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Can you email me at I.am.that.gullible@gmail.com so we can discuss how much you are going to scam me for ?

Hint for anyone buying bitcoin online from strangers.
Escrow or no go.

Explained simply:

A desktop wallet is software code that syncs with the blockchain. It manages your private and public keys. It allows you to sign messages that are transmitted to the network nodes that allow you to spend (send) your coins. It also syncronises to the blockchain and retrieves the valid balance held on the blockchain.
More details about wallets: Bitcoin Wallets - Which, what, why?

Your coins are stored as a record on the blockchain.

Your public key hashes to your wallet address. (A mathematical / cryptographic calculation creates your valid wallet address from your public key)

You can spend those coins by using your private key.

Public and private keys can be generated online and offline. Offline generation is generally more secure.

Once coins have been sent to a wallet address they appear on the blockchain allocated to that wallet address.

A wallet address won't appear in a block explorer until coins have been sent to the address or a signed message has been sent from that address.


In more detail:

A valid bitcoin address is between 26-35 alphanumeric characters beginning with the numbers 1 and 3

Altcoins will use a different prefix for example Litecoin uses:

L - Legacy, Non-P2SH (Pay to script hash) address prefix
3 - P2SH prefix that is backwards compatible to the M prefix.
M - Current P2SH address prefix


Some online wallets will prevent you from sending it to an invalid address outside of that range.
If a transaction is sent to an address outside of that range it can still be potentially recovered (For example as a cross chain recovery).
Not all wallet addresses are compatible so cross chain recoveries are not always possible because the way that the private key is generated is different.
Cross chain recoveries are done by importing the public and private keys into the wallet.dat file of your wallet software.
If a transaction is sent to a wallet address (regardless of what it is) it will by default have a private key that can potentially unlock it - regardless of whether it is known or not and regardless of whether it was initially generated from a a private key or not.

The private key and wallet address are related by a complex mathematical equation.

Coins are allocated to a wallet address and that record is stored on the blockchain. A signed message using the valid private key is needed to spend those coins (transfer them to another address) .

Regardless of what you do offline - the coins are stored online on the blockchain - every wallet has an associated private key or keys - regardless of whether they are known or not.

The blockchain is a ledger. A public record of transactions. A private key is the cryptographically related secret alphanumeric passphrase associated with the wallet address that allows you to generate a message acceptable to the blockchain that provides the ability to transfer it from one address to another.


Chart source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address

Currently (under RIPE-MD160 ) there are (2^160) 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 potential bitcoin addresses and  around 2^96 private keys whose corresponding public key hashes to that address

The total size of the multiple output transaction must be under 100K bytes or it will not be included in blocks or relayed on the network.
A compressed pubkey p2pkh is 146 bytes and an uncompressed pubkey p2pkh is 178 bytes.

Source:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_cheaply_consolidate_coins_to_reduce_miner_fees
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/62781/litecoin-constants-and-prefixes
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5026213.msg45902659#msg45902659

Comments and corrections welcomed.

How does a double spend 51% attack work ?

BTCurious explained it brilliantly in a couple of sentences:

https://www.coindesk.com/blockchains-feared-51-attack-now-becoming-regular/

This is the more comprehensive explanation:

When one person controls more than 51% of the mining power on a coin network they can control the concensus.

The attacker will rent (Miningrigrentals.com or Hashnest.com) or use a botnet to obtain a lot of hashpower.
For instance if the mainnet has 25 Gh of hashpower a 51% attack can be done with 25.5 Gh of rented mining power.

Which would be easy and not very expensive.


How the attack works:

Using a secret pool they make a private chain that is longer than the public chain.

For example:
Say they start at block 100 000
They will build a longer private chain than the public chain.
The private chain has more hashpower so will find blocks faster.
The private chain might have found 10 blocks while the public chain has only found 9 during that time.

The Double-Spend

As soon as they start their private chain they go to an Exchange or merchant and make a large deposit.

Using 10,000 GLD as an example.
This is broadcasts to the public blockchain in block 100,001. But they don’t broadcast that transaction on their private chain, only the public chain.
On their private chain they make a transaction sending those same 10,000 GLD to another wallet address in block 100,001.

