I spent a lot of time at the end of December examining all my transactions in CoinTracking, verifying their accuracy, and correcting any mistakes. Declared my Safe Harbor allocation plan (Specific Unit Allocation) and generated the Reallocation Report before the deadline. 

I've since learned I could have been using the HIFO method on past taxes rather than the FIFO method and would have saved a lot if I had.  I'm considering amending my past taxes.

If I do amend my past taxes, does that invalidate my Reallocation Report?  It seems it should, because different tax lots are sold when doing HIFO vs LIFO.

Does CoinTracking even take into account your past tax reports when generating the Reallocation Report?

Is there a way to see the specific tax lots that are in each of my wallets tracked by Cointracking.info?

Never mind.  I figured it out.

I generated a vanity address and used importprivkey to import it into my Bitcoin-Qt wallet.  After the importprivkey command finished, the address appeared on the 'Addresses' tab.  Later I closed my Bitcoin-Qt client and reopened it.  Now the vanity address is list in the 'Receive' tab and not on 'Addresses' tab as before.  Why is that?

Here's a thought experiment...How about have just one big pool and every miner is automatically a member of that pool.  That pool would of course get every block award.  The pool operator sends out the appropriate fractions of block award based on the hashing contribution of each miner.  As long as the pool operator didn't abuse their power this would be the most fair system.  Of course that degree of centralization would be ripe for abuse and corruption, if history is any guide.  Even if the operator *wanted* to be fair others could find ways to coerce the operator to allocate shares unfairly and cook the books to hide it by manipulating the statistics showing how many miners there are and their relative hash power.  It seems clear to me that having 1 pool with %100 of the hash power is bad.  That raises the question: Is 2 pools split 80%/20% any better?  How about 3 pools 60/35/5%?  Actually, when bitcoin really hits the big time (e.g. $5000 per coin?) then I believe any sufficiently large pool operator becomes a target of the sorts of people who are good at forced manipulation (e.g. governments, criminal organizations).


I think as long as people are in charge of operating mining pools there are opportunities for extortion, abuse, and corruption.

[from Cointrace website]
>Funding is ended by the first issuance transaction.

I think I am missing something.  How is this enforced if you are using standard clients?  What if someone sends a funding transaction to the project address after the issuance transaction?  Is it up to funders to make sure the issuance transaction has not yet occurred before they send a funding transaction?  If so, then there is a race condition here. Funder could be sending a funding transaction at same time as the issuer sends the first issuance transaction.

Maybe it's not an issue.  If additional funds are sent to the project address after the issuance transaction has occurred that's just more 'shares' that can be issued.

I understand the utility of the scheme, but wouldn't some feel this information is a little too personal to embed into a public ledger?

Since he hasn't replied yet I will jump in.  This is what I believe he was getting at...Just as a bitcoin user can have many addresses at which he can receive bitcoin transfers (speaking non-technically here), a miner could also have many addresses he can use to receive the block award (though I don't know how common this is).  Because addresses are relatively cheap to create, a miner could easily specify a different 'reward address' for each block they generate.  Because of that, there would be no way to know, simply from looking at the 'award address' value, that a particular block came from a particular miner (all the 'reward addresses' would be different).  Some other method needs to be designed to indicate that a block came from a specific miner. 

Will btc-e work for you?  https://btc-e.com/exchange/ltc_usd

These guys might know:

http://www.reddit.com/r/locallitecoins

No.  The block hashes link the blocks together into a chain.  The hash of the previous block is included in the data that forms the next block and therefore contributes to the hash of the next block.  This, combined with the proof of work part of the algorithm, causes the chain of blocks to act as a kind of distributed time-stamping service that proves when (and that) each bitcoin transaction took place.  See the 'Proof-of-Work' section of the Satoshi White Paper for more details.

If adding new blocks to the blockchain was cheap and easy then an attacker could add bogus, but valid looking blocks to the blockchain faster than the rest of the computers on the network and cause all kinds of problems.  Adding blocks to the blockchain needs to be costly so that all the good computers combined together will always be more powerful than a single bad computer.  

However, the cost to add a block doesn't necessarily need to be paid with CPU cycles.  That's just how bitcoin chose to do it.  This technique is called 'Proof of Work'.  The 'work' is the CPU cycles used to do a complex cryptographic algorithm.  Whatever is used to pay the price to add blocks to blockchain, the cost to verify that the new block is valid needs to be very low as this is also necessary to thwart bad guys (and make for better user experience).  These two requirements (high cost to add block, low cost to verify block) limit the kinds algorithms that can be used to add and verify blocks.  Another algorithm to add blocks to blockchain is called 'Proof of Stake'.  In that algorithm, the cost to add block to blockchain is that you need to make a portion of your coins un-spendable for a period of time.  Once that holding period is over you are free to spend those coins.  People that advocate this technique claim it uses less electricity.

Maybe someday someone will come up with yet a third way to pay the cost of adding a block to the blockchain.

Bitcoin has inflation, too.  Every time new bitcoins get mined the bitcoin economy experiences a bit of inflation.  Of course, that inflation ends when all bitcoins have been mined.  Additionally, the inflation is offset a little by lost coins.  In the balance of things bitcoin is deflationary.

A PoS system like peercoin contains inflation by design but not in a static 1% way.  At first the inflation comes from both PoW coins and PoS coins coming into existence.  As with bitcoin, the PoW inflation will end when all PoW coins are mined.  However, unlike bitcoin, peercoin destroys coins with every transaction. They go poof and exit the system.  This is done to offset the inflation caused by new PoS coins coming into existence.  Interestingly, I believe if everyone spends there peercoins immediately the peercoin system can actually become deflationary because more coins will be destroyed during the transactions than are created by PoS work.  Therefore, overall peercoin is not exactly 1% inflationary.

The peercoin designers did not design peercoin as a micro-transaction system.  They want it to be more like a savings account that earns interest. Therefore they reward people for saving their coins by allowing savers to mint new PoS coins.  PoS minting also has other benefits as described here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

Others are also working on this idea too.  Check out the Bitcoin Paranoid android app for one. It has over 10,000 downloads so far.  For others just search 'bitcoin alert' in the Play Store.

I have recently created an account with Coinbase and have had no problems so far.  Not sure if anyone has mentioned it in this thread yet but an employee of Coinbase posted on reddit the other day that they are really swamped with all the new accounts created in the last few weeks and are working hard to get caught up.

My first bit of advice would be give up on mining unless you are already pretty well off.  Second bit of advice is to read through as much of the bitcoin wiki as you can take.  Here's the link to that:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

There are some nice bitcoin videos on Khan Academy here:

http://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it

I also recommend going onto YouTube and watch any bitcoin video with Andreas Antonopoulos for really good insights into why bitcoin will be so impactful.

Short:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRqgrCrzTJA

Long:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9-lAYngi4

As for getting you first bitcoin, it depends on what part of the world you live in.