The website blockchain.info has an online wallet system MyWallet which creates backups with a .aes.json extension. While I understand it’s a json file encrypted with AES using my passphrase, I’m still confused about what am I supposed to do to decrypt it and load it into a local client.
I have OSX 10.6, but for portability sake let’s just talk about command line, hoping at least that one stays the same on multiple platforms.
Bitcoin is very disk-intensive and that slows it down. It seems to flush data to disk often thus preventing proper caching. With the datadir on a RAMdisk it is much faster.
Is it possible to increase the db cache size or do something else to improve cache performance.
Of course it would be nice to keep the wallet and important data saved but I would not mind the blockchain to be heavily cached.
I’m asking mainly about Windows OS.
Are there any services offering a dollar cost averaging approach to Bitcoin investing, i.e. something like an index tracker fund which purchases a set amount on a regular basis? If not, are there any reasons why such a service can’t exist:
I hadn’t started/used my Bitcoin client for ages. Now, whenever I start the client, it is downloading block 135407 and does not progress past it.
What can I do?
The CBS Show “The Good Wife” had a series of shows speaking about the Bitcoin and its creation. Although the show is entertaining, it is prudent for those of you who know the truth to record it for historical purposes, not letting the TV drama perpetuate inaccuracies.
In case you haven’t seen it, you can look here: http://www.cbs.com/shows/the_good_wife/video/2186658794/the-good-wife-bitcoin-for-dummies
For example: Is there a Bitcoin manifesto written by Mr. Nakamoto? Is it possible to embed a character string in the block chain? Was Bitcoin incorporated? Was there a lawyer involved who paid people to write code? Has anyone accused Mr. Nakamoto of being a lawyer? (sorry Sir, I know this is a low blow). Is Decode-a-thon the name of the conference where all the cryptologists go?
I’ve read the introduction to bitcoins. But the main question remains: what reasons could push me to buy bitcoins today?
Every 2016 blocks one needs to calculate new bits value. What is the formula to calculate it?
I´m asking this because a possible attack would be to send an flooding number of orphan transactions, which will never be redeemed. Then clients would have to cache them, increasing storage requirements and reducing lookup time. This can lead to a resource-exhaustion attack.
If there is a limit on the size of the cache, then a DoS can be mounted to exhaust the limit.
In both cases, a DoS attack can be mounted.
If there is no protection, adding a proof-of-work to each transaction would help to prevent such attack.