[Trolls, please don't suggest Bitcoin]

Here's an idea that I thought of for a laugh. Let's invent a crypto coin with the most awful properties we can! Trolls, please don't suggest Bitcoin. Thank you.

After thinking about this for five minutes I've decided to call my coin AwfulCoin.

Some properties of AwfulCoin:

Every receiving address starts with your date of birth (eg 09021984-1h8sNh5aUshWpXom92omEvt6hmwPcdSfZ).

Confirmations are "dynamically timed" according to difficulty. Unfortunately the algorithm causes a confirmation to take between 8 and 48 minutes.

AwfulCoin is unique in that you pay receiving fees, not sending fees. When you log into your wallet you must authorise all of your recieving fees before you can make another Tx.

I'll leave it up to the board to add more suggestions. AwfulCoin to tha moon!

With the mass communication we have today how come Bitcoin isn't already widespread news?

I can type a few characters into my phone and the whole world can potentially see it (if enough people were interested in me).

How haven't people realised what a great store of value BTC is now that the price is relatively stable?

Is it scepticism? Stupidity (people want easy apps without understanding anything about the underlying technology behind BTC)?

It seems to me like BTC should be heading to mass adoption NOW, rather than in 5 years time as some people predict?

Personally, I don't want it to go viral too soon though; I would like some more cheap BTC before that happens.

Suppose I create an online wallet with https://blockchain.info/ in Tor browser and keep a small stash of BTC in there. It's an anonymous stash, right? So long as I only access via Tor browser, use change addresses and send BTC wisely.

But I've recently read about people running Tor exit nodes and maliciously sniffing the data through them, so I was wondering if this is a safe way of having an online wallet without anyone gaining access to my password/BTC.

Any thoughts?

So far I've been using Electrum with the various SOCKS5 proxies over TOR in order to make anonymous transactions (sending to paper wallet, etc.)

I've also opened a blockchain.info account in TOR browser and never used it over clear net.

It's a bit of a hassle loading Electrum with SOCKS5 sometimes, especially if the TOR electrum server is down or the TOR node you're connecting to is not friendly with Electrum.

So I'm wondering if using a blockchain.info wallet is the way forward, so long as I always connect in TOR browser. Will my IP remain anonymous?

So, many of us westerners/Christmas celebrators will be starting to save money for Christmas presents pretty soon.

Does anyone think this will affect BTC price? i.e. People who would normally be investing part of their monthly pay cheque in BTC not doing so.

What do you guys think?

I'm coming into some FIAT on Friday and buying Friday afternoon.

Any speculation that we will see the price stay stable for the next three days? Perhaps a slight lowering correction by then? (I hope )

EDIT: I'd actually like it to stay as it is until early 2015 in order to obtain more. I'm all for stability at the moment.

Hi,

I've read about and tried testing BIP38 encryption of private keys and have succeeded in creating and decrypting BIP38 keys.

I have BTC in cold storage, on pen and paper, in an envelope in a secret place that contains my key in WIF format. I also have an identical copy at a trusted family member's, in case of burglary/fire/etc.

Now, here's a hypothetical situation about encrypting my private key:

I want to create a new cold storage BTC address with BIP38 key and send my BTC to it, with a copy at my family member's house.

My question is about the length of password to use. I could use a single character ("0", or "1") to encrypt my key. This would prevent my BTC being immediately useable if it fell into the wrong hands (burglary, etc).

If it was stolen (and supposing the thief knew what Bitcoin was), is it possible to determine the length of password from the BIP38 format, or would the thief have no way of knowing and simply have to brute-force the key blindly using incremental passwords of varying length?

Obviously, I'm not going to use a "0" or a "1" as my password, but I figure a 5 or 6 character password would make the thief's life hell and give me enough time to act and shift my coins somewhere safe.

I know that decrypting BIP38 is a time consuming process on an average PC, so would anyone like to guess how much time, say, a 6 character password would buy in this situation? How many uppercase and lowercase combinations of 6 characters (plus 0-9) are there, and how much time would this allow me to save my coin?

I think Bitcoin is complex enough to warrant a thread that we can use as a quick one line Q&A thread.

I'll start :

Q: I send a BTC and it has zero confirmations, so it's in the unconfirmed transactions pool. Once I get 1 confirmation does that mean it's now sitting atop of the blockchain, with all of the other transactions that make up that block? Or is the block not confirmed until I have x amount of confirmations?

What happens to transactions when I close down my node?

Say I have 12 connections (8 in, 4 out) and I have to reboot my PC due to a kernel update or whatever.

If I close down my node at the exact time someone is using it for a 255kb BTC transaction then will their Tx just be rerouted through another node? Is their Tx interrupted or lost?

Does bitcoin-QT or bitcoind temporarily halt system shutdown while it clears any current TX's?

Just curious, really. 

I decided to start this thread in order to help proliferate the amount of available nodes. It may sink like a stone, but come on people: get bitcoin core up and running if you have the resources.

