So, it seems like blockexplorer.com has lost their minds, and I don't really want to support that.  blockchain.info is a classic fuck-up, not really into them either.  Is there a reasonable block-explorer on the web that I can use with confidence?

Is there a way to ignore an entire thread; to prevent replies to it from showing up in my 'new replies' page?

There are some threads with like over 300 pages (so the option to show all pages doesn't appear) and I posted somewhere back in that thread some years ago and the thread is still continuing to this day and I haven't looked at it for years and now I want to ignore it.  I'd love to be able to do this without trying to find exactly where I posted in order to delete it.  I mean, if a thread has 300+ pages and I have thousands of posts, it's not so easy to find a particular one.

Because I tend to use my "new replies" more than my "watchlist", I would love a way to ignore an entire thread.  Maybe I just have to learn to use my watchlist?

Thanks for any tips.

This should be an easy one for someone here.

I was thinking about turning on pruning to save some disk space.  Do I need to recompile?  I don't recall seeing any options for pruning when I ran

Code:

$ ./configure help

last time I built bitcoind.  Alternatively, is this something I stick in my .conf file?

I'm getting an error from the linker when building bitcoin from the repo on debian testing.

When I get to building qt:

Code:

 CXXLD    bench/bench_bitcoin
  CXX      qt/qt_bitcoin_qt-bitcoin.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-bantablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-bitcoinaddressvalidator.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-bitcoinamountfield.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-bitcoingui.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-bitcoinunits.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-clientmodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-guiutil.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-intro.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-modaloverlay.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-notificator.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-optionsdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-optionsmodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-peertablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-rpcconsole.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-splashscreen.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-utilitydialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-addressbookpage.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-addresstablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-askpassphrasedialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-coincontroldialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-coincontroltreewidget.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-editaddressdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-openuridialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-overviewpage.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-paymentrequestplus.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-paymentserver.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-receivecoinsdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-receiverequestdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-recentrequeststablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-sendcoinsdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-sendcoinsentry.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-signverifymessagedialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactiondesc.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactiondescdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactionfilterproxy.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactionrecord.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactiontablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-transactionview.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-walletframe.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-walletmodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-walletmodeltransaction.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-walletview.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_bantablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_bitcoinamountfield.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_bitcoingui.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_bitcoinunits.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_coincontroldialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_guiutil.o
  GEN      qt/moc_modaloverlay.cpp
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_modaloverlay.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_notificator.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_optionsmodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_overviewpage.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_peertablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_paymentserver.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_receivecoinsdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_receiverequestdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_recentrequeststablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_rpcconsole.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_sendcoinsdialog.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_sendcoinsentry.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_transactionfilterproxy.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_transactiontablemodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_transactionview.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_walletmodel.o
  CXX      qt/qt_libbitcoinqt_a-moc_walletview.o
  AR       qt/libbitcoinqt.a
/usr/bin/ar: `u' modifier ignored since `D' is the default (see `U')
  OBJCXXLD qt/bitcoin-qt
//usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-dri3.so.0: undefined reference to `xcb_send_request_with_fds'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
Makefile:3564: recipe for target 'qt/bitcoin-qt' failed
make[2]: *** [qt/bitcoin-qt] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/tsp/src/bitcoin/src'
Makefile:8897: recipe for target 'all-recursive' failed
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/tsp/src/bitcoin/src'
Makefile:685: recipe for target 'all-recursive' failed
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

My config:

Code:

Options used to compile and link:
  with wallet   = yes
  with gui / qt = yes
    qt version  = 5
    with qr     = yes
  with zmq      = no
  with test     = yes
  with bench    = yes
  with upnp     = yes
  debug enabled = no

  target os     = linux
  build os      =

  CC            = gcc
  CFLAGS        = -g -O2
  CPPFLAGS      =  -DHAVE_BUILD_INFO -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS
  CXX           = g++
  CXXFLAGS      = -g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wformat -Wformat-security -Wno-unused-parameter
  LDFLAGS       =

libxcb-dri3.so.0 exists and is where you'd expect.  I'm not sure why ld is failing.  Let me know if you guys have tips!

Oh yah, and presumably the issue is not in that file:

Code:

$ strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-dri3.so.0 |grep xcb_send_request_with_fds
xcb_send_request_with_fds

Cheers!

Hi, I have three (I think there are three of them) freeroll tickets for the betcoin.ag poker freeroll.  I've been told by roslinipl and the betcoin staff that I can sell them and they'll transfer them from my account for me.

So, I don't really have an opening bid, but if this auction doesn't reach a price which seems worth it for the rigamarole of transferring them, then I reserve the right not to sell.  On the other hand, I'm not able to use these tickets myself for now, so I'm happy to sell them for a fair price.

On Unices that I use, there's md5sum and md5deep and md5:

Code:

$ echo -n "foo" | md5
acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8
$ echo -n "foo" | md5sum
acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8  -
$ echo -n "foo" | md5deep
acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8

For sha, I see sha1sum and sha1deep, sha256sum and sha256deep, etc.

From what I can tell, there's no difference between the output of md5 and md5deep.  And the "sum" versions just adds a " -".  Can anyone let me know what's going on with these variants of these hashing tools?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

I think the official bitcoin wiki is here:

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

But recently, when using a search engine to turn up the bitcoin wiki, I ended up here:

http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Main_Page

On that second wiki, I hit "random page", and ended up on a weird spam page about chocolate, kinda funny but not appropriate, as far as I can tell:

http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Menu_In_Making_Unique_Chocolate_Items

Then, I searched "address" in the wiki's search bar and found lots of weird pages which are certainly not appropriate:

http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/When_Is_It_Important_To_Employ_A_Divorce_Lawyer_In_Round_Rock_TX?
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/How_Do_You_Know_If_Movers_In_Houston_TX_Are_Dependable_Or_Not?
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Personal_Coaching_-_Prime_7_Fundamentals_and_a_crucial_Essential
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/How_Is_Laser_Gum_Treatment_In_Humble_TX_Totally_Different_From_Conventional_Gum_Treatments?
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Trust_your_undertaking_to_gemstonegridirondeck.com5235460
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Abortion_Clinics_In_San_Diego_CA_Alternatives:_What_Choices_Are_Available_For_You?

Finding this kinda nonsense on a wiki about bitcoin seems kinda embarrassing.  Does anyone know who runs this alternative bitcoin wiki?  It seems to be full of weird spam that needs to be deleted.

I think this is an easy question but I couldn't turn it up by searching on the wiki, so I thought I'd just ask here.  Assuming I have the raw hex of a signed transaction, how do I get the txid?  I tried:

echo -n "01234567890abcdefrawhexofsignedtransactioninherefedcba09876543210" | sha256sum

and that didn't seem to be it.  I also tried:

cho -n "01234567890abcdefrawhexofsignedtransactioninherefedcba09876543210" | sha256sum | sha256sum

and that didn't seem to be it either.

Thanks in advance, you wizards!

I saw this in Slashdot yesterday:


http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/09/1938206/cryptographers-brace-for-quantum-revolution

Tokolosh writes:
An article in Scientific American discusses the actions needed to address the looming advent of quantum computing and its ability to crack current encryption schemes. Interesting tidbits from the article: "'I'm genuinely worried we're not going to be ready in time,' says Michele Mosca, co-founder of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo..." and "Intelligence agencies have also taken notice. On August 11, the US National Security Agency (NSA) revealed its intention to transition to quantum-resistant protocols when it released security recommendations to its vendors and clients." Another concern is "intercept now, decrypt later", which presumably refers to the giant facility in Utah.
In related news, an anonymous reader points out that the NSA has updated a page on its website, announcing plans to shift the encryption of government and military data from current cryptographic schemes to new ones that can resist an attack by quantum computers.

