If someone bought $100 worth of bitcoin in October 2011 (approximately 10 years ago), it would be worth approximately $1 million today, a return of roughly 10,000x over 10 years. If you bought $100 worth of bitcoin in January 2011, it would be worth approximately $14 million today (~140,000x). I don't think any reasonable investor would imaging getting those types of returns.

There are plenty of (risky) investments that have doubled investors' money every year, and that have 15x'ed investors' money over 2 years, although both are very risky. There are plenty of investors who try to find these types of investments. Depending on the maturity of the business, pre-IPO companies can have a 95% failure rate, so if you are investing in companies that are not yet public, the companies that ultimately do succeed will need to generate a 20x return just for you to potentially break even.

For comparison, in 2004, Peter Tiel invested approximately $500k into Facebook at a $5.9 million valuation for a 10.2% stake in the company. In 2013, when Facebook went public, the value of Tiel's stake was approximately 3,220x of his initial $500k investment (his stake was diluted due to Facebook selling additional shares subsequent to his initial investment).

I am not aware of any other investment that has returned 10,000x return over a period of 10 years or less. If no investment has generated that level of returns, there is no reason why any reasonable investor would dream of getting those kinds of returns.

Unless describing "shitposters" as being "all" of some group of people based on a trait they cannot change such as nationality, gender, or skin color, I don't think that statement would violate my proposed rule. If someone is a "shitposter" today, they can decide to put more effort into their posts tomorrow and no longer be a "shitposter".

As was pointed out above by JayDDee, calling a black person a "monkey" is probably going to elicit a negative response.

When you dehumanize a group of people, you are saying that group of people are so bad that they are less than human. This will typically involve there being a stereotype that this group of people is somehow dangerous to either everyone or another group of people, hence the potential for there to be violence. There might be an argument to say that "dehumanizing" speech needs to be particularly extreme in order to be removed.

Except if someone is spreading malware, you are not going to be banned because you break a rule a single time. It is unlikely for an established forum member to be banned for breaking a rule a dozen times over a decent period of time.

Someone using sarcasm should be treated differently than someone expressing extremists views that may lead to actual violence. The former is generally harmless, while the latter can have serious negative consequences.

I didn't watch the 60 minutes interview, but I did read the WSJ "Facebook Files" and the article in which Haugen outed herself as the source for the Facebook Files.

One thing that stuck out to me about Haugen is that she claimed a friend of hers because a "white nationalist" after being exposed to "online misinformation", and she ended their relationship. Many on the left will claim someone is a "white supremacist" or a "racist" or a "white nationalist" if they have moderate left of center, mainstream views that differ from their own, even if they believe in things such as equality and treating everyone the same. This friend of hers helped Haugen function while she was recovering from a temporary disability by doing things such as buying groceries, taking her to the doctor's office, and helping her walk.

I think that Haugen is an activist and is trying to profit from her stealing information that is damaging to Facebook's reputation.

There are no whistleblower protections for employees who leak information to the press.

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I found the first article in the Facebook Files to be the most interesting, the one about the "Whitelist" that is not actually a whitelist, known as XCheck or cross check.

It appears there were about 5.8 million Facebook users (accounts?) that were on XCheck as of the middle of last year. The users who are on this special list are subject to the same moderation rules that everyone else is subject to, however, their posts/content will typically not be subject to automated detection to determine if a rule has been broken. Most users will have their posts/content run through a number of classification models depending on a number of factors to determine if a post breaks one of Facebook's rules. Users who are part of XCheck will have their posts reviewed "manually" by a specialized team upon a number of triggers.

The problem with the above classification models is that these types of models are not sufficiently accurate. There are likely well over a billion posts made on Facebook per day, and if a model is 99% accurate, 10 million posts will be erroneously removed every day. I don't know that Facebook has been able to get their automation to be correct 99% of the time.

Binary classification models that are trained on imbalanced data (that is data that is overwhelmingly classified one way more than the other) are typically evaluated by a metric called the Area Under the Curve, which is somewhat similar to "accuracy" if the data was balanced. A classification model that predicts if a patient has a disease or cancer with an AUC score above 0.90 (this is comparable to 90% accuracy if the data was balanced) is typically considered "excellent".

