Faketoshi doesn't control most, if any, of the keys he's claiming he does.  Idiot dug himself a hole and now looks even more foolish than he normally does.  The courts can't do anything to Bitcoin itself, so it doesn't matter all that much what they decide to do.

It's likely that the real owners of those keys value their privacy because they're sitting on a vast fortune, so chances are you might never find out who they are or whether they are satoshi or not.

Then you need to come up with a provable metric that can't be gamed or manipulated.  The whole reason miners perform proof-of-work is to prevent cheating.  Non-Mining Nodes, by definition, aren't doing proof-of-work, so they would potentially be able to cheat whatever metrics you implement.



Wat?   

It would clog the blockchain up more to send transactions to pay every single node every day.  Making a payment to ~10000 recipients (the current approximate number of nodes) would be a large transaction in terms of size.  I'd be curious to know how big that might be.  And if more people started running nodes and more recipients needed to be paid, the transactions become larger still.


//EDIT:  Does roughly 350-450kb sound about right?  It's actually not as bad as I thought.  But I'm sure the number of nodes would multiply rapidly if people could earn money for doing it.  


//DOUBLE_EDIT:  And look how quickly ~2000 new nodes can appear and disappear when it suits someone's agenda:  https://coin.dance/nodes/image/btc1.png

It would be way too easy to cheat.

If you read the topic in full, you'd realise it's likely that we don't need to change anything.  This is purely contingency planning if something goes wrong:

IF <problem> DO <proposal>

---

I support the idea in principle, yes.

I think the main pitfall with your proposal is that you're assuming we'd get to nominate who the extra workload gets assigned to.  I get that people trust this site and it's administrators, but they already do a lot of work just keeping this place running.  I don't think it's right or proper that people should be pressuring them into potentially maintaining two websites just because you have concerns over what Cobra might or might not decide. 

If we're going to have a backup plan, we should be asking for volunteers, not just handing a job to someone who might not want it.

I'm pretty sure nothing has been announced.  There would have been so much noise and attention, probably some drama and controversial opinions being thrown about.  I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to miss it unless you were living in a cave, heh.

You say you would have a wallet that allows you to "unlock tokens" between BTC and "BTC-tokens", but this raises issues.  There would need to be a way to record these "BTC-tokens" to prevent double-spending and if that involves introducing another blockchain, you raise the question of who is securing that blockchain and how are they incentivised/rewarded for securing that chain?  

If you solve that problem, then you run into the issue where the larger blocksize tends to result in centralisation, as fewer nodes will want to bear the cost of relaying these larger blocks.

One alternative if you're not introducing another blockchain is to look at off-chain transactions, but this is already well underway in terms of development by several separate dev teams.  It's also a compromise in that you have to sacrifice some security and rely on a different trust model compared to normal Bitcoin transactions.  Ideas have also been floated regarding "sidechains", "treechains", "merged-mining", but each of these have compromises of their own.

It's nice that you're trying to help, but this is ground that has already been well trodden and sadly isn't likely to yield any sudden breakthroughs.

I don't get all this talk about 'Herd Immunity'.  I mean, first off, does it not bother you that the government talk about the public in the same way they talk about cattle?  They see us as livestock that they own.  And secondly, where's our herd immunity to the common cold or flu?  Where's our immunity to cancer or aids?  You don't necessarily get immunity to some medical conditions.  I think people are living in a fantasy world if they believe we're just going to suddenly become resistant to this thing and it's just going to magically go away.


//EDIT:

Latest news is that a vaccine looks promising, though:  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccine-covid-pfizer-trial-b1719607.html

So close, but you've got one word too many in there.  It's the dream of every authoritarian.  Left or right, socialist or capitalist.  Doesn't matter.  

You'd definitely call me a commie lefty socialist.  I believe in a publicly funded national health service, rehabilitation over incarceration, more protections for the environment (I'll stop before I make you physically sick).  But I categorically don't want to see a cashless society.  Traditional banking is the epitome of the myriad flaws of capitalism.  And it's banks that are pushing for this.  Maybe if you stopped buying into the ridiculous fantasy that all socialists are inherently evil, maybe you'd find some more common ground with them and realise that what you currently believe is capitalism is actually corporatism.  It's completely broken.

