Facebook initially, correctly said that the Russian bots on Facebook had received nearly zero views by Americans prior to the 2016 election. They later changed this stance, likely when they started to belive that Democrats would come into power in Congress in 2018.

Facebook also has a history of bending the rules to in-power-party members of the government in India.
I don't think requiring identity checks would do much to solve the problems that social media sites create. If this is not a worldwide requirement, someone could just use a VPN to appear to be registering from another country.

Bitcoin transactions are "settled" (confirmed) every 10 minutes on average, and if there is a transaction with a sufficiently high fee attached, it will settle (confirm) the next time bitcoin transactions are settled (a new block is found).

Any debt transaction will almost certainly take longer for you to have access to your money.

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As a side note, there are many debt transactions that take place for reasons unrelated to the type of money being transacted. For example, some merchants will receive inventory from a vendor, and will finance the payment for said inventory via a lender with a maturity of when the inventory is expected to sell. Merchants use these types of debt facilities because they do not have the money to pay for their inventory up front, and is typically slower than a hypothetical situation in which the merchant was able to pay for the inventory up front.

The above is not explicitly what you are asking about, but your question reminded me of the above situation.

I have to disagree with this part. You explain why:
-ck provides an important service, that is network connectivity to the rest of the network.

if you are solo mining from your garage and are using your google fiber internet connection to have your node broadcast any found blocks, if you find a block within x second(s) of a major pool finding a block, your block will likely get orphaned because the pools are very well connected amongst each other, and other pools (miners) are likely to have received (and accepted) a pool's block before ever seeing your block that would have to make its way through the network "organically". I would assume that -ck is running multiple, well-connected nodes, that is capable of quickly broadcasting any found block that someone using his service finds. Another service that -ck provides is ensuring that any block found is valid (more specifically that any miner using his service is mining for a valid block).

Instead of charging a fee to connect to his service, -ck charges on a commission-based model in which he charges a fee out of the block reward of any block found using his service.

I am not sure how large this advantage is, but for every 1 second more quickly that -ck's service is able to get your block to the rest of the miners is a 0.167% reduction in the chance that your block will get orphaned. Someone using -ck's service would receive a similar advantage on the other end too -- a miner using -ck's service is going to be looking for a block on top of the most recently found block more quickly when compared to a miner using his home internet connection to get the most recent block for similar reasons.

According to the article you cited, the malware is for sale to third parties who want to try to infect others for profit.

My speculation is that, whoever created the malware wanted to prevent themselves and their countrymen from getting infected, possibly due to legal concerns (for example, if people in their home country are getting infected, that country's law enforcement may devote more resources into trying to catch whoever created the malware). The langue setting could be broad enough such that it is unlikely that anyone in their home country will actually see their coin stolen, for example if people in their home country speaks a diverse set of languages.

Facebook has claimed, without evidence (that I am aware of) that the group violated "Qanon" policies. It is unclear what these policies are, or how the group in question "violated" these policies.

It appears that Facebook (now Meta) is trying to appease the party in power of government, which it appears they have a history of doing (along with trying to appease the party they believe will land itself in power). I think this is a mistake, and will likely result in Meta on a negative end of regulation by (former) opposition parties around the world. In the past, throughout the world, Facebook (and other major US tech companies) have enjoyed serious advantages as a result of their "first mover" status, however I think governments will start to put their thumb on the scale against Facebook (and other major tech companies) over time if Facebook continues to support the party in power, rather than trying to be a neutral entity.

Once you broadcast a transaction, it is public, and there is the risk that someone will rebroadcast it if it gets "dropped". This means that if you are sending coin to yourself, you should keep backups of the private key of the receiving address, and if you are sending coin to someone else, you should either double-spend the transaction or be sure that the person you are sending coin to is trustworthy enough to return any duplicate transactions.

I have detected a shift in the merit system. It appears there was a blitz of merit being sent in large quantities.

