I know nothing about Tomatocage, have no time now to investigate, and tend toward caution in airing such suspicions.  But I do think it’s a reasonable suspicion worth investigating, and I can articulate why:  Quickseller has a prior history of obtaining illicit control of a DT account.  Any unexplained DT action beneficial to him should be examined, as a matter of course.


Oh, yes.  I think that drugs are certainly on-topic in this thread:

Thank you for making this thread, LoyceV.  You’ve saved me real money.

Since I first saw this, I’ve been doing transactions with fees far lower than I would have otherwise even considered attempting, much less dared to try.  This is not to consolidate anything (I mostly avoid coin-merge), but just for ordinary transactions.

Of course, it should go without saying, I’ve been exclusively using Segwit addresses for months (both nested and native).  That also helps significantly.

Namecoin isn’t a chainfork.  It’s a legitimate altcoin, with its own genesis block, address prefix (preventing the loss-of-funds accidents so common with Btrash!), etc.; it’s also one of the few alts with an interesting idea, rather than being only a cheap imitation of Bitcoin.  It can even be merge-mined with Bitcoin, such that shared hashrate can benefit both separate chains; indeed, Namecoin devs invented the concept of merged mining.  It is not harmful to Bitcoin, or even unfriendly toward Bitcoin.  Its goal isn’t even really to create a new currency, but rather, a new naming system which implements Aaron Swartz’s idea for squaring Zooko’s Triangle.


Actually, off the top of my head, it started with so-called “BIP 100” (not a real BIP number).  Some old-timer or Bitcoin historian will need to correct me if I’m wrong there.

Regardless, as I said, the felons have learned.  Early attempts only focused on overtaking the whole network all at once, directly from within.  As I recall, XT tried (and laughably failed) to Sybil the network with a bunch of XT nodes run on cloud-computing machines, compliments of Roger Ver.  I think eventually somebody realized the potential of using a separate forkchain for what trademark lawyers call “dilution” of a brand—thus, Btrash.  Not that the total instant coup attempts have stopped; vide 2X, which is dead, but was only the latest in a long line of attempts at that kind.

I think the worst damage earlier coup attempts did was to (0) manufacture the blocksize controversy as an ongoing (and effective) propaganda ploy, (1) delay Bitcoin’s evolution, especially the activation of Segwit.  Segwit should have been active on the network long before August 2017.  We all could have benefitted from that.  We are all at a real, direct loss from increased fees we paid, as well as opportunity cost.

---

Side note:  I see a persistent recurrence of forum threads over funds loss from sending Bitcoin to a Btrash address (or vice versa).  Also, I see threads discussing problems with trying to install both Bitcoin and “Bitcoin ABC” (i.e. Btrash) on the same machine; Btrash uses the same data directory as Bitcoin, and will happily overwrite Bitcoin files.  Etc., etc.  Btrash deliberately tries to cause as much confusion as it can, in as many damaging ways as it can.

It is such threads as this which help us newer folks decide who was right or wrong in old controversies.

That being said, I shall now pass judgment on Internet flaming competence.  As the only member of this forum who has ever received +50 for an insult, as a shriek from the target of the insult, I declare that you are a clumsy amateur, Mr. “Nasty”.  Attempts at style without substance fizzle out as a wet firecracker:  The tantrum of a garden-variety sadist whose namesake aspiration is to be “nasty”, but who does not know how to hit where it hurts.

On the flipside opposite pain, do you also have trouble finding “the spot” with women?  Not that I’d expect you to even try.

---

Beware!  I heard from a friend of a friend that Quickseller is HIV-positive from his time turning tricks on the street near a bathhouse; and Quickseller has not denied this!

---

Shush.  Mr. Quickseller is busy “looking for the real killers”.  That, and/or scamming somebody.  He will make more cheap, transparent excuses present evidence for his accusations when he has a spare moment in his jam-packed VIP schedule of swindling, molesting children, and selling his butt for crack money (as he has not denied).

---

Meow.

Yeah, the Lauda gang is fearsome.  I thought I was tough enough to survive a “beat-in” for the secret initiation, so I tried to join.  It turns out, Lauda does worse:  A “scratch-in” by cats!  I’m still bleeding from that; and worst of all, they decided that I was too wimpy.  At least they didn’t feed me to the lion—I’m thankful for that, but could Lauda be going soft?