Then I looked a bit at the wikipedia page on elliptic curve cryptography and it seems that ECC is especially vuneralble to quantum attacks compared to RSA crypto of equivalent key lengths.  From what I understand, the main advanage to date of ECC over RSA is that you can get equivalent security for shorter key-lengths.  A 256bit ECC key is supposed to provide security on the order of like a 1028bit RSA key. However, apparantely quantum computers nullify this advanage.

Does this have ramifications for bitcoin?  In a worst-case scenario in which our fundamental crypto is broken, would bitcoin be able to upgrade the protocol to use a different crypto system?  How would the UTXO set be secured?

Thanks in advance for educating me you guys.

[is]

I wouldn't have come across this if it hadn't been for the long saga of quickseller abuse I've been suffering.  But recently he's started using a new alt/sockpuppet to try to attack me and I started looking more closely at the situation.  I realized that it seems that Panthers52 has done several deals which were escrowed by Quickseller.  The fact that Quickseller is escrowing for himself seems like a scammy behavior.  I'm not a trader here so it may be that there's nothing wrong with this.  But in any case, I'll go ahead and present some quantitative evidence here and you guys can discuss it as you please.

I happen to have some training in Statistical Methods for Natural Language Processing so I know a thing or two about how people use language and how to measure it quantitatively.  Although QS does a few funny things to try to disguise his use of Panthers52 as an alt (he doesn't use a sig-ad, he signs each message with "Kind Regards", etc), these techniques are not very robust---they don't disguise QS's style of writing at all when looked at from a big-picture perspective, and this is just what language modeling allows us to do.

One reason that I set out to do this experiment is because all of the pieces are there.  QS has written a pretty large corpus of posts under his main account.  And there's a secondary account as well (one of his alts which was outed only a few months ago) to do model checking on.  So, here's the big picture set up.  We're going to download the corpus of posts of Quickseller, ACCTSeller (his outed alt), Panthers52 (his accused alt), hilariousandco, dooglus, and me.  We'll then build language models using maximum likelihood parameter estimation for all of the ngrams in each corpus up to n=3.  For those who don't know, 1-grams are all of the single word tokens in the corpus, 2-grams (called bigrams) are all of the word pairs, 3-grams are all of the word triples, etc.  The reason I don't use 4 grams or any higher n is that the data just gets more and more sparse the higher you go, unless you have an incredibly large amount of data.  For this project, a 3 gram model seemed appropriate (and the 3-gram section wasn't terribly sparse).  So, step one, I downloaded all of the posts of theses members as raw html.  I used this script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
u=$1
outdir=$2

curl --data "action=profile&u=${u}&sa=showPosts"  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php > $outdir/page0.html
dend=`cat $outdir/page0.html | sed -n -e 's/.*>\([0-9]\+\)<\/a> <span class="prevnext.*/\1/p'`
# dend=`cat $outdir/page0.html | sed -n -e 's/.*Pages:.*\.\.\. <\/b><a class="navPages" href="https:\/\/bitcointalk.org\/index.php?action=profile;u=[0-9]\+;sa=showPosts;start=[0-9]\+">\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p'`
end=`echo "$dend" | head -n 1`
echo $end

i=1
while [[ $i -le $end ]]; do
  start=$(($i*20))
  curl --data "action=profile&u=${u}&sa=showPosts&start=$start"  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php > $outdir/page${start}.html
  ((i= i+1))
done

What's going on here is that you pass in a UID and a output directory and then use curl to get the first page of the "recent posts" of this member.  You then use sed to grab the last page of the post history, then you loop and do curl on each page and save the entire html into an output directory.  After doing this, I had a directory called rawhtml/ with subdirectories for each of the accounts in my experiment.

The next step was to strip out all of the irrelevant html stuff.  Thankfully, the html has a class "post" which contains people's posts.  And has another class for quotes and quoteheaders so it's pretty easy to load a page into beautifulsoup html parser, strip out the quotes and quoteheaders.  Here's my short-n-sweet python script to leave you with what I call "rawposts".

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

indir = sys.argv[1]
outdir = sys.argv[2]
for infile in os.listdir(indir):
  soup = BeautifulSoup(open(indir+"/"+infile),'html.parser')
  quoteheaders = soup.find_all("div", "quoteheader")
  for qh in quoteheaders:
    qh.extract()
  quotes = soup.find_all("div", "quote")
  for q in quotes:
    q.extract()

  posts = soup.find_all("div","post")
  f = open(outdir+"/"+infile,"w")
  for p in posts:
    print>>f, p
  print("done writing "+infile)

So, I ran this script to create a subdirectory for each account in the experment and I end up with a collection of posts, still as html, but without the embedded quotes.  The next step was to tokenize the file and to do some final cleanup before building the models.  By tokenize, I explicitly want to deal with punctuation and other funny stuff.  Imagine, if you leave periods and question marks stuck to the sides of words then you get some really funny counts which misses generalizations.  In fact, a period is a really common token at the end of a sentence so you want your model to have a high count of "." as a unigram, of ". </s>" as a bigram.  But if you leave the periods stuck to words you'll end up with lots of singletons "something.", "do.", "find." etc.  I also realized that the smiley html tags would be better replaced by single tokens so that we could see how they play into sentences.  Finally, I wanted to replace links which still showed up as <a href="..." target="_blank">link text with only their href value.  The rest is just constant and gets in the way of measuring what urls are actually being references.  This latter point could be important in identifying authorship.

So, I made a sed file and tokenized the corpus.  Here's my sed file:

Code:

# change smiley html for a tag
# remove <div class="post"> and <\/div>
s/\(<div class="post">\)\|\(<\/div>\)//g
s/<img alt="[A-Za-z]\+" border="0" src="https:\/\/bitcointalk.org\/Smileys\/default\/\([A-Za-z.]\+\)"\/>/--\1--/g
# change <br> for a real line break
s/<br\/>/\n/g
s/<hr\/>/\n/g
# do sentence breaking after . and ! and ? when space cap
s/\([?!\.]\)\s\+\([A-Z]\)/\1\n\2/g

# cleanup links, just use their href as if it was text
s:</a>\|<a href=\|target="_blank">::g
# punctuation stuff
s/\([,\.?]\)\($\|\s\)/ \1 \2/g
s/'s/ 's/g
s/\([()]\)/ \1 /g

# cleanup any spurious space at the end of the lines
s/\s\+$/\n/g

I also piped the output of this through "sed -e '/^$/d'" to remove any blank lines.  After doing this, I had what I thought was a pretty useable, tokenized, once "sentence" per line corpus of each of the accounts in my experiment.  Hand inspection of the corpus showed that there was still some noise in there, but crucially, all of the corpora were run through the same preprocessing and tokenization scripts, so any noise wouldn't be biased.

So, the next step was to do ngram counts over each of these models.  To do this, you simply count all of the 1, 2 and 3 grams in the corpus and create a counts file that you can use to create language models.  Note, I'm quite happy to share these count files for anyone who wants to see them.  The thing is that I guess they're a little too large for most pastebin services.  The quickseller counts file is approximately 8MB, for example.  I can tar these up and email them to anyone who's interested.  Or if anyone has a site they don't mind hosting them on then I could send them to that person.  Just let me know.

