The press board generates very little traffic. I noted previously that most threads have less than three dozen page views.

I might apply a similar rule that is applied when theymos decides if a new sub is needed. That is to measure the number of threads on the first two pages.

Topics on the first page of the press board have the most recent reply as early as October 25, almost three weeks ago. The second page goes back to Seppember 17, nearly two months ago. Based on the above, I don't think it is accurate to say that what you describe as "spam threads" are drowning out higher-quality threads.

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It sounds like your main concern is that the press board is deserted. If I find any interesting articles about bitcoin this week, I will post them, and will try to find interesting threads and reply to them. Hopefully those who find my posts interesting will read my posts and more traffic will be attracted to the press sub.

Damage will be done if something is not done by the end of 2022, but realistically something will need to be done by the end of the 3rd quarter 2022, or else miners will start to move their equipment out of the US.

Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of electricity, and this additional electricity demand is going to prevent green new deal nonsense from being possible. I suspect the provision was intentional on the part of Democrat leadership.

Neither party especially supports bitcoin, although free-market republicans are probably more likely to support bitcoin. Due to the procedure to take bills to the floor for a vote, it will take more than a simple majority to pass something that addresses the issue. Given the Biden administration's hostility towards bitcoin, I would suspect Biden would be told to veto any such fix, so a 2/3 majority would be needed to pass any fix.

This might be true if there is an agreement to exchange USD for bitcoin over a period of time. However, if on November 15 two people exchange USD and bitcoin valued at $9,000 and on November 25, the same two people again exchange USD and bitcoin at the then market price, also valued at $9000, I think there is a strong argument to say these are two unrelated transactions.

If you were to sell me $12,000 worth of bitcoin in person that involves me giving you $12,000 (or perhaps, me personally sending you 12,000 USDC) and you personally sending me 0.186BTC, we could exchange information required to file the tax forms. However, if we trade similar amounts of USDC and BTC on a DEX, I am not really sure it would be accurate to say that I received any coin from you. I would make the argument that I actually received the coin from the DEX. The law says I need to provide the "name, address, and TIN" of the person from who I received the cash. When a restaurant for example buys $11,000 worth of liquor in cash, one of their employees will exchange the cash for the alcohol, and that employee's information could be used. The same is not true for a DEX, or any other type of transaction you mentioned, except an entirely P2P transaction.

The biggest impact to something being a "trade or business" is that it subjects the person to self-employment taxes (the employer's share of social security and medicare taxes).

The definition of a person engaging in a trade or business is not changing with this law. If someone is presently staking their coin, and earning income, if the IRS has not challenged their tax status, I don't see why this would change.

To me, it appears that anyone mining would be covered. I don't think it would apply to node operators because although node operators facilitate the relaying of transactions, they do not receive compensation for doing so. Here is the law that is being amended by your first quote.

The law would take effect in 2023 for tax returns filed in 2024. IMO, it would effectively ban mining in the US. If the law is still in effect in its current form as of 2023, it would be reckless for a miner to continue to operate because there would be no guarantee the lunatics currently running our government would fix this provision.

Here is the law being changed. My reading of the law is that the threshold is measured by related transactions. So receiving $9000 by the same person twice via unrelated transactions would not be reportable. The term "related transaction" is not defined in the law, and would likely be subject to litigation.

I am not sure this would apply to DEXs, DeFi, staking, and yield farming (and similar) would be subjected to this reporting requirement as this law only applies to a person who "who is engaged in a trade or business", as I don't think someone is engaged in a "trade or business" would apply to someone just because they are engaging in one of the above types of transactions. Again, the term "trade or business" isn't defined in the law. The IRS asserts what a "trade or business is here.

TBH, you lost me here.

There is always the possibility that two blocks will be found by the same miner. How would you handle this?

Assuming you perfected the above issue, I would say that you should not reinvent the wheel. If however, you feel very strongly about your proposal, I would encourage you to create an altcoin with your proposal implemented. If it is superior to the status quo, the market will reflect your altcoin accordingly.

Thanks, I updated my post.

I was originally mistaken about how satoshi was ensuring he was not duplicating work. It doesn’t appear that he used the extraNonce field in the Coinbase transaction, he used the nonce value in the block header, specifically the last digit. The potential values of the last digit of the nonce value are between 0 and 255 (inclusive). Satoshi mines using the last digit of nonce values between 0 and 58, without the values of 10 through 18.

