22
Very little of the time is spent downloading the blockchain data compared to how much time your computer is spending verifying each transaction. Bitcoin does a ton of disk i/o for this.
As there are more transactions since April (thanks to SatoshiDICE, we now see 40K and more transactions a day) those blocks take longer to verify.
If you are on an ...
15
Okay, combining answers and what more I've observed:
The rate of blocks slows down because more recent blocks are larger. The number of blocks remaining is not actually a good measure for estimated time.
You can make an estimate based on how much data is downloaded (in how much time) and how much data is left: At the moment of writing, my blk000x.dat files ...
11
There are a few things that you should check:
Your client is connected (it shows N connections in the status bar). If it doesn't, you have connectivity problems.
You have downloaded the whole blockchain (the N blocks in the status bar is not increasing rapidly). You need to wait until you have downloaded all blocks.
Blockexplorer can tell you if the payment ...
9
if I buy bitcoins, what will I need to know about the software involved?
You don't have to know anything really, if you don't want to.
and where should I keep my bitcoin wallet?
If you don't want to learn about the software or how to keep your wallet secure you should try to find the most reputable e-wallet and keep your money there. People will have ...
6
Yes, it's normal for the rate of blocks being received to decrease as the download progresses.
The reason it slows down is because there were very few transactions in each block in the early days of Bitcoin, so the blocks were smaller. Later blocks are bigger.
The Satoshi Bitcoin Client is still a Beta version, and even if it wasn't it may still need to ...
5
If you got the source via git, you can checkout on the latest stable release tag, currently v0.8.1 using the git command git checkout v0.8.1.
When you did not setup git, you can simply download the source from that tag version from the webpage you suggested using either the .zip or .tar.gz link underneath the tag name. vX.X.X releases are stable ones, while ...
5
Moving blkindex.dat to a let's say ram drive dramatically improves bitcoin/bitcoind performance. Just notice that currently index is around 1.5Gb size.
Next version 0.8, as already been said, is using a new database instead of BDB and this works much faster and don't need to be moved to a ram drive or something.
5
Well, I would run the bitcoind in a VM, and regularly snapshot it. If it fails, rollback the snapshot and reboot. Back online in < 10 min, assuming frequent backups and you start working right away. Not sure if this is the use case you're asking about, but that's what I'd do for max uptime.
5
It depends on how much security you want. If you only have a few bitcoins to get started you can get by with only medium security, for which simply installing the software or any eWallet will be fine. (Just be sure to tighten up security before you invest your entire life savings into Bitcoin). For absolute convenience you can't beat Instawallet.
When it's ...
4
You really don't have to be too computer savvy to own & trade in bitcoins. If you are a newbie, this explanation might help you figure out how to participate.
A "wallet" is where you store your bitcoins. You can have a wallet on your computer, or you can have a web-based wallet online. A great comparison is to think of email. You can use Outlook or ...
4
I kinda figured out how to improve performance on ext4/linux:
http://tlfabian.blogspot.hu/2013/04/speeding-up-bitcoin-qt-on-linux.html
4
git clone git://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin/src/
make -f makefile.unix
sudo cp bitcoind /usr/local/bin
3
This is how I compiled bitcoind from the github source on Fedora 18.
sudo yum install gcc-c++ make
sudo yum install boost-devel
sudo yum install db4-devel
sudo yum install openssl-devel
sudo yum install rpm-build
sudo yum install lynx
sudo yum install python-devel
sudo yum install miniupnpc
sudo yum install miniupnpc-devel.i686
sudo yum install libdb-cxx....
3
You will have to rebuild OpenSSL, since the build shipped by Fedora/Red Hat does not include support for elliptic curve cryptography, on which Bitcoin relies. So you have to build your own.
Once that's done, you can get on with building Bitcoin normally, provided you point it at your private build of OpenSSL with -rpath.
Or, you can just skip all the work ...
3
The standard Bitcoin client should run on BSD machines. If you encounter any difficulties getting it to compile or run, ask more specific questions.
3
Using the default client (which it appears you are) transactions received while the client is online will usually appear immediately but transactions which occur while the client is offline will not appear until the block containing them is downloaded. Based on your description this appears to be what has happened, so your transaction should show up whenever ...
3
You may need to slightly modify the following steps for your needs:
ssh or log into the machine
Make sure that git is installed.
sudo apt-get install git
Clone the github repo
git clone https://github.com/rat4/blackcoin.git
Follow the instructions from the installation documentation which are:
Install the dependencies.
sudo apt-get install build-...
3
I was able to successfully install Bitcoin ABC on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS, alongside Bitcoin Core, using these instructions:
Download the appropriate binary from here: https://download.bitcoinabc.org/
For me, the command would be:
wget https://download.bitcoinabc.org/0.16.2/linux/bitcoin-abc-0.16.2-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Extract the archive:
tar xzvf bitcoin-...
3
That error likely means that you have not done a git pull or git fetch. Those are required so that you can pull down the latest source code and tags so you can then do git checkout.
2
GUIminer "just worked" on my late-2012 MBP-R. https://github.com/downloads/pletoss/poclbm/guiminer-poclbm-macosx.dmg ...Just drag it to a writeable folder somewhere.
Colin's comment is correct, of course-- the low-voltage/power-stingy GPU, though awesome for a laptop, is not a match for the desktop screamers serious miners use to heat their homes. On ...
2
I found the following to install PyOpenCL. It installed on my MBP 8,1 running ML:
git clone http://git.tiker.net/trees/pyopencl.git
cd pyopencl
git submodule init
git submodule update
python configure.py
python setup.py build
make
sudo python setup.py install
2
As explained in the file doc/build-osx.md, before running make, you first need to run ./autogen.sh and ./configure.
2
I ran the ./configure without the -with-gui=qt5 option and the installation went through fine.
btw, this was on MAC OS X Yosemite (Version 10.10.5).
2
There is an rpm family for Centos 7 - and remember you will need at least 300 GB of hard drive space to keep it running for a while - and the blockchain itself is approaching 200 GB alone. it hits the cPU cores pretty hard, and then you will need good security because it will invite every hacker in the world to break in. Within 12 hours of putting ours up -...
2
The problem with running a network facing daemon as root, is that if in the future there is an exploit found for that daemon then potentially an attacker could execute code on your machine as root. This gives the attacker unlimited accesses to your machine. To fix this you would need to create a user/group that your daemon can run as and also assign that ...
2
Thanks a alot - I found the solution:
This worked perfectly:
apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt
2
The particular desktop environment does not have a direct impact as long as you have the necessary libraries for running Qt applications.
On Debian (or Debian-Based distributions, such as Ubuntu) the following command should install the dependencies necessary for the UI:
sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-...
2
They are identical in functionality, data store, and wallet storage.
You can run one or the other, but not both at one time (this will throw an error if you attempt it).
1
If you want to compile Bitcoin on CentOS 6, you will need more than just Bitcoin; several other dependencies are either missing or too old.
The particulars:
Boost is too old. CentOS 6 has version 1.41, but Bitcoin requires features first introduced in Boost 1.47.
Berkeley DB is too old. CentOS 6 has version 4.7, but Bitcoin wants version 4.8 (but see below ...
1
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-osx.md should work for you as Joe White commented, note you'll have to install Xcode first of all, and in Xcode open preferences - downloads and install the command line tools. I recommend homebrew over macports as it's better maintained and a little more user friendly.
the only difference is that as ...
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