The Lightning Network is a proposed payment channel layer for Bitcoin. Basically it allows for cheap transactions, typically small recurring payments, to occur. It is for scalability as it essentially can compress hundreds of transactions into one or two. For example, say for recurring micropayments from a faucet to you, normally, you may receive hundreds of these, and each one requires a specific fee. Instead with lightning, you will still have hundreds of transactions, just that when you want to use that Bitcoin, only one of those hundreds actually ends up on the Bitcoin network and in the blockchain, thus removing hundreds of transactions from the blockchain and saving both you and the faucet hundreds of transactions worth of fees. It essentially tracks balances between two parties.

There is no Lightning Network CEO. In fact, I don't think there are really any fees with Lightning if you use the payment channels. There may be some small fees if you do hops between channels because you have to pay the people you are hopping through.

Pruning is not done through the debug window, but rather the start up command. What you need to do is right click the shortcut to start Bitcoin Core and select properties. In the box that appears, add -prune=N to the end of the string in the box labeled "target". Make sure you have a space between what was already in that box and the prune option.

This isn't a first. I have also written an android app for the forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1195830.0) but I stopped working on it. Another user, elbandi, also created an android app (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327238.0) for the forum but that is also no longer being developed.

The best thing that you can do right now is to publish all of the source code for the app so that users here can verify that the source does not contain any malware. Then you also need to make deterministic binaries so that we can verify that the binaries you published are actually built from the published source code.

Well if participants on the altcoin had tainted their coins with some of the coins produced after the fork, then the transactions on the new chain would be invalid on the old chain. Any transaction that spent outputs created previous to the fork would be valid on the new chain. However any transaction that spent outputs created after the fork would not.

That is harder to do, in fact, I don't think it is possible. But you can completely separate into an altcoin by changing other parameters. Every coin has 4 "magic" bytes which identify the coin that the block or transaction belongs to. By changing the magic bytes, the blocks and transactions of one chain are ignored by the other, essentially separating the two networks.

Also, to do a fork like this, you need to set checkpoints into the forked blockchain and when it does fork, it is easier if the forked part is an invalid block on the old blockchain.

Use the latest official release, rc5, or grab a build of the final. You can use Theymos's posted above or use mine at https://github.com/achow101/bitcoin/releases/tag/v0.12.0. Make sure you verify the checksums against the sigs at https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs.

Well for people who can't connect to the normal Bitcoin network due to censorship, running Bitcoin Core over Tor allows them to circumvent that censorship. With a hidden service, they can also receive incoming connections. Otherwise the connections over Tor are only outgoing connections.

Actually it generates addresses as they are being used to maintain 100 unused addresses in reserve. So after you use one address, another one is generated so that there are still 100 remaining in reserve. After you have used one hundred addresses though, the backup that you previously made then is no longer valid since any further addresses were generated after your backup.

No. That makes no difference. There is no need to send the wallet address if someone is already getting the private key because the address is derived from the private key.

The problem is that since you created the private key, you still have access to that private key and therefore can spend any Bitcoin associated with that private key. People have to trust you to not steal their money.

Right, forgot to mention that. However, Bitcoin Core 0.12 will be released very soon. Probably within a day or two, so if you want to do it the easy way, just wait a little bit and wait for the official release. If you are impatient, you can download the binaries from my github at https://github.com/achow101/bitcoin/releases/tag/v0.12.0. Those were deterministically built so you can check the checksums at https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs under 0.12.0 and check that the downloaded file's hash matches the signed hashes of all of the people who have done gitian builds.

Well for somethings like bumps and +1's it is fairly trivial. But other stuff like asking questions with no intention of buying, that is harder to determine.

Why?

I think it needs to be left open as it uses Tor for doing Tor stuff.

It is actually very simple now. First start up tor, then start Bitcoin Core with the -listenonion flag and -torpassword=<pass> flag where <pass> is your control port password if you have one set. In order to use it though, you will need to enable the control port in the torrc file.

There is indeed a limit of 8 outbound connections. That number is hard coded into the Bitcoin Core software, you can never make more than 8 outbound connections. There is also a limit on the total number of connections you can possibly have. It is limited to 125 connections by default but that can be configured to however you like.

That IS the transaction that happened. The way a transaction works is that it takes inputs (outputs from another transaction) and it creates outputs. Technically there is no such thing as sending bitcoin to an address, technically there is no such thing as an address. That means that in this one transaction, one input was spent and it created several outputs which can also be spent. They are all part of the same transaction.

Why should core check a third party website for the fees? It already has its fee estimating, and if you actually have it run as it is supposed to, I think it is fairly accurate. In order for it to be accurate, you need to let Bitcoin core run for a while so that it receives enough blocks to do an accurate estimate.

It does show you the recommended fee/kB. If you use the coin control feature, then I think it will also tell you how much you should expect to pay in fees.

That isn't actually possible. You can't distinguish between when a user had a sig on or not and whether that sig is a campaign or not without going in and manually doing stuff.

No. Miners cannot find two solutions without running two processes (i.e. two pools). Neither of the blocks were invalid, they simply were not built upon by other miners so those blocks became stale (orphaned).

franky1's answer is the most likely answer for this situation.

Not really, at least for my site, you just need to configure it to exclude those boards in the counting. Since it already looks for the board, all you have to do is change it so that it checks the board before incrementing a counter.

I think off-topic would be a good choice as well as politics and society.

Theymos, can you let us know when you set those changes to go live so that those of us with potential activity checkers (like me) can update our sites accordingly?

Well it can be faked. Any miner could insert that into their Coinbase. Because miners can put whatever they want there, it is not necessarily trustworthy to use that for figuring out who mined a block.

It is possible that that is mis-attributed. There is no guarantee that BitFury produced those blocks, so it is possible that another miner simply produced a block that have the characteristics of a BitFury block but wasn't actually.