It would be interesting to see if other teams also voice opinions on this.
It's a serious issue to have conflicts of interests in leagues but then again... While 44% might not be a majority stake, it is a very large stake nevertheless and a lot of influence could be coming by someone who owns that big of a stake in a team.

If there is a dispute regarding this it would be good to have further clarification on such rules.
Some might say that free market principles should allow owners to buy stakes at whatever tram they have, but imo leagues should also be able to apply rules such this one because some limitations make sense.

Interesting.
Indeed this is a factor I didn't consider.

So if there's an x chance to find a block before the newest one has been received and fully verified, knowing what's in the block if it was mined by you could also mean that you can also construct the next block template safely.
So the risk factor is x minus your percentage of the network's total hash power.

But there's a big IF here.
Does Foundry construct block templates beyond the next block in case they mine two blocks consecutively?
We can find the likely answer to this question by looking if they have mined two closely adjacent blocks.
I remember though, AntPool has mined empty blocks even when they were the ones to have also mined the previous one. So even if feasible, other big pools don't utilize such technique.

Seems like the funds came from an address that is very involved with ordinals:
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1qlccksaaehjkdv4tgf032pvx8n76uhazqt4rgy70y4drmqwh5espqwx89f9

wise.com is one of the most reputable remittance services and they do take debit card.
Also I'm pretty sure western union also accepts debit cards to send remittances.
These two are generally the most popular ones.

Not sure if these are worth it though. It highly depends on your country. You should ask some locals for their experiences too.

I made this thread about Foundry in specific because to me it's logical that they being the biggest mining pool would not be willing to take this risk.
Naturally, the larger a pool becomes, the larger the opportunity cost of having certain chances of losing a block.

So, with network security measures as you mention, can that risk be minimized to an extent that it's negligible even for a pool that has ~1/3rd of the hashrate?
Because if not, they might be doing something else.

Polymarket's bets use UMA as a resolver, so people should be staying away from both really.

This market is a clear example where evidence was ignored in a betting market. But not just that, polymarket was also unable to interpret its own rules properly. This is a three month old market, throughout its span reports came out from reliable sources that Israel had intel on the attack and chose to ignore it. This was pointed out to Polymarket so they could clarify their rules, as well as the hypocrisy of UMA voters was pointed out in their respective discords.

Polymarket failed to add any clarification to their rules and a handful of UMA voters just swayed the vote in the favor of their liking.

If you were to monitor all empty blocks that have been miner by bitcoin tools, you'd come to the realization that Foundry, which is currently the biggest pool, has not in fact miner any emty blocks throughout its existence:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/blocks?q=time(2009-01-01%2000:00:00..2023-12-31%2023:59:59),transaction_count(1)#f=time,guessed_miner,transaction_count,size,id

This is an interesting metric if we consider that empty blocks are mined for a reason:

So how is Foundry able to avoid mining empty blocks?

An interesting theory I heard was that when a new block is mined, while it gets propagated to be verified by all other miners, Foundry is probably pointing their miners towards another pool, and then return them to their own.
This way effectively the pool doesn't appear to be mining any empty blocks themselves, but if the pool they pointed their hash to mines one, it'll be labeled under that different pool's name.

An issue that was brought to my attention recently was that Polymarket is hosting a betting market where people can bet on if bitcoin ETFs will be approved.
The issue with Polymarket is that many people have actually lost a lot of money from its unfair market settlements in the past.

I wasn't aware of this platform until recently, but just by scrolling through their website I noticed that from the many markets they have, many users have been very disappointed with the unreasonable settlements that were given.

An issue I see with the platform is that people can see who bought how much of each market and hence whoever settles the market can make rulings in favor of their friends. This is a big conflict of interest. I noticed a good example of this in the middle east section of the markets.


https://polymarket.com/event/did-israeli-intelligence-have-advanced-knowledge-of-the-attack

This above market specifically, showcases the bias of this platform. In spite of the fact that MAJOR news outlines, in and outside of Israel, as well as state actors coordinating with Israel, all published evidence that Israel had prior knowledge to the October 7 attack, the settlement of the market is going contrary to all evidence, denying truth directly.

Initially the market was swayed towards yes due to evidence. But then some people tried to manipulate the discussion adding to the terms (without authorization by market participants) "Israel knew the attack was coming, but deliberately chose not to act".

Supposedly the market has been under a proposed settlement of yes, but some came and voted no after disputing it to sway it last minute.


