texts: ListAccounts JSON array data isn't consistently formatted (compared to ListReceivedByAccount)

texts:
When I perform a ListAccounts query I get this:

  {
  "result": {
    "": 0.0,
    "account": 0.0,
    "account3": 0.0,
    "account7": 0.0
  },
  "error": null,
  "id": "1"
}

However ListReceivedByAccount(0, true); looks like this:

  {
   "result": [
     {
       "account": "",
       "amount": 0.0,
       "confirmations": 0
     },
     {
       "account": "account",
       "amount": 0.0,
       "confirmations": 0
     },
     {
       "account": "account3",
       "amount": 0.0,
       "confirmations": 0
     },
     {
       "account": "account7",
       "amount": 0.0,
       "confirmations": 0
     }
   ],
   "error": null,
   "id": "1"

Notice how the embedded array data is formatted differently?  Is there a name or term that describes these different array formats (named vs unnamed)?

Why is it different and can this be fixed in a future version?

If it is fixed in a future version will the outermost "id" property become "2" so I can add the logic to my parsers?


texts: Has the payment protocol – which is supposed to protect against Man-In-The-Middle attacks – ever been implemented?

texts:
The two main problems generally mentioned that payment protocol “BIP 0070” (Andresen, 29-07-2013) is supposed to solve are usability and protection against Man-In-The-Middle attacks. In the latter the attacker would substitute an address he owns for the merchant's address when the payment address is shown to the customer. This could result in the customer paying the attacker instead of the merchant.

Has this attack been done before? If so, how was it implemented?
Or is this just a theoretical problem?


texts: Determining the genesis transaction value or genesis_tx

texts: Is there a way to determine the genesis transaction (genesis_tx) hash? I know the genesis block number but how do you determine genesis_tx? I am looking for this hash for an altcoin which was forked from litecoin.


texts:
I have so far enjoyed the experience of learning about Bitcoins, mining, etc. I've setup a bitcoin daemon in hopes of developing a few apps and services in the near future. However, there is one thing that has been bothering me for a few days now and I can't seem to find an answer for.

There is a 'move' command in the client/API calls list that will "Move from one account in your wallet to another". I read somewhere that this DOES NOT flow through the block chain. If that is the case, then HOW can you actually use those coins in the new account/address when there is no public record of the transfer.

Thanks for your help


texts: Tendermint consensus: Are validators "known" and "pre-selected"?

texts:
What are similarities and differences between Tendermint consensus and Proof-of-Stak?

For example, in both consensus, a validator is selected randomly (I think in Tendermint consensus they are selected in a round robin process).

And I think in Tendermint consensus, validators are known and pre-selected, unlike Proof-of-Stake consensus. Is it true? and if yes, what entity does confirm a known validator?


texts:
I want to generate a paper wallet with Electrum using my personal computer that I've been using for a few years now, meaning that I'm online with it daily.
I know that the optimal solution is to use a computer that has never been connected to the internet, but I'm curious if there are any reports of malware compromising this kind of setup.
(I'm considering this setup because where I'm from it is not so easy/fast to get a hardware wallet)

Go offline
Generate seed words
Copy them to paper
Delete wallet from computer


texts: How can using Bitcoin with Tor improve privacy?

texts: As far as I understand Bitcoin, user privacy and anonymity are hard to guarantee in the presence of multi-input transactions and shadow addresses. Some sites suggest using Tor to hide the source of a new user introducing an unconfirmed transaction into the network, but does this really help? It may hide the physical address from which the address was generated, but it doesn't help prevent linkability between Bitcoin addresses and single users due to the two aforementioned properties, right?


texts: Can't Run Bitcoin Wallet After It was Downloaded on Windows 8.1 Desktop

texts:
Please help.  After downloading the Bitcoin wallet, I don't have the option to 'run' it on my windows 8.1.  It was a compressed file, and even though I extracted everything, there is nothing that indicates what contents need to be opened (ran).  I have doubled clicked all 'applications' in that file.

I can only get the window that asks if I want to buy coins.  When I click buy, it wants my email address (that I didn't have an option to set up).  When I click 'Don't have one,' it sends me back to the download Bitcoin Wallet screen.


texts: Is it possible that bitcoin community along with core developers introduce new bitcoins into the system for the good cause?

texts:
I want to create a imaginary scenario here to clarify my question.

Let's say, a bitcoin community is thriving at Cuba. Somehow few thousand Cubians manage to relocate at the remote location at Cuba and name the place Cubian bitcoin community city. The only mode of payment is bitcoin, so basically it's a bitcoin community city at Cuba that manage itself without help from Country Government.

Mr Smith from America sees tremendous opportunity to invest on Cubian bitcoin community city and also want to help since government doesn't care much. Mr Smith invested 1000 BTC to build Hospital on Cuban bitcoin community city.

After few months local Country Government raided the Cuban bitcoin community city and destroyed the hospital. Mr Smith loss all his investment.

So my question is in order to encourage investment on high risk countries like Cuba, can bitcoin community along with core developers upon collaboration and investigation generate new bitcoins and give it back to Mr Smith to recover his loss?


texts: How does the Bitcoin network maintain the chains created when two nodes generate different versions of the same block?

texts:
I came across these lines from the Bitcoin whitepaper:

  If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block
  simultaneously, some nodes may receive one or the other first. In that
  case, they work on the first one they received, but save the other
  branch in case it becomes longer.

Does that mean two chains are maintained in parallel in each node? If yes, how do the nodes actually maintain it in implementation level of the Bitcoin network?


texts: Is there a website that shows historic price data?

texts:
I need to find what the Bitcoin-Mt. Gox USD price was at certain historic dates and times (exact timestamp).

Is there a website where I can input a specific historic date+time, and get the rate for that time?

I believe that Bitcoin Chart's API might do the trick ... but I'm asking about a website with a UX, not an API.


texts: How convert a mnemonic phrase back and forth between different number of words?

texts: I'm relatively new to cryptocurrencies in general and I've tried using Bitcoin and a few altcoins, but it always bothers me that some digital assets are not available in all wallets. To my understanding, I could use the same mnemonic phrase in all wallets, even if some assets are not listed, if that's true I wouldn't have to store a different list of words for each wallet. The only problem is that most popular wallets support a different numbers of words in the mnemonic phrase. Is it possible to convert back and forth between say, for instance, a 24-word phrase to a 12-word phrase, and what tools can I use to make the conversion?


texts: Do US based exchanges need to file as an MSB with FinCen?

texts: What other legal requirements are there and what are the costs of compliance?


texts: address in listaddressgroupings and getnewaddress

texts:
I don't understand the differents between listaddressgroupings and getnewaddress

For example, I have a local blockchain ( regtest ) with 0 Block.
I create 101 block (generate 101)
I can see with listaddressgroupings this output

[
  [
    [
      "mvAH7VsxifvQdEZ46Rdt2oN3nB5BzaPqS8",
      50.00000000
    ]
  ]
]

What address is it?
If dump the priv key dumpprivkey mvAH7VsxifvQdEZ46Rdt2oN3nB5BzaPqS8

I have this result MVA_PRIVATEKEY

ok, If I search this privkey in dumpwallet test.txt that key in associate to this address

MVA_PRIVATEKEY 2019-01-19T10:26:19Z change=1 # addr=2NAoHv7kDBhHND7YHcQKuDS8wCbEz87xLrv hdkeypath=m/0'/0'/0'

Why is not mvAH7VsxifvQdEZ46Rdt2oN3nB5BzaPqS8 ?

Now I want create a new address getnewaddress =>
2NCGuG2v4RbaAKsZp1RQJ2ZpDM6WtW79Mu3

Why this address begin with 2 and not with m or n ? its pk is different from mvAH7VsxifvQdEZ46Rdt2oN3nB5BzaPqS8

If I create another 101 block, I have a new address in listaddressgroupings

anytime I create a new block, I have a new address in listaddressgroupings


texts:
Stale blocks and orphaned blocks are defined here.
What is a stale blockchain tip? Is it a blockchain tip missing the latest mined block? Or is it a blockchain with a stale block (as defined in that post) at its tip?
This question was asked during this Bitcoin Core PR review club session on Bitcoin Core PR 19858


texts: Please, how do I subscribe to blockchain testnet web-socket for an address. I seem to find that for livenet, any help?


texts: Where to find the amount that is being sent in a signed transaction?


texts: Is mining a fair mechanism in blockchain network?

texts: As we know, propagation of a new block in blockchain network has some delay and many nodes receive the new block later. so if it is that the first one who finds the nonce properly wins the block can we say that the mechanism of mining is not fair enough (Because of delay in propagation of a block some blocks receive the block sooner and have more time to calculate the nonce)?


texts: How do transaction fees exacerbate instability in Bitcoin in the future?

texts:
I came across the paper On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward where it says that in the near future where the incentives are only due to the transactions, instability issues will appear.  With only transaction fees, the variance of the miner reward is very high due to the randomness of the block arrival time, and it becomes attractive to fork a “wealthy” block to “steal” the rewards therein.

I tried to read the paper, however I could not understand the exact reason for the instability. So, what is the simple idea that rewards only composed from transaction fees will result in instability that does not appear while there still is a block subsidy?


texts: What does the ledger number correspond to in ripple?

texts:
I'm playing around with Ripple's data on https://xrpcharts.ripple.com.

What does the Ledger # correspond to and how does that number relate to the gateway?


texts:
In my understanding it should be possible to run stratum server over some kinda limited node (the one that doesn't carry whole blockchain) since stratum doesn't need many functions from the daemon... I'd guess getblocktemplate should be sufficient for mining.

In my humble estimate, I can see it should be enough to store just X last blocks instead of having the whole data for the mining purpose. is that correct? (yes, I do know the difference between full node and thin-client)

What's gonna be the best way to setup thin client and mining pool without waiting weeks for it to sync with the net? Is there any API for that maybe?


texts: How do you output segwit bech32 (bc1...) / P2SH (3...) addresses from a bitcoin private key?

texts: I have a bitcoin private key and know that it can output a segwit addresses of bech32 bc1... and p2sh 3... formats. How can this be done easily?


texts: Accidentally shutdown system while Bitcoin Core client was synchronizing

texts: My computer was accidentally shutdown while Bitcoin Core was synchronizing and it is now giving the error fatal error please see error log. Please tell me what is the solution to this problem.


texts: How long does it usually take to mine a bitcoin block?

texts: I am quite new and wondering how long it would take with a single GTX 680? EDIT: I am using a pool.


texts: Are there any commercial nodes available so my transactions won't show my IP address?

texts:
Oftentimes my own IP address shows up as the "Relayed by ip" piece of data reported by Blockchain.info.

