Yesterday I sent a transaction with a very low fee (1 satoshi per byte). It stayed for a few minutes in the memory pool and was showing as zero confirmations on both sending and receiving wallets. Then after an hour or so it had disappeared from both, as if it hadn't occurred. I assumed it had dropped from the memory pool as it was very low fee. Today I thought of entering it again but when I turned my computer on I saw (on the watch only version of the wallet) that the transaction had gone through (>100 confirmations).
Yet at some point last night I could have sent it again from the sending wallet.
What could have happened? Could it be that the transaction was still in the memory pool but one node decided to drop it and the wallet (Electrum 2.9.3) reported it as dropped, but then a miner included it in a block and so it was followed by others? And if so, if I had sent it again, presumably the second transaction would have been eventually rejected?

Καλημέρα. Μπορεί κάποιος να μου λύσει την εξής απορία για το segwit 2x fork:
Ποιο το πρόβλημα στο να κάνουν οι core developers την αλλαγή από 1 σε 2 mb ώστε να αποφευχθεί το hard fork? Τα επιχειρήματα που διαβάζω συνοψίζονται στο ότι το 2x δεν είναι αναγκαίο και ότι αυτοί που το προωθούν θέλουν corporate takeover του bitcoin. Για το ότι δεν είναι αναγκαίο σύμφωνοι, αλλά προκαλεί κάποιο κακό; και για το δεύτερο, ένας λόγος παραπάνω να αποφύγεις το hard fork με το να εισάγεις την αλλαγή που θέλουν και να τους αφοπλίσεις. What am I missing?

So from what I read it seems that the consensus is that after the fork BTC will be the dominant coin, and BCC will be an altcoin that may be worth selling.
Opinions on this welcome.
Now, assuming this is the case, what's a good way to sell BCC?
Since futures are trading now, I thought of doing that, so I opened an account at HitBTC. But before I send any BTC there, I tried to do some research on the exchange and I didn't like what I read.
Is there a reliable exchange that will be quick to list the two coins and allow sell of BCC ASAP after the fork (or ideally even before in the form of futures like HitBTC)?

I sent some BTC from an online wallet (from coinbase) to an offline one in a new address. A few hours after it arrived there was another payment from a different address of 0.00001 BTC. Given that the amount is tiny, and also that it's extremely unlikely someone would send money by accident in a random address I was trying to see if there is a connection to the first payment (as the transaction fees were high I thought that maybe it was a partial refund of the transaction fees) but I can't see any connection. Is this common?

I downloaded Electrum, I turned off wifi, started a new wallet, copied the seed phrase somewhere safe, and also the public master key, then closed the program.
Then I turned wifi back on, and started electrum again. I selected new/restore and entered the public master key and it opened the wallet in watch-only mode. I noticed that the receive address is the same on both the offline and online wallet.
Am I right in the below?
1) Assuming that my computer was clean when I first created the "offline" wallet (not perfectly offline, hence the quotation marks), it is safe to keep using the online watch-only version for receiving coins and checking the balance, if I don't need to spend the bitcoins in the foreseeable future.
2) Specifically I can send BTC from somewhere else (specifically from coinbase and blockchain.info) to the receiving address there. The coins will arrive safely with no risk of hacking/theft (assuming I don't open the actual "offline" wallet any more - in fact I have removed the actual files from the computer and backed it up) and I will be able to verify it from the watch-only wallet I run.
3) Assuming I always have access to the seed phrase I can have full access to them in the future if I wish to spend them. In that case I either run the "offline" wallet again or start fresh from the seed phrase.
Thanks

Let's say we want to safely keep bitcoin for the long term. Most of the solutions available have issues:

- Online wallet: trust issue, and hacking risk
- Paper wallet: it can be lost or destroyed or stolen
- Brain wallet: it can/will be lost or eventually die
- Offline wallet on dedicated computer: computer can be damaged, lost or stolen
- Leaving them in an exchange: hacking risk and trust issue

What I would ideally want is a secure way of storing the bitcoins online (so I am not vulnerable to physical theft or damage to my property). So how about the the following:
I create a wallet and the 12 word recovery phrase. Then I create various files that contain these words separately. For example I write a couple of the words on a piece of paper, then take a photo of that paper. I record a video of myself saying or spelling a couple of other words. I put a couple more in a spreadsheet, etc. Then I put all these files in a folder and zip it with a password, and then save that zip in a usb stick and on a cloud service.

What would you say about something like that?

It's now top of the list at bitcoincharts.com/markets after 1.5m BTC in transactions for the last 24h and last price is 140HKD (that's less than $20). Bid and offer is around 5000HKD though so it seems someone dumped a HUGE amount and then the exchange halted? Any more colour there?

