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I consider myself something not too far from a data privacy activist but to be entirely honest this article hurt my eyes because it contains a lot of misleading statements that give a false sense of security, which is counterproductive when it comes to people being safe on the internet. The rule of thumb that the more safe you feel the less safe you are unfortunately works reasonably well for most users. I can explain in detail if interest is there, otherwise it's enough to say that VPNs have their benefits BUT also have their downsides. They prevent you from being attacked by hackers about as much as virus scanners protect you from targeted malware. NOT. Claiming differently gives a false sense of security that in the end results in over-confident users that do stupid things because they think they are "safe" or "covered" when they are not. Someone being careful and educated in what he is doing will always have more security compared to someone thinking he is safe because he installed a program or uses a service.

It's all speculation guys, let me sum up what I said: from my observations(!) spamming might(!) be counterproductive nobody really knows how the internals work or can do much about it (other than devs that obviously decided not to share the info) mods or support don't have any up- / or down-vote option Maaaybe we should go back to the initial reason this topic was created and share our experiences instead of wildly speculating about things people obviously misunderstand as "information"

If it is anything it is wrong information (reread my two posts, when in doubt)

Sorry, but I didn't say anything of what you implied. What I said is that from careful observation spamming seems to me to be counterproductive. Other than that i can only say that if there was a way to up- or down-vote users for mods i should know it. There isn't.

... exactly, or like using some serious illnesses for similar means - or joking about suicide. if anything it says something about the people feeling the need to use such synonyms, in my opinion.

I don't find it cool nor trendy in any way to use sexual orientations as an offensive replacement for something bad, but maybe I'm just old-school.

Nobody really knows how rainbot internals work, so this is only a suspicion from careful viewing: To me it seems that spamming not only doesn't help but is counter-productive to getting rain. So it looks to me like you don't only need to be active in chat but also constructive

my hope is that is will vanish from chat as soon as people understand that does exactly the same

True, but this is a political/social problem, not a technical one. I always like to say "there is no technical solution for social problems". Your initial question was if this could lead to being a reason for BTC failing or not growing and it isn't since it will simply adjust to whatever politics does. An example that this is indeed a political problem is that in many countries renewable energy is sponsored by the governments in favour of conventional means of creating the electric power (i.e. coal, gas, atomic plants, ..). From a broader perspective there is no energy crisis per-se but an energy-saving crisis in my opinion. The main reason why i.e. solar energy could be adopted more is that the energy is there when it's not so much needed (during daylight, when people are at work) - if there would be better options to efficiently store energy (also avoiding the peaks that lead to energy literally being thrown away to save the power networks) a lot of these issues would be instantly avoided. So this is an aspect where indeed new technological developments might help towards a solution. (But all this is far away from your initial question).

But why would they if it is good as it is? Also: >50% of miners would need to decide to change the protocol - that's not something easily done with BTC due to the sheer number of miners.

It's a real issue but nothing that will ever hurt Bitcoin as such - the difficulty (amount of hash power needed for mining a block) is directly dependant on the overall hashing power of the miners. If the price of kw/h would double it would become unprofitable miners would power down. As a result the hashing power would be lower and as a result of that the difficulty would also get lower (resulting overall in the same network performance). This in turn would maybe at one point make it profitable again to mine even with the higher prices for power consumption and the cycle would begin again. It's one of the many clever things that are part of the algorithms underlying Bitcoin

Thanks for the hint! I merged the two topics

I don't like these events because they create unreasonable spam without any chance for you to verify the legitimacy of players. I also don't like them because they look like you could do something similar as the existing challenges with less than 1% of the price pool and without any time involved on the players side. And I don't like them because I've seen other people do similar things waking bad memories. Apart from all the above I do believe they are also not good for you. You describe yourself as a retired gambler. If you honestly try to get away from gambling doing giveaways on gambling sites seems a tiny bit counter-productive to your goal of leaving gambling behind.

You gotta trust complex systems. My advice is to reduce complexity. Have a look at brainwallets for example (and have a good passphrase)

I do not agree with everything nattekut said, but these are very important points that everyone owning enough values of any kind to worry about should give a thought.