Code:

tspacepilot@computer:~/lm/counts$ ls -lah  
total 43M
drwxr-xr-x 2 tspacepilot tspacepilot 4.0K Sep  4 12:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 tspacepilot tspacepilot  16K Sep  4 11:55 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot 1.3M Sep  3 10:40 as.count
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot  16M Sep  4 08:21 d.count
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot  12M Sep  4 08:20 h.count
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot 617K Sep  3 10:41 pan.count
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot 8.2M Sep  3 10:38 qs.count
-rw-r--r-- 1 tspacepilot tspacepilot 5.8M Sep  3 10:40 tsp.count

The next step is to generate language models from the count files.  I used Good-Turning smoothing over an MLE parameter estimation in order to generate plain text files that include the models.  These models are in the standard NIST format.  Here's the top of the file from tsp:

Code:

tspacepilot@computer:~/lm/lms$ head tsp.lm
\data\
ngram 1: type=21218 token=294893
ngram 2: type=117148 token=287741
ngram 3: type=215034 token=280589
\1-grams:
9787 0.0331883089798673 -1.4790148753233 ,
9243 0.0313435720752951 -1.50385151060555 the
8592 0.0291359916986839 -1.53557019528667 to
7152 0.0242528645983458 -1.61523695785429 </s>
7152 0.0242528645983458 -1.61523695785429 <s>

What you're seeing thereis the counts for each ngram type.  So the tspacepilot model has 294893 tokens/word instances, which fall into 21218 types.  To be clear for those who don't have a background in this, if I say "the" twice, that's two tokens and one type.  Then, you see the start of the 1 grams section.  You can see that I used a comma "," 9787 times and that the comma represents 0.033... of the probability mass of the unigram model, the second colum is that mass converted to a log value.  Here I reused a perl script that I had made some time ago.  It's short enough to show you the entirety here:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Build ngram LM for given count file
# tspacepilot
use strict;


#setting up the input file handles
$#ARGV != 1 and die "Usage: $0 <ngram_count_file> <lm_file>\n";
my $ngram_count_file = $ARGV[0];
my $lm_file_name = $ARGV[1];
open(DATA, "<:", $ngram_count_file) || die "cannot open $ngram_count_file.\n";
open(OUT, ">:", $lm_file_name) || die "cannot open $lm_file_name for writing.\n";

my @data = <DATA>;

my %unis;
my $uni_toks;
my %bis;
my %flat_bis;
my $bi_toks;
my %tris;
my %flat_tris;
my $tri_toks;

#here we build up the hash tables that we'll use to print the answer
foreach my $line (@data){
my @tokens = split(/\s+/, $line);
my $l = $#tokens;
if($l<1){
print "error on this line of count file:\n$line\n";
print "l = $l";
} elsif($l==1){
#print "this is a unigram\n";
$unis{$tokens[0]}=$tokens[1];
$uni_toks += $tokens[1];
} elsif($l==2){
#print "this is a bigram\n";
$bis{$tokens[0]}{$tokens[1]}=$tokens[2];
$flat_bis{"$tokens[0] $tokens[1]"}=$tokens[2];
$bi_toks += $tokens[2];
} elsif($l==3){
#print "this is a trigram\n";
$tris{"$tokens[0] $tokens[1]"}{$tokens[2]}=$tokens[3];
$flat_tris{"$tokens[0] $tokens[1] $tokens[2]"}=$tokens[3];
$tri_toks += $tokens[3];
}  else {
print "error on this line of count file:\n$line\n";
print "l = $l";
}
}

print OUT "\\data\\\n";
print OUT "ngram 1: type=",scalar keys %unis," token=$uni_toks\n";
print OUT "ngram 2: type=", scalar keys %flat_bis," token=$bi_toks\n";
print OUT "ngram 3: type=", scalar keys %flat_tris," token=$tri_toks\n";

print OUT "\\1-grams:\n";
foreach my $uni (sort {$unis{$b} <=> $unis{$a} or $a cmp $b } (keys %unis)){
my $prob = $unis{$uni}/$uni_toks;
my $lgprob;
$lgprob = log10($prob);
print OUT "$unis{$uni} $prob $lgprob $uni\n";
}

print OUT "\\2-grams:\n";

#compute output for two grams
my @two_gram_output;
foreach my $flat_bi(keys %flat_bis){
my ($firstword) = $flat_bi =~ m/(\S+)/;
my $denominator;
foreach my $secondword (keys % {$bis{$firstword}}){
$denominator += $bis{$firstword}{$secondword};
}
my $prob = $flat_bis{$flat_bi}/$denominator;
my $lgprob = log10($prob);
push(@two_gram_output, "$flat_bis{$flat_bi} $prob $lgprob $flat_bi\n");
}

my @sorted_two_grams = sort{(split /\s+/,$b)[0] <=> (split /\s+/,$a)[0]} @two_gram_output;

#print output for two grams
foreach (@sorted_two_grams){
print OUT;
}


#compute output for 3grams
print OUT "\\3-grams:\n";
my @three_gram_output;
foreach my $flat_tri (keys %flat_tris){
my ($first_two_words) = $flat_tri =~ m/(\S+\s+\S+)/;
my $denominator;
foreach my $thirdword (keys % {$tris{$first_two_words}}){
$denominator += $tris{$first_two_words}{$thirdword};
}
my $prob = $flat_tris{$flat_tri}/$denominator;
my $lgprob = log10($prob);
push(@three_gram_output, "$flat_tris{$flat_tri} $prob $lgprob $flat_tri\n");
}

my @sorted_three_grams = sort{(split /\s+/,$b)[0] <=> (split /\s+/,$a)[0]} @three_gram_output;
#print output for 3grams
foreach(@sorted_three_grams){
print OUT;
}

sub log10 {
my $n = shift;
return log($n)/log(10);
}

Okay, with the language models all built (again, email me or PM me if you want to see the models themselves, I don't mind sharing them) we can start to get to the fun stuff.  The goal of the experiment is to use the language models as predictors of the other accounts texts.  The typical measure for this is called "perplexity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity).   One nitty-gritty detail about this is what sorts of weighting to give to the 1,2,3 gram portions of the model when calculating perplexity.  Intuitively, putting more weight into the 1 grams puts more value on shared single-words, ie, the basic vocabulary of the person.  Putting more weight onto the 3-grams puts more weight on how that person puts words together, what three-word phrases they tend to use.  I ended up using weights 0.3 0.4 0.3 (uni,bi,tri grams) in calculating perplexity.  For each language model, I calculated the perplexity it assigns to each of the corpora of the accounts in the experiment.  Here comes the fun stuff, then, the results:

As plain text, checking the QS language model against every corpus:

Code:

==> qstest-acctseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=2722 num=57708 oov_num=1393
logprob=-119405.183085554 ave_logprob=-2.02254828472914 ppl=105.329078517105

==> qstest-dooglus-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=48667 num=827638 oov_num=108735
logprob=-1963318.24588274 ave_logprob=-2.55783608776103 ppl=361.273484388214

==> qstest-hilariousandco-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=42799 num=636455 oov_num=53676
logprob=-1514039.01569095 ave_logprob=-2.42022420176373 ppl=263.162620156841

==> qstest-panthers52-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=1663 num=25359 oov_num=1093
logprob=-53775.973489288 ave_logprob=-2.07397020669089 ppl=118.568740528906

==> qstest-tspacepilot-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=7150 num=280589 oov_num=29664
logprob=-666393.992923604 ave_logprob=-2.5821718218487 ppl=382.09541103913

Well, as you can see, qs' model predicts my corpus with a perplexity of 382, predicts hillarious with 263, predicts dooglus with 361.  But crucially, predicts the posts of ACCTSeller and Panthers52 at 105 and 118!!!!

