The "forgot your password" security question on Satoshi's gmx email is "what day are you born". With no lockout mechanism for brute force attempts, 36500 possible answers for anyone alive, and given a bot that can guess even 5% of the captchas shown, it's no surprise that it was compromised by anyone determined.

There is no information in the site's TOS or documentation about unused accounts expiring, so this is the likely mechanism.


The site also reveals to anyone attempting to reset that the alternate email is  s******@v********.com
This is pretty piss-poor security, since it's obvious that s****** is satoshi and there are lists of free email providers, even ones from 5 years ago that have domains now expired or parked that could be bought and tried against the reset:
vahoo.com
varbizmail.com
vcmail.com
virtualactive.com
visitweb.com
visto.com
visualcities.com
vivavelocity.com
vjmail.com
vlmail.com
vote4gop.com
votenet.com
vr9.com

The reset email shown could be set by the current hacker, if it was previously s******@g****.com it would be even more obvious what else to compromise.

The satoshi junk is just spammers who want you to look up the transaction on a blockchain explorer site and see their name tagged on the address. Other theories are that the dusters are trying to get you to use the satoshis as a way of tracking addresses.

Your balance can go up without any address you see in the user interface being paid. Bitcoin wallets have other addresses not shown to you, that are used for change. These can be discovered from past blockchain transactions, and people can send junk payments to them also.

Completely random crashes usually indicate hardware problems. Bitcoin requires your computer be able to do trillions of calculations without a single error.

There are several utilities you can run to ensure a stable system.

1. Memtest86+ - bootable CD, let it test your RAM for several hours. (Ubuntu live discs also include this as a boot option if you want to burn a more useful DVD)

2. OCCT http://www.ocbase.com/index.php/download - a windows program for burning-in your CPU, will detect computation errors

3. Hard drive manufacturer utilities - bootable CD or USB to run diagnostics and media check on your hard drive - specific to disk manufacturer brand


On the malware/virus side, alternate things to scan your computer include MalwareBytes anti-malware, McAfee "Stinger", and independent rootkit scanners.

BTW, if you must use a virus scanner, make sure to add the Bitcoin blockchain directory to its exclude list, or you will be wasting a lot of resources trying to virus scan the blockchain as it downloads.

One addition: if you are on PPPoE DSL, your ISP may be dropping your connection or forcing new IP addresses on you, which can interfere with Bitcoin, which doesn't expect IP address changes while it is running.

I discovered that behaviour has changed in the latest version of Bitcoin core; the bitcoin.conf in the testnet3 directory is now ignored, your main bitcoin.conf file is used for testnet also (which could give problems if you don't swap a testnet version for the mainnet version correctly). Disregard that advice.

If it is a remote machine, I would remove that factor first. Download bitcoin to your own desktop and get familiar with its operation there. I just renamed my %appdata%\bitcoin directory on my windows machine to simulate a fresh install with the latest version.

1. with no data files whatsoever I get the expected error that server mode is not configured yet:

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\daemon>bitcoind -testnet
Error: To use the "-server" option, you must set a rpcpassword in the configurat
ion file:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\bitcoin.conf
It is recommended you use the following random password:
rpcuser=bitcoinrpc
rpcpassword=7CUwmPZURcPQbFYbi42cAH1EbZrxF6NLYTTWpWpzF6wJ
(you do not need to remember this password)
The username and password MUST NOT be the same.
If the file does not exist, create it with owner-readable-only file permissions.

It is also recommended to set alertnotify so you are notified of problems;
for example: alertnotify=echo %s | mail -s "Bitcoin Alert" admin@foo.com

2. I therefore made the recommended minimum %appdata%\bitcoin\bitcoin.conf file:

3. Ran again, works as expected, the command window sits there after running:
C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\daemon>bitcoind -testnet

4. In a new command window, lets watch the blocks get downloaded with some example commands:

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\daemon>bitcoind -testnet getblockcount
79908

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\daemon>bitcoind -testnet getblockcount
79969

5. Shut the Bitcoin server down the right way through a remote command:
bitcoind -testnet stop

6. Then I also add testnet=1 to bitcoin.conf, and all the above work the same when I remove "-testnet" from all command lines above.

