Steve Bannon Bannon was accused of defrauding Trump's supporters by promising to use money from Trump's supporters to help fulfill Trump's primary campaign promise. Bannon has not had his case heard in court yet, but the pardon was not a good look for Trump. I think this pardon is a sign that Trump is not going to run for President again. I never expected Trump to follow through on pardoning Snowden though.
Snowden was always an unlikely pardon recipient. There are too many loud voices saying that Snowden went beyond "whistleblower" status and made public some information that harmed the US national security. Snowden applying for Russian citizenship (which means he pledges allegiance to Russia) also did not help his chances of ever receiving a pardon. |
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Could Bitcointalk with a few tweaks become a new home for those that have had their free speech crushed?
Probably not. Bitcointalk is a niche forum for cryptocurrency enthusiasts, specifically bitcoin. Bitcointalk also heavily favors those that are very active via the merit system and requires activity on the forum, and time spent on the forum in order to rank up. This means someone with an existing following would have difficulty having a voice on the forum. Bitcointalk does very much value free speech, and takes affirmative measures to promote the ability of people to say their opinions. |
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Newsflash: As of 20 January 2021, Rasmussen Reports has Trump at 51% approval. Although their index of his approval is still negative, they measure him as having the approval of a majority of Americans, with approval now (barely) exceeding disapproval by a statistically significant amount.
It is difficult to trust any poll for various reasons, such as political motives, and the difficulty in getting a true sample of the population with the advent of cell phones. Meanwhile, PN7, my condolences on your plight in a banana republic where Biden somehow managed put the Capitol in a de facto state of undeclared martial law, before even taking office (!). Hey, wasn’t Trump supposed to be the one who would rule by brute force? I think this is a show of force on the part of the Democrats. I think the purpose was to prevent any kind of protests against Biden during his inauguration, and obviously, this is concerning. |
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Gold  Lol, do you have a source for this? If this is real, it would be troll level 45. |
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I have made similar arguments in the past, and I stand behind those arguments. I don't think this means QC can be ignored though. Once the West and the Communists in the East (most likely the US and Chinese respectively) have QC tech, knows the other side knows they have QC tech, and knows that the other side knows they have QC tech, the incentive to keep the technology under wraps goes away.
If QC technology is used to crack bitcoin private keys, it will probably be too late to move away from EDSCA and confidence in bitcoin security will be lost/damaged. Using QC technology to crack bitcoin private keys will also cause a lot of damage throughout the bitcoin economy, and it has the potential to cause a lot of businesses to go out of business.
The threats of quantum computers are very real. That does not discount the fact that the incentives to attack Bitcoin pales in comparison to the other things that you can do with QC. You're assuming that we won't be able to at least adopt another QC resistant standards before it becomes a threat. Long before Bitcoin becomes a target, I would assume that we would've adopted another QC resistant algorithm. QC technologies seems to have an incremental improvement over the years and I don't think that a 2000qubit QC machine would be discovered overnight. As a state, I would think that they are more interested in collecting encrypted information rather than cracking a few Bitcoin keys, and I think the estimates for a ~1500qubit machine puts it at one PK per hour. I'm not exactly sure of the running costs of a quantum computer but I would probably think that it's not worth their time at an early stage where you would probably need a very precisely controlled conditions to keep it stable. Bitcoin prices will probably crash if that type of QC gets discovered overnight, so will the stocks market. QCs are after all not the primary threat to Bitcoin, but to all existing internet infrastructure. Yes, Bitcoin will definitely be affected by QC but the fact that it *probably* cannot be mass produced in the first place will bring about some doubts if people would want to start cracking the keys if they (the states) could stand to gain much more by starting to decrypt previously intercepted internet traffic. Anyhow, I would regard all of the discussions as speculations. If quantum computers gets cheap enough and collecting money is their main goal, then attacking a currency like Bitcoin could make some sense though the effects will be limited. QC can be used to decrypt encrypted communications between governments and their spies. It can also be used to decrypt encrypted military communications, and potentially impersonate the military command to military weapons. The above are likely the first use cases for QC technology that governments have access to and can keep secret. If a government is researching QC technology, they are not necessarily going to make their progress public, nor will they keep the public informed about the status of the QC technology they have developed in any way. This means you will not know how effective the state of the art QC computers are. In some amount of time, the US government is going to have access to QC technology that can trivially crack PK from a public key. The same is true for the Chinese government. At this time, neither will want to use the technology to steal bitcoin because they can use the technology to decrypt sensitive communications the other is sending. Once the US knows the Chinese have this technology (and vice versa), the technology is no longer useful for espionage because both governments will transition to QC resistant means of encryption. There is also the risk of a rogue employee that could use QC technology they have access to in order to steal coin. Each of satoshi's mined blocks is currently worth about $1.75 million, which is a lot of money for anyone. |
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You install a bitcoin wallet on your phone, you make a backup file with a password, and store it somewhere safe.
