Ah yes.  I see what you mean now.  For example, here's one of those "clueless and clearly never used bitcoin in the early days" giving some of that crazy advice about protecting privacy by using new addresses all the way back in 2009. This guy is clearly "a complete moron anyway":


LOL. Clearly this dummy had no idea how Bitcoin works at all.

Obviously it's much better for me to take my advice from this Guessti guy who showed up complaining one day and refuses to learn anything new.

 

Ah yes.  I see what you mean now.  For example, here's one of those "technical bs idiots who clearly never used bitcoin" giving some of that crazy advice about protecting privacy by using new addresses all the way back in 2009


LOL. Clearly this dummy had no idea how Bitcoin works at all.

Obviously it's much better for me to take my advice from this Guessti guy who showed up complaining one day and refuses to learn anything new.

 

Did you even read that article.  It literally says you are wrong.


Correct. You could just send ALL of your change to the miners as a transaction fee instead, but that would be really expensive. It seems like a much better idea to just send it back to a new address in your wallet, just like the article you linked explains.


Almost everything you've said has been wrong, but it seems like you know that and are just having fun making things up.


I think the article is right, and that you are wrong. I guess that means you are part of the problem, not the solution?


Absolute nonsense.


The article says the opposite of what you are saying.


That's probably the only correct thing you've said in all of these conversations.

You do not NEED to use a change address.  You can just reuse a single address for your change. It's a bad idea, and it won't fix anything that you're complaining about, but you can do it.


The article literally says in the 4th sentence, "is one of the key privacy feature of Bitcoin."

It also says:

• sending to same address . . . reduces users privacy
• change addresses play a key role in improving privacy
• to preserve anonymity and to make the job of tracing transaction more difficult change outputs are usually send to a newly created change address

Repeating it over and over doesn't make it true.


Ah. I thought you were a troll. Sounds like maybe you're just a Binance shill?


That's 100% fabricated false information. Good luck with that.

I see you got bored with your trolling over in the technical support sub-forum, and have decided to expand to the bitcoin discussion sub-forum for some new targets.

This has been explained to you a multitude of times.  You're either intentionally ignoring what's been explained, or you're too stubborn to believe that you might be misunderstanding something.

false. People who know quite a bit more about Bitcoin than you have tried to explain this to you, but you refuse to learn anything. You prefer to complain and to assume you know what you're talking about rather than learn how it works, and how best to accomplish what you claim you want.


again, false

The transaction fees depend on 3 things:

• The quantity of UTXO you spend in your transaction
• The type of addresses and transactions you use (P2PKH, P2SH, SegWit, etc)
• The quantity of new UTXO you create in your transaction
• The fee rate that you (or your wallet software) choose to pay per vByte

Projecting much? You certainly have been throughout this entire thread.


You did create a thread in the Bitcoin TECHNICAL SUPORT section of the forum. What did you expect?


I'm not sure when you think "the early days" were, but several of the responses you've received are from people that have been active in this forum for a decade. Thay know a lot more about the early days that you do.


Yes. You have been. I'm glad to hear you've finally realized it.


I've seen a lot of complaining, and I've seen a lot of made up nonsense, but I've seen very little in the way of actual facts from you so far.


Absolute nonsense.


Do they give you perfect privacy? No. Do they increase privacy as compared to not using them? Absolutely.


The fees have nothing to do with the change addresses. Get over it.

There are other causes for your higher fees, but you refuse to even try to understand.


Glad to hear it.  Was it something presented in this thread? Or did you come up with something new on your own?


I can walk you through every line of code if you like. I can explain every byte in the transaction and every byte in the blockchain. You might not like the explanations, but that doesn't make them wrong.


You're welcome to believe whatever nonsense you like. I can't force you to learn anything new.


Of course it is, but you're not interested in that fact, nor in understanding why.


Again with the 100% incorrect nonsense.

It is clear that one of two things is happening here.  Before I waste any time adding my thoughts and response to the many thoughtful and educational posts already on this thread, can you please let us know which one it is.

1. You are very frustrated. You don't understand how Bitcoin actually works, and your frustration is causing you to lash out and ignore helpful advice. You've convinced yourself that you know what's wrong and you know how it can be fixed, and therefore you're unable to learn anything new about what's going on, why, and how you can best make use of it.

2. You're just a troll. You've come here making demands and stating "facts" that are demonstrably wrong. You are then intentionally ignoring or refuting any explanation or attempt to help so that you can continue to complain and try to stir up reactions.

Patiently awaiting your calm and courteous response (or additional trolling).

Personally, if I were going to store a value that I would hash to generate a private key, assuming that my character set is 94 characters:

• a - z (26 characters)
• A - Z (26 characters)
• 0 - 9 (10 characters)
• the 32 punctuation/special characters I can see on the keyboard in front of me right now

I'd want my generated seed to be AT LEAST 20 characters. If I've done the math correctly, that should give me a key that is at least 128 bits long.

