How could anyone forget these:

- Bitcoinica
- Tradehill

No, depending on the level of your subscription you are also allowed production (non-test & development) use of certain types of Microsoft software included with the subscription. For example you are allowed to use one production copy of Office, Visio, Project, etc., if you have a higher subscription such as MSDN Premium or Ultimate. However, even if you are only allowed to use one copy of Office for production use, the subscription might come with 10 so called retail keys (which you can activate several times, unlike real retail keys), so in theory you could still use a legit subscription illegally. An example of this if you have an MSDN subscription from work and installed copies of Outlook on your work computer and your home computer (unless you were specifically using one copy for doing Outlook-related software development).

I doubt that account farmers and scammers would find it difficult to get invites. This proposal would only inconvenience real newbies who we want to welcome to the forum.

Looks like the qunatum computer solves only one problem, which is to factor 15. This means that it is not even a programmable computer. If we extended this technology to find the private key of a given address then we'd need to build a different computer for each address for which we are trying to find the corresponding private key.

It's not on their radar yet. It will be if Bitcoin gains mass adoption and we need to be prepared for that time.

The current implementation using an integer shift operation to approximately halve the reward is very simple and elegant to those who can read and understand the code. There are lots of problems associated with replacing that with some kind of floating point operation, the biggest one being that you need to make sure that the reduction of reward is the same across all platforms. This is not as simple as it sounds because different computing platforms have different rounding errors. The second problem is how you would deal with the last few Satoshis? I mean if you were down to 3 Satoshi block rewards you can't reduce it so 2.7 Satoshis at the next reduction.

Keep in mind that your biometric data is not necessarily private. For example, my former employer already has one of my thumbprints and my retina scans of both eyes on file because I needed access to an area secured by biometric scanners. I am not sure what their data retention policies are for employee records, but I am not trusting them 100% that they won't share or leak this data at some point in time.

I am a little older and I remember the days when financial institutions did not care about the source of funds as long as their own interests were adequately protected. Think of Swiss banks up to the 70's or early 80's. There is no reason to shut down a "high risk" customer, such as a drug kingpin, if you were not forced to by the government.

Well then please enumerate those risks not associated with violating AML/KYC rules that an exchange could face from not knowing it's customers' source of funds. My bank did not even ask those kinds of questions when I opened a business account for a shell LLC that I set up for myself.

I prefer to type "Bitcoin is the shit".

And watch how many people who don't understand the slang mistakenly read it as "Bitcoin is shit".

He is selling one fully functional cube (20% of a Neptune), not a full Neptune.

Note that to convert from private key to bitcoin address you need to go through 2 transforms that are each "one-way", at least for now.

private key -> public key -> address

Someone already mentioned what these transforms are (EC PK cryptography and SHA256). Cryptographers spend their careers designing as well as trying to break these transforms, because they protect other stuff much more valuable than bitcoins.

Now you come out of the blue, claim you know nothing about cryptography, but assert that is should be easy to go directly from address -> private key because there must be some pattern that should be easy to find?

Well, using the standard client, when you make a new receiving address or when the wallet makes a new automatic change address you'd want to save that. I think the standard wallet keeps a pool of 100 reserve addresses by default (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Key_pool) that gets saved as part of the backup, so you only need to do backups when you are about to use up the pool. In the past, many people lost BTC when they restored a wallet from an old backup that did not contain  newer receiving addresses that were created after the backup was made.

Of course if you don't use your wallet or your only use is for coins to keep coming in to the same address(es) then you don't need to keep making backups.

In practice it makes a difference where you might store your PGP key vs. your wallet.dat because the PGP key is static but the wallet.dat keeps changing and backups need to be made periodically. For example, you can store a cold (unencrypted) copy of your PGP key in a safety deposit box and use a very strong passphrase to encrypt the active copy without having to worry too much about forgetting the passphrase because you could always run to the bank in the event that you do forget. However, it probably is not convenient to run to your safety deposit box every night with your updated wallet.dat each time your private keys change.

Yeah, I use this method. I first PGP encrypt the wallet backup, then zip it, and finally attach it to a message on Gmail or some other mail service. Pretty convenient.

Even with a password protected wallet I would never leave it on the cloud without secondary encryption because someone could still see your transactions and addresses.

To restore the backup for bitcoin core, shut down the client and replace the current wallet.dat with your backup copy. Then restart the client.

I used to keep a lot of BTC on Bitstamp and lend them out for a small interest to other traders. I even wrote a bot that attempted to price my swap offers at what I thought was the optimal price based on the historical trend of the FRR. In the end I collected only a small amount in interest payments. I figured that it wasn't worth the risk and withdrew everything.

They probably use Matt Corallo's private backbone to broadcast transactions amongst themselves first. You'd have a hard time plugging all the egress points. Even if you did, the big players already see each other's blocks first.

Big farms make direct stratum connections to their own pools through private networks. You can't DDoS these.

My little farm connects to BTC Guild, but will failover to my local p2pool node if BTC Guild goes down. Furthermore, my p2pool node makes direct connections only to trusted non-mining p2pool nodes that I control, so you can never hit my mining node directly from the internet.

Why?

1) Because some people are idiots
2) To increase their post count

You probably have no idea how much I've learned from this forum in 2010-2012 because this place was a lot different back then. I spent a year lurking before registering because I felt that I couldn't post anything worthwhile compared to the other posters.

Today I when I read the forums chances are that I learn absolutely nothing because all I see are these garbage posts. 1-2 year old members (sophomores) with sig ads talking out of their ass like they were experts but making factually incorrect posts. Give me a break!

In 2013 I had a spare Gen 1 Avalon and set it up in some girl's basement to mine to her wallet. When Bitcoin hit $1000+ she had accumulated 8 BTC but she never sold them. Later I kept giving her my obsolete hardware so that she was always mining with about 700W of slightly dated hardware. Currently she has 2 Neptune cubes running at 1.3 TH/s and I think she has about 13 BTC now. So far she has not touched them. I keep a copy of her wallet.dat in case her computer crashes because she does not back it up (it is password protected). Sometimes I wonder if she even knows what she has, though she is aware that she is paying $120/month extra for her electric bill.