---

In the manner of discovering THE TRUTH!!!, I myself have a pet theory that the merit system is designed as a weapon against Roger Ver’s .com forum playpen.  When all the spammers and trash posters leave, where will they go?  Hahah.

---

I’m glad you appreciate my posts.  But what you say brings to mind something pertinent which has been sitting in my drafts pile for a few days.  The relevant part is that to “rank up”, it’s not necessary to earn merit at anywhere close to the rate I do.  I can often earn +20–30 per day.  Comparing merit and activity thresholds for rank, the system seems designed with an expectation that an ordinary, decent poster will earn on average about +1 per day.  That sounds reasonable, does it not?

---

Much obliged.  And yes, I’ve oftentimes wondered about the cost/benefit analysis (not) done by certain people.  The same applies much more strongly for those who sometimes expend extreme efforts trying to gain money or advantage by gutter methods such as spamming, rather than putting less effort into achieving reasonable success by decent means.  But I suppose that here, some people are of a religious belief that divine law entitles them to make money by posting generic one-liners with a signature attached from farmloads of sockpuppet accounts.  How else could the vehemence of their reactions be explained?  Well, too bad for them that there is such intolerance of their religion.

---

Not good enough.  So in the seven days since you wrote that, I’ve added another 113 merits—to get myself started. <g>

---

100 merits is no problem.  I earned an additional 113 merits just since I last posted in this thread a week ago.  Here is a recent statistical breakdown of where I’m earning my merit.  Dividing out one extraordinary event I don’t deem representative of how merit is earned, the largest proportion of my merit has come from technical posts in Development & Technical Discussion.  But on the other hand, I’ve also oft been deemed meritorious for my vocal support of people who are making an heroic effort to clean up the forum.  —Oops, I meant for “somehow [getting] sucked up into the group of scam moderators.”  So, how would you characterize me?


Correction:  It’s no use whining.  Likewise, it is no use concocting absurd theories.  Meritorious posts earn merit.  For example, one of my highest-merited posts, “Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level”, is currently +18 (including +5 from the tech forum moderator).  Make good posts, and you will earn merit—or don’t, and you won’t.

(I will not even ask what motive theymos is imagined to have for nefariously designing a system to “keep [thoughtfully contributing] members from reaching higher rankings”.  Important words are here inserted.  Logically, if theymos wanted to freeze everybody’s ranks, he could do that much more easily.  Whereas the merit system separates the wheat from the tares; yes, it is designed to stop spammers and morons from rising in rank.)

---

Let’s see:  You created your very own whine thread, declaring a “right to consensus” and demanding that the merit system be put to a “general vote”.  Having succeeded in bringing yourself attention, you got caught by TheQuin passing yourself merit from an alt and red-tagged by Lauda.  Whereupon you promptly diverged into crazyland:  “Maybe [actmyname] and Lauda it's one persone?”  (Hahahah.)

Whining and blustering has worked so well for you in the past.  Keep it up to keep getting the same results!

Neither did Satoshi Nakamoto, in this context.  Not that that would matter to one of the ovine imbeciles who exclusively keeps money on exchanges.  Baa, baa.  Do you even know what a private key is?  It is self-evident that you neither know nor care why private keys are important.


That’s not something to brag about.  That you think it is, says much about you.  But not as much about you as your attitude about private keys.

The Bitcoin Forum is for users of Bitcoin.  By definition, such people have private keys.  Those who don’t are serfs, living on a master’s estate and at his mercy.  As a serf, you should know your place, and never expect anybody to take your opinion seriously.  How dare you come on the Bitcoin Forum and complain that it’s such an imposition to have a private key?


Logic failure.  What you said was this:


How could that even try to solve any spam problems, if it were not mandatory?  I do not expect that spammers would “opt-in”.  Had you been advocating optional SMS “verification”, you would not have suggested it to be an antispam measure.

That would do little against spammers who can easily avail themselves of bulk numbers for SMS; but it would instantly evict me from the forum.  Mandatory phone “validation”!?  It is reprehensible even to suggest that on a forum where many legitimate users, including Satoshi Nakamoto, exclusively connect(ed) through anonymity networks.

