AFAIK, there is no limit as to how many blocks that can be reorganized.

I think the odds of china doing a 51% attack are very small tough, they'd probably just destroy bitcoin by doing this, but at a very big (energy, hardware and labour) cost. The destruction wouldn't be technical, but it would be the destruction of most of the trust in crypto.

It would be interesting tough to see how the community would react. In the past, checkpoints were used, hardcoded into the default core implementation. If there would be a consensus about adding a checkpoint against the non-CCP chain, there would probably be a fork: CCP-BTC and free-ish-BTC.
There would be pro's and con's against such a checkpoint tough... I guess everybody in the west would agree that a state-sponsored 51% attack isn't good, but i guess there would also be a large portion of the community that would oppose any interference with how the protocol works (so they'd be against checkpoints, even for a good cause).

One extra thing you can do if you feel insecure is trying some transactions on the testnet.

A lot of popular wallets can be started in testnet mode (for example, electrum and core). Others have a testnet version for testnet use only.

Start your desktop wallet on the testnet, google for testnet faucets, claim some tBTC and move it around for a while untill you feel confident about what you're doing (then send the leftover of the tBTC back to the faucet). Sign some messages, create a tBTC paper wallet, fund it, sweep it, create a second wallet, play around with the fees for a while, .... tBTC is worthless, so worst that can happen is you losing some time...

I don't think anybody said that it was ok for Bustabit to keep your funds for themselfs...

Look at it from their side: you're making a claim whilst providing proof that's >90% conclusive. What if they just gave you account access with 90% proof without proper investigation and it turns out >90% proof wasn't enough and you were a hacker after all.
What if the real owner popped up in a week or so and gave 100% conclusive proof (in the form of a signed message). Would the owner giving 100% conclusive proof be happy if Daniel accepted 90% proof and gave the real owner's money to a hacker?

I guess 14 days is very slow support, but not unheared of in the bitcoin community... Sure, i guess he should be faster, but do you know if he's working on your case right now? For example, sending an email to the address you lost, saying that whoever reads this mail has 14 days to make a claim?

By the way: sending money back to the address whose funds were used is not a good idear... What if you were using a non-custodial wallet and had no access to that address?

Once again, just to be 100% clear: i DO believe you're the real owner... I just DO think you're not giving proof that 100% airtight... I'm NOT saying it's ok for anybody to take somebody else's money hostage or keep it for themselfs.... I just think it's OK for a casino to investigate proof that's not 100% airtight before restoring account access.

Those are 2 completely different questions:

1) yes, you could (theoretically) create a wallet using an old electrum version... If the version is to old, most nodes will reject your connection tough. I don't see a reason why you'd do this tough

2) yes, you could use your (old) seed in a new wallet, even if the new wallet is using a more recent electrum version

Just make sure you

• write down the current electrum version and save your wallet
• write down the seed phrase and have it at hand
• make sure you download electrum from electrum . org
• make sure you verify the signature

By executing these steps, not much can go wrong... Even if you mess up writing down the seed phrase, you still have the original wallet and versionnumber at hand.

I agree with Royse777 here... All the proofs you've shown can either be faked, or can be known by somebody that hacked your system.
I'm not saying you're a hacker (far from it, i actually believe you're the legit owner... But believing something and proving something are two completely different things).

If you sign a message, at least it proofs, without any doubt, you actually own the wallet... This proof is better than a video.

Don't get me wrong tough, there's a >90% chance you're actually the owner of this account, but i do understand why Bustabit is a bit reluctant to help you out.

Please read my reply... it was only the second one in this thread.

No, you are not double spending when you pay an invoice using the lightning network... The lightning network is in use since a couple of years, i'm running a lightning node since the time you could only run on the testnet chain: you can use it and you will not double spend. I'd even go as far as stating that you could not create a succesfull on-chain confirmed double spend even if you really tried...

That being said, it would be wise to read up before you start using the LN, it's relatively new compared to bitcoin, and i personally find it's tooling not as mature and user-friendly as on-chain wallets.

I don't know who has been feeding you FUD about the LN, but i'd suggest stop listening to him/her.

If you really don't want to use bitcoin for micropayments, you could always switch to litecoin (or a different mature, relatively stable altcoin).

I do have some LN experience... And no, using the LN is not double spending...

You can use the LN for micro payments, hundreds of other people are doing it...

yes and no...
A single miner (or group of miners, or mining pool) can decide to "blacklist" whatever they want... If they run a custom node with a blacklist functionality, they can decide not to include transactions including certain unspent outputs, or funding certain addresses (or whatever they want). They can blacklist on any level they want (clear out reject the transaction, not include it in it's mempool, or not select it for creating a block).
As a result, said single miner (or group of miners, or mining pools) will not include your "blacklisted" transaction into the block he/she/they is trying to solve.

However, as long as there are sufficient miners that do not use a blacklist, worst that will happen is that your transaction gets delayed untill a miner not using a blacklist includes your "blacklisted" transaction into the block he/she is trying to mine.

10 sat is considered dust... You won't be able to send it... A transaction creating an unspent output with a value of 10 sat's isn't invalid as such, but most (if not all) nodes will reject it, so the odds of succesfully broadcasting such a transaction is very (very) low...

Well, @pooya87's explanation is equally valid with the current protocol. It's indeed true that the variable is an integer, so the actual subsidy will be 0 long before halving 63.

