Bitmain sells its miners at a high price. The price Bitmain sells its miners for is the expected value of mining revenue, based on anticipated future growth in difficulty, and estimated costs associated with running the miner (electricity, and repairs), and the price of bitcoin, minus some discount rate to account for the possibility that difficulty will rise faster than anticipated, or that the price of bitcoin will be lower than anticipated.

So in essence, Bitmain is removing the risk of high difficulty growth from their balance sheet and allowing their customers to assume this risk. As Phil alluded to, this also happens to help them finance their manufacturing operation.

I am not aware of any case in which nutildah had any action taken against him for *arbitrary* reasons.

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To answer your question, every mod implements the various forum rules and policies a little differently, however, I have never had moderator action taken against me, while acting as a moderator, which similar action was not taken against others in a similar situation. There is one moderator who is not good with keeping confidential information confidential, however, I would not say this particular moderator takes actions that he does not implement for others (that I am aware of).

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Unfortunately, I have encountered instances in which some reports of mine were either not acted upon, or marked as "bad", likely because some moderators were not able to immediately independently verify the information, even though the information is available to the admins (and possibly some of the moderators). This is unfortunate because it has resulted in hundreds of reports of mine being marked as "bad", even though the reports were accurately reporting a post violating the rules.

Charities are not in the business of accumulating money. Their business is to distribute their donations in such a way that furthers their cause. So any donation they receive is going to get spent on either expenses related to running the charity, or on the cause of the charity. There are few expenses that can be paid for in terms of bitcoin, so IMO there is a good chance they will need to convert their bitcoin into fiat before spending their money.

There are many charities that accept appreciated property (such as stocks) as donations. There are tax reasons why people want to donate these assets (you noted them in the OP). Once a charity receives these assets, they will typically sell them.

The entity you are donating to will likely convert any coin you give them into USD. They will need to pay their bills and further their cause, which will ultimately be denominated in USD.

I am not sure what grounds Maxwell might appeal on. However, even with an appeal, it would be in her best interest to start naming names, even if in a way such that she does not implicate herself, as long as she can back up what she says.

I am not sure if she actually waits for her appeals to be exhausted before she starts naming names, however, once she is sentenced, the fact that she didn’t corporate is pretty much set in stone in terms of her sentence.

I might see some kind of sweetheart deal in which she names Trump right before the 2024 election in exchange for a pardon, however I don’t think she would be able to corroborate Trumps implication, as I do not doubt she has already been offered a similar deal by prosecutors.   

That is assuming a randomly generated password. When not using a password manager (that includes a password generator), many people will use similar passwords across all websites (despite this being a very bad security practice).

My reading of the OP's posts is that he probably uses a similar prefix across most of his passwords, and there will be a postfix that depends on the complexity requirements. So the prefix might be "pAssw0rd", he might use a number of other words after the prefix, depending on the length requirement, and may use a number of personal significance to him, with "@" at the end if a special character is required.

If (some of) the above is true, it will reduce the space the OP will need to search to find his password.

Only if people have to post in the thread in order to claim a spot (which is usually the case for raffles).

If the user needs to send a PM, visit a website and/or fill out a form, the giveaway would not violate the rules, according to my reading of the rules. It would still need to be in the altcoin (tokens) sub though.

Any kind of "work" is going to have value.

With bitcoin's current incentive structure, a miner will perform PoW "for" bitcoin users, who in turn "pay" the miner in the form of the block subsidy. Miners will also confirm transactions for a specific subset of bitcoin users, who will also pay the miners in the form of transaction fees. ASICs used to mine bitcoin cannot be used to perform any other valuable work that comes close to the value of performing PoW "for" bitcoin users (performing PoW with the hopes of finding a block), so if the miners as a whole were to do something detrimental such as routinely accept double-spend transactions in a block race, or perform a 51% attack against bitcoin, the value of the ASIC mining equipment will decline to nearly zero.

On the other hand, if a bitcoin miner were performing some kind of PoW to try to find a bitcoin block (for the purpose of receiving the block reward -- that is the block subsidy plus tx fees), in addition to performing additional "useful" work that is valuable to someone else, the miners will not have the same incentives to not attack bitcoin. If the value of the other work is far in excess of the value of the EV of the block reward, a miner may seek short-term profit in attacking bitcoin, or they may not even bother with mining bitcoin. If the miners were to attack bitcoin, the value of their equipment would not drop to near zero because revenue could still be obtained via performing the other "useful" work.

A public good is typically paid for by the government. If a government cannot obtain a public good via its own resources (for example, a country that does not have the manufacturing capacity to produce tanks), will seek to exchange its abundant resources (which may include money) for resources that will produce said public good. Further, if a government cannot provide a public good period, its wealthy citizens will seek to use their own resources to obtain said public good amongst themselves (for example, a neighborhood building a security wall and hiring private security when the local government cannot handle crime). So there will always be someone willing to pay for a public good, and if you can provide a public good, you should expect to receive compensation for providing this service.

I am not sure how using anonymous emails for sending texts works. However, if someone were to do something like "fax-in" a bomb threat or say there will be a specific horrible event in a specific location (as a prank), it would likely elicit a serious response by the local government (they would have no way of knowing if the threat is a prank or not), and after the fact, law enforcement is going to put serious resources into finding who sent the threat.

According to Peter Wuille, as of when BIP 34 was implemented, coinbase transactions must have the block height encoded in the previous script (along with potentially additional arbitrary data, although the additional arbitrary data is not required).