What this means is that QS's posting style, when measured quantitatively shows through his attempts to hide what he was doing.  This isn't too surprising for anyone who knows how language works, but it may be to others.  For fun, I also ran each model as a predictor against each of the other corpora.

hillariousancco against all:

Code:

==> htest-acctseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=2722 num=57708 oov_num=2260
logprob=-136595.372784586 ave_logprob=-2.34820994988114 ppl=222.951269646594

==> htest-dooglus-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=48667 num=827638 oov_num=109662
logprob=-1934327.44440288 ave_logprob=-2.52311368446967 ppl=333.513704608138

==> htest-panthers52-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=1663 num=25359 oov_num=1828
logprob=-60634.1796607556 ave_logprob=-2.40669126223528 ppl=255.088724501193

==> htest-quickseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=24371 num=503617 oov_num=25750
logprob=-1193959.69530073 ave_logprob=-2.37727869117974 ppl=238.384871857193

==> htest-tspacepilot-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=7150 num=280589 oov_num=26006
logprob=-662995.55023098 ave_logprob=-2.5330988076818 ppl=341.270546308425

So, we can see that hillarious doesn't really have a style predicts any of the rest of us better than another.   At least not significantly.  However, it is interesting that hillarious' model assigns perplexities to all three of quickseller's accounts which are in the same range.  This provides an oblique suggestion as to the similarities of those corpora.  Here is dooglus' model predicting each of the other accounts:

Code:

==> dtest-acctseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=2722 num=57708 oov_num=2518
logprob=-141009.183781008 ave_logprob=-2.43488713532615 ppl=272.199382299313

==> dtest-hilariousandco-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=42799 num=636455 oov_num=44764
logprob=-1532563.94318701 ave_logprob=-2.4154264735252 ppl=260.271415205445

==> dtest-panthers52-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=1663 num=25359 oov_num=1752
logprob=-61358.7835651667 ave_logprob=-2.42812756490569 ppl=267.995538997277

==> dtest-quickseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=24371 num=503617 oov_num=26384
logprob=-1223316.26268869 ave_logprob=-2.43880882666145 ppl=274.668481585288

==> dtest-tspacepilot-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=7150 num=280589 oov_num=20198
logprob=-680500.394458114 ave_logprob=-2.5435368577456 ppl=349.572175864552

here's my model predicting all the other corpora

Code:

==> ttest-acctseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=2722 num=57708 oov_num=2850
logprob=-139530.390079984 ave_logprob=-2.42324400972532 ppl=264.998862488461

==> ttest-dooglus-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=48667 num=827638 oov_num=99717
logprob=-1946265.50900313 ave_logprob=-2.50617510057216 ppl=320.756230152803

==> ttest-hilariousandco-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=42799 num=636455 oov_num=50287
logprob=-1518909.27782387 ave_logprob=-2.41492682099994 ppl=259.972147091511

==> ttest-panthers52-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=1663 num=25359 oov_num=2043
logprob=-61310.1514410114 ave_logprob=-2.45446781060136 ppl=284.752673700336

==> ttest-quickseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=24371 num=503617 oov_num=30864
logprob=-1209678.28851218 ave_logprob=-2.43335322477326 ppl=271.239680896164

Finally, we can also use the acctseller models and the panthers models to predict the other corpora.  These models are a bit smaller than the qs model, so I think it's not as impressive as the results from the QS model.  But they do demonstrate the same pattern.

Code:

==> atest-dooglus-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=48667 num=827638 oov_num=158655
logprob=-1864342.35403158 ave_logprob=-2.59784345298067 ppl=396.135216494324

==> atest-hilariousandco-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=42799 num=636455 oov_num=87812
logprob=-1444217.53179264 ave_logprob=-2.44185825794015 ppl=276.603873729012

==> atest-panthers52-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=1663 num=25359 oov_num=2433
logprob=-54938.2415881704 ave_logprob=-2.23426091293548 ppl=171.498731827101

==> atest-quickseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=24371 num=503617 oov_num=36302
logprob=-1072293.35965131 ave_logprob=-2.18084989129508 ppl=151.652610771117

==> atest-tspacepilot-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=7150 num=280589 oov_num=47163
logprob=-623320.832692272 ave_logprob=-2.59095185177354 ppl=389.898758003026

Again, dooglus, me and hillariuos are all above 270 whereas the other known quickseller account is at 151 and the "suspected" alt is at 171.  And with the panthers model:

Code:

tspacepilot@computer:~/quickseller/ppls/ptest$ tail -n 3 *
==> ptest-acctseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=2722 num=57708 oov_num=5835
logprob=-126943.515020739 ave_logprob=-2.32518573167395 ppl=211.439309416701

==> ptest-dooglus-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=48667 num=827638 oov_num=200298
logprob=-1733046.66220228 ave_logprob=-2.56365194769031 ppl=366.144021870075

==> ptest-hilariousandco-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=42799 num=636455 oov_num=110187
logprob=-1420281.45120892 ave_logprob=-2.49580708635173 ppl=313.18942275869

==> ptest-quickseller-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=24371 num=503617 oov_num=55974
logprob=-1089757.40317691 ave_logprob=-2.30873957801444 ppl=203.582094424962

==> ptest-tspacepilot-3.4.3.ppl <==
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
sent_num=7150 num=280589 oov_num=56725
logprob=-602993.466557261 ave_logprob=-2.61020313295844 ppl=407.570866725746

Again, the panthers model is actually the smallest in terms of input data, so you can see how it's a little less robust for that reason.  Nevertheless, the similarities with the acctseller corpus and the quickseller corpus really stand out when comparing to values assigned to the dooglus, hillarious and tspacepilot corpora.

Lets summarize this in a table:

	qs	accts	pan52	doog	hilarious	tsp
qs	X	105.3	118.1	361.2	263	382.1
accts	151.6	X	171.4	396.1	276.6	389.9
pan52	203.5	211.4	X	366.1	313.1	407.6
doog	274.6	272.1	267.9	X	260.3	349.5
hilarious	238.3	222.9	255.1	333.5	X	341.2
tsp	271.	264.9	284.7	320.7	259.9	X

So, one thing I want to be clear on.  Perplexity measures how well a model predicts a certain corpus.  The first row shows us that the QS model predicts the acctseller and panthers52 corpora at approximately equally well, and far better than it predicts any of the others.  Most of the other rows here are just providing prespective to you.  You can see that the dooglus, hillarious and tsp models don't predict any of the other corpora very well (nothing anywhere below 250).

