I don't think I am going to continue this campaign.

I currently have 242 posts and am still wearing the signature. Can someone please vouch this for me?

LOL they do, but so has the forum.
The alleged hacks. I would argue this is less effective then you think because some were probably the owner faking a hack to steal customer money, however you do have a good point here. I am fairly certain there is a way to protect yourself from this, however I am not sure what it is yet.
Well the forum does have a lot of business conducted on here. Large amounts of data loss would likely result in scams and financial loss to the people that conduct business on here (unless you saved a PGP signed message for a payment address, it would be difficult to prove you were told to send funds/goods to a certain address in the event data is lost).

It also may be more expensive, however if you were to ignore payments to slickage (which are temporary) then the forum is cash flow positive. 

My understanding is that banks, and government agencies charged with securing top secret information use cloud computing.

You are probably right about control.

I would say privacy may be improved at the margins as theymos have more power to fight search warrants and subpoenas, however at the end of the day a valid court request is just that (I don't think the ability to fight search warrants/subpoenas is trivial in any respect).

There are obviously some price points where it would make more sense to have cloud computing over owning physical servers otherwise services like AWS would go out of business.

I would say that AWS would be one step away from cloudflare (which has it's own security concerns along with other draw backs). The infrastructure that amazon has in place would at least make it more difficult/expensive for attackers to successfully DDoS the forum.
I am not familiar with inkblazers so I really cannot comment on why they were spending so much money on their hosting. I do know that there have been several reports of people having ridiculous bills because their accounts were "hacked" and were used to mine either bitcoin or altcoins.

I would imagine that the forum would be able to negotiate some terms with Amazon to either keep costs in line or to get some kind of volume discount.

I would not be surprised if sites like instagram (which I believe to at least previously was hosted on AWS) spend more then $60k on hosting every month.

It should be noted that the forum gives away one free advertising spot worth ~4 BTC per week to PIA which would add ~$4,000 to current hosting costs. I am not sure if we get more out of this then the 4 grand per month we give away in free advertising or not, however I imagine that we do.
There is way too much junk on reddit for me to be a regular user of it, but I will take your word for it.
I believe that google offers somewhat of a similar service that amazon offers and they seem to score pretty well on your chart.
Agreed. However there are ways to potentially change this, for example by lowering requirements to become a donator and/or creating a lower donation rank and/or offering an option to pay to remove the 360 second jail/limit (among other ways to increase revenue).

(slightly off topic) - There is no real reason to treat yourself and the other mods like volunteers (granted some are very early adopters of Bitcoin and can afford to volunteer and would benefit financially if their efforts were to positively impact bitcoin) as the forum is kept generally clean with few, if any major issues. Adding revenue would allow the mods to receive a more "fair" income (especially considering the intelligence/qualifications of the majority of the moderators on here).
I think the a cost benefit analysis of using AWS (and google's equivalent) should at least be done. Granted it may not be a better solution then what we have now, however I think the amount of hardware/hosting related problems we have had in recent past would make the few hours it would take to do this be time well spent. The worse case scenario is that you have one additional argument against people who claim bitcointalk is run in a less then professional manner, and the best case scenario is that we have a cost effective way to host the forum that results in an overall better experience for users.

Considering the fact that you can buy via coinbase with a 0.5% markup, or buy on LBC (as a liquidity provider) at a discount, this does sound somewhat fishy to me. I would not want to accuse you of anything without proof but this does sound too good to be true to me.
If the cards happen to get reversed/chargedback months later then your bank account would also be negatively affected (it would have funds withdrawn as well). I don't think escrow would help you in this case.
First of all, TC posted a receipt of a MyCash card that was purchased with an amex card, and amex is not in the debit card business (AFAIK) so I don't think this is a true statement.

