The source is signed too— it's included as part of the Linux 'binary' packages.

I heard the space aliens are running lot of hash, but I think John Titor's crew from the future probably has them beat.  Do you think that the invention of quasi-protonic timelike hypercomputers in the upwhen will make the time traveler's advantage decisive or not?

I pay you normally without using this system, then use the pool-signed txn to pay myself in a doublespend.  It would make attacks very reliable.

Besides, if your idea is predicated on large centralized pools I wouldn't count on it remaining viable. They're bad for the decentralization of bitcoin and present single points of failure. With the rise of asic mining making miners with single GPUs insignificant I expect to see mining move towards decentralized pooling techniques like p2pool, or the eligius memorypool mode.

You should probably avoid the use of the word microtransaction: Commonly used meanings span at least four orders of magnitude in value.

Is bitcoin a system suitable for $1 scale value transactions.  Perhaps.  Is it a system for sub-cent transactions, very very likely not.  At the end of the day bitcoin is a worldwide broadcast medium. The broadcastness provides very high confidence that it can't be artificially inflated and that old txn can't be reversed. But the fact that no information is hidden does ultimately limit the scaling— though I don't think that its much of a problem. You don't need that kind of security for very tiny transactions. So you can use something that isn't broadcast based to trade small values and frequently settle against bitcoin. ::shrugs::

Of course, none of this has anything to do with improving the performance for what we have today, of course that has to be done.   But the solution to that is "shut up and code" and "shut up and test", not more navel gazing on the forums.

Confirmations can't take zero minutes on average, that graphic is broken. Presumably the data doesn't start until the point where it first ticks above zero.

Can you update your post to reflect this? The implication that delays started so early is causing people down thread to jump to erroneous conclusions.

Gotta keep that FUD machine well oiled, enh?

It's fine.  It validates the header, and if its correct and ahead of the local node it builds on that instead until the local node catches up.  An attacker would need to burn a block just to make p2pool nodes burn less than a block. They'll, of course, stop skipping when their local node advances down another path.

In the future p2pool nodes could watch for the local node to reject a block and then reject it themselves to further narrow things, but I don't see an issue currently. There are other more effective attacks available.

It makes me sad that this this thread has become so long without anyone pointing our two important points.

(1) bitcoinstatus' results are broken, and have been broken for a long time— if not always

The code that tracks listening hosts for Pieter's dns seed is currently tracking 22,624 IPs, and 22,032 of them with uptime in the last 24 hours.

Has there been a decline in listening nodes?  Maybe. I certainly believe there has been a decline in total bitcoin nodes from the time when we had the wild popularity surge a year ago, but since then we've managed to get UPNP working correctly and enabled by default so I wouldn't be surprised to find out if we really had more listening nodes now than we ever had.

(2) there is no reason to assume those listeners are miners. There is no requirement to listen to mine, and in fact the higher relaying load and exposure to dos attackers can adversely impact mining— prudent miners separate those functions.

Your exponential growth figures are incompatible with the current operations of the software. The current absolutely maximum rate of growth is about 52Gbytes/yr.  This is high and scaling improvements are needed to deal with it but with the download eventually not blocking use of the software its less of an issue.  ... But fundamentally running a full bitcoin node will remain to be more burdensome than alternatives.  It's also more secure— both for yourself and for all the users of bitcoin.


This sounds strange, unexpected, and it's inconsistent with what other people are experiencing. What version of the software are you running? On what kind of system? (OS? CPU? Memory? SSD? HD?).  Especially the report of high cpu on a single block is surprising— there should not be more than a second to a few of CPU time spent on any block.


I'm not sure why you're using pywallet. Bitcoin has had integrated key import/export for something like a year now. Can you help me understand what's missing?

Moving between some different clients may be easier in the future, I don't know if it will ever be dead simple simply because differences in how wallets are handled are part of the distinctions which make alternative clients worth having.


This is now becoming increasingly to happen because no one is stepping up to continue maintaining it.

Because securing the worlds only completely decentralized currency, which is already inherently forgery proof, against reversal is a waste?

I can only imagine what you think about the costs of handling cash, armored cars, and flying treasury agents around to deal with counterfeiting. 

People have proposed alternatives to bitcoin that do additional useful work at the same time— but they're all insecure/vulnerable to cheating. The best we've got is merged mining.

Right click on the mystery transaction and give us the transaction ID for it.

Why did you think that?  The overwhelming majority of transactions sent by regular users don't need fees.

Fees are only required when your txn is not distinguishable from a DOS attack by the system.

He was later shown to have underestimated the risk of this kind of activity. So a search for the finney attack.

There are procedural and regulatory distinctions which separate forex brokers from the business Bitcoinica is engaging in, random link— but even so many people regard forex brokers of even the most reputable type as scams, just google around a bit.   If Bitconica had advertised itself as forex for Bitcoin rather than margin trading I think people would have somewhat more aware of the relevant risks.

What Bitcoinica does is not what Wall street does.  The trader's positions on Bitcoinica were not backed by actual (virtual) assets—  As their FAQ said: "To make things simple, there are no deliveries of Bitcoins."  Bitcoinica was not a brokerage, it was not a stock market, it was not engaging in margin trading of any kind most people are familial with. Nor was it a derivative markets with contracts backed by assets or at least strong, enforceable, obligations to furnish the assets.

