There are no rules to the minimum fee structure - miners and nodes are free to enforce whatever fees they want. Ultimately the market will decide what fee structure is best for Bitcoin, which is the way it should be.

This isn't "my" trick, it's a pretty well-known method of abusing file format quirks. It works quite simply: Most file formats (MP4 included) start with a header which describes the data contained in the file, as well as (in most cases) providing byte offsets to the data chunk(s). Any data beyond these offsets is ignored, and you can append whatever you want to such a file without breaking anything.

But ZIP files are different. The header of a ZIP files is at the end of the file, not the start, and the offsets to the compressed file entries within the ZIP file are relative to the start of this header, not the start of the file. This is completely the opposite of most file types, and allows ZIP files to be prefixed with arbitrary data without breaking them.

These two facts allow you to stick a ZIP file onto the end of another file, and the resulting file will function normally as both the original file and the attached ZIP file without having to use special tools to separate the two.

But that's not all. File type signature tools typically work by reading a few bytes from the start of a file and comparing it against a database of known file headers. This works for most file types, including undoctored ZIP files, because ZIP files normally start with a compressed file entry, which is not the header, but is treated as such by signature tools because it is uniquely identifiable as being part of a ZIP file. But this assumption fails completely for ZIP files which do not start with ZIP compressed data, and the tool will instead identify the file as being whatever type of data the ZIP file was prefixed with.

This is, of course, trivial to detect if you know what you're looking for (namely, the file size being significantly larger than the apparent data contained in the file), but most other steganography techniques have the exact same problem.

Actually, it is.



This is really no better than cat SomeVideo.mp4 SecretData.tc.zip > InnocentLookingVideo.mp4 (Zipping the TC file allows it to be easily extracted by just opening the resulting MP4 file as a ZIP file). The resulting file requires no special tools either to create or open, and it's no more likely to be detected than more complicated methods (the MP4 file still works, and is still identified as an MP4 file by all standard file type signature tools, so nobody's going to check it too closely and if they do, they would have found the secret data anyway).

I'm not sure what you mean... If you installed from the Linux tarball, typing which bitcoin-qt at the command line will tell you where you installed it. As far as I know, all the other installers install to the standard location for whatever OS you're using, and if you need to know this location, you're doing something horribly wrong.

The same way you buy any other currency: you buy it from exchanges. You can also recieve (extremely small quantities of) bitcoins for free from various sites, which is a good way to test if your software is actually working before you put real money into it.

Link to list of vendors
For vendors that don't accept bitcoins directly, you may be able to find third parties selling gift cards for bitcoins.

The file wallet.dat (in %APPDATA%\Bitcoin) contains your bitcoins (technically, the cryptographic keys needed to spend them). Just transfer this file to the computer you want to spend your bitcoins from.

Again, the wallet.dat file is all you need to back up (and you should be backing up this file regularly whether you're planning on formatting your PC or not), however you might want to back up everything in the %APPDATA%\Bitcoin folder, since this will save you from having to download the blockchain all over again when you reinstall Bitcoin.

It's a Win32 executable, not an Office file. The vulnerable software it targets is Windows.

Did you even read that paper? It's a technical paper, describing the basic details of how the various components of the Bitcoin system operate. There aren't too many adults who could understand it, let alone children.

So, you're saying I can't buy infinity bitcoins for 1 cent? Damn, I had plans for those infinity bitcoins!

Also, what the heck's going on with your domain?

I would want people to find out about Bitcoin on their own terms. Trying to force it on people is just going to turn people away from it.

This idea is not merely mistaken, it's possibly the single most ill-conceived idea in Bitcoin history (and that's saying something).

Why? Giving different addresses to different people is not just a good idea, it's downright necessary if you want to be able to keep track of where your money's coming from. Limiting users to only serves no other purpose than to make things needlessly difficult and complicated.

