I've been on the standard Qt client since 2011, and looking to finally switch to Armory. But here's a few questions I had:
1) I already have the whole block chain up to date for the Qt, is it possible I use the database already on my computer rather than downloading a new one for Armory?
2) I want to keep my current wallet.dat from the Qt client, is it possible to transfer over all addresses from this wallet, as well as the transaction history from the Qt to Armory?
1) Yes, Armory will automatically use the block chain from Qt. FYI, it builds its own DB from that, that's about the same size as Qt's files (you need both DBs currently). 2) You can import private keys, which will get you the history of sends and receives, but AFAIK you can't automatically bring over the comments associated with those transactions/addresses. Having imported addresses kicking around that contain money (or may in the future) also means that you need to make sure you have backups of those private keys in addition to your one root key that Armory uses to generate addresses. Additionally, if you have bitcoind installed (non-graphical version of Bitcoin Qt) then Armory can run that instead so you don' t have an extraneous GUI floating around. Even better, you can configure bitcoind to run all the time as soon as you boot your computer, whether Armory is running or not. |
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tl;dr The protocol works very well and these considerations are baked in. Bitcoin is quite secure in this regard.
So many people get caught up in the trap of "how will we make sure a market will arrive at the correct price for a service" without understanding that the question itself is invalid. |
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...and how does one get one of these amazing "stealth addresses"?
Right now, the only option unfortunately is to use Dark Wallet. If you really need to receive donations from hundreds of people and stealth addresses are not practical yet (they aren't) then you should set up a web site where donors can go to be given a unique donation address. Alternately you can add to the privacy pollution by giving out a single static donation address. That's a solution that's easy for you and will cause harm to other people in the future, but lots of other people are doing it... |
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I do know that the core devs want to reduce the orphan cost by propagating blocks by TX hash whenever possible. High orphan costs are sometimes blamed for the hesitation of some miners to build larger blocks. Of course they do, just like how McDonalds wants to reduce the marginal cost of cooking a Big Mac and a FedEx wants to reduce the marginal cost of shipping a package. Allowing the network to process more transactions at a lower cost is a good thing. |
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Say the situation where a miner includes n transactions in a block or n+1 is equivalent in cost*. This situation does not exist. The cost is very real and not-insubstantial - the increased orphan risk which you completely glossed over above. The marginal cost can - and should - be brought very low but it will never reach zero. The amount of transactions a miner can process in a ten minute interval is finite, therefore it is scarce, therefore the service of including transactions in a block will always have a price. |
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OK, so how do you get a mass amount of people to donate bitcoins to you securely??
Put out 100 different ads with different addresses?!? Seriously?
That's precisely what stealth addresses are good for. You're right that it's a travesty that only two clients are interested in incorporating them at the moment. |
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I think there should be a limit otherwise no-one will pay any meaningful fees ever and people will stop mining. The system will only work when there is a limited amount of space because if it is unlimited it is advantageous for miners to include transactions with any fee, even 1 Satoshi. If that happens Bitcoin will stop to function correctly as the block rewards decrease. If you believe that markets don't work without externally-imposed production quotas, then you're in the wrong place. Stick to central bank-created currencies. I signed up for Bitcoin with a 21M unit cap and a 1MB block cap. That's great. I signed up for a Bitcoin that originally had no explicit cap on the transaction rate. Rationing transaction throughput was never part of the economic model of Bitcoin, and turning a temporary anti-spam measure into some kind of permanent feature is a form of attack against the currency. |
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100 addresses? That's insane. That's like going to the bank and them giving you 100 checking account numbers.
No, addresses are not account numbers. Addresses are single-use payment identifiers. Using the same one more than once is a security and privacy vulnerability. |
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Buying space in the Blockchain (through fees) only works if the amount of available space is limited. I hope we'll quickly run into the 1 MB limit and the limit is NOT increased, then we'll see transfer fees increase. Increasing the limit is the same as printing more fiat currency, the value of space in the Blockchain will tumble towards zero and therefore the fees will too undermining the long term viability of Bitcoin. That's FUD and historical revisionism that Jeff Garzik started spreading, for reasons about which I can only speculate. If the limit is increased I'm going to seriously consider to reduce my investment in Bitcoin significantly. When the limit is changed once it will be changed in the future as well as this will create a precedent. It's almost as bad as outright increasing the maximum number of Bitcoins from the current 21M maximum. When the limit is removed, I hope you do sell all your coins. In fact, why wait? |
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The primary argument to retain the 1MB limit is that smaller blocks helps ensure decentralization of Bitcoin. Lots of people rightly care about this. That was never a very good argument. The 1 MB limit was originally an anti-spam measure, and since it was put in place the biggest proponents for keeping it there were altcoiners who wanted Bitcoin to stay crippled to leave room for them. The loss of full nodes is due to a delay in the appearance of Bitcoin-native businesses. There's nothing wrong with the demands of running a full node being something that only power users/small businesses and up can handle. |
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Has anyone considered what might happen if a government with money and technology were to build their own large scale mining farms? Nope. They could secretly mine tons of bitcoins and sell them on the market and manipulate the value. Oh my gosh! Or they can render the entire bitcoin network inoperable due to various attacks or manipulations. Can they really do that? There are lots of government that can do this, and maybe some of them are already.
Wow. How frightening! This is terrifying. I'm selling all my coins right now. |
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I predict that in two weeks, Bitcoin will have an exchange rate.
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Since we can store the wallet balance in the chain We don't and we can't, so the rest of your suggestion is invalid. |
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Sounds great, one more question - what's one full Bitcoin node? That's a copy of Bitcoin-Qt or bitcoind (better). Those clients work by downloading and verifying the entire blockchain, which is approaching 20 GB last time I checked. Getting a full node running from scratch means a day or two of investment, and that's if you speed it up by using Bittorrent to grab a blockchain snapshot first. So for a user/BTC owner that doesn't have that kind of technical knowledge is Armory no longer an option? If you have >100 BTC and not enough technical knowledge to run Armory, you're gonna have a bad time. |
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Sounds great, one more question - what's one full Bitcoin node? That's a copy of Bitcoin-Qt or bitcoind (better). Those clients work by downloading and verifying the entire blockchain, which is approaching 20 GB last time I checked. Getting a full node running from scratch means a day or two of investment, and that's if you speed it up by using Bittorrent to grab a blockchain snapshot first. |
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Armory.
Just use Armory? Is there any other component or how do you use Armory? I'm not entirely familiar with using it so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Armory generates addresses deterministically, so you only need to make one backup that's valid forever. Armory has a very nice GUI that walks you through offline transaction signing, the best form of cold storage (better than paper wallets, by far). When you create paper backups of your wallet (remember, this backup covers every address the wallet will ever generate), you can split the backup into m-of-n copies for any amount of redundancy/security you want. All the other options mentioned in this thread are a joke in comparison. The one downside Armory might have is the requirement to run a full Bitcoin node on the online machine, but if you've got >100 BTC to store then presumably you can afford a real computer so that wouldn't be a problem. |
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What bank pays interest on bitcoin?
All that do are/were scam. So I got bad news for you! What are you talking about? Bitcoin Savings and Trust had such a prestigious name - they were honest, right? |
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Why is this troll thread already 6 pages long?
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