For completeness, here's the script I used to calculate perplexity:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Build ngram LM for given count file
#
use strict;
use Try::Tiny;

#setting up the input file handles
$#ARGV != 5 and die "Usage: $0 <lm_file> <l1> <l2> <l3> <test_data> <output>\n";
my $lm_file = $ARGV[0];
my($l1,$l2,$l3) = ($ARGV[1], $ARGV[2], $ARGV[3]);
my $test_data = $ARGV[4];
my $output = $ARGV[5];
open(LM, "<:", $lm_file) || die "cannot open $lm_file.\n";
my @data;
if ($test_data eq "-") {
  @data = <STDIN>;
} else {
  open(DATA, "<:", $test_data) || die "cannot open $test_data.\n";
  @data = <DATA>;
}
open(OUT, ">:", $output) || die "cannot open $output for writing.\n";

my $lmstring;
while (<LM>){
$lmstring .= $_;
}

#build up the lm data structures for quicker retreival
my @lm = split (/\\data\\|\\1-grams:|\\2-grams:|\\3-grams:/ ,$lmstring);
shift @lm;
my @data_lines = split (/\n/, $lm[0]);
my @one_gram_lines = split(/\n/, $lm[1]);
my @two_gram_lines = split(/\n/, $lm[2]);
my @three_gram_lines = split(/\n/, $lm[3]);
my %unis;
foreach (@one_gram_lines){
my($prob, $w)=$_=~/\S+\s+(\S+)\s+\S+\s+(\S+)/;
$unis{$w}=$prob;
}
my %bis;
foreach (@two_gram_lines){
my($prob, $w1, $w2)=$_=~/\S+\s+(\S+)\s+\S+\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)/;
$bis{"$w1 $w2"}=$prob;
}
my %tris;
foreach (@three_gram_lines){
my($prob, $w1, $w2, $w3)=$_=~/\S+\s+(\S+)\s+\S+\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)/;
$tris{"$w1 $w2 $w3"}=$prob;
}


my $sum;
my $cnt;
my $word_num;
my $oov_num;
my $sent_num;

for my $s (0 .. $#data){
  if($data[$s]=~m/^\s*$/) {
    next;
  }
$sent_num++;
chomp $data[$s];
$data[$s] = "<s> ".$data[$s]." </s>";
my @words = split /\s+/, $data[$s];
print OUT "\n\nSent #".($s+1).": @words\n";
my $sprob = 0;
my $soov = 0;
  for my $i (1 .. $#words){
$word_num++;
if($i==1){
#w1 given <s>:
my ($w1, $w2) =($words[$i-1], $words[$i]);
my $onegramprob;
my $twogramprob;
my $unknown_word;
my $smoothed_prob;
if(defined($unis{$w2})){
$onegramprob = $unis{$w2};
} else {
$unknown_word = 1;
}
if (!$unknown_word){
if(defined($bis{"$w1 $w2"})){
$twogramprob = $bis{"$w1 $w2"};
} else {
$unknown_word = 1;
}
}
if ($unknown_word) {
$smoothed_prob = "-inf (unknown word)";
$soov++;
} else {
$smoothed_prob = log10((($l3+$l2) * $twogramprob)+($l1*$onegramprob));
$sprob+= $smoothed_prob;
}
print OUT ($i);
print OUT ": LogP( $w2 | $w1 ) = $smoothed_prob\n";
} else {
my ($w1, $w2, $w3) = ($words[$i-2], $words[$i-1], $words[$i]);
my $threegramprob;
my $twogramprob;
my $onegramprob;
my $unknown_word;
my $unknown_ngram;
my $smoothed_prob;

#the trigrams
if(defined($unis{$w3})){
$onegramprob = $unis{$w3};
} else {
$unknown_word = 1;
}
if(defined($bis{"$w2 $w3"})){
$twogramprob = $bis{"$w2 $w3"};
} else {
$unknown_ngram = 1;
}
if(defined($tris{"$w1 $w2 $w3"})){
$threegramprob = $tris{"$w1 $w2 $w3"};
} else {
$unknown_ngram = 1;
}

print OUT ($i);
if ($unknown_word) {
print OUT ": LogP( $w3 | $w1 $w2 ) = -inf (unknown word)";
$soov++;
} elsif ($unknown_ngram){
$smoothed_prob = log10(($l3*$threegramprob)+($l2*$twogramprob)+($l1*$onegramprob));
print OUT ": LogP( $w3 | $w1 $w2 ) = $smoothed_prob (unknown ngrams)\n";
} else {
$smoothed_prob = log10(($l3*$threegramprob)+($l2*$twogramprob)+($l1*$onegramprob));
print OUT ": LogP( $w3 | $w1 $w2 ) = $smoothed_prob\n";
}
$sprob+=$smoothed_prob;
}
}
my $sppl = 10**(-($sprob/($#words-1)));

print OUT "1 sentence, ".($#words-1)." words, $soov OOVs\n";
print OUT "logprob=$sprob, ppl=$sppl";
$sum+=$sprob;
$oov_num+=$soov;
$cnt += $#words-1;
}

my $ave_logprob = $sum/($sent_num + $cnt - $oov_num);
my $ppl = 10**(-$ave_logprob);
print OUT "\n%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%\n";
print OUT "sent_num=$sent_num num=$cnt oov_num=$oov_num\n";
print OUT "logprob=$sum ave_logprob=$ave_logprob ppl=$ppl\n";

sub log10 {
my $n = shift;
return log($n)/log(10);
}

In sum, we know that Quickseller is adept at checking the blockchain to reveal transactions signed by particular accounts and to link them.  So it makes sense that he knows how to cover his tracks there and to use mixers and whatnot to make it difficult to detect his alts in that way.  He is an expert in this, so while I haven't tried, I suspect it would be difficult to link any of his accounts on the blockchain.  However, presumably, he's not an expert in forensic linguistics and statistical NLP so he didn't realize that providing a corpus of 552365 word tokens would actually give someone who wanted to detect his alts a reasonably reliable way to find the statistical fingerprint which is right there in the statistics of how he writes.

There's plenty of other circumstantial evidence that Panthers52 is an alt of Quickseller, but I'll leave that for others to talk about and discuss.  Also, I'm not a trader here so I'm not really affected by QS giving escrow for himself, but perhaps others who are will have more to say about whether this practice is truly a scam.  I opened this thread here because it seemed like scammy behavior to me, and I wanted others to be aware of it.

Here is a screenshot of QS feedback taken today:

Again, if anyone has any questions about this experiment or wants access to the particular data I ended up using, just let me know.  I believe I've provided all the tools in this post in order to replicate these results for yourself, but if something's missing, let me know about it.

I just read through the text of 100, 101, 102.  If I understood correctly 101, ends up at block size limit of 5GB in 20 years (10 doublings).
'
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
5096

Is that correct?

102 was very terse and I didn't really understand the detail of the proposal.

https://github.com/jgarzik/bips/blob/2015_2mb_blocksize/bip-0102.mediawiki

The "specification" section is only 3 lines (the first of which just says the current state of affairs):

1    Maximum block size permitted to be valid is 1MB.
2    Increase this maximum to 2MB on November 11, 2015 at 00:00:00 UTC.
3    Increase maximum block sigops by similar factor, preserving SIZE/50 formula.

I believe I understand lines 1 and 2 completely, but what does line 3 mean?   Increase by a similar factor (x2?, how often?).  What's the SIZE/50 forumla he refers to?

Hi bitcoin pros,

I'm trying to put together my first "by-hand" transaction.  I'm following along with ken sherrif's bitcoins the hard way blog and looking at the docs etc to try to get this going.  I decided that I wanted to do something on testnet first before trying anything on mainnet.  So my step 1 was to generate a testnet address and get some coins sent to it from a testnet fountain.  I did this.

https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC/tx/3ca5868acb7ea66fc8c2a3ed841337d24774183ec8edb626d0e05d799a271e57

I own the address:

mtmAtMCFotG5NbFgkbVHTPhARKpqToWsky

So, in theory, if I do things right, I should be able to put together a transaction to send those coins along.

Here's what I got so far:

Code:

0100000001571e279a795de0d026b6edc83e187447d2371384eda3c2c86fa67ecb8a86a53c010000001976a9140f532b6d8285d6d1bba1286cd74350270edbc7ee88acffffffff01703a8c00000000001976a9140f532b6d8285d6d1bba1286cd74350270edbc7ee88ac00000000

This isn't signed yet, but I wanted to get someone looking over my shoulder to see if I'm on the right track.

