It was gone a long time ago.
The main restrictions are having a 6 minutes break between post decreased linearly with activity. Reduced to 74 seconds when you get 16 activity. The signature is subjected to restrictions, no links, no long characters. You will have a warning message sent to the receiving party when sending PMs. You can send up to max 5 PM per hour at activity below 16.

Back in the days, you had to run a full client to spend Bitcoin or a full node to mine. Nodes are beneficial for Bitcoin as it forms the backbone of the blockchain. Without these nodes, there wouldn't be blockchain or Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core is safer than SPV clients for example since they don't trust miner to enforce the network rules. They are essentially trustless clients. Bitcoin nodes are best to be distributed evenly around the world. The general thinking is the more nodes, the better. The nodes would be beneficial towards anyone near you who is downloading the blockchain since the speed would be faster. There are also lots of features.

Like you mentioned, there are some downsides to running one. The required hard disk space is around 40GB+ as of now. If the block size increases in the future, the amount of increment would be much higher than now. The hard disk price is decreasing due to the introduction of SSD and lower production cost. It doesn't cost much to get a new hard disk. Synchronization is reduced significantly with the introduction of heads-first synchronization. This would allow the client to get the blocks simultaneously from various nodes connected thus reducing the time taken to synchronize. But the bottle neck is there if your CPU isn't very powerful. There isn't any incentive to run a node now although there is a program that randomly rewards users https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/incentive/. To run a node, you must first run Bitcoin Core and open TCP port 8333. Ensure that you have more than 8 connections. 8 outgoing and 1 or more incoming.

Gavin Andresen has said that the network doesn't need nodes that shuts down frequently or isn't reliable. Network needs high uptime and reliable ones.

By default, Bitcoin Core only allows 8 outgoing connections. To attain more than that, port 8333 must be open. However, you can still modify net.cpp line 57 and change the max connections. The best way to check is by going to https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ and check your connection by using the join the network.

I still remember this fairly clearly. That day, US Senate had a hearing and the price surged all the way to $900 before briefly crashing and China investors started to invest and accept Bitcoin then it surged past $1000. It was truly amazing I must say. Bitcoin was heavily regulated in China and it started to slide gradually. However, a few months later, Mt Gox became insolvent and the price crashed due to it being the largest exchange at that time and loss of confidence.

Even though double spending risk at no confirmation is little to none, the risk is still there. People don't understand how Bitcoin works and draw the conclusion that any no confirmation transaction have the risk of double spending. However, it is worth noting that in the event of 51% attack, transactions can be reversed relatively easily. It can be done but lots of computing power is needed to initiate such attacks. Many other methods still exist for transactions with no confirmations, all the seller have to do is to take precautionary measures to ensure the risk is minimal.

Well, the release of new ASICs can potentially increase the difficulty by a huge amount. Depending on how you look at it, it can be positive or negative. Mining is usually really risky and hard to ROI. Not to factor in the risk of bitmain closing down and there goes your dreams. Hashnest seems to be okay but like all mining operations, it is risky.

Bitpay. I have used them on various site and they don't seem to require any confirmations if the owner chooses to. If you wait for a few minutes and check for competing transactions, propagation and fees, I don't see why would you have much risk when accepting such transactions. The best way is to ensure that the transactions is in the mempool of the top pools and they have reasonable priority.

Mining is okay if you have large funds, land and cheap electricity. However, risk like DOA and late shipment can occur. This would result in potential loss of profit and you have to bear that risk. The price can be a huge factor too.
Investing at gambling site can be risky but the risk would be moderate. The profit tends towards the house edge in the long run. If you aren't prepared to wait for sometime, then this isn't for you. Main issue here is trust. You have to trust the site owner to not cheat you or run away.
Trading is very risky. For those who have experiences, go ahead but the risk is still there. In the long run, you can lose all your funds if the coin you invested in crashes. Trading bots aren't designed to generate profit. You have to test it out yourself and find the settings. Again, no guarantees.
There's no such thing with no risk when investing in cloudmining. Mining isn't profitable for small players and cloudminers anymore. The only one profiting is the owner of the cloudmining company. It's hard to mine for guaranteed profit nowadays, even with altcoins.