If following this example to-the-letter works on your local computer, duplicate on the remote computer: rename the .bitcoin directory and make a new one, create the four-line config file, and run your bitcoin commands with the latest version of bitcoin. For remote testing, don't try to put the first bitcoind in daemon mode or in the background, just open another ssh terminal to run the second copy. The only thing remaining would be that the ISP is interfering with ports on the remote machine or bitcoin isn't able to run correctly on that box for technical or software library reasons.

I see from the first comment where you say "it's just hanging at the terminal". Just to clarify: You need to run one instance of ./bitcoind -testnet which will look like a hung terminal - it just sits there and runs. That is the 'server' part, the d stands for daemon.

You need to leave that first bitcoind running, then use another terminal to issue the RPC commands to communicate with Bitcoin. Open another console window or tab and then you can run the commands I outline in my first response where I say "shell #2".


If you have the testnet and server options in bitcoin.conf, you can also start bitcoin-qt (confirm it has the green logo for testnet when it starts) and communicate with it using bitcoind the same way as if you were communicating with bitcoind as the server.

Just so you can see it running correctly before you get too advanced - use the -testnet command-line option for every command like I show in the first reply and see that all those commands work. Then you can move to the bitcoin.conf option.

You can leave rpcallowip commented out; it is only needed if you are communicating from another computer. The IP address in rpcconnect=127.0.0.1 means localhost so leave that line there set to that IP address.

When the .bitcoind -testnet command line option is used to start Bitcoin in testnet mode, a different bitcoin.conf file is used, ~/.bitcoin/testnet3/bitcoin.conf - if you are starting with the -testnet command line option, then this is where you need to make the changes. A misconfigured config file in testnet3 (where there is another wallet.dat for testnet) could be messing up things.

The requirement for all outputs to be 0.01 or greater was dropped. Instead the dust prevention method is now a minimum of 546 satoshi (~1/3 of fee)
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/core.h  line 195

Free transactions have a minimum priority that dictates relatively large BTC amounts or well-aged coins. People can't continuously spam with this rule because they will quickly run out of funds that can be sent for free.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10090/how-to-get-an-addresss-balance-with-the-bitcoin-client

If you don't want to use a third-party service, you can use third-party software on your own Bitcoin:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Abe
https://insight.bitpay.com/

or you don't have the server=1 option turned on or such. Here's an example file: http://we.lovebitco.in/bitcoin.conf.example
remove example from the file name, and go through all the options, uncommenting and changing the ones appropriate for you. The port option in bitcoin.conf may force the testnet bitcoin to be on the mainnet port if you forgot to comment that out.

The bitcoin.conf file has to be placed in the bitcoin data directory (likely the hidden .bitcoin directory in your home directory; try cd ~/.bitcoin to get there). There isn't one by default, you have to make one.

Just putting -testnet in all the commands will be less ambiguous.

You don't have to wait to see, you can immediately start polling with commands like I demonstrated above to watch the block count increasing as blocks are downloaded or see network details.

You can also have some free coins:

>.bitcoind -testnet importprivkey 92GaZxWBnoNw1dtARu6Uge7YS8NYGLvkSbt5vEqHxsMJpDPzia5 fromdc

The problem with such a command is it wouldn't work the way you would expect:

1. someone sends my 1DCeLERon address 5 BTC
2. i send 1 BTC to my friend
3. the balance of my 1DCeLERon address is 0 BTC

This is because if the 5 BTC is the only money in my wallet, the remainder 4 BTC is sent back to a different address in my wallet as change. If I get paid another 5 BTC to the same address again, I have 5 BTC in that address and 4 BTC in the other.

This is why Bitcoin gives you a wallet balance, not an address balance. It is also why looking up an address on a blockchain explorer site will confuse noobs. These sites can't tell if the 4 BTC or the 1 BTC is change back to you, or even if they are both payments to other parties.

The RPC command is "listunspent". I have 24 addresses with a balance in my current wallet just used for personal testing, and that is even after sending some money back to myself to consolidate it. What one entry from this command looks like, btw:

The most likely mistake you are making is that every command you issue has to include the -testnet parameter, unless you have put a testnet=1 option in the bitcoin.conf config file - replacing your normal Bitcoin options. Likewise, if you specify a datadir at the command line, every RPC command has to include the same datadir option.