The first part "01000000" is the "version number"
Next "01" is the input count.  I only have a single input for this transaction.
Next,
571e279a795de0d026b6edc83e187447d2371384eda3c2c86fa67ecb8a86a53c
is the bytes reversed of the transaction hash where the input is found (3ca5868acb7ea66fc8c2a3ed841337d24774183ec8edb626d0e05d799a271e57)
Next, the index of the previous output (it was the second output in that transaction, the first was change) 010000
Then, the script from the output (length, script, ffffffff) -> 001976a9140f532b6d8285d6d1bba1286cd74350270edbc7ee88acffffffff
Then the output count 01
Then the value of first output 9190000 satoshis encoded as hex (leaving 10KSat for fee), reversed "703a8c"
Then the script to pay to the address OP_DUP OP_HASH160 DATA OP_EQVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
Then the block lock time (00000000)

How is this looking to you guys?

After waiting nearly a month to hear back from Tomatocage on my situation (main discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.0)

Tomatocage, perhaps unintentionally, engaged with my situation in the wrong thread  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1151680.msg12143374#msg12143374).  Strangely, when I replied to him in the thread thanking him and asking him to reply to me in the proper thread, my entire reply, carefully worded and thought out, was deleted?!

I can't understand why this is the case.  Why would such a post be deleted?  What have I done wrong that the mods don't want to get my situation addressed?  Clearly my post was on topic, I was addressing a situation in which QS seems to be once again acting overly violently against someone, both badbear and tomatocage engaged with me about it, hexcoin's main situation seems done, and I don't have the right to reply to them?

Mods, I only want to get this resolved, why the persecution?  What can I do?  Why would such a crucial post be deleted?  Why on earth would tomatocage be allowed to address me in the wrong thread and I can't write back and ask him to take it up with me in the proper thread?  This makes it look like I ignored his comment, which is hardly the case, I cherish it and I want to reply.  Why would a mod try to silence me on this?

A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by a Bitcoin Forum moderator. Posts are most frequently deleted because they are off-topic, though they can also be deleted for other reasons. In the future, please avoid posting things that need to be deleted.

I think you're reading more into QS's messages than there actually is. Hexcoin's primary concern is not that he and his alt accounts were discovered -- it's how they were discovered and how he might avoid this with his next round of accounts. I don't have any more say over what QS writes than I do over which way the wind blows, but while he may offend some people, I much prefer that situation than the one where scammers slip through the cracks and end up stealing peoples' money. I hope you understand this.

I appreciate your reply.  I surely wouldn't have even thought twice about QS' mockery and taunting if it weren't the case that I'm still suffering from it myself (after 5 months).  You suggest that the only wrong he's doing is offending people.  Let me ask you directly, is it okay that he's also using alt account to leave multiple sockpuppet trust ratings on my account?  That seems a lot more shady than just being mean.  And, while I have your attention, one more question if I may, what happened to the idea that people on your trust list shouldn't be leaving trust ratings vindicitively and without evidence?  In my case, he's not only called me all kinds of mean names for months, he's left me a false rating which he refuses to explain.  If he can't explain it and you trust him, perhaps you can explain it?  If you can't explain it, maybe it's time to look at what kind of people you're trusting.  Given the large group of "scambusters" who seem to be able to constrain themselves to addressing situations where some actual shady behavior that has occurred, why would you add someone to your trust list who leaves negative ratings just because he doesn't like someone?  And worse, someone who goes to shady methods of using alts and sockpuppets in order to try to disguise what he was doing?  Surely you've seen the situations with worhipper (in which he neg-repped someone for simply refusing to do business with him), or the one of ndnhc (in which he apparantely tried to use an alt to frame him to give him negative trust---quite similar to what he did to me using his ACCTSeller alt, which wasn't at the time exposed as one of his alts).  Or there's the whole deal with the dadice people, somehow dooglus, Shorena, DiamondCardz seem to have been able to write feedbacks like "refuses to show cold wallet", whereas QS shows up once a week in the dadice thread and trolls and shouts about how its a scam site (except that there hasn't been any scam, and no one else seem to feel the need to go to such extreme measures and tactics).  Surely you're aware of all this, right?  These are just cases I happen to have run across for one reason or another, I'm not spending any time trying to follow around QS and see how many others of his "scambusting" situations are actually just smear campaigns.

But, then again, maybe we should go ahead and have this conversation in the proper thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.0).  If you wouldn't mind, I think I'm owed and explanation to these questions, and there's a thread that you and QS seem to have been ignoring with all your might just next door.  I apologize if I seem a little irritated, it's just that I kinda am.  I apologize if you feel like I've hijacked this conversation.  I admit that I'm quite frustrated at the lack of replies from the involved parties in my own situation and the mocking tone of QS was all too familiar.  Seeing how well Shorena was able to handle the inquiry, I thought I would offer him my plaudits while trying to ask people to contrast that with the bile of Quickseller.

Will you please reply here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.0 so that we can continue this conversation in the proper place?  Or, send me a PM so that we can chat privately?  Assuming you are the same person I communicated with under the username tomatocage 2 months ago, I would have thought we would have resolved this privately right off the bat.

Best,

--TSP


EDIT:

PS:  I just wanted to add that I don't really understand what you stand to gain by ignoring my thread and my concerns and refusing to communicate with me.  It seems to me that if we talk about this, we may successfully resolve the situation.  If we don't talk about this, the situation just continues to drag on and on and on, and as far as I can tell, it makes people trusting quickseller look very bad because they refuse to address this concern.  I understand why Quickseller refuses to reply or address this, as his current status quo is acceptable to him; he's back on the trust list and his slander stands and if he has to try to explain it, it just draws attention to it when he can't do so.  But for you guys who are trusting him, it seems like your vested interest would be to resolve the issue.  You don't stand to lose any credibility by addressing the issue, and it seems like you do stand to lose credibiilty by avoiding it.

Hopefully we will talk soon.

I don't know if this is supposed to be in here or in the mining subforum itself, I'm sure a mod can move me if I'm wrong.  Anyway, my observation is that the description for the Mining subforum says "Generating Bitcoins".  But in principle, mining is manily about securing the network and reifying blocks into the blockchain.  The coinbase which diminishes over time is clearly a big movitvator these days, but isn't that really only a side-effect of the fact that we're in the early stages of bitcoin's existence?

Maybe a better tag-line for the mining subforum would be:

"Creating blocks and generating bitcoins"

^^^ with that, at least we'd make a nod to the fact that we hope that there will be miners long after there are no coinbases left.

What do you guys think?

As has been discussed previously (but not conclusively), QS has left me a negative rating which is based on zero evidence, is clearly punitive and meant to smear me off the forum.   This topic is being started in order to discuss the merits of QS's false rating separately from the other issues which complicated this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.40 (the previous one).

A quick recap for those who aren't in the know:

1) Early in this year, I called out Quickseller for his temper.  I told him that he shouldn't be calling people idiots and that there are more helpful ways to disagree.
2) QS responded by calling me and idiot.
3) QS further responded by logging in as an alt and beginning to troll me.  He told me that he'd be having me kicked off my signature ad campaign and made other threats.
4) QS spent 24 hours looking through years of posts in order to try to find something against me.
5) QS found tradefortress' false accusations on me and necro-bumped a 2.5 year old thread to threaten me using his main alt ACCTSeller
6) QS logged back in with his main account, and "found" the bump from ACCTSeller, and used it as an excuse to neg rep me.
7) QS's plan backfired, temporarily, the signature ad campaign continued to employ me because they could see that what was happening was someone trying to troll me; QS's vitriolic temper became well known; not long after he was kicked off of badbear's trust list
QS continued to troll me for months
...

