Nodes aren't the same as miners. Miners have specialized equipment which does the computations to find the hash that is less than the target. Nodes are just computers that keep a local copy of the blockchain and fully validate all transactions and all blocks it receives. Nodes would still be the same affordability since the blockchain would be the same size and validation still is the same.

How would you achieve consensus? My node might choose to not relay or store certain transactions in the mempool while yours does. By including different transactions, different hashes will be produced. Consensus cannot be achieved this way. Even if the mempool rules were fixed, due to the propagation of transactions, some nodes might have transactions that another doesn't. This also has an issue of a spam attack preventing use of Bitcoin transactions. Say an attacker with a little bit of computational power creates thousands of transactions beginning with the letter "a" and spams the network. Then all of your blocks are filled with spam and legitimate transactions are not included.

What do you mean "pull only the numbers and obtain a big number"? The hash itself is a big number, 256 bits, represented in hexadecimal format.


What prevents someone from forking the blockchain and doing double spends? There is nothing that prevents a malicious user from creating thousands of blocks and attempting to fork the blockchain. PoW and PoS prevent this because it cost resources in order to fork the blockchain and attack the network. Your proposal has no inherent protection so it would be vulnerable to various double spend attacks and blockchain forks.

They don't require 2FA to login? That is pretty stupid.

What do you mean by monitoring? Do you want a command that checks to see if there are any new transactions for a bitcoin address? If so, there isn't.

You have to set the change address when you do createrawtransaction. If you don't it will become a transaction fee.

Java is widely used for Bitcoin clients. MultiBit, Hive, Android wallets, and a bunch of others use BitcoinJ, which is a Bitcoin library in Java.

The problem with this things is it is closed source, from a newbie, and risks money in order to audit the code.

If you make it open source, people who don't know how to compile java programs or don't want to can buy a binary copy from you. Sure you might not make as much money, but it makes you seem more credible.

I would be interested, but I question both the security of the product and the security of putting my wallet on google drive.

use the getwalletinfo command. It shows the keypool size

You can use other software such as pywallet to dump your wallet into human-readable format. You can see all of the addresses it contains and whether they are in use or not. Addresses that are labeled as reserve:1 is unused.

It will only generate new keys when the keypool runs out or the encryption is changed. Adding a password and changing it will have it regenerate the keypool AFAIK.

MultiBit is annoying in that you can't import private keys from other wallets. It also can't read from a wallet.dat file. Instead, make a blockchain.info account and import the wallet.dat file there. Then send all of your Bitcoin to an address from MultiBit. The "wallet words" are the seed phrase it uses to deterministically generate addresses.

That actually is to prevent spam and spammers.

They also care about security a lot because many financial transactions happen here. If a trusted account was to be compromised, then the attacker could use that account to scam people and steal a lot of money.

I haven't seen any evidence of miners intentionally mining empty blocks. To me, they just seem to be a byproduct of their mining operations which probably aren't all that optimized so mining empty blocks still allows them to be competitive. Of course, if they are mining empty blocks intentionally, then they are also losing some Bitcoin from fees (not enough to have a large impact) and hurting the network.

Some pools have better conditions than others. As kano stated
Those pools with those conditions and other mindsets as ck and kano have (seems to want to help the network, not just profit) choose not to mine empty blocks because at the very least, there is no incentive. They can make more by including more transactions because of fees. And since they have conditions where the overhead doesn't matter, why not mine full blocks and fully verify blocks?

Also, for Chinese miners and pools, that overhead does matter. They might have a powerful server, probably not a well tuned bitcoind or they have poorly written custom software, and they most likely have a shitty internet connection due to the Great Firewall. This makes them find every possible way to make a profit, which includes having to SPV mine and mine empty blocks.

I mean that the average of two blocks, one found a few seconds after the previous and the other twenty minutes after the last block, is still around 10 minutes. The affect of those blocks on the difficulty retarget is negligible.

I'm not trying to compare two specific implementations. My point is that miners will choose to continue to allow empty blocks to be mined because they in general allow them to make more money. Some implementations might be worse than others, for instance, your ckpool software is obviously working better or on better hardware than Eligius's software.

