Yes. It is possible to consolidate multiple outputs into one single output simply by sending the highest amount of coins that you can using the smallest number of involved outputs. In order to help you visualize it, consider 10 separate outputs of 1 coin each.

1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 <-- outputs before consolidating
Let's assume (for this example only) that consolidating 5 outputs into one is the optimal choice.
(1+1+1+1+1) => consolidated into (5)
(1+1+1+1+1) => consolidated into (5)
So now we have two outputs of 5 coins each.
We can further consolidate those two into a single output of 10 coins if we want to later on.

So how do we do that? Well, if you are familiar with the console commands for the Bitcoin Core client, then you can manually handpick the outputs that you want to tap into. This might be outdated, but it's a good enough step-by-step guide for a good method of consolidating outputs. Just replace any outdated commands with the updated ones if any. Do not play around with this or you might LOSE some coins. Try it with low-value altcoins if you really are inclined to do so.

I'm not familiar with every Bitcoin client in existence, but I believe that some clients automatically provide users with the optimal selection of outputs in transactions as far as transaction size is concerned. Only consider consolidating outputs if absolutely necessary. Also note that consolidating outputs haphazardly might end up costing you more in transaction fees than just sending coins as you need them.

I do NOT recommend beginners messing around with raw transactions or output consolidation. I don't even do it myself. It's easier to just not deal with dust transactions at all or let exchanges handle the consolidation for me.



The amount may be (relatively) small, but you have a lot of dust outputs. Your 5 BTC transaction involved 232 outputs - primarily dust outputs -- and had a transaction size of 41685 bytes. 232 is a huge number of outputs for a single transaction.



I understand what you mean, but that's just how Bitcoin works. Hopefully, users more knowledgeable than I am can give you some advice regarding this.



Yeah, that's fine.



Blockchain.info says that that transaction has over 250 inputs. After seeing the 232 outputs of your 5 BTC transaction, I'm gonna assume that your 30 BTC transaction has over 1500 outputs. Nodes are prolly rejecting that transaction due to the large number of outputs.

Balances are not stored as one total amount, but as a collection of "outputs" connected to Bitcoin addresses. In the simplest of explanations, imagine that you have a theoretical Bitcoin address labeled Bitcoin1. Over the course of time, three separate transactions occurred which sent coins to Bitcoin1. For our example, ignore the value of the coins and just assume that it's a whole number - let's say 10 coins per transaction. If you check the balance of Bitcoin1 in your GUI client, you'll see that you have 30 coins. But in reality, Bitcoin1 does not have 30 coins, but rather 3 transactions of 10 coins each. If you want to move that total balance to another Bitcoin address, each of those individual outputs will have to be tapped and stored as part of the new transaction. Essentially, the more outputs that are involved in the transaction, the larger the transaction is. There are more things involved and more things which I didn't address, but that's basically the gist of it.



Do you know the transaction ID of the 30 BTC transaction?

No. Did you even read anything other than the headline?



In a nutshell, the patent is simply meant to ensure the open-source nature of any technology that Blockstream employees create. They don't have to be paid any royalties -- that's all they're saying. I don't even know why you'd think what you thought when the article clearly and explicitly states the opposite.

Looking at it from their perspective, the patent is there just so no one can profit from maliciously claiming the work as their own or patenting parts of it in order to monopolize any technology built from it.

They are not necessarily unrecoverable. A wallet passphrase is specific only to the encrypted wallet file that it is "locking". If, by some act of divine intervention by the God of Entropy, you are able to generate the same private key that holds your Bitcoins, then you can gain access to the coins in that private key once more. If you have a unecrypted backup copy of that wallet file within the last 100 change addresses, then you can recover those coins as well.

There is no penalty for attempting to brute force your own passphrase, so that is your best option if you know the character length of your passphrase and the subset of characters that your passphrase was composed from. If I were you, I would try to remember as much as you can of your forgotten passphrase, and then attempt to brute force it on your own using a custom script.

Alternatively, the previous poster suggested a service that would attempt to brute force your wallet file for you for a fee. I wouldn't recommend relying on a third party for something like this, but I suppose it's something to consider if you are desperate and have no other option available to you.

