Alright, you now can't merit the same post with the same amount within 60 seconds.

No. I changed it to "Your ban message may have an email address which you can email. If not, then appeals are unlikely to be accepted."

I don't want to so blatantly encourage people to "appeal by making a topic in Meta" because that's just a ridiculous process, especially since it so rarely works.

There are daily offsite backups, so only up to a day of content could be lost in that case.

Agreed. The UK is an authoritarian nanny state with a very broken political process, and France seems addicted to unsustainable welfare programs. Leaving the EU won't solve their problems, and may exacerbate some of them. But I still support it, since there's a better chance of a few independent countries out of many figuring things out than the EU as a whole, especially when the EU is run by totally-disconnected power-hungry bureaucrats who want to engineer everyone's lives.

Maybe the UK or France could pull it off. I don't advocate it, but I think that a welfare-heavy state can be stable and not too terrible if the people in charge look at economic realities rather than dreams, and maybe the UK people will learn from the brexit mess and put less power/faith in government. Not likely, but you never know.

This is just the domain name; the server would be unaffected. I could have an alternative up in less than an hour, probably. It would be extremely annoying in several ways, though.

I hate that the DNS is so trust-heavy. It's like storing money in banks: you just have to hope that your bank/registrar isn't being manned by easily-manipulated idiots today. (I don't like the designs of any decentralized DNS solutions that I've seen so far, though: often they're "DNS + blockchain!" nonsense solutions with no real thought.)

I agree, but leftists fundamentally won't: that's what makes them leftists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_rights

I've been extremely interested in Mimblewimble since it was first presented a couple of years ago, though I only recently heard that grin is finally launching its mainnet soon. This is the first altcoin that has ever significantly interested me.

I will definitely be buying grin fairly early on. Probably won't bother figuring out mining, though. Note that due to the way grin emits its coins, prices are likely to start out high and steadily drop for the first few weeks/months.

If you're mining grin and want to sell for BTC: let me know and I'll buy from you.

I was going to try to evaluate more, but I never got around to it.

Current thinking:

 - Extremely interested: grin
 - Good: XMR
 - Some merit: ETH
 - Possibly some merit, not sure: XLM, TRX, QRL, IOTA

I see two ways:

First, although I still consider it bad, I think that it'd be better policy-wise and ethically for governments to eliminate regulations while still collecting and distributing taxes. For example, instead of having a 25% income tax and a $15/hour minimum wage, I'd consider it better to have a 30% income tax, no minimum wage, and some sort of welfare system to cover up whatever holes you see created by the lack of a minimum wage. (The 25%->30% income tax increase is just an example, and is maybe not worth eliminating just the minimum wage regulation.)

Second, we can have many small countries with different policies. There's no need for world domination. I'm a big supporter of seasteading, anti-EU movements, and secessionist movements around the world.

Perhaps. I do feel strongly that people are too tied to the necessity of 9-to-5, 5-days-per-week jobs, even though people have been working similar amounts (or less!) for 100+ years.

But it's important to put the cart before the horse! If government mandates low amounts of work, for example, then the economy might not be ready, possibly causing economic breakdown and poverty. It also puts a barrier in front of the minority of people whose primary desire may be to work as much as physically possible so that they can significantly move their family up the economic ladder. The government should just stay out of it and let people work as much as they want/need.

I agree, but I thought it'd be interesting as a change of pace to pretend that we'd all be willing to form one political platform.


It's not surprising. There are two main branches of political belief: liberalism and authoritarianism, and "liberal" derives from "liberty" (=freedom). In the past, there was significant true political belief in authoritarianism, where people would actually say that they believed in eg. following an absolute ruler, but now almost all politics is at least couched in terms of liberalism. For someone to disagree with my vague individual freedom statement would require them to be far outside of the overton window, probably an extreme communist type or an extreme conservative.

The main difference between libertarians and left-liberals is that those on the left recognize some positive rights as integral to freedom, such as the "right to healthcare", while libertarians only recognize negative rights such as the "right to not be assaulted".


Maybe someday material scarcity could be eliminated for most practical purposes, but scarcity can't be eliminated on the whole. For example, you may desire to have something custom-designed by one particular famous artisan, and that person's time is limited. Or you may like Picard in Star Trek desire an authentic kurlan naiskos artifact.

In this area, some leftists make two major mistakes:
 1. They tend to just dismiss a desire for anything that technology cannot conceivably produce ~infinite amounts of as something that people shouldn't desire. This brings them out of touch with what humanity actually is.
 2. They tend to assume that we're 99% of the way to post-scarcity, so we can just immediately eliminate all modern-day ways of managing scarcity. Even the USSR thought in this way to some extent, dreaming of a future where automation would solve everything, even though from today's standpoint they were laughably far from post-scarcity.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin

It's not clear whether quantum computers large enough to attack Bitcoin will come into existence in 10 years or 100+ years. If the former, then making Bitcoin quantum-safe in a hurry will be messy, though it can and will be done.

