Right, so these votes aren't replacing money? So what good are they then? Let's say I collect 10,000 votes. What can I do with them other than give them to other people? Can I spend them? Can I buy things with them? What are their actual purpose?

Your proposal is still left with a number of issues:

So what's to stop someone taking some goods or services and then awarding no votes, and instead keeping their votes to "spend" on something else? This will just reward selfishness.

The proposal also penalizes things which have a high cost and only benefit a few people. For example, take an intensive care bed in a hospital. Expensive equipment needed, expensive to run, multiple expensive staff members, benefits a single person and their immediate family, meaning only a few votes shared by many people. Why would someone do that when they could run a small clinic on their own with few overheads and see 30 patients a day, and collect votes from all of them?

You still haven't explained why a blockchain is needed for this project.

I agree with above: storing a seed phrase is a better option than storing a single private key, as it makes it easier to spend the coins in the future with less risk that you lose your change, and it also means you can avoid using a printer altogether and just hand write the seed phrase. Here is the process I would follow if I was going to do this today:

Use an old laptop which is permanently airgapped by physically removing the WiFi card.
Boot to a live OS from a USB stick (I would probably use Tails since I am familiar with it, but Ubuntu is fine provided it is a clean download and verified).
Download Ian Coleman's BIP39 site from GitHub here (https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39/releases), verify it, and transfer it to the airgapped machine on another USB stick, SD card, etc.
Run it, generate your own entropy manually by flipping a coin or rolling some dice, enter the entropy in to the site, and write down the seed phrase by hand on two separate pieces of paper.
Generate a long and complex passphrase, either using a similar random process such as flipping a coin, or perhaps using an open-source password generator such as KeePass (again, transferred to the airgapped machine via a USB stick or similar).
Write this passphrase down by hand on two separate pieces of paper.
Enter your seed and passphrase in to the Ian Coleman site to generate a receiving address to send funds to.
Store the 4 pieces of paper securely and separately.

I've had quite a few reports marked as "Good" and the post in question not deleted, even though I thought it should have been. Sometimes, as Loyce has said, the user receives a warning or temp ban instead, but we can never know that unless the user or a mod confirms it. Sometimes, if it's a whole thread, the thread is moved or locked rather than deleted. Sometimes the post has been spammy, but the follow up comments to it have been good/useful/constructive, so although the report is marked good the post isn't deleted so the remaining useful posts still make sense in context. I've also had a mod tell me that they thought it was a borderline case, so marked the report good but didn't delete the post.

You are confusing your terminology here. Addresses aren't mined. Nobody ran a vanity generator to find a private key for that address though, if that's what you mean. They simply calculated the correct checksum for the last few characters to make the rest of the address valid, which is fairly trivial to do.

I mean, you can certainly tell the vanity generator to try, but even if your computer could run forever, we would reach the heat death of the universe before you even scratched the surface.

That's not accurate. There are (just short of) 2²⁵⁶ private keys, but only 2¹⁶⁰ valid addresses, so on average each address has 2⁹⁶ private keys associated with it.

The bitcoin eater address is just a valid address. Nobody knows the private key.

If your vanity generator is stating 6.4 years, then I'd pick a shorter vanity address and try again. Vanity addresses become exponentially more difficult to find with each additional character. Choosing something like 1sendbtc should bring your search time down to a few days rather than several years.

This is probably the easiest method, but there are a couple of additional security precautions you should take:

The downloaded bitaddress site should be run on an offline live OS. Ubuntu from a USB stick as you mentioned would work just fine. Just make sure the live OS is always offline - transfer the bitaddress site to the live OS using a USB stick.

The printer you use to print the paperwallet should be a "dumb" printer. Modern smart printers keep copies of files that they print in their memory, and some printers are even susceptible to malware. Use an older printer without an internal memory, if you can. If you can't, make sure your smart printer is also offline, and figure out how to wipe its memory/cache.

This isn't a concerning issue. It's due to Electrum's use of PyInstaller, which runs its bootloader in a separate process. It's been discussed by Electrum develop SomberNight in this closed GitHub issue a few months ago: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5747

As mentioned above, as long as you downloaded from the official site and verified before installing, then you can safely ignore this.

Well, shoot. Can you not tell the multiple various businesses I shop at every week whom I pay in bitcoin? They've been happy to accept bitcoin for several years, they've been paying some of their staff with bitcoin, and I know at least one of them pays a supplier in bitcoin, but now they are going to find out its not worth their effort? It'll be a real hassle for them if you tell them they have to stop. </s>

A way to hedge against it, such as using a payment processor to convert the bitcoin you receive in to fiat? And they charge significantly less fees to do so than the fees you pay when you accept credit cards? If only there were multiple different companies offering exactly this! </s again>

Look, we all know you are 100% in gold and will say anything to try to push your false agenda, but at least try to make sensible arguments? Saying things which are provably and demonstrably false just makes you look silly.

