I think it is more the Biden administration and mainstream democrats that hate Musk.

Musk is very pro-freedom, and authoritarians do not like that. His buying Twitter, and promising to make it more transparent and more free-speech-focused isn't helping his cause.

Space X is not a charity, it is a for-profit business. With all the billions of dollars worth of military equipment going to Ukraine, paid for the US taxpayer, it is not unreasonable to expect the US government to help pay the bill for Starlink. They are paying for everything else.

Data from the internet must interact with the Jade device. I have previously argued that some HW wallets are superior in security compared to "traditional" 'air gapped' setups.

Every security measure uses various tradeoffs. The Jade, for example, reduces the risk of loss (via theft) if someone gains physical access to the device, in exchange for incremental additional vulnerability via having to connect (via an app) to the internet. Realistically, I think the risk of having a HW device stolen is greater than someone being able to inject malware into it, so it is probably a good tradeoff. However, I don't see how one could argue that Jade is in fact "air-gapped"

Logging into the forum and accessing the first page to send merit should take 1 second each. The reason for this is that it is good practice to limit the rate you access pages via automation to one per second, which is a rate that Theymos has previously requested that members limit their scripts to.

Querying his db will take some non-zero amount of time.

Most likely, the discrepancy has to do with the time ddmrddmr spends running his script that does not involve the actual sending of merit. For example, querying his DB to find the posts he wants to merit, logging into the forum, and accessing the first page to merit the first post in his spree.

She was in office for only about 6 weeks, and her policy proposals had not yet been voted on, let alone implemented.

IMO, it is more likely that markets were responding to the potential for a winter energy crisis that was caused by her predecessors, and Job Biden.

This.

The sale of block space at a premium to 'retail' customers when fees are high makes sense because many lack the technical skills to double-spend a transaction to increase the fee. The high fee is really more for technical help than for including the tx in a block.

Pools could sell block space well into the future to companies who expect to need a lot of block space in the future. This will allow both the pool and the consumer of block space to have a more predictable revenue and expenses. Today, transaction fees to get transactions confirmed, even on a next-block basis is very close to zero, but this will not always be the case.

I think pools will eventually start selling their block space (off chain) to large consumers of blocks space (for example to exchanges) via long term deals. Today, pools sell their block space (off chain) to retail consumers, often at a huge markup, however the required tx fee is currently so low, that most likely, few need to do this.

A pruned node validates all transactions. All nodes (pruned, and non-pruned) will download the entire blockchain, and will keep track of the UTXO set. Pruned nodes will delete block data older than x blocks (more specifically, it will limit the total block data to x GB), while non-pruned nodes will retail all blocks. The main difference between the two types of full nodes is that one has access to all transaction data, and can serve new nodes all previous blocks, and the other cannot do either.

I don't see how nodes would be able to validate if a block is valid or not under your proposal.

In order for a block to be valid, all consensus rules must be followed. I don't see how nodes would be able to validate that each transaction contains no inputs that have been previously spent, and that all inputs are valid.

Further, not all transactions that are included in blocks will be in all nodes' mempools for a variety of reasons. Some transactions have not even been broadcast publicly before a block is found. It is important to remember that each node has its own mempool, and the transactions that are stored in the mempool from node to node will vary.

Nodes can already disregard blocks that are more than x blocks deep. All that these nodes need to store is the UTXO set and the last x blocks.

the TXID itself does not allow for nodes to validate that the transaction is valid. I am also unaware of any way that a node would be able to update the UTXO set based on the various TXIDs of transactions included in a found block.

Most clients will only allow users to set a fee rate when crafting a transaction, however, it is possible to craft a transaction with a 'flat' fee, for example, x sats. Or in the case of what j2002ba2 found, 1 sat.

Regardless of what nodes will relay, as long as the transaction is valid, if a pool is willing to include said transaction in its found block, it has the potential to be confirmed, if the pool is aware of the transaction. Most of the time, this will involve either the pool receiving compensation for including said transaction(s) off-chain, or the pool including its own transaction(s) in its found blocks.

If sanctions are being placed on an entity that does not exist, it is a statutory defect.

There are many cases in which the outcome is clear to most involved in the case because the evidence is clear. The evidence against Ulbright was strong, and there is additionally evidence that Ulbright knew what he was doing was going to result in a long prison sentence if he was caught. I think the law is less clear in the case of Tornado Cash.

In general, a server seed is going to be unique for each player, because once it is revealed to one player, any other player can potentially learn the seed, and bet accordingly.

