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Comment by gwillen | Hacker News Reader

Do not, do not, DO NOT, try writing raw transactions at home. You will fail and you will lose a lot of money.

If you must: - Use testnet! If you don't know what testnet is, you have no business writing live raw transactions. - ALWAYS validate your transaction first by having bitcoind pretty-print it, and checking the output carefully, before sending.

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>Do not, do not, DO NOT, try... You will fail and you will lose a lot of money.

Typical HN top comment :)

For some reason it makes me really want to try writing raw transactions at home, even though I have no idea what I am doing.

> Do not, do not, DO NOT, try writing raw transactions at home. You will fail and you will lose a lot of money.

I don't see the harm in putting a dollar or two into a new wallet just to have some fun. Just be careful not to mix up the private key with your real wallet, if you have one.

> I don't see the harm in putting a dollar or two into a new wallet just to have some fun

I did this with "a dollar or two" in early 2011 before USD parity.

You might eventually be happier if you use "a satoshi or two" instead.

The big problem was that you could forget to specify a "change" output, and then any unspend bitcoins would become the transaction fee. For large inputs this could be a disaster.

The 0.9 release candidate of bitcoin-qt now does sanity checks on the transaction fee, so this shouldn't be such a big problem anymore.

If I remember correctly there is a testing network for bitcoin. You shouldn't try on real money but you should definitively try.

Right, it's called testnet. I left more info in another comment.

Unfortunately, there is no way to spend a multisig (or any other nonstandard) transaction besides using the createrawtransaction API. It would be really nice if somebody implemented a better(safer) interface for them - n-of-m transactions could seriously increase security in many scenarios, but it's hard to get them right.

What someone does with their money (virtual or not) is their choice, and not for you to decide...

It's solid advice, as it's very easy to lose money writing transactions manually.

gwillen isn't deciding anything for anyone. They've provided advice to people so they can save themselves a lot of heartache. Would you be so upset if someone were to post about (let's use a Myth Busters example) sticking your hand in molten lead, and the top comment was "Don't try this at home! If you're off by a few degrees you will seriously injure yourself."?

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