Satoshi earned those coins deservedly as compensation for his invention, and nobody but Satoshi has any right to decide what happens to them.

Nor I.

No, the benefit of decentralisation is that there are no trusted third parties in the first place. Decentralisation almost always increases costs, and there is no reason to expect Bitcoin to be any different. Personally, I'm amazed it's so cheap; that's probably just due to lack of mainstream adoption.

They are possible whether I want them to be or not; you just have to pay the fees. (They're especially possible if, like most people in international finance, you think "small" means "under a million dollars". The only people who pay for coffee via international wire transfer are those importing it by the tonne.)

"Electronic cash" generally means wire transfers and the like. What else can it mean? I suppose if the coherence problem with quantum money is ever solved, it will be possible to teleport physical currency from one location to another, but that's a long ways off.

Nowhere is it mentioned in the white paper that doing so would be free, or even cheap.

I didn't mention other systems. Bitcoin is an international wire payment clearing system, and there is no problem whatsoever if you don't try to pretend it's something else and use it for a task for which it's entirely unsuitable. Bitcoin is not, nor was it ever designed to be, suitable for microtransactions.

Buying a coffee with an international wire payment clearing system, lol.

The addresses 216.150.155.151:8333 and 216.150.155.152:8333 are hard-coded into the xbadprobe client. It's not clear to me why it doesn't just send the actual addresses it's connecting to and from, but I guess that's why it's not called xgoodprobe.

As I keep telling people, you can't and never could. Bitcoin isn't for micropayments.

Unlikely, but you never know.

I suppose I was premature to assume malice over incompetence, but with Blockchain.info it's hard to tell the difference.

Probably. The sender has plenty of time to double-spend those transactions before they confirm, at which point you'll know for sure you've been scammed.

It is part of a chain of 56 unconfirmed transactions, none of which can confirm until the first one (ef43df70a69413ab2a4c58173af5b0754f8fa08c1148f125d79aecf6d616f387) does. Which they probably never will, since none of them pay anywhere near sufficient fees.

People do things in church other than pray, which you'd know if you've ever actually set foot in one.

You're wrong. The Internet is not a public service, it is a collection of privately managed networks run by private individuals and organisations at their own expense. It is indeed a "real" thing and not "virtual", whatever that means, though from the rest of your response, it seems to mean that you think that basic facts of reality (such as property rights and leadership structures) don't apply on the Internet. They do, and you will not get far in life if you don't understand that.

No. Websites (other than those operated by government agencies) are private property, and the owners are generally allowed to do whatever they like, while everyone else may only use the site with the owner's permission. Aside from a few exceptions such as racial, sexual, or religious discrimination, the owners are allowed to ban you from their property at any time for any reason.

There is no such function, as subtraction is non-commutative, meaning the order matters. It's not possible to take an unordered list of numbers and subtract them from each other.

What exactly are you trying to do?

As the subject says - the forum always returns 504 when I try to access my Ignore User Options. Is it because my ignore list is so huge? What am I up to now? 3,000? 4,000? Anyway, I've got a whole bunch of new annoying users to add which I can't because of the aforementioned error. (I could find threads they've posted in and use the Ignore link on their posts, but there's too many of them; it'll take forever to ignore them all individually.)

It has. SegWit is active on testnet, and several Lightning implementations are currently being tested on it. I expect Lightning will be stable by the time SegWit activates on mainnet.

Well, there's your problem. No version of Bitcoin supports the packet-over-air protocol. Your node is stalling because your Internet connection keeps dropping out; it's nothing to do with your peers.

If you're so sure others want to listen to you, go start your own website and see how many hits you get. Otherwise, quit complaining. In case you didn't notice, this forum is not your property and you have no right make yourself heard here. Go somewhere else if you don't like it.

The Raw Error Rate is completely meaningless except in comparison to Hardware ECC Recovered - if the numbers match, there's no problem. Even the Normalised Error Rate is fairly useless - some drives are just better or worse than others in that respect, and as long as the errors are recoverable, it doesn't really matter. If SMART says nothing else is wrong, it's more likely filesystem corruption or misbehaving antivirus software.

As a serious adult who actually really makes money, I will answer your questions.

El Dorado? You're not going to find it here, that's for sure.

I don't.

Yes.

I didn't realise it was that few. I thought it was more like 99.9%.

Partly because people are stupid, but mostly because altcoiners can't afford a forum of their own, which should tell you something.

Yes. Stupid people are going to lose their money one way or another, so what difference does it make if I'm the one who profits from it? If I don't, there's always someone else who will.