That doesn't make sense to me. Why do you not trust sites running targeted ads? Someone who regularly views, but doesn't post in the gambling sub would probably be interested in ads for a casino, while someone who posts in the altcoin sub might be more interested in an exchange.

Your post history is no secret. The forum is already collecting enough information to serve targeted ads, but for some unknown reason is not doing anything with the data it is collecting on its users.

A couple of things about this comparison:
*A car is a deprecating asset. A car gives utility (the ability to quickly move from point A to point B), which over time, removes the value of said asset. Except in unusual circumstances, someone buying a car is doing so for the utility, not for the hope of it increasing in value.
*I think most reasonable people who invested in NastyFans expected to have returns in terms of BTC, not USD. This is true for all investors in mining equipment. Mining equipment is illiquid, and as such is going to generate higher than /BTC returns for people to continue to invest in mining equipment, otherwise people would simply invest in bitcoin.

I think some reflection as to why NastyFans has performed the way it has since its inception is in order. What happened to cause the price of seats to go down so much? Like cars, mining equipment is a deprecating asset because they will generate less revenue over time as the difficulty increases, however mining investors expect the mining revenue to make up for the lost value in the miners.

Jesse Powell gave pushback against giving information to NY regulators a few years back when Kraken was not allowing New York resident to use his service, so he may put up a bigger fight than Coinbase gave.

No. Certain bank transactions above thresholds are reported to the government, but this is mostly for AML purposes, not necessarily tax fraud/collecting tax purposes. The IRS does not have access to bank balances, although there is a means for the IRS to get your balances:

The Bank Secrecy Act restricts when banks can disclose information to the government or other third parties.

You are probably right. I am surprised that gemini wasn't able to send their own ETH to pay for the gas, and take a portion of the recovered token as a fee that could pay for the gas. 

Coinbase fought this years ago and lost. I believe they were able to get the scope of the summons narrowed somewhat, and Jesse Powell may be able to get the scope of the summons reduced somewhat.

I think this is a very valid point.

Traditionally, the need for a new sub is measured by how many threads on a topic are on the first few pages in their existing sub. A better measure might be similar to when a new local sub is created when the one megathread for the local community gets too big.

The LN megathread is currently 37 pages, and it appears that posts tend to occur there in bursts. I would ask if it is common for posts to get "lost" that might otherwise get responded to because there are too many other posts?

I don't think they are trying to take the dataset down (once it is in the public domain, it will always be out there). I think they are trying to find ways in which information can be leaked from Facebook.

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The biggest risk of the leaked information is that a thief will try to port your phone number to hack your accounts. This can be mitigated by not using SMS 2FA, and use a token based 2FA, such as google authenticator. It is possible that additional information will be combined with information from this leak that might lead to useful information about you. If this is a problem, it is too late now, but moving forward, you can use unique email addresses for each service you sign up for.

Nodes do not normally "reach a consensus" on anything. Nodes will validate each block according to consensus rules, confirming that each block is valid, and that no blockchain exists that has a higher total POW.

No matter what, someone will have the ability to know the "random number" ahead of time, and could use this information to their advantage, either by mining personally, or selling the information to a select group of miners. It is possible to prove that you knew information on or after a certain time, but it is not possible to  prove you did not know information prior to a certain time.

If the difficulty target block time is reduced, there will be more stale blocks because there is a higher probability that two blocks will be found in the time it takes for a found block to be propagated and validated by the network. This has nothing to do with a malicious actor.

In the case of competing blocks at the same height, the current status quo allows a "race" to be potentially resolved very quickly if a subsequent block is quickly found, however under this proposal, it will take a minimum of 8 minutes to resolve. 

This wont create an opportunity for a 51% attack. The ability to pull off a 51% attack is based on the attackers hashrate as a percentage of the total network hashrate, it is not a function of the difficulty.

In a hypothetical situation, in the future, tx fees will make up the majority of miners' income. If there are periods during which there are not transaction (fees), most miners may decide to turn their machines off until there are enough transactions to confirm that pay a sufficiently high fee.

However, as long as the block subsidy is high enough, miners will decide to mine empty blocks if the mempool is empty. Or they will mine blocks full of transactions to themselves, if there is some rule requiring blocks to have a certain number of transactions.

