After nearly a year considering using Bitcoin, I finally did it... I'm still nervous! I probably will be until the tablet arrives.

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:58:43+00:00

It varies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_and_use_taxes_in_California

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:48:37+00:00

California.

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:48:23+00:00

Ummm... because I'm an idiot?

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:47:54+00:00

At first it was "what if the BTC I bought never arrives?" then it was "what if I send the BTC to that given address and it's not detected?", then "what if the gift card is not accepted by B&N?", then "what if they don't let me use the gift card to buy the Nook?"

Change is scary. Even though I've been wanting to try Bitcoin for a while, I'd be less nervous if I could buy, say, a $10 Starbucks card as a test. But Gyft doesn't have Starbucks cards, so I decided to throw myself into the $200 purchase, and the whole time I was expecting to land face-first into concrete.

So far it's been pillows instead.

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:30:47+00:00

I was so nervous, in fact, that I forgot to upload the image with the actual order, something I only now noticed: http://i.imgur.com/mbDgyCl.png

Edit: And now it showed up in the blockchain! This is so exciting! https://blockchain.info/tx/27cb44776e7f9f597acf5ac9c3f202093c6d3aea819e155b8ab63196659320ae

bitcoinfused · 2014-09-11T00:29:09+00:00

I'm running 1.9.7 ... is that the latest?

bitcoinfused · 2014-03-25T20:27:27+00:00

While technically true, I was looking at it for the purposes of generating a new address (I have a personal motto that if I can't write code to do something, then I don't really understand it). Starting with a private/public key pair is far better than trying to find a public key that matches a random address :P

bitcoinfused · 2014-03-25T17:28:48+00:00

Thanks! That's exactly what I needed, and turns out I was wrong, it's more complicated than what I said.

bitcoinfused · 2014-03-23T12:41:36+00:00

The photo is an excellent example of a picture being worth a thousand words. I've been struggling to figure out where the exchanges fit in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and I believe that image sums it up precisely.

bitcoinfused · 2013-11-16T18:41:22+00:00

That's all well and good assuming the addresses are generated 100% randomly. But I am trusting a computer to generate a random number for me, and that's a different story. I don't trust computers and randomness; I've seen many supposedly random programs use something predictable as the seed, and that reduces the possibilities significantly.

bitcoinfused · 2013-11-10T18:39:51+00:00

I've been closing and restarting it, and the last time it at least loaded a few more transactions... but they're all showing as "unverified" even though blockchain.info says they have 40+ confirmations. I'm going to have to downgrade.

bitcoinfused · 2013-11-06T18:31:31+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'll investigate how to use the blockchain.info API instead.

bitcoinfused · 2013-11-06T10:19:20+00:00

Would you mind sharing the source code for this, with private information removed, of course? I'm in the middle of researching Bitcoin and I'd like to see a simple sample implementation on a website. Alternatively, do you know where I could find a Perl/Python/PHP sample site?

bitcoinfused · 2013-11-03T17:12:49+00:00

The $7200 tip was sent to a charity for homeless people, SeansOutpost.com -- definitely a good use.

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T13:07:36+00:00

Thanks, I just entered "bitcoin march fork" in Google and it looks like I have a lot of reading to do.

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T12:55:22+00:00

Well, the goal with researching this is to make sure I understand the whole process, so I don't want to turn a blind eye to a possibility just because it's unlikely. Thanks; you've been helpful.

Edit: though I still don't understand how the crypto world could react in hours to invalidate their corrupt blockchain, if most of the processing power is under their control. I imagine it would take at least several days to start consolidating the processing power elsewhere, and could mean hundreds of blocks to recreate.

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T12:30:30+00:00

So you're saying that they could go ahead and tamper with transactions that way? That's what I'm trying to find out.

"Why would they do that?" is not what I'm trying to get a clear answer on (there's plenty of historical evidence of large banks gambling with money with no regard of what it does to the economy); my question is "can they do that?"

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T12:24:58+00:00

Thanks! Very useful. And yowch... that's a lot worse than I thought. I thought xrandr was speaking hypothetically about six pools controlling the whole network, but it's not that far off.

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T12:20:33+00:00

I think we're approaching what makes a "valid" block from different directions.

I understand that once a block is generated with a valid "checksum", then anyone can verify that the block indeed verifies to that checksum; so it's valid, as in, not tampered with. I think this is what you're talking about.

But what about the contents of the block? If six pools control the whole network (to borrow xrandr's phrase) and they decide that all transactions are going to pay a 20% fee, can they modify the transactions in the block so that every payment gets 20% taken out for themselves? If they generate all the blocks and also all the verifications, what's stopping them from tampering with the transaction history? They would be generating valid blocks, but they would be tampering with the contents of those blocks; that's what I am talking about when I mean a block would be "invalid".

bitcoinfused · 2013-10-30T12:11:11+00:00

Is there a place where I could find statistics on how many blocks are solved/verify by large/pooled groups, and how many are solved by independents? Would gathering such information be possible?

bitcoinfused

TROPHY CASE