As you can see, the above (fake) quote is in no way verified by the forum. When someone "quotes" a post, they have the ability to change what is in the quote as they please, even if the quote is completely fabricated. The forum will help somewhat in helping create a BB code tag that will allow for someone to see when the (alledged) post was made, the author of the (alleged) post, and to have a citation link, although all of the above can be trivially changed by whoever writes the post.

Even if a transaction chain appears to be "linear", all transaction chains are formed via a DAG by bitcoin's nature (assuming the transaction is valid).

I can only speculate why someone would chain so many unconfirmed transactions together. I would suggest you monitor any such transactions and capture the graph immediately prior to the transaction chain getting confirmed.

If immediately prior to when the graph of transactions are confirmed, there is a transaction at the "tail" of the graph that has an outsized transaction fee, most likely someone was trying to minimize their tx fees, and was using a strategy similar to CPFP.

If the above is not the case, there could be a number of other reasons why someone is engaging in the above practice. The first thing that comes to mind to me is that someone might be trying to test the limits as to when certain entities are willing to accept unconfirmed transactions.

Yes, this is very likely. Especially with someone who has been wrong on every foreign policy issue over the last 40 years as president in the US. I can all but guarantee that this would not be happening today if Trump was president.

NATO was intended to deter Russian aggression toward Europe, and even though Ukraine is not part of NATO, invading Ukraine is a signal to NATO that eastern NATO nations are next. Unfortunately, the US has effectively been subsidizing European defense since during WW2, and NATO members other than the US are not serious about defending NATO.

As it stands, now Russia would suffer major losses in invading Ukraine, even if NATO and/or the US does not get involved. The people of Ukraine are against being invaded by Russia and the US, under the Trump administration had fairly decently armed Ukraine. So even if Russia does invade Ukraine, it is not a given that Putin survives politically (he is a dictator, but even dictators can only do so much and still stay in power).

Assuming Russia invades Ukraine, what happens next, will largely depend on Germany and the rest of Europe. If the Germans are willing to shut down the Nordstream pipeline and impose strong sanctions on Russia, I don't think Russia will advance past Ukraine. However, if Europe is unwilling to force Russia to pay economic penalities for an invasion, Russia will likely quickly expand Westward.

Temporarly.

Although not explicitly part of the merit system, those with more merit tend to have more credibility, so if someone is being critical of a project with a lot of merit, the thread will be close to the top of the page (temporarily), but your post will also have more credibility than those defending the project if those defending the project does not have much merit.

Ignoring the above, the bump system was not designed to forever keep scam projects away from the top of the first page. It was created to prevent spammers from excessively bumping a thread to the top.

In order for an NFT to have value, the issuing entity needs to have some kind of ownership claim to the underlying asset. So if one entity sells the same underlying asset twice on two different blockchains, the buyers of those assets could come after the issuing authority in court.

The solution to the above problem is not technical, as it not technically possible to prevent someone from selling the same asset on two blockchains. The solution is legal, and is something that would need to be handled by the courts.

Posting in a thread has a much lower effect compared to pressing the "bump" button. As such, you should not worry about "bumping" a thread when you post in it.

If you post criticism of a project in its thread, the thread will be visible as will its criticism.

Development costs to create a payment processor is not trivial at a company like Amazon. So the estimated additional revenue would need to outweigh the development costs. Also, although Amazon developers likely spend very little of their time actually coding (developing), they don't have free time in which they have nothing to do, so devoting resources into creating a bitcoin payment processor means that some other project will need to take the back seat.