This won't work.

Who determines what the random number is? Transactions are not timestamped when they are broadcast, and there is nothing to stop a miner from broadcasting their own transaction 8 minutes after the prior block was found.

Also, block timestamps are not the exact time a block was found, it can have up to a two hour variance, so it is possible for block n to have a later timestamp than block n + 1.
It takes time to shut down a miner, and to start a miner. The power savings would not quite be 80% under perfect circumstances.

I think this would encourage miners to backdate (or back time) found blocks, and withhold the blocks until the next block is broadcast, creating many orphans.

The US has a treaty with Kazakhstan that compels their government to help with investigation of crimes the US is investigating. My guess is the State department would need to get involved for it to be invoked, and I don't think the State Department is going to get involved in a $20k dispute in which the complaining party suffered no losses. If there was a pattern and eBay were to complain, it might be a different story.

Keep in mind that the seller was claiming to be from Kazakhstan, but that does not make it true.

My guess is that eBay suffered losses when refunding your money, and that the seller was probably able to withdraw the proceeds of the sale to their bank account.

Im curious if you are actually the real maidak, or if this account was hacked. I also suspect that this is an attempt to troll the forum.

The fact that forum treasurers are getting paid ~45 grand/year to safeguard private keys makes me regret my escrow shenanigans from years ago even more.

I think theymos is probably overpaying for what amounts to escrow services, considering that each treasurer may not need to ever do any work, or sign any transaction.

When considering ad revenue, mod payments, and treasurer payment accruals, the forum is certainly operating in the red. The forum has the ability to operate this way for many years/decades, so theymos may not be concerned.I do think that the forum should at least allow targeted ads, which I would anticipate increase total ad revenue.

I can't imaging the cost of serving a single user stats page being very high. Oe option might be to allow copper members to view at most 50 user stats page per month, and perhaps create another member type that is allowed to view more user stats pages per month that might be a different price than a copper member. The majority of copper member stats page views would probably go unused.

One thing that theymos has done an especially poor job at is monetizing the forum. This is probably in part because he was such an early investor/adopter of bitcoin that he no longer needs to care about money, and has other priorities to advocate for. Special features is probably one additional means the forum could be monetized.

Improving the auction process for forum ads is another way the forum could generate additional revenue. Allowing advertisers to better target forum members would be a good first step in increasing revenue. Ditto with changing the metric that ads are displayed from "time" to "page_views"

I dont think eBay will allow bitcoin to be used as a payment method, unless it is through some kind of escrow service they approve.

The policy you cited says that eBay only allows payment methods "that offer strong protection for buyers and sellers", and they explicitly disallow irreversible methods such as cash in the mail, and Western Union payments. 

I think some people are unable to let go of a petty grudge.
i was told the information in question before lauda became a well known forum member, and the person who told it to me is someone who has solid ethical values, so I have multiple reasons to believe it is true. Over the recent years, lauda has taken many steps to safeguard her privacy, so I would assume she would have cutoff communication with this person when she abandoned her lauda persona.

The forum has over 3.2 million users, and probably 99.9% of those accounts will never have their stats page looked at by anyone, so creating cashed versions of the stats page would use more resources over the long run. It might make sense to keep a cashed version of an accounts page for up to a month, or however long, but this would open the forum to a DoS attack in which an attacker visits many accounts' stats page.

I might suggest that theymos calculate the cost of forum resources to visit one stats page, and allow people to view a single stats page after paying a LN invoice of the same amount.

This is unlikely. Satoshi mined an estimated million bitcoin, and has not touched them despite his stash being worth an estimated $60 billion. I think he is either dead, or has lost his keys, in which case he is living with the fact that he lost something that would make him the ~22nd richest person in the world.

I know that at least one person knew lauda on a personal basis. This was before lauda became infamous, and was a low profile forum member.

I kinda feel like that Musk is trying to make a statement with the Cybertruck. It is apparently cheaper than comparable trucks, which is the opposite of prices of electric cars when compared to gas cars (gas trucks tend to get poor gas milage). Gas trucks also tend to have high profit margins for car companies.