Is there a commercial node available that I can conract with to act as relay so that my IP won't be known?  (and has as part of the agreement their assurance to not log IPs for transactions)?

I know there are certain well connected nodes that I can connect to, but I don't have the guarantee from them that they aren't collecting and sharing my IP info.


texts: How to run bitcoind in a low memory environment

texts:
I have a Raspberry Pi with 925 MB of memory. Bitcoin Core, operating as a full node, uses between 600-900 MB. How can I reduce bitcoind's memory usage?

I tried setting maxmempool to its minimum allowed value, 5. What about maxreceivebuffer and maxsendbuffer? Would setting these to a low value reduce memory usage?


texts: Can the mining pool with the most mining power always win?

texts: Suppose we have three mining pools, one with 40% of computing power, and the other two having 30% of computing power each. Will the node with 40% power, be able to solve the puzzle for each node always quicker than the others?


texts:
Do you know any real-world examples of double-spends, where the second transaction was accepted to the block?
There's https://doublespend.cash/ for BCH but for BTC I would like some examples where the second transaction is accepted. (And this website shows all occurences of double-spends. I just want some successful ones.)


texts:
I'm new here but I've been in the crypto world since 2016, today I'm going to tell you what just happened to me.
I had to send 25 euros to the address:
3Lch25qM9kKNEydEKKCKc2Em1naHBLN44y
After an hour from sending my BTC I still do not receive anything, so I decide to review the transaction and I was not believing what I saw .. a completely different address had been used to receive BTC and not giving an explanation I try to copy again and paste and I realized that that address changed once pasted. I'm not kidding, I'm not a scammer nor a liar, try also to copy and paste this address:
3Lch25qM9kKNEydEKKCKc2Em1naHBLN44y
and you'll end up with this:
3LP8AqQ5neyhGs9X5djjBBQ5RBBRCQ3LnY
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/3LP8AqQ5neyhGs9X5djjBBQ5RBBRCQ3LnY
Please help me


texts: How to check my address balance in regtest?

texts:
I have created a regtest address and I want to check it's balance.

I have run the commands:

-regtest generate 101
-regtest getbalance
-regtest sendtoaddress n4MN27Lk7Yh3pwfjCiAbRXtRVjs4Uk67fG 10.00
-regtest generate 6
-regtest getbalance n4MN27Lk7Yh3pwfjCiAbRXtRVjs4Uk67fG

after the 5th step the balance is still 0.

Why this happened since I have already sent 10 BTC to my address?
Do I have to sign any outputs in order to claim the bitcoins?


texts:
I am trying to understand how UTXO works. I came up with these charts https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set

I don't understand why the 1st chart (total Tx's with unspent output). As I understand it, the UTXO represents the "change" you keep after sending some funds.

Using this logic all Tx's should have a UTXO, right? As any time I send money to someone else, it should be an output for the remaining balance.


texts:
What is the Bitcoin Global Stock Exchange?

How can one use it effectively?


texts: Doesn't overt AsicBoost reduce the search space for a valid block header hash?

texts:
ASICBoost is a new method to mine bitcoins with a 20% speedup, as covered in this article:

https://blog.bitmex.com/an-overview-of-the-covert-asicboost-allegation-2/

Now, consider the following diagram:

Apparently there are two versions of AsicBoost - covert and overt. Overt AsicBoost involves changing the Version section of Chunk 1 only, while Chunk 2 remains unaltered (except for the nonce, which is still incremented). This is faster than the traditional method of incrementing the nonce, and then adding the extra nonce.

However, doesn't Overt AsicBoost reduce the search space? The current Bitcoin network difficulty is 15,546,745,765,529, which means that a miner has to iterate through approximately 2^76 hashes before a valid block header hash is found. However, the Version section of the block header is only 4 bytes (32 bits), and the nonce is also 4 bytes (32 bits). Therefore, if a miner implements the Overt AsicBoost technique, the search space is only 2^32*3^32=2^64 hashes, which is far smaller than 2^76. Wouldn't this be completely insufficient to find a valid block header hash?


texts: In the future, if I pay a coffee with a very low fee, will it ever be paid?

texts: So this is the thing, I am just learning about feedrates and how the miners pick their transactions with higher fees, so they can get more money. But, what will happen in the future when people pay really small things in the daily basis and the fees are insignificant, does this mean that I would get my coffee but it will be never paid?


texts: How can a pruned node be classed a full node without the full blockchain?

texts:
A full node is a node with the whole blockchain and is able to verify any new incoming blocks.

A pruned node, is a node with only some of the blockchain, namely it has removed some of the older blocks due to space requirements. A pruned node cannot validate blocks, as it does not have the full history of the blockchain right? So how can we still say that it is a full node?

Am I also right in saying that they do not serve any value to the network, as any blocks they send out will not be fully validated?


texts: What would happen if every miner adds a transaction to his block that did not occur?

texts:
Let's say every single miner in the world added the same transaction to their block via trickery. The transaction was never initiated by the wallet holder. Would a block from these miners be added to the block chain?

If so what is the minimum number of miners needed to add a fake transaction to the block chain?


texts: How can Blockchain.info query information from the blockchain faster than I from my own node?

texts: I've just run a Bitcoin node but I don't understand how blockchain.info or any other blockchain explorer works. I mean, sometimes I have problems like "socket.timeout". Shouldn't it be faster to query info from my own node than from a blockexplorer?


texts: Actually is there a list of hardware we could use and their bitcoins/hardware price ratio so I can compute return of investment?


texts: Where is the part in code related to the installation on Linux/Mac and windows?

texts: Where in the source code is the part related to the GUI and platform depended installation?


texts: How do I import a Multibit HD wallet with seeds into Electrum?

texts:
I installed Electrum to replace the broken and intolerable Multibit HD. I entered my 18 seed words, but it wouldn't allow me to click Next. I clicked Options > BIP 39 and it enabled Next. It created the wallet, but I don't see my balance or transactions. There doesn't appear to be any menu options to rescan the network.

Inside Multibit, it says this about my wallet:

Standard MultiBit wallet
Private keys are encrypted on this machine
BIP32 compliant. m/0h (Account 1 only)


texts: Lost wallet problem: I have a 240 byte file from a 2013 wallet. Can I access bitcoin with this?

texts:
I lost the device with my Android Bitcoin Wallet late 2013. At the time, I had stored a 'wallet backup' file. It has no extension, is 240 bytes, and begins with 'U'.
With only that file, is it possible to recover the value of the Bitcoin?
Please explain what the 240-byte string is, and what else would be necessary to recover the Bitcoin value.


texts: How can I recover a blockchain.info wallet from a 17 word phrase?

texts:
I have a wallet at blockchain.info which I've opened about 4 years ago.
Right now I cannot access it. It looks like the site is sending me a verification email, but sadly I don't know which address it uses.
If I use the "I've lost my 2FA Device" option, I have to enter my mail, but it keep telling me that the mail address is not correct (I've tried my main mail and 3 other mail addresses that I've used to use).
If I use the "I've lost my Wallet Password" option (although I have the password), I have to enter a 12 word phrase. I have a 17 word phrase and I've tried to use the first 12 words and the last 12 words, but no luck - I cannot even press the "continue" button.
I've contacted the site's support a few times but haven't got any answer at all.

Is there a way for me to recover my wallet directly from the 17 word phrase?


texts:
when somebody send me BTCs I recognize that by seeing a transaction output is equal to my address. But how can I be sure that it's really me and only me who can spend the output?

I can check, I can unlock the output.
But consider I'm an evil, I sell BTCs to somebody. But I create a multisign-script wich unblocks the transaction output also by my private key and when I receive $ I take my BTCs back.

Is there a protection against this? Do wallets check the output scripts somehow before claiming the balance?


texts: Are miner builder/sellers profitability calculations true?

texts:
regarding to this question here How many hash calculation is needed to reach one BTC? , it takes about 1387 years with 1 TH/s power rate to reach 1 BTC.

So if someone has a machine with 53TH/s power rate and his machine works for 24/7, he can reach 1 BTC in 1387 / 53 = 26.1 years, and if he has 100 of that machine, he can gain 1 BTC in 95.5 days, or nearly 4 BTC per year.

So if the price of 1 BTC is about $9500 today, he earns 9500 * 4 = $38,000 per year(let's think the electricity consumption is free!). But in many websites like this https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/bitmain/antminer-s17-pro-53th, it calculated the profitability of one same machine of $4,333 per year and it will be $433,000 per year for 100 machines!(It also considered the electricity power consumption).

How is it possible?


texts: How to identify large block of coins referenced in this article, reportedly mined by Nakamoto?

texts:
This article refers to a large block of Bitcoins mined in 2009, potentially by Nakamoto.

What's the best way of identifying which block of Bitcoins are referenced in the article?


texts: The blockchain lookup speed in a local machine

texts:
How to determine the exact required time (seconds, milliseconds) to find a particular block when searching within a local blockchain using address?

Is there any way to make a benchmark to study the lookup speed of the different blockchain research engines?


texts: Are coin minting and difficulty level related?

texts:
I am sure this question has been answered somewhere, but most searching comes up with "how blockchain works" and other unrelated results. I am trying to verify my understanding of the theoretical end of minting new coins.

Is my understanding correct that coin minting and difficulty levels are not coupled? In other words, the difficultly level changes according to hash power, while the coin minting schedule decreases in a hard-coded way. Such that, in the end, no new coins can be minted but block difficulty would remain proportionate to hashing power of the network.

I think this is right but need to confirm before educating others about this scenario.


texts:
I have read that bitcoins are relatively immune to inflation and will actually deflate in value:

  Once 21 million coins exist, they become deflationary since no new coins are issued and, as naturally occurs, money falls out of circulation as wallets are lost.

Deflationary currency sounds terrible as this would encourage people NOT to spend the bitcoins they have. Which is the opposite of what you want in a capitalist society dependent on transactions. Inflation exist for a reason, it encourages people to spend the money they have because holding on to it would mean losing value in the long run.


texts: Why is my segwit private key generating a 3 address vs a bc1 address like how I originally generated?

texts:
I have the following btc private key that I generated from another application:

5KCPzu4tEAnFqwLrXUbW3GKMDSnUYY8CMie2HMRuHouSvrFhXA9

That application gives me the following segwit address:

bc1qluk574lw9t536u72n0z2ya0ksx3s0kg0evkrme

But when I goto https://segwitaddress.org and scroll down and enter in my private key at Enter a WIF private key to generate its corresponding segwit address. I get a totally different address:

37wArHq69dxRwLkHt6MY8PpmbB6qjErrbK

So do these 2 public keys actually have the same private key? How do I verify if my private key does indeed output the same public keys? I couldn't find any program to do this verification.


texts: How can Auroracoin be the 4th crypto-coin by market cap if it's unreleased yet?

texts:
Auroracoin has become the 4th biggest crypto-currency measured in market capitalization. How can an as-yet unreleased coin have market value if it's not available for exchange (either for fiat or for another crypto-coin) anywhere??? In fact, save for the storage accounts of its creator, noone has an Auroracoin yet. So whence comes its valuation and thus its market cap???