For high-profile users, it is simply too risky to rely on a series of models to make moderation decisions. A model getting a decision wrong has the potential to cause negative PR problems when done to high-profile users. If one mistake was done in moderating posts from 1% of XCheck every day, Facebook would be mistakenly taking down tens of thousands of posts from these high-profile users every week. That is obviously not something that is acceptable to any rational company.

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There are other issues in the Facebook Files that are worth discussing, such as mental health for young children who use the various Facebook applications.

The issue is apparently related to problems with Facebook's DNS records. When a user goes to a Facebook-owned domain for one of their services, the user will be directed to an incorrect server associated with an IP address that is different than that of the correct server. This is affecting all facebook services, including its internal services.

You should always have at least 3 copies of your entire seed, including any information needed to access your coin, such as your 25th word and/or decryption key. It is acceptable to store portions of the above separately if that is what your risk assumptions require.

If your seed is securing more than nominal amounts of coin, storing your seed in the cloud is not a good idea. Most cloud storage providers are able to reliably prevent attackers from being able to access their customers' accounts in mass, but there is still the risk of targeted attacks. If an attacker can gain access to your seed, they can check more or less every "word" for the 25th word in a seed nearly instantly. If you are using cloud storage to store your seed, it is probably a safe assumption that you are using a medium of storage that is easily accessible to an adversary to store the 25th word of your seed.

If you don't store the 25th word of your seed, you are risking that you will lose access to your coin. There are many things that will potentially cause the human brain to forget a passphrase. The chances you forget your passphrase go up as it increases in complexity, and the less complex your passphrase is, the easier it will be for an adversary to access your coin if they can access the first 24 words of your seed.

This is exactly the point I made above. These people are largely not actually bothering anyone (except those who want to create rules solely for the sake of having rules).

There are alternatives to having a bounty section, however none of them amount to requiring that you must be an experienced member in order to participate in bounty campaigns.

In order to be 95% sure you are within 5% of the actual number, you need a sample size of 324. so the current increase in hashrate as of block 1210 into the difficulty period could be as much as ~6%, and the hashrate from during blocks 1211 to 1671 of the current difficulty period could be as little as 110% of the hashrate at the end of the previous difficulty period.

There was definitely additional equipment brought online.

Dominion power? You think an electric company controls the elections?

The overwhelming majority of bounty hunters never post outside of the bounty section. Bounty hunters generate many thousands of page views that are the ultimate driver of ad revenue. Unless you are a bounty hunter with some merit, these bounty hunters do not affect any forum member. Requiring bounty hunters to have a higher rank and merit to post in a sub that no one else looks at is only going to create a market for higher ranked accounts and for merit, both of which in my eyes are a negative. It does look weird to see these bounty hunters, but they are not affecting anyone and trying to regulate them will only cause damage to the broader forum.

The reference was at the beginning of the video. As is the case with most threads that are discussing a specific video or article, it is best to view the article and/or video prior to commenting on the thread, this is regardless of if any references are in the text of the thread.

There is a lot of junk in Off Topic. If that sub was even moderately moderated requiring threads with actual discussion, it would probably cut down on a lot of spam forum-wide, as people have used that sub to rank up extensively (although I am not sure they do this anymore with the advent of the merit system).

I think the Off Topic section might be why many old-time forum users leave the forum, even if they had rarely posted in Off Topic during their tenure. For example, someone may have come to the forum because of their business, but no longer conduct business, or they came to the forum to discuss their mining equipment, but have no intention to mine anymore, they might stay to discuss interesting topics in Off Topic that are not necessarily directly related to bitcoin, but are interesting to many people who were at one point involved in bitcoin in some way.

There are multiple classifications of speech when deciding if it should be removed:

*Speech you disagree with: If this is your only issue with speech, it should absolutely not be removed. IMO, it is not even necessary to discuss potentially removing this type of speech, but this classification is needed to help establish a spectrum.

*Hate speech: Assuming said speech does not fit into any of the below categories (that involve speech that should be disallowed), it should be pretty clear cut that these types of threads/posts should not be removed. Again, it is needed to mention this classification to help establish a spectrum.

*The use of slurs or epithets: This is speech that should be protected, even though I do not like it when people engage in this type of speech. This is a very good example of when more speech is a good solution. Again, I need to mention this classification to help establish a spectrum.

