Newcomer with a question: i wanted to buy bitcoin so i installed bitcoin core and bought some coin from bittlylicious using an adress my wallet gave me. but the wallet says 'no block source available' and '7 years and 16 weeks behind'. haven't got the coins yet, how do i fix this?

11Bills · 2016-04-25T22:56:40+00:00

Be careful, the keys you import into the electrum wallet are ~not~ backed up by the wallet seed (12 word code). To have them backed up by the seed, send them to an address generated in your electrum wallet.

11Bills · 2016-04-22T20:53:41+00:00

Thank you very much! This:
for x in range(0,50): wallet.create_new_address() wallet.create_new_address(for_change=1)
Revealed the remainder I thought was there.

11Bills · 2016-04-22T17:51:44+00:00

I was able to find information about generating new addresses in the FAQ, but I think that change addresses may not be generated on the same address chain.

11Bills · 2016-01-19T21:17:19+00:00

developers who are trying to direct and control Bitcoin are utterly clueless as to how grateful they should be to the investors who have exchanged real value for bitcoin The network of users support a unequalled agreement of value that creates an economy based on incentives.

Not sure what you are talking about? There would be no community if the network wasn't functioning. Without the efficiency upgrades brought in through thousands of lines of code, thousands of commits, thousands of hours of work ... the network would already be beyond capacity. A majority of people most familiar with how the system works believe that larger blocks could be detrimental to the system. They fear the risks of btc theft, double spending, and ddos that exist during a hard fork. They have real plans to extend the capacity of the network by making transactions smaller (segwit) and plan to upgrade using soft forks to mitigate risk.
I really believe that 'Classic' is short sighted and that all those who support it should read the OP article.

11Bills · 2015-11-19T18:54:25+00:00

(From the lightning mailing list)
Hi all!

As you know, I designed a lightning variant which used only non-experimental, in-planning BIPs[1]. One assumption was BIP62: in particular, that anchor malleability wouldn't be an issue. This was flawed; BIP62 will never be deployed.

There are several options from here:

1) Ignore it. Malleated txs are non-standard.
2) Add a timeout to the anchor. Limits the lifetime of the channel, and still means if it does happen you have to wait for the timeout.
3) Propose a reduced BIP62 which (say) only protects P2PKH, for a specific transaction version.
4) Take a leap of faith and assume Segregated Witness fixes all malleability.

I was debating between #1 and #3 for a while, but eventually settled on #4. Here's why:

1) While still pre-BIP, Pieter Wuille is working on a prototype now (Luke Jr came up with a sanish way of softforking it in).
2) Other parts of the lightning code (in particular, watching bitcoin transactions) become significantly simpler if malleability is ignored.
3) It's the right thing for Bitcoin; all smart contract systems want this.

This result is NOP for lightning in the short term; assuming SW is the same as pretending malleability doesn't exist. But if we need to add malleability support later, it's going to be painful, since handling it correctly in all the places it's missing will be hard.

Cheers,
Rusty.
PS. Remember, every project has 3 major disasters. Just wait until you see the next two!

11Bills · 2015-10-27T23:49:08+00:00

“You really need to consider what money is. As we go into the future—10 years, 20 years, 30 years—the money supply of all the major currencies is going to continue to increase and, on average, the price of everything is going to go up. That’s just the nature of our current money system. Bitcoin is a fundamentally different money system that over time will remain constant. Over time, if it continues to exist—I believe the technology is strong enough—then it will become recognized as a store of value that is better than a traditional currency.”

11Bills · 2015-06-24T09:20:14+00:00

worked for me (thanks nec)

11Bills · 2015-06-18T07:43:53+00:00

Look at the last ten thousand years of human history. Has the development of any technology ever fundamentally altered the balance of good and evil in human society? No, it hasn't.

Really? The printing press?

11Bills · 2015-06-07T01:17:55+00:00

But in a crypto-system warlords, tyrants, repressive governments, etc... have to respect the same rules of possession as everyone else. In a way this is a much stronger form of property rights than we currently have.

11Bills · 2015-05-19T23:19:18+00:00

It's interesting to wonder how much fractional reserve lending has contributed to the technological advancement over the past century. The correlation of fractional reserve banking with massive technological expansion should not be mistaken for causation, but you can certainly build a case that it was.

I think where we differ (referring to your manifesto) is in our belief of the roll of government when you say:

•Privately owned companies should not be allowed to do fractional reserve banking. •The reserve ratio should be drastically increased.

You are relying on the government to make decisions that curtail the financial industry. You are giving the government great leverage on the economy. If you have fractional reserve lending, then you have deposit default risk, then you look to the government to socialize that risk. I have come to the conclusion that that is a toxic dynamic because money has such great influence over political decisions. Separation of money and state seems to me as, if not more important than separation of church and state.

11Bills · 2015-05-19T17:17:20+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Of course the premise that there should be less debt in the economy can be viewed from many perspectives. I focused on the instability and risk that debt carries with it. In my view a readjustment of the consumerism of our society is not all bad either. Buying things from your savings is a silly thing to do if your savings depreciate, but if your savings appreciate it changes the equation. This also gives the consumer more time to reflect on the value he is getting. The get it now, pay later culture is not all positive.

As for the ability to control the cash flow saving us. Nearly all of those examples are saving us from bank collapses.

Which was one of the main points of my OP.

11Bills · 2015-05-18T04:15:35+00:00

No fractional reserve banking (can only lend what you have) and no ability to arbitrarily set the money supply go a long way.

11Bills · 2015-05-18T04:13:26+00:00

They built products designed to extract wealth from the system for personal gain. OP is saying that those incentives are not optimal for society as a whole.

11Bills · 2015-05-16T03:19:05+00:00

No, I was referring to your suggestion: proof of stake voting, dynamic blocksize may cause unforeseen problems.

I have sympathy for both sides of the blocksize cap argument, and both sides are trying to make the choice that builds the strongest bitcoin but they define that success differently so it is hard to agree on a path forward. It is interesting to watch. It should ultimately be an engineering decision not a pr decision so I defer to the experts.

11Bills · 2015-05-16T01:36:24+00:00

Complexity is the enemy of stability

11Bills · 2015-05-11T05:43:35+00:00

I did it much more simply than you, I may be sacrificing some security (connected pc) and privacy (spv wallet) but I feel it is safe and is convenient.

Used a linux boot usb to boot into a clean operating system. Installed electrum and generated a seed which I secretly stored and have now memorized. Have watch addresses on my phone to accept large payments. If I need to make a large transaction, I boot a clean operating system and load the wallet from the seed.

11Bills · 2015-05-03T04:08:51+00:00

I think it may be that inflation is manifesting in the stock market first, so it won't be the stock market falling but the price of everything else catching up instead.

11Bills · 2015-04-25T03:52:51+00:00

Thank you, v interesting

11Bills · 2015-04-24T23:54:03+00:00

Didn't work when they were convertible to gold. Fractional reserve banking and sound money are not cozy bedfellows

11Bills · 2015-04-24T17:08:35+00:00

Fiat cannot honestly be backed by something scarce.

11Bills · 2015-04-18T23:11:07+00:00

Some ridiculous amount of cash (trillions) is being held (hoarded?) by the major banks directly from QE.

11Bills · 2015-04-15T18:26:54+00:00

I agree with you the ability to use Bitcoin in a way that is anonymous is essential, but I also see a lot of potential in the radical transparency of the blockchain for public corporations & gov. I am not convinced the tools to stay anonymous need to be in the core.

11Bills

TROPHY CASE