Why? To prevent people from getting the bonus multiple times? What about proxies? Or NATs? Did you think this through at all? Or is this just to make it easier to trace transactions back to a specific user?

You're telling people what they can and can't install on their own computers now? To what end? What's stopping people from just putting Tor on their network gateway and connecting through that?

Seriously? What. The. Fuck? Suppose someone installs this Bitcoin Promo Wallet, sees that it's a steaming pile of bullshit for all of the above reasons, tries to uninstall it, only to find out they can't even get this crap off their computer? What then? They're going to decide that this whole Bitcoin thing is bullshit spyware that takes over their computer, and when they finally clean up the mess they're never going to want anything to do with Bitcoin ever again, that's what. This whole thing is designed to just get people totally pissed off at Bitcoin.

You know what I like about Bitcoin? The fact that nobody's forcing me to pay money for bullshit reasons. I seriously doubt you're going to get many supporters with this nonsense.

Bitcoin is like PGP in that in uses public-key cryptography for digital signatures, but differs in all other respects. I don't know what you mean about "code that can be fractioned"...

Actually, bitcoins are stored in the blockchain, a public ledger that everyone has access to. Addresses link bitcoins to public keys, and the wallet stores the correspoding private keys which are used to sign transactions.

If you don't know anything about him other than that he is referred to as "this guy", then it's a distinct possibility... However, it's also possible your software hasn't fully synchronised with the network (which will take a very long time (usually several hours) the first time you do it, so be patient). Assuming you're using the standard client, you will see a green check mark in the bottom right corner when it is fully synchronised. If you're seeing circling yellow arrows instead, you just need to wait a while (assuming there's nothing wrong with your connection, which you check by hovering the mouse over the icon immediately to the left of the circling arrows - as long as you've got at least 1 active connection, you're good).

Good luck finding a radium watch these days. Glow-in-the-dark watches now use tritium, which is much safer and much more useless in an RTG. (Though an RTG built from household radiation sources would be pretty useless anyway.)

Three possibilities:
1) This is a net-gain fusion reactor, which is impossible because the described process has nothing to do with nuclear fusion, or anything else even remotely plausible (the "theory" of hydrinos has been repeatedly debunked as pseudoscientific nonsense).
2) The first law of thermodynamics has been broken, which is especially impossible.
3) This is a hoax, just like Brown's gas and similar "discoveries".

My money's on number 3.

You must make five posts, and spend four hours online.

Switzerland isn't even a member of the European Union, let alone the Eurozone. Ignorant American indeed.

Damn. And here I thought yellow was a combination of red and white...

Bitcoin has a fixed monetary base of 21 million BTC, which will never increase or decrease. These coins are initially distributed (as mining rewards) at a limited and constantly decreasing rate, and once they have all been distributed, no new coins will ever exist. However, this will not be the end of Bitcoin, because the initial distribution of new bitcoins is not the only reward for mining: miners also collect transaction fees. Although transaction fees currently only make up a small fraction of the total mining reward, this will change as Bitcoin becomes more popular, since more transactions means more total fees (assuming the fee per transaction stays the same).

The number of coins in circulation (as opposed to the total number in existence) will slowly decrease over time as people accidentally lose them, however it is virtually impossible for all the bitcoins to disappear (since that would require that everyone loses everything), and because Bitcoins are divisible the economy can continue to function normally even if only a single bitcoin, or a fraction of one, remains.

+1

I personally don't mind spending and receiving stolen coins for exactly this kind of reason.

My address too. We can split the stolen coins equally. That seems like the fairest thing to do. Any other takers?

Specifically, some viruses include a copy of cgminer (or other miners) to use unsuspecting people's processing power to make some money for the virus creator. Some anti-virus programs seem to think that the miner itself is the virus, when they're actually targeting the wrong program altogether. If you installed cgminer yourself, then it's definitely a false alarm, and you should consider installing a better anti-virus program than the one that comes Windows.

FTFY