Very true - also I wouldn't be surprised at all if computers at some "wang ba's" (internet cafe/bars that are popular for gaming) are mining like crazy when not being used by customers (or perhaps even used by customers to do so).

True but for sure it is still very common (the stored value card business is still going strong I believe).


Have been here over 5 years now and my wife is Chinese.

Large multinationals might pay a lot of tax but most small businesses do not (ever been asked "xu yao fa piao ma?").

It is very common for an employee's salary to be officially listed as 3,500 RMB per month (no tax due on that) and then to receive an annual (or sometimes monthly) bonus in the form of either cash or stored value cards (which are anonymous for values at least up to 100,000 RMB).

Also bear in mind the very vast majority of Chinese do not work for companies at all (they work in the farms and get paid cash in hand).

Moving cash between banks can be a pain so in fact for large amounts the RMB is often physically transferred but also if you are able to find a branch of one cities local bank in another city the transfer is often free (and btw the 0.5% applies only up to a max of 50 RMB so for very large amounts it can effectively almost nothing).

I'm not saying there is no use for Bitcoin in PRC but quite a few of the commonly listed "use cases" that are very applicable to westerners (such as credit card or Paypal fees) are just not applicable in China.

Without a doubt "cash is king" in PRC (you see people going in and out of the banks with hundreds of thousands of RMB in bags daily) and the amount of tax paid by most is very little (if any at all). They also have anonymous shopping center "smart cards" which are often traded and can sometimes contain tens of thousands of RMB per card.

Understand that also the cost of banking (in terms of fees) is virtually zero and the cost of making internet purchases on taobao is completely fee free (with the ability to send back or get refunds) so for the vast majority there is really nothing to be gained from Bitcoin apart from perhaps escaping inflation.

I do think that Bitcoin mining is something some internet savvy Chinese would be doing as it is quite likely that they may have access to "free electricity".

Understand that the main thing I am trying to do is implement a General Ledger application which will work with Bitcoin via bitcoind but I would like it to be compatible also with the GUI.

I am also thinking the changes might need to go a little further with the address map (or "label") entries being added for the "to" address when you do a "sendfrom" via bitcoind.

I guess that my confusion comes from this:

            string account;
            if (pwalletMain->mapAddressBook.count(r.first))
                account = pwalletMain->mapAddressBook[r.first];

this is the code used to provide the "account" in the "receive" category tx's.

I gather now that in fact the string variable is perhaps incorrectly named (should be called "label" I guess).

In that case sure I will change both the optional argument to "tolabel" and will fix up the above code also.

Of course that dreaded wall is a concern but at least so far I have not seen any blocking of the ports nor of the main websites (perhaps this is just because it is too small to be on the radar yet).

I have only recently started playing with bitcoind (which is most likely the way I intend to use Bitcoin in my own software) and got rather confused with the "account" label when using the "listtransactions" command (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66214.0).

After Pieter Wuille's help I was able to understand that the problem I was seeing was that the GUI displays account labels for Sent tx's that have been assigned to the "sent to" address whereas "listtransactions" only shows account labels for "sent" category tx's that have been assigned to the "from" address (or something at least close to that).

So in short you cannot in any easy way get the same output as you see in the Sent tab in the GUI from bitcoind. My proposal is to add an option to listtransactions so you can get the same output (both "account" output and filtering for "send" category tx's to be taken from the "sent to" address). Note of course this is an option and would by default be false.

The change is to the bitcoinrpc command listtransactions whose usage would become as follows:

listtransactions [account] [count=10] [from=0] [usesenttoaddresses=false]

When usesenttoaddresses is set true then the account mapping for "send" category tx's is to the sent to addr (rather than the current behaviour).

Link for suggested commit changes:
https://github.com/ciyam/bitcoin/commits/opt_use_sent_to_addr_for_acc

I don't have an environment set up for compiling Bitcoin (and am flat out doing other work) so for now I would be grateful for any comments or suggestions with the proposed change.


Cheers,

Ian.

Not sure if any dev is watching this thread but I have made suggested source code changes to bitcoinrpc.cpp from this forked repo branch:

https://github.com/ciyam/bitcoin/tree/opt_use_sent_to_addr_for_acc

As I don't have boost or the time to get it and other libs installed at the moment this has not even been compiled (so I have not submitted a pull request).

