You can leave your BTC on the exchange, but that's not a good idea. Many many people have had money transferred out of their account by the account getting hacked (stolen password or hacked site), or by Bitcoin-related services simply shutting down and stealing money.

If you want to continue trading for fun and profit, you'll need some money "live" on an exchange, but if you are simply purchasing BTC, you should transfer Bitcoins to a wallet that is solely under your control.

My personal recommendation is to use Bitcoin-Qt. It is the reference client and is secure in ways that other "lite" software and just about any web-based wallet are not. You should download it now and leave it open, it takes over a day of downloading the blockchain before it is ready to use, you might as well do that now and get familiar with the program too. Before you use it for serious money, encrypt your wallet with a password, and then create a backup of your wallet (file menu), and research how you keep that secure in case your computer hard drive dies.

Namecheap has the following policy for expired domains:

The owner of a domain has a non-guaranteed grace period of approximately 27 days after the expiration date to renew the domain at the regular domain rate. If the domain is not renewed, the domain will be deleted from our database and it is transferred to a "redemption period" at the Registry.

If the domain is not re-instated in this phase, then the domain is released to the public by the Registry and becomes available approximately after 80-85 days in the status of redemption or is auctioned off by the Registrar and becomes property of the different party.

The expiration date in Whois changes only in case the domain name is renewed. If it is not renewed the date is left the same till the domain name is released to public.
===
It looks like it was renewed:
Domain Name: BLOCKEXPLORER.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
Name Server: ELLE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: MATT.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 22-nov-2013
Creation Date: 21-nov-2010
Expiration Date: 21-nov-2014

I'm able to access the site, if you can't, try adding this line to your hosts file:
141.101.125.174  blockexplorer.com

I just checked the Comcast DNS servers: http://dns.comcast.net/index.php/tools/cachecheck, only half of them have the IP.

That's the whole point of an exchange. However anti-money laundering laws and such, you may have to verify your identity, and then money wire may take a while. You should look at the forum thread for that exchange and read up on other's experiences to see if it is an exchange you would want to use.

You'll want to just copy the whole Bitcoin data directory with the wallet.dat and subdirectories, so you don't have to download the blockchain again.

Once you have made a deposit of either bitcoins or government currency on an exchange, they are stored as an account balance on that service, you do not have direct ownership or control of them anymore. You have to initiate a withdraw back to your wallet or bank account to retrieve your money.

Before you send any money to an exchange, you should review their policy about identity, many will allow you to make a deposit, but will effectively lock your funds from withdraw until you provide notarized or apostille documents such as your ID, passport or bank statements.

Depending on your network connection and CPU you are running, it may take over a day to download and verify all 12GB of blocks. If you sent bitcoins to an address you created in Bitcoin-Qt, they will be spendable when the download is complete.

I strongly suspect you are wrong. Satoshi was not an over-sharer that would need to have something removed.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56272.msg669898#msg669898

I can press delete on a post, which I've done, especially when I made the mistake of posting in a noob thread that gets spammed forever. This is a recent addition to the forum though.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the question.

I would recommend a fee of at least 0.0002 per kB. The "per kilobyte" part is because each input and output in your transaction adds to it's size. The fee is evaluated in terms of the data size of your transaction, a 0.0020 fee 20kB transaction would be lower-ranked by miners than a 0.0003 fee 1kB transaction.

In Bitcoin-Qt, the optional transaction fee that you set is per kB of transaction size. For example, if you send a payment that uses 7 previous payments, it may be 1.7kB in data size, and you would be prompted about the 0.0004 fee that will be included when the optional fee is set to 0.0002.

Besides outspending other transactions to get them confirmed fast, minimum fee rules of 0.0001 BTC/kB rules also apply for most transactions when they send smaller amounts of bitcoin, to discourage spam. Transactions without this minimum fee will be discarded by the network. While Bitcoin-Qt will always include the minimum fee when it is required and calculate it correctly, other wallets, including a particular web service, don't seem to make this calculation correctly for you; blindly adding 0.0001 may be insufficient if your wallet doesn't tell you how big the transaction will be, you may need to add much more to be safe.

I already had that username on ignore, so came to the not listening decision long ago. I had to unhide to see what this thread was about.

I initially thought from the title that someone was at fault and wanted to be paid winnings from a bet they didn't enter in time.

This is not the case, the money was sent to the site, delayed in confirmation and not entered into a bet, and then kept by the site operator. Stolen.

The "terms" that allege that the owner can do this are unconscionable, and no court of law would find on the side of the site owner. Scammer tags deserved.

We need not just a user reputation, but a site reputation feature. It's pretty amazing looking at old forum posts and old correspondence how just about everyone has turned 'scammer' and run.

bitconitalk.org is the domain he's using, if someone has the time, call the registrar and report the abuse to get the domain yanked.