As much as I admire the stated intentions of Auroracoin's creators and their ingenuity for turning stuff traditionally seen as BAD (premining, universal and compulsory registration for all citizens) into GOOD, this market cap point makes me a bit suspicious.


texts: How can I determine the number of confirmations of a transaction and its fee using the Blockchain.info DATA API?

texts: How can I know if any given transaction has confirmations and has paid the miner's fee, using the BlockChain.info DATA API?


texts: What happens to the difference in compatible buy and sell orders on bitcoin exchanges?

texts:
Let's say Alice is selling 1 BTC for $10,000. Soon after Alice makes her sell order, Bob places a buy order for 1 BTC for $10,010. These two orders are compatible, since Alice would gladly take an extra $10.

My question is, what happens to that $10.

Does Alice receive $10,010 even though her sell order was only for $10,000?
Does Bob only have to pay $10,000?
Maybe they split it down the middle, Bob only has to pay $10,005 and Alice receives the same?
Does the exchange just keep the difference? Is this how (in addition to the fees) exchanges profit?


texts: LN Payment Channels: Can you have more than two nodes in a channel?

texts:
I can't seem to find an answer to this but apologies if this exists somewhere already.

From the last paragraph of section 2.0 in the lightning network paper version 0.5.9.2, "Micropayment channels create a relationship between two parties".

However the staked coins for the channel are held in a multisig address, and those addresses can have more than 2 signatures, max 20 signatures I believe, so can a lightning channel be set up that would be able to resemble more of a traffic circle than a 2 lane highway?


texts: Is there a reward or penalty for validators in proof-of-stake (PoS)?

texts:
In PoW consensus, if a miner could solve the puzzle, they receive some monetary reward (some coins) to incentive miners, since mining process has a considerable monetary cost for miners including providing hardware and energy/electricity cost.

However, in PoS, participation in transactions validation has not a significant monetary cost for validators (i.e. stakeholders) (I hope I am right), and if so, is there any incentive to motivate stakeholders for participating in transactions validation?

Also, what is the penalty of a validator who ex. confirm a double-spent transaction?

Thanks


texts: Do I understand correctly that mnemonic seeds are specific to individual wallet software and its versions?

texts:
I know mnemonic passphrases are used to derive a master key that can then be used to procedurally generate your addresses. If you lose everything except the mnemonic, you can regenerate everything and recover your losses.

But from what I understand, and as my limited experimentation has shown, these mnemonic seeds seem specific to an individual program and even its versions.

So let's say one day I lose everything except my mnemonic and I decide to recover it all. I set up my a new pc and such, and look for a wallet program. My original program is no longer available because nyan cat ate the source code. Am I now not basically screwed because any alternative program won't be able to process my original mnemonic seed?

So if I want to not take any chances and not be bound to any single platform, I shouldn't focus on the mnemonic but on my master key, which I'm merely presuming is standardized and universal. Having to store this single long string of pseudorandom chars isn't exactly an improvement over storing a csv of pseudorandom strings, is it?

And of what I've seen, programs like even electrum and mycelium are all but crystal-clear about what exactly you are backing up and what exactly you can do  with it (on mobile - electrum is much clearer on desktop, though it still doesn't say anything about the nature of the mnemonic for example). A button labeled "back up my wallet" doesn't really tell me if I'm backing up either type of seeds or just a list of keys, or something else. I suspect a binary file specific to this wallet program at that moment. Programs relevant to the same thing (i.e. wallet programs) should really carry labels on all their features, pointing out what is universal/standardized/cross-platform and what isn't.


texts: Is Bitcoin Cash the same as Bitcoin classic?

texts:
Sorry for the dumb question.

I am confused to the status of Bitcoin classic. There is a lot of support for Cash on the Classic website which leads me to think they are the same. Also I see more news for Cash than for Classic. Also, was it not true the currency acronym 'BCC' was reserved for Classic? Now I see its used for Bitcoin Cash.

What is the difference between Cash and Classic forks?


texts: What is the current growth rate of the bitcoin blockchain size month by month in 2020?

texts: I'm looking to get a VPS to host a btc full node and would like to know how much space I should get and what is the current Bitcoin blockchain growth rate on a monthly basis?


texts: What is "segregated witness" and how can it improve network scalability?

texts:
I've just heard about it, and it is claimed to be a "turning point" in the block-size debate.

What is "segregated witness?" how does it work?

How can it be used for improving network scalability?

Is this the answer to all of network's scalability concerns?


texts: How does offer creation impact fund requirement of an account?

texts:
How much does each offer created increase the XRP requirement on that account?

Does it relate to PayerGets?

Is it cleared once I cancel the offer?


texts:
I recently downloaded the Bitcoin Core wallet, and was mildly inconvenienced by the fact that I had to spend 4 days downloading 200 GB, but I just beared with it.

However, I soon discovered that some wallets like Electrum and Bitcoin Wallet don't need syncing at all, which makes me curious about why some wallets need syncing and others don't, and what are the benefits to syncing as it takes up a lot of space, time, and bandwidth?


texts: How will a common guy use Lightning Network when BTC hits 10 mln$?

texts: If BTC hits 10mln$ and transactions fees will be horrendous denominated in $, how a "common guy" will be able to opt in using Bitcoin, if even opening LN channel will be too expensive then since it requires on-chain payment? As I understand the only way for him would be to rely on third party which would'nt be very different from using a bank.


texts: Without being continuously connected to the network, how can I protect from Double Spend attacks?

texts:
I'm a vendor who is interested in protecting myself from double spend attacks.

What software, configuration, connectivity, or timeout is required to mitigate this risk?

Namely, how would I protect myself if a continential communications blackout were to occur, as described here.

This could occur if I'm accepting payment on a satellite link, as often occurs on boat-casinos, islands (Hawaii), or in 3rd world countries.


texts: How can I generate an address with some string on it, which will check as correct? I don't want to necessarily have the private key for that address, but I want to be able to send money to it.


texts: Running bitcoind in a different directory

texts:
I installed bitcoin core in windows 10 using ( Windows Subsystem for Linux ) . I installed ubuntu from the store and I used it to Install bitcoin core. The thing is everything was installed in the main hard disk C and it doesn't have enough space to download blocks. Is there a way to copy it to another partition (D partition because it has enough space) ? or while running bitcoind is there any way to run it with a specified path?

Ps: I hope the question is clear

Thank you


texts:
I would like to start trading with Bitcoins. My only question for now is:
Can you lose more money, that you deposited on Bitstamp? If yes, how?

Step by step question:

I deposit 1 bitcoin (balance 1 bitcoin)
I trade with bitcoins (balance 0 bitcoins)
I lose (balance -1 bitcoin) <-- Can i get in negative state, or is there a limit of 0?

Thank you for all your answers!


texts: Blockchain gets stucked if no blocks are mined

texts:
Yesterday I decided to fork a project, just for fun and to learn more about it. So, I forked a project, I generated my own genesis block, changed timestamps, nounce, keys, reset the min chain work. Everything was fine. Compiled it for Windows and Linux, it worked perfectly. I set up a wallet on a Vultr server, the other one in my own PC, mined a few blocks and then I went to bed.

The Vultr walllet kept running, but mine didn't, I closed it.

When I woke up and opened the wallet, it was trying to download blocks. getblocktemplate basically says it is downloading blocks, but there are no blocks to download. It says "8 hours behind".

I'm not sure if this is supposed to happend.

In my ignorance I'm going to assume it is normal: how do I fix it without having to delete everything and making a new chain?

If it's not normal: What did I do wrong?


texts: How bitcoin finds a few transactions earlier account balance from outputs?

texts:
I am reading and watching about transactions and they say a transaction's input is previous transaction's output. They all show diagrams in which these transactions are consecutive.

How an account's balance is found if the latest input and previous output are away from each other away more than 1 transaction.

Also how an account's balance is found if there are some outputs to that account with small values in different transactions and another output which is account's balance? How they are gathered?

With which algorithm wallets traverse blockchain?

I am making my own node and wallet to grasp bitcoin better and couldn't understand these things about transactions.


texts: Missing btc after -zapwallettxes and blockchain rescan

texts:
I sent a transaction in Bitcoin Core and realized that the fee was too low. I waited a few days to see if it would confirm and then wanted to try something else. I read that starting bitcoin core with -zapwallettxes would allow me to resend the transaction with a higher fee, but after doing this I encountered a few problems.

First, the spent and unspent amount to be returned to me from the transaction didn’t seem to be reflected anywhere and were missing from my balance. I attempted to rescan the blockchain, but the transaction confirmed during this time. Now, the transaction and amount I spent are shown in the history, but the excess btc that was unspent and to be returned to me isn’t reflected anywhere. How do I go about getting bitcoin core to recognize that this btc should be back in my balance? Here is the transaction if that helps:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/c50fa9c0a1bae6b554fdac1fb7f628f1f8136ed7fea4a1ff2085c6cf727d0895

Second, after the -zapwallettxes and rescan it appears that a bit of additional bitcoin is missing from my balance. This missing bitcoin was not part of the transaction and I haven’t had any other transactions recently (in a few months). I can’t seem to find any cause of the additional missing bitcoin and am honestly more concerned with this chunk than the missing unspent balance in my other issue, which I expect I can be fixed. I would appreciate any tips or suggestions that might help find this missing chunk of bitcoin or get bitcoin core to recognize where it is.


texts: I bought 1BTC and the transaction was instantaneously, how?

texts: So, I went to localbitcoin, I met a random guy at a Starbucks gave him the money and he transfered 1BTC with his cellphone to my blockchain.info account. I thought I would have to wait at very least 10 minutes or so before the transaction would get included in the blockchain and have the first confirmation, instead the guy sent it and literally one second after that the bitcoin was there in my blockchain.info wallet, how is that possible?


texts: Can the wallet's balance be deduces from the wallet's address and the blockchain's history? Is this concealable?

texts: Since all bitcoin transactions are public, I guess that all transactions could be summed up to get any wallet's balance. Thus sharing a wallet's address means sharing the whole wallet's data. Even using a proxy wallet would not hide the pattern of expenditure thus potentially revealing where the Bitcoins are being spent. Is there a way to be able to receive payments in Bitcoin, yet keep the balance concealed?


texts: Restoring private key from old bitcoin wallet

texts:
I have old bitcoin wallet with some (not very huge) amount (last transaction was on 2014). It was created in Multibit (Classic, I guess, then I had old computer with old OS). Now I have new device, system and wallet, and want to restore old [wallet] to send bitcoin to the new one. I know, I need a private key, so I imported old wallet (it's watch-only wallet right now) in Bitcoin Core with rescan and next try to do like this guy -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ev33XGCH8M, however, after putting "dumpprivkey"-command in console, it says "the private key for this address is not known".
That's what I don't understand (interesting, though), b'cause I remember I've backuped it and hold those files for all those years on my USB stick, but now they're completely unusefull. :(
How can I resolve this problem? Anyone knows?


texts:
I've read all the relevant BIPs, and am still confused.

