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1500 questions
42
votes
8 answers
Can bitcoin exist without miners?
In the past year only, the bitcoin mining difficulty has increased fivefold. If in the coming years the difficulty increases so much that mining is no longer profitable (i.e. consumes more power than money is earned), can the bitcoin network exist…
Eduard Avetisyan
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42
votes
4 answers
Where is the data folder for Bitcoin-Qt?
Where can I find the blockchain, wallet.dat, etc. on each of the operating systems Bitcoin-Qt supports?
Chris Moore
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42
votes
1 answer
How are transaction hashes calculated?
I'm trying to calculate the hash of transactions in bitcoin blocks, but I'm not getting the right answers.
For example, the genesis block has a single transaction.
Here's how I'm attempting to calculate its hash...
Transactions are encoded as:
a 32…
Chris Moore
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42
votes
7 answers
What happens if I mistype the address when making a payment?
I sent bitcoins to an address, but I think I made a typo when I copied it. Where did these bitcoins go. Can I get them back?
lemonginger
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42
votes
6 answers
What are stale shares and what can I do to avoid them?
When I mine at a pool, only a part of my shares are accepted. There is a small percentage which is marked as stale.
As far as I know I only get paid for accepted shares, so what are these stale shares and how can I avoid them?
nmat
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41
votes
1 answer
My raw transaction destroyed 0.0284377 BTC. What did I do wrong?
Years ago I designed a .NET module which facilitates the transmission of BTC to my customers. It creates a binary representation of the desired transaction based on the material presented here and here:
The binary representation is then converted to…
Festus Martingale
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41
votes
1 answer
What is the difference between the rpc port 8332 and port 8333?
What is the difference between the protocol and commands used on default ports 8332 and port 8333?
From what I gather, port 8332 is the RPC port, it's "sensitive", only allowed by local host by default, and it has one username & password.
On the…
makerofthings7
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41
votes
5 answers
What will happen to mining after the 20 999 999th Bitcoin?
After the 21 millionth bitcoin or 20,999,999th bitcoin is mined, what will happen to bitcoin mining? - will it just stop, or will we make a further division of the satoshi thanks to Bitcoin's infinite divisibility? Or maybe miners could mine a share…
Marco Scannadinari
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41
votes
1 answer
Cryptocurrency Arbitrage - What do I need to know?
I'm curious as how one would go about arbitraging crypto currencies - How does it work? what do I need to look out for? What are the risks and caveats?
deepbrook
- 1,672
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41
votes
2 answers
What is a Finney attack?
What is a Finney attack? Extra points for explaining its purpose, the prerequisites for it to be possible, how the attack can be performed and the origin of the name "Finney attack".
Dr.Haribo
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41
votes
3 answers
Can I use my wallet on different computers?
I'm used to synchronize my data on different machines. Depending on the data I use SVN, Dropbox or SSH (Unison). Is this possible with the bitcoin wallet, too?
Thor
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41
votes
4 answers
What are the keys used in the blockchain levelDB (ie what are the key:value pairs)?
I am wondering if I can use node.js and levelup to access a copy of the blockchain database directly.
But from what I can see, I need to know the name of the key(s) before I can get any data, as this is used in the get method of levelup.
However, I…
T9b
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41
votes
10 answers
I am new to Bitcoin, how can I get started?
I am new to both StackExchange and to the new online currency called Bitcoin. I understand what Bitcoin is and how it works, but I was wondering: how do you actually get started with Bitcoin? I have read some articles about mining and the different…
PowerofMerlin
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40
votes
3 answers
Who gets Bitcoin transaction fees?
Whenever I send bitcoins from one wallet or one exchange to the next there is always a fee. This makes sense with the exchange sites, they are just collecting the fee so they can make a living. What about the open source wallets that I've installed…
Albert Renshaw
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40
votes
2 answers
Do unconfirmed transactions expire?
Do they just sit there unconfirmed (e.g. when you be evil and don't pay a tx fee) forever? Or do they get deleted after a few days?
lurf jurv
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