Let's remove the signature campaigns and bounties. I'll be interested in seeing how the quality of post would be.
A simple scenario: Oh no, I don't agree with his point of view, DEMERIT HAMMER! / Oh no! I don't like him! DEMERIT HAMMER!

It's not easy for the community to function this way. It's a lot easier to find some of the more constructive posts than all of the shitposts. Either you get loads more whining or leave the mods with a huge mess to deal with.

The node owner will have to create a webpage with their address included on it. The owner (or anyone else) will have to make a request via CURL to their server for their bot to crawl the page. It's pretty common for nodes to have webpage with statistics on it. I've had a node running with the program and I just created a page with my address without any fancy stuff.
Who is funding it? Why should we trust whoever is managing that incentive to not manipulate the system and have their own nodes win the lottery? Why would I want to run a full node because I can have a 1/10000 chance of winning that small prize?

Absolutely. Most of the posts there doesn't have any actual discussion going on and is mostly just a heaven for the shitposters. I've stopped going there already. IIRC, some of those threads were either locked or moved to offtopic.
If the thread is very old, you can try reporting it as a necrobump. They would most likely be removed.

Half correct. Bitcoin's difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to take an average. Bitcoin doesn't actually care about the hashpower. They only care about the time it takes between each block and tries to get it to as close as 10 minutes as possible.
Bitcoin is designed in such a way such that the longest chain with the valid proof of work is always correct. With 51% attack, the attacker is able to generate blocks faster than anyone else on the network. The attacker can first spend a transaction [A] and get it confirmed. Next, he will start to mine blocks starting from the point before the transaction [A] is confirmed and include a transaction [C] which spends Bitcoin to a separate place. The attacker will broadcast his own chain once he outpaces the legitimate chain. Since everyone thinks that the longest valid chain (difficulty wise) is correct, they will follow the attackers chain.

Bitnodes.io aka. bitnodes.earn.com used to have this sort of program where it awards nodes which meets the criterion randomly, once per week IIRC. The whole program doesn't really compensate much for the overheads of running a node and it certainly does not act as huge as an incentive to run a node. The uptime for the node should be about 24/7 to have a chance, together with the others which focuses on the quality of the node.

The problem with this kind of program is that it isn't sustainable. Nodes are important but there are probably enough people running it such that a reward program isn't justified.

Unfortunately not. They have a fixed number of posts that they will pay for and I'm pretty sure I'll exceed that this term
. I can't really see how I could've rephrased the first post to form the second though.
No need to apologise. Posts in meta doesn't count towards my signature campaign. I don't really care about that either, else I wouldn't be spending my time in sub forum and posts like this.

I believe that I have elaborated on the questions posed to you enough and you seem to be unwilling to address any of the questions.

First of all, stop using that version of Electrum. Search around for a Tails upgrade or just upgrade your Electrum. That version is not safe at all, please shut it down.

The extended seed option basically just increases the difficulty of anyone bruteforcing your seed. It doesn't really matter that much since the default number of mnemoric words is more than safe. Assuming that the length of the seed is 13 words, the possible number of combination is 2048^13. That is an incredibly large number and its unlikely that anyone would get to your seed in several of your lifetimes. If you'd like, the longer number of words would definitely be better with regards to this matter but I would prefer to store as little seeds as possible.

At any rate, Electrum doesn't follow any standards in their generation of seeds. Hence, any seed you generate using Electrum is incompatible with everyone else.

I'm sorry that I didn't reply sooner but it was buried under my recent replies and I feel that I should provide my own experience too.

I've used greenaddress previously and I feel that the concept was somewhat okay. Personally, I feel that it doesn't provide much more security than a wallet without a 2FA enabled. Now to the negative part:

Their Android app was nothing short of confusing and buggy. There was this one time where I've sent 0.044BTC to an address in a greenaddress wallet I've created on my Android app. I was certain that I have done the 2FA correctly and I didn't set any emails. IIRC, it crashed and closed after I've created the wallet. I wasn't given any warnings about it. When I tried to send the funds, the 2FA was incorrect and I was frustrated as hell. Thinking that I can get my funds back with their timelock function, I decided to wait. However, I can't send any of the files with the fact that there is no email set with the wallet. It's $500 in today's value and its terrible to see it stuck there. Their support wasn't helpful at all.

In short, stay away from Greenaddress.it. Good idea but terrible execution.

What did you really expect? Isn't the OP of that topic also Lutpin?

In most cases, the number of times that you plug in a SD card isn't the problem. I've never had a card that failed on me due to that and I remove them pretty often for various of my projects.

However, as with all non-volatile memory chips, they have a limited number of read/write cycles. SD cards and SSDs are both susceptible to this problem but I wouldn't worry too much in the case of SSDs. With SD cards, I doubt they are designed to function well under this kind of load. Bitcoin nodes are pretty resource intensive with the client fetching information ever so often. If they aren't one of the "better" ones, I wouldn't expect them to last a very long time. The SD card in your smartphone is probably fine since it didn't go through that many read/write cycles.

To the point on Raspberry Pi nodes, I feel that it is way more cost effective if you purchase a HDD to connect to it. It would be the best if you could salvage it from elsewhere. The sheer cost of a 128GB card is more than a 1TB WD HDD.

