When you're down and troubled, and you need a helping hand...  (James Taylor)

A call for help should always be answered, and sometimes it can feel like you're so deep you've lost all sense of direction.

You reach out, hoping you're not alone, and I absolutely guarantee you the path is - sadly - well travelled. By many intrepid crypto explorers who have tripped, stumbled, fallen, and need that helping hand to pull themselves up. To see that life's journey, can, and will continue for you. The direction from here is your choosing, but you don't have to do it alone.

Advisable that the initial steps to find a stable footing might be small steps taken with care. Try to find some time to reflect, reminisce of times before recent events, or even before your crypto journey began. Try to spend some time with people, even if you are not ready to tell them what is bothering you. Are there special events during the year you would look forward to?

If you are feeling shame, guilt, embarrassment, or failure, etc. We are all human, we all make mistakes. But as humans we are capable of amazing things, joyful and spectacular things. Many of those wonderful things in life involve some level of risk, and we as humans are hard wired to test the limits of risk and reward. Life is about sharing experiences, thank you for sharing your story with us.

And yes, initially your family might be shocked to learn of the financial misfortune, even angry at first. But in time, people forgive, and remember:


You've come this far to share your story with your crypto brethren of 7 or 8 years. Let us know what we can do to help you share your story with a trusted friend or a professional, the steps forward will become clearer as you unpack your burdens from your mind and speak them out loud.

Seems to be a plausible explanation, MS Office is notorious for being overzealous with auto correction.

Well spotted... (or validated if you were tinkering with your WIF recovery tool?)

This should be interesting... will OP be amending and/or explaining? 

Agree with most people here who are saying the monetary value is not the "prize" , so it's really just a "for fun" puzzle if someone feels motivated for a technical challenge.

Starting points for someone trying to crack this would be to look at what can be excluded

There's only 35 unique symbols (of 58) used, meaning 23 can be excluded from combination/permutations.

It appears to be a compressed public key format because it's 52 characters in length, so your pattern with start with: L or K (not a 5 for uncompressed)

You can reduce the target length by a few characters because you don't need to "crack" the base58 checksum, this should reduce the search complexity by a few orders of magnitude... but it is still a pretty big one at that!

Good luck, if you solve it you should post back here and share any "shortcuts" you took in attempting to solve.

There's a lot of scientific research and almost endless theories on the role and importance of sleep in humans and other living creatures.

Not quoting any specific research but anecdotally it sounds like a couple of the key points of why sleep is useful (beyond "curing tiredness"):
 - Repair and rebuilding the body on a cellular level
 - Neurological (brain) function, including building and "storing" long term memory

It could be interesting (thought experiment) ponder if reducing sleep overall might lower life expectancy (ignoring accidental death)

Maybe there is an upper limit to "active awake time" for any particular person.
e.g. someone who's life expectancy is 80 years, and assuming 7 hours sleep daily (56.67 years awake) if they self limited to 4 hours sleep daily would they still only achieve the same number of years awake? Therefore reducing their life expectancy to 68 years instead of 80?

Hard to say, but I think we should sleep on it.

Are we in a simulation?

Yes.

This universe is merely the attempt to solve 1 valid block hash in a unfathomably large blockchain.

Interesting facts: the speed of light is the current block height and Pi is a representation of the current merkle root.

When this block is solved the universe as we know it will end. 

I agree, but the option is there for those that want to spend their time doing that.

If anyone is interested, and has spare time to stare at photos of empty ocean, there's a crowd sourcing effort to trawl through satellite images of one of the search areas. Yesterday they were showing a set from March 9, today they are showing images from March 12.

It can be found at https://www.digitalglobe.com/ top of the page.

At least now if people are complaining "I wish I could do something" you can send them there.

Yes, as you can see by now other miners have built on top of that block.


1. Why? because they can.
What other reasons might cause a miner to mine a block like this.

• There's no other unconfirmed transactions in their memory pool, unlikely
• The mining software might be quickly issuing work based on the previous block header before syncing its mempool based on the transactions in that block. Basically trying to get a headstart on other miners with a small chance of quickly solving an "empty" block*

2. It shouldn't happen. Miners would be missing out on accumulating transaction fees, and would ruin the network making their rewards worthless.
"Empty" blocks are going to happen from time to time, they won't make up the majority of blocks while the Bitcoin network is still actively utilized.

*A mining pool operator might be able to shed light on this. I'm guessing that if there is a short period of time that a miner is working on an empty block, they are generating a valid merkle tree of unconfirmed transactions in the background and then start working on that instead of an empty block.

Hi Lorenzo, welcome to the forum.

I understand the possible confusion, until recently I wasn't aware the move command even existed.

In general I think a lot of people assume that "wallets", "accounts", and "addresses" are all the same, and they are not. An account can be associated with several Bitcoin addresses, but the reference client also allows you to do some internal accounting which abstracts accounts from the underlying addresses.

As far as I can tell a move command simply re-assigns some bitcoin amount to the internal wallet database, and to make sure you don't "overspend" an account (i.e. dip into other addresses/accounts in your wallet) then you need to always use "sendfrom" which should respect the account balances.

Basically, accounts is a virtual balance inside a wallet, moving amounts between accounts just updates internal references to which account values are associated to 1 or more "real" addresses. An outside observer wouldn't know the balances of your accounts, but they could see individual balances of each address (if they knew you owned them).

I just noticed when I referenced a different thread from my watchlist (i.e. goto "new" posts) the noindex directive is given. This would support the theory that SMF sets it on "special" pages to avoid duplicate content for crawlers.

When I open the same thread directly from the main forum list, noindex is not in the source.

/end side-track.

Nah, most of the threads are indexed by search engines. Go have a look at the source of just about any other thread page, no robots meta tag...

Well spotted sir, but what would you speculate the motivation is behind that?
Also, am I right to assume only mods and/or admin can set this meta tag on a thread?

Sad news, sorry to hear that the regulatory climate has ultimately suffocated the business.
Don't hesitate to ask here if you need any assistance with any aspect of winding down the business - Speaking for myself, but hopefully other investors, we have it in our best interests that all loose ends are tied up with little complication as possible.
 

FYI the last dividend was issued in December (after Bitfunder closing) and was 8 satoshis per share (0.00000008 BTC)

If any other investors are interested in these numbers, here's a quick 'n dirty breakdown of dividends and share price.

Note the same message was sent to at least 2 other addresses in Jan 2014
https://blockchain.info/address/17ewBhK712mY2E4uPAbinThibdY2LRyabd
https://blockchain.info/address/1CvPC3zQ4xPL4ZcFWwfS3D8cmTgQSVcp2P

Probably just like all the other "begging" in public notes to addresses with large balances.

Indeed, 1 confirmation per split. Also each branch appears to be forming one at a time as if someone is doing it manually (not programmatically), or at least manually supervising the process - I suppose that's warranted with such large transactions!

By now I'm sure you have read or heard about the article published by Newsweek that has spread like wildfire through the media; The Face Behind Bitcoin. It claims to have uncovered the identity of the fabled miner of the Bitcoin genesis block, "Satoshi Nakamoto".

Putting aside any criticisms about the article and the journalist, what do *you* think? Is Dorian S. Nakamoto the man who created Bitcoin?
If you haven't had a chance to catch up on all the events yet, one important thing to consider is that Dorian has already gone on the record to deny this claim.

Please cast your vote, and discuss why you think he is or he isn't.

Note: I've set the poll to run for only 7 days to capture only early opinion.

Or a TOR exit node's IP address... probably.

Genesis (0) block coins can't be spent sorry, but coins from blocks 1,2,3 etc still can be.
source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

This, but to prove he didn't setup a delayed message: ask the "real" Satoshi to post a signature that includes a recent block hash which couldn't be known before the live stream commenced?