The US is one of few countries where dual citizens must pay dual taxes regardless of their primary residence location.  That is to say that US citizens must pay the same US taxes on their income regardless of where it came from and/or where it resides.  If there is an exception to that, it would likely be one where taxes where higher when money/income were not in the US.  They also have plenty of other ways to track your income, for instance, any US-based exchange and likely any exchange in any in any of the fourteen eyes countries.  Even trading outside of that jurisdiction doesn't guarantee they won't know, for instance, see the btc-e.com takeover landing page, where the IRS logo is present amongst other US LEA logos.

Regarding the concern about using the coins but not updating a private key with a lawyer or safe deposit box, this is not a problem if you have a deterministic wallet.  I believe the latest version of bitcoin core will create a deterministic wallet if you don't already have a non-deterministic wallet.  Several other wallet softwares will as well, and I believe all hardware wallets are deterministic.  To be clear, a deterministic wallet is a wallet where each subsequent change (and/or receiving) address can be unlocked from the same root key/password.  In other words, you only need to store the information once, and anytime a wallet is re-generated from it, the remaining coins will be spendable.

Regarding the concern about involving a bank or lawyer in general, it has been a few years, and I have not had any luck finding the service even though I want to, but I once read about a service that stores whatever information you want (I say information, not data, because I believe they store the data in a secured database vs storing individual files, and the service is really meant for passwords and account information) in an electronically secure manner (supposed to be secure from hackers and disasters) for release to designated persons upon your death.  Obviously this would not be a zero-knowledge service, so there would be some third party risk, but in order to do the same thing with a zero-knowledge service and not still involve a third party to protect a password (something you know in 2FA terminology), it would be necessary to secure that service with something you have instead or as well.  Unfortunately, I don't think I've ever seen anything secured with zero-knowledge using something you have for security.

I agree that it represents progress, but I believe it should have been implemented as a hardfork to fix the very "softfork" security issues it takes advantage of and without the "lighter" "full nodes".  However, my point above was that another of your anti-hardfork arguments isn't holding water.

I don't care enough about ETH to have an opinion here, but I already pointed out that not all hard forks are good in an earlier post, I'm only still commenting because not all hardforks are bad.

1) Satoshi was long gone by the time of the event I am referring to.  In fact, he was long gone before I heard of bitcoin.
2) As in war, the winners will write history, and bitcoin will be what they say it is.
3) The segwit soft fork that core is pushing so hard will allow existing full nodes to function, but they won't truly be functioning as full nodes were meant to anymore since they don't have all of the data to validate.  Moreover, the newer version will support a "lighter" "full node" function that has these same flaws by design, while I'm not implying as much, this could be a false-flag-style attempt to reduce network security, so IMHO, your argument regarding power grabs seems to fall a bit short when you turn around and support core.

The core devs may want to change the definition of a hard fork in order to make this claim, but it has.  If it had never hard forked, you could still run the original client, but IIRC, at some point an alert was sent out about any client older than 0.5.x not validating blocks after a certain block number due to a fork.  At the time, there were months of notice, but multiple pools were still running 0.3.x and not happy about being "forced" to upgrade.  They weren't forced to, and there was no "core" yet, but they were the economic minority, and even then, without fear-mongering, and even though bitcoin had tanked from $40 to $2, they still wanted to stay on the longest chain.  If an old client won't work anymore due to the change, the fork was hard, period.  That having been said:

Yes, bitcoin has had a hard fork in the past.

No, there won't be two relevant chains.

ETA: relevant is a key word in that second point.  There may be a subset of the 25% or 10% or even 5% (depending on what percentage is treated as "consensus" in any intentional hard fork) who continue to work on the old chain intentionally or otherwise, but even if some exchange validated that short insecure chain, nothing would happen but dumping, because there wouldn't be any demand for it.

Now, regarding hard forks being dangerous, unintentional hard forks (or even intentional ones that don't have "consensus") could certainly be dangerous and lead to separate continued chains for a longer period of time, but "because we're core and we said so" doesn't really have much to do with consensus, and if the right set of pools and exchanges got together and decided they wanted to fork, they could likely do so without the support of any other nodes and ram the change through regardless of what anyone on this forum prefers.

So you call yourself a "Free Market Capitalist" but you are afraid of a free market?  Wow, I'm impressed.

FYI, hard forks have occurred in the past.

FYI, the only way both forks would continue on is if a subset of miners kept mining each fork.

FYI, if that happened (it wouldn't), you would still control the same amount of "money" with the same private keys, it would just be divided across two chains.