You should not do this. What you describe is a bad security practice. Your backups should be accessible to you and you alone, but using passwords will lead to the loss of coin because backups will potentially not be accessed for a long time after you create them. You are also making the mistake of using only one backup. You should always have at least three copies of your wallet, in at least two mediums of storage and have at least one in an offsite location. |
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Ahh, time has come. It is Trump's last day in office. Perhaps some thoughts on his Presidency?
Who knew with Trump's personality that he'd be the President to not engage in oversea conflict?
Trump implemented very good policies but was toxic personally. He made everything a referendum on himself, which was a mistake. I suspect Trump's personality made other countries afraid to provoke the US into conflict. I think they were afraid of an overreaction by Trump. This is probably especially true with regards to North Korea. Iran came close to baiting Trump into a conflict, and we even had fighters in the air before Trump called off the strike. I think Iran believed the left-wing propaganda in the US would make any conflict with Iran unsustainable politically.
It looks like Trump has largely already left the White House, as most of his belongings have been moved to Mar-a-Largo, and most of his staffers have left. Trump may be spending the night in the White House residence tonight, and reports say he will leave in the morning at a time such that he will land in Florida before Biden becomes President. |
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The OP clearly has made two posts in this topic, but for some reason, his profile shows he has 1 post and 1 activity. Very strange. To answer the OP's question, your thread was moved to the trashcan. My best guess is whichever mod moved your thread did not like you advertising those two hosting providers. |
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That would be the rhetoric of the morally and politically bankrupt GOP leadership. —The leadership of the same GOP that numerous right-leaning Americans have despised for decades.
The GOP has long been afraid of what the left-wing propaganda arm of the Democrat party will say about them. This has played a role in the lack of GOP effectiveness in governing, and the lack of their kept promises. Just imagine if the media were to report on Trump at least semi-honestly. Or at least, imagine if they were to stop hurling at him a 24/7 nonstop barrage of easily-debunked total lies. He would now have one of the highest approval ratings of any president in American history! As I alluded to above, the media is the propaganda arm of the Democrat party. I think Trump was upset that Fox News was not willing to be his propaganda machine late in his term, and after the election. If Trump was constrained by facts and was more articulate, he would have a stronger case in overturning the election, and none of this would probably have happened. In 2016, Trump was widely thought as the only person who could lose to Clinton in the general election.
Honestly, my take home from the Clinton — Trump election was that Americans were not yet ready for a female president despite all their mouthed speeches about democracy. They loved Hilary Clinton but couldn't close her up to win the presidency. They had to choose controversial Trump instead. Even if Clinton had contested again against Trump in 2020, Americans still wouldn't have voted her in.
Clinton was willing to say anything to get elected, and I think many Americans saw right through this. She was the most unlikeable major-party Presidential candidate in history. Despite what the polls said, I don't think there was any real chance she was ever going to win against anyone. |
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Depends on how you look at it. It consists of 2x 5 qubit processors and a 16 qubit processor. So, not really practical to attack cryptography at all. My point is that QC tech is currently publicly available. I would anticipate it will continue being publicly available, probably a few generations behind the 'state of the art' technology. A government that does not want their unit of currency debased by bitcoin/cryptocurrency may also have an incentive to use QC to harm the public perception of the safety of using bitcoin.
