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Preventing another 9/11 style attack. Preventing terrorists from having a safe haven in Afghanistan. Giving basic human rights that Democrats claim to care about to the people of Afghanistan.

We have had less than 23 combat-related troop deaths per year since 2015. While we should do everything to prevent American military losses, this is a small price to pay compared to the next Obama Bin Ladin being able to carry out another 9/11 style attack.

There are currently somewhere between 11 and 40 thousand Americans in Afghanistan who need to leave the country. The Taliban currently has a "ring" around the Kabul airport, which is the only way out of the country. This does not count the thousands of Afghan translators who helped the US over the last 20 years.

To put the above another way, the Taliban currently has up to 40,000 American hostages. In the last 24 hours, the US was able to evacuate around 700 Americans out of Afghanistan.

The Afghan military has been fighting the war since 2014. Trump did not make the decision to recruit, nor train them. The Afghan military relied on air and logistics support from the US, which Biden removed.

Trump was going to withdraw from Afghanistan but was going to keep Bagram air force base so we could still easily launch airstrikes. Trump would also only withdraw troops based on the conditions on the ground.

Trump was going to continue to provide the Afghan military support via air support. Biden basically handed the country over to the Taliban.

Biden is going to keep silent on Afghanistan as long as possible. He is going to avoid answering questions on Afghanistan for even longer. I am willing to bet that Biden will not take questions tomorrow. Biden saying anything on Afghanistan will hurt him politically. If Biden does not get his messaging on Afghanistan exactly right, it will end his presidency, and how Afghanistan was handled may end it anyway.

Biden was warned about the consequences of abandoning Afghanistan, but he did it anyway. He ignored advice from military and national security advisors. His administration was unprepared for how quickly the Taliban was able to take over.

That is ridiculous. Covid tests are not even 100% accurate, so a single positive may be a false positive.

Their economy is not going to be able to sustain sudden lockdowns over a single case. Either people will be out of work due to the snap lockdowns, or the government will need to borrow to pay for stimulus and transfer payments that cannot go on forever without high inflation, or investors declining to continue purchase government bonds, or both.

They should focus on getting their citizens vaccinated with one of the Trump vaccines, so cases will not matter.

Your equation does nothing to address the issue I brought up previously. Miners can and do receive transaction fees in ways that are not attached to the transaction. For example, viaBTC offers a paid transaction accelerator service for people who have attached too low of fees to their transaction. They charge a fortune for this service, so it is not widely used, but if pools have incentives to show transactions having lower fees than is actually the case, you can guarantee more pools would offer this service, and the cost would be very low.

If you are referring to civilian deaths as a result of the war, the US pulling out of Afghanistan means the number of civilian deaths will go up. There is a reason why people were willing to hang onto the wings of a plane in an attempt to escape the Taliban -- it is because the Taliban is a brutal organization.

Over 70% of the people of Afghanistan is under age 25, meaning they have always lived in a country that gave them freedom and opportunity. With the Taliban, rights will be stripped of almost everyone, and there will be no opportunity for the Afghan people.

To argue that the Taliban taking over Afghanistan is somehow humanitarian is just ridiclous.

The consequences of staying includes spending a little bit of money in order to guarantee Afghanistan won't be a haven for terrorists.

The US and NATO forces have not engaged in combat since 2014. The last time the US lost a service member in Afghanistan was 18 months ago. The Afghan military was fighting the Taliban with US support, primarily air support (that the US withdrew).

You make a good point in that the Afghans clearly were willing to fight the war with US assistance.

There are reports the Taliban is going door to door killing people who worked with the US and for the previous government, and raping women in said families.

Yea, none of this is true. They want the world to legitimize their new government and want to reduce the chances that the rest of the world will intervene.

There have been plenty of companies over the years that initially appeared legitimate but turned out to be a scam. There are plenty of companies that acted legitimately at first, and later scammed once they had more customer money. There are plenty of companies that were technically initially acting legitimately, but were giving off red flags, and eventually scammed their customers. There are companies out there that almost certainly scammed their customers, but proving the scam in a verifiable way is nearly impossible. There are legitimate companies that are subject to scam accusations by customers who are upset with the company. There are instances in which everyone may not agree if something is a "scam", even if everyone agrees with the underlying, and relevant facts. There are instances in which customers lose money due to a company getting hacked (the term "hacked" applies both with and without quotation marks).