Almost every bubble in history has had some positive side effects even after bursting. The associated investment during the boom years resulted in infrastructure or capital building that benefited society even after a lot of the original investors went bust. Telegraph, railways, fibre optic cables, housing, alternative energy, you name it. During the inflation of the bubble, investors pile up, supply increases as a response. After the pop, prices drop but the capital stock remains and society as a whole benefits from the increased capital formation, even if some people are hurt if the bubble came with associated credit expansion and then credit collapse/balance sheet recession, like in the recent housing bubble. Obviously there always is some malinvestment along the way (McMansions in suburbia, lots of failed dotcoms) but if for every 100 Webvans there's one Amazon and one Google, the overall balance is positive.

So I was wondering if the same can be said for bitcoin. We are in the boom phase, a lot of investment is happening at the moment, in many areas (hardware for mining, numerous applications and services creating an ecosystem, etc.). At the same time the price is exploding, which helps to further fuel the arms race. People are increasingly interested as price goes up, more and more services come up, more hardware is built, and a virtuous circle is unfolding. At some point this will stop. It could end up in a number of ways, with the most extreme being bitcoin going to zero because of something better that replaces it and bitcoin becoming the dominant global currency reaching orders of magnitude of its current price. Given market dynamics, in either scenario there will be a market overshoot in both price and infrastructure investment. How do you envision the adjustment after that overshoot? Obviously the ecosystem infrastructure will retain its value (assuming it's not replaced by a superior system) regardless of the price, but what about the dedicated hardware for example? Old PCs and GPUs can be re-purposed, but ASIC miners? Could one change the firmware to make them do something else (eg folding) after it's uneconomical to mine for bitcoins?

Hello,

I am trying to set up an offline wallet. I downloaded the lucid puppy distro as it's supposed to be very light. Made a bootable USB disk with it and copied the offline Armory bundle in it. I booted from it, unzipped the bundle, and installed all the packages. At the armory main package, I got the message that the program would be in the menu, under the folder "utility". However it wasn't there, and I can't find any way of running it. I opened the package manager and it shows as installed package, so it has installed.

I know this is a newbie question but I have never run Linux before. Any suggestions?

Thanks

I received a PM by rahulghandi with a link supposedly to a thread in bitcointalk, but in reality was another website with the same look and feel as bitcointalk and it was the login page. So I polluted his database by entering a bunch of random fake passwords, but be careful if you receive something like this to not enter your actual password.

In a typical economy, activity is cyclical. Starting from low price levels, demand starts picking up. This attracts producers who start investing to produce more goods and services as it's profitable to do so. Additional investment increases overall income, which further increases aggregate demand, which absorbs the added supply, which results in a virtuous circle with GDP growing. At some point prices reach a high level and demand peaks. Also, competition among producers means overall supply is very high, margins are thin and profitability low. At the first sign of price decline, losses occur, producers can't afford to stay in the market any more, there's less and less investment, defaults etc., prices, income and aggregate demand go down in a vicious circle (recession). Until the economy reaches a low level, where it stabilizes and the cycle starts over.

I'm thinking that something similar happens in bitcoinland. In 2011, as the price was rising, a lot of miners invested in expensive hardware, as it was increasingly profitable to mine. When prices peaked, there was way too much productive capacity in the economy than needed by the then current demand, which created increasing selling pressure. Prices started dropping until an equilibrium was reached (probably after a lot of miners exited the business and others subsidized it with other income). After the prices started climbing again, more and more miners started investing in more expensive hardware as it was increasingly justified with bitcoin at $50, $100, $150 etc. Unless a new high is reached quickly (before the next electricity bill, mortgage payment, credit card payment etc. start coming), this may lead to another bitcoin recession, probably for several months until supply drops to such a low point that a new virtuous circle starts.

Thoughts?

Hello,

People recommend having a live CD in which to install and run a client in order to make sure it's clean. Would the same work with a virtual machine, like VMplayer, running the same linux distribution? how should one go about ensuring proper sandboxing in this case?

Thanks

Hello,
What do people think on online wallet services such as blockchain.info, compared to using/managing your own wallet in your local pc/USB stick/dropbox?

Hello,
as a newbie, I can't write on the dedicated thread so I'm asking here.
I would like to buy some bitcoins, and it seems that BTC-e is one of the exchanges with the lowest price.
Questions:
1) would you say it's reliable? (I've seen they survived a DDOS attack recently and there are people that might consider it less safe than Mt.Gox)
2) any alternatives? (for a lower price than Mt.Gox)
3) Assuming no alternatives, what's the easiest/cheapest way to fund it? They mention OKpay with 1% fee but then OKpay charges another 1% to load funds in its wallet so we are already at 2% fees. Is this really the case?
Thanks in advance