Debate performance is ultimately meaningless. The worst debater on Earth could be a fine president: he'd just delegate anything debate-like to someone else. The problem with Trump is not his debating skill.


No, but neither is Harris. These are both terrible candidates.

If Trump wins, hundreds of thousands of lives will be ruined due to his deportation/immigration policies. It'll be both an economic and a humanitarian disaster. The world's economy (as well as the US economy specifically) will be hurt by his aggressive deglobalization. He'll support Israel's aggression against its neighbors. He'll support friendly-to-him authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia as they oppress their population, and look the other way if they invade their neighbors. He will reinstitute the maximum-pressure campaigns against Iran and Cuba, which was a humanitarian catastrophe, and risks dragging the US into a larger war with those countries. While I wouldn't support sending US troops to defend Taiwan, there's a high risk of Trump signing a "big beautiful deal" with China which explicitly lets them invade Taiwan in return for some nominal benefits for the US. Similar for Ukraine. Trump and his allies will promote a xenophobic attitude against anyone out of the norm: immigrants, non-Christians, sexually-unusual people, certain ethnic communities (not due to racism, exactly, but due to a dislike of culturally-unusual people), etc. He'll promote an anti-science attitude. He'll promote legislation which hurts Internet freedom in the name of "protecting children", such as restrictions on social media, attacking section 230, etc. By promoting his own crypto scams, he'll give crypto a bad name. He'll ramp up the war on drugs, and hamper criminal justice reform more broadly. I'd like it if he'd take his experience being the victim of state oppression/surveillance to eliminate those Orwellian systems, but he'll probably actually enhance those systems and use them against his political enemies. He will aim to basically destroy the bureaucracy, which is good in some respects, but it'll cause a lot of chaos, and a lot of innocent people will be hurt thereby. Etc.

If Harris wins, she'll continue the Biden administration's squeezing of the crypto industry, the end goal of which is to make it almost impossible to legally use crypto except through a financial intermediary (which makes crypto pointless). Like Trump, she will support Israel's aggression against their neighbors -- maybe just slightly less loudly. Like Trump, she'll add tarriffs and barriers to immigration -- just less. If China invades Taiwan, she'll send US troops to their deaths there. She'll ramp up US involvement in Ukraine in a way which could very well lead to WWIII. She's campaigning with the war-criminal Cheneys. From her time as CA AG, it's clear that she has zero problem with oppressing random people just because it's convenient for her personally or for the government; this mindset will permeate her administration, to the detriment of anyone put at its mercy. She'll continue the Biden administration's policy of persecuting anyone who stands in her administration's way (I'm not just talking about the prosecutions against Trump: see eg. this recent comment from Democrat Jamie Dimon). She doesn't actually believe in anything (she has much less ideology than Biden, and maybe even less than Trump), so she will do whatever is most politically beneficial to her; she'll only care about things that can affect her own power/legacy. She'll regulate the Internet to suppress "misinformation", also probably attacking section 230. As a Democrat, she believes in big, strong government, so she'll raise taxes, continue the Biden administration's crushing regulatory agenda, increase the size of government overall, and increase the surveillance of US citizens. She'll appoint liberal judges to the courts, who won't constrain government power at all. Etc.

I judge that Harris is slightly worse on the whole, but I'm certainly not supporting either of these psychopaths. Once the result is known, I will be relieved that we avoided the other one, but horrified at what we got.

I didn't watch it, but I heard that Trump did well on Joe Rogan's podcast. That'll probably draw quite a few votes, considering that the podcast has so many listeners, and many of them are politically disengaged. And I agree that it was smart for Trump not to debate again, since he's a terrible debater.

All of the other things you mentioned will IMO have little impact. They're just tiny news stories. Harris's appearance on Fox may have actually helped slightly on net, since even though it generated some minor bad headlines, it removed to some extent the criticism that she wasn't doing tough interviews.

Apparently AOC and Walz are doing (or already did) some gaming on Twitch today. In principle I feel like that could be a good strategy: similar to the Joe Rogan interview, it's a much more casual form of politicking, targeting a good demographic. AOC legitimately likes gaming, and she's fairly charismatic. But probably it'll be cringy and boring. These sorts of casual, less political, less fake events are IMO good things to do at this point. Harris should go on a cooking show or something, since that's one of her actual passions.

Trump definitely has momentum in the headlines and polls, though I've heard that Harris's ground-game is massively better than Trump's. (That's stuff like using public records combined with social media posts to find people who are probably leaning Democrat but are likely not to actually vote, and sending someone to knock on their door and badger them until they commit to definitely voting ASAP.) This sort of thing doesn't make headlines, but it could make the difference in the election.

