Some have died, some will die, and some are struggling. If the dev of a particular altcoin knows enough about programming and economic principles to find a method that will keep his/her coin's blockchain as secure as possible, then it will survive. If it does, then that solution will eventually propagate to other coins, and possibly Bitcoin.

The whole cryptocurrency scene is a huge technological, economic and social experiment. Anything important that we learn from Bitcoin and all the other altcoins are used to further evolve the Bitcoin protocol and all cryptocurrencies in general.

All online wallets are only as secure as the servers hosting them. If you really have to use an online wallet, then always, for the love of all that is holy, always enable 2-factor authorization. I wouldn't use an online wallet as a cold storage solution though. I wouldn't keep a whole 2 BTC in an online wallet either. Remember Gox?

I don't recommend using a mobile phone wallet for storing anything over 0.10 BTC. Essentially, you should treat a mobile phone wallet the same way that you would your pocket wallet. After all, you can encrypt a mobile phone wallet with the longest and most complicated password that you can remember, but that won't help secure it if you lose your phone while your wallet is unlocked.

Ideally, you should split your long-term Bitcoins into multiple offline cold storage addresses with multiple backups. Hot wallets can be anywhere (phone, in your case) if you're going to spend the funds in them immediately anyway. Personally though, I don't trust the entropy of randomness used by mobile phones in generating new addresses, but that's just me.

Kickstarter would be a better fit, actually. Large-scale investment projects aren't really suited for this forum. The OP has an inherent paranoia about other people stealing his/her "idea" though. You'd think that someone who has supposedly been involved in a considerable amount of business ventures would know that ideas are a dime a dozen. This apparent shadiness is mostly where the community distrust for him/her stems from.

Well, it's true. Unless you just want to check out how Bitcoin works, then faucets are a complete waste of time. Faucets were created for one reason -- to disseminate Bitcoin during its early days to help lead to greater adoption of it. Faucets weren't designed to be a source of additional income. Some people would argue that a few faucets still give out a somewhat decent amount of Bitcoins, but they can never dispute the fact that they could be earning more from doing legitimate online work. Essentially, if you want Bitcoins, then faucets are not the way to go. If you want easy satoshis, then faucets would prolly be your meal ticket.

Having said all that, consider that Bitcoins are viewed by many as an investment. Many people hoard Bitcoins hoping that they could cash out when it reaches its peak value and get rich without doing anything. Delusions of "1 million dollars per Bitcoin to the moon in 1 year" abound, and speculation is the fertilizer that keeps Bitcoin growing. So why should they work for Bitcoins? They shouldn't -- at least, not for their day jobs. It's quite volatile and using them for one's daily life involves a lot of transaction and exchange fees. However, earning a Bitcoin or two is a really good investment for the future. Bubble or not, it's still better than investing in Beanie Babies and all that collectible crap.

Most people who have lost money on a scamcoin have been warned multiple times by people who can see past the hype. More often than not, those who are merely doing a good deed by warning potential victims are accused of spreading FUD by the same people that they are trying to protect. And when they do become victims, instead of thanking the people who tried to warn them, they blame the "FUD-ers" for somehow causing the coin to collapse. Scamcoin victims blame everyone but themselves -- that's why they're victims.

If you think a coin is a scam, then just ignore it. Let the get-rich-schemers play among themselves. Without a regulation of cryptocurrencies, the only way to stop scams is to not keep them alive by not continuously pointing people at their direction.

That's such a costly and time-intensive method of generating verifiable randomness. You could achieve the same level of entropy by flipping through the cable channels and hashing the first ten TV shows and/or commercials that you see. I would even prefer just hashing two random pages from a random ebook than going through the trouble afforded by your method. I'm not saying that your method is bad, just that it's unnecessarily cumbersome.

The mere fact that an address has any funds in it at all means that a transaction involving that address has already transpired, and therefore is publicly viewable by anyone with a copy of the blockchain. Unless it's empty, then the network already knows that a particular address has funds in it. Monitoring your address is no different than telling it to another person in order to receive payment.

It's relatively easy to query the blockchain for any address containing over 1 Bitcoin. Anyone who wanted to find "an address with some serious money in it" would simply write code to do that instead of coding an address monitor and waiting for a random user with a large Bitcoin stash to use it.

The protocol is open source though, which makes any attempt to completely thwart the effects of human greed simply a delaying deterrent at best. Also, any theoretical principle will always play out differently when applied in the real world, which means that even a perfect protocol will eventually find itself abused and exploited. So the mining process is adequately functional as it is now, in my opinion.

If you want to keep the blockchain as decentralized as possible independent of people's behaviours, then you would need to rewrite a large part of, if not the whole, protocol and make it closed source. That's obviously out of the question. Ergo, it's the miners themselves who have to change.

The posting delay is the board's last line of automated defense against potential spammers. If all it takes to remove that is a few dollars, then any Paypal/CC thief can spam up the board in no more than 5 minutes, leaving the staff busy cleaning up the mess left by a hundred spambots.

The maximum posting delay is only 6 minutes. Anyone who has anything important to say can wait that long. Most people who want that delay completely removed only want to post stupid things like "haha lol" or "gib me bitcoins" anyway.

