Using the software is voting for the changes. Participating in a pool is voting for the pools actions.

The developers may make the changes, but those changes are public and reviewed by others. Not everybody has to review every change. The point is that everybody could review every change. And if there is something wrong in that change that person can point it out, "waking up" others to review/confirm.

Asking to explain a complex matter in a way a 5 year old could understand it is either trolling or just being lazy.

More like organized wasting time.

It's probably easiest to read over this:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

Also keep an eye on Armory development. There are plans to include Shamir's secret sharing in the paper backup.

This allows you to encrypt the paper backup so that k out of n keys decrypt it. For example, you could put 3 papers at different locations and even if one gets compromised the private key is still safe.

Along the way more digits can be added, making those satoshis infinitely divisible. Today's 64 bit is somewhat arbitrary.

We'll let future generations sort that out.

Depends on your download speeds and the upload speeds of your peers.

If 0.01% Bitcoins are lost everyday, how long does it take for all of them to be lost?

As long as it is offline, yes.

My guess is that you plan to use it online afterwards. Do you know what kind of data is left is the browser cache, or if ios stores that kind of data somewhere. Maybe it wants to help you remember a password you forgot. This is all about that is theoretically possible.

Realistically, you could probably just generate that key online and be more than fine.

How does that change anything? For trading purposes it is exactly the same as bitcoin.

It looks like there is someone that can do arbitrage well for China to Japan (MtGox), resulting in their exchange rates to be close.

Such is not as refined between the other exchanges. The higher the overhead, the larger the price difference.

There is a lot of money to be made here, so chances are this will be resolved in the future.

Looks like the best of the poor. Lots of ways to improve?

Does Dropbox keep multiple versions? Or will it overwrite a good copy with a corrupt one (incase your local wallet ever gets corrupted)?

Not openly hostile and even a bit pro Bitcoin. Surprising.

As long as you don't do more than 100 transactions in a month ...

Oh, yes, another vote for Armory!

Default size of that pool is 100.

First off, let me say that if you are not in a hurry, I suggest you just wait. Eventually the transaction should go through or the coins should show up again in the wallet.

If you cannot wait, you can double-spend the coins with added fees, which should cause the new transaction to be included in the chain and reject the old one. However, please make sure you fully understand what you are doing!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231309.0

The standard client gets much more attention, because there are more developers and users.

With lightweight clients there is always a chance that the parts that were cut out to make the implementation lighter had some sort of use. One example for this is address reuse.  Blockchain.info, for example, sends the change back to the original address. So each spending results in a signature with the same private key. In general, this is fine because each signing also involves a random number. If the RNG is broken (which happened to android devices recently), two random numbers can be very similar. This in turn makes it possible to calculate the private key from two signatures that used the same private key.

Yes, those are some odd circumstances. I'm not saying lightweight clients are bad, but I also would not keep too much money in them.

Many questions. I'll get started answering with what I have some experience with.



Armory interfaces with bitcoind from Bitcoin-Qt, so for that purpose it is like running Bitcoin-Qt, which means storing the full chain and requiring plenty of memory. On top of that, Armory adds additional security features like deterministic wallets and offline signing of transactions. In its current version it is a huge memory hog (you need about 8GB memory), which will be addressed in the next version.

Offline means that you have the option to sign a transaction on a seperate client. To use this feature, you create the transaction on the online client (which has bitcoind running and the full blockchain) by entering recipient and amount. This transaction is then saved to USB stick and can be copied to the offline computer. The idea here is to have a seperate computer, which was never connected to the internet. On this computer the private key was generated and never leaves it. Therefore an adversary would need to physically access the computer and know the passphrase to use the key. After copying the transaction to the offline computer, reviewing it, and signing it, it is again copied to the online computer (via USB stick), to be broadcast to the network. Note that the offline computer does not need a running bitcoind or the blockchain and, therefore, has low system requirements.

You have to trust the code from bitaddress.org.

When you import the private key into Multibit, it could take a while. I'm not that familiar with light clients, but it may require downloading and parsing the full chain.

Don't forget the change. Let me give an example. Say you backup the private key for address A, you transfer 100 BTC to address A, you import the private key, you spend 10 BTC which causes the 90 BTC change to be sent to a new address B, and then delete the client on the USB stick. If you were using bitcoin-qt, you would have lost the 90 BTC. Again, I don't know what Multibit does.


Yes and yes.