Another reason might be that Eddie’s uncle recently had exposure to someone infected with Covid, or Covid symptoms.

Both should be considered “unvaccinated” although the uncle will have some protection while he is waiting two weeks after his second shot.

This doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you use storage buckets for storage? The storage itself is very cheap and you only need to pay for what you are using. It is also very cheap to quickly access to storage objects to serve your customers.

Smart contracts typically are built on top of a blockchain. The blockchain would have a POW, or POS, or something else to secure the blockchain, and the smart contract would periodically settle on the blockchain according to the rules of the smart contract.

The OP suggestion is akin to saying that LN would be an alternative to POW. LN is great, and will improve bitcoin, but it is not something that will replace POW.

If China wanted to harm bitcoin in this way, they would just seize the miners physically located in China, stop exports of miners, so they can use those miners to attack bitcoin, and seize control of the miners manufacturing plants so they can produce additional miners.

China is an authoritarian country and its government basically does what it wants. The cost to the Chinese government is nearly zero. They would only decide to attack bitcoin if they decided it was too difficult to control their population with their citizens using bitcoin.

Block explorers are often used by businesses to show evidence that a transaction has occurred to their customers, but they will generally not use blockexplorers to make business decisions themselves. The former is a means to provide customer service to their customers and the later involves the business taking action.

If major block explorers start displaying incorrect information, it would create negative customer experiences, and businesses may start using alternative services.

If miners start mining on a chain that arbitrarily change consensus rules, without warning, the rest of the ecosystem is not going accept the changed consensus rules pretty much under any circumstances and that chain will be worthless.

You also need to consider that just because there is a chain split, it doesn’t necessarily mean there are conflicting transactions. In most orphans, there are zero conflicting transactions. Obviously in the OP example, no one would accept an address receiving millions of bitcoin arbitrarily, and miners would quickly abandon the chain.

I think the OP is a good example as to why it is beneficial to allow for users to get second chances after breaking the rules in a serious manner. Obviously plagiarism has been a problem for a while, but a small number of mistakes should not result in someone who is genuinely interested in bitcoin to be removed from the community.

shasan was banned two years ago, regained his ability to post about two months later, and has been generally active with a signature ban since then.

I hope he has learned his lesson and will not plagiarize or do anything similar in the future.

He made one post last month and the last post he made prior to that was in October 2020. My guess is that he has been similarly inactive during that time. He may have responded to some reports during that time if he was still a mod, but has probably not been particularly active as a moderator.

He might have resigned due to the lack of time, but he was probably removed due to inactivity regardless if he asked to be removed or not (the underlying root cause).

He also only made 14 posts in 2020, if that gives additional information.

The first and last point are really not compatible with each other. If you are sending an API request to a 3rd party service, you are trusting the service to give you an accurate response, even if you have the private keys associated with the address they are supposed to be giving you. If they return an address that you have the private keys to, you will remain in custody of the bitcoin, however if you are given an address that you don’t have the private keys to, you will not have control of the bitcoin.

If you are using an API to send payments, you will need to give the service your private keys. Even if they are not moving or commingling the inputs, I really don’t think this would be described as “allowing you to maintain custody of the bitcoin”.

I would be surprised if this ever happened. They are not a one-man shop, they have hundreds of employees. I don’t see a scenario in which employees couldn’t see this happening and someone saying something.

Blockchain.com has had its share of security problems in the past, however they also are one of the oldest bitcoin related company and many, even most early bitcoin related companies had security problems.

When responding to the two articles in the OP, this is really the correct answer. The referenced articles are talking about mandatory reporting of transactions (deposits/withdrawals) exceeding thresholds to the government for the purpose of enforcing tax laws. Making on-chain transactions private will not result in more privacy. If anything, it would result in more mandatory reporting by exchanges, having a net effect of reducing privacy.

Exchanges have vast amounts of data on their customers bitcoin holdings. Taken with data from other exchanges, someone could probably deduct who owns the majority of addresses.

The forum is really not the best venue for development of software. A venue such as GitHub is really better that can track things such as Issues and improvement requests (pull requests). GH doesn’t have the ability to track things such as BIPs, but the Dev mailing list is a good venue to discuss these. If receiving emails from the Dev mailing list, you can pretty easily filter out messages from people who you don’t want to talk to, can filter so you only receive messages from who you believe are experts, and there is not the same incentive to write many messages/posts.

They sell ads on their website. They also advertise their exchange service, which they presumably make money off of. They also sell access to some of the data they have on various blockchains via their API.

Do you have the ability to get electrum installed on your computer? If so, there is the option to set the fee rate for your transactions.

If you are not concerned about a quick confirmation, you can choose a lower fee rate. If the rate is too low, your transaction may never confirm.

You can visit https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to get an idea as to what fee rate you might want to pay.

I can assure you that all the major exchanges are subject to frequent DDOS attacks. The same is true for the forum, and probably most other bitcoin related websites that bring in a lot of people (profits).

You are right, exchanges tend to go down when trading volume spikes. This is not a DDOS attack but is a potential attack vector. In the past, Bitfinex was attacked by someone creating many accounts, and depositing small/dust amounts into their accounts, wrecking havoc on their hot wallet UTXO set to be used for customer withdrawals. Requiring KYC verification will stop this attack.

For arguments sake, let’s days that Wright is in fact satoshi (there is a lot of evidence suggesting this is not the case, and nothing except Wrights word suggesting that he is). Also, for arguments sake, we could say that the coin in question is rightfully owned by Wright.

If both of the above are true, forcing entities to change software to allow for Wright to spend his bitcoin whose private keys he has lost is akin to forcing speech on an innocent person. No one involved had anything to do with Wright loosing the private keys that he alleges belongs to him. It would be wrong for a court to grant what Wright is asking, even if the facts supported him telling the truth.   

This is unlikely. When the price of bitcoin falls, the prices of altcoins tend to fall more. Also, when major services go down, the instinct is generally to sell.

I don’t buy the theory of DDOS for market manipulation, however if this was the case, it would probably be someone who is short crypto hoping to profit.

I don’t see this being implemented on a forum basis. I could envision the forum publishing certain stats about various users, and someone could create a user script that will hide posts by people whose stats exceed certain thresholds.

Even the above may be difficult because FUD is typically allowed on this forum and there is a lot that will not get removed that might get removed on other forums that give less freedom. So even getting stats would be difficult. It might provide a good way to ignore a lot of the signature spammers who are able to avoid getting banned but post garbage nonsense.

The flu vaccine, at least as I understand it, is not a booster shot, but is rather something that protects against the mutated version of the flu going around that year. Or something close to the above description.

I understand a booster shot to be something along the lines of getting your body to continue making antibodies so that if the virus does enter into your system, your immune system can quickly defeat the virus.

On a slightly unrelated note, the response to covid has made the flu almost not a problem. For example, hospitalizations related to the flu are down 90% from the prior low point, which was during the 2011-12 flu season, on a per population basis. 

You can see a history of outages and downtime at coinbase at https://status.coinbase.com/

The issue was first noted at 6:12 AM PDT, a fix was implemented at 7:38 AM PDT, and was marked at resolved at 8:36 AM PDT. There were a number of issues at coinbase throughout that day, and it looks like they might have had some additional downtime later that evening, when trading volumes were anticipated to be lighter to perform some maintenance.

It seems like many bitcoin related services and websites do not scale very well when they encounter heavy traffic volume. I understand why an exchange might have more difficult scaling 'on demand' due to security issues, but I would think it would be almost trivial for a site like CMC to scale. I would think CMC is fairly profitable, so I don't think cost would be an issue as to why they would be unable to scale.

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