Are segwit enabled blocks stripped of witness data and marker and flag bytes when they are propagated to non-segwit peers? Or are they just serialized in such a way as to ignore the those bytes?

It is my understanding that blocks containing segwit transactions may have the witnesses, flag, and version bytes in them, or may not - depending on where that block is being propagated from. If it is coming from a non-segwit node, the transactions will be stripped. However, what happens when a stripped-witness block then reaches a Segwit-enabled node? How will it know that those transactions are actually segwit and are just missing the relevant data? Do they compare the txid's to txids in their cache and fill in the data?

Follow up question: what is the process/flow for individual transaction messages? Do their contents also depend on what type of node is asking for them?


texts: Why are m-of-n transactions not used today?

texts:
BIP 11 supports m-of-n transactions. While BIP 16 and BIP 17 are being debated and voted upon, I have to ask: why haven't there been evidence of BIP 11 used in for m-of-n transactions?

All that BIP 16 and BIP 17 do is shift the cost to the recipient. This is healthy for the long term cost structure, but it doesn't mean that BIP 11 style m-of-n transactions aren't usable today, does it?

Have it been used somewhere and I just don't know about it? Or is the current protocol not usable for m-of-n transactions?

See also this question about BIP 12, 16 and 17.


texts: How to calculate DGB-Groestl difficulties?

texts:
I'm new here.
I want to know how mining difficulties are calculated, specifically for DGB-Groestl, which uses Myriad-Groestl algorithm.

I might understand how to calculate the Bitcoin difficulties from this post but having hard time to calculate difficulties for other algos. I hope someone could help. What are the details/data that I need to calculate and what is its formula.

Thanks in advance to all. :)


texts: Is a smart phone wallet (i.e. Mycelium) safer than leaving BTC on an online exchange like Coinbase?


texts: Why are the inputs of Bitcoin transactions signed?

texts:
This is my understanding of what a transaction looks like:

inputs:
  input0:
    txid: <funding tx0 TXID>
    outputID: <output ID of UTXO in the funding tx0>
    scriptSig: <pkhash_redeemer> <sig0_redeemer>
  input1:
    txid: <funding tx1 TXID>
    outputID: <output ID of UTXO in the funding tx1>
    scriptSig: <pkhash_redeemer> <sig1_redeemer>
  ...
outputs:
  output0:
    scriptPK: <scriptPK for new UTXO>
    amount: <amount for new UTXO>

Where the signature <sig_redeemer0> is over:

<funding tx0 TXID>
<output ID of UTXO in the funding tx0>
funding transaction's Pub Key Script
<scriptPK for new UTXO>
<amount for new UTXO>

I've read much that states things along the lines of: "the signature is over the entire transaction" or "the signature signs all the inputs and outputs". However, there are a few points of confusion I have:

Do multiple inputs necessitate multiple signatures? Or is my example wrong?
Why do we need to sign the inputs of the transaction?

If the inputs aren't signed, that means the following are left unsigned:

txid of funding transaction
<output ID of UTXO in the funding tx>
sequence number (?)

If all outputs are signed, the amounts and scriptPubKeys of all UTXOs from funding transactions are fixed. An attacker might be able to change the inputs to the redeeming tx, but they are only unlockable if the inputs remain the same, so an attacker can't use an arbitrary input.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks


texts: Bitcoin Binary Options - What are they and is it a Scam?

texts: I recently came across Bitcoin Binary Options. I didn't really understand what Binary Options mean, is this like actual Bitcoin trading or is it one more scam I need to avoid ?


texts:
First I am not trying to open a bank but I have a core i3 3210 @ 3.20 GHz and a gt 210(pretty bad).I know I am late at mining so I thought of alt coins,like people who invested in bitcoin first, now they would have returned with a greater result.I bet you gotta agree with me like some more coins Monero,Zcash,Etherium,Dash.
These coins were also worth nothing as the time went by, they are crushing the crypto currency mining.My computer can't mine any of these.
No one one knows what another coin can get in the market.I looked up on coinsmarketcap recently added coins and found Votecoin which is at is acceptable state (November 2017).All I wanted it to mine some VOT(votecoins) but I really can't get it to work most of the miners are for CUDA 7.5 or 8.0.Although I cannot even get a cpu miner.It uses Equihash algorithm, would be fine for my old system at lease 2 -5 coins a day right now.just think as I think if getting 150 VOT(votecoins) with my current rig and after months or even 1 - 2 years like bitcoin it at least be the worth of 25$.But in this meantime if I mine Monero or Dash I won't be near the revenue I will in an investment like this.People with mining rig's and good Cards get instant results but what about the people who don't have equipment's but can mine and wait for a great revenue
Plz someone just help me out, it will go a long way down.I am at a point now to lose all the hope I got as a crypto currency enthusiast, neither of the software recognizes my GPU but for VOT which is currently 2 cents per coin.All I want is a satisfaction I have some coins in my wallet at his point.Even getting 1 really 1 coin in 10 hrs is enough for my satisfaction now.
Please even a cpu miner is accepted for me.
more specifically,

How do I mine Votecoins using my Cpu Even

or if you the answer of this

How do I mine Vote coin with my GPU
Cpu Miner for equihash algorithm

I do not want any answers like it is not profitable.At this stage I am not looking to profit but to satisfy my heart.


texts: Discrepancy Between Nonce for Single Block

texts:
I'm looking at nonce data from blockchain.info for block #1 ( https://blockchain.info/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048 ) and it shows a nonce value of 2573394689 However when I take a look at blockcypher.com ( https://api.blockcypher.com/v1/btc/main/blocks/1 ) they report a nonce value of 2083236893 for the first block.

Is this a mistake? Is it possible for there to be a conflict in the true nonce? When I check block #2 both sites show the exact same nonce.


texts: are there other sites similiar to coinbase and circle.com

texts: does anyone know of any other bitcoin wallet sites that offer the same instant usd to bitcoin exchange services, such as coinbase and circle.com? I must also be able to withdraw instantly to a linked bank account or credit card too. if anyone knows of a bitcoin site with same services as coinbase and circle.com for usa residents,please respond back. thank you


texts: What really happen when user moves fund between Main Account and Trading Account in HitBTC?

texts:
I am building a crypto exchange and I wonder how HitBTC exchange (https://hitbtc.com/) is handling "Main account" and "Trading account", as the image below:

According to them, Main Account is like cold wallet, while Trading Account is like hot wallet. Storing your fund in Main Account (cold wallet) will be safer to your fund.

Now, let's talk about definition of cold wallet and hot wallet. Cold wallet means private key is stored offline, while hot wallet means private key is stored online.

So, am I correct that, when user store his fund in "Trading Account", what really happens is, HitBTC moves private key of that particular user's wallet to an online server? And when the user moves the fund to "Main Account", what really happens is, HitBTC remove the private key from online server and store it in online offline servers?

If yes, then how can HitBTC, when necessary, moves private key from offline server to online server, without making the offline server online?


texts: How do I send bitcoin to multiple recipients at once? Like this. Also, I would like to know if the reason I see people do this is for privacy reasons? As when I sell items online they usually send the btc to multiple recipients at once.


texts: Do I have to buy a full bitcoin to get the price increase?

texts: If I buy half a bitcoin at $500 and the value of a bitcoin goes up to $1000, does that mean I earn 1 bitcoin or do I have to buy a full bitcoin to get the price increase? How does it work? Please give me some examples.


texts: Is there an efficient and secure way to transmit bitcoins over shortwave radio?

texts: This experiment by CBC that used chirp over the radio to transmit a wallet seed tickled my interest. Of course this isn't secure. And it's also inconvenient to create the wallet from the seed. What's a better way to do this in a practical way? Chirp is very accessible and convenient. Shortwave radio has a decent range, some distance over the sea.


texts: Are there counterparty nodes that one can run to support the counterparty network?

texts:
Does counterparty have its own set of nodes to keep its service up?
Is it pow or pos system? Or is this just a centralized service?
What was the purpose of it burning bitcoins to generate their own counter party tokens when its somewhat centralized?


texts: Why can I only see the balance of my wallet and not the one of each of my receiving addresses? (Multibit)

texts:
I have some troubles to understand the logic behing addresses and wallets. I use Multibit to manage my BTC. I have one wallet with 5 receiving addresses. I have transfered from an exchange website 0.1BTC to each of my receiving address. So Multibit indicates that my wallet balance is 0.5BTC (to simplify, I don't include the transaction fees).
So far so good.

What I don't get is why I can't see  in multibit the balance of each of my receiving addresses seperatly, like:

A1 = 0.1
A2 = 0.1
A3 = 0.1
A4 = 0.1
A5 = 0.1

If I got it right, it's because now the 0.5BTC aren't anylonger tied up to the receiving address I sent them to but only to my wallet. This would mean that it is useless for me to send money from my wallet to a A1 for example to get this new balance...

A1 = 0.3
A2 = 0.1
A3 = 0.1
A4 = 0
A5 = 0

...because it would be exactly the same as the total balance of my wallet would still be 0.5BTC. But this doesn't seems right because blockchain track the amount of transaction per addresses.

But then why can't I choose from which "receiving" address out of the 5 I have, I want to take the money of when I sent BTC? Multibit only ask me the receiving address where I want to send the money to not the address where it takes the money of. Who get to choose which  sender address will be kept in the blockchain?

This is really confusing! Thanks for your help!


texts: Can I trace Website Addresses that a Bitcoin wallet has passed through?

texts:
first time posting here.

Please help. I have a BTC wallet address, and I would like to know to which websites/IP addresses this BTC wallet has been used to. Something like If I use this BTC wallet address on a certain website, can it be traced?

