There are a lot of people around here that are insistent that everyone should work for free. IMO, it is utopian nonsense.

I personally think these tokens are tacky, but there is clearly a market for what they are selling, and AFAICT, they aren’t misleading anyone, so I don’t see an issue.

Further, most of their projects are on GitHub so anyone can fork/copy what they are offering if they think they can offer a better product.

I expect all major exchanges to require KYC in the near future. Bitcoin and crypto trading has become too big of a business for government regulators to ignore. An exchange that doesn’t require KYC is going to attract a lot of negative attention from the governments, which will inevitably lead to bad outcomes.

If you want to trade without KYC, you will most likely need to use some kind of DEX. I can see more coins adopting SW so they can be traded on a LN based DEX.

Democrats have the ability to raise the debt ceiling via reconciliation with a simple majority vote. Senate rules limit the number of times reconciliation can be used, and Democrats want to use it for their $5.5 trillion spending bill. The senate rules can be changed with a majority vote, but doing so would be more difficult than getting the votes to vote for the crazy reconciliation bill currently being proposed. Raising the debt ceiling via reconciliation would also mean the bill would need to raise the ceiling to a certain limit rather than the debt incurred prior to a date, and would also mean that Republicans would be able to force Democrats to vote on amendments that take stances on things they don’t want to take stances on.

McConnell got the messaging wrong on the debt ceiling this time around. He has since made it clear that he will not deliver any votes to raise the debt ceiling in the future (he had trouble getting 10 votes to vote this time around). It is, or should be clear that Democrats need to raise the debt ceiling via reconciliation as a longer term solution.

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Once the US defaults on its debt, meaning it doesn’t pay interest and/or principal of treasury securities on time, it cannot be reversed. In theory, the treasury could issue securities late at night in order to pay for interest and principal of bonds it needs to redeem that day. So a “default” of 4 hours would not actually be a default.   

Why do you think people start to distrust the banking system after a natural disaster? I would argue that barter transactions increase because people have less use for anything that can be described as a store of value -- people need actual goods/services that allow them to survive.
If you are in a rural or even a suburban area, with a mesh network, it would take a very small number of dishonest nodes to pull off a Sybil attack that affects a large portion of the entire network, as all traffic is flowing through so few nodes. There is little reason to run a node in a sparsely populated area because it will connect to so few people.

My understanding is that the blockstream satellite will broadcast transactions to anyone whose "antenna" is pointed in the appropriate direction, and has no way of discriminating against a specific user.

Using a blockstream satellite alone will not allow someone to broadcast a transaction, which would be important in a power/internet outage. 

Nodes do not calculate this hash presently.

Presently, nodes review information from each block starting from block 1 to keep track of all outputs, and if they have been spent. The only way to know if an input is valid and if it has been previously spent is to look at all blocks, or to use information derived from looking at all blocks. Nodes currently keep track of the UTXO set by storing it in RAM, but the only way they authoritatively know the UTXO set is because the node previously looked at every block.

For example, a node will know the following is part of the UTXO set:
txid,index,amount,block
2a6a13ffb7146ef05a009d65d83b08bf48d53b13c471d13113345b4c9953611b,1,13.55748202,704548

Nodes store the above information, along with similar information about every other unspent output.

If a node were to store the UTXO set in a very specific order, and in a very specific format, two arbitrary nodes would calculate the hash of this information and the calculated hash would be the same.

If the above hash were to be stored in blocks, someone could spin up a node, obtain the UTXO set from an arbitrary untrusted third party, and immediately know if an arbitrary transaction they receive is valid or not (assuming they know the current consensus rules). Your average user would not need to download and store the blockchain, nor would they need to wait for their node to catch up to the current tip if their node has been offline for a period of time.

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I would also point out that dissenters who are using bitcoin will want to minimize their data use as much as they can. No amount of data use would be "safe", but being able use a full node after has been offline for days/weeks without having to download all blocks subsequent to the last time it was online would reduce the risk of using bitcoin, and would make it so they would not have to rely on third-party services to send transactions or verify if a transaction has been received.

Immidiately after any of the examples you provide, the percentage of barter transactions tends to go way up. There tends to be less use for actual money, and more use for tangible goods used to survive, such as food, fuel, and water.

I don't think any kind of "mesh" network is going to work very well when there are many users involved, or when it needs to cover the entire globe (or even large parts of the world). A mesh network greatly increases the chances of a Sybil attack and makes detecting such an attack much more difficult. There are also privacy implications to using radios to use bitcoin, as it would become trivial for anyone in your area to know you are using bitcoin; this is compared to only your ISP knowing you are using bitcoin currently.

Storing the entire blockchain will provide businesses the opportunity to profit, for example by serving ads to users viewing transactions on a block explorer, analyzing previous transactions (similar to the work done by chainanalysis).

I think my proposal would remove nearly every barrier someone has to running a full node, and that people using light nodes would go down to nearly zero. I also think over the long run, if bitcoin were to see widespread adoption, it is going to see a much higher percentage of transactions conducted via their phone, either on-chain transactions or transactions on an L2 type network such as LN. I don't see any reasonable way to run anything resembling a full node on a phone without the ability to not download the entire blockchain.

Further, there is no reason why I need to know about someone buying coffee in 2014, or about every single transaction in the 2015 spam attack, or any other subsequent spam attack. The reason why I need to validate these transactions today is that these transactions must be validated in order to validate subsequent blocks.

I think a lot of your examples would probably constitute "business" use, although most residential ISPs would probably not especially care if someone was doing any of the above except for the ISO files if they are downloaded on any kind of regular basis. Perhaps someone who is working from home might reasonably use 350 GB+ of bandwidth using his work computer, depending on the specific setup, and how much of his day is made up of meetings that must take place via video.