It's certainly not the "end of blockchain technology". Anyone who says that doesn't know what they're talking about. Designing a quantum-safe cryptocurrency is trivial, though it adds significant overhead, which is why nobody's really doing it yet. QRL claims to be a functioning and remarkably efficient quantum-safe cryptocurrency (though still much less efficient than quantum-unsafe cryptocurrencies), but I haven't looked into any aspect of it very much.

It's part of Electrum's design. Anyone can run an Electrum Server and put it forward for the public to use. When you run the client, you connect to a random Electrum server (run by some random person), send them a list of your addresses, and they send you back the transactions associated with those addresses. (More-or-less.) This is less secure than running your own full node for various reasons, and it's also terrible for privacy, since some random person gets a list of every Bitcoin address you've ever used along with your IP address. But if you want to avoid these sorts of tradeoffs, then you have to run your own full node, which takes a bit of time and resources.

You might suggest that clients should only connect to a fixed set of trusted and well-vetted Electrum servers, but that introduces fundamental centralization into Electrum's operation, which the Electrum developers wished to avoid. This attack, where an attacker creates hundreds/thousands of legitimate-looking network nodes all controlled by him, is called a Sybil attack, and is a common issue in decentralized systems.

 - Electrum is a low-security wallet in general. It focuses on bleeding-edge features and usability, not absolute security. Store only pocket change there (and on the same computer as Electrum). For storing large amounts, use a hardware wallet.
 - The fact that this phishing message was prefixed by "error: error sending transaction" should make one immediately suspicious. If you feel any suspicion about anything, stop and discuss it on the forum or elsewhere.
 - When a new update comes out, wait a week or two before installing it. If it's listed as critical, look at various sites such as bitcointalk.org to figure out why it's critical. If in doubt about whether a "critical" update is real, you can just stop using Electrum for a few days and wait for further news.
 - Navigate to the site using a bookmark if possible, and use HTTPS.
 - Verify the PGP signature when you download it.
 - When you run the executable on platforms that support digital signing, make sure that it's signed by "Electrum Technologies GmbH"

If you're using Electrum or a derivative, you may receive a message like this:


This message is false, sent to you by a hacker. If you click the link in the message and install the software, then your BTC will be stolen. If you ignore the message, then you should be OK. Version 3.3.2, released a week ago, makes the messages less readable/convincing, though you could still receive such messages.

Note that altcoin derivatives of Electrum are very common, with over 1600 forks on github, and they will also be affected.

More info:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968

Discussion:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089963.0

Rather than copying the email address, please just say "the email address in theymos's post" or similar. These email addresses will be periodically cycled, so if you copy it, it'll stop working eventually.

Thanks.

That's why signed messages for account recoveries have to include the desired new email and a date.

Not sure what you're referring to. One thing I'm working on (maybe for release in the first half of 2019, not sure) is a proper address-staking system. The main point of this would be to replace the current ad hoc address staking situation and safely allow opting out of any of: long-term IP log retention; email password recoveries; or manual recoveries. Automatic recoveries using a staked address is possible, but not much on my mind right now.


If a signature is provided, probably. But each case needs to be considered separately.

We've streamlined our processes, and Cyrus has put together a team for handling these cases, so account recoveries should now be handled at a reasonable pace again. Additionally, we will be somewhat more lenient in recovering accounts without signatures, though signatures often will still be required, depending on the situation.

If you have a locked account, send a new email to the @bitcointalk.org email address given in your "account locked" error message. (The email address changed a few weeks ago.) If you were previously sending messages to me or Cyrus, send a new email to the address here. We might try to go through the backlog of old-process recoveries in the future, but for now you should send new messages.

Sorry for the delay!

If you get a message similar to "your account is locked"

You should be given an email address in the error message. Send an email there and you will be given further instructions.

If you are banned

Your ban message may have an email address which you can email. If not, then appeals are unlikely to be accepted.

If your account was hacked

Email recoveries_2021_xxlgg@bitcointalk.org, ideally from the account's email address. Include your username and a brief description of the details of how/when the account was hacked. A signature will likely be required (see below).

If you forgot the password or similar

Try using the email password reset. Check that the email isn't ending up in your spam folder. If that doesn't work, email recoveries_2021_xxlgg@bitcointalk.org, ideally from the account's email address. Include your username. A signature will likely be required (see below).

Signatures

Often, you need to prove ownership of the account with a PGP or Bitcoin signature. This has two steps:

 1. You need to show that the PGP key or Bitcoin address is associated with the account, for example by referencing an unedited post in which you posted the address.
 2. You need to sign an appropriate message with that key/address.

For example, this is an example of an appropriate proof of ownership:


Note the following elements:
 - The message contains the username, the desired new email, and the current date.
 - You specify the address.
 - You include a signature.
 - You link to the association between the address used for signing and the account.