I'm not sure what you're trying to ask here. It's all very straightforward.

If you have evidence that a single person is participating in a giveaway or signature campaign with multiple accounts -- and if you are sure that such an act is not allowed under both the stated and implied conditions of that giveaway or signature campaign -- then PM all of your evidence to the manager of that giveaway or signature campaign.

If you have evidence that a single person is posting on the same thread in a way that is contrary to the rules of this discussion board (for example, replying to his/her own posts, making an additional post using an alt account when an edit of a previous post would suffice, acting as if an alt account that previously posted on the same thread was owned by a different individual in order to scam other people or to gain an unfair advantage over other people in that thread in some way, etc.), then PM all of your evidence to any moderator, global moderator and/or admin.

Evidence -- that's the keyword. Let the forum staff determine if something is spam or not. Just present any reasonable evidence that you've gathered to the appropriate individuals.

I highly recommend being wary of newbies offering to pay for posts made on a newly created forum. I once joined a new Bitcoin-related forum based on a pay-per-post offer (since I was already posting in other forums for free anyway) which immediately closed down as soon as a handful of members had made enough legitimate posts to ask for payment. Soon after, the domain was put for sale. Most newly created forums paying for posts are only farming for email addresses to sell to advertisers, phishing for universal passwords and/or gathering consistent "legitimate" traffic to sell the domain for a higher price than it's worth. Ask for payment in escrow first if you really want to dip your toe in these waters.

If you are using Bitcoin Core v.0.12 (and above), then you can try the abandontransaction command.

https://chainquery.com/bitcoin-api/abandontransaction

You have several options. You can:

A) Create a new address on the Dogecoin client on your PC and send your funds to that address
B) (Depending on your mobile Dogecoin client) Dump the private key of the Dogecoin address containing your funds and import that key to the Dogecoin client on your PC
C) Transmit a (hopefully encrypted) backup copy of your Dogecoin wallet.dat file from your mobile device to your PC via email, online file transfer or cloud storage
D) Send your funds to a crypto exchange that hosts Dogecoin and proceed from there

We may be able to help you more if you provide us with more information. Telling us which Dogecoin client you are using on your mobile device would certainly be useful.

However, do NOT send your wallet.dat file nor give your Dogecoin private key to anyone here. Just because they're belittling your 300 coins doesn't mean they won't take it for themselves given the opportunity.

If I remember correctly, all of the PoW-first/pure-PoS-later coins were launched with an implicit "will be hardforked later" warning on them. I don't believe all of them ended up implementing a hardfork (correct me if I'm wrong), but a lot of them did. If my facts are accurate, then Mintcoin and its clones implemented a hardfork that was generally accepted by their users and expected from the start. If you want a list, then I can only remember Mintcoin, Blackcoin and Zeitcoin at the moment. My information might not be 100% accurate though, so just use it as a starting point for your research.

Since you are already paying out with an altcoin, you might want to consider contacting the developers of some thriving coins and see if they would be interested in providing you a bounty in exchange for cross-promoting their coins. Crowdfunding is also a viable option for you -- crowdfunders are generally more interested in the prospect of active participation rather than profit.



If someone can design an autonomous chess-playing bot that never loses to anyone or anything, then that person can make more money building a machine for it and going on chess tours against grandmasters than cheating a small app.

I see a lot of people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.

If by "secret keys", you are referring to private keys, then there is no need to "hack" them. Here, go to this site -- http://directory.io . You can get every single private key in existence from that site. It doesn't matter though, since the digits amounting to the number of pages are more than all your fingers and toes combined. You can try to run a bot which checks every single private key you find there and your computer will die even before you get through 0.00000000000000001% of that "list". Now, if you're talking about hacking someone's computer in order to get their private keys, well, anyone can do that right now, so that's not really a theoretical scenario. Safeguard your computer and your files like a rational person would.

As for the people talking about "hacking" the blockchain, what exactly are you going on about? Do you even know what the blockchain is?

It was not "announced" -- it was known right from the start that the total number of Bitcoins would not exceed 21 million. It was known right from the start that transaction fees would eventually become more significant once the block reward had decreased to a significant level. The issue of inflation and value were discussed and debated right from the very start. Mining cannot disappear as that is what keeps Bitcoin alive. Everything that you're asking has been explored in the Bitcoin whitepaper. In fact, even skimming through the Wikipedia entry on Bitcoin would answer the majority of your questions.

