Welp, that's the magic of it, results can be unpredictable at times!

Here we are with a new matchday now though:



My predictions are on wins for:

PAOK
Olympiacos
Panathinaikos

Because sometimes you have to go with the more secure ones.
Odds aren't the best and I'm still contemplating if I should make this a multi,

But I think it's hard to go wrong when the matchups are so uneven.
Good luck!

How do some ordinals transactions get a 75% discount?
Idk, maybe you can look at the tx I linked, hover over the green text saying "SegWit" on mempool.space and verify it yourself to tell me as also. (77e996de08c48ed282a7b8bc88ca199712a15fa68babb10a0b3ee760674cf21b)

Do non-ordinal transactions regardless of address type get the same discount? Probably not as they don't throw as much data in the blockhain.

The dynamic that is created here is that you get a transaction that is considered to be paying optimal fees, while actually grossly underpaying for the space it takes in a block.

Look at the stats for the provided transaction:

‎Size          19.99 kB
Virtual size ‎5.07 kvB

75% discount means the one making the inscription actually pays for what can count as an acceptable optimal fee transaction on the Virtual size instead of the actual space it takes.

I feel like you're not answering my main question. Maybe I'm dumb, so let me dumb things down (for my own understanding).

On the point of Ordinals making sense to include in blocks:
I presented a transaction where an ordinal gets a 75% discount.

I was then told anyone can utilize these discounts.

But it's only ordinals that utilize the discounts to that extreme by essentially tricking the system.

---

So tell me in the end, with these massive discounts, does it make more sense financially for a miner to actually include an ordinal inscription or to include non-incription transacitons that don't abuse fee discount mechanisms?

Yes, anyone can utilize fee discounts, but who's actually going to ABUSE them?
Someone transaction BTC from address A to address B, or someone uploading entire JPEGs on the blockchain?
That's the thing that matters on this issue.

This makes little sense.
Astroturfing is a thing.
I can PRETEND not to be affiliated with a service, and still promote it.
Especially with mixers, there'd be a high incentive to do it since they're very starved of visibility.

Do we want bitcointalk to be a hub for mixer promotion while they come under increasing regulatory scrutiny?
Probably no.
If your assessment is that bitcointalk should not be associated with mixers and you want to stick with it, the OP proposal makes more sense.
Not saying that it's ideal, but priorities have to be set straight.

Leaving the window open for abuse always means that there will be abuse at some point.

We have to think, why did satoshi exhaust his genius to build a trustless system for cash payments?
1. Money moves the world.
2. With financial incentives, it's easier to balance incentives.

When parties in a network have a financial interest to do their job right, this also acts as a disincentive to make mistakes, so the network is less likely to collapse.

Ok, so incentives are important. What would the incentive in a decentralized social network or forum be then?
Tough questions to answer.  
Many smart minds after satoshi have contributed towards creating decentralized social platforms, but all have so far failed to achieve widespread use AND censorship resistance at the same time.

Let's not kid ourselves. There is plenty of progress alright.

I understand that slow progress might be hard to notice in a fast moving space, but the progress on privacy and decentralization is still constant.
Think about it, going to Turkey for instance (along with many other countries), you'll see a booth to exchange FIAT for crypto in every other corner.
Adoption is making tremendous progress.
Under this setting, it's easy to transact in whatever way you like with crypto and never be noticed if you're careful.

10 years ago this would have been unheard of.
10 years ago also some individual got life in prison for running a free (as in freedom) peer to peer marketplace with bitcoin payments.
This hurt bitcoin's reputation tremendously.
These days, even though the "notorious" side of the economy has grown, it's peanuts compared to the whole crypto scene. That's because of how much the "legitimate" side has grown. And maybe things need to stay that way if we want growth.

It's not like we can't use btc and crypto platforms to transact in any way we want and do whatever we want. But maybe it doesn't currently help our cause to discuss such use cases in bitcointalk.org on the clearnet.
Give it a few years, with progress people will start seeing through the tyranny of the current financial system and governance structures at increasing rates.