*Dehumanizing speech: Depending on the circumstances, this is where I might consider advocating for removing a thread/post, depending on the circumstances. Examples of this would include describing a group of people, based on some characteristic they cannot change, (such as their gender, skin color, nationality, or disability), or things like religion, and sexual orientation to an animal in a negative way, or describing them as otherwise less than human. One reason why it should be considered to remove some of this type of speech is that this type of speech will often lead to violence. If someone is describing the viewpoint of a third party unrelated to yourself, I think said speech should remain, as long as someone is not using this as a "loophole" to dehumanize others. If dehumanizing speech is part of a larger speech that is otherwise allowed to remain, I might frown upon the thread, but the entire thread should be allowed to remain.

*Speech advocating for, or calling for violence against a person or group of people, who are not active in a country's military, when said violence does not involve a state/government: In most cases, I think this should not be allowed. This is specifically excluding cases in which someone is discussing an unrelated 3rd party's viewpoint so long as they are not using this exception as a loophole. Another exception to this might be innocent people who are being used as human shields (in these types of cases, it is really the group that is using the human shields who are advocating for the violence against the innocent civilians, even if the violence is done by their adversary). Another exception to this would be speech describing what can reasonably be described as self-defense, for example, violence against someone who is actively swinging a baseball bat at you. Calling for actual violence against innocent people is not protected speech (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942, and others). This is probably not something that can be defined in a one-line rule.


*Speech that is objectively uninteresting: It is difficult to establish a standard as to what is "objectively uninteresting", however threads that meet this (yet to be established) standard, should be removed limited (threads that are very uninteresting, or low value should be removed). I don't think it is appropriate for someone to be making dozens of threads in the span of a short period of time when the overwhelming majority of them receive no or very few replies. This is based on the principle that you should have the right to say things that I do not like, but at the same time, I do not have to listen to what you have to say. If you have a half-dozen threads on the first page with a total of zero replies, you are not only preventing other, more interesting threads from easily being viewed, but you are also giving the impression that a particular sub does not have many interesting threads, which may prevent someone from returning to that sub later.

*Threads that do not meet the description of the particular sub they are in: At a minimum, these threads should be moved out of their current sub. Depending on the moderation standards as to what is allowed to be in the Off Topic sub, these threads can be moved to either Off Topic or the trashcan. This is not a novel concept, and this is really just saying that existing forum rules should continue to be enforced. Earlier today, I reported a dozen or so  threads, mostly started by B1tUnl0ck3r, currently in P&S for not being related to "politics", nor "current events" as is required per the current forum rules. So far, one (not one of B1tUnl0ck3r's) has been marked "bad" and the rest are unhandled.

*Other speech: this can be discussed, and rules can be formulated accordingly. SCOTUS 1st amendment rulings can be used as guiding principles.

The OP did not specifically say, but I got the impression that whatever the dev is creating needs to have RPC access.

If the above is true, even if the OP is running a full node on a different server than the production server, the prod server will still need to interact with the RPC.

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It is probably best to not allow the dev to work on a production server, or to interact with a production bitcoin node. The OP should give his dev access to a development server in which he can test his code to make sure everything works as intended. Someone working "honestly" could easily accidentally write code that results in something happening in a way that is not what was intended (this is quite common). Using a development server prevents this from affecting the OP's production full node, nor his production server. Once the code is complete, the OP can audit the code and push the code to the production server.

Anyone with access to a RPC server will need the passphrase in order to dump the private key or sign any transactions, so there is some level of protection from the stealing of coin.

Even if the dev does not have access to production servers, it is still possible that whatever he is developing will result in stolen funds from the OP. For example, a dev could make the backend act as if a deposit was received to the OP's wallet if a transaction to bc1DEVaddress....12 is received. This is why it is important to audit any code a dev creates for you.

The link you provided says he sold his AMC on Jan 26, and the high price of AMC was 5.19. On the following day, the high price was 20.36, and the low was ~11. The price never fell back to the highest possible price he sold his shares for.

When a brokerage customer sells a share of a stock, the brokerage will not receive the proceeds for 3 business days, but if the customer has a margin account, they can buy a new stock immediately. If a customer buys a stock, the broker must send cash to a clearinghouse that day. If a customer makes 10 day trades in a day that each spend their entire account balance, the broker must come up with 10x the customer’s cash balance.

