You're right, but to be fair, you could have chosen your words better. I mean, what about all the women without vaginas, did you ever think about their feelings? You really should have said "humanoids without a Y chromosome". No wait, that doesn't work in all cases either (eg those with Swyer syndrome or de la Chapelle syndrome). You know what, how about we just forget about classifying individuals based solely on the appearance of their genitalia and instead just call them all "people" and treat them all equally?

There definitely exists a "magic number" which allows whoever knows the magic number along with 32 bytes of the PRNG output to completely predict the rest of the output. The algorithm designer may (or may not) have had a specific magic number in mind when designing this algorithm. If so, it's a backdoor. If not, it's not (but there's no way to know for sure). Consider also that this algorithm is about a thousand times slower than other PRNGs and produces random numbers with a slight bias, making it an extremely poor choice even if it doesn't have a backdoor. The only reason I can think of for the NSA to endorse such an obviously flawed algorithm is that it's the only one they were able to get a backdoor into. What other explanation is there?

I don't think this has ever happened to any reputable modern algorithm (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). All now-broken cryptographic algorithms that I know of were widely known to be broken long before an actual attack was successfully demonstrated.

Of course it's possible to send "old algorithm" coins to an "new algorithm" address. It's already happening: compressed public keys technically function as a new algorithm, even though it's all ECDSA.

Yes. That's the whole point of using encryption in the first place: for those situations where you know (or at least suspect) that an eavesdropper will see all your messages, but you want the eavesdropper to be unable to determine the content of the messages that they see. If you need to prevent an attacker from knowing a message was sent at all, encryption won't help; you need to use other techniques to hide your messages, such as steganography.

No, as that's not what encryption does or is supposed to do.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Wait - extract the public key efficiently? How is that even a problem?

The headline is misleading, as Dual_EC_DRBG is a pseudo-random number generator, not an encryption standard.

Only if you use Dual_EC_DRBG. Bitcoin doesn't use it, or any other PRNG for that matter, instead relying on the OS's entropy source, which (normally) produces random numbers from hardware sources. Note that ECDSA (which Bitcoin does use) is not related to Dual_EC_DRBG in any way other than being based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, and does not have this backdoor.

Polymer frames are easy. Designing polymer barrels that don't instantly disintegrate from the combination of heat, pressure, and friction is a slightly harder engineering challenge.

They're just addresses, they don't "want" anything. More to the point, A, B, and C are addresses that belong to either the same person (who probably doesn't even know or care about individual addresses in the same way that a person using cash doesn't bother keeping track of individual coins and notes), or (though this is far less likely) multiple people acting jointly as a single entity (in which case there is no way to tell what each individual was thinking, other than that they were all in complete agreement as to how the money was to be distributed - exactly how they came to that agreement is their own business and no-one else's).

A, B, and C are almost certainly different addresses in the same wallet, and belong to one person. But in case you're wondering, clicking "Show scripts & coinbase" in blockchain.info will show you exactly how much came from each address.

No, this has always been around. In fact, it's pretty rare to find a transaction that doesn't send to two or more addresses, since transactions usually have to make change.

Both of these situations are explained in Chapter 9 of the whitepaper. Note that there's actually no limit on the number of outputs, and although a transaction from one person to another will normally only have two outputs, it is possible to use more than two outputs, for example when sending to multiple people with one transaction. The whitepaper only provides examples of the most common situation.

"Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth." -- The Galaxy Song

This may be a stupid question, but did you have "Hide extensions for known file types" in Explorer turned on when you created your bitcoin.conf file? If so, you've probably accidentally named your file "bitcoin.conf.txt" - that won't work at all. This "feature" is probably the single most annoying thing I've ever had to deal with on Windows systems - and that's saying a lot. Turn it off and leave it off, and your life will be a whole lot less annoying.

What Gabi said. The (out of sync) warning was introduced after a huge number of people complained that Bitcoin-Qt wasn't working properly, when really the problem was that they were trying to use it before it had finished synchronising with the network.