And that basically brings us to where we are today.  Now QS has been readded to default trust and his rating are again causing me issues.  I have no desire here except to be left along and it blows my mind that someone who has publically acted in such a way as QS could be added to a default trust list.  How can you trust someone who takes such extreme measures to exact vengence on someone just because you don't like that hey called you hot-tempered?

At this point, basically everyone who has weighed in on this issue says that they find it extremely hard to believe that such nonsense could go on for so many months and yet, here we are.  I'm pretty convinced that when QS started his smear campaign against me he just thought that I would roll over and die, or perhaps purchase a new account (from him?!) and try to get back to hero member status in a few years.  That he could steamroll me off of the forum.  However, I'm not going to let that happen.  Instead, I'm publically calling attention to this behavoir and asking what we can do.

I think it's going to be next to impossible to get QS to remove his false ratings at this point.  I'd love to find out that I'm wrong, but the last thing that QS has said to me was basically mocking me and everyone else.  He said that he'd be paying 0.1BTC to the first person who could convince him to leave me alone.  So, what to do now?

I have opened another thread in which I solicit TC to reconsider his trust of QS, or else to at least talk to me about it.  But that is purposely in another thread so that here we can discuss trust abuse by QS against me and what do about it.  I'd like to further add that at this point, a number of poeple have spoken to me about this privately (mods can verify this) but asked not to be revealed because of the attack power of QS.  People are afraid to cross him.  Is that the kind of person who should be on default trust?

There is at least one other obvious solution, other people on default trust can remove QS from their trust lists in order to fix this.  I honestly have no idea about the internal politics of this.  Is it seen as a slight against Tomatocage if, say, badbear adds ~Quickseller to his trust list?  I don't know.

I also don't know what to do about this issue.  I think a lot of people are afraid to speak up and those that are speaking up are asking QS to drop this assault.  I wish he would.  I look forward to your input.

This isn't exactly a mining question, as I know that these days you need and ASIC for that.  However, I'm trying to figure out some stuff about hardware and I think you guys can answer some questions that I'm a little confused about.

I was looking at this ASUS chromebox which has an i3-4010U processor (with some kind of onboard HD 4400 graphics).   I've sen online that you can remove some screw and then flash whatever system you want, so I'd be running debian on it.  What I'm trying to figure out is if this kind of machine could run openCL stuff, like, for example, vanitygen-ocl.

In the past I had an ASUS zenbook which supposedly had an Intel HD gpu, but I couldn't actually use the GPU for gpu mining or OCL because apparantely it' wasn't the same thing as the "standalone" graphics card.  Is that coing to be the same deal on this chromebox?

Thanks for the insight, hardware gurus!

[Incomplete list of quotes from forum members regarding this situation:]

UPDATE 16 Sept 2015:

All the latest indications are that the Wardick account was taken over by an imposter---having been either stolen or sold sometime during or after the original Wardrick's "rage-quit".  Many have suggested that Tradefortress might have been behind the stolen account and that would certainly explain "Wardrick"'s suddent enthusiasm to inherit the Tradefortress legacy whole heartedly, as wel as some of his intimidation techniques and general unpleasantness.  At the moment, Theymos has locked the Wardrick account due to the suspicous behavior so it may be that the issue here has been resolved (finally). 

I don't know what precident there is for deleting the feedback and actions of an attacker who gains control of an account when the original owner is long-gone, but I'm looking forward to finding some reasonable resolution.  During the few days that the attacker had control of the Wardick account, he did do quite a few edits of the original Wardrick's feedback---having removed at least one positive on ndnhc, and having added a number of negatives to those who seemed to be opposing Quickseller/Tradefortress in QS's scandal.

The thread will stay open for now as Theymos continues to investigate, but I'm starting to be hopeful that this nonsense, nightmare saga from discredited Tradefortress and Quickseller is finally going to be put to bed.


UPDATE 7 Sept. 2015:

QS has joined Tradefortress in the realm of the completely discredited thanks to an escrow scam he was pulling off.  Surprisingly, a fellow who goes by the handle of "Wardrick" has appeared to inherit the Tradefortress lineage of lies.  Why?  Who knows, maybe he'll speak for himself in this thread.


UPDATE 25 August 2015:

Quickseller has recently removed one of the trust sockpuppet ratings he has left on my account.  Presumably he was responding to comments in this thread.  Thank you Quickseller for solving this.  There is one more sockpuppet account left for him to remove (it's unclear why he removed one but not the other).  Hopefully he will remove that soon.

Then there will only be the matter of the main abusive rating from QS.  But alas, maybe this issue will be solved one step at a time.


(Older OP content below hr)
The original content of this thread's OP is below the horizontal line.  What's happened is that there are really three issues at play here and I had locked this topic and started three separate threads.  However, the mods prefer to contain all of this in one thread so this has become a 3in1 of sorts.  

The first part of the thread is mainly looking for tomatocage to weigh in, although there is some interesting stuff where Quickseller shows up and makes a mockery of my concerns, laughing at me and saying that he'll give 0.1BTC to anyone who can convince him to leave me alone (a clearly impossible task).

The 3in1 section begins on page 3, here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.msg12055206#msg12055206

It seems that tomatocage has re-added quicktroller to his trust list.  Which means his slanderous lies are once again reddening my reputation falsely.   Which means I have to chat with tomatocage.  But I find that I cannot send him a PM (PM blocked).

Is tomatocage's account okay?  Not been hacked or anything I hope.  I recall there was a moment about a month or so ago when he was shut out (I think).

TC, how do I contact you?  I found your email on your profile page, is that what you prefer?



Incomplete list of quotes from forum members regarding this situation:
(note, I have further support statements from many others who are off-the record in my PMs because they are afraid of retribution)

Your situation is unique tspacepilot with that scam accusation from so long ago. I can not really say if you scammed TF or not back then, but it does sort of look like you did. Back then TF was not so questionable so his ratings were pretty valid for most of us at that time. I personally would not have left you a negative, but I am not really a scam buster here either. QS does do a good job with scammers here so I do feel he is good for the DT network. He does sometime ruffle some feathers (as expected for what he does). I think you have done pretty much all you can do in this situation. You have also handled it very well by keeping your cool, and overall you seem pretty legit to me. I think you getting a neutral rating from him would be a good call for both parties as everyone here is pretty aware of what went down back then. Anyways good luck with all this.

I do believe tspacepilot deserve to get the negative trust feedback removed and QS has not been right in doing this.

Those arguments before makes me convinces me that QS simply used a trust feedback as the next level of attack?

IMO, I don't think anyone should trust TF's word.  He was a liar and a scammer.  

Why don't you and Quickseller shake hand and make up. Endless strems of text and explanations. I doubt anybody read it. Come on, life is too short for this type of fights.

Make love not war <3

Like I said in my earlier posts, I think QS should change negative feedback to neutral. If he suspects tsp that much, it is probably better for him to keep an eye on tsp. But for now, although tsp did withdraw those coins, he is not worthy for a negative trust feedback/score.

But meh, the event in question for the negative trust happened 2 years ago. I see the reasoning for the negative trust but after that long it probably should just be let go. It wasn't *scamming* per se either like how EAL didn't *scam* Stunna by (allegedly) abusing the PrimeDice giveaway, just shady.

