It has been a bit of adventure to have joined in and been involved with the whole Bitcoin ecosystem.

I only just realised recently that I've had actually spent nearly 300 days on this forum and I've decided now that 300 days will be enough (so once I get to 300 days I'll "cease and desist" from posting which should be in two weeks or so from this post).

Like any adventure there has been many "ups and downs" for me on this forum (and IRL) since I first read an article about the Silk Road in July 2011.

In the time I spent on this forum I learned a huge amount about Bitcoin (thanks to the core devs and other technically savvy contributors that used to post here) and have thought quite a bit about the problem of "fiat currency" (which I see now as being perpetually doomed).

Unlike perhaps what has become the norm now I didn't actually enter into this ecosystem to make money (that was just a fortunate outcome because I believed in the concept and held on rather than cashed out between 2011 and 2013). Funnily enough all I was trying to do initially was to move money from Australia to China without being ripped off by bank fees.

Being a programmer I also wanted to contribute what I could and created a secure way of holding BTC "offline" (using only QR codes which is actually about the safest way possible). I also took an interest in the idea of "Turing complete smart contracts" and developed AT (Automated Transactions) which has been implemented on two blockchains (and actually beat Ethereum to go live by a year).

Some low points were getting involved with an infamous ICO altcoin (which was only due to having done work for Litecoin and then not being paid for that work) and losing my cool over insults about my wife (as this forum was becoming more and more of a cesspit).

I'm sure those that have been attacking me will be glad to see me go (and this is why unfortunately I will have to self-moderate even this last topic).

Hopefully when the forum moves to its new software platform some changes for the better might happen (as ad sig posting rubbish has basically ruined it for anyone who looks for actual information).

For those still wondering - Bitcoin really is a revolution - and we are only just seeing the start of what this revolution will bring us.

I will be helping with some other projects and will continue to work on my own project and look forward to seeing how things pan out for Bitcoin and the cryptosphere in the next few years.

Holidays were extended as I had pretty much lost motivation on the project ("burn out").

Recently I have been doing some low-level DB stuff as a tangent but hopefully some further work on the Trade and Wallet packages will be coming soon.

It can be done with the current protocol by using OP_RETURN but the problem is that the length of said message is 80 bytes (so only a very small message which would be best encrypted using an XOR style cypher).

You could also just put the hash of the message in the OP_RETURN part and store the message in some other places (such as cloud storage services). In that way the actual message can be as long as you like.

Note that in either case you'd need a modified wallet to display the message for you.

Bitcoin has had several soft forks already so "fork-o-phobia" isn't really correct. Perhaps "hard-fork-o-phobio" would be more accurate.

A fair point - and some have suspected that the DAO hack was also an "inside job" which has nothing to do with any failure of the underlying Ethereum smart contract implementation either (yet they got involved enough to create a hard fork).

That would generally be a "soft fork" (i.e. let it be tested and maybe supported rather than be ordered).

This is why "soft forks" in Bitcoin typically require a lot of support (above 90%) before becoming the new "rules".

We have seen the hacking attack of reportedly 60M USD from Bitfinex and the attack of the DAO for reportedly around double that amount.

But after both attacks we have seen two very different things happen.

In the case of the Bitfinex attack there isn't even the slightest suggestion that some sort of "hard fork" would be offered by the Bitcoin Core developers (so they are just going to have to wear their loss for their mistake) but in the case of Ethereum we have now ended up in a "fork war" with ETH vs. ETC (and ironically ETC is actually the "original" code with ETH now being a fork).

Opinions?

What would make more sense is an AT that does this (in the same manner as the Lottery AT).

It comes down to whether you want to promote the platform or make a profit (ATs can be used for the former but not so much for the latter).

If you use an AT to do this (and I had actually suggested this over a year ago along the lines of what is called "two up" in Australia) then only the fees would be the profit (made by the minters).

