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Showing 3 of 3 results by fortunative
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Do you have to "Sweep" Brain/paper wallets?
by
fortunative
on 20/12/2013, 08:11:46 UTC
I keep seeing people say that paper/brain wallets must be swept. As I understand it when you send an amount that isn't the full amount of an address it sends a "change" transaction that sends the remaining amount back to the address.

Can you not do this with paper wallets for some reason?

They don't have to be swept, but it's recommended that you sweep rather than import.  Also, never import publicly known private keys: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=216278.5
Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Delayed transactions (using nTimeLock)
by
fortunative
on 14/12/2013, 11:14:53 UTC
One thing that wasn't mentioned yet was that there's not currently a mechanism for replacement.  Locked transactions can be "introduced" into the blockchain fairly easily, and nodes will accept them and hold them in their memory pool (and thus drop conflicting transactions), but they won't forward otherwise-valid replacements, and only miners with custom rules will mine them for you.  If you want to replace a time-locked transaction, you're going to have to mine it yourself, or go find a miner to agree to help you.  Once a replacement is mined (or even just a regular transaction spending one of the inputs), all nodes holding the time-locked tx will see the conflict and drop the one in their memory pool.

So, if you can create the tx, you can get the "time-delay" aspect out of the network right now, but you have to work pretty hard if you use the "replacement" aspect of it.

P.S. - Congrats on being the most well-spoken, research-driven, single-post Newbie I've seen on these forums Smiley

etotheipi, I don't think this is the case anymore.  Time-locked transactions can't be introduced into the blockchain until the time expires, right?

Also, I believe that transaction replacement is not a problem now because time-locked transactions are non-standard and not relayed until the lock_time is reached.  Therefore, replacement isn't needed because nodes aren't storing the locked transactions in their mempools.

Given that, I also think that the Mike Hearn example "Dominent Assurance Contracts" that Aakselrod put on the bitcoin wiki page is wrong when it says "The scheme requires the use of multisignature transactions, nLockTime and transaction replacement which means it won't work until these features are available on the Bitcoin network".  Since locked transactions aren't relayed and stored in the mempools, it seems like you can implement this scheme today even though transaction replacement is not available because you should be able to push the transaction that completes the contract because no locked transaction will be in a mempool to conflict.

Could someone confirm this?
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: >- Time to download the Blockchain is a bit of a drawback at least until a faste
by
fortunative
on 11/12/2013, 09:54:33 UTC
>- Downloading using the Bitcoin-Qt option for windows, from the http://bitcoin.org/en/ site. <<

Searching on the net there is a lot of talk about security, and that this is the better way to get involved. (downloading the original as it was meant to be,  Bitcoin-Qt)
     An online wallet is much easier and faster, but if one is thinking of getting involved with more than few hundred or few thousands USD, he/she would be somewhat apprehensive about the security issues, especially in view of all the hacking and funds disappearing from a great number of sites.

A recent example:
https://truthnewsinternational.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/the-heist-of-96000-bitcoins-us-103296000-or-e-76416000/

List of Bitcoin Heists - link from this forum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

Hopefully the next version will be solving some of these issues.

Right now, just to get the feet wet, few bucks and an online site might be the easiest way to start involvement.



Storing your bitcoins offline in cold storage is a good way to secure your bitcoins, using something like Armory:
https://bitcoinarmory.com/

There are new options coming out that will let you use a "hardware wallet" for keeping your coins easily accessible but preventing any form of hacking.  One promising one that will be out soon is called the "Trezor":
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardware_wallet