It appears that the default behavior of the extraNonce value in the Coinbase transaction will increase by one once the nonce value overflows, at which point the nonce value will reset. So the extraNonce value, if default behavior is used, will be a function of how many block candidates you have checked (I don’t believe either value resets after a block is found). I believe it will reset if you stop mining. This means the extraNonce value is ultimately a function of how much hashrate you are using (and how long it has been since you stopped mining). There are patterns of the extraNonce value being much higher than the rest of the blocks found around the same time. The extraNonce value maximum would be exaggerated by a factor of about 5 if one were to estimate the amount of hashrate that satoshi had (assuming no blocks were found but not broadcast and luck of 1).

jgarzik is not currently a mod, the same way that MiningBuddy is not a mod or the newbie section. If you look at each of their profiles, you will see they do not have a staff title. Listing someone as a mod of a section is different than someone actually having mod authority over the section. For whatever reason, Theymos has not removed their names from the header of the sub.

When a miner is mining for a block, they will create a block header that contains certain information. One piece of information that is in the block header is the extraNonce field (via being optionally part of the coinbase transaction [that can be a null value], and changing the extraNonce field will cause the merkle root to change). Other information in the block header includes a nonce (this is separate and distinct from the extraNonce part of the block header). Once the block header is built, it will be passed through a hash function called SHA256, and if the output of this hash function is lower than a target number as determined by the current difficulty, (assuming all transactions in the block are valid, and the block otherwise follows consensus rules), the block will be valid.

Block headers also include a timestamp, a derivative of the transactions in the block (called the merkle root), the previous block's hash, and a version number.

If you were to pass through a block header through a hash function on one computer, and pass through the same block header on a second computer, the resulting output would be same same on both computers. However, if you pass a block header through a hash function on one computer, and pass a block header that is the same, except that it contains a different extraNonce value, through a hash function on a second computer, the resulting output would be different. So if you are mining on two different computers, you need to do something in order to ensure both computers do not check the same block header, because if they do, they would be completing the same work.

The last value of the nonce can be between 0 and 255. This is something that one would expect to be random. If you remove the blocks that are believed to belong to satoshi, the remaining last values of nonces are more or less randomly distributed.

I think it is unlikely that Satoshi mined with 58 computers.

The last values of nonces were 0 through 58 appeared in blocks more frequently than the rest possible last value of the nonces (the range of possibilities are from 0 through 255), so the range of nonces is 59, not 58. However nonce values 10 through 18 have a "normal" frequency. This might lead someone to expect that satoshi might have 50 computers mining in bitcoin's early days.

I think it is probably more likely that satoshi was intending to use 6 computers, the second computer broke (or otherwise was unable to mine), so he ended up using 5 computers to mine. If this is true, he may have configured 6th of the remaining computers to mine on nonce values 19 instead of 59 before realizing that the specific nonce values do not matter, and wont have an impact on the chances of any computer finding a block. He was using either 50 or 5 computers, not 58.

There is evidence that satoshi may have not mined for as much as 5 minutes following when a block was broadcast, and if true, he may have not immediately started utilizing all of his mining equipment immediately after the 5-minute timer expired.

Obviously, it is not clear these blocks were actually mined by satoshi, although I think it is more likely than not to be the case.

Like I said, it used to be a big deal when any news article was written about bitcoin. That is no longer true. I want to talk about the news, not the news article.

If posts need to get merged, one post will be deleted (or if three posts get merged, two posts will be deleted). So it will be marked as delete reply in the modlog, and if reported, it will be in the OP's stats as a good report.

His bot is a moderator/patroller. I believe offending posts are found rather quickly, so it is unlikely any of the posts will get reported.

I think there are several issues with the press board.

1 - The board gets very little traffic. This results in threads about interesting articles getting few views (and replies). This is not something the mods can address, but I think the reason for this is most news about bitcoin is often discussed in other subs. For example 26 of the threads on the first page have less than 3 dozen views, and 20 of the first page threads have less than two dozen views.
2 - The press board appears to have been created in or around 2012. At that time, it would be unusual for any news outlet to write about bitcoin or crypto. Today there is a whole niche industry dedicated to writing about bitcoin, and there are articles about bitcoin in the MSM almost every day. CNBC for example displays the price of bitcoin prominently on it's rotating ticker tape. I think this might imply that the press board is outdated and should be closed
3 - As there are several companies dedicated to writing nearly exclusively about bitcoin (coindesk, cointelegraph, etc.), the press board gives these companies a way to effectively advertise and get additional backlinks for free.

IMO the best course of action would be to close the press board. If there is interesting news in the bitcoin world, there will likely be dozens of articles written about it. As such, if there is interesting news, a thread can be opened to discuss the news, press articles could potentially be cited, but there should not be a new thread for every article.

An alternative would be to limit the number of threads someone can open in a given timeframe. A thread can not count against the limit if it gets at least x number of replies from y different users. This could prevent someone from opening several uninteresting threads, but someone who creates many threads that get a lot of attention can create threads as long as they continue getting attention.

Rittenhouse was not an active shooter. He shot three people who were trying to actively harm him. The people that were trying to harm Rittenhouse were using deadly force and were the instigators of the confrontations.

