I've gotten so many good replies for technical questions before that I have to abuse the good brains on this forum some more.

Why is it hard to track backwards from public address to private key?
I don't have a higher degree in math, but in the kind of math I'm used to, if I have a formula and the unknowns, I'm usually able to solve this given a little time.
Why doesn't this hold true in cryptography, and especially in elliptic curve cryptography?
Why is it hard to find the private key when you have both the formula and the output?

How in the world did that address come into being?

http://blockchain.info/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE


I'm trying to brute force a simple bitcoin address of 6 or 7 characters, and it takes quite a bit of computer power. If someone can brute force such an address, why can they not just brute force my address?

What data type is used in Bitcoin to store the value of a transaction?

I doubt it's double or float due to rounding errors. My guess is that it's integer or long with a system for moving the decimal. Can someone help explain this?

I tried Google, but it said just "I don't know".

Thanks.

As I understand, and to my experience, in Armory you can take a single backup, and the program will be able to regenerate all addresses in a wallet based upon this one backup. It means that you can take one backup when you create the wallet, and that's all you need. It will use the information from the first address as a seed to generate the next, so you don't risk loosing the other private keys.

Is there something similar implemented in the Qt client? Or do I have to back it up every time I create a new address?

What information is used as seed when I generate a new address in the Qt client?

I read something like the following, and I'm wondering if it's correct:

When mining, the hash is not known beforehand, but some kind of product is known. I think the product is the number of 0's before the rest of the hash string. So for example this hash:
http://blockchain.info/block/000000000000039ce32a9b18b1c676f14658ee02ae15dd5791f8604ae2d31968
will only be valid when it has 13 0's before the rest of the string.
This means that except from all the 0's in the beginning, there is no known method for predicting the content of the rest of the string before it's been generated.

Thanks for any feedback.

By the way, what is the function of the Merkle Root?

And another: It seems that going from 13 to 14 0's in the beginning of the hash is a quite large adjustment; about 8%. How can the network adjust difficulty just a few percent up and down?

Thanks again.

I would hope that some smart guy here can answer the following:
Where are the unprocessed transactions stored?
When miners process transactions, the transactions obviously goes into the blockchain. But what about the low priority, high risk of spamming transactions? Do they go into a repository in a chain or stack of "unprocessed" transactions, are they just sitting on the local computer since no miners wants to process the low priority transactions, or something completely different?

Thanks for any answers.

I'm looking for a secretary.

It's best if you have some useful skills, like for example accounting, programming, marketing skills, PR, creating reports... stuff like that, but not required.

If you don't have those skills, but you are interested in privacy, I have some easier work that requires less skills. We can discuss hourly rate and how many hours per day/week.
You don't need to know a lot about Bitcoin and cryptography, but a little computer skills like knowing Facebook, Twitter and the like is required.

Long term relationship preferred, I'm not interested in working with you for just a week or a month.

PM me if you are interested.

I suggest people can watch some videos while waiting.
I would suggest movies about bitcoin, so that newbies get some basic understanding.

Here are two for starters.

What is Bitcoin?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

Some shameless self-promotion, more about privacy than Bitcoin, but you might find it useful nevertheless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPL5JvMKqQc