Example usage:

(in shell #1, to run Bitcoin)
>.bitcoind -testnet

(in shell #2, to talk to Bitcoin)
>.bitcoind -testnet help
addmultisigaddress nrequired ["key",...] ( "account" )
addnode "node" "add|remove|onetry"
backupwallet "destination"
....

>.bitcoind -testnet getblockcount
279565

>.bitcoind -testnet getnetworkinfo
{
    "version" : 90201,
    "protocolversion" : 70002,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "relayfee" : 0.00001000,
    "localaddresses" : [
        {
            "address" : "10.0.0.10",
            "port" : 18333,
            "score" : 4
        }
    ]
}

What needs to be done is to coax blockchain.info into killing off all these stupid address tags to remove the incentive, or at least take abuse reports and retag it as spammer.

Your wallet program will choose previous payments seeming at random to make up your new payment, and it is the number of these payments that make up the data size of the transaction you will send and therefore the fee. Your wallet may choose to spend from one large previous payment, or it may take 50 dust payments and spend them all to make the transaction. Bitcoin Core will alert you to the specific fee that will be included when sending. Unless you have a relatively unused wallet, there is no way to predict what the size will be (Bitcoin attempts to minimize the change, not minimize the fee).

You can manually compose a payment if you want to get into the inner workings of Bitcoin transactions, but this is beyond the needs of most people.

You can move blockchain files between your own Bitcoin installations, but they cannot be trusted if obtained from anonymous sources, as anything could be inserted without verification. Importation of the bootstrap file verifies the block contents the same way downloading it normally would.

What's old is.. still old. Except the difficulty is not 3M any more, it's about 27 Billion now.

What exchange are you monitoring? I just ran the post #1 script with no command line options, and it updated 5 days of bitstampUSD and btceUSD history, and is getting live trades from both.

If a particular exchange is not getting data, it may be that the API between bitcoincharts and the exchange is broken (which is why I don't try to write a version that connects directly to individual exchanges - it would need to be constantly updated). You can look at the chart data for btce for example: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btceUSD#rg1zig1-minztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv - see that it is up-to-the-minute, and then compare it with the trade data from the exchange you are watching. If the other exchange has no new data, you should notify info@bitcoincharts.com that the feed is down.

Thanks for running this, it's good that more nodes are up that can send out 100mbps instead of the ~2mbps that most home connections can do. When Bitcoin picks a sad node to download the blockchain from, it delays the user getting caught up. A lot of people only run Bitcoin when they send money, requiring a day or weeks to be downloaded at once.

You might as well do something interesting like put up an abe blockchain explorer if you are fronting the bill for services. Also https://insight.bitpay.com/ is newer explorer software.

Are the stats for 26th and 27th you downloading the blockchain after installation? That seems like an awful lot of inbound traffic.

Having a majority hashpower means you get to decide how future blocks are constructed. If you have more hash power than the rest of the network, you will always persevere in a race to construct a longer blockchain. If I have and maintain a 50.1%+ hash rate and start mining blocks now, ignore blocks mined by others, and do something detrimental like ignore all pending transactions, eventually if not immediately I will have a longer blockchain that will replace the community chain. The certainty that I win becomes higher the more time passes.

What's even more fun is if I withhold my longer empty chain until later. If I have been mining a month silently and am ahead of the network, I can announce my blockchain and wipe a month's mining and transactions. I mine all the bitcoins, but even better, I can get back all the bitcoins I previously owned but spent during that month. This would be a bitcoin killer, 99% of clients immediately wipe the orphan chain data, and it would be a challenge to construct a client ignoring the new chain and get it out to every user before Bitcoin is declared dead.

Think of companies such as merchants and payment processors that have no way of reclaiming their payments if the sender does not retransmit after such a mass block-replace. Such a massive orphanarium will likely break the majority of Bitcoin accounting software running behind sites, maybe even in a history-wiping way depending on how the backend was programmed. The current hashrate is massive, it would take the NSA's million-square-foot Utah facility being converted into all-ASIC miners to have a chance. However, all we need is for a nation state or three-letter-agency to seize the operations of some of the biggest miners to reduce their impact or turn them against us.

If you have your clock set incorrectly, it can also show difficulty 1. You don't have to be quick. This is also too high of a difficulty for testnet, some miners are making it hard to do testing.

I've posted some testnet coins here if you need some (besides thousands I've dumped into the faucet previously): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=415732.msg4595907#msg4595907