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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I am not trying to extend my political debate. One person that I cited likely actually believes what he is posting and one is likely sponsored, directly or indirectly by terrorists, both are posting misinformation. Each can potentially be handed differently.
It is currently against the rules to post about bcash in the bitcoin forums. In 2014, this would not be against the rules because no one had thought to create such a rule. The purpose of this thread/bump is to generate debate that will hopefully lead to a new rule being created against posting terrorist propaganda.

Of course, I favor freedom.

With the kind of propaganda I am referring to, particularly the kind being published by Ljunior, I would say the publisher (I am intentionally not using the word 'person' as I have my doubts he is writing in his personal capacity, or even if it is a single person behind the account) does not necessarily believe what is being published, and he is taking steps to make it difficult to counter his statements. For example, he is making his posts full of images, so a casual reader will not be as likely to read the post immidiately after his post. This makes it difficult to counter what he is saying.

The authoritative sources should be chosen by someone who is responsible for the reputation of the forum. If authoritative sources are chosen that are not reliable, or are too biased, the forum's reputation will suffer. I don't think the forum should say that anyone is right or wrong, or that the linked authoritative sources are right or wrong, but I do think some of these posts should contain links to additional information so readers can decide for themselves.

There is a distinction between someone like Ljunior, and someone like jrrsparkles, who very well may believe what he is posting, and IMO is repeating what someone in his family, or friend group taught him. jrrsparkles is not doing anything to impede discussion, while Ljunior is via his very long posts.

We don't allow people to post about bcash in the bitcoin subs, claiming that bcash is bitcoin. We also don't allow inauthentic behavior that might artificially increase their threads or posts visibility.

The definition of propaganda is:
I am not necessarily advocating that posts be censored, but am rather highlighting a problem. I don't think the posts in question violate any current rules.

If the argument that Palestine is a "concentration camp" that would be the fault of Hamas, not Israel. Israel is giving away free electricity and water to Palestine. Hamas is occupying the territory.

There are authoritative sources that say Hamas is a terrorist organization (as cited in the post you quoted). The mods do not need to make independent judgements, but can rely on a set of reliable and authoritative sources. If, over time a particular source proves itself to be unreliable, it can no longer be relied upon.

I think it would probably not be best to remove the propaganda posts in question, but would probably be good to perhaps have warnings applied to posts linking readers to authoritative sources of information about the subject, so the readers can make their own unbiased judgments.

The best cure to misinformation is more speech. However some malicious actors are able to produce a lot of speech, either by generating content that many are sympathetic to, or via automated means. If authoritative, neutral sources of information are linked to certain posts/threads, the effectiveness of a lot of misleading speech would be reduced.  

That is ridiculous. The Israeli military calls the citizens being used as human shields ahead of time when they are about to bomb terror targets. Take a look at this video that is a phone call the IDF made to a civilian in Gaza.

Coinbase was also down earlier in the day. Prices were down heavily today, and this resulted in heavier traffic to exchanges and sites like CMC. I wonder how much Coinbase and Binance going down contributed to the acceleration of price declines.

It appears that terrorist propiganda is being posted in various P&S threads. Hamas is not only designated as a terrorist organization, but is also subject to OFAC sanctions.

The propaganda is not limited to one thread. There is another thread advocating for the mass murder of Jews whose replies contain pro-terrorism propaganda.

Of the vaccines for Covid that are available (except for the Chinese and Russian vaccines) the  AstraZeneca is the one that raises the most concerns. If I had the choice between getting the AstraZeneca vaccine and getting no vaccine, I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine. If I had a choice between AstraZeneca and another vaccine, I would get the other vaccine.