I think the opposite is more likely. China is Japan’s adversary and has been increasing their military spending in recent years as a means to counter Chinese projections of strength.

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Biden is doing exactly what he said he would do to energy prices — he intentionally making them very high so that people will have greater incentives to buy electric cars that are powered by electricity from coal. It should be no surprise that the Saudis are not receptive to Biden’s request for more oil if you read his comments about the Saudi royal family.

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I don’t think the US will provoke a war with China via Taiwan. It is more likely that China will invade Taiwan after Russia wins its war in Ukraine (assuming they do). I think China wants to see if Russia sees are real consequences for the invasion. This will likely result in a real war directly with China, although based on the fact that the Chinese government likely has a lot of dirt on the Biden family, it is possible that the US will initially sit out of the war.

Dont do this. Hashing a pass phrase will not result in additional entropy. If an adversary were to know that you hashed a brain wallet pass phrase, they could do the same to brain wallet candidate pass phrases they believe you are likely to use.

Using a private key that is derived from in a similar manner is very risky, and is very likely to result in tears. There are many people who are monitoring a large scope of potential addresses for transactions being sent to them, and some of these people look to bitcoin-related forums to increase the scope of these addresses. You can call it a brain wallet if you want, but my advice is to not do it.

The reason why brain wallets are insecure is that they are typically generated in ways that are not truly random. Generating a brain wallet using a random function will not have this problem.

For example, if a brain wallet is a phrase that is found in literature, there are a very limited number of phrases in literature, and the number of candidate brain wallets are many orders of magnitude less than the number of potential private keys.

Holding your own coin is very different than having a password to a bank account. There is no way to "reset your password" if you forget your passphrase, and best practices include keeping multiple backups of your private keys in multiple locations via multiple mediums of storage -- all of this is new for most people.

If you do not fully understand how to implement the above, it is probably best to not hold your own coin, at least not in substantial amounts, as there is a serious risk that you will permanently and irreversibly lose access to your coin.

Some custodial storage "services" (such as exchanges) will turn out to be scams, and although these services (should) employ experts in securing coin, mistakes still happen, and these services are a bigger target for hackers, so there is the risk that coin will be stolen from these services. Storing coin on a centralized service also opens up the potential that your account will get hacked, and your coin be stolen from this service.

It is important for people to fully understand the risks and advantages of storing their coin via various means, that are personalized for them specifically. Once someone understand the risks, they can evaluate how to best store their coin.

LN is entirely separate from bitcoin core. It uses existing consensus rules to implement a layer 2 protocol. Further, the software is entirely separate.

There are a number of BIPs that made LN possible. The BIP related to SW is a major one that comes to mind. There are others going back years before the concept of LN was ever made public. The BIP related to nTineLock is one example.

This kind of arrangement is common. Various airlines have cards issued by major banks (American - Citi, United - Chase, etc). Even brands that have their own billing interface have this arrangement, for example the Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs, but you access your account exclusively via the Apple wallet app. Some smaller banks will even outsource the underwriting and servicing of their branded credit cards to larger banks.

I am generally against name calling and personal attacks.

I stated my opinion on the fillippone situation and I said that I think nullis is in the wrong. But I don’t think two wrongs make a right, and I don’t think calling anyone a “cunt” is going to result in anything productive.

I don’t think I would agree with that broad or a statement. For example, if someone uses deception or exploits a weakness in security to install malware on a computer to obtain a private key, I would not consider the person the “legitimate” owner of the key. Similarly, if someone uses a $5 wrench attack to obtain a private key, they are not the legitimate owner of said key.

After reading the thread in question, it is clear that fillippone was not using deception, nor force upon any third party to try to find a private key originally used by someone else. As such, I don’t think it is accurate for nullis to describe fillippone as a “wallet thief”, wannabe or otherwise.

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fillippone was using what amounts to be brute force to look for used private keys. If however there was a more efficient means to generate an already used private key, I would expect many people to generate these keys, which is why I desire bitcoin to use robust means of cryptography to go from private key, ultimately to address. I would equate calling someone looking for weakness in the cryptography used in bitcoin as a “wallet thief” the same as discouraging looking for weaknesses in cryptography, and that will ultimately lead to negative results.

I have seen evidence that Lauda was not initially careful with their identity when they initially joined the forum. I prefer to not publicly state what evidence I have seen as it may weaken Lauda's privacy as it stands today.

I think Lauda initially struggled with some of the technical aspects of Bitcoin, and later learned the necessary skills to understand bitcoin. I find the reasons that I previously stated to be most reasonable.

The threshold to submit a PR is low, so some of them may not be seriously considered, and/or are a low priority.

The development of Bitcoin is different from most other software because no one entity is responsible for it, and also because there is so much commerce that involves bitcoin. The later gives an incentive for many to try to influence the development of bitcoin for various reasons. As achow101 said above, much of the work regarding BIPs is done outside of github.

This is likely the case. I just changed my trust settings to view RaltcoinsB's trust list in 'real time' and this person includes 9 'people' along with the 'DefaultTrust' account.