However:

• I don't see any good reason to do this.
• If I did it anyhow, I'd want to be VERY CAREFUL about the method I used to generate the seed. Any lack of randomness in the process, resulting in any bias in the results could lead to unexpected weakness in the security of the Bitcoins.

Wow, That's quite a wall of text.  I'm glad you used punctuation and capitalization, or it wouldn't have been worth the effort to try to get through it.  Perhaps some line-breaks and/or paragraphs in the future would be helpful.


You could have just saved yourself the time, effort, and worry by asking here. Many would have been happy to explain to you what would happen.


This assumes that the transaction is no longer being broadcast.


Any node can rebroadcast any transaction that it knows about at any time if it wants to, so long as the transaction is still valid.  This means that the recipient of your transaction could be rebroadcasting it regularly to increase the odds that they get paid. Additionally, the wallet software that you are using may be rebroadcasting the transaction for you.  If you want to get rid of the unconfirmed transaction, your first step should probably be figuring out how to remove it from the wallet software that you used to send it.


Depending on how you sent the transaction, what wallet software you are using, and just how low your fee was, you may have a few options available to you.

For example:

• Child pays for parent (CPFP)
• Replace By Fee (RBF)
• Transaction replacement after removal from mempool
• Transaction acceleration with a mining pool

Then I would recommend a small (BUT REASONABLE) fee, as a replace by fee transaction so that the fee can be easily increased on the transaction if the sender (or recipient) become impatient.


While it isn't technically impossible for a miner to include a free transaction, it is extremely unlikely. They have no incentive for including such transactions.

Also, there is a minimum fee for relay set in the most common configuration of the reference software. Any fee smaller than that will generally not be relayed by a large portion of the Bitcoin network. As such, most miners will never even know about such transactions.

Small fees are fine, as long as they are larger than the minimum relay requirements and the network load is light.


You explained that you knew it was going to be a problem, and you did it anyhow. It's not a permanent situation, and it can be resolved, but it may take some effort on your part.


It has. As such, we have RBF, CPFP, Acceleration, and removal and replacement.


Sure there is. I've listed a few of them.


Correct.  It's a decentralized system.  There's nobody in charge.  You have no control over what other peers do with their nodes. As such, you should make sure you understand the consequences of your actions before you do something that will cause you problems like this.


Certainly. If a mining pool wanted to do this they could.  However, they have very little incentive to do so, and the participants might end up leaving the pool to go find one that earns/pays more revenue. Regardless, there are some pools that offer a free acceleration service as long as you have at least paid some minimal fee.  I think there may also be a pool that allows you to send a payment directly to them to pay for a transaction that has insufficient fees.

Correct. If you don't understand how transactions ACTUALLY work, then you won't be able to solve the puzzle without some help from someone that does understand.


That's certainly one way that you could do it.

Another option would be to write your own computer program that solves the puzzle and creates the transaction.


Transactions are all publically stored on the blockchain.  Anyone that wants to can learn how to access them and then can find the puzzles.


It means figuring out what data needs to be supplied in a transaction input to satisfy the requirements of the puzzle transaction output. Then, create a transaction that uses that input and sends the bitcoins to whatever address you like.


Bitcoin mining equipment doesn't solve math problems.  It simply hashes 80 bytes, checks to see if the result is small enough, and if not, tries a different 80 bytes, until it happens to get lucky and stumble on 80 bytes that hash to a low enough value.

Correct. If the input is invalid, then the transaction is invalid and it will be rejected by EVERY node on the network.


Broadcast it to whom? Bitcoin nodes will simply reject it.


It is exactly zero.  Invalid transacitons can not be confirmed.


No. That is incorrect. Fake, invalid, transactions never get into the mempool in the first place.  A transaction is verified BEFORE it is accepted into the mempool.


How would a wallet or an exchange know that you created a fake transaction? Why would they care?

Nonsense. It is not an "issue" for a person to decide that they want to save money for the future and not spend it right now.

I prefer to just call it what it is, "unspent".

Say what you mean: "suggesting a mechanism to STEAL money from others"

Nothing lasts forever. If you don't want to lose your bitcoins, then make sure you have a good system of storing and securing your private keys.

Sounds to me like you're trying to DESTROY the integrity, not preserve it.

Wouldn't permanently lost bitcoins IMPROVE scarcity?

Or simply choosing not to spend their bitcoins.

That's the point, isn't it?  My bitcoins are SUPPOSED to be inaccessible to you.

You can presume whatever you want, but that doesn't give you the right to steal them.