Please use the latest version of Bitcoin-Qt and leave it open until it has finished synchronising (which will take several hours or maybe even a day or two depending on your computer - it has to download and verify the entire transaction history; fortunately you only have to do this once, after that it only has to download new transactions to keep up to date). Don't try to do anything with it (except encrypt your wallet and back it up, in that order) until it has finished (however, you can shut it down and then restart it later if it's taking too long - it'll pick up where exactly it left off rather than starting from scratch, so you don't have to download it all at once if this is not practical for you).

Just shut down Bitcoin, download the latest version, and install it. Back up your wallet first in case things go wrong (really, you should back up your wallet anyway whether you're upgrading or not), though usually nothing goes wrong. Your old wallet and blockchain will not be touched during the installation process and will be recognised and updated automatically when you start the new version.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The harsh restrictions of the outrageous noob jail,
Or to create meaningful content against a sea of spam,
And by posting, end them?

I have spiders in my room. All insect problems solved.

I don't get it. If I pay $50 for a box containing $40, and you get paid $30 to put $20 in a box, how is that any different from me just giving you $10? Are people really stupid enough to not realise that? Oh, wait, I just got it.

It's the average share price over the last n days. It's used to even out day-to-day fluctuations to get a better general idea of the price.

I kid you not. If you want to collect rainwater for any purpose in Colorado, you have to pay an exorbitant fee for a special permit (which can be refused for any reason and is subject to arbitrary restrictions) in order to essentially buy your rain from the government.

Probably either a figment of some tinfoil-hatter's imagination, or radiation from the van Allen belts interfering with the camera. (To anyone who suggests that this radiation would have been fatal and this proves we never went to the Moon, the radiation levels were already determined to be non-fatal before manned missions were planned, and in any case, over 90% of the Apollo astronauts who left Earth orbit later developed a specific form of cataracts caused by radiation poisoning, proving that they were exposed to an unusually large dose of radiation, such as would be caused by travelling through the van Allen belts.)

HAARP refers to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which has been blamed by tinfoil-hatters for all sorts of things including earthquakes, floods, storms, drowsiness, and lack of appetite, despite being just a big HF radio transmitter with some fancy sensors to measure changing ionospheric conditions and how radio waves are affected by them. Since this is boring to most people, and most people assume that such a huge project ought to have a correspondingly exciting purpose, they tend to believe that the whole thing is just a cover-up for something nefarious, when really it's just a boring experiment studying boring radio waves. It's important and useful research for radio astronomers and people developing long-range RADAR equipment and the like, but that's just not exciting enough for most people.

How's this for Moon conspiracy: apparently, Buzz Aldrin was supposed to be the first man on the Moon, but Neil Armstrong decided that since he was in command, that honour ought to belong to him. Aldrin went along with it, presumably because low-gravity boxing techniques had yet to be developed, but got his revenge by refusing to take any photographs of Armstrong. If you've ever wondered why there are no pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon other than the fuzzy images recorded by the lunar module's TV camera, now you know.

Nonsense. Transporter operators have much higher ethical standards than that. Nobody vaporised the duplicate Riker created by accident when a second transporter beam was activated when the first one became dangerously unstable, then the transporter operator forgot to deactivate the first beam, causing the poor guy to be rematerialised twice. Both Rikers were allowed to go on with their lives, though no record is made of society's reaction to the news that transporter operators can duplicate people just by pressing a button. (Probably because, due to the aforementioned ethical standards, transporter operators would never duplicate people deliberately. Oh, no. That absolutely never happens, right? Right?)

Actually, you can ditch BitPay right now and stop paying their fees simply by setting up the Bitcoin software on your server yourself, securing the server yourself, integrate it with your website yourself, and doing all that other complicated stuff all by yourself. Since doing all this yourself is not very easy, and not even advisable if you have no experience in these areas, you pay other companies to do it for you. You probably pay for water too, even though you could, if you wanted to, install a rainwater tank to collect your own water and pump it and filter it yourself for free*. It all comes down to convenience vs. cost. BitPay makes handling bitcoin payments far more convenient than managing it all yourself, so it's only fair that they receive a fee for their services. It is most unlikely that anyone will offer similar services for free, since there are real costs to providing these services.

*Except in Colorado, where the rain is government property and preventing it from going down the drain is considered stealing. Technically, you can be arrested for staring at the sky with your mouth open on a rainy day.