As I mentioned previously, if the server seed is constant, and a nonce is used, it is much easier for players to verify bets, than if the server seed changes after each bet. However, changing the server seed after each bet does not remove the provable fairness. If the server seed changes, the change will need to be displayed to the player in advance.

In this case, it appears that the representative is not understanding your concern, or they are intentionally answering a question you are not asking, if your screenshots are genuine.

This is not true. In order for you to get a perma ban, a mod/admin would need to "press the ban button" on your profile. If ban appeals were eliminated, you would lose the ability to contest a ban if you were banned in error for example.

We already have something as you describe. I have occasionally seen the mods allow someone to create a new account after being banned so they can continue participating in the community. It is pretty rare for the admins/mods to explicitly allow this, however, there are also many instances in which this is implicitly allowed as many who have been banned come back as new users, and most of these people do not get banned for ban evasion.

I don't think ban appeals should be eliminated. A ban appeal is an opportunity for the person banned to present evidence/an argument that the mods may not have considered when deciding to ban someone. When done publicly, it also allows the community to weigh in regarding the person's benefit (or possibly lack thereof) to the community, which should also be considered.

In order for a casino to be provably fair, it needs to commit to the server seed before the bet is placed, and allow for the player to provide some additional input to be combined with the server seed (often referred to as the "client seed"). Once both the casino and player commit to their own respective seeds, some operation needs to be performed on both seeds in order to calculate the outcome of the bet.

Due to the fact that the same calculation done to both seeds would produce the same outcome if repeated, after each bet, the casino will need to change either the server seed, or add a nonce that is also part of the calculation that will change after each bet.

I personally think using the same server seed, and a nonce makes verifying bets easier for the player (which, in turn, will add trust to the casino), however changing the server seed after each bet will not invalidate the provable fairness, provided the hash of the server seed is known to the player before they make each bet.

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In this particular case, assuming the screenshots are genuine, it appears there are two different server seeds for the same bet. If the casino cannot provide the actual server seed that hashes to fc86...15a to allow the player to verify the outcome of the bet, the casino is not provably fair.

Code being open source does not mean that no one owns said code.

Many open-source projects attach one (or more) of various licenses that allow others to freely replicate and/or modify their published code freely.

Open-source or not, someone had to publish the Tornado Cash code onto the electrum blockchain so its smart contract can execute. This person would, IMO, would be the one who "owns" this particular instance of the code.

This is one of the claims in the lawsuit cited in the previous article you posted.

I think the free-speech claim has more merit for the developer of Tornado Cash than for its customers/users. I don't think the users of Tornado Cash are actually effectively saying anything by using its service.

I haven’t had any posts deleted in a long time. But unless something has changed recently, the member will only receive a generic message saying that their post was removed by a moderator. It won’t give a reason. The single generic message says that they should not make posts that break the rules, but that is really not helpful

When a moderator takes action that results in a report being marked as "good", they could also classify the rule violation as one of several of the most common reasons that real users have action taken against them (along with an other category). This would benefit the administration in two ways:
1 - it would make it much easier to determine the validity of a ban request for a particular user
2 - it might uncover communications issues that certain (groups of) people don't understand certain rules
2a - the impact of the rule violations can be more easily studied to understand the impact of said rules, which may lead to the tweaking of rules to further improve the user experience of the forum.

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To answer the OP's question, the mods are not in the business of banning users. To ban a forum member means to remove them from the community, and that is not what the forum administration wants to do on a regular basis. The mods are in the business of keeping the forum a place where various topics can be easily discussed, in part by enforcing the various rules of the forum. A forum member is banned only as a last resort, and a ban is typically seen as a negative outcome. Obviously, in some cases, there are situations in which banning a forum member is necessary.

I hope that "Coin Center" wins. I don't think there is statutory authority to have Tornado Cash on the OFAC list. The government might argue that the coin on Tornado Cash is the property of the developer, who I believe is a foreign national, and this would get around the argument that the government cannot sanction a smart contract. I don't see any other argument supporting the sanctions.

Both the sanctions and the lawsuit are making what I believe to be novel claims, especially around the statutory authority. It is difficult to predict how lower courts will rule, however, I think this is a case the Supreme Court will ultimately decide.

lol.

Maybe so, but much, if not most of the time, a meme isn’t going to contribute meaningfully to a discussion, especially when it is all that’s in a post.

I also don’t think it is realistic to have a discussion using memes. People could create memes for each post, but that would be bad for people who don’t speak English — it would be very difficult to translate the text on each picture.