Why not instead, in addition to getting them a more "traditional" wedding gift, offer to give her an hour or two of your time to teach her about bitcoin? One of my friends in real life also started the same way - sending me messages on Signal whenever he read some story about bitcoin being "dead" or the price falling or whatever, trying to poke fun at me or provoke a reaction. Eventually I offered to sit down with him and explain the basics about bitcoin, helped him set up his own wallet, and sent him a few bucks to play around with. The most recent message I've had from him on Signal now was telling me how pleased he was with himself that he isn't panic selling and is instead buying the dip.

If she is really interested in bitcoin then your offer will be a welcome gift. If she isn't, then the worst she can say is no thanks, and you'll already have given another wedding gift anyway.

They might get lucky, and no one will have their coins stolen by this method before their next model is designed, released, and becomes widespread (I am assuming of course they will fix the issue in question when they inevitably do release a new model - it would be crazy not to). Having said that, however, they only need a single user to lose a significant amount of coins via this method for it to explode all over Twitter, Medium, Reddit, this forum, etc., and cause significant damage to their reputation and their profits. It's a very large risk they are taking, especially when it can be mitigated quite easily.

If it were me, I would send an email to all the customer addresses they have, explaining the vulnerability and stating how to protect against it. I would put an announcement on their social media channels, on their web page, and I would include a section in their set-up guide explaining that it is highly recommended for all users to use a (complex) passphrase. Anything short of that is highly irresponsible on their part.

Just because a user is a newbie on the forum doesn't automatically mean they are new when it comes to bitcoin, blockchain, programming, economics, or any of the other things which are discussed here. It also doesn't mean they are new to online communities or forums. Sure, the majority of new users start off with low quality posts, spam, copy and pasting articles, or immediately asking how to earn merit/coins/tokens, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all newbie accounts are spammers.

Owning multiple accounts is not against the rules, and so even if some of these good newbies are more senior members writing from a new account, then I don't see the issue as long as they aren't evading a ban. If they are evading a ban it is usually discovered at some point, and if they are farming an account to sell, it is almost always discovered when the post quality, writing style, grammar, even the language suddenly and drastically changes.

I'd rather have an alt account of an old user making some good posts than a brand new user spamming meaningless trash.

Bad advice. You should never be using an online website to sign a message, as doing so necessitates that you enter your private key in to the website, therefore exposing it. All coins stored under a private key which you have entered here (or any website for that matter) are at risk.

Web wallets are a poor choice, regardless of how trusted or reputable they are. Use it to store your faucet winnings, sure, but recommending one for a long-term hold is bad advice. There are too many risks, too many things which can go wrong, which simply aren't an issue with your own wallet where you control your private keys. If OP was content with a custodial wallet, then he might as well just leave his bitcoin in Coinbase. The whole point of withdrawing is to get control of your own coins.

Slight correction: You need more exclusions than inclusions from DT1 users to be excluded from DT2. If you have equal numbers of inclusions and exclusions (giving a net score of 0), then you will be included.

Correct. Just like DT1 users can include or exclude DT2 users as above, they can also do the same to fellow DT1 users. Any DT1 user with more exclusions than inclusions from fellow DT1 users will be excluded from DT1 (and potentially, but not necessarily, also from DT2). Again, as above, equal numbers of inclusions and exclusions results in an overall inclusion.

The most common number you will see suggested is 6, which will take an hour on average since each block occurs 10 minutes after the last on average. Note that this can vary, as blocks don't occur exactly every 10 minutes, and at the extremes can vary from a few seconds to over an hour after the last block.

6 is an arbitrarily chosen number, though. If you want to be really secure you can wait for more, but realistically, you are safe with fewer than 6. Many exchanges wait for 6, but some will be happy with 3. You can play around with the numbers on this site: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/attack_success.html. If an attacker has 10% of the hashrate (proportion of 0.1), and you wait for 6 confirmations, then they only have a 0.02% chance of reversing a transaction.

Personally, it depends on the amount of bitcoin you are receiving. If I was sending or receiving a couple of bucks, I'd be happy after one or two confirmations, because if the transaction was reversed it's not a big deal. If, on the other hand, I was sending or receiving a few thousands dollars worth, then I'd be waiting for 6 confirmations. It's entirely dependent on what you think is acceptable risk.

