...and which coins currently have lightweight wallets such as Electrum and MultiBit for them?

Part of the reason why people keep their altcoins on exchanges is because it can be a huge hassle to download clients and blockchains for every single coin. Some coins like the CryptoNote coins also have very large blockchains because of the way they're designed.

I know Litecoin has Electrum-LTC and Dogecoin has MultiDoge and Electrum Doge. I think NXT and FIMKrypto also have a lightweight wallet built for them (Mofowallet?). Are there any other examples out there?

Because from what I've read, this definitely seems to be the case.

Are there any other online wallet services that offer users the ability to control their own private keys? If not, then why not? To me it seems quite obvious that this is the main reason why Blockchain.info is so popular and why it's not recommended to keep your coins online UNLESS that online wallet happens to be Blockchain.info. In fact, there is a popular saying that "if you don't have the private keys, then you don't own any bitcoins".

That isn't to say that there aren't other security issues that need to be taken into consideration even when using Blockchain.info (such as the risk of phishing attacks, for example). Nevertheless, having users control their own private keys means that even if the site shut down, your coins would still be safe and that's the biggest danger when it comes to storing your coins online.

So what other online wallets are there which offer this feature?

[UPDATE: OFFER IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

UPDATE: OFFER IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Would anyone here be interested in this?

Basically, it's an electronic gift card that can be used at retailers across New Zealand. The gift card can be converted into any of the gift cards shown below. There isn't a huge selection but as you can see, there are a few that might be popular such as iTunes cards, movie cinema cards, and JB HI-FI which sell electronics:



The pizza one is a special promotion. You can buy any pizza from Domino's for $5. That's the normal price for their value pizzas but you can also choose to order one of their more premium pizzas for just $5:



I have about $100 worth of credits on a survey site. I could either choose to wait 4-8 weeks for them to deposit the money into my bank account or I could convert them into electronic gift cards and have them emailed to me instantly. Unfortunately, I don't really shop at the above retailers very often (sure would have been nice if they had a Countdown gift card!).

Once converted, the gift cards can either be printed or emailed and displayed on your smartphone.

Where can I spend it?

Domino's Pizza Voucher

Valid for one free Traditional, Chef's Best, Value Plus, or Value range pizza. Pick up only. Valid for online ordering only. Only one voucher per order. A surcharge applies to upgrade to premium pizzas, half ‘n’ half, additional toppings, indulgent crusts and promotional products. When redeeming this voucher online, remember you must select Pick up, and you must use the full 12 digit voucher code including leading zeros. This voucher will not work if you select Delivery.

Apple iTunes eGift Card

All the music, movies, TV shows and apps you want, all in one place.

JB Hi-fi eGift Card

JB Hi-Fi has it all - best brands, huge range, cheapest prices, convenient locations, but most importantly genuine personal service from experienced specialist staff. This gift card can be used online or at any JB Hi-Fi store in New Zealand.

Event Cinemas Movie eVoucher

Event Cinemas is the ultimate experience for movie-goers. This eVoucher is valid for one Adult admission at Event Cinemas nationwide, The Embassy Theatre or Rialto Cinemas – Newmarket & Dunedin. This voucher is not valid after 5:00 pm on Friday and Saturday.

Peter Alexander eGift Card

Valid at any Peter Alexander store in New Zealand or online at www.peteralexander.co.nz

Ticketmaster eGift Card

Ticketmaster is your online destination for Music, Sport, Theatre, and Event tickets.

Note: The iTunes card can only be used for purchases on the iTunes store for New Zealand. The Event Cinemas voucher is another special offer and is worth $18.50 but can be purchased for $15.

I've always found Cryptsy to be a very reliable exchange with quick deposits and withdrawals. I've heard that they had some issues regarding NXT withdrawals which would be delayed for days but I believe the problems were attributed to the fact that NXT's code is very different from Bitcoin and most other altcoins. I've also heard that this problem has been fixed although I continue to use other exchanges like Poloniex for anything NXT-related.

Other than that, the only other criticism I can think of is that they have a lot of low-quality altcoins (or more specifically, scrypt coins based on Litecoin with little innovation) which were popular in 2014. The fact that they stake PoS coins and receive profits from doing so is something that all other exchanges do and isn't unique to them.

