The miners are in control. They choose which version to use, the new or the old. If enough of them use the new version, then the blockchain forks. If enough of them use the old version, then the blockchain doesn't fork. Either way, most miners will not be mining worthless tokens because the fork will only occur first with a soft-fork when the majority switch, and second with a hard-fork when the super-majority switch. If less than the majority switch, then all miners will still be mining valid blocks and the tokens are then not worthless.

As soon as people begin noticing that one pool is nearing or has 51% of the hashrate, there will be shitstorm on this forum, and the miners will switch off of that pool to prevent the attack. This happened to Ghash.io a while ago.

How do you "merge" mining pools?

Assuming that it is not a scam like most cloudmining services, it still costs a significant amount in order to start up and then the service needs to profit in order to buy more equipment. Profiting would be rather difficult because the service needs to constantly payout.

What hasn't been mentioned is that it is more profitable to have 51% and mine normally than it is to have 51% and try to attack the network.

This is done through adjusting the difficulty, but that does not guarantee more regular confirmations, only that confirmations are more likely to occur within 10 minutes.

I do. It doesn't matter what Gavin does, since his only method of forking without fucking everything up involves getting consensus through first the majority then the super-majority. Either the network disagrees with him and his fork does not get consensus and the fork fails, or the network agrees and there is consensus to fork. Either way, the Bitcoin community will decide together whether to fork or not and Bitcoin will still thrive.

I also recommend reading this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1076501.0

What do you mean "Make bitcoin decentralized"? Bitcoin is already decentralized. Are you talking about the development? The development is somewhat centralized, but it is still decentralized since anyone can alter the source and try to commit to it. Not one developer has any final say about anything. Due to consensus, which is decentralized, no developer can force anyone to do anything.

You should also add Gavin's actual email into the OP.

In Gavin's email, he also says how he plans on completing the fork. Once a majority of the network supports his Bitcoin XT fork with a new block version, the blockchain will soft-fork by essentially having those nodes only accept blocks with the new version but still only mine blocks that are 1 Mb or less. Then, once he has a super-majority (>90% of nodes) with the new blocks, the blockchain will hard-fork with the mining of larger blocks. This is how consensus will be achieved, and very few people will be left on the old chain, thus making the old chain weak and undesirable.

I've done some research, and I have looked at Gavin's email about this, and I found that this statement is false.

He is not going to actually fork Bitcoin into two different coins, he is forking Bitcoin Core into two different projects, one without the increase and one with. He would create in Bitcoin XT another version of blocks, say v5. Once a majority of the miners are creating valid-by-old-rules blocks with the new version number, then he creates a soft-fork so that people update to a new version where all of the new-rule-blocks are valid, then once a super-majority uses the new client (greater than 90% of the network), the hard-fork occurs and anyone still using the old clients which reject the larger blocks are then left in the minority and left behind. By forking it in this way, only one coin will remain with the majority and be accepted, and the remaining minority will be left behind.

I will post the email here once I find it.

I think that is his repayment address, not the address where the loan was sent to.

Looking at your screenshots, it seems that your client has not synced yet. It is updating the balance as it syncs and it has only synced up to December 2013. Wait until the red "out of sync" message next to where it says "wallet" and "recent transactions" to go away. Once that is gone, Bitcoin Core should be fully up to date and you will see how much you actually have.

You should allow the connection to your computer if someone is attempting to connect to Bitcoin-qt or Bitcoin core. This will allow you to be connected to the network and sync the blockchain.

I think what Quickseller did was he was already investigating question2 about the extortion attempt. When he saw that question2 had posted this address, 12Ey8KPWPcv22VVUdZWCTQFZH97Yy1XAuE, he looked up that address and saw that the first transaction it co-signed was with 1GjMtZop3K6JZW7emBWXC11ZhdQ1xEJwpm. Doing a quick search of the second address on bitcointalk on google shows that the first link is to ndnhc's topic which quickseller linked in the OP. This is probably how he reached the conclusion that question2 was ndnhc.

A confirmation means that it has been included in a block. Confirmation times are on average about 10 minutes because a block is mined every ten minutes. However, due to the random nature of blocks, confirmation time could vary wildly depending on whether a block is mined or not. Sometimes miners are lucky and find blocks very quickly, other times they are not and the block is not found in less than 10 minutes.

I don't think it has it yet. However, Gavin is going to leave Bitcoin core development and implement the larger blocks into XT if the core devs cannot agree. At least, that's what it sounds like in the email.

What was the first time?

Probably not. You can check the source code and see for yourself. If there were, then someone probably already found it and you just didn't know about like with the alert keys.

It looks like TheGr33k will be escrowing their sig campaign. He has yet to post a signed contract though.

The alert key is a private key, like your Bitcoin private key. Anyone who holds it can send out alert messages, it does not require the majority of developers in order for it to work. These messages will show up in Bitcoin Core if the message is signed and verified with the alert key. The fact that these messages can be sent without other key holders' consent means that they could be used for personal gain. However, other alert messages can also cancel older ones, so other key holders can negate an alert if it was sent without consensus. Also, there isn't much else that having an alert key can do besides send messages, it used to be able to put every node into a safe-mode where the RPC server was shut down, but that function was removed.

Yes. Just replace the wallet.dat files. You don't need to restart the computer.

Hey, I'm paranoid. And I don't like it when people tell me what to do.

If you're just going to attack me for my reason for asking this, please don't post.

Wouldn't it help the community anyways to know who actually holds the alert key?

Yes, it is just like Bitcoin Core but with a few extra features added.

Does anyone have a list of all of the people that hold the alert key's private key? I know that Gavin and Satoshi both have it since Satoshi gave it to Gavin. Also, according to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alerts, theymos also has the key. Does anyone know who else has the alert key?

I'm asking this because of the possibility of Gavin using the alert key to abuse the alert system and broadcast to everyone that they need to switch to his fork. If other people hold the key, then this kind of abuse of the alert system can be mitigated because they can send out alerts which cancel Gavin's.