The wallet.dat is the only file which contains your private keys (aka "your wallet").



To make a backup:
copy the wallet.dat somewhere safe.
If you AREN'T using client encryption you should encrypt the file w/ third party software.
If you ARE using the client encryption it is already encrypted you are done.

To restore a backup:
copy the saved wallet.dat to the bitcoin data directory.
Your done.


If you start bitcoin client with NO WALLET.DAT then Bitcoin will make a new empty wallet but understand that empty wallet has different (random) addresses.  It is worthless from a back up point of view.  Simply delete it and copy the backup wallet.dat to the data directory.

So your stop loss kicks in at <$8 and when the market rebounds a few seconds later to $8.50+ you lost 10% or more?  Sweet!
Stop loss + high volatility = good way to lose a lot of funds.

Trying to guess the bottom of normal volatility and putting your stop loss below that is a fools errand.  If the markets did allow stop losses the next major manipulation would be intended to force those stop losses to execute and rob you of your coins.  There simply isn't enough market depth, so someone with $500K to $1M to could force a 10% move which is enough to kick you your stoploss.  Now if it was just your stoploss it wouldn't really matter but imagine there are 1000 other unsophisticated traders with a combined stop loss of 20K more coins.  The price falls way down to $7 (remember stop loss executes at market).  The manipulator buys after the panic sells and in span of a few seconds hundred thousand dollar or more is transfer from you (and others) to him.   Rinse and repeat over and over and over until you rob every single stop losser dry. 

The only thing worse than a flash crash is a flash crash where your "safety stop loss" caused you to sell at the bottom.  The only thing worse than that is watching BTC price rebound in a matter of seconds and knowing your coins are gone.

http://bitcoin.org/clients.html

Yup there are lite clients available.

The reference client should never be lite.  I mean it is an oxymoron.  It is the reference implementation of how a node interacts with its peers using the Bitcoin protocol.  It by its very definition must be full and complete.  Users are not required to run a full node.  Satoshi never intended for most users to run full nodes.  It just happened that for the first couple years the amount of resources required to run a full node were trivial and lite nodes simply didn't exist. 

I do think decoupling the "satoshi client" from bitcoin.org eventually is useful.  The Bitcoin.org website should be client agnostic.  The client list page is a step in the right direction. 

If you really had some money I would take a gamble and aproach the top 3 pools.  Offer to prepay them a premium directly if they use a vanity address (1st25BTC....) you generated as the coinbase for that block. 

Then it will be 0 hops.  Of course even w/ top 3 pools you only have a ~50% chance of getting that particular block.

IF BFL releases the ASICS and they meets the specs as listed and they can produce in volume you can expected difficulty to increase by a factor of 100x (no not 100%, 10,000%).

There is no free lunch in mining.  If you have a rig that is 100x as powerful so does everyone else and the difficulty increases.

Bitcoin can't spend part of an output.  If you have a 2BTC output you MUST spend 2 BTC.  The second 1BTC is a "change address".  A new address from your wallet.  Your client spent 2BTC.  1BTC was sent to the destination and 1 BTC was sent back to you.

All Bitcoin transactions work this way.

I like seeing the higher lows.   The selloffs are so artificial; nobody with that amount of coins cashes them in, in such a stupid manner ("hey let me sell 40K BTC at market, yeah that sounds like a good idea").  The intent was to drive the price lower yet on each of the three plunges it was less effective.   The drops are both smaller on a % basis and the bottoms are higher on a nominal basis.  

Roughly:
$7.40 -> $7.70 -> $8.00
20% -> 15% -> 10%

If the manipulator(s) can't push it below $8.00 on their next failed panic sell then they are done.   Someone burnt a lot of coins trying to keep the price down and it has been futile.

USER DON'T NEED TO DOWNLOAD 2GB.

If they want to be a full node they will however no matter what is done the initial startup time for a new FULL node will be high.

If Bitcoin becomes 20x as popular the load on full nodes will rise.   Yes higher fees (no not stupidly increasing the low priority mandatory fees I am talking about competition among users raising the effective fees), blockchain pruning, openCL acceleration, more efficient indexing, multi-peer parallel downloads, will make the blockchain/nodes more efficient but just the overall increase in the size of Bitcoin "universe" means the load on full nodes will be HIGHER not LOWER in the future. 

So you have two scenarios:
a) Bitcoin growth stagnates at which point it doesn't really matter how large or inefficient the blockchain is.  The project has fizzled out anyways
b) Bitcoin growth continues and no matter what is done the load on full nodes will RISE.  Full nodes will be more efficient so the network being 20x as large won't require 20x the resources but the load will be higher than today.

NOT EVERYONE NEEDS TO RUN A FULL NODE.  A couple thousand full nodes is more than sufficient to ensure the network is secure, stable, and decentralized.  I don't see major businesses, exchanges, miners, mining pools, service providers, ewallet providers, and bitcoin enthusiasts seeing 2GB or 20GB being an impossible hurdle.  I mean people torrent hundreds of GBs a month.  Will 99.999999999% of users opt for the cost and complexity of a full node?  No and absolutely nothing you can propose will change that.  The good news is they don't have to; if someday there are 20 million bitcoin users and only in in 10,000 runs a full node well that would be awesome.

Who said anything about money laundering?  This bill doesn't even cover that.  Existing laws are already on the books covering money laundering.  And no selling WOW gold (or anything) isn't money laundering unless it meets the statutory elements of money laundering (namely that the intent is to transfer funds which are involved in or are the proceeds of a criminal enterprise).

Meh.  I don't think central bank means what you think it means.  I can't use dollars and be outside the influence of the Federal Reserve.  You CAN choose to never do business with MtGox.  At one point MtGox had about 90%+ of the daily exchange volume and today that is more like 65% to 70%.  That is in the trades tracked on exchanges, plenty of trades occur off exchange.

