If I were to get infected, I wouldn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to not infect others.

Individuals need to educate themselves on how to protect themselves from contracting the virus and if they get it, educate themselves on how to avoid spreading the virus. They would need to take these precautions.

Why do you need to buy bitcoin with a debit card? If you are willing to link your checking account, you can use a larger variety of exchanges. You would probably have to wait a few days each time you deposit money into your exchange account.

Accepting debit cards is risky for an exchange and you are going to have to pay a premium for that risk if you are buying coin with a debit card.

I saw marketing materials for the keepkey and my initial thought is it is a marketing gimmick for shapeshift. My guess is keepkey doesn’t support many altcoins that are not available via shapeshift.

Would you consider allowing a random contest to be performed this way? For example, there will be only one item being shipped chosen from all entrants. If only one person is receiving an item, there is no reason for everyone to send their shipping address, and choosing out of unpublished codes can lead to possible claims of not actually giving anything away.

It could work like this, anyone eligible can claim a code until a deadline, a random function could be used to choose which code is the winner and the winning code could be published so whoever has that code can send their address to receive the item.

Another request would be to publish the number of eligible accounts that meet the criteria so anyone considering to participate can decide if they want to have their address associated with that small number of accounts.

Your "wallet screenshot" has a QR code saying that 3Af5Jj7PoPDiMeYN34XQZcagWnXwpQQCxn is your address.

3Af5Jj7PoPDiMeYN34XQZcagWnXwpQQCxn has never received any coin...

It really comes down to balancing security vs convenience. it is also a balance of security vs being able to memorize your password. If you have a complex password full of entropy, that is great and all, but it kinda defeats the point if you can't decrypt it because you forgot your passphrase.
In many companies, writing passwords down as you describe would be a 'clean desk' violation. Many companies also utilize some kind of Single Sign On technology that allows employees to use a single username/password combination across (nearly) all services requiring authentication; in these cases, all the applications are run by the same company, so the risk of 'one' password leaking is not the same as it in normally, and companies usually keep track of unsuccessful login attempts, and will lock accounts upon a small number of attempts. Using a weak password to a service or application is bad, but not the same as having a weak encryption key.

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Back on topic....if your device holding coin is subject to a physical attack, I would suggest you consider it to be eventually compromised. If this is part of your threat model, you should create countermeasures that involve you discovering, or being notified of the physical attack quickly, and use other countermeasures that delays the time from the physical compromise to the compromise of the keys.

It bears repeating that a trezor allows you to have multiple passphrases, so you can have a simple of moderately complex passphrase securing a low to moderate amount of coin. If any attacker physically steals your trezor, and can discover your simple passphrase, they need to make a decision if they want to continue looking for an additional passphrase, and if they want to spend the coin they have discovered. You can monitor the coin being secured by the simple passphrase, and if this coin moves, you can move the coin being secured via a more complex passphrase.  

No, it is not. They could enable it by default, or prevent it from being disabled. None of this would prevent someone from using a blank passphrase, or a very simple one such as zzzz

500 merit!

You are describing something on the other end of the equation, that is something that would serve as a countermeasure to QC cracking encryption.

I don't know if the Chinese scientists came up with this technology/ability on their own, but I do know the Chinese have a long history of stealing technology from the West. If a western company working for a Western government originally created this technology, it may not be publicly known.

I also believe that QC and QC proof encryption are two separate and distinct technologies. I don't believe having the ability to do one does not necessarily make it easier to obtain the technology to have the ability to do the other.

This technology is very valuable. Its value will decline if it is known the technology exists. My prediction is the technology would be more valuable, and probably more costly to create than a few thousand coin. Someone with QC technology that can crack encryption quickly will not only target cryptocurrencies, they will likely be used by governments to steal rival governments' secrets.

The value in being able to trivially steal a rival government's secrets can probably not be measured in dollars, but rather in millions of lives (of its own citizens/military) possibly saved in the event war breaks out.

Using QC technology to destroy faith in cryptocoins might allow a country to collect more tax revenue, or maintain better control over its citizens, but this is nothing compared to a country's ability to learn what other countries are doing and know. This technology would also prove useful in warfare:

Last year the US downed an Iranian drone near one of it's warships with technology that disabled the drone. I don't know the specifics of what the US ship did, nor the underlying technology. Imagine a country could prevent another country's war planes from taking off (or from continuing to fly), or could send a signal to change the course of another country's missiles that have been launched.

I think you answered your own question as to why the person referenced in your OP created a new account to voice his concern.

If you don't want to see this type of thing happening, you must push back against every tag that is questionable, and other people need to do the same. This will continue until it has been a long time since that have been any tags you describe as "questionable".

I have noticed your aversion to participating in forum drama, and I don't find this unreasonable. There are plenty of reasons to want to avoid participating in drama....it is exhausting, it is often childish, this is not the reason why most of us have come to participate in the forum, and applicable to the liberals, it means someone disagrees with you.

I think it is probably safe to say Hhampuz appreciates a "fake newbie" (I don't believe that person ever claimed to be a new user) bringing up the subject. Based on his response, it is safe to say that Hhampuz felt obligated to repay the campaign participants.

Taking this presumption, it is much more reasonable to delay paying participants two weeks today than it would be if someone else complained six months from now.

Don't you think this is a little bit like the pot calling the kettle black?

Are you the original owner of this domain? If not, who did you buy it from?

The payment is not due to be paid for a week and if he ends up sending me the payment I will just forward it to him after getting an address.

In light of this announcement, I would like to request that the address for next weeks payment be updated to one belonging to Hhampuz, on the condition that if Hhampuz is reimbursed from that company (fully, or in part), that the first $25 be sent to me. After next weeks payment, I will update my payment address.

