My personal opinion is that the thread you reported is one that should not be deleted. As such, it was appropriate for it to be marked as "bad".

In my experience, there is a bias of moderators to mark reports as either "good" or leave them as "unhandled" when they are "bad" as a means to help users' reporting stats, and to avoid conflict with those who are active in reporting posts. I disagree with this mantra. I want to be informed when a post I report should not have been reported so I can use that feedback in my subsequent reports. If I disagree with how a policy is being implemented, I can open a thread in meta arguing to change policy.

You must be referring to this puzzle. When I previously responded, it was unclear to me that you were not referring to a transaction whose inputs were not being spent by a private key that was generated with 160 bits of entropy. I am not sure your math is correct, but if it is:

If you were to solve one of these puzzles, you can firstly not enable RBF, so nodes should not accept a double-spend transaction by default. This should make it unlikely that a pool will even know about any competing transaction after someone learns of the private key based on the public key. Although someone could have an existing agreement with a miner to allow them to confirm competing/double-spend transactions.

You can avoid the above by contacting a miner directly and asking them to confirm your transaction without having the transaction previously broadcast publicly. There would still be the risk that the miner would calculate the private key and confirm a competing transaction themselves.

Other than the above, you can also obtain sufficient hash power in order to find a block on your own, and you can confirm the transaction without it being publicly broadcasted.

1.2 BTC is currently worth close to $75k. Someone could potentially create a program that listens for a transaction that spends one of a set of outputs, rents a VPS and GPUs on GCS, and executes a script that will find the private key, and create a competing transaction.

In order to spend any bitcoin, you need the private key associated with the address.

It is not trivial to get the private key from the public key, in fact, there is no known way to calculate the private key from the public key. Quantum computing may change this, however, we are still a long way away from a Quantum Computer being able to get the private key from the public key.

I will take 3 - PrimeNumber7

It is trivial for miners to create additional transactions to be included in blocks they find that have tx fees that affect your algorithm in order to increase their revenue. This alone is enough of a reason to not have a max block size limit that "adjusts" based on demand.

Further, anything that costs money does not have a fixed demand. As the price of something declines, the demand for that thing increases, and as the price of the item increases, the demand declines (when the demand curve is elastic, as is the case for the vast majority of things).

I don't think the term "laced" is accurate, but if you replace the term "laced" with "contain trace amounts of" I would agree with the statement, based on this article and other information.

The fact is that hard currency (aka physical dollars) are frequently used for illicit purposes. Unlike bitcoin moving through CM, or any other mixer, it is very difficult to track dollars, especially if they never end up in the banking system. When I receive dollars from someone, although I don't think the dollars are the proceeds of some illegal activity, I really have no way of verifying this. Also, unless a dollar I receive is brand new, or nearly brand new, there is a high probability it was used for some illicit purpose between the time it was printed and when I received it.

I don't think this is an implementation of 2FA, as the end-user only needs a single means of authentication to access their Binance account. Although to be fair, someone will have to be already logged in for them to gain access to their account.

 There is the potential for a MITM-type attack. The means to prevent a MITM attack is for Binance to ask the user to confirm the new device's IP address, geolocation, and device type.

That graph does not factor interest one would expect to have on the $100 it measures. It is very uncommon for someone to keep all their money in a mattress. Bank interest rates are low today, but they have been closer to the inflation rate in the past, and in some cases, exceeded the inflation rate.

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It is no secret that the price of bitcoin has gone up. This has not been caused by purchasing power inflation of fiat currencies. The price has increased because more people have seen the value in using bitcoin, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

At this point, my best chance of winning is that same trader moving his money to bitstamp and moving the price to that same amount right as the deadline approaches and keeps it there until the deadline passes. After that, the price can go back up to $400k+ where it was trading on other exchanges at the time ☢️

I don’t blame Trump for what happened on January 6, what happened, happened very quickly and Trump did tell his supporters to go home. His speech said to be peaceful when marching to the capital.

I certainly don’t blame Trump any more than I blame Biden, Harris and other mainstream Democrats for what happened last summer during the Floyd Riots. The Biden voters were bailed out by Harris and other mainstream Democrats. Trump supporters were condemned and held in solidarity confinement. There were no FBI agents/assets involved in instigating the Floyd riots, while FBI agents/assets were involved in the January 6 riots. 

Well the majority of businesses ultimately fail, and all presidencies come to a peaceful end (who knows how Biden's presidency will end, considering how authoritarian he has shown himself to be).

To my knowledge, Trump has not previously obtained outside investment in any of his previous businesses. I also don't think Trump is going to be running the day-to-day operations of his social media company, he is apparently going to be the "Chairman". My guess is he will be in charge of directing broad strategy and policy.

Trump has an advantage he did not previously have in his previous businesses. He now has a very large, loyal following who are likely to use his platform because of the Trump brand.

Building buildings that remain unoccupied give jobs to the workers who are constructing the buildings. It gives profits to the various suppliers of the builder and employment to the suppliers' workers.

I might compare the Chinese building ghost cities as public works projects in the US in the 20th century. Although, unlike the US public works projects, it is unlikely that any Chinese citizen will ultimately use/occupy the ghost cities.

Also, unlike the US public works projects, private citizens own the end work products of these ghost cities, meaning there is the potential that real estate prices will collapse.

President Trump's SPAC is up ~15x in the span of two trading days (we are at the beginning of the second trading day). The Trump SPAC, trading under ticker DWAC is the vehicle that will take Trump's social media company public.