Comes down to opportunity cost. I don't see quantum computers with that many qubits to be readily available and they would very much rather use it for deciphering sensitive information. Using it to attack Bitcoin won't reap much benefits especially when some BIPs would probably shift it to a quantum resistant algorithm fairly quickly. As to the prior argument, I would say that if there comes a day where quantum computers are powerful enough, the governments will keep it for themselves. Breaking asymmetric cryptography is useful for espionage and mass surveillence, don't think they have any incentives to do so.
I have made similar arguments in the past, and I stand behind those arguments. I don't think this means QC can be ignored though. Once the West and the Communists in the East (most likely the US and Chinese respectively) have QC tech, knows the other side knows they have QC tech, and knows that the other side knows they have QC tech, the incentive to keep the technology under wraps goes away. If QC technology is used to crack bitcoin private keys, it will probably be too late to move away from EDSCA and confidence in bitcoin security will be lost/damaged. Using QC technology to crack bitcoin private keys will also cause a lot of damage throughout the bitcoin economy, and it has the potential to cause a lot of businesses to go out of business. |
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My guess is they sell those gift cards in a low enough of a volume that costs associated with procuring the gift cards is so high they need to charge more. My guess is some merchants give them a better price for the gift card, for instance clothes sellers that have a large profit margin. THis may be true, but I also think that in general, if a merchant is selling a lot of gift cards to a single customer, they will offer a better deal. (getting KYCed to buy a pizza!) is utterly ridiculous. Isn't it enough the pizza guy knows where to bring it? I actually somewhat understand this. Buying a pizza and giving a very large tip via bitcoin might be a way to launder money, which is what KYC is supposed to prevent track. |
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No, since quantum computers will likely be only available to governments, and potentially high level companies. They wouldn't have any reason to attack specific users, or even Bitcoin in general.
IBM currently allows public access to their quantum computers. A government that does not want their unit of currency debased by bitcoin/cryptocurrency may also have an incentive to use QC to harm the public perception of the safety of using bitcoin. |
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You are contradicting yourself here. Someone with the skill set to create a model that can write semi-coherent posts, and actually post using a bitcointalk account is not going to be wasting their time trying to farm accounts. Their time will simply be too valuable for someone like this to earn coin like this. Firstly, what I entail isn't as involved as what you might have in your head: you're just leveraging the already-existing GAN and consuming the output. The implementation of the tool would solely be accessing the API and taking the text. Secondly, I'm not quite sure how much you could gain from account farming but presumably it's enough for some people to do it manually. I am not aware of any publically available GANs (specifically generator models) that are pretrained and ready to generate content. (there are a few websites that will use a pretrained generator model to generate an image). Most of the GAN architectures I am aware of involve images, and a few involve generating sounds. I have built generative models involving text before, but they were not GANs, and they could not come close to generating the two posts we are discussing (they would look at an image and create a caption of the image). Even if one were to implement a GAN architecture that already exists on a text dataset to create their own GAN to create posts, they would need to have the skills that far outweigh the possible income generated from farming accounts. You can know how much you can earn from farming accounts by reviewing pay rates of signature campaigns, and estimating how many accounts could be farmed at once. I would question if someone could earn anything at all from farming accounts using AI because I am not sure if they would earn enough merit to rank up to even a Junior Member. I don't think this is the case of the "user doesn't want to do much work" I think this is the case of the user wants to have their posts be 100% automated, without intervention without humans. -snip- Hence an attacker would want to try to use their working model where there are robust measures to detect plagiarism. Sure, this is a thought, but I would never expect Bitcointalk to be the place to do so. Have you seen our moderation? I mean... really. I feel like someone using BCT to limit test their model would have a much higher success rate here than elsewhere - although the rules and all are pretty anti-spam, it doesn't look much like it when you actually browse the place. The type of content we allow here is very broad, we do not allow plagiarism, and are under consistent spam attacks because we allow our content to be indexed by search engines (which is not the case for many social media platforms). We also require posts to be coherent and replies to be related to the OP of a thread, neither of which apply to other social media platforms. Someone tweeting incoherent nonsense here would probably get banned, while someone tweeting the same thing would simply be ignored by anyone who reads the tweets on Twitter. |