I believe Hhampuz is doing the right thing and he should be recognized for doing so. This is true even if this isn’t something he has any obligation to do. 

Disclaimer: I am currently participating in a signature campaign run by Hhampuz and have been for some time.

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I looked at the OP of the campaign thread and don’t see anywhere that says Hhampuz is guaranteeing payments, nor that he is escrowing the coin to pay participants. There is the quote LoyceV posted above, but that is ambiguous. For these reasons, I don’t believe Hhampuz is obligated to pay participants. I also believe it would be wrong for someone to demand payment from Hhampuz.

With that being said, Hhampuz is going to have difficulty attracting quality participants if this kind of thing happens on a regular basis. I think the right thing to do is warn participants that he doesn’t have the coin from the business owner and participants can decide for themselves to take the risk of not getting paid, if Hhampuz does not want to guarantee the weekly payment.

I have zero interest in managing signature campaigns, but if I were in his position, I would extend credit to the business for one week to pay participants out of my own pocket.  I would also structure what I get paid so that if businesses don’t pay me, I am still making money and would set the expectation that businesses should pay upfront.

If the technology ever exists with the ability to crack private keys ever exists, it will probably not be used to steal any crypto, and probably not on a large scale. QC will not be able to calculate your private keys if you have never published a signed transaction with the specific private key securing your coin. This distinction may be moot if technology exists to calculate a private key within under 10 minutes.

This technology would be very valuable to whoever creates it, and its value would decrease if it were to be known to exist. If someone can use this technology in private, they can secretly decrypt certain communications and continue doing so, keeping this advantage. If the technology is public, companies and people will move to new and better encryption that QC cannot break. If someone were to use QC to steal coin, it would be obvious that someone has developed the technology and people will move to better encryption.

This is partly why I am concerned anytime I read about internet traffic getting routed through China temporarily in “error” as the Chinese government can capture the encrypted traffic and potentially decrypt it once they develop the technology to do so.

When I open a topic in P&S, I want to have a serious discussion. I don’t mind educating someone on the background of a topic, but expect they have at least minimal knowledge of what my topic is about. There is also the type of people like the flat earth guy who is posting in the coronavirus thread; he is not a serious person and I believe is trolling and is being successful in derailing any serious discussion (even if what he says is technically on topic). Additionally, as of recently, I don’t like reporting posts that are posted incorrectly or otherwise break the rules, and self moderation allows me to remove posts myself that should be removed by a moderator if I had removed them.

I believe the above reasons are all valid reasons to create and use a self moderated thread. As long as you are not removing posts because you disagree with the content, I have no concerns with self moderated threads.

I also have seen some liberals using self moderated threads as a means to censor thoughts and ideas. This is a very good example of how self moderation should not be used and of people being unwilling or unable to defend their ideas.

I read the reviews on Glassdoor, and I found a couple of things interesting:

*there is a litigation warning at the top of Kraken's page. IMO this warning is far more harmful than any of the reviews
*I read the negative reviews on Glassdoor, I would say they sound a lot like opinion to me, and as such are protected speech, and are not actionable
*In order to read the negative reviews in question, I had to scroll (sorting by date, descending) past several pages of positive (and few neutral) reviews, that appear to have been given in 'bursts', all given last year. This is after only having a small handful of reviews prior to the negative reviews in question being given. I found this to be very suspicious.

Business is slow for most (all) exchanges, and has been for close to two years now. It is understandable that Kraken had to downsize, and it is understandable they had to cut off access immediately. It doesn't sound like their severance plan (if they even offer severance) is particularly good. It doesn't sound like the terminated employees were treated particularly good after they were let go. If Kraken wants to remain competitive, and retain competent employees, they should treat their employees better when they lay them off, otherwise the ones that remain will look elsewhere for employment. 

I believe this has to do with their security precautions.

I understand they keep track of their wallet balance as per the blockchain, and compare that balance to total wallet balances as per their business records. I can't speak to their current specific procedures, but my presumption is if there is a large enough variance, they will stop processing withdrawals, and stop crediting deposits until they figure out what is wrong.

They probably have similar safeguards in pace for LN balances.

It is easier to keep track of various coin balances, and troubleshoot any problems they encounter if all balances are kept separate.

Yes, I saw that, and that is why I made the suggestion. I rather a thread with good enough posts to receive merit to not automatically get deleted if the OP happens to be a very new user, and gets banned.

As of when his thread was archived on jan 26, the 4 posts were deleted/removed, based on his activity count. Unless he made some additional posts, or sent some unsolicited PMs that broke the rules, he was nuked because of the thread referenced in the OP.

I think there is a good chance there may be a scandal in bitcointalkland in the near future.

The OP of the thread was nuked, which automatically deletes all their posts and removes all threads they have created.

It might be a good idea to revise the later action to instead generate a report on the thread if any post on the thread has received any merit, so it can be manually reviewed to see if removing the thread really is appropriate.

I have no idea why the OP was nuked.

No. This is asking to either have a lot of abuse or a situation in which it would appear there is a lot of abuse (which would make actual abuse more difficult to detect). The majority of lower rank users post nothing other than crap and don’t deserve merit.

I have given out hundreds of merit based on merit (no pun intended), and most of the time, lower rank users are not deserving of receiving merit. If I was a merit source, I would give out merit based on if a lot of effort is put into the post, if the post makes a good point, if the post presents an interesting perspective, if the post is one that “we want more of” and similar reasons. I would not base sending merit on if they are a low rank, the only exception being if they make generally very strong posts and need merit to rank up to a high rank.  If merit sources follow this (I believe they mostly do, with few exceptions) low ranked users will naturally rank up.