Fortunately, this has absolutely zero chance of ever happening here; and it’s a waste of everybody’s time for you to even mention it.


If you don’t control your own private keys, then you are not using Bitcoin.  Forgive me if I am underwhelmed by your opinions about the Bitcoin Forum.

Not true.  I will use myself as a handy counterexample.

Counting with a 1-based index unlike a C programmer, I am currently #7 on the list of all-time top-merited users.  My rank is currently “Member”; I already have sufficient merit to skip up two ranks to “Sr. Member”.  Whereas the soonest I can reach the activity threshold for “Sr. Member” status will be on 17 July 2018 at 20:40:00 UTC.

Following is the breakdown of where I’ve earned my merit thus far.  The largest proportion has come from Development & Technical Discussion, where I am proud to have recently become the first (and thus far, only) person yet awarded merit by Core developer gmaxwell.  Here in Meta and elsewhere, I’ve also been trying to contribute to the efforts of DT members who are protecting the integrity of the merit system; but in the ordinary course of discussion, I haven’t been awarded as much merit for that as for my tech posts.


(Percentages do not always add up to 100.0% due to rounding.)

So much for your absurd theories.  The merit system is very simple:  Meritorious posts earn merit.  For example, one of my highest-merited posts, “Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level”, is currently +18 (including +5 from the tech forum moderator).  Make good posts, and you will earn merit—or don’t, and you won’t.

---

I gave +1 for the rest of your post, plus +1 for that alone.

---

You have it backwards, upside-down, and inside-out (as most people who make armchair historical arguments usually do).  Society collapsed (past tense) in large part from a surfeit of “empathy”.  “Society/family/clan” worked by honour and the sword, hierarchy, obedience, group loyalty, and merciless shaming and shunning of social traitors and misfits.  Not by bleeding hearts and sob stories.  The world today is drowning in empathy.  The meek are inheriting the Earth; and of course, they will wail and gnash their teeth over a merit system which stops them from inheriting the Bitcoin Forum, too.

---

There, you are wrong; for tradition stands falsely accused of an “empathy” which it never had.  This thing called “empathy” by our contemporaries who use it as a religious byword implies empathy for the weak, stupid, diseased, degenerate, cowardly, incompetent, and outright criminal.  I have never heard anyone cry that we must have “empathy” for superior achievements.  Think about it rationally:  “Empathy” is inimical to survival.  Any species with too much of it will prove to be an evolutionary dead-end.

Nature never had any “empathy”—or for that matter, mercy.  Neither does Bitcoin, whose first commandment is to keep safe your private keys:  If you lose your private keys, then you lose all.  If you fail to secure your private keys, then Bitcoin will reward a thief and punish you.  You may cry, scream, shake your fist, preach about “empathy”—it will not help, and nobody can help you.  The judgment of Bitcoin is cold, merciless, exacting, mathematically precise—and final, without any court of appeal.  It is the judgment of pure cause and effect, a financial law which echoes both physical law and the moral laws of older forms of Hinduism.  And as such, Bitcoin excludes the vagaries of human arbiters, human emotions—human corruption.  For those who are willing to take ultimate responsibility for themselves in exchange for ultimate power over themselves, Bitcoin grants freedom.  For the rest—well, I am surprised to hear people whining about “empathy” in the Bitcoin Forum.


Being a reasonable person with decent premises, you miss the contrary unstated premises of the “empathy” brigades.  The purpose of the “empathy” religion is not to induce people to help others, or achieve any other constructive goal whatsoever.  Rather, “empathy” is designed to create an inverted moral hierarchy with pitiable wretches at the top, and you at the bottom.  Its ultimate end is to destroy the very concept of superiority of achievement, and thus stop all achievement.  The architects of the general class of philosophies which converge as antecedents to today’s “empathy” were and are motivated by one or more of hatred for all mankind, blind jealousy, idealization of primitive hunter-gatherer societies and “noble savages”, and/or psychotic delusions (e.g. Auguste Comte; I categorize Rousseau similarly, on grounds that he frankly admitted being unable to cope with reality).

Please go on actually helping people, for whatever non-empathetic reasons you may have.