I think, for the most part, most of your above list is probably not very commonly used in third-world countries.

A pruned node is technically a full node, although with slightly less functionality, such as the ability to rescan the blockchain for transactions.

When I purchase hardware with the intention of using it for anything to do with bitcoin/crypto, I will purchase hardware that could potentially be (and most often is) used by someone who is not using the hardware to handle bitcoin/crypto transactions. This reduces the risk of someone tampering with the hardware who is targeting someone who is a bitcoin user. If someone is selling HDDs with the blockchain pre-loaded, there is the risk to the buyer that the seller has put some kind of malware on the HDD designed to steal the buyer's private keys.

I suggested upthread that blocks contain a hash of the UTXO set. This could potentially be done via a softfork, for example by requiring coinbase transactions to have a OP_RETURN transaction with this hash. Nodes must already store the current UTXO set in order to check if a particular transaction is valid or not.

A node can obtain the actual UTXO set as of block x from a third party, calculate the hash of the UTXO set it was provided, and compare this to the hash contained in block x it receives from its peers. The node will also look at subsequent blocks to see how the UTXO set changed according to the blocks, calculate the hash, and validate accordingly. As long as the node is not being subjected to a Sybil attack, I would confidently say the node has sufficient information to know if a transaction is valid or not.

I am not sure where you live, or how big your family is. My guess is that a big chunk of your data usage is from various streaming services. Streaming a video in 720p (HD) uses about 0.9 GB per hour, and streaming in 2k (higher quality HD) uses about 3 GB per hour. That works out to about 2.7 hours of 720p per day (assuming a family of four), or around 50 minutes of streaming per day at 2k. I don't think spending 2-3 hours/day watching Netflix is something I would want to be spending my time doing, but I also don't think it would be totally unreasonable.

I don't think there are a lot of people in third-world countries spending $14/month on Netflix though.

The cost of hardware is not the only cost of running a full node. Users must also have an internet connection that is sufficient to handle block downloads and the initial blockchain sync. For most of the "first world", this is not an issue as users will have an existing broadband connection they use and need for other reasons. There are "data caps" in some parts of the world that limit the amount of data a customer can transfer per month without paying an overage fee. If you have a data cap, there is a good chance the 350 GB initial blockchain download will exceed your cap, as there are very few legitimate reasons to need to download that much data in one month (the initial blockchain download is probably the only legitimate reason for most non-business users of an internet connection).

For the overwhelming majority of people, they should get the Covid vaccine (and most other vaccines). But it should be their choice to do so. Government mandates are wrong and are not going to convince many people to get the vaccine.

In order to increase confidence in the vaccine, the costs (potential side effects and their prevalence) should be clearly disclosed, along with the chances of preventing various types of instances of the disease it is preventing, and the potential negative outcomes for people who are unvaccinated and catch the disease it is preventing. This information can be customized for an individual’s specific condition. For almost everyone, the above information will indicate the person should get the vaccine, but again the individual should be the one to decide.

For Covid specifically, if you don’t get the vaccine, you are almost certainly going to get Covid.

The description of how vaccines work in the OP is incorrect.

My best guess is that testnet is used to test custom mining software, and any improvements and/or bugfixes to mining software. It may also be used to test things intended to reduce orphaned blocks of the miner.

Bitrefill also accepts LN payments.

Exchanges accepting LN will result in more traders engage in arbitrage, and I don't think will result in a lot more adoption of LN. Services and merchants accepting LN is what will really drive adoption.

The OP clearly wants to buy a copper membership. No one is going to spend almost $3 million to obtain features on a forum they just registered an account on.

Since the OPs question was answered, we can lock this thread.

I calculate your winning range to be between $69,237.51 and $71,022.99, so yes you are correct.

The VIX is an index of options that measure the expected volatility of the S&P 500 index. The VIX does not measure any individual stock price or even the options price of any individual stock.

I think Foxpup will only let people who have tons of merit "join" the "club" (in the top x in terms of merit received). All that is involved is that those who are members are paid to wear an avatar. I am fairly confident no actual merit is exchange.

TBH, the "club" is an example of someone who has way more money than they know what to do with, that gets spent trolling someone who in all likelihood has left the forum.

Do you have some specific data point(s) to suggest that these pools are not representative of the entire population of miners?

BitFury is one entity that is not representative of the network as a whole. The same is true for any other individual miner.

In terms of the number of blocks found in any given difficulty period, those pools are statically significant to all blocks found. 

It is very unusual to survey an entire population to find out authoritative information about a population.

No, this is not possible.

Each new block that is found is a derivative of the previous block, and every block before it. In order to validate if a block is valid or not, you need to know if all inputs spent in that block are valid, and the only way to know if an input is valid is by at one point looking at all previous blocks. If your node has never looked at all previous blocks, it will have no way of knowing the UTXO set.

One solution might be to change the bitcoin protocol so that blocks must contain a hash of the UTXO set so that someone has the ability to run a full node without processing the entire blockchain.

If you want to use a full node as anything resembling a block explorer, you must store the entire blockchain. When you run a pruned node, you are disregarding the history of all transactions, and are keeping a list of all unspent outputs that can be part of a block, plus a portion of the recent blockchain in case of a reorg.

If all you want are unspent outputs, you can run a pruned node, but this will omit a lot of information that pretty much all other block explorers provide.

It seems that all your services are down. Your 'home page' and search page for viewing unedited posts are available, but all pages with actual data are inaccessible.

Don't try to farm merit. That is frowned upon around here.

You should put effort into your posts, and make interesting posts. If you do, you should receive merit over time.