Hi

as to my understanding, bitCoins success is based on the peer to peer structure and any entity owning 50% of computational power could cheat on the rest or stop the show for all. While pools are no threat in the latter sense as miners are no zombies tied to them against their will, I come to understand that pools really pose a threat in the former sense.

(Yes I know this must have been discussed somewhere in depth but i could not find it. It's mostly annoying me that all people suggest to join a pool based on the kh or Gh they do.)

My understanding of "mining" was that the miner may add into a block he creates *one* transaction for the reward and as many other transactions as he likes taken from all 0conf transaction that he sees. (input data) he then brute force tries adding salt (never read that but that's my conclusion) and if hash(prior block + input + time + ... + salt) < x he sends it out to the world. fool proof. simple. great.

As in slush pool's sticky post it is made very clear that in a pool situation it is not the miner who decides what gets into the block but the pool delegates the work to the miners. I read it such that not only does the pool dictate the reward (would make sense) but also transactions, time, prior block and the salt to try out.

My questions:
Am I about right in my analysis?
Does the miner know when it found a block?
Does the miner promote its finding only to the pool?
Does the miner do plausibility checks for the timestamp at least?
What if it is not plausible?
Do pools keep an eye on each other by comparing block chain data ...?

Thanx for pointers and answers ...

I would definitely tip for BitCoin Wallet android app as it would really have the potential to bring BitCoin to a wider attention.
I added a tipping address to my sig out of curiosity. Wondered why here everybody does it and didn't want to stand out too much

I'm also interested. I came across this question when thinking about how a political party could use BTC for donations and membership fees. Any payments that can not be attributed to a real person would need to be rejected so either given back or handed over to the president of the Bundestag in Germany for example. Actually having to give it to the president would be fun as in return that guy would have to somehow accept/take BTC, wouldn't he?

romantic thread ... *sigh*

lets hope Satoshi is romantic, too.

taken that mining leaves you with an already quite serious amount of bitcoins once you get just one block, air gapping serious amounts of btc will not work

in theory (not there yet): i have a fully encrypted (all except boot) usb stick for "serious amount" but do networking with it. it's also my system to do online banking with.
of course the wallet(s) are backed up gpg encrypted with a 30 letters strong password to remote places.

my biggest concern is not that i will ever get my wallet stolen but see this being the advice to friends that will at the same time drive them away from ever using btc.

my hope is that bitcoin wallet for android or similar will work soon so i can also show the easiness of btc handling out on the street - with amounts of cash that i also would carry around in my leather wallet knowing i might loose them any day.

a cron job to create a transaction 100 blocks later would be the by far inferior solution in my eyes.

well the whole point is to have the reward be charged to account(s) that are offline. As far as I understood, the miner needs the bitcoin "client" to connect to peers, collect the block chain and new transactions, determine the work to be done but it does not necessarily have to assign the mined block to an own id.

How is this done for example: http://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000000026210a972387c00e6db801346b32a815a996d698211d71a197c

Whatever you call that thing after Bitcoin: in your signature.

I'm not planning to do pooled mining. My setup at home now has a miner and a bitcoin gui client running and somehow magically it manages to make rewards show up in just that client's wallet. I want to control in who's wallet the coins are to show up and best would be to be able to reward more than one.

Hi,

my mining rigs are to be set up in a rather insecure server room and I'd feel better not running a bitcoin client collecting millions of blocks stored in that insecure environment. Can I set the miner or the client to assign blocks to a specific bitcoin id?

As I'm not running the rig alone it would even be better if I could configure it such that 20BTC go to id1 and id2 and 10BTC to id3? I've seen there are pool(s) that do that.

Regards

so if it was down i would like to know, why. clearly people try to make others sell in panic to buy cheap and taking down the forum while at the same time selling the BTC down 2 dollars is more effective than to scream SELL!!!1!PANIC!! every once in a while.

So I want to know what happened! The forum did not look like it was subject to a ddos as it was answering quickly with empty pages. Was it hacked? Was it configured to reply with empty pages (forum admin wanted to buy) or what?