I've heard them being referred to as "Craptsy" which is puzzling because I can't think of any other exchange which gets as much hate and criticism as Cryptsy does. Also, it's rare to find an altcoin exchange which hasn't even been hacked at least once in its life so they must be doing something right security-wise. Can anyone shed some light on why Cryptsy gets so much hate around here?

[(Even maybe something as simple as getting a hundred or few hundred people lined up as initial stakeholders and dividing the total number of coins to them as initial stakeholders right from the start.)]

I found this rather interesting post the other day in a thread discussing Novacoin, an early proof-of-stake coin:

Is proof of work really only there as a way to distribute coins initially, or does it also rely on it for timing the blocks, that is, to try to make average time between blocks meet some target duration? I am wondering whether one could turn off proof of work entirely to make a purely proof of stake coin and use some other method of distributing coins initially. (Even maybe something as simple as getting a hundred or few hundred people lined up as initial stakeholders and dividing the total number of coins to them as initial stakeholders right from the start.)

-MarkM-

Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=143221.msg1518745#msg1518745

Now I'm not saying that MarkM is BCNext because his other posts are quite critical of NXT and PoS-based systems but it's interesting to see that at least one other person had essentially solved the same problem of how to distribute a pure PoS currency before BCNext put forth his solution in October 2013 when he announced NXT.

Which leads me to wonder;

Was NXT really the first coin to use the IPO which has since been copied by hundreds of other coins since then and is now the dominant method of distributing PoS coins? Or were there older coins which used a similar method? My understanding is that before NXT, PoS currencies used a PoW stage to solve the distribution problem which is what Peercoin and Novacoin uses. The new method that NXT used was called the IPO because it's similar to the way stocks are distributed during an IPO.

Sure feels strange to be posting here again since I'm definitely not a newbie anymore but I can't really think of anywhere else to post this question.

That being said, any mods can feel free to move this thread.

A few weeks ago, my parents received a $10,000 transaction into their bank account which they weren't expecting. Of course, they did the responsible thing and phoned the bank who then informed the person who had deposited the money of their mistake. What was suspected and eventually confirmed was that either the sender had written (or typed) the wrong bank account number or there was a mistake during processing and the funds were sent to the wrong account. The transaction was eventually taken back and the $10,000 disappeared from the account.

Now, I know that mistyping a Bitcoin address is highly unlikely since there is a checksum associated with every Bitcoin address which allows the client to detect invalid addresses and prevent coins from being sent to these addresses. Hence the title is "miscopied" and not "mistyped".

What would happen if someone copied the wrong address into their client and sent coins? Well I know the answer to that. Obviously, the coins would be sent to the wrong account. But then what? What recourse would the sender have to correct the error and if there is no recourse other than tracking down the recipient and convincing them to send the coins back (highly unlikely), then how will such mistakes be handled when Bitcoin's transaction frequency approaches that of the current fiat system?

First of all, I'm highly critical of the current cloud mining industry and I understand that most are unprofitable. Nevertheless, I figured it wouldn't hurt to do this small experiment for just a bit of fun.

So basically, I was thinking about doing a series of blog posts where I purchase a small amount of cloud mining contracts (e.g. 1 to 5 dollars worth) to compare the returns of different companies over a period of time. Is there a list of cloud mining providers that have low or zero minimum purchase requirements? I know GAW had their hashlets which could have been bought for 8 or so dollars at one point but I'm not sure if that deal is still available because the last time I checked, their hashlets were out of stock.

Anyone know of any companies that might fit this description?

Now that the new version of Electrum recommends 13 word seeds, would it be a good idea to convert both my 12 word seeds into 13 word ones? Are there any security implications for doing this manually as opposed to generating a new seed automatically? Could (should?) I choose a word from the Electrum dictionary and simply append it to the end of my existing seed to turn it into a 13 word seed?

I've been reading a few posts around here and it seems that a lot of people want Mark Karpeles to go to prison and stay there for a very long time. However, even assuming that Mt. Gox was a scam and not a genuine hack, wouldn't it be in the best interests of society if he were allowed to continue his entrepreneurial pursuits and continue developing valuable services using his expertise on programming - with the condition that he use this money to pay his victims?

Putting someone in prison turns them into a drain on society's resources. The average cost of incarceration for federal inmates in 2011 was almost $30,000 per year which is paid for using taxpayers' money. For someone like Mark Karpeles, it would make far more economic sense to utilize their valuable intellectual skills for good rather than evil.

