Ok,

Now with all the talk about malleability. What is the proper way to make payments from a program with bitcoin-qt ?

If one wants to make automated payments and be able later to track down the transaction what is now the current best practices to do that?

Should one still just do:
sendtoaddress    <bitcoinaddress> <amount>  Returns the transaction ID <txid> if successful.

txid is usable with bitcoin-qt or totally unreliable? The value you got from sendtoaddress can change to something else in bitcoin-qt?
Some say that you should keep the timestamp. How do you get that? And will the value be exactly the same on blockchain.info, or
do you have to look around and find a transaction that has roughly the same value?
Some say you should keep input addresses. How to get that?

Better to use raw transactions? But it seems more difficult and requires a lot of manual work.

And what to do if a transaction does not go through. -Just wait more?
sendtoaddress will keep the transaction active in the net until it eventually goes through?

Here are some images that BFL tries to "censor". If you try to post something on their forum, it is shut down in minutes.

They have a guy hired to delete everything that is not fanboy like.

Talk about a company with no sense of humor.

I am just wondering what is happening in the wallet.dat file in the standard bitcoin client.

Can anybody explain the high level functionality in a way a layman can understand?

First I thought the file was just a list of private keys. But it does not seem to be the case.

I see in the log:
Flushed wallet.dat 408ms
AddToWallet xxxxxxxx  new

Why does it need to write anything to the file when
it is starting up (rescanning). I thought it was only needed to write to wallet.dat when generating a new address.



Don.

Hi,

I am just wondering about if there is an API to get the balance for a specific bitcoin address.

I know there are some sites that allows this http://blockchain.info, http://blockexplorer.com/ and other
sites that lets you get notified if you get money transfered to you.

Those sites are great and a lot of work has gone into those, but are there some API in Java, PHP that lets you hook up the block chain in some way so you can do this on your own.

The regular bitcoin client only allows you to list addresses you own right?

I assume the way those sites work are by processing the block chain and look at each new block. Then insert
all the information into a database so that one can search per bitcoin address.

All that seems like a lot of work to do for some small project. So I am looking for something ready made.

My boss is really strict and wants things done very quickly and cheap. So there is no way of making something from
scratch that takes many months to do.

BTW:
I am posting this in this in newbies since this is the question I wanted to ask when joining this forum. And this is the
only place I am allowed to post at the moment.

Thank you for any inputs.