC0.01, or about $1.20). Maybe an even cheaper system can be devised which can handle even smaller transactions, but there'll always be a limit as to how small.

Note also that Bitcoin's transaction fees can be (and have been) changed to reflect changing market prices, so rising prices will not lead to exorbitant fees.

I have several times. They've always paid the same day, though most banks take 1-2 business days to actually credit your account.

Yes, this is normal. P2pool has a much higher share difficulty than other pools, so it takes longer to find a share, but each share is also worth more, so you still earn the same amount (on average) as with other pools, though you'll get more variance.

You won't get an efficiency figure until you've found at least one share, and it won't be statistically meaningful until you've found a lot of shares.

It's okay though, because...

Mt. Gox is in the writing business now? That must be where all these incompetently-written articles are coming from.