Chairman theymos, I rise to offer a motion wherein the spunkulation subforum will henceforth have threads tried against the Mom & Dick Test.

If the content of the OP can be fully responded to by:

• My dick could be a bear market next year
• Your mom might be worth $10,000 tomorrow if her blowjobs made up 1% (by value) of global drug market transactions
• Prices go up and down based on supply and demand
• (remember Kronos.io? That's probably why not.)
• (infowars link confirming OP's theory that current BTC price trend is part of geopolitical conflict between East and West)

it should be deleted. I yield the rest of my time for debate. Thank you.

Is that accurate by any reasonable definition? I had no idea you could use CT on relatively low-draw stuff.

OP_NOP can allow extra embedded information, but you must mine the block yourself since it's non-standard, making it about as useful as DUCK_FART. ETA: Maybe legitimate use cases could be thought up back when mining a block by yourself wasn't a big deal.

That reminds me of the guy who put his DNA sequence on some kind of blockchain... In the future, I'd guess assassins could send you DNA proof in the form of something much smaller than a severed head which you could compare against their public DNA sequence. ..... .... You know, with that DNA sequencer you had made up at the local bitcoin-accepting 3D printer rental outlet at the strip mall.

Or maybe the government "assassins" would just synthesize matching skin samples in the FBI vat labs. ETA: To clarify, the latter definitely doesn't exist. No, sir.

I've decided to shelve this project altogether. It's clear to me that I belong with the modding community, not here (and Rimworld's caught my interest). I don't have anywhere near the time this needs, which is disappointing because I'm not terribly satisfied just altering someone else's narrative.

I might push out a quick update fixing the lending and block generation formulas some day... still need to figure out the right way to determine future difficulty, though.

Fees aren't always mandatory (usually when the transaction where you received control of the coins is old and of "substantial value" and the transaction you want to make is of "substantial value"), and some miners will always allow transactions through without fees. However, some transactions require a fee or else other Bitcoin clients (not necessarily miners) will refuse to transmit the transaction to other clients (or significantly delay them). The latter is called the relay fee. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees Fees are allowed to be heavily market-based in that it can be significantly modified by miners and clients to fit their ideals and other desires without requiring a network fork. That said, most people don't mess with the defaults, so you should probably assume the default fees listed on the wiki are a solid rule-of-thumb.

Transactions without a fee attached when required will eventually be ejected from the transaction queue, usually after a week or two, effectively giving you control of the coins again as if you never tried to push the transaction.

I'll give it a whirl...

Bitcoin (capital "B") is a protocol used to generate and transmit bitcoin (the currency, lower-case "b").

The controller of any bitcoin is determined by which address is effectively flagged as the owner by miners. Addresses have two parts: the public key (what you see when people post "their Bitcoin address" - though this is hashed internally) and the private key (the "password" to that address which authorizes control). Breaking addresses into two parts allows for people to post the public key for the receiving of funds (either peer-to-peer or through generation) without compromising their security*.

bitcoins are NOT data. Addresses ARE data, and Bitcoin has already defined all addresses which are valid without being able to generate all of them (the number of addresses is too high for even all the computers in the world linked together to find in any reasonable span of time). There is data determining who controls bitcoin, but you will never "see" a bitcoin in your wallet because it doesn't exist.

Bitcoins came into being through generation in a method we call "mining," which is effectively just encrypting hashing a set of routine data (transactions and bitcoin generation which requires previous blocks to be valid). Mining is a bit like the lottery in that unlike, say, encrypting a .zip archive, you can not "progress" in mining -- there is no way to make a progress bar because the process requires computers to spit out as many valid strings of characters as they can. These strings provide different numbers when "decrypted." Bitcoin has been written in a way where miners must find an extremely high number, but they're unable to know the number any given string will produce before generating it. Think of it as a quadrillion-sided die and each "hash" a miner generates is one roll, where they need to land on one particular number (in reality, it's more like a 2^216-sided die where the die needs to land on anything above, say, 2^215). Each time the die lands on the right number and the data is submitted, clients on the network will quickly verify the findings and pass it along to everyone else until the vast majority of users recognize the work as legitimate and the block as being solved so they can go on to solving the next block (this does not necessarily mean the block is actually legitimate -- future miners will verify old miners' work, and if they dispute old miners' submissions, a fork will occur).

