You are accurately describing how NFTs work today, however, NFT as a concept is something that could potentially translate into real-world use.

For example, the Los Angeles County Register of Deeds could issue NFTs to real estate owners representing ownership of their property. The owner of a property could transfer their property to another person by transferring their NFT to another person. In this example, the Los Angeles County Register would need to agree (probably via statute) to recognize an NFT as ownership of a property. If you are buying a NFT representing ownership of real estate property, you would need to make sure the LA County Register actually issued the NFT (which can be done via reviewing the blockchain), and you would need to trust the LA County Register of Deeds, however, you need to do the later anyway if you are buying property in LA County.

The above could reduce the costs associated with selling your property, as it would make things such as title searches much easier, and would nearly eliminate title insurance payouts, which should reduce the cost of title insurance.

I do agree that the concept of using NFTs to transfer "digital art" is more or less bogus. It is trivial for someone to create a similar image of something that already has an NFT with a different hash, and to alter the image in a way such that it is difficult to find the original image (if you don't know where it is).

When you deposit coin into a casino using bitcoin, the coin you receive from a withdrawal will not necessarily be spend-linked to the deposit transaction. So if you have stolen coin, you could deposit it into a casino, and the withdrawal you receive would not be associated with that stolen coin.

Obviously, law enforcement could simply ask the casino what happened to the deposit, and could then continue to track the history of the coin you received.

The price to read/write to "DNA" will come down, but the cost to process that much data will exceed the available amount of resources required to process that much data. See the above picture posted by NeuroticFish above.

You are right. I was thinking in terms of Big O Notation for the time complexity of calculating an address, based on a private key. So if you want to calculate j addresses from their private keys, you will perform p * j calculations, and if you want to calculate (j +1) addresses from their private keys, you will need to perform p * (j + 1) calculations. Or, to put it another way, for every additional address you want to calculate from a private key, you will need to perform a consistent additional number of calculations, with the consistent being a positive integer. 

If I understand correctly, address A belongs to Alice. Address A can send to any address upon the signature of address A.

Address B, belonging to Bob, Alice’s son, (the associated private key) can also cause unspent outputs from address A to be sent from address A to address B. The private key associated with address B can spend any output from address A, but only after x blocks since a transaction was sent to address A from address B. Address A can spend any output from address A to address B at any time.

The above means that the benefactor can spend some of his coin without having to provide an updated transaction or key to the heir.   

Storing all private keys is pretty pointless, IMO. Simply storing a list of private keys without the ability to a) quickly access the corresponding public key and address, and b) quickly check if the associated address in "a" has received any transactions, will not provide much value to anyone.

As an example, I currently have all possible private keys stored in my head. This includes all of your private keys (although I have no way of filtering out all private keys that do not belong to you). However, my brain cannot quickly calculate an associated address from a private key, so the process of obtaining an address from any private key in my head is very slow. The process for me to look up if an address has received a transaction is even slower.

The above concept can be applied to a computer that is able to store all private keys on a hard drive. Even if a computer could quickly check many private keys to see if a private key's associated address has received a transaction, in order to check n private keys, the computer would need to perform n calculations. The number of private keys is too large for any computer to ever perform any calculation on all possible private keys, given theoretical computational limits.

If I am not mistaken, you are describing the amount of space required to store all private keys as 32 bit integers. Most private keys are numbers that are greater than 32 bits.

The chances of a private key being in any 2^40 range is approximately 1 in 10^67, or approximately zero.

Wallets could potentially black list those private keys, but if that was a mainstream thing, crackers could simply monitor the next 2^40 set of keys (and this process would continue).

I seriously doubt that the key 2^35 is being actively monitored, and I doubt that someone that naturally generates this key is going to have their coin stolen.

Sure, if you say to send coin to an address associated with a key in that range in the next month, there would be a guarantee that monitoring those addresses would present an opportunity to see coin stolen. But monitoring all those addresses for years, or even decades would be much more expensive, with no assurance that the attacker would be able to receive any coin as a result of monitoring all those addresses.

Even if everyone spent all their sMerit, the merit system would eventually run out of sMerit. Without merit sources, the total amount of merit that could be sent would be appropriately (but under) the amount of merit that was air dropped.

Obviously, not everyone will care about anything, but I think the response to implementing the merit system was very strong. I think a lot of farmers pushback on the merit system pretty strongly (they also tried to use their air dropped sMerit to their advantage, often without success).

Its possible that xyz was the first to respond, or other owners of other TLDs were able to find out that square was trying to buy “block.*” and tried to get exorbitant amounts for the domain.

I would think that a referral link on block.io would generate a decent amount of money, so a high price wouldn’t be completely unreasonable.

The whois for block.xyz changed in mid-December. My guess is that Square (who was named square at the time) purchased the domain around that time.

Square Block does seem to have a decently sized market share for credit card processing for small businesses. However payment processing is a very competitive business.

Most of Square's valuation seems to come from its Cash App business. They charge fees to do things like withdraw to their bank account "instantly" or withdraw from an ATM. I am actually surprised that anyone would pay for these types of services. Maybe I am just lucky that I am able to keep enough money in the bank so that I would never need to utilize this type of service.