What he should've done instead is said: "If and only if Trump wins Pennsylvania, I'll enter every registered voter in Pennsylvania into a 'Thank You PA!' lottery, where 30 people will each win $1 million." Alternatively, he could send $10 to every registered voter if Trump wins. Either one of those options creates an even stronger incentive for people to do whatever they can to get Trump to win, compared to what Musk is actually doing, but because it's disconnected from any particular person's action (ie. a person can get the reward even if they've never heard of it), I feel like it'd be on stronger legal ground.

I wonder what would happen if openly buying votes was completely legal. As somebody who doesn't idolize democracy, I'm not horrified by the idea, though I'm also not sure that it would be a net positive. If people buy votes purely for ideological reasons, and not as part of a plan to exploit their influence on government for profit, then they probably know more than the average voter and have more to lose, so that might actually be good. But it'd be really bad if you had a situation like: Candidate John Doe promises to make AT&T a monopoly again, so AT&T pays voters to vote for John Doe, and then AT&T makes back its vote-purchases via its resulting monopolistic rent-seeking. That'd be amplifying a problem which already exists in big government, where companies often have the ability and incentive to spend $1 million on lobbying for a policy which allows them to steal $0.01 from 300 million citizens, netting the company a profit, but not costing any individual citizen enough for them to care about it.

Yeah, I'm not that far from considering Harris the lesser evil. Trump's first term was pretty good (grading on a curve here...), but that's because he often listened to the Republican establishment when they told him that he was being stupid. This time around he seemingly plans to surround himself with only loyalists. In a few cases this is good -- Trump is much more anti-war than the Republican elites, for example --, but in many cases this is bad. Trump's policies on immigration and tarriffs will hurt the economy, and JD-Vance-style Christian Nationalism is almost diametrically opposed to the sort of free society I'd like to live in. The fact that Trump cited authoritarian Viktor Orbán positively in the last debate is not a good sign.

But with Harris also being very bad, I consider Trump the lesser evil because:
 - He will do some very good things, especially deregulation
 - He seems to have a strong anti-war instinct
 - He used to be a Democrat, and I think that in his heart of hearts he has no interest in promoting conservative social policies. (Though he will go along with this stuff when it's politically convenient.)
 - His administration will be a total mess, just like last time, so he won't be nearly as effective at advancing his terrible policies as Harris would be with hers.

Harris has fallen slightly behind in many of the election models, but I have a feeling that the polls may be underrating her a bit. I think that when undecided voters go into the voting booth, a lot of them are going to view this as essentially "Trump vs The Mystery Box", and they're going to prefer The Mystery Box. Moreover, a lot of people are going to be relieved to have somebody to vote for who isn't a senile old man. Keep in mind that most undecided voters are also low-information voters, and don't know more than the bits and pieces of vague rumor that they've absorbed without trying.

So I think that Harris will win like this:


For the Senate I think it'll be 51-49 for Republicans, and for the House 218-217 for Democrats.

I like split government, where not much can get done, so that wouldn't be a terrible outcome. I think that Trump is slightly less-bad than Harris, so the ideal scenario would be for Trump to win the presidency, with Republicans in the Senate so that Trump can make conservative judicial appointments, but with Democrats in the House to try to block some of Trump's authoritarian and crazy instincts. This particular outcome isn't very likely, but it's not impossible.

Polls are very close, though, so anything's possible. If polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, then we could get either a huge Republican win or a huge Democratic win. (I don't see any reason to assume that if polls are very wrong, then they'll necessarily be wrong in Republicans' favor again.)

I really feel bad for Peter. Hopefully people forget about this soon, and he doesn't get a bunch of stalkers obsessing about him for years. What a ridiculous, reckless "journalist".

This sort of thing is why I hardly ever deal with journalists: most of the time, they're far more interested in telling an interesting story than they are in telling an accurate story.

Are all of the interviews in the trailer original? I got the feeling that several of them were interviews I saw many years ago, though I could be wrong.

My current feeling on Satoshi's identity is:
 - Sassaman is a very bad candidate. If this is their conclusion, then they totally failed to do proper research.
 - 50% chance it's someone nobody's ever heard of, and nobody will ever figure it out
 - 35% chance it's Hal Finney. (Over time, I've moved more probability into this category.)
 - 10% chance it's someone else in the Bitcoin-verse
 - 5% chance it's a group within the CIA

But I'm really not a fan of the whole "search for Satoshi" genre. Being anonymous, Satoshi is an excellent myth and source of inspiration, since we can't see much of his flawed humanity. Mythical-Satoshi is a humble man who, with a lot of persistence and skill, but not with a level of brilliance beyond the reach of us mortals, single-handedly created a clockwork device so powerful that it shook the world. And then, in an action which nobody in the traditional halls of power would ever take, he had the wisdom to walk away: a modern Cincinnatus. I like that myth very much, and I'd rather it not be tainted by association with an actual human.