This is the “double spend” part - they spend those same GLD twice.

How they Profit

The exchange sees the 10,000 GLD deposit on the public chain and after 6 blocks of confirmations it is accepted and the balance is transferred to the exchange ledger – making it available to be traded.

The funds are now securely in the exchange wallet – right ? Because the coin network has confirmed that they are there. It appears on the block explorer as a correct transaction.

The attacker then trades the 10,000 GLD  for Bitcoin at market prices and immediately withdraws the Bitcoin.  
The exchange approves the Bitcoin withdrawal and the attacker now have the proceeds in BTC.
By now, we’re at block 100,008 or 100,009.

As soon as the BTC comes out of the exchange -  the attacker will release their long private chain of 10 blocks, broadcasting it to the public network. Their longer private chain is now public. Because the private network has a higher hashing power (over 51%) and longer than the previous public chain  it is now accepted by the public chain as the true record.
This is called “Chain Reorganization.” The 9 blocks previously on mainnet are orphaned and the 10 new blocks are put in place as the new mainnet. This is how any chain splits are resolved in the GLD coin network protocol .

The coins that were accepted origionally by the network in the exchange wallet are now rejected as invalid by the coin network.
But the exchange has already released the proceeds of the sale of the coins for BTC to the attacker in BTC.

While their wallet initially had 10,000 GLD the network has voided that transaction and approved the private chain as the “true chain”.
Suddenly, the mainnet does not include the original deposit of 10,000 GLD to the Exchange back in the original block 100001 but it does include a transfer of those 10,000 GLD to the attacker’s own wallet back from privately-mined block 100,001.

On the new version of the chain the attacker never sent them to the exchange but they sent them to themselves instead.

So the attacker took out 10,000 GLD worth of BTC from the exchange, and they no longer gave the 10,000 GLD to the Exchange in the first place.

They may have paid a lot of money for all that hashpower but the GLD they stole is worth a lot more than that.

So is it a hack ?

The blockchain didn't get hacked. But the decentralized coin node network that runs the blockchain got exploited because the network had inadequate hashrate to protect against that.

In May Bittrex was the victim of a 51% double spend attack on the Bitcoin Gold network. The Bitcoin Gold developers only offered to partially compensate Bittrex for the losses and Bittrex chose to delist Bitcoin Gold instead.
Other coins that have been targeted by 51% attacks have usually compensated exchanges for their losses.
If a coin has enough hashrate to secure their network it would be almost impossible to carry out a 51% attack.
Some coin networks have resorted to merged mining or introducing a hybrid of POW and POS.

Sources:

https://www.coindesk.com/blockchains-feared-51-attack-now-becoming-regular/
https://forum.bitcoingold.org/t/anatomy-of-a-double-spend-51-attack/1398
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52388.0
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-makes-over-18-million-in-double-spend-attack-on-bitcoin-gold-network/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bittrex-to-delist-bitcoin-gold-by-mid-september-following-18-million-hack-of-btg-in-may


Translations of this article:

Thank you to Lafu for the awesome German translation he has made of this topic.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5035620.0

Thank you to theyoungmillionaire for his fantastic Filipino translation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5038913.0

Thank you to taikuri13 for a great Russian translation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5039027.0

Looks like charlie137 has some valid concerns.

If you look at the code there are more references to Dash than to Straks.

Suchmoon had a possible reason:


A lot of those big megathreads are often used by people in signature campaigns to meet their posting quota so moderators in a response to try to stop the practice delete posts that are deemed "low quality" (Rule 1)

The spammers and bots are making it hard for people on the forum - especially those starting out.

Don't let it affect you.  I've also had posts deleted where I have been puzzled. It is sometimes hard for the moderators to judge those that have an intent to engage in conversation and those that just churn out content to meet their signature campaign requirements.

I've adopted the OP under my "help a newbie" program. If you look at his posts they are not great but not terrible either. He has obviously put in a lot of effort into some of the recent posts (despite them appearing very cliche) - I am going to channel some of that energy into some constructive posts. We have already chatted quite a bit via PM.

Some more puzzling deletions :


Jet Cash also said some of his posts from his noobie alt account were deleted in the mining forum for unknown reasons.