For a market of around $600k USD, someone would have expected a settlement grounded in reality end evidence. Instead, just based on some people's voting power through the UMA platform, now many participants of this market will be losing a lot of money unfairly.

I've not used UMA or polymarket myself, otherwise I would be starting a scam accusation, but to me this is good enough evidence to warn people against using these services.

No because there's no gambling market I can trust on this issue.
UMA who opperates polymarket.com is literally worse than a monkey in settling its markets and I think no one should trust them.

Take this market as an example:
https://polymarket.com/event/did-israeli-intelligence-have-advanced-knowledge-of-the-attack

The question was
Did Israeli intelligence have advanced knowledge of the Attack?
There have been statements released from Israeli newspapers as well as the New York Times proving that Israel had prior knowledge to the attack. And yet UMA simply denies the truth, making so many people lose money...
The issue has been disputed but it's still unclear when the market will be settled, which is just another red flag.

Let's get a few things straight:
You admit to not mining empty blocks here:

It gets pointed out that by sheer chance sometimes block are mined right after a new block was found and this essentially forces the pool that found it to mine an empty block in order to avoid throwing away ALL of the rewards of their block.

With this knowledge you later admitted that not only does kano not mine empty blocks, but also it does it deliberately. But why would a pool be so willing to throw away perfectly good block rewards?

Uh uh. While I can commend the altruistic reasoning behind deliberately throwing away hash power and potential minned blocks, one must recognize some irony here.
Completely missing on the entirety of a block (i.e. not mining it at all) is definitely worse for the interests of a miner.
Your just admitted your pool has a high chance of doing that because of altruistic reasons.

Meanwhile though you seem to have made it your mission recently to discredit Ocean, failing to ignore its many mertis, in spite of it being arguably the most decentralized pool and the most small-miner friendly pool.
How sure are we than that you're in it for what's good for bitcoin?
If it dawned on you that doing self-promotion at someone else's expense is at best a bit out of place, at worse highly unethical, you perhaps would have restricted yourself in just commenting about the technicals (which I'm sure you have the knowledge to). But instead every second sentence we hear "my pool".
Well good luck defending yourself now that it was discovered that Kano arguably does something much worse to its miners for purely ideological reasons.

I ONCE told you that while some of your ideas make sense, your conclusions on politics and current affairs are outlandish.
I then compared this to the fact that even Marx having been born 200 years ago thus having far fewer access to information and analytical tools than we do, came to better conclusions than you on several matters.

In YOUR mind, me recognizing that you've said things provably dumber than someone born over 2 centuries ago means I admitted that I'm a leftist.
Probably though that only proves that you're allergic to literature and maybe reading as a whole. Not only did what I said fly directly over your head, but you're showing prejudice towards me just because I made a mere passing mention of a historical figure.
Perhaps though, if you had read ANYTHING in the form of a book you would have understood that personal insults don't make up for a good argument.

Easy guess. But we can only speculate.
Probably some accounts that grew to become reputable haven't actually change their passwords in a good while and it must have been caught on a compromise.
Someone with malicious intent was just testing accounts and got access to these.

It might be a good idea from now on to require loan requests to be done with a staked address or signed by one.

It's possible that Kano pool doesn't mine empty blocks solely because with such low hashrate the chances would be very slim for them to mine any.

Or perhaps the hashrate they have as part of the network isn't considered significant to do something with hash power between block propagation. So if the latter is true, it would mean that by choise Kano is opting to miss out on ALL potential block rewards if such circumstances arise. Not just those coming from Ordinals.

Some napkin math says that if block propagation takes a few seconds and new blocks are found arojndy every 10 minutes perhaps by that standard there would be a ~1% chance to miss the entirety of a block's rewards mining in a pool that doesn't properly handle hashrate during these seconds.

As a pool operator I'm sure you know better than me that under these circumstances the options were to either throw a perfectly good block away, or to mine it empty because the previous one hadn't managed to propagate to all miners at such a short time period.

Pretty much every pool* out there will point their hash to an empty block while they're waiting for the new one to fully propagate. Not doing that would mean wasting hashpower for a bit more of a handful of seconds every time there's a new block.

If you can explain in technical terms a feasible method pools can utilize to avoid wasting hash without mining empty blocks, please, by all means... Stop arguing with me and go publish some code that will improve bitcoin and act as a quality of life improvement to all of the protocol's users.
OR if you have such good skills to be able to implement something like this yourself... I don't know. Maybe pitch it to investors and make your pool grow with some healthy injections of VC funds. Mining is quite big on institutional investment these days, OCEAN got started with a big investment too.