This is a discussion board created for the discussion of Bitcoin though. While it has evolved to allow discussion of various other topics, as well as permitting trade negotiations to be initiated and performed within its digital bounds, that is not its primary purpose. "Helping [you] sell and use escrow" is not the main concern of this board "as a site". I am sure that there are many members who would be willing to help you if you need anything within reason, and the staff might be willing to accommodate you on some issues as well, but do not take that as an indication that the forum is obligated to help you in your business, nor that you are owed any form of special treatment.

If talking in real time is a priority, then that's what messengers and Skype were created for.  Some reputable members who are willing to serve as escrows for private trades also have their own threads in the Marketplace subforum or one of its child forums, so you can contact them there as well. And I'm sure that there are other forums out there which are more lenient in terms of private messaging, so that is an option as well.

There is no such thing as mining Bitcoin by hand or on paper. I am 100% sure that you just read one of the threads where someone asked the algorithm used in mining so that he/she could try doing it on paper, and for some reason, decided to create a separate thread for it. You can only mine Bitcoins on an electronic device connected to a network of Bitcoin nodes. Assuming that you can perform at least 1 hash/sec with your bare mind -- which is currently impossible for humans -- you would still need to find a way to magically send that piece of paper to computers all over the world to do what you want to do.  

Rather than disabling signatures in the Marketplace subforum, I believe a better way to curtail sig spam there would be to not increase the post count for any post made in all of its child forums. The Marketplace subforum is already rife with scammers, and padding their post count there just increases their chances of scamming even more. Besides, the forum is already providing a service to the members by yielding to them one whole subforum to perform their trades. Do they really deserve a bonus "+1" to their signature earnings from buying and/or selling something that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise?

In order to help reduce the amount of sig spam in the forum, allow me to share a few general guidelines to determine what I personally consider as sig spam.

1. Beating a dead horse - There are some threads wherein only some very specific replies can be considered helpful. Posting the same thing that the last ten people before you has posted does not benefit anyone (except the spammer padding up his/her post count). Read the OP, read the first couple of pages of the thread, and read the last 2 pages of the thread. Do at least that much before you post something which might have been just posted five minutes ago. "Extreme parroting" that can be avoided by simply reading the last ten posts is just a lengthened '+1' post with ignorance used as an excuse for plausible deniability.

2. Giving unsolicited opinion that helps no one - Not all threads require your opinion. If the OP just wants help with something specific, then don't post your opinion when it has no chance of helping the OP. Getting helpful advice is always a good thing, but someone who needs help fixing his/her corrupted wallet data file surely doesn't want to read about some online wallet that you use for some irrelevant reason. If it's tangential to a solution, then go ahead and share your opinion. Otherwise, find some relevant thread to share your opinion on.

3. Guessing needlessly - Sometimes, people have problems but have no idea what that actual problem is. Oftentimes, the problem isn't clear to everyone else as well. When that happens, people start guessing what the problem could be and how to solve it. That's acceptable since it advances the discussion, and would ultimately lead to a resolution. However, in cases where the problem has already been resolved, there is no need for you to post what you think the problem could be. No one needs you to guess why a transaction isn't being confirmed by the blockchain when people who actually know what they're talking about have already said that it's a double-spend. If you can't contribute anything to the topic, then just shut up (figuratively) and read quietly -- you might actually learn something.

4. Posting on spam threads - Yes, some threads are just meant to pad a spammer's post count. Threads that ask you how many Bitcoins you have, or what you would do if someone gave some random number of Bitcoins, or how many Bitcoin private keys you hold, or how long you have known about and/or used Bitcoins, et cetera, et cetera -- all of those are sig spam threads masquerading as discussions about Bitcoin. There is no intelligent discussion going on in there, and any intelligent discussion that does arise would most certainly be off-topic. If you want to participate in such a discussion, then either take off your signature or move the thread to Off-Topic. Posting in those threads is just as bad as posting "1st" as a comment. If you aren't getting paid for posts in the Off Topic subforum, then why do you think you should get paid for posts on threads like those?