Thank you in advanced!


texts: How are blockchain addresses pre-existent?

texts:
I read the following statement somewhere on the web:
"Every blockchain address possible already existed, long before a wallet found it. The reason is that blockchain addresses are the result of a mathematical operation."
Can somebody explain this to me as they would to a child. I have no computer science background.


texts: Which BIP describes the structure and algorithm for creating a wallet file?

texts:
My app is able to create a public and private key from BIP39. The uncompressed private key is concatenated with a sha256 (private key) and then encrypted via AES and saved to a file. To decrypt, you will need to decrypt the entire file, then take a hash from the first order of bytes and compare with the second half.

I plan to add support for BIP32, 43, 44 and am already working on it, but I am faced with the issue of storing information for creating backup.

My way of creating a file is not suitable, so I’m wondering if there is a ready-made BIP to solve this problem.


texts: Synchronizing with network – What does it mean?

texts:
The messages:

synchronizing with network
xxx blocks remaining

what does that mean?


texts:
I want to use a mixing service and I was wondering what is the right way of using it.

I have some funds in my wallet (associated with a Bitcoin Address).

Should I generate a new address in my bitcoin client (this address would be picked up from my keypool itself right now). And after generating the address, I provide this address as the receiving address (for withdraw) to the mixing service?

Second case. Let's say I want to purchase something online using my bitcoins, like dedicated hosting service or something similar. The merchant wants me to send them the Bitcoins to their bitcoin address, but if I go through the mixing service for this purpose, it would take a very long time and transactions with merchants have to be completed fast.

In cases of mixing services like bitcoinfog, the minimum time interval is 6 hours after which the withdraw process starts.

So, what is the right way of using the mixing service?


texts:
Bitcoin core v0.19.0.1 automatically prunes. I keep loosing the blockchain. How can I stop this?

I went into preferences and I de-selected the pruning. I also added the line prune=0 to bitcoin.conf. And in spite of all that when I booted my computer after a power outage Bitcoin Core desktop pruned my copy of the blockchain. At first when I booted my Mac Bitcoin Core showed me a screen asking me for the filesystem location for Bitcoin. I had to mount the USB external disk and enter its encryption password. As soon as I confirmed the file location it took it upon itself to prune. This problem is not limited to power outages. When I upgrade to the next version of the software it prunes again. How can I put a stop this?


texts: Why did Bitcoin first start to gain economic value?

texts:
I am really having difficulty answering this:

  Why does a bitcoin have an economic value, such that there are people willing to
  trade US$ (or any other traditional currency) for these virtual numbers?

What did the creator of Bitcoin do at the start to give it economic value?


texts: I've recently reformatted my Mac, and reinstalled Hive. I have a back up to Dropbox option enabled in Hive, and my old bitcoin wallet file is there. But I cannot find any way to recover my old bitcoin wallet to my new installation. Being able to back up but not recover doesn't make much sense to me right now, can anyone help me with this process?


texts: How can I check the hash of a bitcoin block?

texts:
Let's pick an example bitcoin block: #499583

This is the block: https://insight.bitpay.com/api/rawblock/000000000000000000677c4077da7c9f01dde5f332ba2fbff962ee699714d5da

It starts with 00000020164a1e4a7f34b96b0e201d....

I'm trying to hash it so that the hash is 000000000000000000677c4077da7c9f01dde5f332ba2fbff962ee699714d5da again. This is my Javascript-Code:

var Bitcoin = require('bitcoinjs-lib');
var request = require('request');
var crypto = require('crypto');

function getRawBlock(blockHash) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    request('https://insight.bitpay.com/api/rawblock/' + blockHash, // hitting an insight API to get the full block
      (error, response, body) => {
        try {
          var block = JSON.parse(body); // result is in JSON
          resolve(block.rawblock)
        } catch (error) {
          reject(error)
        }
      })
  })
}

getRawBlock('000000000000000000677c4077da7c9f01dde5f332ba2fbff962ee699714d5da')
  .then((rawBlock) => {
    var hash = crypto.createHash('sha256').update(rawBlock).digest('hex');
     console.log(hash);
  })
})

But the result is 484cd10be70dbc7615dd9a71b1f91375b100715d9b2a0ecc6a05b9d247a8cda9.
What am I doing wrong? The result should be 000000000000000000677c4077da7c9f01dde5f332ba2fbff962ee699714d5da. Do I hash something in the wrong format?


texts:
Bitcoin enthusiast here. Learning "the hard way" how bitcoin works (andreas books, looking in js/python implementations), I'm writing (as an hobby) some code here and there to understand things and to test it, I'm using the tests available on the bitcoin github repo. But now, I'm struggling with the ones on the sighash.json file.

What is the encoding format used for the raw transactions ? (first element on each array).

I understand the traditional format which looks like 0100000000010280e688...000ffffffffe9b54...39da98ac00000000. But here I'm honestly lost. On the tests file, it doesn't look like a regular transaction.

Example:

907c2bc503ade11cc3b04eb2918b6f547b0630ab569273824748c87ea14b0696526c66ba74020000004ab65ababfd1f9bdd4ef073c7afc4ae00da8a66f429c917a0081ad1e1dabce28d373eab81d8628de802000000096aab5253ab52000052ad042b5f25efb33beec9f3364e8a9139e8439d9d7e26529c3c30b6c3fd89f8684cfd68ea0200000009ab53526500636a52ab599ac2fe02a526ed040000000008535300516352515164370e010000000003006300ab2ec229

How am I supposed to decode such string ?

Thanks.


texts: What is the largest password/passphrase size for a wallet.dat file?

texts:
Suppose your wallet.dat file is copied to the wild.

I am working on methods for creating very strong (512bits, hopefully much more) passphrases that would make it unfeasible to either use rainbow tables or to try brute force it.

Ideally, even if:

i) one's passphrase is simple; and
ii) the wallet.dat file is copied...

...an adversary would have to employ giant computing power to try to unlock it.

Since I couldn't get it from the documentation, I wonder if anyone knows how large (in, say, bytes) a passphrase/password can be.

related question: How does the Bitcoin client encrypt the wallet.dat file?


texts: Most of the Bitcoin exchanges, are they using 3rd party API like blockchain.info or running their own node?

texts: I'd like to know how the bitcoin exchanges work. It's not about big exchanges like binance or bittrex. I'd like to know people could make an exchange solely relay on third party apis and are they safe ?


texts: I tried to use bitcoin to buy ethereum and failed, what will happen now?

texts:
I tried to use some at the shifty exchange in the ethereum app, just for research. I sent money to the provided payment adress, but I think I included a to small fee.

My payment is now uncofirmed and in shifty the deal is expired, What will happen now with the bitcoin etc?


texts: How can one download the initial Blockchain data files securely?

texts: I see several sources for binary downloads of the Bitcoin blockchain.  Can any of these be used securely?


texts: How was the overflow bug of 2010 detected? Should UINT64_MAX value transactions be considered suspicious?

texts:
The overflow bug of 2010 was a result of a client that summed two values together and reaching INT64_MAX instead of UINT64_MAX.

Should transactions of INT64_MAX (or any similar constant) be treated with suspicion?
How was the overflow bug of 2010 detected?
Are there provisions in place for similar, future large transactions that may involve larger sums?  (128 bit values (if possible in the network))


texts: Confused by the term: trading partners. And how to convert more fringe currencies back to bitcoin

texts:
Two questions:

I am confused by the term: trading partners like BTC/ETH, etc.
I'm into some more of the fringe currencies, IOTA, and SAN. Bought them with bitcoin on bitfinex, how to convert back? Seems to be a one-way street. Am I stuck?


texts: Using bitcoind, is it possible to set a specific fee with sendtoaddress?

texts: For example, setting the fee to exactly 1000 sats or 300 sat/kw?


texts:
In the context of the Drivechain proposal, for UTXOs in miner-controlled escrows to be spent, they have to be voted on by each block over a large number of blocks, right?

Now, how are these votes made and where are they computed? I think the votes are somehow written in the block coinbase, but how exactly? It's not like there's much space there. And then each full node has to keep a table of what transaction has how many votes and verify against that whenever a transaction is included in the block?


texts:
I'm almost new in Bitcoin / crypto currency world.

I know that "old" coin like Bitcoin and others (for old i mean 2-3-4 years), when you want to mine there is a difficulty variable to considerer.

My question is: if i put my CPU (or my low computational GPU) to try to mine, can I except to be "lucky" and mine ..something ?
My question is : is there also a "Lucky" factor to consider when you try to mine cryptocurrency, or .. it is only a cpu/gpu power matter ?

Thanks


texts: Are there alternatives to Bitcoin which take a different approach?

texts:
Are there any alternative approaches to decentralized, electronic currencies?

Bitcoin was built with certain technical characteristics in mind. I'm hoping to see if there are alternative approaches. I don't mean things like Namecoin or other adaptations of the blockchain concept.


texts: Are there bitcoin exchanges that do not require an extensive verification process?

texts: Are there bitcoin exchanges that do not require an extensive verification process to begin trading? I do not want to submit forms on MtGox.


texts: How do bitcoin qt sign signature/messages work?

texts:
In bitcoinQT what is the sign message for? I'm not exactly sure what I can use this for.

can someone give an example of how this would be used in a layman way? nothing too technical please.
also those this message only reside on your computer or your wallet file?
so it doesnt go into the blockchain?


texts: In concrete terms, how do I start using Lighting Network right now?

texts:
I have Bitcoin Core installed on Windows and it's fully synced. I am able to send and receive Bitcoin payments.
I hate the fees and waiting, so I want to use Lightning Network.
I've spent countless hours of my life trying to figure this out, but as soon as I get to the part where I'm supposed to use it, I only find nonsense like this: https://docs.lightning.engineering/community-resources/resource-list
What does that page really say? I don't see any "Lightning Core" or anything which I can readily install and use.
What am I missing? What is the concrete step for me to take right now in order to enable me to send and receive Lightning Network payments on my computer which already has Bitcoin Core synced and ready?
Please answer clearly. I really want to use and support this thing, but I don't see anything but endless lists of seemingly unrelated software.


texts: Which version of the JSON-RPC protocol does Bitcoin use?

texts: I would like to get some clarification on which version  of the JSON-RPC protocol does Bitcoin use? 1.0 or 2.0?


texts: How do Bitcoin and Colored Coin react to malformed transactions?

texts:
I need some help to clarify Bitcoin and colored coin mechanics.

Are the assumptions below correct (and complete)?

If an error (maybe a fraud) is presented in a Bitcoin transaction, nodes (including the miner) reject this transaction and do not forward it to other nodes. This transaction will never be included in a valid block.
If an error (maybe a fraud) is presented in the "color code" (included after OP_RETURN) of a colored Bitcoin transaction, this is a legal Bitcoin transaction accepted by (non-colored) nodes and mined by a miner. But these colored transactions are verified, rejected and ignored by colored nodes and therefore they are forgotten by the colored coin network.

