My introduction to bitcoin and the blockchain technology has increased my interest in understanding money and how economy works. It is a different form of money from what I had been used to and challenged the status quo. Bitcoin served as a catalyst which spurred me to seek to learn more about finances.
It also increased my understanding of privacy and how valuable data is and why it should be protected.
Bitcoin exposed me to this forum and the knowledge I have learnt and still learn everyday is invaluable.

Without having earned or bought a single satoshi, I would still consider my journey to have been very beneficial.

It would be considered gambling in my opinion, there's a wager involved, the outcome is unpredictable and totally random; entirely dependent on luck.
I have joined a couple of such games on the forum, but the were mostly some kind of giveaway (involving bitcoins or some form of collectible) and there was no need for the participants to pool funds. There has also been gambling pools involving the EPL and the UCL.

You can run such a lottery game on the forum, but there's no guarantee people would be interested as there's no skill involved to spice it up, despite the honest motive.

My guess: 394,129,046
Roobet username: Upgrade00

Seed phrases are taken from a limited number of words at random, so there is a possibility of having one word appear twice in a 24 seed phrase.

This should definitely be a fault from the wallet. Seed phrase is the unique identity of the wallet and it shouldn't be possible to skip the process if the word list is not valid, except it corresponds to that of another wallet. The odds of this are impossible I would assume, cause afaik, only 12, 18 and 24 word seed phrases can be generated basically, and you should have a 23 word phrase with one missing.

As suggested above you should drop that address as the phrase is faulty.

The seed phrase giving over would give the hacker the ability to sign transactions and spend the coins on the wallet, but the original owner still owns the phrase and can recover the wallet (although empty) and sign a message on it to prove ownership.

Most people fall for these scams cause they usually expect a warning or a red flag to be shown when they are dealing with such scammers, the internet however is not censored and scam websites can easily seep through the filters of "reliable" search engines like Google, this gives people a feeling of faux security and they let down their guard.
Treat everything offer as a scam until proven otherwise, doubly so when it is related to your assets. Taking a pause and asking yourself if this action is safe, could be the difference between people who are scammed and those who aren't m

I think that is a possible time frame, this is the last message from theymos I have come across regarding the status of the new forum software; it was vaguely optimistic and listed a few limitations which are delaying the transition (mainly security and privacy concerns), you should note that this was close to 20 months ago so it's possible some issues have been solved and new ones may have popped up.

Limited testing was one of the issues listed at that time and is the only one the community can collectively help out with: beta testing thread

I just reported one of their replies and dropped a link to their post history for the mods to take a look. Asides being a spammer, the user is breaking a number of other forum rules by advertising in threads which they did not start and most likely did not read, as the nature of the replies as well as the thread in which they are posted in suggests.

I agree with this, whale investors usually take positions in or drop certain assets after some inside information or some market activity which would be reflected at a later time.
Warren Buffett usually is attracted to firms with positive net profit margin and a high asset turnover, he is also attracted to assets which returns dividends to shareholders, which Barrick Gold did earlier this year:

Toronto — Barrick Gold Corporation (NYSE:GOLD)(TSX:ABX) today announced that its Board of Directors has declared a dividend for the first quarter of 2020 of US $0.07 per share, payable on June 15, 2020, to shareholders of record at the close of business on May 29, 2020.
Source

On whether or not he owns bitcoins, it's possible without it being made public. Berkshire Hathaway has previously requested that some of their holdings not be made public by the SEC, without any public news, there can be no certainty.
He can also of course have a private wallet.

It's likely the thread was moved to trashcan and not manually deleted.
Topics which are deleted show up in modlog, however when a thread is moved to trashcan (only accessible to staffs, global mods and admins) the action does not show up in modlog as the threads can be easily restored by global mods and admins.

Reply from a staff;

Bitcoin transactions are transparent, so as said above, if he had included a repayment address the loan can be refunded by the borrower and there would not be any need for a confirmation from him/her as the txid can be checked and verified by other users. Complications may arise if the loan is defaulted, especially if it is a collateralized one and the user would have to receive something of equal value which would have previously been escrowed. This can however be arranged between the escrower and the user off the forum. (Through one-way PMs on the forum)
There's also the case of the borrower defaulting a no-collateral loan and the lender not being active to draw attention to it or create a scam accusation thread against the said user.

In this case I think the mods would allow a reply in the appeal thread (if one was created) in which the banned user can request the community looks into it.