Once the majority of the population realizes that buying prescription medicine from abroad to be able to afford to live (as many people use crypto for) is not a crime as it's characterized to be, compared governments freely getting to finance murderous wars abroad, maybe then we will not even need mixers.

Till then, we can work within the system's tolerances, grow, and if we don't trip and fall on the way, think about how we'll do big moves once time has matured.
Alas, changing entire systems isn't something that happens magically and we'll need more than just bitcoin. But bitcoin is surely a good tool. We need to use it wisely.
I think we can be confident that a revolution will happen within our lifetimes.

We could though, and in fact I don't see why not.
The merit system was put in place to prevent spamers from reaching high ranks with ease as it was possible before.
Inaction against merit abuse just makes it easier for them to get around any meaningful restriction that it imposed.

The U.S. isn't Draconian, it's actually very permissive.
We all know that in Europe people have gotten sued over online posts and even lost their cases and had to pay damages, even for saying the truth.
Apparently hurt feelings in many jurisdictions are fair game to go after someone.
Bitcointalk enjoys freedom in that it's a forum where you can say anything about anyone, and just lay it out to the court of public opinion without fear of it being taken down.
There exist VERY few public forums that allow completely free and uninterrupted discussion of people and ideas.

And besides, it's not just the website location that matters. The whole value that bitcointalk can provide is based on the fact that there's active staff maintaining it.
And it's their jurisdiction that matters most. Like, we can't expect anyone to migrate to Russia for simply running a forum. That's not realistic. And it's also unlikely that this would allow more freedom of speech.

So if governments today consider that mixers are helping facilitate illegal and harmful transactions, why should our moderators be caught in the crossfire?
We did notice from a past mixer thread that was shut down for instance, that user assets were frozen on Binance for simply having been paid through a signature campaign... And this is just a small example. There's no need for forum members to come under such serious regulatory scrutiny with sanctions. Because it was obvious that large part of this forum's userbase was actually receiving payments from mixers. And even if users are willing to take that risk, I'm pretty sure nobody in the west can risk hosting a forum where large parts of its userbase are under sanctions.

In the long term I'm pretty sure keeping the forum alive, its administrators and staff out of jail is more important than going to ridiculous lengths over any ideal. We don't have the strength in numbers or means to fight governments as of right now. Buuuut... One must also consider that governments are actually one step behind, not ahead. What we do have, is the technological advantage.

Mixers could only be shut down because they're fully centralized and trust based. But there already exist trustless and decentralized ways to mix coins. The use of which will likely increase a lot, and with use, also comes increased interest to fund and improve these technologies.

How sure are you that Ordinal transactions make sense to include in blocks economically?
Did you know that Ordinal transactions can get a ~75% fee discount from exploiting Taproot OP codes and SegWit?

Example: https://mempool.space/tx/77e996de08c48ed282a7b8bc88ca199712a15fa68babb10a0b3ee760674cf21b

So maybe it could be in a miners best interest to actually not mine any of them as they take too much space in blocks and get big discounts.

Sadly or not, Theymos is non an anonymous entity.
He's known running this forum with a real identity attached to his name. He can't run this website like a rogue, completely disregarding government instructions and laws.

Luckily the U.S. jurisdiction that he is in is pretty permissive about freedom of speech laws, but financial transactions are heavily sanctioned by the current governance system that the U.S. has.
This is a step to protect the forum as a whole. Mixers were advertised on here for long enough but the negative attention becomes too much of a risk at a certain point.

Well I didn't wannt mention this initially just for the remote possibility that OP didn't know there was an open call to sign a message and get these coins... But now that the cat is out of the bag I just want to say...

OP saying he wants compensation from an open source wallet developer is just nuts... His signature was valid yet he doesn't seem able to understand bitcoin well after supposedly having hacked into a seed phrase.