Thank you!


texts:
Some bitcoin transactions (especially CoinJoin transactions) include two or more sub-transactions. for example, consider a transaction with
Inputs = [2, 3, 4] and
Outputs = [4, 5].

In this example, we have two sub-transactions:
(2+3 = 5) & (4 = 4)
so it is a kind of subset sum problem but for 2 sets, inputs and outputs.

I want to know how to solve subset sum for this specific problem. I know it needs a brute force, but don't how to optimize it? I don't know how to run a brute force either.


texts: How do I get new unconfirmed transaction from mempool?

texts: I know there is a function that allows me to see all transactions that are in mempool, but is there a way to see every new transaction that enters mempool? Like log to file whenever new unconfirmed transaction enter mempool.


texts: Number of Trials Required For Brute Force Attack To Have x% Of Success?

texts:
I'm making an informational video about how unlikely it is for an attacker to successfully brute force a specific bitcoin address. Obviously, it will deal with impossibly huge numbers ("not in earth's lifetime with today's technology"), but I would like to include the number of trials required for an attacker to gain 1%, 50% and 90% confidence of success.

Normally I can get away with using Excel for statistical problems. However, Excel doesn't do really big numbers so I'm unable to calculate.

If I were to use Excel, I would use the below formula that tells me the chance of getting 0 successes in ???? trials. I would subtract the result from 1 and that % represents the possibility of success.

=1-BINOM.DIST(0,????,2^-160,TRUE)

For a simplified example of what I'm looking for: If I were to play a game with a 1% chance of winning, I would have about a 90% chance of 1 or more successful efforts after 250 trials, 50% chance after 70 trials, and 1% chance after 1 trial.

91.89%=1-BINOM.DIST(0,250,0.01,TRUE)

50.52%=1-BINOM.DIST(0,70,0.01,TRUE)

1.00%=1-BINOM.DIST(0,1,0.01,TRUE)

Can anyone calculate how many trials would be needed for 90%, 50%, and 1% possibility of success against a single bitcoin address? The possibility of landing the address correctly is 1 out of 2^160.

Kudos if you can do the math in your head.


texts: Can someone explain how does Bitshares market pegged assets work?

texts:
I'm reading up on Bitshares and they say they have market pegged assets that are linked to USD and Gold (BitUSD and BitGold)

They say it holds a stable price and fluctuates somehow to make sure you still have that exact value. What I'm assuming they mean is that if you have 100 BitUSD that is equal to $100 USD. And if BitUSD dropped in value to say $90, your bitUSD will fluctuate to 110 or something to compensate the change. So the coins/asset are the #'s that are actually moving not the value.

Now the question I have is say if you have 1000 BitUSD and you want to cash out to USD. Who is going to be the one giving you actual dollars? Sure if you put in $1000 USD and purchased 1000 BitUSD. Say if you wanted to sell that 1000BitUSD now, who is going to buy that back from u at $1000?

This is what I'm confused about on the Market Pegged Assets.


texts: I'm in the UK, how to fund my account at mtgox?

texts: It is getting ridiculously hard to get bitcoins in the U.K. International wires are to expensive, my bank doesn't support SEPA. I'm seriously thinking about converting ukash vouchers to cash u account, funding okpay with that. Then using that option at mtgox. There must be easier way.


texts: Logical flow to check for receipt of a bitcoin payment

texts:
I'm experimenting with writing some Bitcoin software in Node.JS using the node-bitcoin lib to talk directly to my own bitcoind via JSON-RPC, and I am trying to work out the best-practice way to recognise when a bitcoin payment has been received by an address.

The only way I can really think of doing is is as follows:

a recipient provides the Bitcoin address they wish to receive payment to (presumes they have their own wallet already - else I could generate one for them)
My webpage generates a QR code in the proscribed format for a user's smartphone wallet app to scan.
The user scans the QR code and sends payment via their wallet app
I then assumed I could poll getreceivedbyaddress with the recipient's address until the transactions showed up, but the docs explicitly state that this:

  Works only for addresses in the local wallet, external addresses will always show 0.

So I assume the solution is to generate a new receiving address for the recipient rather than let them provide their own receiving address. Ideally in this situation I'd generate a new receiving address for each sale the recipient makes.

Then I can easily poll getreceivedbyaddress, analyse the raw transaction when I see it come in, and, assuming it all makes sense, ping a web-socket event to the webpage telling it to close the QR code and spit out a formal receipt.

Does that make sense or is there a preferred way to do this?


texts: Is it a problem that miners participate in a pools?

texts:
I am talking about miners centralization with large pools. Is it a problem?

I think there are some possible ways to prevent miners from pooling. For example add miner signature to the block header, so pool will not be able to disclosure their private key to outsource calculations. Miners should use something like insurance instead of pooling.


texts: Can you detect that the addresses generated by an HD wallet came from a single wallet?

texts:
Can someone who is looking at the blockchain detect that 2 or more addresses generated by a single HD wallet are actually generated by that single seed/HD wallet ?

Can someone who does know that 2 or more addresses came from a single HD wallet derive the seed or any keys ?

I'm using Bitpay's Copay app on Windows 10 mobile.
It's an HD wallet and it holds several addresses with a bitcoin balance.
As I understand it a HD wallet generates new addresses from an initial seed which I have backed up.

Out of curiosity I transferred some bits to a new receiving address generated by the same wallet, and I noticed the wallet UI says I "moved" the bits, not "sent" or "received" them.
I assume this is just the wallet being smart and letting me know the bits came from this same wallet, but this brings me to the question of, have I just linked these three (including change) addresses together for anyone on the blockchain to see ?


texts: What happens if I receive a payment after deleting the payment request

texts: I just started with Bitcoin using Multibit HD. I clicked request payment and sent the address to someone. I then deleted the request. What happens if bitcoin is sent to this address? Will it just appear in the payments window?


texts: Is there a help file for the bitcoin client?

texts:
Is there a help file / man page that explains all the possible commands and arguments for the bitcoin daemon?

I'm looking for an in-depth coverage of the commands seen when I do bitcoind help.


texts: How will a massive increase in hashpower affect orphan rates?

texts:
Difficulty always lags behind a little. It is also limited in how large adjustments it makes each time. What if the (global) hashrate doubles overnight? What if it quadruples?

How much can we expect the orphan rate to go up? By orphans I mean blocks on a block chain fork other than the main chain (longest chain).

How large would the losses then be for PPS pools and other pools that pay for orphaned work, before the difficulty catches up?

What about a solo miner? What about P2pool? In both cases many of the miners may not be well connected to other block generating nodes on the bitcoin peer-to-peer network.

Perhaps there is useful information available from alt coins that have gone through something similar or just have a higher rate of block generation.

The question is of course motivated by the imminent shipment of ASIC-based mining equipment with hashpower that will dwarf anything seen so far. If you do an estimate, feel free to use any numbers you feel are realistic. I have no idea what amount of ASICs are currently going into production. The question could also apply to next generation ASICs, quantum computing or weaknesses that may be found in the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.


texts: Why do so many Bitcoin websites have such bad reviews

texts: I'm very interested in starting out trading with a cryptocurrency but I've noticed every single website seems to have a low Trustpilot rating, full of one stars claiming the website is fraudulent etc. Is this just a common, untrue thing amongst Bitcoin trading sites?


texts: Is there an easy way to estimate the number of mining nodes?

texts:
I was curious about the number of mining nodes on the network, yet I haven't seen it discussed.
I tried two different approaches to approximate the count of mining nodes. I looked up the hashrate of the fastest hashing machine (which appears to be the Antminer S19 Pro at 110Th/seconds) and compared its projected mining profit with the total mining reward.
A profitability calculator estimates that I'd earn 0.2911 Bitcoin per year with the device running 24/7/365. This means that at 6.25 bitcoin per block, I contributed to solving 0.0465 block in 1 year. If the network used only these machines, then I estimate 55,000 blocks / 0.0465 blocks per mining node = 1,182,795 mining nodes. This is the lower bound, the minimum number of mining nodes on the system.
Now, my other assumption is that the network difficulty is equivalent to the average weighted hashrate of the sum of all mining nodes on the network (time frame is probably smoothed here). If the current, March 18 2021, network difficulty is 21.6 Th/seconds, then the same calculator calculates that my device would earn 0.0572 Bitcoin in 1 year. Using the same calculation, I get 55,000/(1/(6.25/.0572)) = 6,009,615 mining nodes.
These two numbers are quite a bit apart. Is there a better way to estimate the mining node count?


texts: Paper wallet creation, how safe is this approach?

texts:
I would like to create several paper wallets for different crypto currencies. Now I've read through a lot of manuals and I tried to install this Ubuntu version on a USB stick which I wanted to boot on my Mac computer. However after several tries I was still unsuccessful. So how safe would it be to:

Download all key generators, so I can use them offline
Disconnect from the internet
Generate the keys offline (in the "private" mode of Safari)
Not saving anything but directly connecting my computer to my printer via cable and print out the paper wallet
Delete all temporary files on my computer and on the printer
Reboot Mac
Only then connect again to the internet

Is this anyhow unsafe? Can someone intercept anything like this? Or find still some cached file or something after I connect back to the internet?


texts: Do I need to pay fees for the transactions from my full node?

texts:
I have a full node running right now.
I've created a wallet on my server. Do I need to define any transaction fees while transferring my coins to another wallet? lets say to a wallet on blockchain.info?

Thanks.


texts: What would be required to disincentivize mining pools?

texts: Now that mining pools are starting to hit the 51% cusp of total mining power, what would need to happen to the Bitcoin protocol to reduce their success, and encourage distributed mining power over pools?


texts: Getwork and GetMemoryPool - why is previous block hash different?

texts:
When I called:

print bitcoin.getmemorypool()
print bitcoin.getwork()

using Python JSON for a testnet BitcoinQT server, I got the following responces:

{'previousblockhash': '00000000032e361b246e96c4e594523b6ff42bc0527e560f203fb20a08a86185', 'transactions': ..., 'version': 1, 'coinbasevalue': 5000400000, 'time': 1329342730, 'bits': '1c2336a4'}
{... 'data': '0000000108a86185203fb20a527e560f6ff42bc0e594523b246e96c4032e361b000000004c50804820b143e1583c8c49dd43a6ddb8bc777c57c2da4a92b39ee0e709bf504f3c290b1c2336a400000000000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000080020000', ...}

Comparing the previous block hash from GetMemoryPool and one extracted from the block header from Getwork:

00000000 032e361b 246e96c4 e594523b 6ff42bc0 527e560f 203fb20a 08a86185
08a86185 203fb20a 527e560f 6ff42bc0 e594523b 246e96c4 032e361b 00000000

From what I can see, the data is reversed in chunks of 4 bytes. Why is such a procedure done, and what other fields from those two RPC calls undergo such an operation?


texts: What will happen when nLockTime is used along with Counterparty transactions

texts:
I heard that Counterparty cannot handle lock time, but I cannot understand why.

