Bitcoin Forum

In December and January I paid a total of about $350,000 of forum funds to hire Slickage Studios, a software development firm. I plan to officially announce this on Monday. At the same time, the firm will start interfacing directly with the community to get ideas for the new forum. Not all ideas will be accepted, and the design will not be decided through voting, but the community's input will be seriously considered. Additionally, some people from the community will eventually be selected by me and others to participate in a development committee that will oversee the creation of the new software.

The estimated total time until SMF can be entirely replaced is 1 year, though pre-release versions of the new software will be available much earlier. In the meantime, I plan on continuing my (slow) development of our fork of SMF for at least ~9 months. I might upgrade to SMF 2.0 if this isn't too difficult. I hope that I will be able to enable avatar uploading and themes. I might hire someone to do a security audit, though perhaps the security bounties are sufficient. Despite past incidents (only one of which was actually due to a flaw in SMF), I feel OK about SMF's security while it's in the reduced-functionality state in which I have it in now.

I recently did a ton of accounting work (for tax calculation), so I can offer some statistics about the forum's finances up to 2013:
- Total income: 7731.42 BTC
- Income from donations: 3113.62 (58,546.99 USD at time of tx)
- Income from ads: 4617.80 (265,792.42 USD at time of tx)
- Total expenses: 929.09 BTC (+ 331.48 in 2014 so far)

As you can see, most of the forum's current wealth is from BTC value increases. USD income isn't so high.

I consider money that was donated to be earmarked for things like:
- Hosting expenses (currently zero)
- Server operation/development (such as a sysadmin, if one is ever hired)
- Legal expenses
- Software development
- Other things that are necessary for the forum itself to survive and thrive

I consider money obtained through ads to be unrestricted except that the money can't be taken as any kind of dividend. It must be used in reasonable non-profit ways. Currently, around 25% of monthly ad income is used to pay moderators. The forum's reserve of money is never used for this. In the future, I'm likely to use a large percentage of forum ad revenue and maybe even some unrestricted reserves to pay someone to work on Bitcoin Core full-time for a couple years. Donated money will never be used for this kind of thing -- that's only for operating the forum itself. (I probably would allow donators to move their donated funds into the unrestricted fund so that they can be used for things that are probably more useful.)

Interesting....
First there's bitching about nothing being done...
Now that there's something being done, there's continued bitching...

http://hbe.ehawaii.gov/documents/business.html?fileNumber=93287C5&view=info

https://i.imgur.com/h1kIX8B.png

In accordance with the information found in the above link, the Slickage company was registered on 13 February 2013 and Jian Shi Wang was appointed as manager.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/slickage-studios

https://i.imgur.com/kgVfaif.png

http://www.linkedin.com/in/wangbus

https://i.imgur.com/kgVfaif.png

https://index.docker.io/u/slickage/

https://i.imgur.com/2RhNo1b.png

http://htdc.org/Clients_Tenants

https://i.imgur.com/20cjlqW.png

http://slickage.com/

https://i.imgur.com/FKi3eIp.png

https://npmjs.org/~wangbus

https://i.imgur.com/ke66zKh.png

http://wangb.us/

https://i.imgur.com/mlb3DAi.png

I deep-searched the asian dude. He's a node.js guy
.
Is the new forum software going to use javascript?

If one line of javascript appears on bitcointalk.org, me and my sockpuppets are leaving forever. That will be the sign that the forum has gone full-hipster.

That's server side bro
But I'm sure JavaScript will be used, it already is lol

What I meant was that javascript would be required for the website to function. I'm not whitelisting bitcointalk.org. Typically node.js requires javascript to run on the client as well as server, I think thats by design. My knowledge of it is limited. I hate javascript because it is evil.

Node is just a server it doesn't require client JavaScript ever. That's up to the developer. It doesn't magically change html all into JavaScript.

But yes I hate these new hipster languages.

We should be running OLD software that is known to be highly secure and stable. 3 year old web servers are a definite no go. We should be using 30 year old web server software. Some hacker would be browsing the forums one day, accidentally break something some hipster wrote yesterday and then realize they've just found a 0day in node.js and decide to own the forum.

For $350K I can do the whole forum, and in less than a year. Also what happen to people that had to build the most of the forum software and show it to the community thread? Theymos we need answers and now.

Thank you leak, you did this community a service!

We should be using 30 year old web server software.

i would lol so hard if it was TF.

i would lol so hard if it was TF.

Normal websites only have to worry about automated vulnerability scanners, weak admin passwords and common misconfigurations when it comes to security.

BitcoinTalk.org is in a different kind of situation. It is in the cross-fire of cyber-warfare. Plenty of malicious hackers use this website for nefarious and non-nefarious reasons. It is likely to be the target of 0day exploits. Anything that runs on BitcoinTalk.org needs to be battle-hardened. We should be running OLD software that is known to be highly secure and stable. 3 year old web servers are a definite no go. We should be using 30 year old web server software. Some hacker would be browsing the forums one day, accidentally break something some hipster wrote yesterday and then realize they've just found a 0day in node.js and decide to own the forum.

Wtf kind of shit is this, building a software studio for one fucking forum

nobody picked up on his play on bangbus? wangbus?

For $350K I can do the whole forum, and in less than a year. Also what happen to people that had to build the most of the forum software and show it to the community thread? Theymos we need answers and now.

Thank you leak, you did this community a service!

You expect him to run a secure forum for a multibillion dollar industry but spend not spend big bucks?

This is A Bitcoin forum, not THE Bitcoin forum.

De facto, it is.

Cmon man ask me anything on this forum pls. No need to do any hunting. What do you guys want to know?

it is not a professional studio. they dont even have a website, or people who work for them.

that $350,000 is to help them start one so they can start on the project.

i just wonder how much this will end up costing and if we end up with anything.

that is true  ;)

It is $1,000,000 plus now, but this "firm" is not able to do the work with out being able to hire staff and workers. I doubt they would trust that escrow anyway.

Why not! He vetted Matt Carson, the first ever double vetted person in all of BitcoinLand.

BTW, I just learnt that MNW deleted his Reddit post. Odd!

wangbus is not a admin at this forum? but hes only doing external work and not part of this forum.

He's staff now apparently. I'm sure it'll cause some confusion and complaints when people see a newbie on staff  ;D.