minifrij likes to blindly support his friends. Even if they are engaging in illegal and/or scammy and/or unethical behavior.

I don't think this would be a very good idea, honestly.

I don't think this is true...

Are you saying these people are involved in this scam, or are you addressing this thread to these people?

This would make prosecuting less than an open and shut case. In terms of USD, there are relatively small amounts involved when the USD value is measured at the time of the transaction, and there is no actual fraud involved, so I don't think this is something the SEC would give a high priority to anyway.

nepotism runs rampant around here. 

I think wallet software such as electrum is very far from anything resembling a bank. I would even argue that a light wallet might even be safer than a full node over public WiFi unless you are being specifically targeted because your attacker would need to impersonate a more specific service that all his victims may not use.

Another solution would be to run bitcore on a trusted computer/connection that is also running insight. You could then connect to your node via an HTTPS connection while having a user experience very close to a block explorer except having the trust of a full node.

What were you banned for? PM spam? What you were PM'ing?

This is going to be risky. It is generally trivial to impersonate a public WiFi hotspot, which would result in an attacker controlling your internet connection, and in turn controlling all of the connections of your node (for example, an attacker could pretend to be multiple different nodes connected to your node).

If you are receiving payments, an attacker could cause your node to think the most recent block is behind the actual most recent block, broadcast a high fee transaction that would be valid as of that block, however is invalid on the blockchain the rest of the network is using, causing you to believe said transaction will confirm in the next block, and tricking you into releasing valuable property to the attacker. If the trade is large enough, an attacker could also make it appear the fraudulent transaction has a confirmation when in fact said transaction is invalid. If you are using a public WiFi to connect to a VPN, this specific attack would not be possible, however you would need to trust the VPN to not perform a similar attack.

If you are using public WiFi to only spend your bitcoin, you will be much more safe. All an attacker would reasonably be able to do is prevent your transaction from broadcasting to the rest of the network, and know which transactions you are specifically broadcasting. This would be a nuisance at best, and an attacker would already know which transaction is yours if you are trading with him.

I would suggest using electrum if you are wanting to use a public WiFi connection to use bitcoin. Doing so would better hide the fact you are using Bitcoin, preventing "$5 wrench" attacks against you.

I would say you should not try this. Your biometrics are more or less public information upon having a picture of you. Also if using biometrics as a private key, those with a lot of money may become a larger target for things like kidnappings because criminals would know they can transfer large amounts of money with nothing more than their face.

To be entirely fair, the signature spam, and related nonsense posts is fairly unpleasant...

My issue with the ivory tower is that its placement within the forum more or less makes it an off topic section that allows for a broad variety of threads that I may not be interested in reading. I would say I would rather have the ivory tower be a child of bitcoin discussion, and allow any non-marketplace, bitcoin related threads, even if said thread would also be appropriate in technical discussion, trading discussion, and similar. 

This should reduce the ability for spammers to advertise via unsolicited PM spam. It also might allow newbie PM restrictions to be lowered somewhat.

Overall, great idea.

There is still the possibility that someone could send a payment via a hacked bank, or zelle account, in which case I can almost guarantee the transaction will be reversed.

I am pretty sure that zelle is reversible...

Gemini doesn’t change anything for wire withdrawals. The fees are likely that of your bank.

If you have any questions about when or why Lauda will leave negative trust, I would advise reviewing this video.

I would reject your proposal to restrict new(er) users from creating threads in off topic. I suspect that low level accounts cost fairly little and it would be more or less trivial to purchase a sufficiently high level account to create these kinds of shit threads. I also don’t think it is the threads themselves that cause issues but rather are the shit replies that cause issues - for example someone could buy one account to create 50 shit threads and subsequently use those threads to farm many accounts they create themselves.

Restricting low level accounts from posting in off topic would be a different story. If many accounts are being farmed in the off topic section then I don’t see a major issue with restricting these users from posting here. Off topic is, by definition not bitcoin related so I don’t think anyone will join bitcointalk to post in off topic, so this will not realistically turn anyone away.

I might go a step further and either remove off topic or significantly restrict what can be posted there. The vast majority of what is posted is shot and adds very little to the community.

The politics section I more complicated because it is well political. Restricting the politics section would reduce the forums protection of free speech which is something I know theymos greatly values.

The evualuation is done at registration.

Users will have to periodically close/settle LN channels for a variety of reasons even if fees are high. If participants of LN channels start to act maliciously, channels will be forced to close, when channels have nearly all of the balances on one side, the other side will want to close the channel to reduce risk, channels will be opened and closed as users start/stop using bitcoin, businesses will close channels as they accumulate large amounts of bitcoin so they can move coins to cold storage, etc.

It seems as if this is the 4th(?) time your account was hacked, maybe not even including when erwin45 was hacked.

Assuming you did in fact recover your account (which I have my doubts), it would probably not be advisable to ever send first to you because of the high risk of dealing with a hacker.