Same goes for hackers too. In fact, with hackers, many governments have already realized this and already do employ hackers as security experts. There are plenty of cases where hackers were able to escape punishment provided that they work for the government. For example, there was a hacker called AKILL who was caught by the New Zealand Government. He was able to escape conviction under the condition that he accepts a job offer by the police as a professional security consultant:

New Zealand police offered Akill a job for his unique ability, the head of e-crimes lab said he was the top of his field.

He had to pay £5,500 for the damages, but didnt record his conviction.

This week the court case came to an end with Owen managing to dodge a conviction. Instead he will have to pay US$11,000 in costs and damages (even though he reportedly earned US$32,000 during his crime spree). He will also work with the local police to help crack down on online criminal activity.

I live in a place with free electricity. My original plan was to mine bitcoins using a used Antminer S1. However, I soon realized that the noise created would be too much.

Does anyone know if it would be profitable to mine altcoins such as Darkcoin with free electricity? The answer seems obvious but the problem is - I'm currently using a laptop from 2004 so I'll need to build my own dedicated mining rig.

What would be the best way to go about doing this? Could I simply buy an old Pentium 4 computer and stick a graphics card or two inside and mine profitably with free electricity? Or would I be better off buying a computer with a newer processor and attempting to mine CPU coins?

I posted a while back about how I was thinking of buying a miner or two. The miner that I was thinking of was the Antminer S1. However, after watching this video, I can see that it would be too loud for where I'm currently living.

A few questions:

1. Now I know that the Antminer S1 can be underclocked to 170W. Would this result in a quieter machine or would it still sound exactly the same?

2. Are newer generations of the Antminer S series any quieter?

3. Is there such thing as a quiet and powerful miner? I know that USB miners can mine completely silently but they aren't powerful enough to be profitable even with free electricity. Preferably, I would like something with either small fans (think of the fans that you'd find in a typical PC) or entirely passive cooling.

And before anyone says that mining isn't worth it. Well, I have free electricity.

Back in 2011 after I first heard about Bitcoin, I did a check to see how many Bitcoin-related names were still available and found out that most had already been taken. Apparently someone in these forums went on a massive registration spree a few weeks before and took them all. I remember finding one that wasn't registered back then but is now, and that was MilliBTC.com. I considered registering it to set up a faucet or something similar but chose not to instead.

Today, MilliBTC.com is registered and redirects to Bitcoin.me which seems to be an informative site about Bitcoin. The "milli" part refers to millibitcoins or simply millibits - i.e. 1/1,000th of a bitcoin.

Just out of curiosity, but how much do you think this domain would be worth today?

In the very, very early days of Bitcoin mining and markets (i.e. early 2009), there was one miner called NewLibertyStandard who mined bitcoins and then sold them on his website via email. His prices dictated the market at the time and it was based solely on electricity costs:

During 2009 my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days.

Because of the way mining works, if the reward exceeds the electricity cost, lots of people will jump in and the network difficulty should adjust itself so that mining becomes more difficult. If reward is lower than the electricity cost, lots of people will jump out and the network difficulty should adjust itself so that mining becomes less difficult. Therefore, the economics suggest that mining should be profitable, but only barely so.

However, the reality today is that most miners do not make a profit - i.e. the above model does not explain why things are the way they are. Does anyone know the reasons for this?

Now if I had to guess, it would be because many miners are not rational actors motivated solely by profit but are either mining for fun or as a hobby. With a large chunk of the hashrate being controlled by miners who don't care whether they are losing money, this messes up the equilibrium and turns mining into a generally unprofitable thing for everybody.

Basically, I have a large number of sim cards and new ones cost $2 which have their own number. There is no need to provide ID to buy one and they can be bought using cash which would make them practically untraceable. Now I've been wondering whether or not some type of phone verification service might be useful for those who don't have a phone or don't wish to give away their identity for whatever reason. However, a few important issues need to be clarified first:

1. Would there be any interest in this at all?

2. Couldn't someone who offers such a service also hack into any accounts that used their service anytime they wanted to? (e.g. by sending a password reset code as a text message?)

3. Is it legal? And even if it is, would this be against the ToS of most sites? And if someone were to use such a service to verify an account which is later used for illegal activities (e.g. hacking), would the person who provided the phone verification service also be held liable for the crime?

4. Is it possible to verify an account logged in from, say, Canada, using a phone number registered in Mexico or Sweden for example? Or would the IP address give it away?