Hanlon's razor is a thing. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

We can't exclude the possibility OP is just a dumb idiot. He could have went for the claim directly.
Now he'll probably get nothing and it will also mean that the poor guy who had his funds stolen also gets nothing as he can't get his address verified in a trustless manner given the proven compromise (at least by cryptographic means).

If there's a third party reviewing all transactions and filtering them in coordination with the coinjoin provider, does that still allow transactions to be private? Asking for a friend.

Oh and how about if this party's filtering is in compliance with state authorities demands? Does that mean CoinJoin is actually NOT a replacement to mixers? Also asking for a friend.

Right?
So many mainly clearnet services have .onion website alternatives to combat censorship.
Facebook is among them.

Online library websites also, Zlibrary. Just off the top of my head.
Also file sharing websites like TBP do this to overcome government DNS blocks. There's so many legitimate anti-censorship uses to the TOR service, it'd be a shame to completely have this blocked in bitcointalk.

As I understand it, there are quite a few bitcoin users that don't particularly like Ordinals and the effects they're having on bitcoin's blockchain, especially fees. So Luke isn't alone in that.
Surely plenty of miners would probably be on board in creating block templates that would not include Ordinal transactions.

But the thing with mining is that it has nothing to do with individual (person) support. It's all in the hashpower.
OCEAN has promised create infrastructure which would allow their miners to create their own block templates. And so far AFAIK there wasn't a pool that actually gave miners the opportunity to say no to mining ordinals. Once that update is released on the pool I guess there wouldn't be any reason for there to be any blowback. It would be purely the choice of miners to exclude ordinals from the transactions they confirm with their own hash.

OCEAN's block included 1571 inscriptions (Ordinal NFT images and BRC-20 tokens alike):
https://ordinals.com/block/000000000000000000009ef7ac2c30976bc7e05c2cdab10e5a5de7efd96492a7

So... These rumors about censorship weren't true at all!?
One has to wonder why these rumors weren't addressed in a more direct manner but hey... Good do know it was just FUD. The pool is only active for a few days.
Sooner than later it should allow for public access to its block template API and people will be able to bring it under all the scrutiny they want with even more transparency.

No way to know this as a user.
If you are to receive fund from a mixer or interact with it in any way, it's better to do so in an address where you control the private key to, otherwise they might be seized from services contacted by the authorities.
Already users in the sinbad thread reported that they had this happen to them.

It's risky business.
Ironically, you need to mix funds from mixers again before you can actually use them...
Maybe BTC mixers will have to start paying in Monero.

Also, what's interesting here is that the wallet in OP has a transaction paying a fee valued over 3m USD:
https://mempool.space/tx/b5a2af5845a8d3796308ff9840e567b14cf6bb158ff26c999e6f9a1f5448f9aa

Which likely links it to this story:
https://cryptonews.com/news/bitcoin-user-claims-hack-triggered-record-3m-bitcoin-fee-139-btc-lost.htm

I don't want to speculate on what's going on but...

Signature verified on
https://www.verifybitcoinmessage.com


Did you input the whole thing?


Might depend on if you're using an older Electrum version. Someone should try Bitcoin Core.

Just as I along with many others suspected.
Mr. Luke has repeatedly called Ordinals an attack on bitcoin and had developed his bitcoin client to run without broadcasting them as a node.
I think it's good that such choice exists though, because so far all other pools were mining ordinals without consulting their miners at all.

Interestingly though, OCEAN has mentioned that miners will be able to propose their own block templates, being one of the first to do so.
So miners on OCEAN could easily propose their own block templates including ordinals no problem if they wanted.

It seems to be mostly Antpool that mines these empty blocks.
Given that they have a similar hashrate to Foundry, shouldn't this be happening at a similar frequency between the two?

This makes me suspect that Antpool is doing this on purpose. I get that this blocks that came out empty were mined at a very close time proximity to the previous block by the same pool...
But couldn't they have mined in such a way that they would be able to confirm at least some transactions?
Well if it's only antpool mining such blocks these days maybe other pools found a way to prevent empty blocks!