---

When I was young, I was given the advice that the hardest part of being a boss is firing people.  When you call some incompetent fool on the carpet and his eyes get all wide, and you think a grown man might start to cry as he begins to stammer about his kids and his wife and how much he needs this job, then you yourself are being tested for whether or not you be boss material.

If you give a damn for his sob story, then you are cruel:  Cruel to all the competent workers who also have wives and kids and families, and are breaking their backs carrying the incompetent fool as worse than deadweight.  I myself “empathize” with competence.  If you have a heart, then you must realize that firing the fool makes the workplace more efficient so that you can give everybody else a raise in wages.

Whereas here on the forum, the spammers are killing the goose which lays the golden eggs for them.  Let them rot with their own myopia.  I don’t care if they are (or claim to be) poor, have kids, or whatever—whatever.  “Please, sir, I really really really need to spam” is not an argument which moves me.  Substitute any other crime for “spam”, and the same applies.

(Aside:  I myself have real-life experience with desperation brought by ill circumstance, hardship, hunger, ailing health, and outright homelessness.  I would win any game of one-downsmanship before a jury of bleeding hearts.  I dislike mentioning that, and shan’t discuss it further, because I have something called dignity; and it does not give me any special credibility in this argument, as if only those who have had it tough can pass judgment on wrongdoing.  I bring this up only to point out that in my experience, those who have had easy lives seem most susceptible to catching “empathy”.  I infer from that a misplaced sense of guilt.  Whereas those who face genuine life-and-death hardship either become degenerate beggars, or embrace the lesson that the strong survive and the weak perish.  “Builds character.”)

---

Well, here’s a “Legendary” who is unable to distinguish between a user who contributes to the forum and has a sig ad, versus a user who comes here only to spam the forum to make money off sig ads.  F in logic.

---

No, not really.  Also, please look up the word “humanism”.  It is one of the words most abused by pseudointellectuals who have no idea what they’re talking about.  I myself would claim (or at least aspire) to be a “humanist”, in the Renaissance sense.  I totally reject the concept of “empathy”.

---

You almost hit the nail on the head.  See what I said above about “group loyalty”.  The only part you missed is that to “empathy” advocates, this isn’t a bug:  It’s a feature.  So-called “empathy” is nothing more than a toxic social solvent which forces people to not only embrace the lowest common denominator, but expand it beyond your own village’s idiots to include every poor wretch in the whole wide world.

---

Drop the “lot of you” false equivalencies, or else I will stomp my feet and hold my breath until I turn blue.

Another limited reply:


To be clear, I had my heart set on “nullius” as a favoured nym for a future project years before I ever heard of nullc.  My attachment to the nym is why I made the mistake of beginning to use it without checking for collisions with existing use.  (I’m not the “nullius” on Reddit, either; I’ve never had a Reddit account.)

I’ll take it as quite a compliment if you mistook Gregory Maxwell for me!


Good point.  Thus, is it any wonder that


are leading big-blockers?  Cui bono?

---

Thank you for focusing on “real technical reasons”.  In the twentieth post I made to this forum as a “Newbie”, I wrote:


Now, let’s see what “real technical reasons” are offered by the evidently intelligent gentleman of whom you speak:

Mircea Popescu’s primary technical argument against Segwit is, “There’s a one Bitcoin reward for the death of Pieter Wuille.”  (Dr. Pieter Wuille, a/k/a sipa, is one of the principal codesigners of Segwit; he is gmaxwell’s esteemed colleague.)


Well, there are your “real technical reasons”, cellard.  The red colour is here presented exactly as Popescu put it on his blog.  To show that this was a serious technical argument, he PGP-signed it; the following has been confirmed by me to bear a signature dated 2015-12-10T14:25:01Z from Popescu’s PGP key, fingerprint 0x6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452:


N.b. that unlike most of the anti-Segwit crowd, Popescu is against P2SH, too.  He really means it when he claims that the only valid Bitcoin addresses start with a “1”.

Caveat lector.  Generally, Popescu states many truths, including a few controversial ones; he liberally mixes that with half-truths, innuendo, bare assertions of questionable factuality (or worse), and occasionally, outright nonsense.  He is obviously intelligent.  He excels at showmanship.  He is probably effective at overawing and brainwashing many readers.  I have no idea what his game is, and he is not sufficiently important for me to attempt divining his motives.