IMO, this SPAC is a sign of Trump's popularity among Americans.

I have been told this before by a conservative professor, and I used to believe it. I now think this is somewhat flawed reasoning.

Even though the US is ultimately paying for these manufactured goods with not-money, actual money is flowing to Chinese workers, and to the Chinese economy. These same jobs would otherwise be available elsewhere, including potentially in the United States. Some of these lost jobs will ultimately cost the US economy money on an ongoing basis, meaning we will have to continue borrowing from China in order to support some of these people who lost their jobs. This is all fine and dandy today, however, if tomorrow, China decides it no longer wishes to continue lending to the US, the government will no longer be able to support these people who lack the resources to provide for themselves.

The US has become to rely on China for manufactured goods. If China were to decide they no longer wanted to sell us these manufactured goods, the US would have problems and would be unable to acquire these goods. The US economy largely relies on these imports from China. The useful life of products the US imports from China is very short when compared to the useful life of goods the US exports to China. This allows China to potentially influence the US, and will give them an advantage in the event of a War. The fact that China is a major supplier of medicine such as antibiotics to the US makes the situation all that worse.

Some of the trade imbalance involves China buying up US property, such as real estate and shares of US-listed corporations. This allows China to exert influence on American companies, and local economies. Americans who own shares of Chinese companies have virtually no rights/influence over management.

The scenario in the OP is that electricity and internet connectivity are both down, and that some kind of mesh network is being used to communicate transactions and found blocks. With a mesh network, an attacker physically present in the same location as his victim will know which nodes his victim is connected to because he will be connected to the same nodes.

The point I was trying to make in my last post is that in the scenario described in the OP, as someone receiving bitcoin, you really don't have a good handle on the risks involved in accepting transactions. It might not be unreasonable for 90% of miners to be offline for some time in this type of scenario, so maybe there are several days with 100-minute blocks.

IMO the more likely risk is that accepting a transaction via a mesh network with no internet connectivity is that, due to network failures, the transaction never makes it out of the mesh network, or if it does, that the transaction is not paying a sufficiently high fee that internet-connected nodes relay it. There wouldn't necessarily be malicious intent on the part of the person sending you bitcoin, but the end result would be that you would still be unable to spend your coin.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2214098.msg58191049#msg58191049

I reported the above post for malware about 18 hours ago and included a virus total report confirming the malicious activity in the linked file. The report remains unhandled.

The security of n confirmations relies on the assumption that you are not being subjected to a sybil attack. If your transaction has 6 confirmations on the actual chain with the most total work, unless the attacker controls 51% of the network hashrate, the transaction for all intents and purposes is not going to get double-spent. However, if you are connected to a single malicious node that sends you 6 blocks that in sub reflect a transaction having 6 confirmations if these 6 blocks do not reflect the sum total of the most total work, your transaction could already be double-spent.

If your node was previously connected to the internet, and you know you were not being subjected to a sybil attack because your node was connected to a diverse set of nodes, you can be reasonably certain you are not being subjected to a sybil if you immediately start receiving blocks every approximately 10 minutes. However, in an event as described in the OP, it is likely that many of the miners are likely to be without power, so it is likely the average block time will be well above one every 10 minutes, and therefore it will be difficult to know if you are being subjected to a sybil. The cost of serving n blocks to someone while executing a sybil is approximately the expected mining revenue of generating n blocks, so the additional security from asking for 10 confirmations over 6 confirmations is that any sybil attack would be more expensive to execute.

You might argue that Alice is only one person buying a few hundred dollars worth of supplies. However, it would be possible to execute a sybil attack on a large geographic area, and it would be possible that Alice was part of a larger syndicate of organized crime that is taking advantage of the current situation.

Including debts of local governments, some of which is hidden from the public, there are some estimates that the debt to GDP ratio is somewhere in the range of 0.77.

To put China's ability to raise money via credit markets into perspective when compared to the liabilities they would be taking on in bailing out Evergrande, in late 2020, China raised US$6 billion via bond sales, and this was the most it had ever raised at once via dollar-denominated bonds and matched the amount it had raised the prior year. China was recently able to sell $4 billion in dollar-denominated bonds. It could probably sell more in bonds denominated in its local currency.
Centrally planned economies will always do far worse than a free market. This has repeatedly been shown to be the case. With that being said, small amounts of government regulation is not a bad thing, especially when it comes to preventing particular sectors from becoming overheated.

The Chinese economy has not had any "ebbs" in the natural "ebbs and flows" cycle of economies. As such, it is likely the Chinese economy is running vastly hotter than it should be if free-market economics were allowed. For example, state-owned banks were required to loan money to state-owned businesses at terms that would not normally be made by a bank using reasonable underwriting standards. This prevented mediocre businesses from failing or getting bought out by more successful businesses.

I think the goal of building up all those "ghost cities" in China was to ghoose their economic growth, to keep people employed, and to increase wealth of Chinese citizens (to keep them happy).

Ultimately, Chinese real estate prices became too hot, to the extent that the CCP was afraid households would become overburdened with debt when trying to buy real estate, so they tried to cool the market. It appears they have gone too far, as sales have been down by double digits YoY for two months in a row.

I am not taking a public stance on if you are lying or not, however, it appears that your domain was registered the day the other thread was created and the Whois was last updated earlier this month.

I am not an expert in the value of domains, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for someone who is not an expert in valuing domains to accept your domain as collateral. If an expert believes in the value of your domain, they are free to risk their own money.