Consider this:
I set up a pool using the exact same software, server config, etc, except I allow empty blocks to be mined. Since I am not using extra cpu time to gather mempool transactions, logically, I will have faster block changes and more blocks than you will.

Another thing, you seem to be comparing between you and Eligius. Both only represent a small percentage of the hash power. What about comparing between your and f2pool or antpool? Are their block changes faster than your or not? Have you tried?

Right. I forgot about the difficulty retarget. However, those blocks found with extreme time differences (1 sec or 1 hour) essentially cancel each other out in regards to the retarget.

Well, I stand corrected. I didn't quite understand the data since I didn't see any headings, but after examining it a little more, it seems that your pool and a few others have never found an empty block, which I find kind of surprising.

I used logic, I have not verified it. Logically, more CPU cycles to process transactions will take more time than not spending those cpu cycles to process transactions. However, I will test this and see if my theory is correct.

I do not think that such a test would be an accurate test. Since both pools use different software and are run on different servers and configurations, there are too many variables that could change those times. Instead, I will perform a test on a regtest network where I will create a mempool of 0, 10000, 50000, and 100000 transactions and compare the times it takes for the getwork and getblocktemplate commands to complete. This creates a controlled test environment and reduces other factors that could affect results.

Because it negatively impacts the network. As we have seen with SPV mining, there are issues that can occur and cause blockchain forks and weaken Bitcoin. However, I personally don't think empty blocks negatively impact the network. They are typically found within seconds of the previous block, so for transactions, it really is just like a block was found with two block rewards. It doesn't particularly mess with confirmation times and while it would be nice if those blocks included transactions, it doesn't matter (at least for me) that those transactions wait another ten minutes like they should have

You should be fine with the first backup. You only need the private key to spend the coin. However, if the wallet.dat is anything like Bitcoin's, after you use 100 addresses, you need to backup again because it will generate another 100 addresses for the keypool. If you don't backup, you could lose those coins since the keys are generated randomly not deterministically.

No. You can see any trust you like, so long as you configure your trust list to include people that you trust. Default Trust is added to everyone's trust list to protect newbies from scammers. It includes people that have proven to be trusted in their time on this forum. You can remove Default Trust from your trust list if you want to.

What pool do you want them to mine with then? Every pool that I know of mines empty blocks. It is simply part of mining. Gathering transactions from the mepool to fill a block takes time, time when another pool that doesn't do that can claim the block reward before your pool does. They lose time and money by creating only full blocks. For receiving an extra 0.1-0.2 BTC every so often, it doesn't make much sense to most pool operators and miners.

You can use mixers as people have already suggested, or use CoinJoin transactions which have multiple people participate in one transaction that makes it incredibly difficult to determine who owns what output of the transaction.

Actually, Default Trust is not seeable by everyone. You can set who is in your trust list, and the user DefaultTrust is automatically added to every account's trust list upon creation. You can create your own trust network by adding people that you trust to the trust list. This will let you see the trust ratings of people you trust.

Probably has to do with the volatile price. Since the price of Bitcoin is not very stable, businesses are less likely to use Bitcoin because they could lose money with it. They could use service likes BitPay, but they charge fees. Most businesses use services like BitPay to convert the Bitcoin to fiat immediately.

Also, they might not want to be associated with Bitcoin because of all of the negative press that Bitcoin gets. For some reason, people always associate Bitcoin with drugs and illegal stuff when they think of Bitcion.

The blockchain is very big. This is normal. To sync faster, get a super high speed internet connection and a very high performance CPU. If you don't like the wait, go for a SPV wallet like Electrun or MultiBit.

There is no service that does this AFAIK. I have looked around for a while and the only ones I see accept Bitcoin and give you fiat, not the other way around.

I just did this and Keyscrow's service is very nice. It tells you exactly what to do and requires only a little bit of technical knowledge. Overall, the service is great for multisig escrows and I would definitely use them for real transactions.