The transactions are unlikely to be completely blocked. The sender broadcasts to at least eight peers, and the miner probably gets transactions from ~30 peers. Even if every miner blocked transactions, the non-miner relays would probably be enough to spread the transaction to many miners.

It can't be done without major changes to the protocol.

I'm talking about the case of any hash matching any other hash. That was my reading of the OP's question.

No. The coins are chosen with some randomness, so it can't be known in advance.

You can ignore fees if you generate blocks.

That transaction was small, and it wasn't a micro-payment. I don't think a fee should have been charged. Are you sure you didn't have paytxfee set? If you ever set it in the past, the setting would have been stored in your wallet.dat.

What version of Bitcoin are you using?

Your balance must have been made up only of several small payments, which caused the transaction to be large (byte-wise). When transactions are above a certain size, a fee is always required; the transaction will never be included in a block if you don't include this fee.

The GUI version would have asked you whether you still wanted to send the payment.

Out of curiosity, what's the hash or address of this transaction? I can't think of why Bitcoin would send only 0.01 on a transaction with a required fee.

This is my view, also. I don't think any of the regular posters on the forum are Satoshi.

It's ~6.84x10^-49. Did you put "1 in 2^160" in Wolfram Alpha? 


Yes. It is a birthday problem.

The IRC server doesn't make the privacy issue worse. As soon as you connect to a Bitcoin node, you send them a message containing your IP address. This IP address is then broadcast across the network, and you are added to the address database maintained by every node. Every node knows every other node. So an attacker doesn't need to use IRC to see that you are using Bitcoin.


This was made using the addr system, without IRC.


If you've ever connected to a Bitcoin node, you will have a list of thousands of IP addresses you could try. The seednodes are only used the first time you join the network. You could use -addnode instead.

It's the probability of any two addresses matching in a set of ~17 billion random addresses. The probability for finding one specific address is 1 in 2¹⁶⁰ per attempt, as you pointed out.

Was it this? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin.org_translations

The unconfirmed ones are queued for inclusion. They have low priority because they are small in value, large in size, and based on recently-used coins. They will be included eventually.

Those transactions aren't in blocks yet, so no action is required.

I don't think that would have worked in this case. The warning the OP mentioned is caused by a corrupted block database, which would not be fixed with -rescan.

Yes. The resend randomization probably doesn't help anonymity much.

Yes. You need to re-download all blocks, which will take an hour or two. The number you've downloaded is displayed at the bottom of the Bitcoin window, and here is the current number.

It wants to randomize the resend times so it's not obvious that you own the transactions.

That might explain why it took so long. Bitcoin resends transactions 5-30 minutes after it starts, so restarting it will delay resends.

Try deleting everything in your Bitcoin data directory except wallet.dat (and bitcoin.conf if it exists). Your block database may have been corrupted.

Then people will want to back up the block chain, which is unnecessary.

Keeping the block reward at 50 BTC would continue to encourage mining forever, which might improve network security. It would be a "tax" on all coins, used to keep the network secure.

I don't think this is necessary, though.