Bitcoin Forum

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Goat covered most of what I want to know, but just to add:

Will there be a working non-javascript version of the forum?

Are there any plans to open-source the forums software? considering it was funded by donations it should be "owned" by the community.

Out of millions of choices what motivated you to choose this particular dev company?

Also:

Why is the forum paying people a fee to store the forum's bitcoin when storing bitcoin is free? Can't the forum find enough people that will store bitcoin for free?

Why would it be "owned" by the community?  Setting aside bitcoin quirks even regular non-profits don't work that way.

Why does this forum require $350,000 for?

Does it really cost that much to reform a site and such?  :o

What kind of software are talking about here, since $350k is a lot of money. I mean you assumed we all know what you are talking about.

Not too sure, probably security systems and additional features.

Because it doesn't need a tipping function inside the forum itself. It's rather easy to copy and paste a Bitcoin address, adding a built in tipping function is one more thing which can go wrong, and at this moment in time to forum doesn't need anything else to go wrong. If you want to tip people look at their profile, signature or contact them about it I'm sure they won't say no.

Also, I would appreciate it if you didn't use such annoying text and edit your previous post instead of replying to get your post count up.

It was just to get the question noticed. Thanks for the reply though.

Yes, I know that, d00d. That is exactly what the defence would have to provide, real facts about how the funds were spent.

Augusto Croppo is just trolling, he surely is buthurt because he sold all his bitcoins at $200 on the past months.

LoL at the global moderator trying to control the discussion when he fails completely to do that in other sections of the forum.

I also have some questions:

Why you admitted to spent 150,000 USD in a deal to hire a software firm as the below evidence shows? It that just part of the whole 350,000 USD payment? If so, what is the ID transaction of this initial payment? You also stated that you used the 10 BTC from Matthew and that only cost Matthew 52.09 USD. How do you know that was exactly what Matthew wished to provide at the time of the donation? Moreover, why did you specifically choose Matthew 10 BTC to exchange for 6408.50 USD? Could you present proof the exchange happened?

Certainly whatever BTC I sold in the past months has nothing to do with the present situation.

The only "buthurt" here is you, d00d.

Just out of curiosity all of you who want a refund of your donations are you expecting straight XBT refund or fiat equivalent and why?  Also why did you donate at the time if those questions weren't answered?

Since the forum donation levels are pegged to BTC, they obviously want a refund in BTC. Works both ways you know  :P

So someone donated to the forums a few years back at $10/XBT and let's say the forum spent that XBT on hosting or some other minor things.  So by your logic where will these refunds come from now; out of the current donations, theymos' pocket, or where from exactly?  Is every later donator supposed to basically subsidize these refunds and give a profit to earlier donators?

If the BTC had already been spent then they would not get a refund. And this is the logic of the forum, not mine.  ;)

EDIT: If the BTC was spent in an improper way, then they would be refunded in USD of course.

Goat, when was Theymos going to answer these questions? Has this been disclosed?

An Idea ... not sure if its a good one but an idea nevertheless.

perhaps any spare money leftover should be donated to a charity. EFF ? used as bounties for software development the community see as appropriate, or maybe all forum users that registered before a certain date could be given free lifetime membership to the bitcoin foundation as way of thanks for the contribution to the forum over the years.

just a suggestion  :-\

Irrelevant, at that point the advertisement revenue was already covering that.


The refunds will come from the unspent funds.


No. Donations are not an investment fund. No one donated expecting to withdraw that later. Everyone donated to cover the necessary expenses to improve the forum. However the forum was not improved and the funds were not spent. So it is quite reasonable reimburse the funds collected and start a new campaign from the scratch, with a clear and open plan to determine how the funds will be used.

That still do not achieve the cause. The implied agreement was a better forum, which not just include a new software, but improvement of the forum internal organization as well. That will not happen if the unspent funds are donated to a third party.

Are the tags sale able?  I'm sure you'd get plenty interested buyers.

Donator / VIP tags

That would be a ponzi. ;)

Isn't there am (open) financial overview made every year?

Yeah I get that, my point was for the leftover funds, obviously new forum comes first, but we could get a gold plated, diamond encrusted, teleport enabled, super forum for $350 000. It would be crazy to spend that much. There is clearly going to be funds over and above requirement.