Tesla for example, employs a large number of software engineers in order to develop and improve their cars (this is likely to be mostly the self-driving capabilities), so using some number of engineers to create a back-end capable of processing credit card payments would likely not have a major business impact, nor require hiring additional engineers. So Tesla can implement some system to accept bitcoin themselves with nearly zero cost.

You could probably not make similar statements for most other merchants that sell directly to consumers. Walmart for example likely has an analytics team that is decently sized that can help with things such as pricing and staffing (and other things that have tangible metrics), but I don't think they would normally create software that does something other than to help allow someone to make a decision. So Walmart would probably need to hire a team of software developers to implement payment processing software if they were to handle processing bitcoin payments from customers in-house.

Bringing charges is ultimately up to the current administration (the Biden Rice administration.

Milley has towed the Democrat party line, so he is unlikely to face any kind of consequences.

A wagering requirement would probably do less to combat attempted money laundering than some kind of KYC requirement. The expected cost of attempting to use the casino as a means of laundering coin would be the wager requirement times the house edge (the higher your deposit is in relation to the minimum bet amount, the closer your actual cost to the expected cost will be).

A KYC requirement provided there is a sufficient chance the verification process will actually determine the identity of the person submitting the documents should prevent someone from attempting to launder coin.
In theory, someone could deposit a large amount with the intention of stopping to gamble if they have exceptionally bad or exceptionally good luck. I do agree that not gambling anything is not expected behavior of someone depositing at a casino.

I don’t think it would be a very effective way of detecting money laundering (or attempting to do so).

Someone who wanted to try to launder coin could simply repeatedly bet the minimum bet, having the maximum chances of winning each bet, then withdraw once they have bet 25% of their deposit.

A 25% wager requirement might cut down on the number of stupid people using their casino as a mixer and the number of requests from law enforcement asking about what happened to various deposits.

I personally think the OP is less concerned about the wager requirement and more about the confirmation requirement.

Trump attempted to influence a specific vote before the votes were cast. This is very similar to what happened when Trump was elected in 2017, and when W Bush was elected in 2001, and 2005. 

Most stores use third party providers to process non-cash transactions, such as credit card payments, so using a payment provider for crypto shouldn’t be surprising.

Regal (and AMC) is one more reason why someone might want to hold bitcoin.

I would actually be surprised to see many companies accept crypto directly (without some kind of payment processor). For the average person, using bitcoin means they blindly downloading core or electrum (possibly verifying the hash in the process). This procedure would not work for most companies, as generally, someone within the company would need to review the code, and approve its use before implementing it. A payment processor can provide its own hardware and a guarantee that payment will be received under specific circumstances.

Those city’s economies are the biggest because of private employers, not their governments. You are citing government support for crypto, not private support. I might also note that all those cities have single party rule, so supporting extreme policies is not necessarily a political risk (not that supporting crypto is a radical policy).   

I would be more interested if major companies started supporting crypto

Age is not a factor in his stance. He is basically running a major insurance company, and needs to understand technology. I would confidently say that he (or someone that reports up to him) has used bitcoin for testing purposes on behalf of his company.

I think his concerns about crypto is that it is difficult to predict in terms of the price, and in terms of legitimate transaction volume (in terms of transactions that are not to yourself). So if many people use crypto, it will become more difficult to value companies, especially private companies (or importantly, companies with competitors who are private). It would similarly be difficult to judge a particular market for similar reasons.

All of the above is how his company makes money.

New software is always very expensive to develop, given the high cost of developers/engineers.

For whatever reason, SMF appears to be fairly inflexible.

At the end of the day, a forum is a database, and forum software will query said database.

Part of a forum database is various permissions that each user has -- this can be simplified by creating user groups that a user is assigned to, and giving the user group various permissions, and flexibility can be added by adding multiple group types, such as 'native_rank, paid_group, and banned_group'. For example to check if a user has permission to do something, the output of MIN(banned_group, MAX(native_rank, paid_group)) could be used.

Forum software ultimately needs to be programmed to make various database queries, and present the output of said queries in a user-friendly format.

When you look at forum software as the above, your only limitations on features are your ability to create programmatic database queries.

I really don't think there is any reason to reinvent the wheel. I would propose creating a flask app for the new forum software. Adding new features would be as simple as editing the database schema (if necessary), writing a SQL query, and editing a little bit of HTML.

Trump tried to change the outcome of the election before it was voted on.

That makes him a politician.

There is really no other way of looking at it.

I previously answered your questions, and the answers are unlikely to have changed in the preceding 9 months.

I think most likely, thread 2 had content that is similar to thread 3, and satoshi was testing the functionality regarding deleting threads (and possibly posts). He may have made one or more modifications to SMF after deleting the thread.

I am not sure as to where any of threads 1, 2, or 4 were located, or which users were able to view that sub at the time were.

If there were restrictive permissions on thread 3, it is unlikely that anyone except satoshi ever saw that thread. If thread 3 was ever public, it is possible that google or another search engine indexed it, however I think that is very unlikely because satoshi made the first public post over two and a half days later.

I can say with a high degree of confidence that there were no replies to thread 3, and anyone looking closely will agree with this statement. This assumes that anything having to do with thread3 was done prior to satoshi's first post.

---

Anyway, I think it is most likely that you are a very old forum member. My guess is you have been involved in the forum for the greater part of a decade, if not longer.