*DannyHamilton will correct this statement.

I'm not aware of any which were operating that early. He probably would've been buying in IRC's OTC room or using this forum. It's very unlikely any website's holding them. He likely used Bitcoin Market or MtGox to purchase the coins... maybe the first try at TradeHill if later -- assume any coins which were there are gone. If he mined them, he has better chances since not all mining pools prune user funds out of accounts (but many do, including Slush's where it's likely he was unless solo CPU mining really early on). ETA: I don't think Luke's pool ever prunes, though, fwiw, and his was there right about from the get-go.

Assuming he's on Windows (and if we're talking 2010, he was), he wants wallet.dat from C:\Users\[USER ACCOUNT NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin -- AppData folder is hidden by default, IIRC, so you'll want to open up the control panel and show hidden folders in the Folder Settings options.

If the hard drive or OS (assuming a normal configuration) were ever wiped, the data's almost definitely gone unless it was very recent. Deleting the Bitcoin client shouldn't have deleted his wallet.

I'm not at all a fan of the layout or GUI there, either. You have to click a thread title two or three times to get to the content you actually wanted, or there's some type of sorcery involved there to do it right and I just don't have the knack. Community voting seems to leave content on par with Youtube comments. ... Idunno, I guess I've just never really given it a fair shake.

Stack Overflow has a similar feeling of ugliness and lack of intuitiveness, but the content's been a life-saver too often to ignore.

I was more thinking child sex trafficking and I guess I decided to blur that together with child pornography and 80s-90s movies with gratuitous pimp-slapping. Okay, let me get this back off-topic -- let's change what I said there to being about child escorts. ... but then there'd still be turf wars - the opposing sides would just order the invaders' escorts.

So... wait. We need to remove the "turf," right? A local group of nobodies isn't going to go kill a guy 500 miles away for selling vacuum-packed weed and taking what would've been their transaction. -But that doesn't really apply for child exploitation since they aren't generally mail-order (in Soviet Russia, child bride mail-orders you! ). Uhhh... Anyway, there's probably a troll with a functional brain who'll go with a similar line of melodrama some day.

Trolls have been missing a good slippery slope argument here.

What about child pornography gangs? I don't think there are any, but honestly, I've never seen an actual drug gang either. -Or pimps for adults. Pimps are usually violent in movies -- well, not porn movies, cause porn studios have a reputation to uphold, obviously. ....

If children were sexually abused in the privacy of their home rather than beaten on the street AND sexually abused, should we applaud bitcoin's triumphant entry into the market and post comments on news sites about how bad child rape was before bitcoin came on the scene?

-Or the assassin market. How many people wanted to hire assassins but were assassinated upon payment before crypto-escrow? I bet more than one.

"Straw Man" would be two words. I don't care what your conversation was with Madness nor why you're trying to bring me into it.

I don't even know what kind of bigoted straw man you're trying to set up. What religious doctrine? Who are "you guys"?

Free action obviously involves murder and blowing up buildings, fascist.

Words don't mean anything if we get to say whatever while those on the receiving end don't have free action. "Free speech" (anti-action) is a poorly-enforced series of government laws. Disagress yourself before you wreck yourself, bro.

Long live abrasive White dickheads.

If there were any movement, it'd definitely crash the price, at least short-term. I'd imagine serious traders have watch-only wallets or at least a Python script pulling from Blockchain looking at them.

o.O That was fantastically lucky of them for Ulbricht to use such a high timeout number that they could do anything with it before it relocked. I'm sure the forfeiture defense will be fascinating. Thanks for response.

I haven't hung around in IRC for years and the people I used to buy Amazon GCs from at a nice discount (nothing like 50%, though) are long gone. http://bitcoin-otc.com/

Someone buy it (well, at this price, it's more like taking it...). It's a great game. Relatively short, too.

Pray to one god prior to each roll. If you win, roll again. When you've exhausted your list of gods, check your tallies to find which god gave the most winning rolls and pray exclusively to him.

Alternately, find out which religion has the highest rate of unpleasantness happening to its population and pray to its god(s). He's bound to pay out soon.