In my experience, I can't even see the interface until after the on-disk DB is fully loaded.  However, I have an SSD, so the behavior you describe might be normal on a standard HDD.  Additionally, I am assuming you mean until the DB is fully loaded, and taking forever to sync isn't the best term for that if I am correct.  Sync(hronization) is when the blocks on the public network (Internet) are downloaded.  This is why I specifically mentioned the on-disk DB being loaded.  Until that is loaded, it would not make sense for the interface to display any data.  However, once that is loaded it should display balances and recent transactions with a warning that you are not fully synced and they may be inaccurate.

I'm not sure how much risk there really is, but it is recommended to shut down the client before manually copying the walled.dat file in either direction.  It used to be possible to issue a resync command whenever replacing the wallet.dat file to make sure it was up to date, but I believe some things changed in the most recent versions and that may no longer be possible and/or necessary.  Regardless, assuming you only have one wallet.dat file and simply want backups, you can take them while core is running by using the command "bitcoin-cli.exe backupwallet " from the daemon subdirectory of your Bitcoin Core installation folder.

Finally, while this response may have come pretty quickly, There is a Technical Support section where you should have posted this and might typically get quicker (or at least more informed) responses to these types of questions.

Definitely a biased article.  Writer starts out with "decentralization is sooo important" but then uses that as his argument for supporting segwit and lightning being better solutions than big blocks.  However, segwit encourages pretend decentralization (if you don't have the witness data, you aren't protecting the network's data) and things like lightning require gatekeepers that are even more centralized still.  I'm not saying centralizing microtransactions off-chain is a problem, but the argument that decentralization is so important that we should centralize stuff is not a very good one.  If the concern was really with centralization, the answer would be pruning, but attackers could easily fight against pruning with spam, and even if that wasn't a possibility, years of misuse of the blockchain as permanent data storage has lead to the opinion that pruning isn't an option.

Obvious scam is obvious, not even necessary to go look at the transactions "verified in the blockchain".

Old FUD that actually has nothing to do with what they try to claim is relevant in the same paragraph.

What scam doesn't start with "we can get free money, but we're going to do it for you instead of ourselves?

Even including this makes you look like a part of the scam.

Easily emulated with spoof and you don't even provide link, almost as if this is bait to get people to go to the aforementioned redacted URL, again, makes you look like part of it, edit your post if you aren't.

IOW: Don't test a small amount in this scam, because you won't get a second chance to make money, put it all in now even though it's a scam.

To be clear, when I said supporting, I meant providing development support, not actively peddling.  For instance, in the already discussed incredibly hypothetical scenario, 75% of new blocks would already be on a chain where some blocks are >1MB and a group of core developers refuses to adapt core to accept that chain as valid.  So, at that point the options for a developer who does want to continue supporting that chain and doesn't see a problem with 2MB blocks (since that is what this thread is predicated on, regardless of what any wallet may support) are to try to improve the most popular client on the larger chain (I would predict this to be your decision based on the post I quoted in my previous post), stick with core (presumably this requires the belief that the longer 75% chain can and will fail without turning off most users), or walk away completely (this seems like an unlikely choice, but it is still certainly an option).  That having been said, I failed to acknowledge the possibility of developing for multiple clients at once (sticking with core, but contributing to other projects as well).  Moreover, I can understand why you might not want to answer the question in its hypothetical state with so many people potentially ready to misquote such an answer (or otherwise use it against you), so I will pretend you are undecided for now unless you actually feel so strongly about this that you want to post that you would stick with contributing to core and core alone in said scenario.

I don't agree with everything you post, but refuting FUD that "supports" "core" certainly helps convince me that you do believe what you are posting (vs just being a shill).

I think a far more important question for gmaxwell is this:

So if this rumored hard fork actually occurred, where would you put your effort if the majority of core developers wanted to call it an altcoin and block support for it from being added to core?

This question is important because my belief has always been that if something else wins out, core will adjust and may again become the best client, however, what the best developers do is far more important than what core does.  So as a developer with "nearly a lifetime of relevant experience" that helps to "identify initiatives which are likely to be successful" I'm interested in whether he would jump ship if he had to (supporting classic or unlimited, for instance) and also in whether or not he would believe he had to (vs expecting the ~75%/+ longer fork to die off without confidence in the ~25%/- fork concurrently being so shaken that there is no longer a "successful initiative" on either "side").

You mean like you learned from the history before 2013?  First bubble I saw was $30-40 and burst back down to $3-4.  There were other bubbles after that and before 2013...

Wow, based on my understanding of existing guidance and a few simple questions that don't even mention that guidance being answered by a CPA, it looks to me like the AICPA showed that they are incompetent and can't even do simple web searches to find past guidance instead of using old guidance and common sense to reduce their number of questions from 10 to 4.  I hope this doesn't set the IRS (in even more of a position than they already had) to change things and screw up anyone who has been following the old guidance.

Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, the closest your quoted post provides to such a comparison is as follows:
15400tx (blocksize 3.5 mb) @ vs 15840tx (segwit w/ 2mb)
It's not accurate since 3.5 mb < 2mb segwit, but none of the other numbers line up at all.

To be clear, I'm in the hard fork camp.  I'm not 100% pro or anti regarding segwit or blocksize, but I am anti regarding a soft fork for a major change.  However, I'm calling you out because you shouldn't be playing their game.  It isn't right when they're playing it anti blocksize, and playing the same game anti segwit doesn't make it any better.

Assuming the original topic was also on the forum or some other public space, a link to said original topic would be really useful here...

Making failure to decrypt something a criminal offense is as bad as making failure to comply a criminal offense (sadly, that is becoming the status quo, freedom could be dying, and the only people that would recognize it would be the ones with no voices because they had already been snared).

Rules like this are not necessary (the law abiding will already comply when they aren't being violated, and those not abiding the law can already be charged with something else), easily abused, and absolutely infringe on basic human rights.

Our system is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but the government's take is guilty until proven innocent.  It's terribly sad that free individuals are willing to so quickly switch to that harmful stance with the littlest bit of fear mongering (the ludicrous "forgone conclusion" of child porn, when that wasn't even initially suspected here, is clearly nothing more than a means to an end for someone with an agenda).  Moreover, if there was legitimate suspicion, that would imply that enough proof to get a conviction should already exist without the hard drive being decrypted.  Warrants are already abused in physical searches to find things that weren't specifically called out in the warrant, and decrypting a drive could absolutely be "self-incriminating" even if the drive doesn't contain child pornography (it could contain nothing more than correspondence related to an affair, and even something as simple as pirated music would be legally incriminating).

What is most interesting and scary about this to me is that a judge could already order decryption without these extra legal arguments, and a person could already be detained indefinitely for refusing using contempt of court charges.  Given that, there is absolutely no excuse for the behavior that is taking place and yet "free" individuals are still easily convinced that it is reasonable and necessary.

ETA:  I failed to point out two things:
1) It could even be that the accused has nothing to hide but firmly believes in standing up for his rights.
2) The feasibility of any suggestion of what might be on the disk per evidence, Occam's razor, or any other theory isn't really relevant; my point is that the government shouldn't be circumventing our constitutional rights for any reason.

I certainly agree with that half of your quoted comment.  I could have bolded the other half for emphasis, but I thought my point was made in the rest of my rambling.  That point being that wallets/clients other than core can't be altcoins until/unless there is actually a fork in the chain.  The term altcoin shouldn't be thrown around the way it has.  "Hearn is threatening to create an altcoin with XT" would have been accurate toward the end.  "Hearn is risking creation of an altcoin with XT" would have been accurate much sooner.  "Hearn created an altcoin with XT" was never accurate.

ETA1: Re: "Hearn created an altcoin with XT" was never accurate: (to an extent that it mattered, as its pulse was gone before the discussed forced fork date that I don't even know to have or not ever been coded).

ETA2:  Don't mistake my use of the name Hearn for confusion as to who Gavin is.  Gavin provided coding support for multiple alternative clients, but he did not create them and I don't know whether he personally publicized him using his name (vs letting the creators do so).

No, anything on "chain 1" as you put it, cannot be an altcoin.  Alternative clients are alternative clients, but until they fork the chain and that fork continues to grow alongside another fork, there is no argument about what is bitcoin and what is an altcoin, as bitcoin is the only surviving chain from the genesis block.  Any logic suggesting that changes which don't lead to two competing chains indefinitely is an altcoin is no different than logic suggesting core itself is an altcoin.  Moreover, worshipping core is like worshipping satoshi.  I'm constantly accused of being a big-blocker, but quite frankly, like most recent posts where this accusation has been flung, I'm not talking about big blocks, I'm talking about the idiocy and hypocrisy on both sides of the debate.

This. Because no one else has posted any support, I will note that I agree here.  The software is open source, but an ambiguous/hidden roadmap on a project of this size represents anything but the ideals of community and open source.

It doesn't have to be stated to be implied.  I have seen claims that bitcoin classic is an altcoin, and I have seem bitcoin classic threads moved to the altcoin section.  I've never supported bitcoin classic, but to the best of my knowledge, it is another client that follows the same protocols on the same blockchain until/unless there is a believed/detected "consensus".  I have also seen similar behavior surrounding another (even more questionable and less supported, but nonetheless allegedly compatible) client whose name I don't recall.  So there was no XT altcoin, and there is no classic altcoin, and there was no altcoin for that other unnamed client,but at least some members of core (and/or the community) with some level of authority are abusing that authority and suppressing alternative (albeit poorly conceived) wallets as altcoins solely because they offer potential future support for potential future changes.  These actions practically scream "it's my way or the highway" so the suggestion that no one has come out and said that means anything is a bit of a farce.