You cannot produce a signature for an arbitrary message of an arbitrary private key. You can produce an (arbitrary) signature, and arbitrary message and calculate the corresponding public key, and calculate the corresponding address to the public key.


You explain why your solution would not prevent botnets above. A coinbase transaction could send 1 satoshi to a private key distributed to all computers in a botnet, and the remainder to the botnet operator.

Pool trustworthiness has largely not been a major issue in the bitcoin world. It is trivial for a miner to switch from one pool to another, and pools are generally expected to payout mining rewards on a frequent basis.

The question as to if the coin produced via early blocks is not necessarily if satoshi (or whoever mined those blocks) controlled the private keys when the blocks were mined, the question is if satoshi controls the private keys associated with the output of the coinbase transactions today.

Satoshi did spend some of his coin that he mined, so it is reasonable to believe that he controlled all the private keys associated with the coinbase transactions of the blocks he mined at the time they were mined. Further, anyone mining any kind of coin will need to expand valuable resources to mine, so it would be illogical for someone to intentionally mine in a way that results in coinbase transactions being sent to addresses they (directly or via an agent) cannot spend from.

The US claims to have worldwide jurisdiction in enforcing its laws. The US has also signed treaties with various countries, including with the Czech Republic, that require other countries to extradite people charged with serious crimes.

So if a person (or company) is doing something from the Czech Republic that is breaking US laws, they can potentially be subjected to punishment by the US government. This would include the types of things I described above.

I would point out that funds donated to charity are intended to be spent, so any "escrow agent" would obviously need to facilitate spending any coin received in order to convert it to fiat in order to eventually donate it to charitable causes. This is unlike an escrow agent facilitating a transaction between two people when the money should not be touched until the parties agree to release the coin to the other party (unless there is some agreement otherwise).

I would expect most donations to be converted to fiat before being put to good causes.

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While reading this thread, I did not approve of cabalism13 using $500 for medicine for his grandfather, however upon reviewing the spreadsheet that crwth posted, it looks like, in April 2019, some of the money was sent to legendster with a reference that talks about donating to various what looks like "go-fund-me" pages (or more accurately, a fundraiser hosted by a competitor of go fund me) for medical expenses.

I think there should have been some transparency regarding the transaction to help cabalism13's grandfather, as it appeared to be the case for many other times that funds were disbursed.

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Another major issue is that the thread announcing the "charity" is very vague as to what the funds would be used for, and as to the level of documentation that would be kept and presented publicly to prove that donations were actually made. I would personally like a very detailed accounting of specific expenses, I think it is difficult to justify demanding receipts months (or longer?) after the fact.

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Overall, I think those involved did a poor job running the charity, as it appears there is a lack of confidence in its operation, and expenses have not been well documented. There is also a lack of documentation as to what funds would be spent on, so those involved are not setting expectations for their donors. I would recommend against donating to the "Bitcointalk Charity Program".

This is very likely a unit of measure of cabalism13's local currency. Based on what others have written in this thread, he is based in the Philippines, so he was likely referring to 350k of Phillippines local currency.

The problem with your suggestion is that it is not possible to know which other addresses received transactions around the same time your address received a transaction. If you had this information, you would not need to query an SPV server in the first place because you would have access to all transaction information.

Even waiting until your address has received a transaction is difficult because, in most cases, you will not know for sure if you have actually received a transaction (if you knew you did, why would you be asking an SPV server for this information?) -- you might have been told that a transaction was sent to you, however in these cases, there will sometimes be a delay between when someone tells you they sent a transaction, and when a transaction is first seen on the network.

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SPV nodes, by their nature trade privacy for resources required to run the node.

I think the best way to maximize privacy while using an SPV client (given the limitations of SPV clients) is to query a single address at a time after you have reason to believe the address has received a transaction. You can do things such as alternate SPV servers each time you make a query to reduce the amount of information any single entity will collect about you.

I don't think anything good will come out of this service.

People in this thread are worried about privacy when using this type of service. However, if someone uses this service to make a prank that is taken the wrong way, or to make an actual threat, this service will have problems if they don't know who the sender is. So this type of service is going to have to keep track of their customers' identities.

I am fairly confident that "faxing" companies are not protected by section 230, so they would be responsible for anything transmitted using their services.

I don't think it would work very well.

I don't think a spying SPV server is going to care about any address query of an address that has already received one or more transactions. By the time an address receives a transaction, it will be public knowledge that the address exists.

I think it would be more efficient for a spying SPV server to keep track of unfunded (never used) addresses that receive a transaction after an inquiry is made about the address. So if Bob asks about a particular address that has never been used, that later receives a transaction, there is a very small number of people who would know ahead of time that address will receive a transaction.

The above is possible because SPV nodes will ask about all addresses that have been used plus additional x addresses (the gap limit).

Satoshi created bitcoin, but he is not in charge of bitcoin.

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I would advise the OP to contact local law enforcement if he is being blackmailed.

My general advice is to not pay a blackmail demand as the person can potentially do whatever they were going to do in the future if you end up paying the blackmail.

If your computer is infected with ransomware, your files are likely lost.

On behalf of the PrimeNumber7 family, merry Christmas! 🎁🎄

The OP is trying to answer your question. In order to calculate if a potential reward should be sought, you need to determine the probability of losses.

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To answer the OPs question, it depends on their ability to manage credit risk. They are not an outright scam, but they obviously make money by lending out coin they are holding on behalf of their customers and pocket the difference between the interest they pay and what they receive.

You can judge their ability to manage risk, in part by looking at interest rates for borrowing compared to interest rates they pay deposits and the conditions in which collateral will be liquidated.