It all depends on how the pool is run. All pools have different timelines. Some will reward after the block has been confirmed enough times that the operators feel it is safe to payout, some will wait for 101 confirmations which seems to be the quasi-official 100% confirmed value.

The proliferation of countless altcoins which are mostly worthless and often outright scams was foreseen from the very beginning. I refer you to a very early thread about this very thing from 2010. That link puts you at a very salient point but I suggest you go back to the opening posts that set the stage for the discussions back then.

Yep. Spot on 

Shares are the work being sent to the miner and results sent from the miner back to the pool. They are one-shot data transfers, with the pool/miner talking to each other 18x per minute (on average). Read the Workers part of that link for details.

That would require massive bandwidth for the pool. Virtually all set worker difficulty to produce an average of 18 shares per minute.
You should checkout the various help topics this pool has. Going through the various Help topics there should answer most of your potential questions.

As far as miners sending serial numbers or a pool requiring you to provide that -- AFAIK that is unheard of and there would be zero need for it. BUT - yes a pool can within limits identify a miner as to what it is (and firmware running on it) because part of the response a miner sends out via Stratum has data fields assigned just for that. Kano does that to track performance of miners connected to his pool -- something it seems most other pool operators either do not do or if they do, do not share that information with the pool users. If you read through the Mining Details section of that Help area you will find that each worker has a unique ID generated that the pool uses to track your efforts.

edit: mainly fixed typos

Blokforge is an excellent and utterly trustworthy company. Over the years I have bought dozens of miners (Avalons), PSU's and controllers from them with zero issues and very good after-sales support.

The water is used to cool the power plant equipment and regardless of what the load is (miners or grid), for the same power output the resulting temperatures would be the same. Nowhere is anything said about mining changing the average temperature of the lake and of course water temps near the plants outflow will be fairly warm. That is a rather important point as the article says "nearby residents are reporting the water is like a hot tub" and nothing about the overall temp. In short: water temps are within licensed norms.

Do keep in mind that the plant was built to be used for load leveling when power demand on the grid is high - think of it as a reserve generating station - and normally is running at reduced power, ready for output to be increased when a large demand is predicted. Thing is, power plants cannot just be throttled up and down willy-nilly, they need to be kept operating within fairly narrow margins with large changes happening over several hours

So, the plant operators had a choice: Accept the costs of normal slow response and wildly varying power plant efficiencies due to it not operating near full power (as has been the only historical choice prior to crypto mining) OR use (their) miners to provide a solid baseline load so the plant can operate near full power keeping the equipment happy and yet allowing the power plant to very quickly supply reserve power to the grid simply by throttling back on the number of miners running. Once grid demands drop off the miners are restarted and the plants boilers or turbines continue operating in a steady state. Increased plant performance aside, mining of course has the bonus of providing a new direct source of income to the plant operators. In my book it's a win-win for all.

The only down side is that the thermal output into the lake is more constant vs fluctuating up & down as it did prior to crypto mining at the site.

Old news.
They started making noise about it late last year. Yawn.
I might add that DMG is also the group that was looking to censor transactions by processing only those going to/from known wallets. They recently backed down on that but still not a company I would deal with.

If you are in the USA, blokforge.com for both new miners and used ones coming in from the dismantled Chinese farms.

It most likely deleted by moderators because:
a. What Bitcoin mining hardware is it? A s9, S17,an Avalon miner or one from Inno etc.? If it is altcoin hardware this is the wrong area (Bitcoin hardware only). Altcoin stuff has their own areas...
b. It was considered a 'low quality' post because you did not do 'a'. We are not mind readers...

edit: seeing you are asking about the L3, as Mikey said below, odds are the mods will move this topic & posts to the altcoin area as well.

Then most here will have to say - DO NOT mine in your country. You are only asking for trouble when you are caught...

So just how does the OP posting that equate to saying Ricardo's bank is even considering much less saying they are about to, start accepting Bitcoin?

Ans. It doesn't...

I must beg to differ. Judging by most of the posts seen here there are a helluva lot of folks that do not know that because those same folks have zero knowledge of how the internet works.

Now as to if the added latency matters, depends on who you ask. Technically, YES it does because longer relay time means that there is a larger window where someone else may submit a found block to the network before you do. Does that matter in the Real World? If the latency is under say an arbitrary 1/2 sec, you'd have to look at a history of block finds to get a sense of the timing between submissions leading to Orphan races to figure that out.

The only hard fact is that you want the fastest possible connection to the BTC network and that rules out VPN's which generally bounce your data around the globe before sending it to the target destination.

If you mean miners using a power plant dedicated to powering only the miners, yes there are a few farms doing that.

Specifically, they usually are located in oil production fields where there is an excess production of natural gas that cannot be economically cleaned up and transported away from the site. In those cases the gas is flared (burned off) BUT flaring is penalized with hefty fines. Thing is, if the gas can be used to power something - in this case generators feeding miners - then there is no flaring fines. Just look up 'flare gas mining'.

Gotta love it when folks with obviously no electrical engineering background say things like that... A capacitor does not 'save energy'. It stores and releases energy and that means that energy must be put into them from some outside source. More to the point, any energy storage device be it an inductor, capacitor, battery, or pumped storage (of water or air) is not 100% efficient. There is always a loss between energy in vs energy withdrawn.

"Number of zeros" in what? What the hell are you asking? 

Getting back on topic, "Re: can bitcoin be protected by freedom of speech?"
Trying to tie use of ANY currency to 'Freedom of Speech' is ludicrous. Rates with up there with saying that using foreign currency vs your countries native fiat is 'Freedom of Speech' and must be allowed...

They are vastly different concepts

A better question is:
Why on earth would the OP NOT own Bitcoin?  
As long as you do a little research on historical prices and trending rise/fall and don't buy it at peak prices, it is a more or less safe long-term investment.

Key point about what that site says: In plain English that is legally defined as a MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) scheme which is pert-near the same thing as a Pyramid scheme...
I repeat - SCAM. If you want want to play with it then this topic will be moved to the altcoins sections where it belongs. This area is exclusively for mining Bitcoin. Not crapcoins.

I beg to differ. I found that paying this years taxes involving BTC to be very painless. Services like cointracker.io made is exceptionally easy for my tax folks to process the taxes due from new coins and taxes due after I cashed out a fair bit (to pay off my house mortgage). Since the coins I cashed out were earned more than 1 year ago they were treated as long-term gains resulting in a surprising low tax rate of only 8%.

As I said earlier, as long as banks allow transfer of coins to/from other accounts -- just like fiat -- this is a huge win-win for all parties.

amazed how little discussion about this here... To me it rates as far more important than when PayPal opened up to crypto.
Yes no doubt that like Fiat, the banks will hold the keys to your crypto accounts with them BUT -- as long as they treat crypto the same as fiat, as in allowing transfers not only to merchants but also (unlike PayPal), to other private crypto accounts as well, so what? It would make crypto just as usable as fiat.