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GOP leadership is firmly not behind Trump right now. Trump's behavior is also a risk to the future of the Republican party, so [...] In 2016, Trump was supposed to be the challenger for Americans who distrusted the GOP after decades of being betrayed by them. He has always been disliked by the corrupt career-politician GOP leadership, and especially by the neocons. It was as much an upset for him to win the party nomination as it was for him to win the general election; but the GOP leadership had no choice but to go along, because Trump was overwhelmingly popular. In 2016, Trump was widely thought as the only person who could lose to Clinton in the general election. GOP leadership was afraid of losing the House, Senate and Presidency if Trump was nominated. In 2016, none of this turned out to be true, but the House was lost in 2018, and the Senate and Presidency were lost in 2021/0. I think Trump lost in 2020 because he made the election a referendum on himself. Trump has consistently been less popular personally than his policies. Ditto with his tweeting, his personal attacks on his critics, and the chaos that he caused. I don't think Trump had the right people helping him at the top of his reelection campaign.
With there being a day and a half left in Trump's Presidency, I don't think he is going to be removed from office via the 25th amendment. |
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No. You can look at historical data regarding increases in processing power, and network capacity, both at specific price points. You can also look at near term projections of both of the above.
1. Need to change Bitcoin protocol to explicitly disallow transaction low fees. Currently minimum fees is only set with parameter minrelayfee, but miner could include transaction with 0 fees on mined block.
It is not possible to prohibit transaction fees under any threshold at the protocol level. A business could for example privately send a transaction that pays a transaction fee of 0.01 btc to a mining pool, and privately receive a refund of 0.005 btc separately when this transaction confirms. Miners will not do this unless there are insufficient transactions to fill blocks that pay the minimum protocol-required transaction fees. |
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Any guesses at Ross Ulbrichts odds?
I would strongly doubt that Ulbricht gets pardoned. Ulbricht allowed people to have greater access to addictive drugs via his Silk Road platform. A major part of the Trump Administration agenda was trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The Lil Wayne pardon is the most hilarious. I have no clue what federal charges he's caught up on, but it sure does explain why he randomly endorsed him for reelection last year.
More likely, Trump pardoning Wayne is payback for the endorsement.
Tucker Carlson on his show tonight called for Trump to pardon Julian Assange, and John Kiriakou, the whistleblower who disclosed the waterboarding of detainees in 2007. The argument for Assange to be pardoned is on 1st amendment grounds, and Kiriakou is on the grounds that he made public information that the public had the right to know that was being kept secret by the intelligence community. Both should be pardoned. |
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Effective this week, campaign payments have decreased to $6 USD/post. All other rules remain the same.
I think some of the smears against ChipMixer and it's signature campaign were influenced by the large payments CM signature participants were receiving, both abstractly and when compared to what other campaigns pay. I think the reduction in pay should help alleviate those smears while still attracting participants who make very good posts. |
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I would nominate Cryptohunter and his related alts. He frequently complains about the trust system, particularly those in DT. I tried reasoning with him a long time ago, but he was unwilling to listen to my logic nor compromise.
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So is change address basically forced in CPFP?
No, it is not forced, it would be possible to send a transaction back to the same address as you are sending from, if that is what you wanted to do. Doing so will result in reduced privacy for you though. |
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2fa
Some people's accounts were able to be hacked because their email was hacked and used to change their password on bitcointalk, supposing 2fa has been enabled on the email, it will be more difficult or impossible for such to happen. Anything online is not safe, using 2fa can make it just more protected.
In before the questions.... bitcointalk does not use 2fa. He was saying to use 2fa on their email accounts to prevent a hacker from hacking their email account, and using the email account to reset their bitcointalk account. It is good advice. |
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