Technically, there is a finite supply of gold, but all we have are estimates on when it would be exhausted, gold mining has been on for centuries. It's quite different from Bitcoin which is barely over a decade. They are also very different in functionality and usage. Being limited in supply is not the singular quality that attracts people to Bitcoin, it is immutable, divisible, trustless, pseudo anonymous and decentralized.
You're right about Bitcoin being used for speculation or storage, but that's not its only use case. It's already being used a means of making payments. Try using gold to wager on a gambling site.


• Bitcoin is already accepted by a number of merchants and can be used to pay for services.
• The economy does not need massive printing out of thin air which devalues the money in circulation.
• I would assume you are referring to miners' reward for each confirmed block... the last mined bitcoins is still a long way away and it would be difficult to predict now how the network would adjust to that. There are however transaction fees which are paid on every transaction and which goes to the miner, so there would always be a financial reward for block confirmation.

With all the excitement about various vaccines being worked on, I fear one of them may be approved too soon. Vaccine preparation usually goes through many stages to ensure its effectiveness as well as the absence of side effects, this process occurs over several phases which would take months or years.

The novel coronavirus has been around for over 9 months, this has given researchers and laboratory scientists some time to understand the virus and come up with a viable protection, there was however little historic data as regards this virus as it's fairly new, potentially increasing the time it would take to have a vaccine created and approved.
We should also note that if a vaccine passes preclinical and clinical trials, there still needs to be a period for monitoring of the volunteers who showed positive improvements, this time however they would be watching for side effects.

Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it. The political pressure to restart and revive the economy while bringing life back to normal shouldn't be a reason to endanger the lives of people.

DEXes has seen a surge in adoption over the past few months, although this may be partially due to the hype around the DeFi system. Adoption however needs a spark and this might be the one to increase usage in decentralized exchanges.
In the case of LN, it would definitely be a gradual process, making payments is meant to be basic and easy, on both the part of the buyer and seller, the intricacies of LN may be confusing to most people now, but with time and a more streamlined access, it would surely get more adoption.

Tryninja has included a notification button in his telegram bot which would notify you when boards you posted in are deleted so you can keep track of it - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5248878.msg54441882#msg54441882

Back in 2012 Bitcoin was not quite popular, so the basis of adding a custom icon is that, this is the custom forum for BTC and is primarily for discussions about the bitcoin network. An altcoins section is in place to make it more inclusive, but integrating more specific altcoins into the forum is not necessary as most of them are quite dissimilar from Bitcoin.

If popularity was given such precedence we would be having shills about DeFi projects run on the forum.

That's a rule that many managers state in their requirements, but do not always enforce, maybe due to the fact that the users applying for their campaign may be currently wearing some other signature of some other campaign, and taking that off would mean they would lose their current spot without any guarantee of getting into the new one they are applying for.
Some may use it as a means to check for bugs in the sig codes when launching a campaign. While some actually try to exploit the participants.

Whether or not the rules are fair when enforced, the employer (and managers) reserves the right to make them and the applicants can aswell reject them by not applying.

I think this thread should be in service discussion board, not Meta.

If you're asking if there's a way to know if a thread has already been reported by someone else, there isn't.
You can of course report threads you suspect to be scam and add your reasons in the comment. It would usually get deleted if confirmed by the mods and the user nuked if their activity is low enough. Cases of malwares would get the user banned.

You should also check out the trust flag and feedback system, it is useful in warning users of potential and confirmed scams.

As mentioned, there are a couple of unofficial means of fighting scams on the forum, as well as default systems to protect users (such as the newbie/guest warning in some sensitive boards).
An official list of scams would not be possible as it cannot be comprehensive. There are always new innovative ways to scam and keeping up with them is a lot of work and not 100% possible.
Such a list could also be counter productive as users would assume any offer not officially listed cannot be a scam and hence fall victim to newer methods used by scammers.

As a rule;
• Verify, do not trust, and
• Treat any offer as a scam until proven otherwise.

If they're mostly old posts it shouldn't affect you much. I personally do not like the idea of reporting old posts especially when there's no active discussions in the thread it was made in, better for mods to focus on more pertinent issues.

Users rarely get banned for spamming even when done repeatedly, although there is a rule regarding that. In very serious cases there would be a warning or a temporary ban, if the user persists the temp ban period would be increased, till a parma is issued.
Whether or not the post were worthy of being deleted is objective, you and the mods could have different conclusions regarding that.