A mesh network will make the network more susceptible to Sybil attacks. The current status quo is that nodes can connect to a geographically diverse set of nodes. A mesh network would mean that all nodes a user connects to must be local, and this means an attacker could generate many nodes concentrated in a particular area to have a high chance of pulling off a successful Sybil attack.

A mesh network would also make it difficult to the network to reach across continents, or even cities. A mesh network spanning a large area would result in bottlenecks when data needs to go through sparsely populated (which means fewer nodes) areas.   

If you were to send 0.0001BTC to poolin's address, it would be obvious to most that you are sending a small amount to poolin, and that the change address belongs to you.

If however, you were to send 0.0001BTC to a never-before-used address, and had change sent to a never-before-used change address, there might be some techniques a blockchain analysis company could determine which is the change address, depending on how the outputs are eventually spent, but it would not be obvious which is the change address. If you send BTC to yourself via two outputs, some blockchain analysis companies may be able to conclude you just sent BTC to yourself via two outputs, depending on how the outputs are eventually spent, and how the change outputs from subsequent transactions are eventually spent.

I am not sure if CloudFlare affects tor users, but the forum is already accessible via tor. Even if a .onion address were to be setup, users would still need to solve a captcha to sign up and login for the first time.

If connecting via tor, an ISP would be unable to block any connection to the forum, unless it is also blocking connections to tor. The way that tor is setup, exit nodes do not know who the end user is, and the forum uses SSL, so all the exit node knows is that someone is accessing the forum, but can not know what they are reading, writing, or sending via PM.

I filled up this afternoon, and the gas station was running at capacity with some cars waiting for gas. In North Carolina, approximately 12% of gas stations are out of gas. In South Carolina the number is about 7%.

If the pipeline does not come back online by the end of the week, there could be serious gas shortages in parts of the country.

I think this was a major intelligence failure on the part of the Biden Administration.

Well the viabtc free accelerator has a limit of 100 per hour, and it usually fills up very quickly.

I have received payment to accelerate transactions in the past, and although I didn't charge as a percentage of the outputs, the amounts involved were generally not trivial, and most people were willing to pay whatever it would take ahead of time. I would generally charge in the range of what it would take to get included in the next block.

Although pools may not find enough customers to fill up their blocks, but it would be worth it to implement.

There is no punishment, but theymos has encouraged the merit sources to spend all their source merit. If I do not spend all my source merit, it will go to waste, so I might as well give more merit on a per post basis so all my source merit is depleted. Theymos has said in the past that it is better to give one post 50 merit if you can only find one merit-worthy post in a month and have 50 source merit rather than let your source merit go to waste.

I don't think it would be difficult to implement. I believe many pools give priority to their own transactions, and it should not be difficult to add additional transactions to this priority.

The Viabtc accelerator IMO is marketed to users who are not technically savvy. If they cannot figure out how to double spend their transaction, they will never have a way to ever spend their inputs "stuck" in unconfirmed transactions. (this part could be solved by modifying the nLockTime feature to allow for a maximum block number that a transaction will be valid for, as opposed to a minimum block number).

There are usually over 2,000 transactions in each block. Charging $300 to confirm 1,000 transactions in a found block could nearly double pool revenue based on your example of $350k revenue per block, and charging $300 per transaction.

As a merit source, I tend to give out a varying amount of merit, depending on a number of factors, including the amount of total sMerit I have to give out, and my mood, but also the effort put into the post, and the importance of the information in the post.

Merit sources should do their best to keep their available source merit close to zero (ie spend all their source merit), and doing so is not always easy if they do not read a lot of good posts. This means they may need to send a lot of merit per post.

Ideally, as the total amount of time on the forum increases, so does your knowledge and your ability to make quality posts. As your ability to make quality posts increases, so does the chances of you earning merit, all else being equal.

I have noticed that meta has tended to not have as many threads with many posts getting merit recently. Same with reputation. I am not sure if this is because less merit is being circulated, or because people have reacted to criticisms from certain forum members, or for some other reason.

Slightly off topic, but this should help you gain some perspective on very large numbers.

A googol is 1 * 10^¹⁰⁰, or the number "1" followed by a hundred zeros. A googolplex is 1* 10^^googol, or 1 * 10^^{(100^100)}.