I told the user I couldn't see any issue with his posts but also stated I'd post it on here for a further opinion.

I personally cannot see anything wrong with them - unless they were posted in a thread that was talking about something else and they were off topic. It is more likely that they were mistakenly deleted. I'll quote the post in another thread on meta and see if I can get an answer for you.

LOL - I even agree with your opinion on the electric cars. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/

Did just your post get deleted or the whole thread ?

There is also a lot of spam from newbies on the forum. Newbies are moderated by patrollers and they occasionally make mistakes.

Have a look at the rules and see if anything could be the cause for them to be deleted.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0

What you describe is called shilling.



I'm glad you have realized that it is a sales ploy.

Investors really have to do their own research. Everyone will try to tell your their shitcoins are the best.

The rule of thumb I use is:  Is it going to give me a return on my investment as good as or better than bitcoin OR is the idea behind the project so amazing that I want to be part of it.

IF not - I don't spend my bitcoin.

Regardless of how good an investment may seem - diversify. You may not get maximum gain - but you are also not exposed to maximum losses.

I think he means HODL 

It is interesting that you mention that about the mining forum: Puzzled about deleted post.

Even the moderator couldn't flaw that post.

I think some of those users are possibly bots. Others will translate the text from Russian to English to do posts for signature campaigns but they may not speak English.

The comments in the article about bitcointalk are complete nonsense.

There is no censorship on here. Even scammers are not censored.

There are rules that you have to abide by. Like no posting of off topic subjects.

I don't know about reddit because I do not post in that sub reddit.

I challenge them to show one deliberately censored post on bitcointalk that didn't break any of the rules.

It is uncensored so lets have some discussions about bitcoin core on there. Shit-posters please go to Bitcoincashtalk.org


Archived: https://archive.fo/3zpC9
Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/a-censorship-free-version-of-bitcointalk-developer-launches-bitcoincashtalk-org/

Personally I have seen no censorship on here. But they are welcome to the banned plagiarists, account farms, bots, shit-posters and other rule breakers. Maybe Theymos can include a link to their site in the "you are banned" message. 

Interesting that for 28889 posts he only earned 1 merit. I was going through his posts and he is definitely no shit-poster. His posts are generally reasonably good but just really short so don't attract merit.

Perit = where you parrot others in an attempt to gain merit ?

I regularly trawl through the different sections. Even some of the local language sections. I'm sad to say but there is not much merit-able material that I come across in some of the sections that lack in the merit statistics.

You can come to Meta as a newbie to try to get merit but as many have found out that it often results in their post history being scrutinized for plagiarism, low quality posts or eligibility for the shitposter awards.

The statistics also show a slightly skewed result. By merit sources giving merit to senior members - many of who like posting in Meta - those senior members get sMerits to distribute. While it may seem like a lot of merits that are being given - it takes 100 Merits to go 4 ranks from newbie to Full Member and then 900 merits to go 3 ranks to Legendary.

What I always recommend to newbies that want to earn merit.  Instead of aiming to get merit - aim to create great content. Spend some decent time researching a unique topic (check that others haven't already written extensively about it - or substantially improve on what they have written) that they are interested in and write a comprehensive article about it citing all your sources. Use spellcheck and invite others to comment (and edit out your mistakes based on those comments). You are better having one great article that you are really proud of than to have a 1000 mediocre posts.
Keep maintaining and improving the article. Soon you will get inspiration for more ideas. But keep maintaining your old content. (Unless it's relevance has expired)

That happens with some other languages as well.  It is a clear indication that it has been translated using automatic translation tools.

But the rule 27 appears to only apply to local boards.

Unless it is plagiarized (which I have seen before - translated from plagiarized Russian articles or posts) it probably doesn't break the rules or fall under the "low quality" rule.

Unless I misunderstood the point.

I'd consider it borderline "low quality posts". While if something is pointless or garbled nonsense I report it. But I do give a bit of leeway if the author is trying to be part of the conversation but is just struggling with the language.

I use transliterations and posts in local language regularly to detect what language is their primary language and then see if they use translation tools to plagiarize content written in that language.

Like here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4997729.msg45093762#msg45093762