No. There's no difference between a 1MB transaction and 1KB transaction to the miner. [Or in terms of block weight]
Seems like the Segwit adoption remains somewhat constant throughout the months. Segwit is likely not the main reason for lower fees, unless you use Segwit too.

The only thing that affects the transaction fee is the amount of unconfirmed transactions and the willingness of miners to include your transaction. The fee market works in a way such that those that pays the highest fees/size will most likely be one of the top to confirm. If the number of unconfirmed transactions or transactions that pays high fees is low, then you could send your transaction with a lower fee and expect it to be confirmed in a reasonable period of time. Of course, miners can choose whichever transactions they want to include.

The number of inputs/outputs generally determine the size and hence the total fee. The amount does not matter.

Will you be kind enough to show us an example of a post of yours for which you believe is constructive? It's very subjective but the general consensus is that yours isn't, its pretty easy to tell.
No. The merit system isn't fool-proof but it seems like it works pretty well at separating the constructive and non constructive post.
Oops. But correlation =/causation. Still seems like you are reaching a bit too hard.

Copper member isn't any exclusive rank at all. Frankly, anyone can get it, if they are willing to pay. It just unlocks more features. Have you seen the content in their posts though? I would never consider a newbie or a legendary highly, unless they can at least provide content that has been well elaborated. I frankly ignore the rank when I look at posts.

Okay. Then why do you care so much about your rank? It seems like your rank is so important, to the extent that you need to type out a whole paragraph for it. Your opinion has been noted several times by the various topics with similar content. The fact that I see the signature on your signature space seems to suggest something else, together with the posts that you have with little to no substance to it.

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I wasn't on my computer and thus my message was rather short.

Based on your quote:

It seems like you have the impression that the rank matters so much, such that newbies and people from the lower tiers cannot hold discussions on this forum. This is completely wrong and unreasonable; it is a forum that facilitates discussion. The rank does not prohibit or censor anyone from openly discuss their thoughts or ideas. Posts or "opinions" as you may say, are welcomed. They aren't when there are literally hundreds of topics regarding this.

Quite the contrary. I've seen most of the merits going to people who are in the lower end of the rank spectrum as opposed to legendary etc. The main reason for that perception is because most of them either repeats what is being said or has subpar post quality.

FYI, it's not. Your rank doesn't undermine your posts. If your post has a decent substance to it, everyone will read it, no one cares about the rank.
You will never get merit because you don't post constructively period. That is how the system is supposed to work.
Neither is: nullius
LoyceV
etc. I could go on.

The point is, your status here doesn't matter. Everyone takes nullius seriously because he adds to the discussion and not because he is just a member.
Surprise, surprise. It is a Bitcoin forum. No one cares if you post. You only get merit when you post something that is constructive, at the very least.
As time passes, the number of farmed accounts would decrease substantially. You shouldn't be here to get paid*. If that is your main aim, this forum isn't for you. From what I've gathered from your post, it seems like the rank is the only thing that matters to you. Hmm.

* I'm never paid in Meta section nor have I really cared about getting paid or not.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm.

There's really nothing about opinions in this kind of stuff. It's just cold hard facts. I'd like to clarify that the transactions is indeed hashed together with the other transactions to form the merkle root but I feel that "merging" sounds wrong. And if its copied from elsewhere, it really isn't your opinion, but someone elses.

Given that the block reward would take quite sometime to reach 0, the efficiency of the ASICs would likely increase quite substantially and the electrical prices would decrease. Transactions are still being transacted on chain, albeit only in the opening and closing of channels in the case of lightning network.
If the volume of Bitcoin transactions increases even more, then the mining would still likely be fairly profitable.

Bitcoin's blockchain will still likely remain as the integral part of the system for the rest of its life, as well as the miners. Lightning network helps with the micro transactions but ultimately, it would all still involve Blockchain. The transaction volume now is quite substantial, if Lightning network becomes a reality, then normal day-to-day transactions would be feasible and hence a higher overall transaction volume.

Miners can definitely control the amount of hash power that they want to contribute, most likely by turning on and off the miners that they own. I'm pretty sure they can try to control the clock speed that their miners run at. The problem is that miners don't really mess with them. ASICs do have a specific frequency to run at such that they have the maximum efficiency. Each miners do cost miner to keep and they should be on at all times. Else, it is a net loss and a dead weight to the miner.


Yes. While more hashrate does mean that the electrical consumption will increase, it is assuming that the hardware doesn't change.
That's somewhat correct. The prices is definitely partially influenced by the miner since they do sell some Bitcoins. However, more often than not, the prices is not representative of how much hashrate there is on the network. There is no metric to compare against.

The block contains the transactions that the miner wishes to include. They don't have to include any of the transaction that they see.

The data is never merged with another Bitcoin transaction. The miner doesn't explicitly process a block but they assemble a set of transaction and hash them to form a merkle root, which is a part of other values in a block header. The block headers is hashed repeatedly, changing the values in the block header after every hash. The miner verifies the transaction data but that happens with any other nodes on the network.

Passwords only protect against physical attacks against your machine. They are completely useless against RATs or any other malware for that matter. If they can access your computer, they can install a malware to capture your password. The attacker would get your password the next time you unencrypt your wallet.