Maand: december 2013

During this CCC conference from 2011, starting from 00:18:55, the presenter suggests that as bitcoins can be lost (lost private key, dead owner, sending to an “eater” address that nobody posses, etc.), and as the total amount of bitcoins has a known threshold (21 millions), there is a possibility that given enough time, most bitcoins, if not all, will actually vanish (be unusable).

The questions is when?

Actually, according to him:

• if 0.5% of bitcoins are getting lost per year, “all” bitcoins will be gone by approx. 2032;
• if the losing rate is 0.1% per year, it will probably last for a century, but will ultimately be doomed.

And if we suppose that inactive wallets (2 years with no transaction) are in fact lost wallets, we reach that 0.1%/year threshold…

Not sure anything can be done, but I want to know how they did it and to prevent them using the coins if at all possible. Here are the details of the theft.

You just sent 0.8495 BTC (worth $604.46 USD) to 16fYQiV2cdHuycGo3eibE5JSKvndY2z8Gw.

~6.40GMT 29th December.

I only access coinbase via the android app, did this get compromised somehow?

I can’t get the BFGminer to work on my Windows 7 machine. I’ve followed the instructions on https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=support. But when ever I run bfgminer.exe I get the following message at the top:

Waiting for devices; press ‘M+’ to add, or ‘Q’ to quit

I want to use my GPU, as I don’t have any FPGA or ASIC devices yet. Can anyone help out?

Is there any step-by-step tutorial about how to build own cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin code?

Identical to this, but for dogecoin? https://blockchain.info/api/create_wallet

There is a lot of criticsm and debate over whether bitcoins will ultomately fail because of its deflationary nature.

I don’t want to debate if that’s the case or not and I also understand that the goal of bitcoin was to have a fixed amount of coins so that there is no risk of (hyper)inflation.

What I’m wondering is, would it be technically possible for a crypto currency to have a fixed target inflation rate? For example the european central bank has a target inflation rate of 2% (I think) which is supposed to stimulate growth while at the same time avoiding over-inflation.

So I guess my question boils down to: Why are all popular crypto currencies deflationary? Is it a technical problem that cannot be solved or is there another reason it was designed like this?

I was wondering if any of you could help me in making my own mining calculator. I know there are many good web apps out there, but I would like to make one myself.

What I don’t understand is how to calculate the statistical outcome, knowing a given hardware’s hashrate per second and the difficulty level.

Do you know what formula should I use?

I’d like to stash away at least part of my Bitcoins in an offline wallet which I will put in a bank deposit box.

Which media is recommended to use for that? Should I burn a CD/DVD or put it on an USB stick? Which one has the longest expiration date? Are there other alternatives?

Please assume a small island nation becomes 100% denominated in a cryptocurrency.

Now please assume that for some reason the rest of the world manages to cut if off from the rest of the internet for some extended period of time, eg 1 year or more.

During the time that is isolated, it of course is able to continue using the cryptocurrency; however, what happens when connectivity to the outside world is restored?

Will all of this nation’s transactions be lost forever and reset to the time before connectivity was lost?

If the transactions can be somehow recovered, what happens to all mining fees on the island during disconnection?

If anything is lost, how could a protocol be altered to manage this eventuality?

I don’t understand one thing : If I get paid an amount of 0.000055 BTC ore more, how come the fee is 0.0005 ? The fee is ten times bigger than the amount I was paid?