In general I am not in favour of gambling but something like a Lottery or a Coin Toss I am okay with (as it is isn't the kind of gambling that leads to addiction).

An exchange (Bitfinex) was hacked and that has resulted in some panic selling but Bitcoin isn't going to be hard forking to try and "bail out" that or any other exchange.

It should probably be looked at as a buying opportunity.

Yes - the difficulty adjustments are made to keep the average time at 10 minutes (but those adjustments are only made every 2016 blocks).

Even if on average the blocks were found a little quicker (due to a constantly increasing hash rate) you wouldn't expect the number of blocks being created to be greater than say double what the 10 minute average would predict (so still no issue in regards to a 32 bit number being used for height).

Assuming the average time of 10 minutes per block you only get 144 blocks per day, 1008 blocks per week and 52,416 per year respectively.

So in 10 years the height would only be 524 thousand and in 100 years only 5 million - so I don't think it matters if it is only a 32 bit number (we will have a hell of a long time to make any change if needed anyway).

It would not really be correct to call that a hard fork as only a small number of mining pools had to downgrade to keep everything going (non-mining users were not forced to downgrade at all).

Unfortunately there isn't even "consensus" (of the human variety) about "what is consensus" so the terms soft fork and hard fork are often confused.

Although I think that ETC had some influence over the last week the huge price drop last night would undoubtedly be due to the BitFinex debacle (another exchange bites the dust by the looks of it).

IMO the price will not raise back up for some time (and it may even drop further depending upon what the outcome of the BitFinex issue is).

The big event that is probably most relevant to the recent fall in BTC prices is the Ethereum "fork" (due to the DAO "attack").

Basically all holders of ETH (at least those who held the tokens themselves rather than in an exchange) can sell as ETC and still retain their ETH (i.e. "free money" due to the fork).

If you check out the volume of BTC traded for ETC on Poloniex in the last few days you'll be amazed - my guess is many ETH holders have sold ETC to get BTC and cashed out their "windfall" which has caused downward pressure on the BTC to fiat prices.

Actually no - you have made the fool out of yourself which is why no-one else is interested in your nonsense topic.

Enough of troll feeding - I'm spraying some "troll begone" on you now and really leaving this retarded topic "to the retards".



(nothing worse than a "smartass" who is actually a "dumbass")

It really doesn't help at all to "divide by zero" as that is not "infinite divisibility" (you're now the one trying to nitpick one useless edge case with IEEE floating point numbers that are not used by Bitcoin).

If your point is not to talk about Bitcoin then please remove the Bitcoin references in your OP (and instead insert some "useless pure math" concept).

When the discussion is starting from the point of "let's assume their are unicorns" it isn't really a very useful discussion in regards to actual practical things like Bitcoin.

You are talking about IEEE floating point - which Bitcoin does not use (but which was created in the 1980's).

Try not to be insulting and please read this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8031354/what-is-the-result-of-divide-by-zero

Let me quote the most relevant part:


Now - let's see if you can tell me how Bitcoin numerical values are represented?

If we were talking about pure maths and not computer software then that idea might have some purpose. But if you are wanting to refer in any realistic way to Bitcoin (which is computer software not pure math) then you simply can't use such nonsense.

And - "divide by zero" is an ERROR in any computer. (you clearly don't even know the most basic things about computers and software).

You should find something other than Bitcoin to base your "infinite divisibility" case on but I don't think anyone is going to care as that is not software and therefore can't actually be used.

And yet infinite divisibility is a technical impossibility thus rendering this whole topic pointless.

(am really not going to reply again but just couldn't help correcting a nonsensical statement)

(hint: there is no computer that can count to infinity and there never will be)

By default the number of keys generated in the "key pool" for the wallet is 100 so you can expect it to grow in size after 100 transactions (you should take regular backups of your wallet).

Each receiving address has its own private key (Bitcoin Core does not use a deterministic wallet).

A lot of work has gone into performance improvements in the last couple of years so indeed you should notice that.