You're not stating anything new or unknown. That's the whole point of Bitcoin -- decentralization. The fact that mining is now gradually converging into a centralized state is not a flaw in the mining process, but rather a direct consequence of miners becoming greedy. This trend will continue until all pool operators decide to limit their hashing capacity. Ghash and everyone who insists on mining there with only profit in their minds are the problem, not Bitcoin or mining.

I will be very blunt -- this is a moronic idea. Even if your intention is to dump the scam-coins, the mere fact that you are buying them from the devs means that they are still making a profit from it. You would only really be hurting yourself and the victims of the scamcoin. And once you've dumped a scamcoin down to the lowest price that you could, the dev could simply pump it back up for a fraction of the profit that he/she got from you and earn even more than he/she would have otherwise. If you do that with every scamcoin that comes out, then the scam-devs will have even more incentive to keep making scamcoins because they know that they will make a huge profit from you and whoever follows your asinine idea as soon as it gets enough votes to warrant being accepted into a large exchange. Essentially, you will be invigorating the scamcoin trade, not killing it.

If you want to kill a scamcoin, then ignore it. It's that simple.

In addition to what everyone else has said, the transaction fee also serves as a deterrent to transaction spam. It inherently prevents malicious entities from bloating the blockchain with dust and unnecessary transactions. That, by itself, helps secure the network from an attack that is more easily orchestrated than the misunderstood "51% attack."

Spamming is not only about quantity, but also quality. A significant number of your posts are extremely lacking in quality. They read more like text messages sent between two 12-year old girls rather than educated and informed responses stemming from a passable, if not deep, insight of the various topics discussed. In fact, if I were to ask any kid I know to post on the board, and that kid knew absolutely nothing about Bitcoin, I would bet that his/her posts would more or less resemble most of your posts.

Now you may ask, "why was I singled out?" Well, it's because you're participating in a signature campaign. As it currently stands, a lot of users abuse the existing signature campaigns by spamming the board with one-liners and trivial responses. Obviously, that hurts the reputation of a forum committed to helping disseminate accurate information about Bitcoin. (It also taints the integrity of an honest signature campaign, but the mods don't work for the campaign runners, so that's a moot point.) It may not have been your intent to "spam," but that hardly matters, as intent is not something that you can prove nor present as consolation for any harm that your actions may have caused. Maybe you were spamming on purpose, maybe you weren't. No one knows but you. All that matters is that your posts brought up red flags, and those were enough to justify banning your account for spamming.

I've also noticed that you've started to post on threads casually again using that account. That's ban evading, and it doesn't really help your case.

Despite the enrollment form being buggy, would it still be accurate to say that members who were not added to the list despite following all the instructions would not get paid for the previous month?

That doesn't solve anything. A "request for payment" transaction is still a transaction, and would, by default, eventually find its way into the sidechain that you want to implement for it. Automating a transaction is relatively easy -- malicious entities could easily send out millions of those "request for payment" transactions within the first hour of implementing the sidechain. On the other hand, if you force a potential "requester" to pay a transaction fee in order to use the service, then it becomes useless because malicious parties can abuse it by submitting multiple fraudulent purchases to merchants that use an automated implementation of it.

There's really no need for it anyway. Copy-pasting takes less than 2 seconds.

You can do that.

You can also use File > Save Copy to create a backup copy of your wallet.

You can also get the actual wallet.dat file from your %Appdata%/Electrum/wallets folder.

Note: I am assuming that your current Bitcoin client is also Electrum.

Bitcoin is backed by the support of its users though. It may not have an army enforcing its legality, but it is just as useful, if not more, in facilitating trade among a community, namely the Bitcoin community. If I wanted to trade 10 bottlecaps for my friend's handmade sandwich, then that's between the two of us and no army should have any say in that. The same goes for Bitcoin. You don't have to call it money, but it would be completely totalitarian for any government to forbid you from using it as an agent of trade.

So how should you explain mining? Keep it simple. Mining is a techno-way of adding stuff to the database of the Bitcoin network, and the one who mines a block gets some Bitcoins. Oversimplified, but enough for anyone who wouldn't understand the technical explanation anyway.

This is the formula used by Slush's pool to determine how much you would receive if a block is found:


The estimated reward, as previously explained by jonnybravo0311, is what you would receive based on that formula if a block were to be found at any particular moment. As more valid shares are sent by you and other miners to the pool, every miner's percentage of contribution changes, thereby affecting your current estimated reward.

All of this is explained in the main page of the pool. It is highly recommended that you read a document before signing it.

Technically, yes, but that's only because CPU mining is less powerful in terms of hash generation. A lot of miners also overclock their GPUs to taxing conditions to get the most hashing power out of it, whereas most CPU miners tend to reserve some threads so that they can still use their computers for other activities while their miners are running.

In the context of altcoins, it's just another buzzword like "completely anonymous" and "new business infrastructure." Essentially, it's a claim that a particular altcoin is a step above the currently existing coins in a number of aspects. Be warned though -- most so-called "next generation" currencies either end up being scams or useless trade fodder. Personally, that term is a red flag for me. Unnecessary hype is never attractive on any financial investment.