* Worth noting that FOUNDRY USA doesn't appear to be pushing any empty blocks with their label on them. But it's unlikely that they're throwing all this hash power away being the biggest pool so there's probably something else at play here.

How sure can you be about that though?
Have you measured how much the same work would pay in OCEAN and how much it would pay under other share models?
For all I know even if a pool doesn't accept payments for "accelerating" transactions (which take space away from other transactions without guaranteeing payment to miners), most other share models heavily favor the handful of largest miners in a pool at the detriment of any smaller miner that might not be as "professional" end up earning much less.

In sports betting I play paroli often so I would say I win a little less or sbound half of the times but that is only normal when the odds are hugger than a 2.00x.
When playing luck based games I don't care that much how much I win. I have a pre set amount of money I will be spending each week and don't bother too much with caring about the rest. Like yes, I will try to not go in the red, but if the money is over it's ok. We might win next time.  

This is for Greece where the only allowed lottery is by a sanctioned monopoly that used to also be state owned.
Their new mobile app launched recently and they were giving anyone 10€ to bet, new and old users alike.
The ad said it was to buy lottery tickets. There's lotteries with a ticket price as small as 0.5 EUR. But this could also be used to play KENO, and the ticket price is also a minimum of 0.5€. So with the given amount you could bet on however many tickets you wanted.
If you put that money towards lotteries you'd likely just use it all with no reward. But with keno the chances to win are very good (around 60% to get money back or win higher amounts, on low risk tickets) compared to the lottery where it's like one in a twenty-five million or something.

I've been thinking this might have been a miscalculation on their side, to allow players to also bet on keno. Because most of the time I see casinos handing out no-deposit bonuses it requires extreme luck to get anything back and very few manage to do it.

Already many bitcoin users dislike LN a lot in spite of it having been adopted as a semi-official scaling solution by many core devs.
The bitcoin community calls most of the rest altcoins or too centralized for BTC on there to be equivalent to actual bitcoins.
I see bitcointalk.org accepting anything else other than on-chain BTC ironic personally, doing it on something other than LN would be even more ironic.

Well yeah, thinking about it a promotion's success can be judged in a plethora of ways.
This specific promotion I mentioned probably was more costly than the company had predicted due to how easy it was to actually cash out, potentially even easier than they had predicted.
But at the same time that promotion also must have brought in a lot of potential customers so they could probably count that as a win. If a promotion brings in more revenue than it costed in a matter of months, it's successful for sure. Many online services such as stock brokers and banks are offering cash just to sign up these days. So it's not something unheard of.

There's a lot of investment to bring in customers that might become paying customers years down the line with financial services. If the same is to be applied to gambling then maybe it starts making more sense.
But from my experience gambling services expect a faster return on investment than that with their promotions usually.

Such bets are worth it for me sometimes, but only if I'm familiar with the league or the association teams playing.
Sometimes many markets don't have enough bets on the actually best team, and in such the moneyline doesn't get tipped to the most likely direction it would be.
So if you're early to a market you can catch good odds on a team that actually has good chances to win.

Betting on an underdog imho wouldn't be worth it unless the odds were significantly higher.

So for the example mentioned in the OP, I don't think Pacers are that much of an underdog and the odds actually make sense. If the match was something like Celtics vs Wizards with these odds, it'd make absolutely no sense to bet on Wizards with these odds given the past performance their team has had in the league. It'd be a bargain to bet on the Bucks however.

Have you ever noticed a promotion that was meant to exist for testing a service, but if utilized smartly could lead to real winnings? I have a recent example of this.

Very recently the local lottery monopoly in my country wanted to promote their app and gave 10€ to buy lottery tickets to anyone that would use the app.
The only requirement to cash out according to the promotion would be to buy some tickets, and any potential winnings would be yours to keep.
As you know, lotteries have very low winning odds, so probably they expected no one to win anything out of the promo balances they handed out. But seems like they forgot something...
Their mistake was that aside of just allowing this promo money to be used at lotteries, they also allowed it to be used on keno.

The gambling store version of keno has a high house edge of ~30%, but still with low risk keno tickets those playing smart would have a 60% chance of getting back all the promo money as a withdrawable balance or even winning more. Upon noticing this I told my friends and family to also create accounts and many of them got more out even than the promo balance.
Most of my family have never gambled but free money is too good to skip in any case. So we're now all waiting for the next promo, if there will ever be any. 

Have you had any such experience where you managed to play in a smart way to actually be able to cash out money intended for promotion?