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1500 questions
59
votes
4 answers
What is the difference between kH/s, MH/s, and GH/s?
I started mining on a friend's computer and it shows 300 kH/s. But when I research other peoples' hash rates I usually see MH/s. Are these speeds the same as kilobytes and megabytes?
Also, when I say 300 kH/s does that mean 300,000 Hashes generated…
Exploit
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58
votes
8 answers
What effects would a scalable Quantum Computer have on Bitcoin?
A scalable quantum computer is a quantum computer that is easy to extend - adding more (q)bits of memory is not a fundamentally hard problem, and will happen. Or, alternatively, that it follows Moore's Law - its memory capacity and speed will…
ripper234
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57
votes
4 answers
Have any cryptography experts vetted the bitcoin source code?
Theoretically, bitcoin's open source nature makes it more resistant to bugs and exploits. However, due to the specialized nature of the code, even many programmers don't fully understand the cryptography pieces. Have any well-regarded cryptography…
lemonginger
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57
votes
10 answers
What methods could a government use to shutdown Bitcoin?
Let's say that a government decided to shut down the Bitcoin network. What options would they have to achieve this? Would they need to convince other governments? All governments?
Let's set as a precondition that they were able to scare away all the…
David
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57
votes
7 answers
Can bitcoins be counterfeited?
Traditional currencies have anti-counterfeiting features designed to make them hard to copy, but despite this attempt counterfeit money is a real threat. Since bitcoins are digital, it's trivial to copy them. Does this mean that bitcoins can be…
eMansipater
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56
votes
2 answers
What is the longest blockchain fork that has been orphaned to date?
The orphaned blocks view from BlockChain.info shows a recent fork of the blockchain (starting with block 173,928) that went four blocks long before being orphaned.
Other than the controlled rewind following the Value Overflow bug in August 2010 in…
Stephen Gornick
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55
votes
1 answer
What are Channel Factories and how do they work?
One of the open research questions for Lightning Network is that it will take a massive amount of on-chain transactions to create enough payment channels for all the Lightning Network users. Lately, I've seen the term "Channel Factories"¹ pop-up in…
Murch
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54
votes
5 answers
Why was the target block time chosen to be 10 minutes?
According to the wiki, 10 minutes was chosen as a 'tradeoff'.
Why ten minutes specifically? It is a tradeoff chosen by Satoshi between propagation time of new blocks in large networks and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits.
However in…
z7sg Ѫ
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53
votes
14 answers
Will deflation destroy Bitcoin?
With the limited total quantity of bitcoins, and people losing their wallets constantly decreasing that number, won't rampant deflation destroy Bitcoin?
eMansipater
- 14,456
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52
votes
3 answers
How does change work in a bitcoin transaction?
It seems that when you send a bitcoin transaction, all the coins in the sending address are spent in that transaction, divided into the amount that you intended to send, and "change", which goes back to you, but at another (newly created) receiving…
Thilo
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52
votes
8 answers
Is there any way to track an individual bitcoin (or satoshi)?
For example, if I wanted to "collect" important bitcoins is there any way to track a coin rather than a series of transactions? If I wanted one of the bitcoins from the infamous "Bitcoin pizza" purchase, for example, is there any way to do…
David Perry
- 14,378
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52
votes
3 answers
What's the difference between a wallet and an address?
Bitcoin seems to have the concept of a wallet and an address. Are they the same thing? If not, how do they differ?
Colin Dean
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52
votes
4 answers
Import wallet.dat into a new Bitcoin-Qt client
I had Bitcoin-Qt on my computer with several bitcoins in my wallet, using Vista. Then my computer crashed. Finally I was able to get my computer fixed and download a new version of Bitcoin-Qt. Now I would like to import my original wallet.dat from…
Doug
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51
votes
3 answers
How can I run bitcoind in pruning mode?
I read this comment:
You could consider running a pruning node, which is practically the
same as a full node (including security), except it throws away some
of the old history. Version 0.11 will make that possible
But I can't find details of…
user
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50
votes
2 answers
What happens if two miners mine the next block at the same time?
The process of mining as described in the answer to this question is simultaneously repeated by multiple miners.
Is it possible for two miners to find the next block at the same instant? If it is, what happens if they do?
Emre K.
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