Maand: oktober 2011

Many people will not touch bitcoin due to it’s historically extreme volatility. Many new currencies have pegged their value against an established currency until such time as it is sufficiently established to be decoupled.

For example the Irish punt was linked to the Sterling pound until they joined the European Monetary Union in 1979.

Would it be possible perhaps by way of a financial service organisation that guarantees a value against a stable currency such as the swiss franc for example, this using bitcoin as a form of promisory note?

Is the agreement of a fixed rate against an established currency like type of future or option in the stock market?

I think this could help speed adoption.

What is the maximum size a block can be?
Is there a minimum size?
Can you have a block with 0 transactions included?

To date I’ve only participated in mining GPU-optimised crypto currencies. I wondered what happens when I pointed my GPU miner to a Litecoin mining pool worker, Litecoin being designed to be optimised for CPU mining.

I tried do this for just three shares on coinotron.com and according to guiminer (running Phoenix) two of them were rejected as stale and one was accepted. However, my worker on coinotron.com registered no shares submitted at all (which is probably correct, since it’s likely a GPU miner won’t work at all for Litecoin).

If I can’t use Phoenix, then what do I use to participate in a Litecoin mining pool?

What is the algorithm used for encrypting the wallet.dat file?

I`ve recently read a presentation that mentioned a couple things about how big would be the potential bandwidth if Bitcoins would handle the transaction volume of Visa:

http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/black-ops-of-tcpip-2011-black-hat-usa-2011

It stated, that storing all Visa transactions would take about 1TB of storage per week. This certainly limits the feasibility of using the Bitcoin protocol as an alternative to existing payment processors. Are there any plausible concepts of what part of the economy Bitcoins might be capable of replacing entirely, and which would be harder or impossible to substitute with ‘coins?

Assuming you have multiple (30+) computers, what options are there available to do a distributed solo-mine? Can I have them all checking into one bitcoin application over the network, or do I need to create/join a pool?

A Bitcoin Laundry or Mixing Service is a service that accepts BTC payments, and returns the same BTC amount, only from coins that are unassociated to the original BTC. It is a privacy service that works well if it has massive usage.

What are some good mixing services? Is there any data on how well they actually anonymize (e.g. what size are their “stashes” or user base (bigger stash = bigger anonymity)?

When building bitcoind on LinuxCoin (Debian based), I receive this error

“headers.h:36:20: fatal error: db_cxx.h: No such file or directory”

following the instructions at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-unix.txt

I believe the error is caused by the package “libdb4.8++-dev” being non-existant for the distro, as when attempting to “apt-get install” that, I get:

Package libdb4.8++-dev is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package ‘libdb4.8++-dev’ has no installation candidate

NOTE: libdb4.8-dev and all other dependencies are already installed.

It’s probably a silly mistake on my part but any help is appreciated! Thanks.

When I mine at a pool, only a part of my shares are accepted. There is a small percentage which is marked as stale.

As far as I know I only get paid for accepted shares, so what are these stale shares and how can I avoid them?

I’m writing a Bitcoin web app that is to be deployed on an external server over which I have no control. I probably won’t have access to standard Bitcoin port (8333). Will this cause a problem when connecting to standard Bitcoin clients, or can they handle communicating with a non-standard port number? Are there any Bitcoin-related applications that also use other ports to communicate (like a pool or the like)?