Rittenhouse was trying to protect the community that the BLM terrorists were trying to burn down.

You need to change your email address associated with your account. This is what you need to do and you need to do it immediately. This is your answer.

You can stake your address, but you need to change your email address. Until you change your email address, your account will be vulnerable to being hacked by whoever owns that email. They have probably also been receiving emails from the forum intended for you, so they are aware of your account being associated with their email.

The brain wallet for your name does not match that address. The brain wallet for your name with the string " ozono" appended at the end is associated with that address.

The chances of that particular brain wallet being associated with an address with that particular "vanity" would be the same as any other vanity of that length.

One feature of bitcoin and all altcoins (except stablecoins) is that when an output is spent to an "address", the only way that it is possible to spend that output is by the private keys associated with that address when the address was generated signing a transaction (and that transaction being broadcast). This is the primary feature that gives bitcoin and altcoins value. There are no assets, nor any expectation of future dividends backing bitcoin and altcoins. Not all addresses are generated the same way, and some may require multiple private keys to spend any outputs received to a particular address, however, this is determined when the address is generated.

If there was an altcoin in which it is possible for an arbitrary person to spend someone else's coin, there would be no reason for anyone to give this altcoin any value. There would be no reason for someone to exchange anything of value for a coin that could be taken from them by the majority of miners, who could potentially later switch to mining a different coin.

Some stablecoins can be 'frozen' by their sponsor for potentially arbitrary reasons. However, even stablecoins sponsors cannot move an arbitrary stablecoin output to a different address without the associated private keys.

In addition to the above "promise" (it is really more of a guarantee) that no one can spend bitcoin sent to your address without knowing your private key, there are other features that also give bitcoin and altcoins value, but without the aforementioned promise, all of these features would be useless.

I think there is a strong argument to say that the “ban” message for accounts locked for security purposes, should not say they are “banned”. This creates a lot of confusion, even if someone only needs to read the rest of the message to understand what happened.

It might also be an idea to reconsider blanket account locks when certain actions are taken. For example, if someone resets their password, their account will only get locked if they don’t access the forum from a “new” browser within x time, and access the forum at least y times over x days in w unique days. 

I think you are referring to something different than what larry_vw_1955 and I were discussing.

It is very easy to get from a string (or a file) to the SHA256 hash of said string (or file). Very little computational effort is required. I was referring to an algorithm that takes a relatively long time to get from the string to the ALGORITHM hash of that string.

It is currently not possible to calculate a string based on the SHA256 hash -- the only way to know that the SHA256 hash
C67F9F258F01BEC38DB1E0ACC35CBD33675774153B1460BDB414A2252E50E9EE
is the hash of the following string:
is by going from the above string to SHA256 hash, you cannot go the other direction. I believe this is what you were referring to.

In the future, it is possible that someone will "break" SHA256 hashing algorithm, and whatever algorithm larry_vw_1955 is thinking of. Then again, secp256k1 curve cryptography could also be broken in the future.

Electrum is open source, and as such, you could change the default derivation paths routes for the change index. So you would specify /84'/0'/14' as the derivation path after changing the index for receiving/change addresses. While the implementation may be non-standard, the resulting addresses are standard, as are any transactions sent from those addresses (all else being normal).

The point of my post was that given a high enough index range, such as m/84'/0'/14'/0 through m/84'/0'/14'/2^256 you will have collisions with address that other people have generated, however it is not possible to generate that many addresses.

Say for example, I have a seed of:

The first five addresses I would generate would be:

You can get a high-level overview of how the above addresses are created by looking at this post from Greg Maxwell in 2011.

At a high level, when you "generate" an address in electrum, you are passing a derivative of your seed, and additional data into a hash function, the output of which is the private key of your "generated" address. The additional data passed through the hash function changes in a predictable way, such that it is trivial to calculate the "additional data" based on the number of addresses already generated.

Generating one additional address via electrum, is the same as generating one additional private key. I refer you to the image previously posted by bitmover. If you were to continue generating addresses with your seed, you would eventually generate every potential private key. However, it is not possible to generate every private key because the sun does not contain enough energy.

It is not. In base 10, the number 2^256 is 77 digits long. It is well documented that the average person can memorize 7 pieces of information at once. You are not going to be able to reasonably memorize a function that is one out of 2^256 possibilities.

People tend to have a bias towards their own experiences. If a function is something you thought of on your own, it is probably not random. If the function is partially the output of a random generator (for example if at one point you multiply your starting number by 5, and "5" is the output of a random generator), your function will be more difficult to memorize.

I was referring to the algorithm that you may invent that would be computationally expensive.

IMO, the only excuse for having a low entropy input to generate a private key is that it is expensive to go from input to private key.