Done, I've just destroyed Namecoin: http://explorer.dot-bit.org/n/122135

If the input is random, then mixing it with the worst corrupted backdoored random source won't make it less random (as long as the functions are blind to the contents). If the input is not random, mixing it with a good random source will make it random.

A one-time pad is the perfect encryption, I'm using a one-time pad on your dice and throwing it away.

Before, the input was XORed with 0x00000000f (nothing), which reveals the dice rolls and any bias in them.

If your dice were heavier on the 1 side than the 6 side from the pips being drilled, then the "random" number would be biased in a way revealed by a randomness test suite over a statistically significant number of rolls. If I have 100 dice in a dice rolling machine, and die 33 is defective or a camera always reads it's bits incorrectly because a bug died on the lens, I've shuffled around that error and masked it.

Also there is the (non) issue of modulo bias when truncating a nonhex to hex-converted number. I let you type in more dice than required and use the extra bits, however, for non 2^x - sided dice, the number is "extremely slightly smaller than it should be".

Dice are not a quantum phenomena-based random source, and the mere act of putting different shaped ink on each side of a molecularly-perfect cube makes them imperfect physical objects.

Rolling dice is a paranoia level response to NSA backdoored random number generators, I'm just being more paranoid for you.

I've also extended the usefulness of your dice roll, you can continue to cut and paste the same dice into the program and not get identical results.

What taints true entropy is using a hash like sha256, or any other function that maps to a reduced set of bits. Previous hash functions have had successful reduction attacks demonstrated, there is no reason to assume that SHA2 is the perfect hash function.

You can grab line 573-590 out of here if you want to add a "print paper wallet" def print_wallet(priv) to your code:

http://we.lovebitco.in/dice2key.py

Or grab the whole thing to line 483 if you want a pretty version of main.py, but there's still some warnings for python 2.7:

Expected type 'Number', got 'str | unicode' instead (at line 429) (edit: this appears to be an invalid warning I can't make go away)
Unexpected argument (at line 92) (incorrect call argument) (edit: VB fixed this)
472-475 "Q and Qr" are uppercase
redundant parenthesis. 94, 98, 103, 107, 112, 162, 167, 169

along with more PEP8 if: statements on same line, spacings etc.

Ignore whatever that human bot posting is above.

The transaction can only be created by a wallet owner. A signature using an addresses also can only be created by a wallet owner, so using either address is sufficient. When you sign a message with a Bitcoin address, you are telling anybody that verifies it "I am in control of this address, and I approve this message".

Welp, I have plugged away like a busy little beaver, and made a proper dice -> paper wallet app.


I wasn't content merely using dice as a base-6 number. I decided to remove any bias the cryptologists might find in your dice by randomly shuffling the rolls, bits, and hex characters, seeding urandom with your dice, and XORing the private key with system entropy. It's probably idiot-safe even if you just bang on the numberpad.

There's an undocumented feature for testing. At any point when inputting dice, you can put in a special letter to let the computer complete the rest of the dice rolls for you. "g"-generate random dice rolls; "z" - generate rolls of 1; "m" - generate the highest dice rolls possible.

I could maybe make this save the paper wallet info to a file or print at your command, or make Electrum seeds, if anybody even cares.

Addresses and such are calculated with the Python Bitcoin ECC library - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=271343.0

Download links:
http://we.lovebitco.in/dice2key.py (Python 2.7 source)
http://we.lovebitco.in/setup-dice2key.py (for py2exe)

http://we.lovebitco.in/dice2key.exe (Windows 32 bit executable (python 2.7.6/winxp))
md5: be686743bbe03ad8178c35f785e4c6fe *dice2key.exe

You shouldn't trust my exe, but there it is. I've not documented my exact build environment to make it reproducible.

There's a sticky for that:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232979.0

That's about stupid. Electronic proof of delivery is a cursory requirement to seller protection, but PayPal can unilaterally decide to refund when the seller returns the "item" with their own proof of delivery. Or refund whenever they want. Or pull money out of your account because payment was "unauthorized" or charged back. Or close your account and freeze your funds.

Your PayPal adversary is fallen-state cybercriminals who have stolen PayPal account credentials and are looking for suckers to send them something irreversible like Bitcoin.

Click the NEWBIE README sticky, and go to the linked PayPal thread. You're gonna have a bad time.

That transaction is not found as either a confirmed or unconfirmed transaction on the network.

You likely used a wallet that allowed sending with less than the required minimum fee (cough blockchain.info), resulting in the transaction being ignored.

It is also a slim possibility that bitcoin wallet software on your computer didn't properly transmit the message, most will attempt to periodically retransmit if left open.

The correct forum would be "service announcements".

However, I am already skeptical of any "best and highest paying BTC websites". A page with paid referral links to such sites is not going to be appreciated.