With the mania that was occurring throughout the stock market at the time, Robinhood was having to put up billions of dollars to the clearinghouse that far exceeded the value of securities that their customers had upon settlement.

There is no reason why stocks should take three days to settle. Robinhood was the victim of rules that are meant to protect big Wall Street banks from facing real competition.

Also, nearly every retail brokerage uses payment for order flow, but they just didn’t pass the savings from doing so onto their customers, they kept the money for themselves. Robinhood is engaging in the exact same practice as everyone else, but isn’t charging any commission to their customers. Further, PFOF results in the customer getting at least as good of a price as is available on a public exchange, but will sometimes receive a better price.

Robinhood literally makes trading available to the little guy. I would consider a RH wallet the same as Coinbase or any other major retail exchange.

If we could get the extreme P&S opinions to be that covid isn't real, that would be a huge step in the right direction compared to what is said in P&S today. At least with the claim that covid isn't real, normal people can talk about their own experiences, and refute this argument.

This is compared to the suggestion that Mike Pompeo's children should be murdered, and force-fed to Pompeo. No sane person thinks that is a good idea, regardless of his alleged crimes. I also don't think that many sane people would be interested in even discussing such an idea. I might compare someone making this suggestion to someone with a mental illness screaming on the streets of San Francisco. People not only don't want to engage with him, but also don't want to be in that same area.
I think a lot of the extreme threads in P&S are not related to "Politics" or a "recent event in society" even if they mention a political figure.

I don't think these threads should be moved to Off Topic, as this sub is reserved for "other threads that might be of interest to bitcoiners" and the response some of these threads are getting (or more specifically, the lack thereof), shows that many of these threads are not of interest to bitcoiners.

If you watched the video, you would see the video did reference a specific ruling, although I don't think any reasonable person would make the same conclusion that the person in the video made.

I don't have a problem with people posting what I believe to be "false information", as it is entirely possible what they write may turn out to be true, or if not, as you mentioned, people can post rebuttals to said false information. I am more concerned about people posting extremists views. It is not only that the views are extreme, it is that a lot of threads are suggesting things that are near-universally seen as unacceptable by society, such as harming people known to be innocent. As I have mentioned previously, another issue is that some people are posting things that are simply not interesting to ~all other forum members based on the number of responses they are getting, however, these people are creating many threads and these threads are often clogging up the first page of P&S.

I think his argument is that BADecker is making the argument against taking the covid vaccine and that fewer vaccinations will result in more covid deaths.

I think people should be able to make the choice as to if they want to take the vaccine or not. As is said in the OP, the thread in question is clearly false, and I seriously doubt that anyone is going to have their mind changed on the vaccine based on that thread. Further, the best way to fight "bad" speech is with more speech.

I have argued before there should limits as to the number of threads that receive no replies people can make in P&S.

The above would not apply to the thread referenced in the OP because it was sufficiently outrageous that multiple people responded.

I think there might also be an argument to have a more narrow definition as to what is "politics & society" that would be allowed in the "main" P&S sub, and maybe there could be another sub within P&S in which people can start threads about more outrageous topics. I think some of the more crazy topics in P&S are discouraging people from posting in not-crazy topics, and this is a similar problem we had when there was a lot of spam in P&S, before FH became moderator.

The OP of that thread linked to a website that linked to a video. The video in question referenced the below SCOTUS ruling that was made in 2013: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf

The video in question made similarly outrageous claims as the thread title. The ruling in question was for a patient dispute, and I don't think any reasonable person would conclude that the SC ruled that "vaccinated subjects are not classified as humans".

Are you making the argument that since the vaccine is put into your body, that your body "becomes" the vaccine? That is ridiculous. Nearly every medicine is either subject to a patient or has had their patient expire due to time, and you put medicine into your body that will cause your body to respond to the medicine.

I would typically define an "air-gapped" "computer" to be something that is never connected to the internet, nor is ever connected to any device that does not meet the definition of being "air-gapped".