One would hope that it would create a niche in the market that new competitors would fill.  In an ideal world, maybe get a bit more diversity and put an end to YouTube/Google's total dominance.  But something tells me people are getting lazier and many are likely to just go with the flow and not challenge this trend.  Troubling times.



I've been using Ecosia for a few months now.  Seems decent enough.  Never seemed to get the results I was looking for with engines like DuckDuckGo or StartPage.  Ecosia has the better algorithm, IMO.  

Can't say I've heard of any of the others in your list, though.  Might be some good ones among them.

Aww, but I was just going to discuss the theory that Trump / Pence were going to pull a Ford / Nixon.  Trump will step down, make Pence president and Pence will give Trump a presidential pardon to keep him out of jail (even though he rightfully belongs there).

You talk about hate preachers, but do you even look at what you write?  

I get it.  You feel compelled to air your backwards views while you can, because you know your time is running out.  Trump created an environment where intolerant views like yours could thrive, but I suspect many people are hoping that's going to come to an abrupt end.  I'm not going to pretend Biden is going to be a perfect president, but at least he'll restore some dignity to the role.  America's stance on several topics is going to shift, as will the tone of national debate.  It's only a matter of time before the bigoted "patriots" (read "fascists") like you to slip quietly back into the background where no one pays any attention to you because your hateful language will once again become unacceptable in societal standards.

The problem is, even if such a project is started with the best intentions, they tend to be a breeding ground for corruption.  Once money starts flowing in, the temptation will always arise for people to start using it for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of their stated cause.

Without the aid of a time machine, it's difficult to judge how Bitcoin's ecosystem would have evolved without the Foundation existing.  I like to believe it wouldn't have been vastly different to how things are today, though.

Are you the "BBQ BEER & FREEDOM" guy?   

The only reason people even have ads for avatars and personal text is that it's technically not breaking the forum rules.  The generally accepted interpretation of the rules is that advertisements aren't allowed within the body of the post, so someone noticed the loophole and opted to exploit it.  No one foresaw that happening and it never occurred to anyone to make a rule against it.  

I don't see why anyone would expect forum staff to invest time and effort into changing the forum software just to support a style of marketing that clearly wasn't intended.  I'd even go as far as saying people should be thankful that it would also take time and effort to restrict users from putting ads in avatars and that's probably the only reason you haven't been stopped from doing it already.  


Arguably, the part in brackets is being flouted by many of you.  You're all very naughty.   

Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, I'm sure some of the sanctions on Iran were introduced during Obama's terms in office.  It's not just a Trump thing, reprehensible though he is. 

That said, I'm also reading that Obama withdrew a whole bunch of sanctions as well.  Hopefully you're right and Biden will do something similar.

I can't make sense of this post AT ALL.  What am I even reading? 


Are they talking about USD fiat and they don't understand that USDT isn't the same thing?  Someone help me out here.

I was trying to think which "several scandals" they might be referring to that took place back when the Foundation was first formed.  Gox around the 2013/2014 era was the earliest major scandal I can recall (but then again I wasn't around in 2012).  It then occurred to me that the line in question was probably added at a later date.  As it happens, the original draft of that page is probably more telling of the true picture than the current revision.  

The part about scandals wasn't added until July 2018, so I'm assuming it to be a slightly revisionist re-telling of the actual history of why it was founded.

They were definitely intended to be an advocacy group and may have had some successes in that regard, but they also took the piss with it and used the donations they received to travel business class, stay in swanky hotels and generally live the high life while doing whatever advocacy work they might have done.  It could be argued they caused a fair number of scandals themselves and perhaps did as much harm as they did good in terms of reputations.

It's puzzling on their website that they provide monthly reports for their fiat and physical gold holdings to show that their stablecoins are fully backed.  Yet they make no attestations about the quantity of BTC held, instead simply referring to "deep liquidity".  

Like... how deep?  Some of us are skeptical here.  A bit more information from them would be reassuring.  

If that were true, people would be looking at the difference between last few years and now and wouldn't be fooled to begin with.  It's not like we get to pretend the prices increases we've already experienced haven't happened and that this is some new and sudden phenomenon.