The first draft of this post followed the foregoing with a long discussion of Popescu and his tirades against Segwit and otherwise, including some links to choice bits amidst his voluminous writings.  I also thought to discuss the IRC log you quoted (which, by the way, had been quoted by another poster with derision toward Popescu—did you not notice when you quoted that?).  But I must ask, is that really necessary?

My long search for a valid technical argument is at an end; for I have found the ultimate argument of Segwit-haters:  “There’s a one Bitcoin reward for the death of Pieter Wuille.”  Thank you, Mr. Popescu.

---

You know, this is a recurring topic.  In a thread in December titled “Segwit is a 51% attack on Bitcoin”, I myself offered some more valid technical arguments against Segwit, equal in soundness to all anti-Segwit arguments I have ever seen:

I wish to reply to some of the other above posts; perhaps later.  For now, I want to explain something about this post I gave +40.

Bitcoin would not be what it is today without the efforts of a select few people, including Greg Maxwell (gmaxwell).  Without them, Bitcoin would be slower, less reliable, and less secure.  Early on, the Satoshi software was run-and-gun cypherpunk code; it was important because it created Bitcoin, but many parts were—problematic.  Nowadays, despite some necessarily remaining idiosyncrasies in the RPCs, etc., Core is a product of professional software engineering.  This is thanks to the work of many contributors, but principally among them, a few who have more or less dedicated their lives to the project.

Money can’t buy the combination of expertise and devotion which gmaxwell has given to Core.  That can only be bought by ideological dedication to the freedom made by a new form of money.  I’m not saying this to praise gmaxwell; I doubt he needs some Internet hagiography.  Rather, I want to make sure that newbies reading this will understand who gave the answer I deemed to merit +40 (which would have been +50, but the system wouldn’t let me).  He’s not just someone who knows what he’s talking about:  He’s someone who helped make what we’re talking about.  I think he knows how it works.

gmaxwell (a/k/a nullc) is also active in places where Bitcoin is discussed, and used to be much more active here in those days from the archives of the Bitcoin Forum as I wish I could experience it.  To variations of the same disinformation, he’s given that same answer (often at greater length) so many times over the years that I really only gave him a few millimerits for each time he’s explained this.  Sorry about that.

This is why I think user education is important.  For a forum dealing with what is now colloquially called “crypto”, only an astonishly small proportion of users are crypto-savvy.

One of my first thoughts on seeing anything Bitcoin-related is, “Why isn’t public-key crypto used for all authentication?”  Of all places, the Bitcoin Forum should lead with that!  If you use Bitcoin, you should also use PGP, at the bare minimum; and the attention brought by Bitcoin makes for an opportunity to introduce more people to what old cypherpunks call “crypto”, resulting in more security all-around.


Password crackers would beg to differ.  Most passwords are laughably weak.  The way you said that, I am guessing that that includes your password, too.


In this context, that’s the wrong attitude; it encourages people to give up and keep their security weak.  Yes, everything out there is broken.  The state of the industry is horrific.  Most people have bad security because they don’t care about security, don’t put any effort into it—and won’t pay for it, which is why the state of the industry is horrific.

I think the NSA could probably hack me.  I’m sure that forum account thieves can’t.  So much for “anyone is vulnerable”.

I’ve been drafting a longer reply, now much delayed.  I appreciate the insightful discussion—and especially that “Bcash. LOL”.  LoyceV, are you trying to induce me to donate to TPB?  They deserve a tip just for that.

Yet important though it is to properly inform people about the scamforks of the present, my point in OP is that this has all happened before—well, most of it.  The attacks on Bitcoin are now far better organized and more sophisticated.  Also, as I said in OP, Bitcoin itself is much stronger.  “Compare-and-contrast” with scenarios of the past can give the perspective most newbies lack when seeing these controversies for the first time.