What will happen when we use nLockTime in a transaction which includes Counterparty transactions?


texts: Libbitcoin How to generate addresses on demand from xpub?

texts:
Well, I am really new to this. Just installed libbitcoin and I am reading trough the wiki and everything.
Could someone really quick hint me how to generate addresses whenever I want from xpub that was exported from Electrum wallet? And/or Ledger wallet - if someone knows?
I know that it can be done in bitcoin core, however I would like to give libbitcoin a try.
Thank you very much.


texts: How do I restore a wallet from a backup file in MultiBit HD when you have the words and cloud backup?

texts:
I have read this: How do I restore a wallet from a backup file in MultiBit HD?

and have the words and mbhdxxxx.aes files in my cloud storage and the wallet password....

but the next button is not enabled when I enter the words:

update
I have had multibit before the hd client. I have a file like

  mbhd-8a659fc1-9acd420e-b2127154-b924c146-3f974bab-20150825115221.zip.aes

in the cloud and have found a file like

  mbhd-20160630143523.wallet.aes

I have used decrypt_bitcoinj_seed from github and entered my password and got 12 words to restore. The python script did not work with the long and older filename but did work with the short one. But when I have the words and try to recover it says: no datestamp found. When I use the words to continue and select a folder containing the old long file names it does proceed but with errors. I feel that I am getting closer. But I could use some pointers from people who have more experience with multibit hd and recovery.

I did found a folder in a backup on an external hdd which seems to work, but then I got:

I have had 2 wallets now in Multibit. I have selected the old one and waiting an eternity for the sync to finish. I have now my old wallet value as unconfirmed.
How can I fix this? I have read this. but there is no repair... only recover.


texts: Bitcoind lose the latest blocks when synchronize

texts:
I've the latest version of Bitcoin-qt (bitcoin.org 0.15.1). My problem is I lose info about latest blocks with delay about 3-5 minutes. When my GUI or bitcoind started sometimes for a short time I get this warning in debug.log:

  2017-12-26 19:42:52 Timeout downloading block
  000000000000000000594fca8fc2e2e6f7baff5ac96a10d94f33ae3b0f4e1971 from
  peer=12, disconnecting

After that I lose latest new blocks for a while, and the easier way is restart bitcoind.

Is it could be because of that my ports is not forwarding and I have only 8 connections? What means this warning, I can't google it?


texts: Is there a way to pay my credit card balance with bitcoins?

texts:
So imagine that I have 200 USD on my credit card balance from a bunch of small purchases and bar drinks and tips that I want to pay using bitcoins.

I know that I can but gift cards from gyft or do online purchases using joinsnapcard. But If I invite a round on my local non-bitcoin-friendly bar, I want to pay with bitcoin anyways (even I I use credit card system as proxy)

Is there any service that does that for me?

Edit 2017-07-27:  There is a debit card that can be funded with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin (via Coinbase) called ShiftCard https://www.shiftpayments.com/

Thanks,
Nico


texts: What happens when moving BTC from one wallet to another on blockchain.info with 0 fee?

texts: i just tried to move some btc between wallets on blockchain.info with 0 fees and I'm getting this: http://prntscr.com/2bmay9  --- it shows 0 btc but says its moved. what happen here? its been over 24 hours already.


texts: If I connect to a specific DogeCoin Node, is it possible to determine the transactions that originate at that node?

texts:
I would like to know if it is possible to determine what transactions are originating at a specific node, assuming that I am connected to only that node.

This post applies to Bitcoin and DogeCoin as well.


texts: I sent money to myself with Bisq, but I have not recieved it?

texts:
I sent money to my own wallet address, from my wallet on Bisq.
I did not receive the money, even though the payment is completed and has a check mark. In transaction, it shows just a withdrawn, without a received funds transaction.
I have not received the amount I sent to myself.
The reason I did it was to reset the wallet address for privacy (they don't let you get a new address without using it).


texts: Many coins have dynamic block reward over the time, for example Bitcoin was 50BTC/block years ago and now 25BTC. My question is how is it defined in the source code ? I searched in Litecoin's source code but found nothing... Is it done manually by releasing a new version each xxxx blocks ?


texts:
When I do createmultisig in bitcoin core, I get the redeemscript as output. I of course want to save this information, but can I put this in my regular database or do I need to take extra precaution with the redeemScript?

In Short: Should I treat the redeem script as a private key, public key, or address hash (what level of security/and do i need to treat it with). This is from a "if it get stolen" perspective. What is the worst thing someone can do with a redeemScript?


texts: Could bitcoin "survive" a definitive hard fork, spawning a new currency?

texts:
What happens if two different groups have a definitive disagreement about the evolution of the bitcoin protocol? I have read is several places that the "majority" somehow would win, but is this really true, or could two different branches (A and B) of the blockchain (now tree) survive indefinitely in parallel?

I imagine that since the coins can be spent twice, once in each branch, they would somehow have their effective value halved. Suppose I'm a supporter of branch B, I would want to sell the A versions of my coins to buy more B-coins. The exact exchange ratio between the two new type of coins would depends on the relative size of the two communities. Is this scenario plausible, or is it economically unstable?


texts: Change port 8333 to other. (Running multiple docker instances)

texts:
My question is:

can I change port 8333 on the network connection to any other port (8334 f.e.) without making my node "blind" to the other peers in the network? Will it still sync/push transaction data?

The core of this question is that I want to run multiple docker node instances on a single VM, with docker ports mapped to local ports.

node1 (:8333 -> :8333)

node2 (:8334 -> :8334)

...


texts: What SIGHASH flags are used when constructing a CoinJoin transaction?


texts: Why I am not seeing received money in my electrum?

texts:
The manual said that it will show up on history.

Status: 0/unconfirmed, broadcast through 4 nodes
Date: 10/26/2015 18:21
To: 19pHw8gbRP596CbiDdjNQbBrddAgQJ8pK2
Debit: -0.00956976 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00043024 BTC
Net amount: -0.01000000 BTC
Transaction ID: e816ada72c9b8940a67779825423bc473e3059fb5f9f5aab9d09ee19c636fa23-000

It didn't show up. Not even pending.

And I think I got the right address

Update: Transaction details changed. Now I got 71 confirmation. Still no money on electrum

e816ada72c9b8940a67779825423bc473e3059fb5f9f5aab9d09ee19c636fa23-000

Is there a refresh button or something? Is my electrum doesn't work.


texts: Difference between Bitcoin versions 0.1 and 0.2

texts:
Does anybody know what the difference is between Bitcoin versions (0.1) and (0.2)?
I need to know this because I am doing a school project about the future of Bitcoin.


texts:
Does the transaction fee of bitcored or bitcoind change everyday?

Am I required to set transaction fee of bitcoind by using settxfee method?


texts: How to measure profit and losses in bitcoin investment?

texts:
If I buy BTC at $1,200 and then sell it at $1,500 it is clear that I have made a profit of $300 minus the exchange fee. If I keep buying BTC at the same price over and over, and the price keeps increasing, I can measure all my gains in a similar way: just subtracting the current rate minus the price I have bought the BTC at. However, how can I measure profit or losses when buying BTC at different prices?

For example, say I bought 1 BTC at $1,200 and then 1 BTC at $1,500. If I sell 1 of these 2 BTC at $2,000, what buying price should I measure this sell against, $1,200 or $1,500, to calculate my profit. Maybe an average or weighted average of the prices? Am I missing something basic?


texts: How safe is sending out transactions using unconfirmed inputs for a service?

texts:
I've been running into problems with a high-traffic hot wallet, where a single transaction would lock up any input for a block with the spendzeroconfchange disabled.

Would it be safe for a service like Coinbase to use unconfirmed inputs on average transactions? Would I run into similar issues like MtGox did?


texts: What is the significance of the version byte in front of RIPEMD-160 hash?

texts: Public Address is generated from the private key following some steps. Please refer Bitcoin wiki to see the process.


texts: Is there a difference in buying coins with bitcoin or etherum?

texts:
So today I decided to throw my hat into the ring and bought some stellar lumen coins.  Since bittrex is not currently accepting new accounts I decided to go with poloniex.

Poloniex doesnt offer lumen in their etherum market so I had to buy it with bitcoin, is there a difference when buying (any currency/token) with bitcoin or etherum?

I am still very new to the Cryptocurrency scene so any information would be greatful


texts: Blockchain vs. Banks: which one has more affordable transaction fees?

texts: Maybe one of the issues researchers are trying to solve in blockchain protocols like Bitcoin or Ethereum is removing / decreasing "transaction fees". However, if we compare blockchain transaction fee with traditional centralized bank protocols (Visa or MasterCard) which one has more affordable transaction fee? (Or which one is more expensive? blockchain (bitcoin/Ethereum)? or Visa/MasterCard?)


texts: Does bitcoin-core software/client connects with only same version number nodes?

texts:
i am trying to connect to maximum number of nodes.

i noticed there are many receive version message in debug.log file

so i have question, does the bitcoin-core connects to only those having either same version number or in short range of version message of our bitcoin's version message ?

or does it connects to all and any nodes which completes the handshake ?


texts: What exactly would need to be added to Bitcoin to support Zerocoin?

texts:
I have read some information about Zerocoin, but not the actual paper.

My question is - what exactly would need to be added to Bitcoin full nodes in order to implement it?

Just the special "zerocoin mint" and "zerocoin spend" transactions? Are they some special, non-standard transactions?


texts: What defines a Buy vs a Sell record in the trading time series of an exchange? In any trade there is always someone selling and someone buying... So what defines a particular trade as Buy or Sell?


texts: How to find the private key of blockchain wallet?

texts: How to find the private key of blockchain wallet of this address 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM


texts: How can I buy Bitcoins with Australian Dollars?

texts: Please! I just want to get them! How hard does it have to be? I've spent some 5 hours today trying to figure it out. I am in Australia.


texts: How to detect a race attack and re-spend the already-spent outputs?

texts:
My service automatically accepts, processes and sends payments to its users. It connects to bitcoind through its JSON-RPC API and makes use of the raw transactions interface.

What is going to happen in this case:

The service receives 3 payments by 3 different users.
All payments are included into the next block so they now have one confirmation.
Upon one confirmation, the service forms a new TX that spends these 3 outputs. The appropriate fee is attached. The TX is now valid but unconfirmed.
A few seconds later a double-spend attack in one of the TX's (now-spent) outputs comes in place.