No thanks. This has been suggested hundreds of times before. Your scam to steal bitcoins is not welcome in the bitcoin community. Go take your stea-a-coin altcoin idea elsewhere. I'm sure there are some scammers and thieves in the world that would love to support you in this endeavor.

There's no such thing as "logging on" to Bitcoin.

There's no way to know whether or not someone has "opened their wallet". Perhaps you fail to understand what the word decentralized means?

Ten years? Ten years!?!

If someone in their 20s wants to use Bitcoin to save for retirement, they may not touch those bitcoins for at least 40 and possibly as much as 70 years! And you want to steal their bitcoins just because they are planning and preparing for their future?

So you're already aware that this nonsense has been presented in the past, and you're already aware that it wasn't received well, and yet here you are being a dick about it and rehashing the same tired trash yet again.  Just go away please.

That's what happens when thieves come here and try to convince the gullible among us to join them in their crusade to take bitcoins away from others.

Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  We don't really know.

They may have searched for any two addresses which start with the same 7 characters, and coincidentally they just happened to have found a match that consisted of the repeating character "8".  However, as you pointed out, it is much more likely that they actually searched for repeating characters.


perhaps you missed the parts where I said this?

No. Not at all. This is a very common misconception about how Bitcoin works.

Technically, in the blockchain, there are no addresses at all.

Addresses are just an abstraction that we humans use to make it easier to discuss the concept of modifying control over value.

What ACTUALLY exists in a transaction is a transaction output script.  That output script creates requirements that must be met in order to be allowed to broadcast a new transaction that uses that existing output as an input.

The most common transaction types have scripts that create a requirement to provide a public key that hashes to a given value and a digital signature of the new transaction that matches that public key.

However, while it is very fast and easy for computer software to create and validate these scripts, it would be awkward and error-prone if I were to tell you to please create a transaction that has an output which requires both a public key that hashes to (some 256 bit number) and a digital signature of the transaction that spends the output which can be verified with that public key.

So, instead, we all agree that we will represent that set of instructions with a single value (such as a 1, or a 3, or a set of characters such as bc1), and that we will then join that to the hash of the public key, and add on a checksum to prevent typo and miscommunication errors.  Once we've smooshed all that together, we call the result a "bitcoin address".  Our wallet software knows when it sees the address how to pull it apart and generate the proper transaction output script.

In this case that you've mentioned, a transaction has been created that has an output that does NOT translate into an address.  It didn't use any of the standard address scripts, so wallet software doesn't know how to build the transaction, nor does it know how to spend it. Instead, this transaction output is a script that sets up a puzzle.  You can satisfy the requirements of the puzzle if you provide the puzzle solution in the input of a transaction that you create.  Since wallet software doesn't know how to translate that script, it's something that you'd either have to do by heand, or write your own software to do.

Then, once you've created the proper transaction input with the solution, you would create a transaction output for your transaction that uses one of the standard "address" scripts.  In this way, you would assign the bitcoins to the control of a wallet that you have access to.

 So, even if the winner solves the scriptPubKey, how can then he/she divert the funds to another destination address?
[/quote]

Imagine that you have a generator that randomly chooses a single letter.

Imagine that you want to run the generator until you get the letter "R".

Every time the generator generates a new letter, you have a 1 out of 26 chance of generating the letter R.

The average amount of time you might need to run the generator is 13 generations to get that "R" (sometimes sooner, sometimes longer).
If you are unlucky, it could take you hundreds of generations until you happen to get the letter "R".

If you want to generate the letter R twice, it will take even longer since you will first need to go through all the generations to get the first "R" and then do it all over again.

Imagine instead that you just want to run the generator until you get the same letter twice (you don't care what letter it is).

This will happen much faster.

On the first generation, you will have a 0 out of 26 chance of getting two of the same letter (since you will only get 1 letter).
On the second generation, you will have a 1 out of 26 chance of getting two of the same letter (since you must match the first generation).
On the third generation, you will have a 2 out of 26 chance of getting two fo the same letter (since you can match EITHER of the first 2 generations).
On the fourth generation, you will have a 3 out of 26 chance of getting two of the same letter (since you can match any of the first 3 generations).
On the fifth generation, you will have a 4 out of 26 chance of getting two of the same letter (since you can match any of the first 4 generations).

Notice that your chances keep getting better and better with each new generation since you have more and more letters from past generations that you can match with your next generation.
Also notice that you are GUARANTEED to get a match within 27 generations, since after 26 generations you will either already have gotten a match OR ALL POSSIBLE letters will have been generated (so the next one must be a match to one of them).


The same effect applies to generation addresses (but on a larger scale).  If you want to search SPECIFICALLY for an address that starts with 188888888, that's going to take quite a while since each character position has 58 different possible characters, and you require one specific character for each of them. However, if you just want to search for two address that start with the same first 8 characters as each other, and you don't care what those characters are, it will happen MUCH faster. Each time you generate ANY address, that's one additional address added to the list of addresses that can be matched by the next address generation.

