I was somewhat pro 20MB block limits before but I have yet to install Bitcoin XT because I am leery of Centralized Authoritarian Mike Hearn's involvement in all of this. Instead, I have added another 6 new Bitcoin core nodes.

In the past, I've had many international wire transfers out of the US routinely blocked by my bank (it may have something to do with the countries I was sending money to). They would eventually clear after I called some compliance officer and explained who and what the money was for, but it was becoming a nuisance. Using bitcoins was one way to get around this inconvenience.

You realize that a 20GB block would never work with a 32-bit client, don't you? The maximum addressable memory for 32-bits is 4GB, and that needs to hold memcache and everything else.

The computation for the rainbow table entry for your address could have been done months or or even years ago. The attacker could just have been comparing live transactions to see if he already has computed your private key in his rainbow table, and then use that to do the sweep.

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That would be a moving target and it would depend a lot on how your brute-force program searches the space (since no brute-force tool is really 100% brute-stupid and would start attacking commonly used characters first). 15 years ago using a regular PC I was using L0pthcrack to scan our network for weak passwords and found many with 40+ bits of entropy.

Looks like he wants to get into mining and wants a lot of questions answered because he claims to know "jack shit". Unfortunately there is no quick way to explain the history of mining and how we got to the state we are in today. He would just have to read several of the long hardware threads from the beginning. I doubt that removing the 5 minute restriction would help him learn what he wants to know any quicker.

Having more addresses does not always imply that your coins would be much safer. If you use the same method to generate the 8 different private keys, e.g. some super lame brainwallet method such as using lines from Shakespeare, then if one of your keys gets brute forced it would only be a matter of time (milliseconds) before the others get hacked too.

Can the difficulty be scaled up/down in a granular fashion so that we will always get 10 minute blocks? I.e., for a given global hash rate that is somewhat appropriate for the current difficulty we don't want large jumps in block times if the difficulty is incremented or decremented by one step.

I second this request, in particular to defining a data retention policy for items such as:
- user access logs
- cookies, IP address and user agent
- deleted posts and messages
- archived database backups

For example, if the policy states that deleted posts are first soft-deleted and kept one the database for 5 years before hard deletion, and database backups are kept for 2 years before being destroyed, then it would be clear to everyone that deleted posts can be recovered for up to 7 years after the initial deletion.

It can be a liability for the forum to keep data around indefinitely.

Yes, localbitcoins has an escrow system that you can use with a buyer who can deposit cash into your Wells Fargo account in the US.

1) Find buyer in the US who will agree to the transaction.
2) Fund and escrow the transaction using bitcoins. At this point you can no longer retrieve your coins without localbitcoins intervention.
3) Wait for buyer to put the cash in your Wells Fargo account and mark the transaction as completed. Make sure the money is really there!
4) Release the bitcoins from escrow to the buyer.

He's paying out the rewards with his own funds. What would you reasonably expect?

BTW, one of my nodes got about 0.039 BTC. It was a pleasant surprise. At least I can say that I got my scrap BTC without taking part in a signature campaign.

Does that mean that you don't hold significant savings in bitcoins? If so, then what do you use to save?

Now the next question would be should you or should you not host your own authoritative DNS servers to resolve the MX records to your domain? Should you rely on cheapo DNS service (GoDaddy), premium DNS service (UltraDNS), or just roll out your own name servers across the globe?

I run my own redundant name servers for my personal vanity domain, but then again I did it just for fun and it costs a bundle to maintain. Plus my DNS servers could never withstand a DNS-level DoS attack.

Yes, I am sure he was originally smart1985, who later changed his name to mybitcointrade.com. I remember some of his posts from 2011/2012.

Wasn't he also the guy who sent bulanula 25 BTC instead of 2.5 BTC?

Well a blockchain based on Proof-of-Authority only needs 1 centralized node and 0 mining power. Let's hope that we never get to this kind of shit.

Looks like the system will include a distributed credit history database which is tied to your phone which in turn is tied to your identity. Pretty much like how the 3 main credit bureaus in the US tie a person's credit history to their SSN. It can work if a person can only have one phone number, so if they blow their credit rating by defaulting on a loan they can't easily get a new identity and new credit history.

Person E is likely to be some random full node that person D happens to connect to in order to relay the transaction. How could E be morally guilty of anything?

A bank does not necessarily imply the existence a central bank. It could just be an independent business where Bitcoin deposits and loans are made. There is already, after all, a Lending section in this forum, so the concept of lending bitcoins should not be alien to anyone.

When I was in school, I met an Australian student at a US gun range who told me that he unintentionally smuggled about 20 rounds of loose .22 LR ammunition in his carry on bag on one of his trips back to Australia. Somehow it wasn't detected by Airport security. His carry on backpack was also his gun range bag, and this was a long time ago before 9/11 so I believed him then.

Anyway he claims to have sold the 20 rounds of .22 LR (with a cost of 40 cents based on Walmart prices back then) for 200 AUD in Australia to some shady character.

Is .22 rimfire really Unobtaniuim in Australia?

I'm pretty sure he was talking about a faucet. Back in the day even Gavin operated a faucet that gave out much more than the scrap BTC you get from today's faucets.