It depends on what you define as safe.

Personally I use Armory because I think it is safer than other options. It uses bitcoin core for networking so it uses a full node and thus doesn't need to trust someone else to provide the right data like an SPV wallet does. It also uses and HD wallet, although that wallet type and the master key format and key derivation is a separate thing that is not a BIP standard. But this HD wallet feature also eliminates the problem that Bitcoin Core has.

Some of the problems with armory though are the additional databases it creates and the huge memory usage of the program. There is also the fact that support for further development for open source armory seems to be dying, but I hope that changes.

Pretty much. Companies invest millions of dollars into chip development and they recover that by selling the chips. The thing is, if you attempt to develop your own chips, you will be investing a ton of money and mining will not recover you that much.

The power cost all depends on your electricity rates. If you have $0.10/kWh, an antminer x7 (consumes 1293 Watts), and run it continuously for 30 days, then the cost is as follows:
(1293 Watts /1000 watts/kW) * 24 hrs/day * 30 days * 0.10 $/kWh = $93.1 in electricity

As for your profits, that is a little harder to calculate. There are many mining calculators out there, here is one: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator.

One thing to keep in mind is that about every 2 weeks, the difficulty changes, and that can affect your profits. Usually the difficulty goes up so your profits will go down. As long as the price of Bitcoin stays high and keeps going up, then you will profit, but if it goes down, you will be mining at a loss.

First of all, you probably won't be able to make much extra cash from mining. It depends on your electricity cost, and that cost can offset the earnings you make so that you are actually earning at a loss.

There probably are scam pools. You should just stick to one of the big pools like slush, ckpool, f2pool, etc.

In general you should not have a lot of stuff on one outlet because the power draw can be too much. AFAIK you can use the 240 V outlet for more power and it will should work better. However you should check that with someone else about that.

Bottlenecks where? Bitcoin nodes download at full ISP speed as well. It doesn't have the additional bottleneck of having to verify all of the blocks after the download. The node will verify the blocks as they are downloaded, not after they have all been downloaded.

I'm not talking out of my ass. From my experience it has been faster to let the client (version 0.10+) sync by itself than it is to download the bootstrap.dat and to import that.

No, this is not possible. An ASIC is Application Specific, meaning that the code to do the hash is literally hard wired. That is what makes it so efficient, but it is not easy to make at home. It cannot be made from off the shelf parts, you need a foundry, clean room, and a bunch of other industrial level stuff that you can't get by yourself. It would definitely not be less expensive and more efficient than other miners. What you are suggesting is like an FPGA, which has already been used and passed. They are not as good as efficient.

You could try pybitcointools: https://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools

If the transaction was valid for both blockchains, then it would be possible for the transaction to confirm on both. However your node will only be able to use one of the forks. It will go with either the longest fork or the one that is valid under its rules if the fork was for a consensus rule change (e.g. soft fork or hard fork).

Tomcat runs by itself, it is a standalone web server. I don't know if it can work with XAAMP. It does work offline.

You will need to wait 2 minutes (its the new wait time), although I guess I should change that for the downloadable version. And remove the ads (I always forget to do that!)Fixed that

Assuming that that transaction did not go back into the mempool, then it would return as 0 confirmations, and after some time it may not even return a transaction at all.

By that definition of orphan blocks, it happens incredibly frequently, but only to a node. It is impossible to have a block to not have a parent block, but it is possible for a node to receive a block but does not know of the parent block. I would imagine it happens very frequently with the current sync method but it is always resolved.

In most cases, orphan blocks and orphan rate will refer to stale blocks

Yes and no. It is possible to include whatever transactions you want in a block, but it requires a code change. You would need to go into the code and change the mechanism which includes transactions into blocks in order to do this.

You will need Apache Tomcat. You can follow the instructions here: https://github.com/achow101/BitcointalkAccountPricer/blob/master/INSTALL.md#running-precompiled-release to download and run the compiled output that I have started posting.

Satoshi 0.11.99 is just a build of the next version, 0.12. The next version is never bumped up to its actual number until a little bit before actual release. Anytime you see a Satoshi x.xx.99, it is simply a version that was built from the source code and has not yet been released.

Bitcoin XT is just another client. It is a fork of Bitcoin Core.

You do not need to worry about those nodes.

How do they contradict me?

Paper takes a lot of time, it's inconvenient. I doubt his business will get a lot of business while he does that.

It is most certainly possible to hack a strong antivirus software. And those software cannot protect against vulnerabilities in software that do not require malware. If he doesn't sufficiently protect himself from attacks like buffer overflows (e.g. heartbleed), sql injection, etc, the best antivirus software will do absolutely nothing. In fact, having antivirus on a server is completely pointless. There is no good reason to have an antivirus on a server since a server should never be running any binary file except for the server software and its dependencies. Nothing else should ever be run, nor can anything else be run if the server owner isn't interacting with server except for site updates. And those should not be messing with the software anyways.

If your passwords are strong and you have SMS verification and email verification enabled, then you should be safe. As long as they can't guess your password and get into your account, then your Bitcoin is safe. You could also enable IP whitelisting and only allow connections to the whitelisted address, but this can be problematic if you have a dynamic ip address.

No. Unless there is a 0-day in the way that Bitcoin Core handles messages, this is not possible.

Is his security better than Target's, Adobe's, OPM, etc, security? Are you saying that this one guy is smarter than all of the security personnel that work at big corporations who have had huge hacks recently which compromised hundreds of thousands of SSN's, credit card numbers, birthdates, addresses, even fingerprints. If he is so good at security, is he famous for being a super good security person? Does he work for some huge company that values it security and has never been hacked?

Basically, I highly doubt that that forum will be secure enough to keep all of that sensitive and private information secure from hackers. It will be a really easy target for hackers to get some easy SSNs and Credit Card numbers to steal.

I see the transaction there with 7 confirmations.

Bitcoin core only briefly stores the data in RAM. It decrypts it for a short time, long enough to use the data, but then the data is removed after a little bit so it reduces the effectiveness of RAM spying programs.

Also, aren't programs only able to access RAM allocated to it unless it somehow has special permissions?