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Topic: Do I contribute to the network just by running Bitcoin-Qt client? (Read 2762 times)

member
Activity: 118
Merit: 10
฿itcoin ฿itcoin ฿itcoin
Now who wants to contribute...ill give back anything i got or whatever u want...just need .00010203249?  any amount of bitcoin for my test on bitzino or SatoshiDice....
legendary
Activity: 1148
Merit: 1008
If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat
Confirmation=block

By running the qt client, you run a full node wich relay the blocks and the unconfirmed transactions to other nodes. Since bitcoin is a p2p network, the more node there are, the better.
member
Activity: 118
Merit: 10
฿itcoin ฿itcoin ฿itcoin
Which is best?  Too many options ,...
legendary
Activity: 2506
Merit: 1010
Conceptual question: Do I contribute to the bitcoin network just by running the Bitcoin-Qt v0.8 client?

If you accept incoming connections (e.g., firewall opened up to your IP) that might give other nodes an easier time of connecting.

A Tx is supposedly trusted after "6 confirmations". Who does the confirming? What constitutes a confirmation? Is it simply when 6 additional blocks have been added to the block-chain?[/quite]

Miners are the ones who include transactions into a block.    A confirmation is the name simply for the transaction making it into a block.  Blocks are chained together, so that first block plus the next five gives a chain of 6 blocks, each block is a confirmation so that gives you six confirmations.



When I first ran the client, I had to wait several hours for the block list to sync. Is it just that I got the block list from other clients,  and that's the "peer2peer" nature of the thing?

That's fast.  It used to take several days.

The full set of blocks since Satoshi's block #0 need to be downloaded.  That's what your client was doing.  Now that your is sync'd, it will share any blocks it knows about with any other peers that connect to you.
newbie
Activity: 23
Merit: 0
Conceptual question: Do I contribute to the bitcoin network just by running the Bitcoin-Qt v0.8 client?

I understand that I'm not creating blocks. But does the client play any role in the peer-2-peer verification of transactions?

A Tx is supposedly trusted after "6 confirmations". Who does the confirming? What constitutes a confirmation? Is it simply when 6 additional blocks have been added to the block-chain?

When I first ran the client, I had to wait several hours for the block list to sync. Is it just that I got the block list from other clients,  and that's the "peer2peer" nature of the thing?

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