We promise to ask intelligent reflective questions, @saylor !

Haven't read through the whole thing yet, but:

Here we will propose an incentive compatible solution, One-Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate, that mitigates prior concerns over replace-by-fee-rate policies by allowing the replacement to only happen when it would immediately bring a transaction close enough to the top of the mempool to be mined in the next block or so.

👏 YES. I've been thinking about exactly this solution since I read the recent discussion about pinning attack issues earlier this year.

Another related realization I had recently is that in many cases there's no need to broadcast a transaction until it has a chance to get into the next block. You can use the time waiting to e.g. batch further payments into the pending transaction or raising the feerate without having to deal with fee-inefficient CPFP or privacy-degrading RBF.

That's very misleading.

The money they "make" from curtailment is not a payment made to Riot for curtailing power usage. Rather, it's effectively a discount on their power bills. What's really happening is Riot is getting discounted electricity because unlike other power users, they're willing to shut off when electricity demand is really high; no-one is going to cut you a check worth more than your power bill simply for turning off your miners. Riot is still spending a substantial net amount of money on power.

It's likely that the $8.6m number in that article is nonsense, based on some misunderstanding of Riot's business figures. Eg that might simply be the raw amount of Bitcoin Riot happened to sell that month. Or it might be the profit margin they made that month.