There is also an additional issue for Amazon to accept bitcoin payments. Most of the time, when I buy something from Amazon, the package will come in an Amazon box from an Amazon warehouse (sometimes, the package will be shipped directly from a third-party seller). In any case, the majority of the time, Amazon is operating only as a marketplace, not unlike the marketplace on the forum (although with many more rules and regulations, and at a much larger scale). Like the marketplace section on the forum, there is a lot of fraud, fake trades, and fake feedback. Amazon has invested a lot into weeding out that fraud, part of which includes forcing everyone who buys on Amazon to provide a real credit card. Allowing people to pay via bitcoin could potentially throw a wrench in their fraud detection models, which could be very costly, even if no fraud happens via its bitcoin customers.

Most people were newbies in early 2010. When people join the forum today, it is often after doing a decent amount of reading and/or research about bitcoin. In 2010, there wasn't much reading to do about bitcoin outside of the forum.

It is interesting to see satoshi responding to new users with questions about bitcoin.

If satoshi were to come back to the forum and provide proof he is satoshi, anytime he would post, he would likely get dozens (if not more) replies, and people would be PM'ing him left and right, to the extent that it would be impossible for him to communicate with anyone.

I don't think theymos was an admin when Satoshi was around. I am not even sure that theymos ever even played any major role in the development of bitcoin, and I don't believe he had more than a few interactions while posting on the (bitcoin.org implementation of the current) forum.

1 and 2 are likely the same issue. Pools that accept low fee transactions for "free" may be using their "free" service as a means to advertise their paid service to include a low fee tx in their block for a fee. Some of the time, these low fee transactions may not qualify to get broadcast based on most nodes' relay rules, however, I think most of the time, these will be transactions with RBF disabled (not opted-into) that are in the mempool of most nodes, making a double-spend difficult.

3 - A pool that is solely taking the on-chain tx fee into consideration for which transactions to include in their blocks are solving something similar to a knapsack problem. CPFP transactions make this a little more tricky, especially if there is a chain of transactions, some of which may cause the transaction date to get confirmed (for example if the tx fee values were: Low, Low, Low, High, Low, Low, High, High, Low, Low, Very High). In general, pools will choose which transactions to include in a greedy manner, by choosing the highest tx fee rate transactions first, until there is very little block space left, at which point they may bypass a higher tx fee rate transaction in favor of a slightly lower tx fee rate transaction if it means the total tx fee increases compared to including the higher tx fee rate transaction (for example, a pool may choose to not include a transaction that would result in one unit of fees in favor of including two transactions that result in two units of fees being paid to the pool -- this may be possible if the former resulted in some block space being unused and the later resulted in lesser block space being unused).

If you do some research on the knapsack problem, you will discover that the average tx fee is not going to give you much information on if a transaction has an unusually high tx fee. There may be other measure that might hint at if a transaction has an unusually high tx fee.

As pooya87 explained, I don't think this is something that should affect any cold storage setup, as the only person (people) who should have access to the device(s) that contain cold storage private keys is (are) those who have the authorization to spend coin from cold storage.

This might be a bigger issue for a business that allows multiple employees to access a machine that has access to the business's hot wallet (or other secrets). In those cases, this is something that needs to be patched ASAP.

This is really the key to the OP's problem/question.

The "blockchain" fee is neither an upper bound nor a lower bound as to the actual fee that a user will pay. There have been instances in which, due to human error, a person has included a fee that is orders of magnitude higher than the going rate for a similar transaction, and pool that mined the transaction has refunded the tx fee back to the user. Similarly, as is noted above, a pool may receive an off-chain payment for confirming a transaction that is in addition to the "blockchain" fee paid. These off-chain payments may be a subscription-like service, or it could be an ad-hoc like service.

With a computer/laptop, you at least have the (reasonable) option to use a full node. If you only have access to a mobile device, you likely are not going to have the ability to use run a full node.

It is tricky to use electrum on a mobile device in a way that guarantees your privacy. I don't think current implementations of electrum would make this very easy.

To guarantee your privacy, you would have to modify electrum to only access an electrum server via tor and to only query a single address at a time. Even if you were to do something like this, I don't think there are many people engaging in this practice, so a 'spying' electrum server may group these types of queries together.