No, I only heard about the documentary when I read the headline on CoinDesk today.

This month 132 users were eligible.

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I'm not going to enter into a cat-and-mouse game fighting adblockers via HTML changes, redirections, etc.

Several years ago I added per-user classes on signatures, like sig35 for my signature. I had hoped that adblockers would list all of the users wearing annoying sigs, and do the adblocking that way. I guess the way they did it here was a lot easier, even if it has some false-positives and false-negatives. Though it'd probably be better if they detected signatures containing <span>s instead of external links: that'd allow for users to link to their private sites, etc., but would (I think) eliminate any flashy ads.

I edited it, though actually I didn't really change the content that much:

I left in the link to this board. I'll try to check from time to time to see if there are any whitelisting requests. Though I don't want to grant any of the recent requests in the old thread because they look to me highly likely to be people who just want to add spammy links to their services. I added to the page that you should explain what edits you want to actually make.

I don't use IRC anymore. Is #bitcoin-wiki totally dead on both servers, such that it shouldn't even be mentioned?

I could add more Permittors, if any veterans here want to do it.

Also, we may in the near future try changing the whole way this works: Anyone will be able to "edit" pages, but these edits will actually be held-back pending review by a moderator. So you won't need to seek out preemptive approval. But it's possible that moderator bandwidth will not be high enough to deal with the volume of automated spam, so maybe this actually won't work out.


For the past ~8 years I've mostly been ignoring the wiki, and I would tell people who contacted me about wiki stuff to talk to one of the other wiki admins. But now all of the wiki admins have gone almost entirely inactive. So I plan to pick up the slack and be a little more active as a wiki bureaucrat for the next couple of years, until hopefully some other good bureaucrats can be found and I can start ignoring it again.

It looks to me like it's working as usual. (Which is to say, not great.)

I use the forum search a lot, but you really need to know how it works and how to deal with its quirks. Some tips:

• If you search for candy corn, it will return posts with both "candy" and "corn" in their bodies or subjects. The two words are keywords that can be separated, so it would match the phrase "I like candy, but I don't like corn". If you instead search for "candy corn", with the quotes, then the two words have to appear right next to each other as a single phrase.
• With the default settings, it will only return the last post in a topic that matches, even if more posts in that topic match. To change this, enable the option "Show results as messages".
• If more than about 5 pages of topics would be returned, then only an arbitrary subset of all results will be returned. To avoid this, setting a message-age restriction is often a good approach.
• If you use the search box in the upper right while in a topic or board, then it only searches that topic or board (& sub-boards).
• If one of the words in your search is incredibly common on the forum, like "the", then search will return bad, weird results, or may time-out after hanging for a long time. This applies even if the common word is in a quoted phrase, like "the president". Some decent-looking results may be returned, but posts which should be returned will not be.

This month 127 users were eligible.

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You're thinking of knightmb.

Create a better one, and then ask a moderator with jurisdiction over that board to switch the pinned thread. There's no need for any big debate about it: if there's a thread which hasn't been updated in several years, and somebody is asking me to pin a different thread which seems better after a few minutes of skimming, I'm probably just going to do it. (But please try asking other mods first, rather than me.) If somebody ends up having a problem with something-or-other regarding the new thread, then they can make a better thread, and we can at that time have a public debate in Meta about which up-to-date thread is better.


Mods are not supposed to edit the content of a post, even if it's a sticky. Mod edits should be limited to non-content things like fixing broken bbcode, merging posts, etc., so that nobody ever has reason to complain that a mod "put words in their mouth". Even if a post is violating the rules, and editing out a word/sentence/paragraph would make it no longer in violation of the rules, this kind of content-edit should not be done; the post should just be deleted.

This month 130 users were eligible.

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It's happened a few times, though not usually, and I would of course ignore such threats.

There's a very large DDoS attack going on. I mitigated it for now, but it's too large and sophisticated to be cleanly mitigated; until this stops, the forum will be on-and-off slow and people will have to endure Cloudflare challenges. Such large DDoS attacks are expensive, though.

That's a "newbie warning / type-1" flag, which requires only 1 net supporter. But TheUltraElite is not currently in DT, so the flag is not active by default. It's active for you because you have a non-default trust list.

No, he never used any avatar, at least while I was here.

This month 133 users were eligible.

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