Solutions like this will not work in all cases. Many malware are capable of being stealth and many can't be detected. Other than that, OP's problem has already been solved.

Half correct, miners have the rights to reject your transaction or they may just set a higher minimum fee limit for them to include your transaction. The transaction also depends on network load. If there are a lot of transactions and most of them pay more than 0.0001BTC/KB and you pay 0.0001BTC/KB, your's might not get confirmed first if the block gets filled with transactions from their mempool. This is due to the fact that miners rank non high priority transactions according to transaction fees.
Avoid posting irrelevent stuff. This thread is for discussing Bitcoins.

The government would require lots of funds. To even get half of the hashrate, they require more space than the biggest datacentre every built or roughly a big island. Needless to say, the power consumption would be ridiculous. The law can't completely regulate the mining industry, it can't stop mining at all. If packets are filtered, encryption can be used. Even if the government gets half of the hashrate, there's still another half. Unless the government takes 100% which is extremely unlikely, Bitcoin transactions will still get confirmed.

Just to reiterate, the mining farm can connect to a pool near China to mine, one with faster internet. It shouldn't matter much. Also, you are just testing one server from the entire country not to say that you are testing from US. I'm sure it would be better at the mining farms but again, stratum requires little bandwidth and speed.

You can't really add a note in using Bitcoin transaction or anything. Those messages you see on Blockchain.info is embedded by users who adds them using Blockchain.info wallet and isn't visible on other block explorers. Pretty worthless I would say since a data loss will result in the messages being lost.

There are faucets which run on the API provided by a service and they will consolidate the payments from different faucets into one block of transaction with the amount being the minimum withdrawal limit you or they specify.
I guess you don't quite understand the concept. The transaction consolidates all the small inputs into one output. With one output, the reciever wouldn't have to use much fees. The size from the previous transaction doesn't affect the size of the next transaction.

Since when? Xapo has never been anonymous at all. They do all kinds of verification while never promising any anonymity. It can log your IP at anytime. It can easily be traced too since they are done on a single server.

Blockchain.info has never had any double spend problem at all. The only problem they had that compromised the security was the flawed RNGs on two occasions which is the reason why everyone dislike blockchain.info.

I see no difference in storing in a SSD or hard disk. They pretty much do the same function and speed isn't too much of a issue for nodes. A decent hard disk would do. In my country, a 2 TB one would cost $100USD. It should be cheaper at other countries. Blockchain pruning is in the works now so it can potentially solve some problems too. For now, most people don't really use Bitcoin Core due to their ISP limitations, a SPV node can do the job just fine for an average joe.

0.0001 fee for a nearly 10kb transaction would never be enough. If I calculate correctly, the priority is 2,367,898. This transaction will not qualify for the 50kb max space in the block qualified for the high priority transactions. Hence, it would have to depend on the fees/kb if it pays 0.00001/kb, the transaction would be rank at the bottom. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It affected everyone who ran android 4.1 and below. Based on the number of transactions, 227 as of now, it isn't that small. AFAIK, only if you generate an address on the wallet, you will be affected.

I don't know too much about PSU but I have been using seasonic m12ii 620w for sometime now. Works well for me. I'm sure he can fit ininside $1000. I built mine for $990 with the price inflation in my country. Furthermore, I had the Z97 PC Mate. H87 would work fine for him in this case.I had a pretty expensive chassis too.

Plan B: Offchain wallets are generally aren't safe. You would have to trust the operator to store your coins in the safest way. There is a risk of the operator running away. One of the biggest scam is inputs.io. They appeared to be quite trusted to majority of the Bitcoin community. In the end, they got "hacked" and 4100BTC were lost. Also, the shop owner must be sure that the operator will not block off their payment and there is no way to prove that the user had actual coins and coins weren't created out of the thin air.
Plan C: This would be like a debit and credit card. This again, requires trust. It is a hassle to maintain so many cards and it would cost some money to issue the cards. This would also cause the centralisation of coins.

As others have said, accepting 0 conf transactions is secure enough. There are less risk associated with it now if precautions are taken.