No because you don't "receive" coins.   Sender broadcasts a message (to every single node in the network) that "you" now have control of the coins.  What enables you to spend those coins in the future is the fact that you have the private key for the public address coins were sent to.   

You (either directly as a full node or indirectly as a lite client/webservice) only need access to the blockchain to verify coins were sent and to spend them.

The protocol can't enforce fees.  The reference rules to prevent DOS attacks impose a required fee on LOW PRIORITY TX only.   Miners are free to choose what transactions they include in a block.  If you run a mining node you are free to exclude ANY transaction you wan't (for any reason).   Raising the mandatory fee on LOW PRIORITY TXs would be foolish and not have the desired effect you think it would as most transaction are HIGH PRIORITY and thus aren't affected by tx fee rules.  


Anti-spam rules make this prohibitively expensive.  The attacker would end up paying 10x to 100x the cost incurred by full nodes (and light nodes would incur no cost).  Trying to outspend your enemy when there are more of them and it costs you $100 for every $1 it costs you is kinda dumb.  Sort of like designing weapons which shoot money at the enemy and trying to kill them by burying them in giant piles of cash.  While technically possible there are far more effective methods of attack.


Why?  There is no need for users today to run a full node.  If they wish to run a full node then the 4GB "cost" is something they accept.  A long term project would be one that OpenCL accelerates the blockchain verification.   In theory bootstrapping a new node could be done significantly faster.

Well no because that assumes there are no other transactions competing for space in the block.  Already today in order to get priority processing many users pay > 0.0005 BTC.  An attacker attempting to launch such an attack would simply find that other users raise fees as they see their confirmations slow down.  A smaller and smaller % of attackers fee are put into the block.  Worse many blocks would go over the 50% mark and the fees required for inclusion of low priority transactions would skyrocket.  The network is well protected against a spam attack.  If necessary the mandatory fees (which AND I CAN'T STRESS THIS ENOUGH only affect low priority txs) can be raised by a consensus of miners.  It has been lowered in the past.  Even without raising the fee the USD cost will rise in relation to the USD:BTC exchange rate.

Generally predictions that begin with "I don't understand this BUT" are worthless.

IF you don't understand the technical details how can you make predictions as to the scope of the problem or potential solutions.   

The reality is that only unspent tx need to remain in the blockchain and over time that will represent a smaller and smaller % of total transactions.  Storage requirements are a non-issue long term.  Casual users are best served by lite clients, a development that Satoshi covers in the white paper written over three years ago.

No.

Your understanding of DOS prevention fees is incomplete.  When a block is more than 50% full the required fees (for low priority transactions) start to increase.  At 50% full the fee would be 0.0005 BTC.  At 80% full it would be 0.002 BTC. At 90% full it would be 0.05 BTC.  At 99% full it would be > 1 BTC.  You could spend millions and go bankrupt before you could spam the Bitcoin network to death.  Of course that ignores what competition for block space will do to fess on legit tx.  Users who want to ensure their tx goes first will increase their fees meaning even paying millions in fees may not be a guarantee that your spam tx are included in a block any time soon.

Downside #1:  It compromises the anonymity concept of Bitcoin.  You provide a great nexus for tracking who sent coins to where.

Downside #2: It compromises the "no trusted third party" concept of Bitcoin.  You simply walk away with all the coins.

Lets say for the sake of argument that a hypothetical investment program offering 7% is just some ponzi HYIP scam.  How does the discredit Bitcoin?  Do USD based HYIP scams discredit the dollar?

Bitcoin is a medium of exchange.  If someone falls victim to a Ponzi it isn't the fault of the medium of exchange.

Maybe you don't realize that LOW PRIORITY AND HIGH PRIORITY have specific definitions.  If you could spam around thousands of tiny transactions without fees well guess what a thousand attacks could spam around millions or billions of tiny transactions without fees and cripple the network.

If the network determines your transaction is low priority then compliant nodes will refuse to relay your transaction without a fee.  This isn't done for revenue purposes this is done to prevent someone creations billions or trillions of tiny transactions a bloating the block chain by gigabytes a day.   It is a safety mechanism.  

None of this has ANYTHING to do with what fee will be required to have your transaction in the next block.  That is up to miners and what other users are paying.

Regarding MPESA last time I checked it isn't free.  Even at $0.01 per tx bitcoin is significantly cheaper than MPESA.
http://www.safaricom.co.ke/index.php?id=255

About 25% of the cost at the smallest transaction and less than 1% of the cost at the high end.

The mandatory fee only applies to low priority transactions so by definition there would be no fee required for a high priority transaction.  If someone is using coins they only recently received then it is likely a low priority transaction (unless they received a large number of coins).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees#Technical_info

I think you are confused into thinking that the protocol FORCES miners to accept certain transactions.  It never has and hopefully never will.  The MANDATORY fee simply exists to PROTECT the network against spam and denial of service attacks.

MINERS determine which transactions go into blocks they mine and may include tx with no fee (or fee less than the mandatory fee) and may also exclude ANY transactions even those with the mandatory fee.   Competition between users will likely force fee HIGHER the mandatory fee so you could set the mandatory fee to zero (a very dangerous idea) and the fee required to get into the next block will still be greater than zero.  Even today we strongly encourage our clients to use a fee of 0.002 BTC of higher as doing so greatly increases the likelihood their transaction will be in the next block. 

If you want to be in the next block you are going to have to pay.  Period.  The next block only has so much space and when # of transactions is larger than the amount of space miners will pick the higher paying transactions.  If you don't care how long a confirmation takes you can pay less or even nothing.  

You can't have your cake and eat it to.  You can't demand free transactions and then also demand that every transaction be in the next block.

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