prolixus's comments

The guidance does have a defintion of ownership: "Under § 61, all gains or undeniable accessions to wealth, clearly realized, over which a taxpayer has complete dominion, are included in gross income."

If you are the sole possessor of a private key which grants control of a cryptocurrency address then you have complete dominion over the crypto at that address. Under situation 2 of the guidance: "B has dominion and control of Crypto S at the time of the airdrop, when it is recorded on the distributed ledger, because B immediately has the ability to dispose of Crypto S."

Taken in the most taxpayer hostile interpretation that means that if the ledger is duplicated you have income because you have the ability to dispose of the forked coin with your private key even if you have no desire to touch it in any way.

No, he's referring to the John Miller tape where years ago Trump called up a reporter and pretended to be a PR person so he could brag about himself.

I think your last paragraph is right.

Right now there's a default transaction inclusion policy in Bitcoin Core that only includes a small number of low to zero fee transactions. Under current conditions zero fee transactions have to wait a while to be confirmed.

There's no proposal to change the default allowance for below standard fee transactions if the block size increases, so assuming cheap means zero or very low fee the increase in size will come from standard fee transactions which means increasing capacity won't drive down existing fees.

I'm not sure that your example makes sense. Suppose a scenario in which there are three miners with equal hash rates and a protocol which emits 3600 coins per difficulty period. The division of coins will be approximately 1/3 per miner when everyone is running. You're a miner and decide to enact your strategy.

What happens is that in higher difficulty periods your competitors who keep running constantly are making 1800 coins each. When the hash rate drops and you come on everyone gets 1200 coins each. Your expected revenue becomes 600 coins/period. The result of your strategy relative to just running constantly is halving revenue.

The only variance introduced is the speed at which new blocks are generated in each period.

The attitude expressed by Faulks in the article seems to be precisely backwards if you genuinely believe that driving while intoxicated is a bad thing. The harm comes from the impaired reflexes and judgment, not someone punching in a command to drive home on a touch screen console. Making the two scenarios legally equivalent will only discourage responsible behavior.

Insurance is a cost of doing business. Coinbase generates their revenue from fees on the purchase and sale bitcoin, and from fees on merchant services. That's where the money comes from.