It's the 4 hours that's really getting me.
Also, it's an absolutely terrible and indefensible method of spam prevention. I've outlined why in one of the first few pages of this thread.

Hahahahahahahahahahhahahhahah
Oh man that's a good one

Bump because I have nothing better to do

The fact that it's not the worst out there doesn't absolve it of its failings.

I generally don't. I save speculation for the alt-coins.

However, checking it now that you've mentioned it.

The person who decides to only tell you about the newbie trap at the very last step of registration?

Every time you send money, a new address is created to receive the "change". (Not quite change, but close enough to call it that). If you receive 100BTC from someone then restore your old wallet, you'll still have the 100BTC. If you then send someone 1BTC and restore your old wallet, all your money will be gone -- the 99BTC "change" will have been put into an invisible address which is only present in your new wallet.
There are coin-control forks of bitcoin for avoiding this, but if you don't know how to use them you can seriously compromise the anonymity of your transactions.

Edit - Re the "recycling" of addresses/wallets: Wallets are never "registered" with other clients. You can send money to a wallet that doesn't exist, then if you're the luckiest guy who ever lived, generate that wallet a year later and find the funds you sent (back when it didn't exist) already in it. The chances of you generating it though is small enough to be considered impossible.
The flipside to this coin is that wallets never need to be unregistered either. Simply not using an address is enough to 'recycle' it.

While I agree, I'd like to play devil's advocate a little: The type of response Gabi gave, while true, is generally rather unhelpful. If I search for nearby businesses with jobs on offer, would I be more likely to get a job paid in bitcoins or pounds? How, specifically, does one search for a job paid in bitcoins?

[I realize BitcoinBarrel has proposed one possible answer to this, but again browsing reddit to find a job is not what I first think of when I want to "Earn more dollars".]

You're a nutter.

Disregarding for now how impractical this would be and other such flaws, where is your evidence that this is happening?

Googling (query: irc.lfnet.org satoshi) tells me that it is the IRC server used by Bitcoin nodes to discover each other.
I wouldn't doubt that Satoshi uses such a place, but I would question the practicality and intent behind wanting to contact him directly.

Algorithms (e.g. SHA-512) are sets of instructions. Their inputs are numbers. The algorithms themselves are not those numbers, so changing those numbers will not further your goal... unless someone has found an efficient method of converting SHA-512 hashes into useful protein folding information, which I highly doubt.

To be overly allegorical:
If I told you (the ASIC) to paint fences (the algorithm) and gave you a bucket of paint to do it with (the "numbers", the input), and you go and paint the fence for me (generate hashes)... what kind of paint would I need to give you so that you end up with a Mercedes (folded protein info) instead of a painted fence (a SHA hash)?

[And the answer is, of course, that I need to tell you to build cars instead of painting fences. I can't do this by changing the paint (the 'numbers') alone]

Check the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3
It hasn't been standardized yet, and it wasn't created to improve upon SHA-2.

Also, what makes you think the NSA is more likely to hide a malicious and clever backdoor in the algorithm than any other group or organization? More importantly: I can understand the importance of decrypting communications, but what advantage could a group like the NSA gain from creating hash functions vulnerable to collision?

It removes the incentive to lurk.

I lurk forums and post relatively infrequently, it's just what I do. Not only does this give me a much better overview of the forum's mentality and norms, but it also cuts the chance of me asking stupid questions that already have a thousand answers elsewhere.

I've been lurking unregistered on this forum for just over a month, it was rather patronizing to be lumped into the "Newbies" section for this.

On the other hand, if I had registered and asked a couple inane questions like "how do I mine with the normal client help guys" then I would have been accelerated to the status of a full member far faster - how counter-intuitive! Other forums I visit support what I am going to term 'lazy registration' (after the Functional Programming concept), in which you only register when you first want to post. The only disadvantage to this lazy registration is being seen as a newbie in the eyes of the populace, but that is hardly a problem with an easy solution and is often insignificant enough not to warrant addressing in the first place.

I think this system needs rethinking - what problem(s) does it address?

• Bot spam
  • Bots can adapt to the system rather easily, maybe imitating someone with a shaky grasp on English with some word templates and markov chains.
  • Captchas were designed to solve this problem, don't reinvent the wheel - you might find that your wheel is not as round as you first thought.
• Newbies asking incessant questions in the wrong sections
  • They can and will and do still do this after they are removed from the newbies group.
  • Warnings/bans and topic moves solves this problem rather well
• Something else?

It also looks like a lot of people think the same:

And that those who don't think the same have rather flawed reasons:
These points I addressed above.

Additionally, if you want some stone cold proof that people make unconstructive posts after being revoked of their newbie status, look no further than the posts immediately before and after mine.

Edit: One final point I would like to add is that to have all of your posts quarantined in a barely-read high-turnover forum without any categorization system whatsoever is insanity: what's the point in making a load of posts if nobody is going to read them?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196259.60
Can't reply to this because forum agreement. Come on, at least give us categories to post under!


I think that the person writing this post should reconsider. To address his first point, there is no monetary incentive to this - why accuse people of "selling their soul" if it's for free?
On the second, not only does it reek of conspiracy theories, but misses a rather key two points: Firstly, nobody is forced to use that client, you can fork and use your own, and if enough people agree with you it becomes the 'de facto' bitcoin. The second is that the patch to bitcoin only affects miners and can be "turned off" or tweaked by users, so it in no way alters the inherent democracy of the system - it in fact gives the users more, not less, power.
For the third point, not only would the forked build "voting" approach be open to attack and technologically infeasible, it would also be far inferior to the current approach, which is that you can edit all this on the command line.

Not only this, but there's always the other option: Fork the client yourself, or get someone to do so! (If your ideal client hasn't been made, that is.) Nothing could be more democratic than that. If you convince people to use your client (as Gavin most likely will with his change), then that doesn't make you a big scary dictator who deserves words like "corporate", "fascist" and "sell-out" to be liberally applied to his name, but simply somebody influential in a true democracy.