If HW wallets are going to allow for firmware updates via a USB connection, and the manufacturer does not give clear instructions on how to do this via an air-gapped computer, calling the HW wallet "air-gapped" is probably more of a marketing gimmick than a security feature.
I posted up-thread that a trezor for example would be superior than an air-gapped wallet. If you are going to use an air-gapped HW wallet, one that requires the user to compile the firmware is probably best. Obviously, in order for this to provide meaningful protection, the user would need to be able to understand the code they are compiling.

If you use the term "its your own fault", there is probably not a good procedure that your "average" user can complete without experiencing security risks.

Also, if your computer is infected with malware, you cannot trust any output it provides. Granted, the manufacturer could suggest a procedure that is something along the lines of using a computer that boots from read-only memory, upload the public key whose private key signed the new firmware to the computer, upload the signature and source code to the computer to confirm the signature was signed by the right key, then install accordingly. However this procedure requires equipment whose cost would far exceed the cost of the HW wallet.

Here is the link referenced in the video --> https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf

He spells out the link instead of giving something you can click on.

The case this person is referencing is from 2013, ASSOCIATION FOR MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY, ET AL., PETITIONERS v. MYRIAD GENETICS, INC., ET AL., and involves the question if mRNA sequences can be patented. The ruling makes clear that DNA sequences cannot be subject to a patient because they occur naturally in nature.

I am not sure how the person in the video comes to the conclusions that he does. The references to humans in the majority opinion are regarding human genes and genomes. Further, the case in question is a patient case, and other than the right to patient an invention, it does not involve any kind of rights that people have.

Can you really say a Hardware wallet is truly "air-gapped" if you are pushing firmware updates to it? Doing so in a way that your "average" user can complete the process without undue expenses.

I think to keep the HW wallet having it's "air-gapped" status after updating firmware, someone would need to compile the source code of the software that updates the firmware, and the firmware itself manually, and verify signatures signing the above code, signed by an entity you can trust, all on an air-gapped computer. I don't think this is something someone could do without a fairly decent amount of technical knowledge, and there would be costs involved that probably exceed the cost of the HW wallet.

I think if you were to update firmware via connecting the HW wallet to an internet-connected device, I don't think most people would consider the HW wallet to be "air-gapped" anymore. There are plenty of ways to do this safely while putting the risk of malware being introduced at near zero, as current HW wallet manufacturers do today, but I also think this procedure means these HW wallets are not "air-gapped".

Which casinos accept zero confirmation deposits today? I remember reading about a Russian scammer from several years ago that did a number of things to trick casinos into accepting his unconfirmed transaction, would make a single high probability bet, would see that his deposit transaction confirms if the bet wins, and double spends the deposit transaction if his bet loses. IIRC, at one point he used non-standard transactions that miners would not confirm by default but was able to get miners to confirm by his request, and at another point would use a chain of unconfirmed transactions, whose total fee was too low for miners to confirm under normal circumstances, but was able to get one to confirm his transactions upon his request.

Say, for example, a gambler deposits coin to a casino, places a bet that has a 95% chance of winning. If he wins, he receives 104.21% of his bet, allows his transaction to confirm, and withdraws his entire balance. He repeats this process an additional 18 times while placing the same bet amount each time. He has received a total of 79.99% of his bet amount from the casino, plus his original bet amount. On the 20th time the gambler does this procedure, the casino informs the gambler that he lost his bet, so the gambler double spends his deposit transaction. The casino has paid out ~80% of what the gambler bet on a bet that wins 95% of the time. The casino should have won the 20th bet but did not actually receive the coin from that bet. If the casino were to sum the 20 bets the player made, it expected to receive 20% of the player's bet amount, but instead paid out a total of 80% of the player's bet amount, while the player won the expected number of bets.

To put the above in more technical terms, when a casino sets the HE at, say 1%, it will set the odds and payout so that the EV of each bet a player makes is 1% of the bet amount. In order for each bet to have this EV value, each bet placed must involve value being transferred to the winning party according to the odds and payout multiplier.

I agree, I think it is far superior to use a seed in all cases, but especially if you are going to write down your backup.

If you are using a BIP 39 seed, I understand you only need the first 3 letters of a seed word to know the entire seed word (when dealing with the English word list). If you are not sure what the first 3 letters are, the rest of the word will narrow down the potential words. If you are missing information about some of your words, the number of potential seeds is much lower than when dealing with a private key.