However even if this was true there would be plenty of reasons to cash out via these cards verses cashing out via an ATM. First of all when you cash out via an ATM with a stolen card, the ATM operator is going to have losses; this means they are going to have an incentive to actively go after you both criminally and civilly. However when you if you were to buy a MyCash card via a debit card then CVS would first incur losses, however they would cover the losses by withholding payment from paypal, now paypal would have a loss, however they could cover their loss by canceling the MyCash card which means they would have no loss. Since no company would have a loss, there would be less reasons to attempt to prosecute you (in other words you have less risk).
Assuming you pay in cash.
This very much sounds like words of a scammer (no offense)

I am not really sure why you are trying to sell so many of your accounts. Especially considering that it would not be difficult to fake a sale, so any buyer would probably not be able to get the negative trust removed from the account

Well someone could just take the tamper resistant/evident bag with them and destroy it. The only thing that tamper evident bags are really good for is when someone transports something specific to another place and there and the person transporting the valuable items do not want to be blamed for any discrepancies.

This still will potentially lead anyone back to the original person who transmitted the transaction. The government could go to the owner of such IP address to get their logs and find out where they got the transaction from, and repeat the process until they find the person who actually transmitted the transaction.

This however is not how they made the link. They made such link by looking at the addresses that the SR servers control and looking at the addresses that Ross's laptop controlled and linking transactions together via the blockchain

What fees do they charge for futures trading? Is it a similar to how exchanges charge a trading fee when BTC is traded? or is it some other fee structure?

It is news to me that Chinese exchanges are charging a fee

My point is that people do not want to pay for things like national security, food safety, roads, and consumer protection services, ect. voluntarily. Collecting taxes is the only way to pay for these things.

In your example, the shopkeeper should give a portion of his earnings to the government in return for protection from robberies (via the police force and the threat of jail via the legal system), and for the roads that his customers use in order to travel to his shop.

This is the auction for the pools to be listed in Dogie's guides. The other auctions are for advertisements in his guides.

Since people will often setup their miners based on his guides there is real value in bidding on a particular pool having them being listed as a lot of hashpower (and pool fees) are likely going to be sent to such pools as a result

Do you think the lender and the OP are the same person? That would explain why he repaid despite the worthless collateral, as well as the fact that the lender accepted collateral that was very likely going to be worthless in the long run. 

I guess it is between you and the OP to decide if the extra .005 BTC is enough to compensate for the extra time it took him to repay. However it should be noted that it did take him ~3.5 weeks to repay a 1 week loan when a 1 week extension was granted, therefore he was still ~10 days late even after the 1 week extension was granted.

Maybe a negative would not be appropriate (in order to give him an incentive to repay) however at the very least a neutral rating would be appropriate as he was very late on repaying

This is not the place to be discussing the possibility of you actually be an alt of Woodcollector. Bringing this possibility up is only going to distract from the conversation, so please stop. There is evidence both ways (the youtube video(s) is evidence that you are not an alt of Woodcollector, but there is also evidence otherwise).

Yea you thought that you helped someone, however the risk is still there on your end. It is a tremendous risk for you. Not only that but the sticky in this section says that any sob story is likely going to be a way for a scammer to get you to send him funds. The 0% interest rate certainly does not help you manage that risk, however the fact that it was a USD pegged loan means that you will end up with more bitcoin assuming he does decide to repay you

I am not sure why you thought that he is going to repay this. Not only is it a bad idea to transfer debt from one entity to another (as Vod mentioned above), but his reputation is not worth the amount of the loan, and you allowed him to receive payment from his signature campaign prior to the loan becoming due causing him to have the ability to extract money from his signature campaign prior to the likely negative trust he will receive when he does not repay you

Recent downtime is actually unrelated to the HDDs failing recently (although both downtimes do make the forum look very bad IMO).

IIRC the recent downtime is due to some obscure DB failing when most people (who have admin access to the forum) were asleep/away.

I am really not 100% sure why theymos has not migrated to amazon cloud computing as the forum has likely grown to be large enough for this to make sense, plus the fact that AWS would likely protect us from DDOS attacks in the future. 

I would say that you forgot about it because it was over 3 weeks overdue. IMO this late of a repayment (without some kind of a late charge) really deserves a negative trust as they did not follow through with their promise.

The search has been re-enabled and apparently is working better then it was before

The problem is that most people are not willing to voluntarily pay for things that is necessary to protect them. They however tend to expect for such services to be provided

Most Chinese exchanges do not have any trading fees. AFAIK it is not known how they actually make their money, although some speculate they make it via interest on margin trades, however I don't think this would be sufficient to cover all their expenses (plus the 1k loss)