You can consider using bitaddress. You can generate a paper wallet offline while using the site offline.

I would suggest that you not use a paper wallet until you have some experience using bitcoin, and you are confident that you have a solid understanding of how bitcoin works, including things such as private keys, importing private keys, and the importance of backups.

Don't use this website. It appears this website will not generate private keys on the client side (on your computer), but will rather generate the private keys on their server. Your private key will also be known to the owner of api.qrserver.com, if different from the owner of the website you are using.

Fee #2 will not be necessary because the payor can receive a LN payment to make the following week's payment. Similarly, Fee #1 will only be required the first time a payment is made.

Fee #3 will apply to anyone not intending on keeping the bitcoin in the LN network, in which case a LN payment would probably not be appropriate.

Go ahead and send the $65 in litcoin to the above address, and post the bitcoin address I need to fund the loan to.

Thanks.

You could use some kind of "wrapped" bitcoin that uses another blockchain, and is easily convertible back to bitcoin. The problem with this is that you are essentially forcing your payees to bear the cost of the fees.

Setting the fee to 30 sat/byte is probably below the lower bound fee rate at which you should expect to have your transaction confirm anytime soon. The reality is that fees for sending on-chain transactions is very high currently.

Others have mentioned that you can send a single payment after a month that represents 4 weekly payments. I think this is probably the best option, and would effectively reduce the fee you are paying by 75%.

If any of your participants are willing to accept a LN transaction, you can pay via LN, but I would say that you should not force this. You can add incentives for accepting a LN payment, such as offing a small bonus.

Trading in an airport, past security would help with protection from theft from your trading partner, but might risk theft from the government (via asset forfeiture) if you are dealing with large amounts.

Other than trading in an airport (past security), there will always be the risk that the other party claims to have a gun in his pocket that is being pointed at you if you don't comply. To any bystander, or any CCTV camera, the interaction will be nothing more than two people talking. In this case, even a weapon of your own will not do much to protect you if you don't want to risk getting shot in the process.

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My suggestion to the OP is to wire money to coinbase as opposed to sending it via ACH. This will speed up the time the funds will be available for withdrawal. Other than my suggestion, there is really not much that can be done to speed up funds availability without sacrificing cost, an ATM for example will take a (usually large) spread or fee.

I can help you with this.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Terms:
bitfinex exchange rates will be used.
Loan amount: $55
Repayment amount: $65
Due date: April 30, 2021
Repayment address: bc1qruh36ap8n6ufhvgtxa9kglrmtm0338fdgflv80
collateral: $65 in litcoin
collateral will be held by: Quickseller at: LbjJmPBrqPdUHWJ8Re3bj13mFpt7wgaKTQ
loan will be funded to: address posted by mbuk81
collateral will be return to mbuk81 at the address of his choosing upon repayment in full by April 30, 2021. If the loan is not repaid in full by this date, absent an agreed upon extension by Quickseller, the collateral will become the exclusive property of Quickseller and mbuk81 will be relieved of his repayment obligations
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That is surprising. I guess that means those who want to avoid using JS will have to use the API, or a framework that leverages the API.

Yes LN payment is safe. The current bitcoin economy does not currently allow for LN payments to be efficient.

In order to receive a payment via LN, you need to either have spent money on LN or have someone else open a channel with you that gives you inbound capacity (usually for a fee). Also, if you receive a payment via LN, it will generally mean you intend to spend most of that payment in the near term, otherwise you will deplete, and eventually exhaust your receiving capacity.

Some bitcoin merchants accept LN payments, but most do not. Personally, I would be open to receiving LN payments if I had inbound capacity, and intended to spend bitcoin at a merchant that accepts LN shortly after receiving the payment, but absent these two requirements, I would tend to prefer an on-chain transaction. 

I haven't looked at the new forum software in depth, but I can assure you that it does not use JS based frameworks on the front end. The new forum software ultimately will have a div that displays the post content, just as the current SMF forum software does.

The API allows someone to query posts by user and by thread. The API documentation is somewhat confusing, but it appears both the username and thread are strings, as opposed to both being ints currently. I haven't looked deeply at the code to see how a thread ID is created.

Congrats. Keep up the good work.

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Maybe theymos could implement some kind of dashboard that updates every day (or however often to not overload the forum's database and other resources) regarding reporters. I would think he would periodically query information about reports, as part of the forum administration. This could be similar to the merit stats, except the stats would not load when someone clicks on the report.

The Police officer is a member of the union, and the union will fight for the officer to get his job back. I have not reviewed the union contract, but I strongly suspect the officer will prevail.

The firing was clearly political. Also, news that the police officer donated to Rittenhouse's legal defense fund, and the comments that he made while donating clearly violate Twitter's "hacked materials" policy, yet Twitter has allowed stories to remain.

The hacking of the website that is hosting Rittenhouse's legal defense fund was obviously done with the intent of harming people who are trying to help Rittenhouse have the resources to ensure he has a fair trial.

If all the IDs in the HTML remain constant, moving to the new forum software shouldn’t break most scrapers.

If your code is structured in a way such that each function does a single task, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to update scripts based on the new forum software.

A 24 hour turn time for phishing links is probably too long. IMO, a better SLA would be an hour or two. If necessary, the admins should invest in a way to get the turn times down to a few hours. This could mean investing in AI or software that will censor posts based on logic, or it could mean hiring additional patrollers.

Are the phishing sites from the same websites? If so, the admins can automatically change the link that newbies post to “suspicious link”.

Another option would be to add a warning to any post a newbie posts with a link advising to verify that the link is correct.

There is a huge chip shortage globally currently. Some have attributed this to Covid, but I am not sure.

The chip shortage is affecting everything from cars to computers to miners. The cited investment is an attempt to increase capacity to bring to closer to in line with demand.

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A large chunk of the chip capacity is in Taiwan. I would be more concerned about China invading and/or attacking Taiwan when it comes to chip capacity. 

I was able to cash out of my investment in bnktothefuture. IIRC, I was asked to complete KYC verification at the time of investment, and had to verify information similar to what I originally verified several years later.

This is not possible yet, but IMO it should be a priority for theymos to implement.

IIRC, theymos has declined to implement LN because of the tax implications of running a LN node -- you would need to keep track of the bitcoin price anytime you received a 10 satoshi payment, and reported the <$0.01 payment accordingly. The above could be done via automation using a major exchange's API, or the forum's LN node settings could be set so that no LN fees will be charged for users to route transactions through the forum's LN channels (or the fees could be set insanely high).   

Anytime you introduce new functionality, there is the possibility it will be exploited. Years ago, the ability to upload an avatar was exploited and said exploit was used to hack the forum. There are many forum members who have the ability to and are willing to create user scripts that will give the functionality that forum users want, and these user scripts will not present the same potential security risks.

See my above comment.

The process itself is not difficult. The difficult part is doings it in a way that protects the private keys of the exchange. Most likely, the private keys of the various coins they support are kept separate, and the devs probably need to perform ETL tasks to move the private keys from the infrastructure of one coin to another. This is most likely done on an ad-how basis, and many tests and approvals will likely be needed to ensure that no information is leaking and that customer money is kept safe.

I would anticipate a delay lasting months, hopefully it won’t be that long. You should follow up with them periodically. Posting in this forum will not accomplish anything.