I do that (using my own tools) - so as you asked I'll try to explain the usage of http://ciyam.org/rawtx_helper.html for you (which might help with your usage of other such tools as well).

Firstly you need to understand that the key thing about being sent bitcoins is that "you are not being sent coins" but instead what are called UTXOs (Unspent TX Outputs).

You could perhaps consider these as being more like "cheques" than coins (in that the value of them can be any value but not in the sense of having to worry that they might "bounce").

To give you some illustration of what I mean please look at the following: https://blockchain.info/address/1ciyam3htJit1feGa26p2wQ4aw6KFTejU (these are the txs from the 1ciyam address in my sig).

So if you had been sent "coins" to an address then you could type that address into a website like blockchain.info to come up with a similar looking set of txs.

The next thing is to look at a particular tx such as this one: https://blockchain.info/tx/135e55010a9caccd412d2c793a18236e9eebbb38412e97dca2b09aa8c354e1c0 and to see the full details there is a "Show scripts & coinbase" link you can click on (on the RHS - last line of the Inputs and Outputs table).

Personally I think you should just say - there is no chance (i.e. remove the basically).

Unfortunately humans are not good at understanding huge numbers - so they still think there is some chance (like winning at a lottery).

Perhaps if you equated it to "being able to travel to Pluto and back for your annual holiday in the next 50 years" then maybe they might realise that *there is zero chance* (but then again they might not as perhaps quite a lot of people actually believe that flying on a spaceship to Pluto and back will be feasible on an average salary in 2066).

It does assume a fair degree of knowledge about Bitcoin (sorry) but I'll try and help explain it to you here if you like (it was created for the CIYAM Safe but actually can be used without it).

You might want to look at the bitcoin-tx utility (that was fairly recently added to Bitcoin).

If you are dealing with a very simple tx (i.e. just the one UTXO) then you might find this helpful also: http://ciyam.org/rawtx_helper.html (it still requires using bitcoin-cli or the debug console in bitcoin-qt to issue the "createrawtransaction" command but might make the process easier for you).

Assuming it is a normal P2PKH tx then yes - the public key (and a valid signature) are provided in order to spend the UTXO (so assuming you know that user X owned UTXO Y and has spent it then you would know a public key for that user and could construct a message to send to them noting that in order for them to decode that message they would also need the public key for the private key you used to create the ECDH shared secret).

Of course the message format that you might choose would probably include both public keys to make it easier for the recipient.

Assuming you do have the public key of the user you are going to send the message to then you can use the following: https://github.com/ciyam/ciyam/blob/master/src/crypto_keys.cpp#L550 in order to get a "shared secret".

This "shared secret" is what you'd then use to do your message encryption (using AES256 or similar) although you might also want to add salt.

I've seen no evidence of miners "abusing their power" - if anything the miners (at least pools) have tried their hardest to not get involved with the politics and just support the future of Bitcoin (which makes sense for them economically).

It is the exchanges (and mostly just American ones) and some of the devs (ex-core) that have been the cause of all the troubles so far (and in the case of devs that seems to be mostly about ego rather than anything else).

I think that is not really going to be such an easy thing.

Miners need to turn BTC into fiat in order to do their business (i.e. pay for their electricity and other costs) - but exchanges need the miners to have a steady source of people wanting to exchange.

If devs wanted to "cut out the miners" then exchanges would be screwed for income in the short-term at least (as many of them are partnered with mining pools) so I can't see the exchanges actually likely to agree with such a change.

Remember it is the mining pools that actually control the consensus (as those who dislike China are finding out much to their chagrin).

You need to do a "git push" in order for your commit to appear on github.

The basic workflow is always:

git pull
...
(do some work)
git commit
(do some more work)
git commit
...
git push

Once you get used to "git" you'll never want to go back to CVS or SVN (so it is worth making the effort to learn the basics).

The CIYAM project has got a lot of criticism about being extremely hard to understand and I'd like to explain exactly why this is.

Initially the project was a closed source one originating from Australia (where I grew up) but once I moved to China in late 2006 I decided that due to the problems of enforcing copyright in China (i.e. no chance) that I would need to make the software "hard to understand" (a sort of security by obscurity approach).

So when I created the initial open source version of CIYAM it inherited years of such development that I had worked on in China (around 6 years).

I no longer actually support the ideas of patent and copyright so I actually don't care too much now about that - what I worked out how to do was to just make a software system so difficult to understand that those things are irrelevant (no-one has even bothered to try and fork my project and modify it).

Maybe you haven't created any topics on this forum lately - if you don't get ad-sigged to death then you'll get trolled to death or whatever.

Freedom of speech should not mean "freedom to take a dump wherever I want to".

Unfortunately these days many people seem to think that taking a dump is exactly what they should do (of course they'd never dare to do such a thing IRL but there you have it).

You can always create a new thread that is not self-moderated - so why get upset by one that is?

Most of those who are long-standing forum members who actually care about communicating do use self-moderated topics now as we have ended up with no other choice (unless you want your topic to quickly become a complete mess of ad-sig rubbish posts and trolls).

We are also keen to find a skilled .js developer (familiar with things like websockets and node.js preferably with a fair bit of UI coding experience).

It should be noted that assuming the CF achieves its target on time then any further funds sent to that AT will effectively become donations (minus the small AT processing fee of course).

You do realise that "there are no coins" in Bitcoin?

So it actually becomes rather hard to explain it to people when they fixate on the idea that there must be "coins" somewhere (some see pictures of "physical Bitcoins" and think that they are the actual currency).

And your name is just "lame" btw.
(supposed to be some sort of "jiao zai mao"?)

Actually "coin" was not really a very good choice (as Andreas M. Antonopolous has pointed out many times) as "coins" are a very bad metaphor for how Bitcoin actually works (there are no coins).

The problem with new technology is that "old words" just don't fit very well - so I'm guessing the name was chosen to basically make it clear that it is a type of "money".

So if it were to be able to be renamed then the "coin" part would be what I'd drop - maybe "Bitmoney" might have been a better choice.

(to some extent I think the project eMunie has perhaps done a much better job with its name choice but I don't think that the name is really going to be the deciding factor)

Getting into childish word games is surely below your incredibly high IQ isn't it?

(think I'm ready to leave this topic now)

It is running on two entirely different kinds of block chains - if you are really interested to study them go ahead but AT is orthogonal to that (it is block chain agnostic).

Apparently it is working as it has been running for over a year on these two block chains (without any serious problem) but if you say it doesn't work then I guess we should just ignore reality and listen to you.

That's funny - first you criticise Vitalik for being too abstract and "in the clouds" and now you criticise AT for being too practical and grounded.

If you would like to do some mathematical analysis you are most welcome to but you should realise that I didn't have anything to do with either of the two blockchains that AT runs on (and AT isn't a blockchain so your question about mining makes very little sense actually as the two blockchains in question work entirely differently).

Presumably for those blocks prior to the last checkpoint it is verifying that the block hash matches the actual content though - correct?

(skipping the signature verification being an optimisation permitted by using checkpoints)

The "checkpoints" don't come into this at all?

(I haven't checked the source code myself but have heard conflicting things about the validation of "old blocks")