As I find it hard to reproduce the scenario above, my question is:

What is the best way for the service to detect this double-spending attack through the RPC API?
Once it detects the double-spending and realizes that the TX will never get confirmed, can it re-spend the same outputs (not including the one that has been double-spent) right away in the case of a race-attack?


texts: Testnet transaction - OPCODE MISSING OR NOT UNDERSTOOD error

texts:
I'm trying to broadcast a manually generated raw testnet transaction. I'm getting the following error from SmartBit: PUSH TRANSACTION ERROR: 16: MANDATORY-SCRIPT-VERIFY-FLAG-FAILED (OPCODE MISSING OR NOT UNDERSTOOD).

My raw transaction looks like this:

01000000
01
e6dc926ae5ffd4f6b83376c7df00136cd27284977714f3ab2295f0bb91e13547
00000000
8d
493046022100dc6c14b905647fc0efde3d37079853bb1cedbcdf2cfdecac6665a3b8b8b2395d022100b13412fae64c9b6341096acf3578d93ab450c23dd6361701ceb21cef6d80100201410404f89c713f44615ad5fdc16f1ef8628351a1cce79ee96130a0e4a6eb09d05278cef28cb002a6ad2ad53181b01d03f931538488a7a689d83684e54822305205d5ba
ffffffff
02
75a58c0600000000
1976a91413aa97d12703b051d9b670097bbf07e2cd78de6088ac
23ce010000000000
1976a914a9974100aeee974a20cda9a2f545704a0ab54fdc88ac
00000000

Assuming that the error indicates a problem with the scriptsig, breaking down the scriptSig, it looks like this:

49
30
46022100dc6c14b905647fc0efde3d37079853bb1cedbcdf2cfdecac6665a3b8b8b2395d022100b13412fae64c9b6341096acf3578d93ab450c23dd6361701ceb21cef6d80100201
41
04
04f89c713f44615ad5fdc16f1ef8628351a1cce79ee96130a0e4a6eb09d05278cef28cb002a6ad2ad53181b01d03f931538488a7a689d83684e54822305205d5ba

What am I doing wrong? The spender's address is: mhJwViAyjAdKoEFNPcX96zN2HxZpv69avm.

EDIT:
I dropped the extra 0x04 and adjusted the 1 byte public key length. I'm still getting the same error. ScriptSig looks like this now:

49
304502202c5a951bbfc185ffbe6c8b74f587a4c4b1afbf99ad2c95050c938dbecdf6bc4b022100a3594fa9168bc8030a73f8fa9d277fad1765ec06d71e378e8637df1e367d260f01
41
04f89c713f44615ad5fdc16f1ef8628351a1cce79ee96130a0e4a6eb09d05278cef28cb002a6ad2ad53181b01d03f931538488a7a689d83684e54822305205d5ba


texts: Raw Transaction Fee - 256: absurdly-high-fee error


texts: Analysis on the Block Chain for Dead Bitcoins

texts:
My understanding is that the blockchain is currently 6.5 GB in size and will continue growing at a fairly hefty rate. Has anyone attempted to analyze the blockchain to attempt to determine dead bitcoins? I'm interested in developing a probabilistic measure to label certain transactions as dead.

What's a good way of getting the raw data from the blockchain? I'd like to batter it with some R and Sage magic.


texts:
Can anyone give me the API details on how to access the prices quotes shown on home page of BTC-E.com.

the api link on the site does not provide details on how to access bid and ask prices.


texts: Can we avoid third party trust for mobile / desktop wallets with respect to lightning network channels?

texts:
Mobile and desktop wallets are nodes that are not connected 24/7 (when the application is closed, computer is powered off, etc...).

The fact that they are not connected 24/7 creates mainly one problem: if a fraudulent node closes a channel with you and sends an outdated CSV transaction, you won't see it and can't invalidate it in time if you don't launch your wallet periodicaly.

A solution to this problem is to send all your CSV transactions to a service (connected 24/7 to the blockchain) and trust him enough to broadcast theses transactions in case a fraudulent node decides to close one of your channels.

And you must really trust this service because if he is affiliated with the fraudulent node you either need to send him a higher fee than the value of the transaction or he will prefer to keep the fraudulent transaction.

The conclusion is that you can't trust such a service.

Is there an other solution to avoid having to trust a third party in such case?

One solution that have been found by the eclair android wallet is to forbid relaying or receiving payments (i.e. you can only send payments). That way an outdated transaction is always in defavor of the fraudulent node. This is obviously not satisfying if you want to have the full functionalities of the Lightning Network.


texts: Is there a logical reason to buy bitcoin for more than it costs to mine it?

texts:
For the sake of this question let's assume bitcoin was useful and had value beyond speculation.

Why would you ever buy bitcoin above mining price?

I have heard various estimates of what it costs to mine a bitcoin.

One answer on the topic on quoara suggests the electricity costs around 400$ (this is from late August 2017).

  Source:
  https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-mine-1-Bitcoin-in-the-US

Let's say with equipment investment and increased difficulty it now costs 1000$ or even 2000$ to mine a bitcoin.

Given that it is relatively cheap to mine bitcoin and there are even managed server solutions you can rent, is there any logical reason to buy bitcoins at a higher price, than they cost in production? Why are people mortgaging their houses in order to buy bitcoin at 17.000$ per coin when they could simply buy computers and electricity and pay only a fraction per coin?

Shouldn't the price of bitcoin be very closely tied to the price of producing bitcoin?


texts: Why will a miner verify the digital signature, instead of directly adding a transaction to the Merkle tree?

texts:
I am a complete noob to Bitcoin, and this question might seem obvious to some. But I can't seem to get my head around it. I read how the process of mining works - they select transactions, verify them, create a merkle tree, and then start creating nonces. I want to ask whether a miner can skip the part of verifying a transaction, and just take the transactions as they come, just add them and be done with it? That is, what part of the protocol prevents him from defuncting, in some sense?

Sorry if this is obvious.


texts: Specification of Transaction Inputs - Bitcoin vs Ripple

texts:
In Bitcoin, the transaction inputs (UTXOs) are specified as a tuple (transaction index, vout) since there is no notion of an account in the bitcoin system and the address (pointed to by vout) alone would not be sufficient. Instead transactions are primary entities.

Ripple on the other hand makes an account a primary entity with transactions changing the account balance. This makes it possible to specify the (account) address alone as an input to a transaction.

These are design decisions. What are the pros and cons of the two models? What was the motivation behind them?

Thank you.


texts: What happens to my bitcoins if lose my wallet file e.g. I suffer data loss and my computer is unrecoverable?

texts:
You run bitcoin as a service on your local computer.  What happens if this computer is compromised?  A corrupt/failed hard drive or theft leads to the machine being lost and unrecoverable, and my bitcoin details (addresses etc) are gone.  Do my bitcoins disappear into the ether?

i.e. What happens to my bitcoins if my wallet file is compromised/lost?


texts: A signature in secp256k1 is two 32 byte numbers. DER encoding a signature adds about 6-7 bytes.  It also needlessly complicates things (is DER encoding used anywhere else?).  In a transaction format that seems to try to squeeze every byte out, this is very strange to me.  Why not just use a 64 byte string to represent sigs instead?


texts: How do block explorer sites show information that is not available on Bitcoin Core?

texts:
As I understood in the following post How to get unspents for a specified bitcoin address?, we should use listunspent only on addresses that belong to our own wallet otherwise will return blank.

But let's take an example of blockchain.info or block.io. Once we type in an address - any address, even if we generate it manually (paper wallet, or algorithmically) - and transfer some BTCs, a search of the address in one of those explorers shows me the funds.

How can they possibly have information from this newly generated address?
How can they list the unspent transactions and the current amount of an address which "is not in their wallet"?


texts:
I have recently come across the features of ethereum and the idea of smart contracts.

I like the concept of smart contracts however as a currency, I much prefer the bitcoin to the ether.

Is there any way smart contracts could ever be utilised by bitcoin?


texts:
It is clear to me why it's potentially unsafe to only use a check on == in scriptPubKey. For one, not verifying a signature in the redeem script means that someone could impersonate the redeemer. From the Bitcoin developer guide:

  This lets the pubkey script verify that Bob owns the private key which created the public key.

  Bob’s secp256k1 signature doesn’t just prove Bob controls his private key; it also makes the non-signature-script parts of his transaction tamper-proof so Bob can safely broadcast them over the peer-to-peer network.

Why would it be unsafe to only use a check on V(sigA, pkA, m={txprev_txid, txprev_outid, txprev_scriptPK, tx_scriptPubKey, tx_amount}_skA) == 1? It seems like this is what we're doing in multisig. I.e., have a ScriptSig that consists only of (a) signature(s) instead of sig and pk like in P2PKH.

Why don't we just check signatures instead of checking both pkhash and a signature?


texts: Matching pushpool difficulty with stratum's

texts:
I have a new question for you.

I have setup the stratum mining proxy, and all is working fine. (Actually found our first block recently!)
However, I have pushpool running as well, and some of my users still use it based on preference.

How can I be assured that people that use stratum isn't getting more shares than those who's using pushpool? Is there a way to set the difficulty on stratum?
As of now i set the difficulty manually in pushpool's config file, with rpc.target.bits

Help is appriciated!


texts: Does a 2009 node sync the whole bitcoin blockchain

texts: So does a 2009 node sync the whole bitcoin blockchain and does the temporary split of 2013 have any impact on that?


texts: How easy is finding related vanity addresses?

texts: Is it easy to find out related vanity address '1googlex' if we already know '1google' vanity address pair, than through usual vanitygen iteration process? if yes, can this be extended further, like, '1googlexx', without exponentially increasing difficulty?


texts: Bitcoin core full node won't start on mac reboot!

texts:
I had been running bitcoin core qt for a few months fine and then on rebooting my mac and opening the application the following prompt popped up

  Error: Cannot parse configuration file: specified data directory ""/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/"" does not exist..

I'm a long way from being technically competent but I'm 99% sure the data directory does exist.

Any advice on what else this could be? or what I'm doing wrong?


texts: How do I change the default blockchain Database download location for NXT?

texts: I'm testing out the nxt client and was wondering how do i change the default database download location? Its currently downloading to the current folder (nxt_db).


texts: When I make a transaction, how is it broadcasted to other clients?

texts:
It's a really nooby question, and with no doubt asked before, but if someone could tell me

a)how are other clients found

b)how is the information send to them

(please explain in a simple way, because I haven't messed with the bitcoin protocol itself)