The only problem with this is that bitcoind is not in the standard Mac download.

Whoa!! Thanks!!

Because human beings need date/time, not block height. And the algorithm I'm working on needs actual days, hours, mins.

Interesting... I've been looking at just that solution. But the problem is that the address-transaction function only gives you the block height, and unless I'm mistaken, blockchain.info doesn't have a function for getting the block from it's block height. <sigh> My bitcoin-qt client doesn't give me all the blocks in the block chain, either. What's a poor coder to do? 

I'm working on some code to generate a balance history of an address. That is, I want to be able to determine at any point within an address's lifetime, what the balance was at that point. This means I need to determine on what dates inputs and outputs occurred.

Yes, yes, I know this is not the wallet balance. I really am interested in the address balance. And also, I'm interested in the balance, not the sum of outputs to that address. Balance at any point in time is sum(outputs to the address) at time T - sum(inputs drawn from address) at time T of the address.

I'm using blockchain.info's address history api function and I'm finding some bogus transaction/block times in the output. Specifically, one transaction has a time stamp of 2005.12.24. Right Christmas Eve, 2005. Now... you KNOW that's not correct! 

After reading this thread and a couple others, I surmise that the miner that generated the block didn't have the time set correctly on the machine. This tells me that these timestamps aren't reliable. So, how do I determine, within a reasonable accuracy of a few minutes, when a transaction actually made it into a block? Is there some independent source of accurate data on this?

I was thinking I could apply some heuristics to the times and then if I find a bad one, simply interpolate between the times of the neighboring blocks. That's probably close enough for my purposes.

Any ideas gratefully accepted!

Seems to run fine on OSX Snow Leopard. Took a while to sync as I hadn't run old version in a few days, and really burned up the CPU for a good hour doing it. Otherwise all good and shut down without incident as well.

Just downloaded on OSX Snow Leopard. Still doing block verification. Stay tuned.
Does this version expose any of the new Identity work?

Thanks for fixing the https endpoint. Working fine again.

Thanks for all the replies. This has been very informative. I checked the Preferences on bitcoin-qt and found that it uses uPnp, which has the ability to open ports on routers that have it enabled. So I am trying, just as an experiment, shutting off uPNP on my router and see if anything else breaks.

The other interesting thing I discovered was that my supposition was correct about UDP. UPnP uses a UDP variant of http called httpu. You can do some pretty cool things with UDP because it doesn't require establishing a heavyweight connection like TCP.

No permissions were requested, plus the firewall is on my wi-fi router, and I know damned well it has no ports forwarded.

My guess is that they're using some sort of server polling handshake or maybe UDP punch-through?

Thanks for the replies. Well, I always thought that the miners served out the blockchain not the clients. And my client is behind a firewall, with no port forwarding, so how are other clients attaching to it?

I recently downloaded the newest version (0.8.5) of bitcoin-qt to my MacBook. I'd been using 0.8.0.
Today, I just happened to notice that my internet performance was sluggish so I took a look at the Activity Monitor and saw something was uploading to the internet at max speed. It was rolling along at 600+Kbytes/sec, which maxes out my Comcast cable upload capacity.

By process of elimination, I determined it was bitcoin-qt. Now I can understand it having to download the blockchain, but what on earth is it uploading?

Thanks

Is comboy aware that the https endpoint is no longer working correctly? I've been pulling my hair out for days trying to figure out what's wrong with my browser. Thought it was just Chrome, but it's Safari, too. Try https://bitcoinity.org/markets All text, no graphics, no styling.

Or perhaps I should ask, was this change to the unsecure URL announced and I just missed it?

Anyone else having a problem with bitcoinity.org not displaying correctly in a Chrome browser? There are no graphics or styling. It's just text, rendered black on white. It's someone turned off CSS.

Well said. There are many more cryptographic experts in the world than at the NSA. It's not a secret algorithm that's controlled by the NSA. It's in the public domain. Anyone can examine it. If you still think the NSA has a secret back door, then there's a good possibility you're a delusional paranoid shit head.

This would be pretty easy to test. Just get a bunch of friends to start exchanging encrypted messages about bombing an embassy or govt office. If these douche-bags can break it, they'd be on you like white on rice.

And one that will run on Snow Leopard? ie, 10.6.8

I'm building out the collateralized ID prototype (http://joecascio.net/joecblog/2013/03/25/collateralized-identity-using-bitcoin-to-suppress-sockpuppets/) which needs to be able to sign messages using the bitcoin-jsonrpc function of the Bitcoin-Qt.

In order to sign a message you need to issue the "walletpassphrase" command, with the passphrase as the first arg and the time-out as the 2nd.

Now, I'm obviously concerned about putting the passphrase in a file where its path could be sniffed out in the django setting file, etc. and stolen. So is best practice to actually pop up a form and have the user input the passphrase? Then you'd still have to worry about key loggers but that's the limit.

Any advice gratefully accepted.

Not really. I'm just wondering if you have ever actually received a block reward and how long it took to get it.

How often do you solve a block? Just curious. It seems like statistically, with so many people mining and a block being solved only every 10 minutes that a lot of people would never get a block reward.