This whole thread in general from all main participants is ridiculous though. How the hell have you guys let this go on so long? Try an alternate route rather than all trying to scorched-earth (yes, your favourite phrase tspacepilot, but you do it as well) your way to the top by destroying each other's rep.

As I have said what feels like a long time ago, I dont think this should still be an issue. Yet it is. Im not entirely sure what Quicksellers motivation is and in fact I dont need to know. I know QS is very strict regarding the removal of trust. The idea that an account can be washed clean and thus a scammer can get away with a scam is something QS is against strongly. I mostly agree, yet still think that anyone should be given a chance to redeem themself. On top of that I remember to have read the thread that "proves" tspacepilots scam and I came to the conclusion that it does not deserve a negative feedback[1].

I also stated and I still think this is true that the rating by QS is fine and that they should stay on DefaultTrust.

Its seems though that neither of you two (QS & tsp) can just let this be and get on with your lives. Is it that you tspacepilot are hindered by the rating in any way or is this an ego/honor thing?

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303613.msg11167058#msg11167058

Tsp asked me to rethink my opinion about the issue and I did.

My overall assessment of the situation is (boiled down):
- the issue is from the ancient (in internet terms) past
- there has been no other issue since
- there is no concrete proof, just assumptions and interpretations
- the circumstances under which QS dug up an old post as well as the behavior[2] after the rating was left, indirectly removed (BadBear removing QS from DT) and reinstated (TC adding QS) along the several[1] ratings make me question whether this is personal or not.

Yes, there are no rules regarding the DT List, but I would suggest to remove the rating or at the very least change it to neutral.


[1] @QS Im not sure whats wrong with that word, but you left 3 ratings, as QS, as ACCTSeller (now removed) and as FunFunnyFan.
[2] Both sides seem to be locked in some sort of vendetta now. This is does effect other threads and posts.

I'm not against Quickseller (I've never even interacted with him/her) but I really feel this issue needs resolving.
tspacepilot is not a scammer.

Is there no way you can remove this negative trust Quickseller? For the good of the forum?

Please!

Be a good man & end this dispute.
I don't want to get too involved but this does need resolving once & for all.

Look at 'TradeFortress' trust (The guy at the centre of this dispute)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=67058

Wow this is really sad that he is in the default list again . It is definitely true that he doesn't do things based on whats real and whats not but heavily lets his ego influence his decisions.
I am sure TC would have read this thread by now , but no idea why he chose to ignore it .


I know I have repeatedly pointed this out but you should also make him aware of how he puts trust on 2 exactly similar cases.  pagalwana , proved earlier to be an alt account of a scammer was given as collateral for a loan . Quickseller initially added a negative trust to the account  . Later that person who got the account asked Quickseller to act as an escrow for the sale of the account and just because Quickseller was getting 1$ for the trade he agreed and removed his negative trust. I actually had an exactly same case where I purchased the account from the person who initially gave the loan . The trust got added just as the same way after 2 months but just because I didn't use QS as an escrow and criticized his trust , he didn't care about the case after that. I believe its definitely not right to have him in the default list .

Not this again! I, and probably a lot of people are getting tired of these fights.
@quickseller How old are you? 5?
How about you drop the drama here. Now I ain't gonna take a side, because I wouldn't be surprised if I got negative trust as well. What you should have done is ignore his alt too, and just report the necro posts. There needs to be a line between disagreeing and distrusting someone. This makes me wonder if the staff (or whoever adds people) has correctly appointed members to the default trust list. There are a lot more mature and reliable members of the newer generation than someone who intentionally abuses trust due to a disagreement(s).
Don't you think so?

Trust isn't really moderated often. This is where it is a problem. People suffer the consequences.

How is this guy still on the trust list?

Yes you are right, there is no solid proof and even if it is, as dooglus said, it´s not really fraud? I mean after all quickseller was selling accounts with DT, which i would consider fraud. He should change it to neutral and leave it like that.

But no one can really force him to change his negative feedback, maybe one day he will retract and change it to a neutral one or better delete it.  No one remember this sentence : Trust system is not moderated.

However I don't think that tspacepilot is a 'bad' person and the -ve trust is not necessary in my opinion (Negative - You were scammed or you strongly believe that this person is a scammer.)  Maybe Quickseller thinks that tspacepilot IS a scammer, but I think he is wrong.

TF seems to have been quoting the whole amount that tsp withdrew, but only a small fraction of that was due to the malfunctioning bot.

You reaction to his bot accidentally earning a tiny amount of dust seems way over the top. How do you justify leaving multiple angry trust ratings for this? I think overall your contribution to the trust system is a net positive, but in this case it feels to me like it's borderline abusive.

Hi everyone,

I know about the "stress tests" of a few weeks ago, these were publically discussed and there was a group taking credit for it and talking about how much they spent and cetera.  But in the last week transaction volume and backlock of unconfirmed transactions seem to have hit new heights and are staying high.  I haven't yet figured out who or what is behind this.  It seems like if it were just another spammer doing a "stress test" attack then they're going to have to run out of money sooner or later.

I ask because I sent a 256byte transaction with a 2KSat fee almost 5 days ago and still no confirmations.  Thus I keep checking the number of unconfirmed tx and thus I keep seeing how high it it.  But I haven't found a bitcointalk thread discussing this current situation/attack and I'm really starting to wonder what's happening.

Tips/links/explanations much appreciatated!

I'm not the only one on the forum who thinks that the problems surrounding reliance on default trust have caused more harm than good.  Here's a well-written summary of some of the issues:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1074134.msg11725411#msg11725411

There are many more posts detailing many more problems with the current system, but I can't index them all for you.

Instead, I started this thread to let everyone know that I've taken the step of removing default trust from my trust settings, so I'm starting blank, and I'll add people back to my list as I feel I can trust them.  I'm encouraging others who have done this to post in this thread to let everyone know.

One sneaky, technical detail of this is that if you try to blank your trust list completely, default trust gets added back.  So you have to either:

1) put "~DefaultTrust" onto your list or
2) have at least one trusted person other than yourself on your list

in order to actually remove default trust.

Many good suggestions have been made for improving the issues caused by default trust, but none have been implemented.  I encourage people to "vote with your list".  Remove default trust from your list and encourage others to do the same.  Then post here that you've done it.

Sawdice seems to be having continuous problems dropping huge posters in their promotion thread which have typos that just a simple spell check would fix.  After having warned them about it more than once, and watching them do this again and again, I ended up leaving a sarcastic post intended to satirize the situation and hopefully add some humor too.

But, alas, the forum mods don't have a sense or sarcasm, or maybe don't have a sense of humor, or maybe it's something else, but I'm not into censorship of relevant ideas so I have to make a new thread for this relevant post deleted from the sawdice thread.

A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by a Bitcoin Forum moderator. Posts are most frequently deleted because they are off-topic, though they can also be deleted for other reasons. In the future, please avoid posting things that need to be deleted.

OH jeez ! that is horrible embarrassment, well that is "enough" mistakes for now, and we will be extra careful before posting anything.

... but then ...

BECASUE SOMETHINGS

i think you guys might need someone fluent in english to double check all your stuff before you post them... these typos make me cringe

Maybe it's time for me to launch Interents Tpyo Dice!   It will be a themed sight based on bitcointalk posters' style.  HODL, of course, but the main point is to ROLLIN all nigth long!

Do you guys think I can be a success?  Now soliticing invetsors PM me!