Is that your idea? Have you written an explanation about how it's done, and have others chimed in to verify it's possible? Does Gavin know about that suggestion? Did he comment on it?

Note that a couple other 'riggers' have faces consequences.

Butterfly labs from what I've read, and also the pireat40 dude. And there's always the risk of messing with the wrong people. Staying honest is always the best way to go about it, imo.

Shutdown bitcoin core. Then find wallet.dat, and copy it to a usb drive or two, store those at the office or another location you see fit. Make sure you've sett a passphrase on the wallet. Also realize that once you do transactions, change might be sent to new addresses in the wallet, requiring you to do a new backup.

Once I played on a poker site. Don't remember the name. They had some 6 seat sit and go's. I was rather proficient at such tables, and they claimed that if you won 6 in a row, you would get a superbonus and win quite the substantional amount of money. I managed to win 5 in a row many times, however on the 6th attempt, there was always some kind of freak occurence that prevented me from winning. So I had 5 wins, then 2nd place several times. In the end I realized that it was indeed rigged, and probably there was no superbonus at all either.

It's extremely easy for a poker site to introduce subtle issues into their software that's hard to detect.

Classical examples of rigging is Las Vegas casions that have one-armed bandit machines near the entrance that have a high payout. So people get into the room, start playing and wins a lot, and they're thinking 'oh gee... it's my lucky day', so they proceed to other machines, or games and loses it all, which was the intention of the Casino in the first place.

Also if you run a poker site, there's nothing preventing you from looking at the hole cards of other players, and thus ripping players off in high stakes games for instance. The problem is however once a site get caught, it loses all credibility in the online poker community.

Anyway, the poker site makes money off comission, so if the operator is smart, he stays legit, he will still profit!

Somebody giving away lots of BTC for free? How could it possibly be a scam? This is just a legit as the nigerian princes wanting to give you a 10000000000 USD.

Best thing anyone can do for humanity is to leave Paypal and do not give them any business whatsoever. They're collecting too much information about the users, and they bow to political pressure, and willingly give up any user data when asked to do so.

Excuse me my ignorance, but is there any reason at all to run WinXP these days? Have you looked into running a linux distro? No offence meant.

From what I understand, the internet archive will remove anything when asked to do so, esp. if they think you're the siteadmin and wants them to remove cached versions of your site.

If I said you would implode, would you explode?

According to Snowden, NSA has an agreement with Paypal, and records all transactions. I feel so safe now... (because I don't use Paypal).

An interesting solution could be to PGP-encrypt the private keys, and print them on paper in base64 format,
then send the encrypted private keys to one entity, and send a copy of the private PGP key to another entity, none
of the entities know about each other.

If your house burn down, you contact the holder of the PGP privkey and uses it to decrypt the privkeys. Or even better,
have each of them hold encrypted privkeys and a private PGP key, that only works with the version the other entity has.

Scale up as necessary.

Another way could be to go into the woods and dig it into the ground. If they keys are stored properly, nobody should ever find it.
You could also encrypt the privkeys, and then put the pgp privkey somewhere else. Many possibilities..

You can check the current block count many places, for example at bitcoinwatch.com.

Transactions may not show up until you've synced 100%.

So when bitcoin was at 300, it was the end of the world. Now, when it goes to 400, it's fantastic. People..

Personally I don't twitch an eyelid no matter the price, bitcoin is much more than the USD exchange rate.

Could anyone lay out exactly what are the risks with the proposed hard fork? Ie. what could go wrong, and what are the percentages it could go wrong (if possible to calculate it).

This is not a problem. Because of my religion, I can only use church certified screws. I'll have my friend, who's a priest in my church bless the screw, and then oversee the screwing as well, to ensure everything's screwed in tightly and properly.

Make a small hole in a titanium screw, either ingrave the privkey inside that cavity, or insert something durable with the privkey engraved on it within the cavity. Seal it. Now, go and break your arm, insert a few screws to fix it. The screw with the privkey goes along with the other screw. If somebody ever asks, just say you were in a horrible ice skating accident when you tried to qualify for the nationals. Privkey secured. Retrieval might be another matter, but you're in this for the long term, no?

Perhaps we should ban people banning things they don't like? 

There's work being done on this. If you read the bitcoin foundation post of Gavin where he talks about this proposed fork, he mentions this. Sorry no link.

Very good question! I don't have the answer. Maybe for the same reason that IPV4 address space became to small?