That number is generally called a "nonce".

Technically, only the 80-byte block header is hashed via SHA256 with the nonce, not the entire block.  However, one of the values in the block header is the Merkle Root (which is a SHA256 hash generated from a Merkle Tree built from all the transactions in the block.

The individuals running ASIC do not need to do that.  They are presented with an 80-byte block header from the mining pool and simply need to search for the nonce.

The mining pool will need to verify the transactions in order to build the Merkle Tree and generate the Merkle Root for the header.

The full nodes (which are also run by the mining pools) maintain a list of unspent transaction outputs (UTXO).  The transactions in the block spend those outputs. So for each transaction, the node simply needs to verify that the output being spent by the transaction exists in the UTXO and that the signatures match the requirements from the UTXO. This happens as each transaction is received. The node validates the transaction the moment it is received and then adds it to it's own MemPool (list of valid unconfirmed transactions).  That way, when its time to build a new block, the node can just grab transactions from the MemPool with the confidence that they've already been validated.

But it might.

Any time the ETF price differs from the true Bitcoin price, (due to demand changes on the ETF), there will be an arbitrage opportunity that will drive that same change in demand directly back to Bitcoin itself.

Furthermore, depending on how the ETF is structured, it may be necessary for the ETF itself to purchase real bitcoin to hold as backing for the fund. This might be needed to main the peg to the Bitcoin price.  Even if the fund doesn't directly purchase Bitcoins to keep up with the demand on the fund, any Bitcoin based asset it does hold might be backed by actual Bitcoin.

I don't know the specifics of the particular ETFs that are currently proposed, but it may be worth a closer look to determine if demand for the fund is likely to drive demand for actual Bitcoin as well.

You were running Bitcoin-QT in 2011? And you don't remember how the wallet was created?

What is the timestamp on the file?
What folder did you find the wallet file in?
How big is the wallet file (how many byes)?
Do you know any of the bitcoin addresses from the wallet?

Why do you think that a random file you found on your old Compaq is a Bitcoin wallet?
Were there any other files in the same folder? If so, what were the file names?

A hex value of 20 indicates a "space" from the spacebar on a standard keyboard.  If that image that you provided is from a hex dump of the file that you found, then it's just filled with nothing but blank spaces. No actual data. It's as if you opened up a text editor and just held down the spacebar for a while and then save the file and renamed it to "wallet.dat".

Does that sound like something you might have done back in 2011?  If so, then this is not a Bitcoin wallet.

Or, did you perhaps purchase this file from someone?  If so, you've been scammed.

If 69% of the hashpower is going to successfully collude to control which transactions are valid and which aren't, then there is no need to waste time and effort spamming the network with fake transactions. With more than 50% of the hashpower, they have full control over which transactions are in blocks and which aren't.  They can simply choose the transactions that pay very high fees, overwrite any block from any other pool or miner that doesn't do the same.

I don't remember the exact date. I think it was sometime in 2012, or perhaps early 2013?

Acquire Bitcoin whenever I have some extra funds available. None are any better or worse than any other.

Yes.

Saving for the future. Paying my monthly satellite TV bill. Purchasing items online. Pizza from the local Pizzaria. Paying friends and/or family.

Every month. Usually a few times in a month.

Nothing lasts forever.  Forever is a VERY long time. Bitcoin will probably be around for at least a few more decades. Maybe even a century or a few.

Decentralization.

Technical barriers to entry.

Not until it becomes a bigger part of everyday use for the average person.

I wish I was braver in the beginning.

I've learned a lot about cryptography and security.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was as low as $3,000. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was as high as $200,000. Anything less than $3,000 or more than $200,000 would surprise me.

Hi.

You did not.  You sent some amount of Bitcoin to someone. At the time that you sent it, a business or other service might have estimated the value of that quantity of Bitcoin at approximately $130. That estimate may or may not have been accurate depending on how reliable that business or service is at determining Bitcoin value.

What exactly did you check? Because "The Blockchain" only has the quantity of Bitcoins. It does not convert that value to dollars or any other currency. So, you almost certainly used some website or service to interpret the blockchain for you. That website or service will have done its own estimate of the value of the bitcoins that you sent. That value might have changed after you sent the transaction (since the market value of Bitcoin is constantly changing), or they may simply have used a different method of estimating value.

Depending on what service or wallet you used to send the transaction, and what service you used to find the transaction in the blockchain, this could be as simple as differing opinions on the value of Bitcoin, or it's possible that the blockchain interpretation was showing you the value of ALL outputs (including any change from the transaction).