If you had a million computers, each able to count a trillion numbers per second, your million computers would count to a total of 1 * 10^¹⁸ per second, and approximately 8.64 * 10^²² per day, or 3.1536 * 10^²⁵ per year. After a year, your million computers would, as a decimal, have counted to 3.1536 * 10^(-75100)th of a googolplex.

To put this in perspective, there is approximately 7.5 * 10^¹⁸ grains of sand on the earth.

This means if each grain of sand represented an equal part of a googolplex, you had a million computers, each counting a trillion numbers per second, it would take 2.3782344 * 10^^{(93^100)} years to count one grain of sand.

In other words, you are not going to count to a googolplex, even if you count very fast. There are not a googolplex number of private keys, but the same principal applies.

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If you want to be able to trivially access any private key, you will need to break the cryptography functions used to generate addresses based on private keys, either using quantum computing or by finding a weakness of the cryptography function itself.

Assuming they are the same person, neither one of them is wearing a paid sig. Neither one of them is earning a particularly large amount of merit. So if he is farming accounts, he is not doing a very good job. Sure, it is possible that he has other accounts with paid sigs that he (ab)uses.

I voted that he is a farmer, but I am not sure. It is possible he is trying to learn, but does not like having to look up things on his own. I would agree that he is not a "shitposter" but he probably does make unnecessary posts, and probably causes unnecessary posts to be posted in his threads in response to what he says.

You could probably get more posts out of this strategy than 5 posts. Someone trying to maximize the number of post a "fake" thread/question generates, they could ask a vague question, get a broad answer, be asked clarifying information by multiple accounts, give clarifying information about what you are asking, engage in a debate about what is best, and so on.

I have seen newbies ask suspiciously obvious questions that I somewhat suspect was made in order to increase the post count of alt accounts.

If someone gains access to your computer, they would know you use, or at least access CM’s website. There is a good chance they would know that anyway by looking at the wallet software on the computer plus using blockchain analysis.

Other than the above, I don’t see any downside to using a bookmark. Obviously the upside would be that you pretty much remove the risk of visiting a phishing link.

Part of the reason merit distribution is declining is because merit is being received by people who are inactive. Otherwise, merit distribution is declining because people are not spending sMerit as they receive merit.

As merit sources don’t spend their source sMerit, less new merit enters into the ecosystem. If all active merit sources spend all their merit, and the inactive sources don’t spend any, it would appear that source merit is not being spent when looking at the data, but there would be missing context.

Trump is, in effect, evading his ban on Twitter and Facebook. The posts he writes can be shared on each of those platforms and I would guess that his supporters will often do so. Unfortunately, this will make policing Trumps content more difficult.

Being that Trump’s new platform is not as popular, it will be difficult to criticize what he says.

You can always add a link to a thread to your browsers bookmarks/favorites. There isn’t normally a reason to need to go back to a thread after you have visited it if there aren’t any new posts posted.

You need to pay 25% of the sum of the outputs when using Viabtc's paid service? That must explain why they continue offering their free service, even when the mempool status requires very high fees. I am sure they probably make a lot of money from this.

I am surprised that more major pools don't offer similar services.

The vaccine does not cure covid, it prevents people from getting infected with covid. The majority of people who are infected with covid will naturally recover without treatment.

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Strictly speaking about conspiracies, I would say the best are the ones about Bill Gates.

Any centralized service has the potential to require KYC, even if they advertise otherwise. There is the risk that your activity/behavior raises flags the exchange does not like, and will require you to verify your identity before allowing you to withdraw.

The only real way to be guaranteed to not have to provide KYC is to use some kind of DiFi platform.

I believe the concern most people have with providing their KYC documents is that of their own privacy.

I agree that TMAN's source merit should be redistributed, or at least removed from TMAN's account so there will be accurate reporting of the actual amount of source merit available. I am saying that TMAN has been inactive for over a year, and no changes have been made, so I doubt changes will be made. 

It is likely that certain groups of people are more likely to develop serious adverse reactions to the vaccine. There is some data that suggests that people who recently were infected with covid are at higher risk for some adverse reactions. If you currently have covid, the vaccine is not going to do anything for you, so you should probably not get the vaccine.

Overall, the risk of death from the vaccine is orders of magnitude lower than from the risk of death from covid, even among the healthy. There is also the risk you will get seriously sick from covid, while this risk is basically non-existent for the vaccine.

As previously mentioned, if too many people decline to get the vaccine, you will either need to get the vaccine or eventually get covid.