E.g., apropos hereof in another active thread, we find Greg Maxwell discussing the anti-Segwit “anyone can spend” disinformation:


Oh no, P2SH in Bitcoin and Btrash betrays Satoshi’s vision and lets miners seize “anyone-can-spend” funds with a 51% attack!  I think we should fork Bitcoin from—what was the last version without P2SH?  Off the top of my head, v0.5?  How do you propose that we should purify the blockchain of all these horrible P2SH transactions?  Most importantly, what is a spiffy name for this fork?  “Bitcoin Devolution” has a nice ring to it, but I’m open to suggestions.  The real Bitcoin only allows payment to addresses which start with a “1” (or payments to IP addresses, which Satoshi also envisioned and had as a feature in early versions).

Well, anyway, the felons have learned.  So have long-time Bitcoiners.  Hey, Legendaries, what do you remember about “XT”, “Unlimited”, “BIP 100”, and various other wannabe coups?  How much of what happens now is just “same old, same old” to you?  You’ve got that perspective the newbies lack; please share it!

No, the one who collects the hashes would not be able to predict the outcome.  That is one of the purposes of committing hashes.

0. Collect commitments H(A), H(B), H(C).  Observe that A, B, and C remain secrets; each is known only to the person who generated it.  Thus, the outcome of #3 below cannot be predicted by anybody.  Every participant should have a copy of all hash commitments before proceeding to the next step.  After these commitments are all made, the outcome cannot be changed—yet it is still unknown to anybody!

1. Collect the revealed A, B, C.  Observe that the people who generate these cannot now change them to influence the outcome, because:

2. Verify the revealed A, B, C respectively hash to the committed H(A), H(B), H(C).  All participants can verify this independently.

3. Calculate H("my protocol" || A || B || C).  This is the outcome.  All participants can calculate this independently.

That’s a simplified version of protocols actually in use.  Did you read the Tor specifications as to which I linked?

(I may potentially have further thoughts; but let’s start there.)

Others have read the subject line as missing a possessive clitic “’s”.  That’s how I first read it, before I read the post.

Instead, I think that “pvtuan34897” was missing a comma and a possessive pronoun:  “My friend, [my] account was banned”.

From what I have seen, “my friend” exceeds “sir” in frequency of use as a form of address by posters whom we do not want here.  NO, I AM NOT YOUR FRIEND.  IF YOU PRESUMPTUOUSLY CALL ME YOUR FRIEND, THEN I WILL AUTOMATICALLY HATE YOU.  YES, I AM SHOUTING.  YES, YOU SHALL ADDRESS ME AS “SIR” WHEN YOU TELL ME THAT YOU ARE LEAVING:  “Sir, I am sorry for spamming the forum; and I will show the substance of my remorse by leaving forever.”

That’s not a “theory”.  It is a disturbingly pernicious and persistent urban legend about Segwit, predicated on a common misconception about the role of miners.  Miners have one, only one, and exactly one job:  To provide the ordering of transactions in a Byzantine fault-tolerant manner (which in turn prevents double-spends).  That’s what miners do.  That is all miners do.  Granted, it is an important and resource-intensive job; that’s why miners get paid for it.  But that is the one and only security function of miners.

Of course, miners must validate each block they produce; if they didn’t, they would be unable to reliably produce valid blocks.  But miners are not the parties responsible for enforcing validation on the network.  Full nodes do that.  Each individual full node does that, so as to provide better security for its owner; and all full nodes collectively do that, thus providing validation security for the whole network.  Observe how here as everywhere, Bitcoin precisely aligns the individual’s selfish interest with the common good.

Full nodes do not blindly “follow the longest chain”.  They follow the chain independently validated by them which has the highest total POW.  A miner (or 51+% of miners) who produced invalid blocks would only be wasting hashrate, and likely risking widespread blacklisting of IP addresses.  It doesn’t matter if the invalid blocks steal money from Segwit transactions, steal money from old-style transactions, create 21 billion new coins, or are filled with gibberish from /dev/random.  An invalid block is an invalid block, and shall be promptly discarded by all full nodes—period.


