Yes nodes are arbitrary.  You maintain connections to peer nodes.  You can maintain as many connections are you like.  When you receive new "items" (inventory).  You relay them to the nodes you are connected to.  This includes new tx generated by your node and new blocks produced by your node as well as tx/blocks/headers you receive from other nodes. 

I have no interest in explaining the protocol line by line though.   Don't expect people to spoon feed you the answer.  At least do enough research so you can ask specific questions.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification

The satoshi client is the reference implementation of the protocol.  It is open source and can be used as a template:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

You don't submit just the nonce.  You submit the entire block (including all transactions, and a valid block header including the nonce) to the nodes you are connected to (tcp port 8333).   Those nodes will verify your work and if the block is valid and its hash meets the current target (based on difficulty) they will relay the found block to all nodes they are connected to.  Those nodes will verify and relay it to all nodes they are connected to until eventually your block is known by the entire network.

You "get paid" because the block you constructed has a transaction called the coinbase.  It is the only tx which has no input but it does have an output (which can be any valid address).  The coinbase tx is where the 50 new BTC are created from "nothing" (plus any tx fees) and sent to address provided.

Still solving with paper is just beyond pointless.
Current difficulty is 2,694,047.  That means on average it will take 2,694,047 nonce ranges to solve a block.
Nonce range is 2^32 so it will take on average 11,570,843,758,886,900 solved hashes to find one which meets the target requirement (determined by difficulty).
If you could solve perform the SHA-256 double hash by hand every minute (unlikely) it would take on average 22 billion years to solve a block.

One more time this time bolded for emphasis.


It is NOT possible to mine on Intel Integrated Graphics.  Not sure how much clearer that can be made.

What 500K? The 500K was simply paper profits.  It never existed.  If you think the 500K existed you must think Pirate now has 640K BTC and in a month he 838K BTC and in a year he will have will have 28.2 million BTC.

Pirate never had and likely never will have 500K BTC.  Hell Pirate probably was enough of a retard that all his profit from the ponzi-passthrough was in the zeek ponzi when it collapsed.  Pirate's coins are being held by other people totally unrelated to the scam.  How?  He accepted bitcoins, sold them on exchanges and OTC for USD which he like an idiot put into another ponzi calling it a "biz".

BTC moves from weak hands to stronger hands.

Well no signatures are not required for contracts.  When you signed up for cable TV did the CEO of your cable company come over to your house and sign the contract in person?  I am guessing not.  You will do have a service contract with the cable company.

Still the use of the word contract is this case is likely excessive.  Matt had an agreement, an agreement that he failed to honor. Yeah I am going to go way out of the limb and say neither Pirate nor Matt are going to pay giant sums they never had the intent of repaying in the next however many minutes remain.

Still it wasn't completely useless, I did learn I should never do business with myrkul, as he seem to think that evading the intent of the agreement is ok as long as you don't evade the technical requirements.  Thanks.

Depends on the terms of the escrow generally there are two routes: arbitration and no-recourse.

In no-recourse moving the funds requires consensus of both parties.  There is no economic value in pulling a scam.  You can pull a scam but you will never get paid.  You rep takes a hit and you get nothing for it.  The net value is a loss. 

Escrow doesn't need to be absolute scam proof it simply needs to raise the cost of a scam to the point it isn't worth it.

Matt was never going to pay anyone and he was never going to win.  Changing the deadline is just smoke and mirrors.

Trolloollloolloool.  Keep the drama going as long as possible.  In 8 hours or 17 hours or 47 hours he will have some other excuse as to why the bet isn't "yet" decided.

You don't get to set the terms AFTER the bet is won or lost.  Matt could have required an escrow.  Hell the only thing that would have made sense is to escrow funds from both sides. 

Yeah PUT UP on a bet he had no intention of honoring.

Yes he is certainly a victim.  Poor him for making false bets...  OH NOES.  What other choice did he have.

That currently does not exist anywhere.  The closest thing would be BitInstant's credit card offering but there is no launch date and even then it is unclear if funds sent to the card would remain as BTC and converted as needed or if all funds sent to card are converted instantly to USD.

What you are asking is the "the holy grail" when it comes to BTC/CC and will would require a high level of integration with a very well capitalized company AND a merchant bank (i.e. a bank which has a license from MasterCard or VISA international).  It simply may not exist for a long time.

You seem to have difficulty reading what other people are writing.

multi-sig IS part of the Bitcoin protocol the implementation is CURRENTLY (as in today but not forever) incomplete.  The current (incomplete) implementation requires both keys in multi-sig tx to be in the same wallet.  In the future that won't be required.

Still even multi-sig doesn't remove the need for cold storage.  Even real world banks use the concept of cold storage.  A bank which has $1,000,000 on hand doesn't have $100,000 sitting in the teller's drawer.  Given that in any reasonable amount of time a teller's cash needs a less each teller only has access to a small fraction of the banks total cash holdings.

Get any reloadable prepaid creditcard that accepts ACH (there are over a dozen) and then you can use FastCash4Bitcoins to load your card by ACH.

People are stupid.  How could anyone NOT know it was a scam?  I mean honestly.

Those saying "Pirate must be paying this weekend" did you forget...

a) Matt's bet was that Pirate would pay per the terms on his thread (which included interest up to the hour of repayment)

b) Over a week ago pirate stated he will NOT honor the terms of his contract and suspended interest retroactively back to the Friday of closure.

If hypothetically 3 weeks ago Pirate owed 500K BTC (the # he claimed) and tomorrow he repaid 500K BTC Matt would still lose the bet.   
In the last 3 weeks another 130K (~$1.4 million) extra interest has capitalized.  So Pirate would need to repay ~630K BTC not 500K BTC.

Even if Pirate intended to repay and had the ability to repay, why would anyone think he is going to give up $1.4 million extra dollars just to ensure Matt doesn't lose his bet?

Received.  Glad to see the OP make good on his obligations.


"It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again."

That wasn't stupid that was pure awesome.  Make it like a +/-.  Too many minus you go to noob zone for a time out and your - score increses by 1 pt per x hours.  When it is back to zero you can come out and play again.

Just a friendly suggestion.  I would recommend this weekend starting to come up with better numbers.    Use the thread to answer questions but you really need to flesh in your details.

Even something as simple as an excel spreadsheet can allow you to start to get a handle on your real costs.

For example you have $8/hr for labor.  As an employer you are required to pay the employer half of FICA (~7.65%) plus Workman's Comp Insurance is required in most states and costs extra.  You (or at the very least your investors) likely want some payroll system to handle tax deductions, remissions, and issue net paychecks to avoid that liabilty/penalty.  So that is just one of your budget items.Generally speaking for most employers labor costs about 200% to 300% of actual wages.  Even with no benefits, sickdays, nothing 150% of actual wages is a good starting point.

What is it about freedom that scares you?

But unconfirmed tx should be visible on the network within seconds.