If any dev (or anyone else) has enough spare time to at least compile and show any errors in my changes then I'd appreciate it.

The change is to the bitcoinrpc command listtransactions whose usage would become as follows:

listtransactions [account] [count=10] [from=0] [usesenttoaddresses=false]

When usesenttoaddresses is set true then the account mapping for "send" category tx's is to the sent to addr (rather than the current behaviour).

EDIT: Link for  commit changes:
https://github.com/ciyam/bitcoin/commits/opt_use_sent_to_addr_for_acc

I do hope to find more spare time to actually compile and test this myself but unfortunately I don't see that happening for quite a while so once again if anyone else has any spare time to check this I would appreciate it so I can then create a pull request.

EDIT: I will start a new thread in the Development board about this and will put a BTC bounty in that.


Cheers,

Ian.

Not sure how much you know about the automated freight trains being used in the coal mining industry in Australia but certainly companies like BHP have a lot of money to spend and the resource boom is still going very strongly down under (so maybe some opportunities there).

The Shanghai maglev will reach a top speed of 431 km/h during peak hour trips (only 301 km/h off peak).

I am no expert in the technology or different variations thereof but I do know that China is building high speed railway like no other country on earth so if you can provide a more cost effective means of doing it then you should be doing it there.

Yes that is correct, however, it is interesting that the high speed train from Beijing to Tianjin (built years later) which is built on extremely flat and dry land was not done with Maglev (but does run at around 400kmh).

I think that if it was more cost effective then the Chinese would have chosen Maglev instead.

Living in China I have taken the (AFAIA) only commercial Maglev commuter train (it goes between the airport and the city in Shanghai).

The cost of that rather short line was so expensive that no other Maglev line has been constructed here (and the other high speed trains run nearly as smoothly and not that much slower).

The cost is not due to the trains but the tracks (the accuracy required for Maglev tracks is much greater than for other high speed trains).

Yes - that is the idea and thanks for your help - I will look into implementing this as soon as I have some free time (or if anyone else is interested 1 BTC bounty available).

I think it might be useful especially for people who have started using the GUI and then decide they want to put all their tx's into a general ledger.

If I get some spare time I wouldn't mind working on adding such an option to listtransactions provided that the core developers don't think it would be a bad idea.

Perhaps another possibility might be to add an option for listtransactions that would change the "account" being displayed (and filtered) for "send" categories to actually be the one attached to the external address (as perhaps is how the GUI is working at the moment) ?

Sure the "big picture" is exactly as you describe (having accounts for a general ledger) and I think if "sendfrom" was used (rather than the GUI) then the output I would see from listtransactions would be exactly as I am wanting it to be (with the account showing as the one for each customer).

My mistake was in not understanding what I was seeing (basically the word "account" confusing me and the fact I peeked at the code and just assumed from what I saw there that it was just a simple map).

I was simply wanting to change the output of listtransactions to see a name appear (as I can do in the GUI) but I now gather that is not possible using bitcoind and instead I should use "sendfrom" to have things appear as I wanted them to.

Perhaps there might be an option to be able to specify an account in the send dialog in the GUI down the track?

I am going to write a GL system (for my own business and which will end up as a package in my open source project) which I want to integrate with Bitcoin (other modules would follow the GL such as Payroll). Currently my own tx's were performed via the GUI so the problem I have is that I cannot (using bitcoind) get the "account labels" to match the GUI without doing this externally.

Okay - think I need to do some more thinking about this (and it's starting to hurt).

From what I gather now it seems impossible to make the change I was wanting to see without resorting to have an external DB (which is what I gather the other posters did).

Well for certain I found the output of listtransactions confusing after playing with getaccount and setaccount (but as originally stated this was my first play with bitcoind).

If doing a "move" would fix the problem I was seeing (simply that I wanted to change the associated account for the unseen from address) then no need to change anything.

Another helpful idea might be to perhaps have the listtransactions output contain both to/from addresses (so you would do a setaccount on the from address of a "send" in order to make the change I was trying to make).