A personal message is a way for you to send a message to a specific person. It is in no way a private message. This means the content can potentially be disclosed to anyone that is interested in the message.
 
The new forum has a specific requirement that the end user have the ability to share the contents of a PM with other forum users via a link. Only one user would need to consent in order for the M to be disclosed.

Right, it might serve as a honeypot for crypto users in locations that are authoritarian, such as China. On the other hand, HW suppliers are less likely to be subject to the authority of authoritarian governments.

To the extent that you believe your government will not become authoritarian, I think buying a HW wallet should be safe.

A list of customers is going to do very little for law enforcement because the overwhelming majority of crypto users are law abiding, even if they tend to go to great lengths to maintain their privacy.

IMO, someone buying a HW wallet is insufficient evidence to suggest that someone has committed a crime and as such any warrant based on this will be invalid.

It would be important to add that this includes barter transactions. So if you pay $1 for each of 10 applies, but pay in the equivalent value of pears, and exchange those apples for $20 worth of oranges, you would owe capital gains taxes on the $10 of profit you realized from the sale of the apples (plus any additional gains you realized on the sale of the pears).

You can replace the above asset classes with bitcoin and any altcoin, or fiat currency and the same concept will still apply.

If Bob has two nodes (Node "A" and Node "C") that are both connected to node "B" run by someone else, broadcasts the transaction from Node "A", and receives the transaction to Node "C" from Node "B", he will know the path of his transaction.

Bob could potentially expand his network of nodes to be larger than two nodes. If Bob has many nodes, he could follow the path of propagation as long as there is exactly one hop between each node not controlled by him to another node controlled by him. He can also measure the exact time each of his nodes receive his transaction to get an idea as to how quickly his transaction is propagating.  

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I would also point out two things:
1- Nodes typically connect to a geographically diverse set of nodes. If I have a node in North Carolina connected to nodes in California, France, Illinois, New York, and Mexico City, if I broadcast a transaction, it may take longer to get to South Carolina than to California, even though South Carolina is geographically much closer.

2 - The time it takes a transaction to propagate throughout the network is very small compared to the time it takes for a transaction to get one confirmation. There is an approximately 0.1664% chance a block will be found at any given second, and I don't think it typically takes more than a second or two for most transactions to fully propagate. So in general, a transaction will have been fully propagated for a long time before it is confirmed.  

Are you referring to the coinbase wallet? Or someone who has a coinbase custodial account (someone who has an account at coinbase.com)?

The coinbase wallet is a software in which the end user has sole access to the private keys. If law enforcement were to approach coinbase about someone they believe is using the coinbase wallet, coinbase would have no way of knowing which person is even using their wallet. On the other hand, someone with an account at coinbase.com merely has a database entry on coinbase's servers indicating their balance. Someone with a coinbase.com account could potentially be under investigation, and coinbase would have various information about the account holder that could be turned over to law enforcement, given a legal process authorizing them to do so.

Great! That is the last of my concerns. Obviously you will need to earn trust in order for people to be willing to use your service. With that change, I don't believe it would be possible for you to steal money without the end user being able to prove the theft.

Do you need to be able to *prove* a post said something, or do you want to *know* (for yourself) that a post said something? If the former, you would have to use something like archive.md or the wayback machine. If it is the later, you can write a script to scrape the person's post history and save it somewhere for you. To my knowledge, no archival services offer API access that can be used to save a page.

I don't think any of the major blockchain analysis firms use ML.

In order to train a ML model, you need a dataset that is labeled with what you are trying to predict. Since all mixers are different, you would probably need a different model for each mixer. So the dataset would need to be specific for that mixer. If you already had that dataset, why would you need to train a model? You would already have the ability to get the information a model might be able to tell you.

I suspect that blockchain analysis companies are "customers" of various mixers, which will allow them to "watch" where their deposits "go", to draw conclusions about which UTXOs are associated with that particular mixer, which will allow them to deduct when a transaction is going from a third party to the mixer and when a transaction is going from the mixer to a third party. They usually wont know this is real time, but may be able to conclude this information after so many days/weeks.

Blockchain analysis is generally the art of making incremental conclusions and building on those conclusions. Say for example you have a CJ transaction with the following inputs and outputs:
IN | OUT
0.1 | 0.7
0.5 | 0.3
1.0 | 0.33
      | 0.16
      | 0.01
      | 0.06
      | 0.04

The first output can only belong to the third input, and since no other combination of outputs add up to the remaining 0.3 from the fist input, the 2nd input must also be associated with the third input. The only two outputs that add up 0.1, the last two outputs must be associated with the first input. That leaves the middle three outputs being associated with the middle input. This is a rather simple example, and sometimes blockchain analysis might not be able to match all inputs with all outputs, but might learn more information as outputs are spent.

See this thread. That person was able to "break" most mixers using a procedure similar to the above two examples in my post.

I think it is important to remember that some VPNs offer "privacy", but you will need to trust them to give you said privacy. For example, if a VPN claims to not keep logs, you need to trust they actually don't keep logs.