Have you ever spoken to her about bitcoin before? What were her views about it? Has she previously expressed any interest in bitcoin whatsoever?

A gift is supposed to be something the recipient would like to receive, not something that you would like to gift. Especially when it comes to a wedding. A gift should be something for the couple to use in their life together, usually something for their house. Gifting bitcoin for a wedding seems a bit tacky to me, unless the couple have expressed an explicit interest in it before.

As I've mentioned before, if I were gifting bitcoin, I think gifting pre-loaded paper wallets isn't a great idea for two reasons. Firstly, the person who receives the paper wallet needs to trust you completely. They need to trust that you generated and printed the paper wallet securely without leaving any traces, and they need to trust that you aren't holding a second copy of the paper wallet yourself. If it's their first experience of bitcoin, then it gives out the wrong message of not trusting any third parties right from the get go. Secondly, it teaches them nothing about bitcoin, how to safely store the paper wallet, how to back it up if they choose, what the numbers and QR codes on the paper wallet mean, how to import it to another wallet and spend the coins without losing the change, etc. If I wanted to give some bitcoin to a total newbie, then I would sit down with them for a few hours, help them to set up their own wallet, show them the basics, and then send some bitcoin to their address as a gift. I think that's far more valuable to the person than just handing them a piece of paper they don't understand and don't know what to do with.

A few days ago there were a couple of newbies asking advice because they had tried to buy something by sending some bitcoin to an unknown darknet site and lost their coins. We see users who send bitcoin to random addresses from twitter because they totally definitely promise they will definitely totally send more back in return. We see users who enter their seeds on random websites, trade with complete unknowns without escrow, send their web wallet login details to complete strangers, send money to brand new cloud mining sites/web wallets/exchanges/casinos/whatever, send money to HYIPs/doublers/Ponzis, download programs and software from any old site they find, and so on. There is no shortage of people who let their greed drown out what little common sense they have.

If these kinds of obvious scams weren't generating at least some profit for the scammers, then they wouldn't be happening so frequently. A fool and his money are soon parted.

First of all, I definitely wouldn't suggest BitPay. It has a well deserved reputation of being terrible. Roger Ver is a heavy investor in it, it supported Segwit2X and continues to support BTrash, and you won't be able to use it to buy your bike without completing KYC as the value is over their arbitrary limit.

BTCPay are a good payment processor, but still require the merchant to manually sell the bitcoin for fiat, if that's what they want to do. Others I've seen used in the past which support instant BTC-to-fiat conversion for the merchant are CoinGate and CoinPayments, but I don't have any experience of using these myself.

As AGD says, the simplest option would be to get him to set up his own wallet and accept bitcoin directly. If he wants to then register on an exchange to sell for fiat, then he can do that too.

He is demanding that payment must be in the form of an "evoucher". This is a very vague term. What kind of evoucher? Issued by which company? From which website? My guess would be that he wants you to buy an evoucher from a specific site, and will say that once you have proof you purchased the evoucher, he will send the coins first and you can then send the evoucher. The website he directs you to will obviously be a scam, owned and operated by him, and as soon as you purchase said evoucher, he will disappear.

I assume you mean 0.0005 is the withdrawal fee, which accounts for the discrepancy between the 0.005 request and the 0.0045 received.

Regardless, it makes no difference why the amount you received was less than the amount you requested. Until you receive the specified amount (or the request times out because you set a time limit on it), it will stay there reading "Pending" unless you delete it like I said above. The request has no relation to the actual amount of bitcoin in your wallet, it's simply a record of what you have asked for. Think of the request like an invoice a company issues for payment to a customer. What is printed on the invoice isn't necessarily the same as what they receive in payment, and keeping a recording of all the invoices they have issued doesn't mean that is the amount of money they have in their bank account.

More significantly, whenever we see big price swings like this we see well above average number of transactions with people moving coins in and out of exchanges to either panic sell or to take advantage of the buying opportunities. In the last 12 hours, transaction fees peaked at the highest they have been since July last year, when we saw the pretty rapid swings between $14k and $9k. It will be impossible tell how much of an effect this change by Coinbase will have until we have a few weeks' data at a relatively stable price to compare to historical data, though.

If the link ETFbitcoin has shared above is to be believed, over half the transactions in the network (at that time) were from Coinbase. Unbelievable. Coinbase customers are obviously happy to pay their ridiculous fees otherwise they wouldn't be using them, so for all these years Coinbase have just been throwing away money and clogging up the mempool because they are too lazy to apply this very simple fix. It beggars belief that Coinbase has become such a ubiquitous company when they are so incompetent.