That begs the question:  It can’t actually happen.  Segwit transactions require signatures, just like old-style transactions.  Segwit transactions have security greater than or equal to old-style transactions in each and every characteristic.  If a miner could somehow steal Segwit funds with a 51% attack, then the same attack could be used against all bitcoins, including Satoshi’s coins.  But such an attack is impossible; the whole idea is ridiculous, just nonsense peddled by Btrash supporters so that


can smear the Segwit upgrade.  And why do they hate Segwit?  Because the Segwit upgrade stops


from covertly exploiting a security vulnerability which gives an unfair advantage of up to 30% in the energy costs of mining.  Of course, they will hate Segwit; and their cronies and shills lie about Segwit.  Give them no credence.

---

DannyHamilton is correct on all points here.  I just have a few things to add or expand upon.

---

I always wonder why nobody stops to notice that the same “attack” based on the “anyone-can-spend” notion could be used against all P2SH transactions.  Oh no, Btrash is also vulnerable!

---

WRONG.


WRONG.

I am sometimes amazed at the confident airs put on people who make authoritative-sounding declarations of totally incorrect information.

---

Interesting link.  Did you read past the OP?  Try the second post, to which I just awarded merit:

That means a randomly generated password of sufficient length, used only for this site and nowhere else.  May I suggest use of a good password manager (non-“cloud”-based).

You also need to prevent your computer from being compromised.  Accounts are not being hacked.  Users are being hacked.

I thought it clear, my implication was past-tense.  You are most of a hundred years out of date for the collapse of anything which could be properly called a functioning “society”.  Some might say, more than a hundred years.  The problem is that those living in a post-apocalyptic desert of downfallen, zombie-like anthropoids have already forgotten what it means to be human—what it meant, once upon a time.

By comparison, Roman society was a zombified rotting corpse for four or five centuries before the civil machine built by long-gone forebears ran out of momentum.  I can see how greater technology could have accelerated the ultimate downfall in various ways.

What’s left is to secure yourself, take care of your own, live by honour alone whereas law is meaningless, keep busy with something productive, and try to have some fun.

---

Hell, no.  Primitivist glorification of savagery is fit only for savages.  It would be better for so-called “humanity” to go extinct—a not unlikely end, at this rate.

---

It was a sociopolitical statement wrapped with dry humour in the guise of a grammar flame.  There was nothing wrong with Vod’s grammar, insofar as it properly expressed what he meant to say.  I was subtly suggesting that the event he described in future tense is an eventuality which already occurred, past perfect.

---

To the contrary!  You have it backwards.  I wish I had just pushed through the post which comprises the first part above.  I kept having to pause and go add replies to additional posts.  This happens to me all too often.

“Optimism is cowardice.” — Spengler (writing most of a hundred years ago)

---

Now, this discussion is far off-topic.  If you want to take it up in Politics & Society, then... no, actually, I don’t.  I think I should leave it at that, and go do something productive and/or have fun.

Please fix your grammar.  Future tense is incorrect here, as is your usage of the adverb “eventually”.

Filed somewhere between “the check is in the mail” and “looking for the real killers”.

---

Usually, I would agree with you.  But in this context, “everyone” is necessarily limited to those who are familiar with the situation.  Surely, that must be a minority of forum members; what about the rest?  That means not only readers but also potential customers, insofar as Lauda does business on the forum.

I think that Quickseller is trying to seriously damage Lauda here.  (Punitive damages terms such as “actual malice” come to mind.  That’s the worst; selling a DT account to a scammer only seems like “wanton and willful disregard” to me.)  I think the attempt will fail; but it could succeed, if rumour-mongering were to be left unanswered.  The key is to pay just the right amount of attention, not too much (amplifying it) and not too little (letting baseless accusations take root as rumours).

(On a related note, there should be a FAQ somewhere with an entry, “Why is Quickseller the single most distrusted active user on the forum?”)

---

“Posts like a lion.  +50”

What security weakness?  The users’ security weakness?  If you know of a security weakness in the forum, please report it and collect a bounty!


If a hacker knows the username and password, then there is nothing to hack!  That’s like saying that if a hacker knows your Bitcoin private keys, he can “hack” your wallet.


That would be extremely annoying, and of little or no use to users who know how to secure their own passwords.  Also, for Tor users, it would effectually mean an e-mail verification for each and every login.


I don’t have a phone.  (At least, not one that you or the forum will ever know about.)  What do you suggest I should do?


I have a better idea:

4. Choose a strong password, and keep it secure.

HTH.