Balance not updating on Mac OSX Bitcoin client

[puckman]

Hi.

I have collected money from 2 sources, I can see it online with the block tracker but it wont show up on my Mac OSX client software.

The software seems to be working ok, within minutes I get between 4 and 7 connections and have 131295 blocks at the moment. I read somewhere you can try deleting a certain black tracking file but I cant find that file on my system.

Any suggestions?

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[chippy]

Simply because there are 131941 blocks as of now, the last few one can take hours to load, like in any good p2p fileshare network where the last 1% of the file can take ages.
bittorrent had introduced the endgame mode for this problem, bitcoin has no endgame.

you simply have to sit still and wait.

[£]

Simply because there are 131941 blocks as of now, the last few one can take hours to load, like in any good p2p fileshare network where the last 1% of the file can take ages.
bittorrent had introduced the endgame mode for this problem, bitcoin has no endgame.

you simply have to sit still and wait.

Is it then a good idea to leave your Bitcoin client open all the time so it is always keeping up with the block chain ?

(Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm new (and stupid))

[chippy]

I am a newbie too but as of using a couple of days, the bitcoin client pretty fas catches up after once it was in sync. Doesn't hurt if you start it to make it catch up every once in a while though, maybe once a week ?

[puckman]

£:
Not knowing is not being stupid.

Chippy:
Of course, silly me. Still getting my head around the bit-torrent as money concept. One question though, does that delay not screw with using the money? The creators of bit coin talk about this being instant but what if I took payments all day, wanted to buy something at the end of that day only to find I have to wait for money to trickle out of the system?

[puckman]

Chippy:
I found the following in the FAQ, should take only 10min...

Why do I have to wait 10 minutes before I can spend money I received?
10 minutes is the average time taken to find a block. It can be significantly more or less time than that depending on luck; 10 minutes is simply the average case.
Blocks (shown as "confirmations" in the GUI) are how the BitCoin achieves consensus on who owns what. Once a block is found everyone agrees that you now own those coins, so you can spend them again. Until then it's possible that some network nodes believe otherwise, if somebody is attempting to defraud the system by reversing a transaction. The more confirmations a transaction has, the less risk there is of a reversal. Only 6 blocks or 1 hour is enough to make reversal computationally impractical. This is dramatically better than credit cards which can see chargebacks occur up to three months after the original transaction!
Why ten minutes specifically? It is a tradeoff chosen by Satoshi between propagation time of new blocks in large networks and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. If that made no sense to you, don't worry. Reading the technical paper should make things clearer.

[£]

Cheers for the post Puckman, although I don't entirely understand it's starting to come into focus.