Also, regarding using a VPN for streaming, many streaming services will block IPs associated with data centers, especially services that offer content based on geo-location. If this is why someone is going to buy a VPN service, it would probably be best to purchase a one-month plan (or the shortest plan available) to make sure they can actually access the streaming service via that VPN.

Both the .com and .org TLDs allow anyone to register their domain. The .com TLD was originally intended for "for-profit" businesses and the .org for non-profits.  

Almost every possible "bitcoin" domain, and many names/words appended to the word "bitcoin" have been registered for almost every TLD. The same is true for many other popular words. This is not something related to bitcoin, or to bitcointalk.

The bitcointalk.com domain was likely registered by a Russian who wanted to create their own crypto-related discussion forum that potentially competes with the 'real' bitcointalk.org forum

Well were to using multiple accounts to evade any kind of limits that Nitrogensports imposes? If you were, you should ask for your original deposit back, and I don't think they will pay out your winning bets.

I know they have a history of paying out, even when someone wins a large amount. The fact that someone won x times in a row doesn't really matter IMO. It is the amount of the payout any casino will care about. 

Very interesting. How does it anticipate the expected future fees? (what assumptions does it make)

I suspect that when LN has an increased adoption rate, the most successful LN node operators will automate their channel balances such that they are balanced (no pun intended), and that there is a low risk channels will be closed due to an unbalanced channel.

The OP claims below that he was not using a VPN. I don’t know for sure, but it looks like nitrogen sports believes the OP was either using multiple accounts to evade betting limits or is otherwise exceeding some other limits.

In general, I am tempted to believe the casino in these types of cases. There have been many in which the casino has ultimately shown to be correct and few otherwise.

edit: typo

I don't agree with the OP's proposal, however maybe something somewhat similar could be implemented in order to prevent a cartel of miners from artificially increasing tx fees.

A mining cartel could potentially confirm their own transactions to themselves that contain very high transaction fees. This could potentially lead to higher tx fees for real users if the remaining block space is not enough to confirm all *real* users' transactions. To the casual observer, these blocks would be full, but in reality only xx% of block space is being utilized after the "fake" transactions (that serve no economic purpose) are removed.

The above potential attack could be addressed by only giving 90% of tx fees to the miner that finds a particular block (block n) and the remaining 10% of tx fees could be given to the miner that finds the n + 5th block.

The miners as a whole would receive 100% of tx fees, there would be no deflation problems, and the above attack would go from being free to having a real cost. The above percentages and the x^th subsequent block could be adjusted upon debate, although miners should receive 100% of tx fees.

Crypto news is probably worse than MSM in trying to push some kind of agenda. Crypto reporters make very little, but what they write has the ability to potentially move markets, especially altcoin markets with lower market caps. I think it is probably fairly common for reporters to receive payments from third parties for writing specific articles (the payments would be hidden and would be from entities different than their employer or the publication the articles are being published on).

Criticism should always be welcomed, but at least try to make it constructive.

I would argue that in general, changes should be incremental, rather than revolutionary. Incremental changes allow for additional improvements along the way, while revolutionary changes more or less will lock you into a concept.

Both Taproot and SegWit are incremental improvements whose ultimate goal is to solve the scaling problem with some type of L2 solution. Currently, LN is the leading contender to be the solution to the scaling problem, however we are not "locked in" to using LN. It is very well possible the ultimate scaling solution will not be LN, although it is likely to at least somewhat resemble LN.

BTW, the article cites "cryptowhale" (whoever that is) as saying the improvements that Taproot offers are already available on 99% of altcoins. My response would be that bitcoin (and litecoin) is(are) the only cryptocurrency that supports LN, or any L2 scaling solution that I am aware of. If it is true that 99% of altcoins already are implementing the features that Taproot offers, they are clearly not doing a very good job of implementing the features, nor leveraging the features to turn their altcoin into something useful.

Just my two cents...

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. I found this in the documentation, specifically under the "transfer" section, step 1:
My reading of the above makes me believe the statechain will be signed with one key and the "blackout" transaction will be sent to another key.

Stablecoins today can be arbitrarily "frozen" by their issuers, and they are issued on blockchains. Even if miners were to confirm transactions of a frozen UTXO, the issuer could publicly say they will not honor that particular UTXO, so no one would be willing to give value to that UTXO.

A CBDC would effectively put banks out of business. The same people that are against business operating in response to market conditions, are the same people who want to be able to intimidate people that associate with people they do not agree with. A CBDC that uses a public blockchain would allow someone to monitor payments made to political enemies and opposition.

For the above reason, IMO, if a US CBDC is implemented, it would be on the blockchain.     

QE was supposed to be an emergency measure for something that has honestly already past.

Inflation is heating up in Europe, and the ECB will need to slow down their QE soon. I suspect that the fed and other western central banks will slow down QE ahead of what is currently scheduled, or else inflation will get out of control.

I am not sure about 13% inflation. If we get anywhere near that level of inflation, there will be broad political pressure for central banks world-wide to tighten monetary policy, which would include both raising rates and stopping, or even reversing QE (ie being a net seller of bonds).