But, the code i posted is a catch-all code in case we decide to stop using satoshi as smallest unit, and decide to use even smaller units to count with (for example, because the exchange rate skyrockets to thousands of times what it is today, and 1 satoshi becomes far to valuable to count with when calculating how much value to transfer OR which fee to use).
Even if we decide start using a smallest unit that's millions of times smaller than 1 satoshi, no subsidy will be given after halving 64, even if the subsidy is a valid integer due to us starting using a much smaller baseunit.

source: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/8071ec179d75cefd41dac2a9a248eaf38054b85d/src/validation.cpp#L1185


basically consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval is hardcoded to be 210000 (source)
So, if the height, divided by 210000 is equal to, or bigger than 64, the block reward will be 0, even if it should have been a small fraction of a satoshi.

Even if we decide to start using µsat (or smaller) in the future due to a price increase, the maximum amount of halvings after which a subsidy still exists is 63... unless we do a hard fork removing line 1187-1190

I'd like to take box 274. ($111,382.48 - $113,610.12) with a guesstimation of $112.124

Why? Well, i do hope that after this bearish market, bitcoin will become bullish again, and we'll end somewhere in the vicinity of the double of the last ATH.
Offcourse, my own reasons are that if BTC reaches this level, i could eliminate about half my holding and finally pay off my mortgage (while still being able to keep HODL'ing).

On top of that, i don't think $112.124 is that far fetched... I mean, $112.124 is still plausible, it's several months away... But it's still a guess, anything can happen in the meantime...

Thanks for the game

For hashcat, there should be sollutions, eventough i've never tried them, and they're probably not a one-click-sollution (but rather a manual setup);

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=frequently_asked_questions#how_can_i_distribute_the_work_on_different_computersnodes

Like i said: never tried this myself... But it should work...

i agree with mk4, but just wanted to point out the darknet is more than scams and drugdealers... Offcourse, if you start visiting darknet markets, a lot of them are pointed towards the illegal stuff...

But, just as a personal example, i've been running openbazaar routed trough tor to sell consulting (which is not illegal). I stopped doing it because of the lack of clients.
Another example is that i've been running my testnet faucet with a clearnet and darknet interface...

Also, a lot of clearnet companys have a darknet presence...

So, all in all, the darknet tends to have a little more illegal stuff, but it's defenately not 100% scam and scum over there... Some people use tor for privacy, some use it to escape the unreasonable requests of their governements, some use it as a technical enhancement (against, for example, DDos attacks on clearnet mirrors)... And some use it for illegal or immoral stuff...

I'm defenately not a lawyer (far from it), but as far as i understand, it was a UK court making a UK decission that should not impact anybody not doing business/living in the UK...
I'm not even sure the UK can force Cøbra to reject UK visitors....

In my country, the pirate bay was banned... What they had to do is force ISP's to change their DNS so the pirate bay domain name would resolve to a warning page hosted by my country... They could not force the operators of the pirate bay to reject users based on their ip block... Why? Because the operators of the pirate bay were ROTFLOL when my country asked them to do this, waving with a piece of paper telling them their site was illegal IN MY COUNTRY, whilst they were living in a completely different country...

But, like i said: i'm not a lawyer... maybe someone with some actual legal background can enlighten us?

I've seen loads of them... not identical to this one, but defenately similar.
Either somebody trying to spread FUD, a troll, or somebody who has been scammed that wants to release some frustration...
Once in a while, posts like this turn out to be legit tough, sometimes people think bitcointalk is the support forum for whatever service or wallet they're using, and they think their post goes to support personel...

Here's a list: https://github.com/alexk111/awesome-bitcoin-payment-processors/#readme
ps: i'm not affiliated with this list, it's not mine, but it looks reasonable...

This list is from the guy who made the debitpay directory, and he seems to maintain it on a reasonably regular basis...
Good luck!

Any wallet you use has an algorithm (or multiple algorithms) for estimating the transaction fee.
These algorithms usually look at the current mempool (and sometimes the most recent blocks): how many transactions are in there, what is the type of transaction and what is it's fee (in sat/vbyte). Based on this information, the algorithm proposes a fee that, to a certain degree of certainty, has a decent chance of getting your transaction confirmed within a certain couple of (future) blocks.

It all boils down to the fact that a miner can only fit 1 Mb of transaction data (disregarding the witness data) into any block they're trying to solve. Since there is a space constraint, the miner usually picks the unconfirmed transactions from it's mempool that have the highest fee per virtual byte of data. What a wallet is doing is trying to get your transaction into the top x Mb of transactions in most mempools (your transaction doesn't HAVE to be in the top 1Mb if you indicate you're willing to wait, let's say, 30 blocks). This isn't an exact science, since the wallet has no idear how many new transactions will be broadcasted the next couple of hours, and what their fee will be... The only thing a wallet can do is make an educated guess based on the recent history and the current state of the mempool.

The only thing i wanted to add to ranochigo's answer is:

source: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.15.0.md

This answers your last question (if estimate_mode is unset, how fee calculated?)

I think that's the last time there were changes in this call. Whenever i use the call, i usually do add either economical or conservative estimation...

I know what you're saying, but just to be clear: a miner has full controll over which transaction he/she includes in a block (as long as it's a valid transaction, otherwise his block would be rejected by the other nodes).

A miner can add a 0 sat/byte tx into the block he's trying to mine, even if his mempool has 1 Gb of transactions with a fee over 100 sat/vbyte.

Even a small, home miner using a default setup node has a very simple command to increase the priority of low fee transactions in his mempool.

Offcourse, financial incentives do push him/her to add the transactions with the highest fee (in sat/vbyte).