...to allow people to withdraw their coins?

Once the government identified Ross Ulbricht and had control of the Silk Road servers, why didn't they keep the site open so that people could withdraw their bitcoins? They could have blocked the ability to trade (so as to not facilitate any drug deals) and instead only allow people to log onto their accounts at the site and withdraw their funds to their own Bitcoin addresses.

This is the part I'm talking about:

Funds held by users of the site, however, were not so well-protected. Before completing transactions on the Silk Road, users would load Bitcoins into an escrow account on the site. The agreed upon coins would only be transferred to the seller’s private wallet once the buyer had verified delivery of the goods. When the feds took over the Silk Road, there were over 26,000 Bitcoins in user accounts that were relatively easy to snatch up.

The FBI has transferred all 26,000-plus seized Bitcoins to its own personal wallet, but because Bitcoin transactions are tracked publicly, it didn’t take the internet long to find the FBI’s wallet address. Users have taken to transferring tiny fractions of a Bitcoin to the FBI with public comments attached decrying the war on drugs and the arrest of Ulbricht. Users have even helpfully tagged the wallet address as “Silkroad Seized Coins.” You can check out the comments as they come in by watching the blockchain for the FBI’s wallet.

Link: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/168139-fbi-unable-to-seize-600000-bitcoins-from-silk-road-operator

Recently I've been seeing a new site that seems to function as an exact mirror of Bitcointalk. The only real (visible) difference is that links containing "bitcointalk.org" are converted to "bitcoin-forums.net" but otherwise it's exactly the same. It shows up in Google search results but logging onto Bitcointalk.org doesn't mean that you'll be logged onto Bitcoin-Forums.net which can get a bit confusing if you have both sites open on different tabs since they look identical.

I'm too scared to log on there using my account here but interestingly, using an invalid username/password combination doesn't display the same message on Bitcoin-Forums.net. Instead, only the words "Not found!" shows up.

Anyone know what this is? Is it a phishing site? Is it a way for people living in countries that have banned Bitcointalk to access the forums?

My Dreamhost account is looking rather empty. If you have a simple website that needs hosting, I'll host it for you under a free subdomain (or alternatively, bring your own domain).

Requirements:

• Must be a simple site - i.e. less than a 50 pages.
• No fancy PHP scripts or databases.
• You must either a.) go to oswd.org and choose one of the templates there that you like, or b.) I will design a simple CSS template for you but it won't look pretty, or c.) upload a template as plain text on Pastebin.
• Website content must be sent to me via PM or posted on Pastebin.
• Images should be uploaded to an established image host such as Postimage.org.

If you're interested, post in this thread or send me a PM. This would suit a small website such as one for a restaurant or a bakery. If you have positive trust or are a hero member, then I might loosen the rules a bit.

I created an account a while ago for a website that I was going to launch. However, I used an email address that has since been deleted and is probably not available for re-registration. Since the passwords for our accounts in the new forum will be sent via email to the email addresses we have on our profiles, would it not be possible to access this account once the forum software is migrated? Is it recommended that I register a new email address and change it to this one before the switchover happens?

I'm launching a new site called WikiScams.

I was reading dree12's thread about his research into Bitcoin heists and thought it might work nicely in a wiki-style format since it is rather long. The name was inspired by WikiLeaks.

It works the same way as Wikipedia basically. And anyone can create or modify an article. No accounts required (yet). The idea is that it should educate people and hopefully make scams less common. Since the site uses an open license, some of the info could probably be trimmed down and ported over to the official Bitcoin wiki too. I'll probably be moving over some of the content to separate articles in the next few days.

There are two articles at the moment: Stackcoin and dice.ninja. Pirate's ponzi should have its own article too. I'll write it tomorrow unless someone else wants to do it.

The URL is www.wikiscams.org.

I was searching on Google a few minutes ago while doing some research on the current situation of Bitcoin in China and found an ad at the top of the page for LocalBitcoins or perhaps some sort of clone of it. Except instead of Localbitcoins.com, the URL was Locolbiticenis.com.

Upon entering the site, it looks exactly the same as LocalBitcoins. Even the title, layout, etc. looks identical.

So does anyone know what this is? Is it someone promoting their referral link? Is it a phishing site? Is it some sort of local/regional variant of LocalBitcoins? The name does sound vaguely Spanish.

Very strange.

Screenshot: