The answer is: just accept to receive a regular payment with bitcoin core client v0.9.2.1. All your bitcoins may be lost! Here are the facts. Today we have done the following experience. I had my client synchronized and running on my laptop, then suddenly it hanged and I had to reboot it. Just few minutes before …
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Bitcoin peer network is in decline: number of network nodes has reached dangerously low levels. Some causes of this problem (and possible solutions) are: There is no monetary incentive whatsoever to run bitcoin nodes. Satoshi just forgot to create some monetary incentive. The number of peer nodes is only around 5,000 which is much less than the …
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Bitcoin is widely believed to be an open source egalitarian system that was designed and fully specified by Satoshi and which is decentralized and governed by some sort of majority rule. The reality is very different. It isn’t any of these. Bitcoin is a murky shadowy system which obeys peculiar rules which nobody fully understands and …
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A critical vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute code on our computers. Immediate patching of everything is recommended. Some points: As bad as Heartbleed, some people say it is worse: severity 10/10. Existed for 22 years since 1992. Not only Unix Linux, MacOS etc. but also Windows. Yes, I have checked with my Cygwin installation …
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Bitcoin has a toxic culture of NOT taking security and cryptography questions seriously ever. Being able to withstand expert criticism, champion best practices and anticipate the risks is crucial for any open source project. Unhappily we observe that: There isn’t a single academic or scientist at the bitcoin foundation and they don’t like being criticized on …
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A Swiss Champion of Empty Promises The Swiss company Bitmine.CH has an appalling track record. They sell miners for cash, they sell hosting plans, they produce their ASIC and they are mining themselves in Iceland. However all this was funded with customer money obtained on repeated empty promises. They have let down a lot of customers, …
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have on 18 September 2014 ordered to suspend the activities of ButterFly Labs. Some details: They have taken between 20 and 50 million dollars in pre-orders. Took orders starting June 2012, by September 2013 more than 20,000 customers still not received their orders. Reportedly they have not delivered for 12 months …
Post in the series “bitcoin mistaken claim of the month”. Bitcoin Wiki and 51% I have today looked at the official Bitcoin wiki which is there to “document [bitcoin] problems openly” and provide an open forum with “loads of discussion about bitcoin’s problems” according to an official and highly respected source. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses I have checked and …
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