Like Danny I am not up with MultiBit but basically it has only two choices wrt change.

1) Create a new address and send it there (which is how the Satoshi client behaves)

2) Send the change back to one of the existing addresses (I guess this should be easily verifiable by experiment).

The search on the forum sucks - a quick google came up with these:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56655.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22697.0

Maybe one of those might help (or perhaps send Mike a PM).

I didn't say anything was *wrong* - just that copyright and patents are not so important in much of it (not a bad thing IMO).

I just don't think it will work no matter how you want to try and frame it (reminds me of Sunday trading fights back in Australia when you could buy a *book* for a thousand dollars and *get a free pool table*).

You're living in SE Asia and are paying for any of those things?

Well one can only admire your willingness to pay for things that you don't need to.

(hint - use Android and get your money out of paypal)

This does strike me as heading towards "over-engineering" - I think the simpler it can be kept the better.

Great designs *allow* for extension but don't try and be everything to everyone all at once.

So assuming you are legit (and I'm not assuming anything else) then *please* just *let paypal go* (even better - delete your account as I did).

Just do some searching and you'll see paypal will reverse *anything* for *anyone* (it is their basic principle to protect the buyer and not care about the seller - and especially if the seller is some nobody to them).

As suggested *forget about paypal* and enjoy Bitcoin.

You seem to think that the problem is not on *your* side.

There is simply no risk to you - but the seller must take all the risk on your behalf - do you see the problem here?

If you want to buy bitcoins then *forget about paypal* and then move on (if you keep at it then it will be assumed by most here that you are not trying to anything but *use* the paypal system to get free bitcoins as has happened many times before).

I think out of your 3 scenarios only #2 really makes sense (unless you think your TrueCrypt software had some sort of time bomb in it).

Did you actually verify that each of your backed up copies actually worked (am not talking about the original but the copies themselves)?

The problem with recovering deleted files is how quickly you do it - the more usage that has happened between deleting and trying to recover then the less chance there is of recovering anything much at all.

In regards to finding the private keys (for an unencrypted wallet) you just need to locate some hex bytes (you'll need to search the forum for that - I think Mike Caldwell has helped people with this before).

And btw - why didn't you back up to a CD-R/DVD-R (not trying to rub in salt but something that really should have been done)?

The blockchain is the record of every single tx ever performed (including "coinbase" tx's which is how bitcoins are created) and the balance of an address is simply the value you get when you subtract all (if any) outputs from all the inputs to it.

You wallet contains (among other things such as labels and tx's) private keys from which public keys and what you recognised as a bitcoin *address* can be derived.

Without a private key you cannot sign a tx to spend an "unspent" output for any given address (but you can actually do the tx signing offline).

So being online/offline is irrelevant to the blockchain and to the "balance" of any given address.

Yes - without wanting to get into the debate about scalability it serves little useful purpose to be sending 1 satoshi "signals" through the blockchain.

There have been a few topics raised by people who sent money from a Mt. Gox (or other similar) account to SD which means the returns went to Mt. Gox rather than the user (and apparently there are warnings on the SD page about not using web wallets).


Yes - that would be the much preferred approach (and *please* don't send back 1 satoshi + fee *signals* like SD does when you lose).

Bitcoin is *decentralised* - I think you need to have a big re-think about how much any *centralised* digital currency will be able to really compete with that (i.e. one threatening phonecall from the government equals *end of currency* for anything else).

I thought originally the idea was that they were supposed to be like "postage stamps" for doing transactions - but it seems a clever bit of social engineering has changed all that.

Also understand that in general for people using web wallets the UTXO source addresses are *not* their own addresses at all (so sending back to them would actually just be sending money to the service rather than a user of it).

Nothing prevents people/organisations from *manipulating* the market (it is a free market after all) - the price recently crashed from above 250 to around 50 but guess what - Bitcoin is still here.

Exactly why I posted what I did.

Start here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated.2C_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost.3F_Won.27t_that_be_a_problem.3F

If the wallet (private keys) are lost then so effectively are the coins.

Although not making any assumptions *if* you were next thinking of starting a topic with a title like "How to fix the problem with lost coins" I would ask you to first *please* search the forum (that kind of thread has been done to death here).

Every TOR based Bitcoin "exchange" so far has proven to be a fraud.

Advice - do not use unless you want to lose.