Bitcoinica was a bucket shop, a kinda of gambling business that looks on its surface like a brokerage house.  Bucketshops had waves of popularity after the invention of live stock tickers allowed realtime stock data in hotels and bars all over the country. They were roundly outlawed in the US (and most of the world) in the early 1900s— because of their habit of bankrupting the unwary and because of the manipulation they caused on the actual markets.

In a bucket shop participants come to place bets against multiples of the change in price in stocks or commodities, with a house take added to the spread. There are no actual commodities traded at any point, however, and the commodities don't even have to exist (at least not at the quantities traded in the bucket shops). The operator of large long lived bucket shops may engage in moderate hedging to prevent regular volatility from putting them out of business to quickly— but the essential behavior is the same: You're not actually buying or selling the underlying asset and it's possible to end up short (or long) more of the asset than is actually available on the market.  The widespread mistaken belief that bitcoinica hedges 100% is now easily disproved by the lack of an enormous decline in MTGOX's volume— if that wasn't already clear enough from bitcoinica's frequent delays to pay withdraws, trading freezes, or the impossibility of hedging shorts using MTGOX.

Bucket shops are very risky— especially ones as narrow as Bitcoinica: A large bucketshop with many 'assets' for sale could potentially cover the losses should one become wildly successful. A single item bucketshop like Bitcoinica would rapidly bankrupt if there were large price motion against their favor.   So when people think about the risk/reward they often get the wrong ratio because highly successful trades are likely to never be paid— because there is no delivery of underlying assets there is no guarantee of being able to cash out your profitable trades.

Worse— Bucketshop operators have inequitable visibility into their markets and a financial incentive to abuse it:  A well timed but momentary increase/decrease of a few percent will wipe out the balances of people in "leveraged" short/long positions, converting their balance to the houses' balance. Between their ability to opaquely adjust the spreads and their holding of (apparently) a good hundred thousand btc of customer coins triggering these events would not be difficult.

Bucketshops also potentially have a distorting effect on the real market— to the extent that traders don't realize that its just gambling the fact that the buckshop exaggerates the supply of long or short positions is potentially a source of inefficient pricing (This is why on real markets there are rules abolishing or at least limiting uncovered shorts and regulating when short trade can take place).

I think Bitcoinica skirted the fine line of dishonesty about the nature of their business.  As far as I'm aware they did not outright make any dishonest claims,  but their appearance left many people with misunderstandings and they have happily sat quietly while other people told outright untruths in support of them.   Fortunately(?), their failure took a form that could have befallen a real brokerage created by completely inexperienced people— risks that the even the biggest rubes could have foreseen— instead of the specialized risk associated with bucketshops.

I will continue to caution Bitcoin users from participating in bucketshops, just as I would discourage them from participating in classic ponzi schemes, negative expectation gambling, apparent money laundering operations, pool defrauding attacks, and fractional reserve banking — especially in the nascent and unstable Bitcoin economy.

Patrick from Bitcoin Consultancy agreed with Luke setting this up when it was going on.  There isn't any funny business going on there.

I did.

Quick coin-control instructions:

0) Shut down cleanly and install the software luke linked to.
1) Start back up, wait until you have 6 confirms on the coins you want to spend.
2)settings -> options -> display -> check display coin-control features (a coin control tab appears in the main window)
3) Go to the coin control tab and select the address(es) you want to send from.
4) go to the send coins tab, the send from box at the bottom will show the addresses you just selected
5) send the coins like normal

This will probably fail if you only have 6 confirms unless you reduce the amount by 0.0005 fee needed because it's a fast turnaround.  You can either wait 144 transactions or reduce the amount that you're sending by 0.0005.

Please report any problems or other feedback you have related to coincontrol— we'd like to get it in as an official feature in the next version.


We live in a bizarre world— as he was giving out these coins the cracker wrote:


He also claimed to have deleted all of Bitcoinica's data.

Regardless of how you may or may not agree with his sentiment about Bitcoinica (I think I've previously made my negative views of it clear enough),  theft isn't a noble act— nor is receiving stolen goods. Returning the funds won't bring Bitcoinica back, nor will failing to return them prevent it from coming back.  Keeping the funds will also potentially create annoyances for you down the road when you are mistaken for someone affiliated with the thief.

If you don't like Bitcoinica and wish it didn't exist, the best thing you can do is to keep reminding people about its poor security track record (At least three known coin theft incidents), and that fact that it was a bucketshop— a kind of casino in the guise of a stockmarket where people trade on large multiples of the change in a commodities price— and not a legitimate exchange where actual bitcoins were bought and sold (a fact their FAQ admitted but only in rather technical terms).

In any case, I hope and expect most people will return these coins.

They fixed some problems the system was having, so the data looks more sane now but not completely sane.

Note, the estimates of bitcoin client are now ~worthless: A few versions ago I changed the reference client to not advertise itself unless it was listening and knew its public IP... so it's expected that that count should go way down.

When you deleted everything did you also delete addr.dat?  If not then I suspect you have a failing disk.

Can you paste the text of the runtime error along with the last dozen or so lines from your debug.log file?