I was not aware that you could file such a complaint with the CIA.

Or they were snooping on you, trying to track down your sock puppet accounts by linking public addresses of other accounts, in order to fill their imaginary neg rep quota for the day. In which case I'd say - they damn well deserve to lose those 50 coins.

With few exceptions I give out unique addresses for each payer. If I found an unexpected 50 BTC in my wallet I would contact the payer to whom I had previously give out the address to. If he/she does not know anything about it, I will keep the 50 BTC!

Running a node has never been free. There was always a cost but so far people have just eaten up the cost. If bigger blocks come too fast what I think will happen is that we will see less nodes run by monetary freedom enthusiasts and more datacenter-style nodes run by for-profit organizations. I hope advances in technology can blunt the effects of this, but we definitely need to find another dimension to scale up in addition to simply increasing blocksize indefinitely.

It may, but I would imagine that the XT miners could easily make direct connections to one another to lessen this problem. Besides XT blocks are no longer competing with core blocks at this point in time, and it is best for XT and core nodes to only connect to other nodes of the same kind. After the fork, it would be a waste of network resources for an XT node to connect to core node (or vice versa) because nothing useful can be exchanged over the connection.

Not necessarily, because Bitcoin is much more than just about speculation. For those who only view it as a purely speculative instrument they deserve to lose their shirts for investing in things they don't understand.

All I can think of is: "Cohagen! You've got what you want! Give these people air!"

If it gets this bad we will overthrow the government and make breathing legal again, no doubt about it. It is very difficult for the government to impose unreasonable restrictions and expect people to live in a free enough manner to make enough wealth that can be "reasonably" taxed.

Large blocks are useless if they end up getting orphaned and the potential fees vanish into thin air. Miners will keep adding transactions to their blocks up to the point where their orphan rate becomes unacceptable. This depends amongst other things on the size of the blocks other miners are building.

Cryptocurrencies, fiat or other monetary instruments are just tools. Ideally they should work equally well for both criminals and non-criminals. Once you start building in features that would make it harder for the criminal-of-the-day to use the tool then becomes a piece of shit.

Around 8/2010 I solo mined two 50 BTC blocks on a Dell 2950 server but I never saved the wallet.

One of my current wallets goes back to 4/23/2011 where the first transaction was a payment from Deepbit. This is my official born again date that I can prove.

Yes, inheriting a second hand open source project and cleaning up the mess in a contentious environment requires a special type of soft skill that many lack.

Of course it is: https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt

I just downloaded the entire damned repository but have yet to look at a single line of code.

There is very little incentive for developers with the right skill set to jump into this role. Besides, what guarantees are there that this new group would better align with your particular needs?

I've set it up so that I get about 5% of my salary this way.

I always make a hard copy of the image of the 2FA QR code and put it in a safe. When I throw away my phone every 6 weeks or so I can set Google Authenticator on the new phone just by scanning the picture.

I am not 100% sure but is sounds like having something to do with facilitating a crime. Just like paying a ransom to ISIS to not chop off the head of your kidnapped family member is technically a crime in the US, but one which is seldom prosecuted because it would make the authorities look bad. On the other hand prosecuting bitcoin dealers on technicalities seems to be the name of the game these days.

Is buying bitcoins to pay for ransomware illegal as well? It should be, and if it is not then the law is retarded.

Well, it could be said that there are 2 developers, but I don't really like the second one (not personally, just what he stands for). Regardless I strongly feel this way too and I won't consider supporting XT until it is backed by a diverse group of developers, including a few with privacy conscious views.

Great! Where do I sign up to be an XT core developer?

Storage and internet bandwidth are not really an issue these days. The real issue is the CPU resources used during block validation. Every new block that a node receives has to be validated against the known blockchain. This includes blocks that a new node downloads for the very first time. Some idiots are still running nodes on Raspberry Pis or Beagle Bones. When/if we move to 8MB, these nodes will not be able to cope with the larger blocks in a reasonable amount of time.

If you run a p2pool node and bitcoin node on the same machine (like I did), you already see a problem today when 1MB blocks come in and you are running anything less than a 4-core current generation CPU. My solution was to run p2pool and bitcoind on separate i7 machines, which was a pain in the ass but my setup can now handle 1MB blocks without too many orphans of p2pool shares.