If I don't get a reasonable answers I'm afraid I would have to leave here. (Not a threat to the forum sure but I would prefer to stay here myself)

Hi guys,

when today the rate fell from 25 to 12 the forum was not available to me (empty pages). Also I wondered why there was nothing on twitter for an hour or so. Has it been only me that the forum was unavailable to? Not getting any news via forum or twitter was a bit scary.
I just wonder why nobody else mentioned the forum's unavailability during that time. Was it functional in the US?

Oh come on ... don't be rude. I laughed

instawallet should actually do for really small presents. i think it is crucial that i can keep a copy of the wallet (the initial amount) as most people will just loose the one $ and ask me how they can recover it a week later when it is at 10$. with instawallet I would also have the link.

Thinking about it:
when it comes to security, you can easily trick people with the key store. send your banker "friend" a wallet of 10$. he takes the bait and once he shifts his billions into BTC, run with it BTC is too complicated for noobs to realize this attack vector.

same with instawallet while there the host can run with the money.

I'm all not satisfied with the clash between simplicity at first site and complexity the deeper you get into it. Actually the *only* way to give BTC as a present should be together with a 2h lecture on security Then you can leave it to said friend what option he would like.

what does it help to know you did not rob my money till christmas when you rob all the money of all users on christmas?

do some server closed source if you need to and the client open source so people can review. you will not get people like me in the boat. I'm even sceptical about apps that just monitor the exchange rates as they might come with a zero day exploit on some update. you can buy 0d exploits for a million and make billions the save way. sure same applies for pocket lights and papi jump clones but for me price monitoring apps have a clear focus that might get used in a malicious way later.

Hi guys

no, I'm not asking for your addresses
And no, I'm not planning to give away my BTC now as they are "still worth something" *PANIC!!* =D

I'm just asking what is the best way to get all those non-geeks into the picture? BitcoinWallet on Android is one such thing that could show off great deal when others see how easy I exchange small changes with other geeks in seconds but that's another story ...

I want to give BTC as a birthday present. I heard that sending a wallet.dat would not work cross platform. Is that true??

If I see the friend in person I could give a bootable USB stick with everything in place but that is most likely too geeky for many. Also getting internet connectivity in place that just works is a concern then.

Any thoughts anybody??

geee! can somebody confirm the wallet is OS sensitive? I mean I never intended to run anything else than linux but I do intend to give away 1BTC as a present in its own wallet and as those non-geek potential receivers all still run windows that would be a downer when that wallet would not work.

On the other side it would be a good reason to directly give a bootable USB-stick with everything in place.

Bitter Now that I just got used to BTC rising 20% per day. Still 20 is a nice price considering I found my first block today

I'm *very* paranoid about software that is too close to my wallet or other means to make all my money go away. Imagine a famous tool that is programmed to do some transactions this christmas. Google fraud regulations would closely check the identity of the developer only then. Even *if* I'm running this under my real name I might consider it worth trying if my app can shift billions in $$.

I'm helping test Bitcoin Wallet as I only trust open source in that area. My main wallet is on a bootable USB stick and backed up in different places.

Sorry to "attack" your most likely well intended app but others are definitely tempted to attack wallets.

The difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks. If no work is done (or very very bad luck causes no block to be found) this can take forever.

As for your speculation: for any given difficulty your BTC returned per kWh is independent of the activity or boycott of the rest of the world but a boycott would affect the next 2016 blocks to pass much faster as difficulty would drop if the the average time to find a block was not 10 but 60 minutes.

bubbles??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ART2V2ICxZI

oh i wish i had seen this pledge earlier

is there any site that collects bounties with an escrow service? On the one hand I see how generous many BTC people are but on the other hand with a 2 or 3 man month effort one would like to be sure to get payed in case one provides the best solution.
Also I see BTC is just perfect for such a bounty service. I saw pledge site for open source development fail but I'm sure if the pledges were charged for real, things might have gone differently.