5. Necroposting - A necropost is not a bump. If it was, then we would call it a bump and not a necropost. If a thread has been dead for a long time and there's no urgent need to revive it, then leave it the frickin' hell alone. If you aren't sure if it's an old thread, then check the date of the first post. Most of the time, just reading the OP would be enough to tell you that the thread is outdated and most likely dead. What exactly is so important that you can't check the date of the first post? Are you afraid that you won't have enough time to spam on your 10 other accounts if you take a minute to read the thread a bit?

6. Posting on a necroposted thread - This is not as bad as necroposting, but it is just as heinous if just reading the last page of the thread gives enough indication that the thread was only revived by a necroposter. Once again, read through the damn thread before posting. Even reading a page or two is better than just reading the thread title alone. If you're not reading a thread before posting, then you don't have the right to object when you get labeled as a spammer.


I hope this proposed collaboration finds some use in the personal guidelines that I shared.

It's true that most -- I'd say at least 99% if I was one of those people who made up statistics on the spot -- altcoins are just created to further the alt-ponzi business. However, that doesn't mean that most altcoins are useless. Aside from the new concepts and ideas that are brought about by a few coins, some altcoins with an acceptable level of community support are also sometimes preferable to use as digital financial tokens rather than Bitcoins. As a comparison, take the case of a real casino. Rather than walking around the place with a stash of paper money, bettors swap their cash for chips and use those to make their bets. Once they are done gambling, they then swap those chips back into money. In the case of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin would be the "stash of paper money" while a chosen altcoin would be the "chips". Instead of the issue of portability and security, the "chips" solve the issue of slow block times and accumulating transaction fees in multiple transactions. There would be volatility of value involved once the chosen altcoin is "swapped back" into Bitcoin, but Bitcoin itself is volatile anyway.

Also, fragmentation is not going to be a problem for Bitcoin since all altcoins are pegged to the value of Bitcoins anyway. Those that have tried to peg themselves to fiat or other assets before have not been successful because a decentralized currency requires the consensus of the majority which none of them have been able to obtain on that specific issue.

(But in general, most altcoins are ponzi trash and script kiddy projects. So yeah.)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199685.0

Since the requirements for a coin to be added to the site include being tradeable on a public exchange with an available API, it stands to reason that they have a bot collecting the stats from the exchanges via their respective APIs. Essentially, the information on that site is just compiled publicly available information from the various exchanges hosting and trading those coins.

Forget about mining if you're still learning about Bitcoin. Don't even attempt it "for learning purposes". If you do, then you will most likely end up ruining your CPU with less than 100 satoshis to show for it. In fact, you can earn more from visiting multiple low-yield faucets in a day than you will in a month of mining Bitcoin with your CPU. Bitcoin mining is now done with dedicated hardware called ASICs, and those mine many millions of times faster than your average CPU.

If you are really intent on mining to earn a little profit, then try mining newly released altcoins and sell those on the various cryptocurrency exchanges.  I will not recommend any particular coin -- there are many to choose from on the Altcoin subforum. Make it a habit to do proper research on your own; that much is essential if you want to increase your Bitcoin holdings. At the very least, I will tell you to stay away from SHA256 and Scrypt coins when choosing an altcoin to mine. The SHA256 and Scrypt mining environments are heavily dominated by ASICs, and any easy-to-mine coin which uses that algorithm is most likely not worth your time to mine.

As a bonus, I will teach you how to fish. If, somewhere down the road, you decide that you want to mine Bitcoin with your CPU simply for the sake of learning, then go to www.google.com, locate the rectangular container where you can enter text on that page, and type a series of keywords that is appropriate to your needs. In this case, a good series of keywords is "how to start mining Bitcoin". I found exactly what you're asking for in less than a second. You're welcome.

If someone is using someone else's identity (i.e., bought an account) to participate in a signature campaign, then that person is defrauding the runner of that signature campaign by not providing him/her with what he/she's paying for. Campaign runners don't ask for non-negative trust members just for the fun of it -- they want someone that the community "trusts". If someone bought an account, then that person is not the same person who the community has come to -- for lack of a more appropriate word -- trust. That's the scamming part there. They're scamming the campaign.