There are simply too many situations in which it is not reasonable to expect the forum administration to judge if a company is a scam or not.

Prohibiting the advertising of scams also gives all allowed advertising an implied stamp of approval that said company is not a scam, which would obviously be impossible for the forum to do.

When we invaded in 2001, we were not invited, and Afghanistan was not a democracy. Once we were able to remove the Taliban from having control of Afghanistan, elections were held, and the elected government asked us for help in fighting the insurgency.

The cost of remaining in Afghanistan was very low. American troops were engaged in very little actual combat. Afghanistan is not the only war zone American troops remained in after the war was won. World War 2 ended over 75 years ago, but we have 60k+ troops stations in Europe, the Korean war fighting ended via an armistice over 65 years ago, but we have 28k troops in South Korea, the USSR fell over 30 years ago, but we have 70k troops in former Soviet states.

Leaving any of the above would likely result in our enemies taking advantage of the situation, and there would be conflicts involving our allies losing wars against our enemies, just as what happened in Afghanistan.

I wasn't even referring to the added cost of using multisig (although that is also a temporary issue), I was referring to the cost of moving your coin back and forth between your hot wallet and what is basically cold storage unnecessarily, and due to the nature of the goal of the setup, almost always having to pay 'next block' level transaction fees.

If you are not comfortable having a certain amount of coin in your hot wallet all the time, it is probably not a good idea to be moving that amount of coin to your hot wallet on any kind of a regular basis. If your hot wallet keys are compromised unknowingly, the attacker does not need to immediately spend coin from that hot wallet, and they probably won't if they know that a large amount of coin is regularly sent to said hot wallet.

IMO the proposed setup involves poor security practices, even if it meets the OP's (misguided) stated goals.

It appears that Biden made the decision to abandon Afghanistan on his own. I have heard that Biden's advisors advised against the complete withdrawal of Afghanistan.
This is a disaster. The cost to get to where we were in the War was high, but we were at a point at which the cost to continue the war was low. We only had a few thousand troops in Afghanistan, most were not seeing actual combat, but were rather providing training and support to the Afghanistan military, and it had been about 18 months since the last US causality.

There are reports of the Taliban going door-to-door looking for people who worked with the Americans, and of schools being burned down. Afghanistan is going to be a safe haven for terrorist groups.

We were not an occupying force, we were there upon the invitation of the democratically elected government.

Part of the issue was that the Afghan military relied on American air support, which was also withdrawn. The Afghan air force was unable to maintain their planes because US contractors were unable to help from Afghanistan.

The Taliban are not nice people. They will likely kill those who helped Americans.

Okay, sure, any pool mining on any coin could change block headers to appear to be mining on another pool, and a single entity could mine on multiple pools. This applies to all coins, including bitcoin.

Do you have any specific evidence or informed speculation that the creators of BSV are a substantial percentage of the hashrate? I have heard this before, and I don’t doubt it, but I haven’t seen specific evidence, nor specific amounts of hashrate that the creators are using to mine BSV.

Probably not. The Afghanistan military more or less put up no fight against the Taliban once Biden pulled American and allied troops out. The Taliban will take over the entire country in short order.

Do you have any sources, or informed speculation to support how much of BSV mining is being done by the creators of BSV?

Blockchair reports two major pools with 44% and 19%, and "unknown" at 34%. This is horribly centralized, as even if these were made up of 100% miners not associated with BSV creators, there would be few choices to go if one pool started acting in a nefarious way. Unless the other 3% is what makes up miners not associated with BSV, at a minimum, there would be a potential savings of 22%.

Right, at a minimum, exchanges will require additional security before accepting BSV deposits if they receive a deposit that gets double-spent.

I would discuss Aliens in a different thread. The TLDR is that I think it is unlikely that Aliens (if they exist) and humans will never meet peacefully, even if CSW turns out to be satoshi.


It will cost close to zero if you spam BSV, regardless if you are mining or not. Any spam attack will not have any long-term effect on the network as blocks can be ridiculously large.

