The intention of these transactions is not to transfer bitcoin, but rather to transfer a token via a layer 2 protocol.

I don't think the entity that owns the private key ever plans on (attempting) to spend any of the UTXO sent to this address.

NATO countries to the West of Ukraine are being reinforced, however to my knowledge, there is no plan to assist Ukraine if Russia invades. There seems to be a fear that Russia will not stop at Ukraine if they invade. I don't know if there is any basis for that fear, but the fear itself has the potential for a major escalation in conflict.

You can post links to exchangers, such as binance. However you cannot post referral link spam in your posts. So you can either post binance, or you could tell someone to check your signature to get the link to binance (with a ref link), provided that doing so is not off topic.

Although most donation addresses for individuals rarely receive large amounts of bitcoin, for some entities with a "good cause" often will receive larger amounts of donations. For example the EFF, Project Veritas, etc. So using the same seed will still have the same security implications.

If the OP makes his victim whole, he should have his trust issues resolved. Although as I mentioned, I think the chances are high that this person engaged in similar behavior in the past.

You are not allowed to spam referral links in forum posts. Sending a ref link in a PM is acceptable, as long as you are not sending an unsolicited PM.

It does appear the OP is in over his head in terms of running a reputable business.

I wouldn't do this. It would be trivial for protonmail to modify their webclient to send the seed to their servers, even on an ad-hoc basis, so unless you check every time, there is the risk you are transmitting your seed over the internet.

It is also generally not a good idea to reuse private keys or seeds.

Most likely the files were encrypted with some kind of passphrase rather than a private key stored on a device. Using a passphrase is less secure, however it gives a level of plausible deniability as the key will never be found on any of your devices.

The specific encryption algorithm is not important, as it is very unlikely the FBI was able to break the encryption -- they were simply able to brute force the passphrase.

I think it is more likely that Putin wants to try to get Russia to become more like the former Soviet Union.

There isn't a serious threat of an invasion of Russia, and the stockpiling of weapons by Ukraine is largely in response to Russia annexing Crimea, and is not an act of aggression against Russia, but is rather a defensive stance.

I agree. This is not anything new. This type of thing has been employed longer than the forum has been around, and is not limited to internet forums -- companies will sometimes employ these types of tactics in presentations and commercials.

I don't think this is account farming. While I think the two accounts are likely operated by the same entity, I don't think the goal is to rank up the two accounts.

Based on my reading of your description of the proposed thread, and the thread you referenced, it is not a discussion about the game, but is rather a thread announcing the game.

My guess is the OP runs some kind of affiliate marketing business. It appears the OP "runs" the website martingalecalculator.com, which is the same as his forum handle, and any negative reputation on this forum would likely negatively affect the above website.

Also, although I don't know for sure, I think there is a high probability the OP has dome similar things in the past to get people to sign up via his affiliate link. I would find it strange if someone running an affiliate marketing business were to offer exactly one person money to sign up via his affiliate link and not pay.

This is confusing. Are you saying that you are already running a node? Why would you not query the node you already have running?

Yes, nodes will send you existing blocks. However if you try to use other nodes as an API to find transactions, the number of nodes that are willing to provide "new" nodes historical blocks will go down. The cost of sending data is more expensive than the cost of receiving data (most cloud service providers do not charge for data downloaded, but do charge for data uploaded).

Also, trying to find a particular transaction or a particular block will be inefficient this way if you don't know which block you are looking for.
If this is your goal, I would suggest that you put all transactions and blocks in a SQL database and search accordingly. This is assuming that you are searching for something that is not supported by a RPC command, and if that was the case, you should just use a full node that has the entire blockchain downloaded.

If you are searching for transactions based on some criteria, and are making multiple queries, you will ultimately have to access the same block multiple times. The time it takes to query a block from a peer is going to be much longer than the time to query a block locally. So you will see negative performance issues if you don't have the blockchain stored on the machine (or accessible via storage bucket) running the queries.

I don't think that changes the fact that the thread in question in a bounty thread. Telling someone to complete some action off the forum, and doing some other action off the forum to redeem the "prize" is still a bounty. From what I can tell, no one is offering any kind of service, and as such, any service discussion sub would be inappropriate.

Most likely, big pharma stands to make more money if smoke detectors were not used. Smoke detectors most often result in people leaving their house unscathed, not requiring any medical treatment. 

Hopefully, once they get this feature completed, theymos can start using the new forum software.

It appears you promised to pay someone 1 LTC to create an account at a casino via your affiliate link, and did not pay when they did. Resolve that issue and you will resolve your trust issue.

You can only make RPC commands to nodes that you control. The documentation on how to setup RPC configuration explicitly says to keep the RPC credentials confidential.

I don't believe that nodes will ever give their peer list to their peers, at least not intentionally (assuming there are no flaws in the node implementation).

If you want to run a (very) light node that connects to other nodes, the only real information you can obtain is historical blocks (by block number) and newly broadcast transactions. I don't believe a peer node will ever provide information contained in most RPC commands.

If you are wanting to create a new implementation of core that allows an arbitrary user to obtain information that you might get from RPC commands -- the only information I can think of would be information about address balances and transactions -- you could connect to an electrum server to get this information.

I don't think there is any basis for believing that -- the bounties section is filled with a lot of people bots who fill out bounty reports and have zero merit, but that doesn't mean they randomly post in threads. I also don't think the expected people who will post in a thread is a reason to not post the thread in a particular section.

It appears I am correct based on mprep's post directly below yours.

The person creating the thread is going to be giving away some tokens or altcoins in exchange for solving a puzzle. That is a bounty.

Based on what you are writing, it sounds like something that belongs in the altcoin bounties section. If someone is having to do substantial work outside of the forum, the thread you describe would not violate the no altcoin giveaways rule. 

No matter what you do, it is not possible to prevent accounts from being transferred outside of certain circumstances. You cannot force people to follow a certain procedure.

I also don't think the admins want to get involved in account sales/transfers.