I think I can just see my node on this map (west of Nottingham city centre, UK):

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

United Kingdom is currently at 378 (5.31% of global nodes).

Come on people:see if you can find your node and let's give bitcoin decentralisation a boost! 

I've got an old HTC desire in the cupboard. It's seen better days: scratched, volume rocker missing, broken proximity sensor.

It's rooted and unlocked and loaded with an older version of Cyanogenmod ROM. The camera and touchscreen work fine, so it could be used with QR codes.

I was wondering if it would be any use as a portable bitcoin wallet or even cold storage. Is there any specialist software available to use a phone just as a wallet or can I just stick it in airplane mode and load a wallet APK onto it?

Last time I did some cold storage I used bitaddress.org.

I've been messing around with manually hashing in Ubuntu terminal and was wondering if I could create a private key manually, then create public key and finally Bitcoin address.

Is it possible using basic hashing functions, or would I need to download a script?

I was just thinking how brilliant this could be if foreign bureau de change start accepting BTC.

In the past I've messed about with Travellers Cheques and have relied on Visa only to find that Mastercard was more accepted (hello USA!).

Won't it be great to send two or three BTC to a newly created "holiday wallet" on smartphone or just write down an Electrum seed, arrive at your holiday destination with no local money. Walk into a bureau de change and three confirmations later you've got a fistful of local cash.

Can anyone see any drawbacks?

Are they on blockchain.info or implemented in some kind of code in the protocol?

Do they exist?

Can I see them?

OK, so I've learned how to install and use bitcoin-qt, insert bootstrap.dat to get up to date, run a full node and run headless bitcoin core thanks to this forum.

Now that I've got a headless node running I'd like to limit my upload speed, if possible, to keep it below 50Kb/s. My connection is 100Kb/s max and I don't want it interfering with other stuff I'm running, like torrents.

I know I can limit the number of connections (thanks DeathAndTaxes) but this doesn't necessarily mean that my upload isn't being max'ed out.

Is there a command line option to set a maximum up speed?

I've been using bitcoin core v0.9.2 for a week or so to help out with the network.

I'm happy to have it running in the background 24/7 because I want BTC to succeed and I'm doing my bit for stability of the network.

The trouble is, I'm using a fairly decent HTPC (6400K CPU, SSD, 4GB 1600MHz RAM in dual channel) but bitcoin-qt is eating my memory. I'm on Ubuntu Trusty and the system monitor shows bitcoin-qt to be using between 600 and 700+ MB of RAM!

If I've got a couple of browsers open and watching a video file this doesn't leave me with a great deal of RAM. The 6400K APU already allocates about 1GB to video performance so I'm left with about 3GB usable and Ubuntu only has about 25% left to spare.

Should I buy an 8GB RAM pair and swap the 4GB pair out? Will bitcoin-qt continue to use more RAM as the size of the blockchain increases and network activity becomes more common?

Suppose bitcoin goes megastrophic over the next couple of years.

Suppose 1 BTC is worth 13 semi-detached houses, in Runcorn.

Suppose people will be buying 4K-4D televisions, tins of cheesy-peas, internet enabled kettles, hover jigsaws and grandma will be buying her Readers Digest in BTC.

This would make the small items a fraction of a BTC, you get my over laboured point by now.

How many digits can we go down past a Satoshi? A Satoshi is 0.00000001 BTC, I think.

Is the protocol infinitely scalable, or is there a limit to the amount of decimal places without a rework of the blockchain?


_{Copyright, Alan Partridge.}

Short story:

I owe my girlfriend £300. I gave her a cheeky ultimatum yesterday: you can have £300 cash when I get paid, or 1 BTC, whatever the cost on 18th June.

She was a bit undecided at first until I showed her a couple of charts, giving her an idea of how it could rally soon. I told her 1BTC would likely cost me an extra £50, and she said "I'll take the bitcoin, but when I want to cash it you must cash it and not try to persuade me to keep it."

My monthly salary has literally just gone in the bank now, and a coin is currently £360.80.

Do I wait for a drop in the morning (it's gone 1am and she's sleeping next to me) or buy, buy, buy in case of a price increase when we wake?

I'm more excited about it than her, to be honest. 

I've set up bitcoin-qt on Ubuntu and have a copy of bootstrap.dat downloaded and I'm ready to sync.

When I copy bootstrap.dat to my ~/.bitcoin directory and start up the client I understand it will consolidate the data from bootstrap.dat to speed up sync of my client with the blockchain.

What I want to know is: will I end up with twice as much hard disk space missing once sync has finished?

I haven't got that much room left on this particular drive and I don't wanna lose 2 x 17GB = 34GB worth of space.

Ta.

What is a hard fork?

I'm assuming that it's when a collective that are trusted within the Bitcoin community get together and shut the network down temporarily in order to install a modified version of the blockchain. I'm assuming this is to correct either an error or disadvantaged situation in the blockchain or to enable it to work with a change in Bitcoin protocol. Am I right?

I've also seen that there was a hard fork back in 2012. What happened and what was the reason for doing it?