Both 'DefaultTrust' and 'OldScammerTag' are actual accounts in the forum database, so any algorithm that checks for a number of accounts will take these accounts into consideration.

I think the 'OldScammerTag' is likely obsolete at this point, although I am unsure if it is appropriate to outright delete the account (along with the associated ratings with the account).

The algorithm will need to be updated to exclude these two "accounts" or a decision needs to be made that including as few as 8 accounts is acceptable if these two are included in one's trust list.

There is a "US Government" "region" in AWS that is used by various US government agencies, including the DOD. I don't think the nuclear launch codes are stored there, but I do understand that classified (and other sensitive) information is likely to be stored there.

So a "never" policy for using cloud services is probably not appropriate, but it is important to understand the risks involved. It is easy to make mistakes with permissions when using cloud services, although most cloud providers will alert you when you are doing something that is clearly undesirable, there is no guarantee that your cloud provider will catch all mistakes regarding permissions. It is similarly possible to make other mistakes that will result in either your cloud services being exposed to the general public or that may result in your information being exposed to someone you don't intend to have it exposed to.

In general, the appropriate customers for cloud services are governments and/or businesses. If you cannot be described as either of these and are using the cloud to store sensitive information, you are probably doing something wrong. Governments and businesses can hire professionals whose job it is to ensure that relevant settings are correct and that your private information will not be exposed to those who should not have access to it. They can also hire separate professionals to audit the above

If the security of the network depends on a subset of the users of said network, over time, some of the people who "donated" to the security will stop doing so and will allow the remaining of those who is providing security to continue doing so. Over time, this will result in a small group of people being responsible for security.

LN closing transactions are currently designed such that they can be broadcast at an arbitrary time in the future. Further, if coin is removed from (a subset of) the UTXO set at intervals less frequent than every block, there will be incentives to get transactions confirmed prior to this frequency, and as such, the cost of getting transactions confirmed will spike immediately prior to these block heights.

This issue can be entirely resolved by simply increasing the total supply of bitcoin. Tail Emission is already a major change, so if this change were to be adopted, you may as well adopt it in the most simple way, and increasing the total coin supply is the simplest way to achieve this.

Using the "preview" feature will prevent you from visiting any (malicious) links, however, it is not guaranteed to prevent you from opening malware, including malware that is hidden.

If you have raw text, that text is compromised of a bitcoin address, and you copy that text, you will not be exposed to malware.

There is however always the potential that someone will transmit hidden malware to you via whatever means of transmission they send you that address. If someone is communicating with you via a messaging app, or via email, there is the risk that malware is being transmitted to you via that app or via email.

Even previewing a potentially malicious file is generally not a good idea on a phone or a laptop. While "previewing" a file will generally mean that you are looking at the file in a more "sandboxed" environment, there is no guarantee that someone has not figured out a way to get arbitrary code to run when someone "previews" a file.

It is not possible to know with certainty that your computer is not infected with malware. If you had antivirus software running when you opened the potentially malicious file, your chances of being infected are lower, but it is still possible that someone infected your computer with malware that your antivirus software did not detect as being malicious. It is also possible that any malware will change the output from your antivirus software.

The only reason why someone may want to split up their unspent outputs would be if they knew with certainty that they will be spending very specific amounts in the future (and they have a good estimate as to the future fee rates), and they split up their unspent outputs in a way such that a single new, split output is equal to an amount the person needs to pay in the future, plus tx fees, with no change. If fees go up by enough in the future, this may make sense, although it is generally unusual to know the exact amount that will be spent in the future.

The attacker would need to have assistance from someone who has the ability to update your mobile phone account with a new SIM card. This means the attacker can be in any location. Some mobile phone operators have employees based in other countries than where they operate.

Except that most children have values imposed onto them by their teachers and schools. The issue needs to be solved by reforming the education system to prevent what can only reasonably be described as very sick teachers from imposing values onto young children.

This is not quite right. What you say is true only for economically rational miners, and only to the extent that the miners are strickly rational in regards to the economics of mining bitcoin.

One of the assumptions that satoshi made when designing the security of bitcon was that the majority of miners would be honest. Currently, it is very expensive for a bad actor to control a large percentage of the network hashrate, but if total block rewards (block subsidy plus transaction fees) become too low, it will become less expensive for a bad actor to control a majority of the network hashrate. I would also point out that if a miner was not being rewarded enough for their mining activities, in addition to turning off their equipment, they will also often attempt to sell their equipment.

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That would not be a good solution. It would make L2 solutions like LN impossible to implement because the sum of the total inputs would always be changing. If it were decided to implement a tail supply, it would be superior to simply issue more than 21M coin.

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I don't think a large holder would be acting rationally by doing this. I think this holder would be better off selling their coin if they were needing to provide security for everyone.

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From an economics perspective, having modest inflation is generally a positive outcome. Modest inflation will encourage people to actually spend their coin on goods/services rather than simply hoarding their coin until they absolutatly need to spend it. Modest inflation should encourage additional adoption, as it will cause the bitcoin ecosystem/economy to grow.