If you can 'starve' other BSV miners from their mining revenue, the majority of them will stop mining BSV, so it would be possible for you to utilize less hashrate to be guaranteed to mine all BSV blocks. This means that it could potentially be +EV to 51% BSV, sell the resulting coin from these blocks on an exchange, withdrawing from said exchange, and creating an alternative blockchain that double spends these deposit transactions (and selling the originally mined coin again, on another exchnage). Your cost estimate rounds up. If you remove the rounding up, it would cost about $235k per day to be guaranteed to mine all BSV blocks. I would not be suprised if some of the current BSV miners are renting on nicehash, and would stop doing so when they can no longer mine any blocks (any block they found would get orphaned), so the $235k figure may actually go down.

You can earn about $135k per day mining BSV is you are only selling your coin once, so if you sell your coin twice, you can earn $270k per day.

According to coinmarketcap, the #1 exchange for BSV is huobi global, and it it unclear what they actually receive from traders in trading fees, but a lower bound rate of 0.05% is probably a safe assumption. Assuming volume is consistant throughout the year, they have made about $6 million in a year from BSV trades.

Even bitfinex, the #5 exchange for BSV, has made about $192k in trading fees over the past year, assuming they actually receive 0.1% of trading volumes, and their 24h volume (that is entirely made up of a weekend) is consistant over a year.

I am not sure if a $100k loss would even be sufficient to get the #5 exchange to drop the coin. It would probably not be sufficinet for the #1 exchange to drop it. This probably would be a different story several months after BSV was released.


This may actually be a good opportunity to review how bitcoin handles very long reorgs, and possibly improve how it handles them. BSV nodes were obviously able to handle the initial block download, so there shouldn't be any reason why they can't handle downloading a few hundred blocks at once. The current UTXO set is stored in RAM, but I am not sure if the UTXO set as of any prior block is stored anywhere -- my guess is it is not because doing so would duplicate data already in the database, for example, you can know the UTXO set as of block 1000 by querying all transactions where the block number is less than 1000.

It might not be a bad idea to store the UTXO set from the last 10 blocks in storage, in case there is a reorg up to 10 blocks deep that involves a double spend transaction, changing the UTXO set.

There is also the issue of cost. Tx fees are cheap now, but they will not always be this way. If you want to unfreeze some of your coin, it will typically be because you want to spend it, thus it will probably not make sense to pay a fee that results in it taking days (or longer) to confirm when unfreezing your coin. Similarly, when freezing your coin, if you pay a fee lower than next block confirmation, while your tx remains unconfirmed, there is the potential for it to be double-spent by someone who has access to the private keys on the phone wallet (in your example).

Changes in difficulty should not affect the mempool when it is for all intents and purposes, empty. This is especially true when describing situations in which the difficulty will increase. This might not be the case if the difficulty was dropping by a substantial amount, but that is not the case.

What the community thinks doesn't matter. Moderation is not a popularity contest, and the only consideration that should be used when moderating is if a post follows the rules.

As I noted in my previous post, it is my belief that an exception to the rules should be made for your posts I described. I believe the benefits to both my those specific posts outweigh the negatives. I don't report posts I believe should be allowed to remain.

My point is that if we were to implement a strict policy of banning people after x number of deleted posts, it becomes difficult to account for making exceptions to rules, as I advocate to in your case.

I have posted before that I opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. I don't think Trump would do something as reckless as continue a withdrawal as the Taliban reneges on its peace deal, and starts to take over major parts of the country.

US troop losses have been low since 2015, and if anything, American troop presence was a deterrence to the Taliban (somewhat similar to a wall). American troops have not recently seen a lot of combat in Afghanistan, and most of our resources were spent in training the Afghanistan military.

The US has military bases in Germany (and throughout Europe), and in Japan, over 70 years after winning its second consecutive World War. A similar point can be made about our military presence in South Korea. Afghanistan is not as close of an ally to the US as these other countries are, but the point remains that the US has maintained a military presence throughout the world for decades.

I don't think anyone can defend Biden's decision in good faith. Even the left-wing media is describing the situation as "Biden's Saigon".

Who would have thought that one of Biden's first acts as President would be to lose a war in which US troops were seeing nearly zero active conflict?

If Trump had done something similarly reckless, I would be calling for his removal from office.