You can still donate 10/50 BTC for Donator/VIP status. It isn't really emphasized anymore though because the forums doesn't really need more donations. The amount is not being changed, because 10 BTC has always been 10 BTC, and the dollar amount is irrelevant. Theymos had thought about adding smaller increment donations, however did not because no more money is needed.

No, the books were never open.

But what you can do with the donated BTC clearly is relevant. If the forum needed more donations, I am pretty sure it would lower that  ;)
And why was it set at 10/50 BTC rather than 0.0001/0.0005 BTC? The dollar amount?  ;D

Nope, Theymos has stated multiple times that the donation amount would not be lowered. 10 Bitcoins was about a month's worth of hosting at the time, which is why it was set at 10 Bitcoins, I'd imagine the fact that 10 and 50 are both even and common denominations is another factor to why it wasn't 8.79428 BTC and was 10 instead.

I've decided not to create an official announcement thread today. But I will answer some questions.


I've answered this before.

The forum was created by Satoshi and Sirius. Without any explicit agreement or assignment of ownership, it came to be the case that I am now chiefly responsible for forum management. The domain is owned by Sirius. I have no way of forcing him to do anything with it. (Though I recently did gain partial access so that I can change DNS records.) I control a lot of the forum's money. Sirius cannot force me to do anything with this. Various treasurers control other forum money; they're bound by the treasury agreements.

I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure who the forum's owner is legally-speaking, and this is irrelevant to me unless I'm dealing with legal stuff.


I've answered this many times.

I control most of the money. I consider it my responsibility to appropriately manage this money for the non-profit benefit of the forum, Bitcoin, and the world. I take this responsibility seriously. However, I retain sole control over how the money is spent. No one has any right to influence my decisions, though I can be convinced by reasonable arguments.

The rest of the money is held by treasurers bound by the treasury agreements. Under the treasury agreements, I have a lot of decision-making power, but I can be over-ruled in some cases.

Again, talk to a lawyer if you want to know who owns the money according to governments. I don't care about this unless I have to.


No. I avoid the term "non-profit" in official materials to avoid giving the impression that a government has assigned the forum with a non-profit label, but the term does accurately represent the philosophy of the forum. No one gets or will ever get any kind of dividend from forum revenue.


The most popular forum software is:
- Old.
- Written in PHP, which sucks.
- Written insecurely and messily.
- Difficult to modify, especially safely.
- Not much more featureful than SMF, if at all.

There are a handful of newer forum software packages which solve some of those problems, but all of them are very sparse in features.

The goal of this software project is to create new, open source forum software which will compete with SMF, phpBB, etc.


This isn't completely defined yet. It'll have almost all features that we have now. A main goal will be improving filtering and data presentation so that users can more easily manage the flood of posts both board-wide and within threads, while simultaneously reducing the need for centralized moderation.


The total cost will probably be around $1 million. The $350,000 covers several months of work, after which I will evaluate the performance of Slickage Studios and choose whether or not to continue. In any case, the code will be open source, so no work will be lost.


About one year from now.


No.


Yes, there will be 2FA.


Maybe. I don't see any harm in that if it isn't too difficult/expensive.


Yes, though some advanced functionality may be unavailable without JavaScript.


Some of the treasurers do store funds for free, but extremely-trustworthy people who will do this are rare.

In clearer terms:
Theymos owns the forum.


In clearer terms:
Theymos owns ~5000 of the BTC collected by the forum

The remaining ~1800 BTC is stored by "treasurers". The treasurer must send some or all of the bitcoin they store to an address if theymos tells them to. They have 14 days to complete the transaction. 1 trustee or 3 members of the community council may stop the transaction as follows:

List of Trustees and Community council members


IMHO this makes it worth it.

According to theymos (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155000.0) three people store funds for free. I don't see why they can't store all of the funds (Since they already store 85% of the forum's BTC). 3.5 BTC / month is a waste IMO.

Adding three since I didn't see them in the list probably the obvious ones but since it may be stickied into a FAQ.
 Best to get them out of the way

Will newbie hell return
Will Ignore Lists start showing colors with the new forum aka get the bugs fixed
Will the Trust System be modified or tinkered with the new forum or carry on from the original forum.


When you mention non-profit ventures can you explain what sort of ideas you have in mind
Bitcoin and the world is a fairly large scope
An example will do just curious if you mean advertising to increase bitcoin adoption
Lobbying with regulators
Seed Funding
Charity relief
Advertising
Etc.

In other words how big is the world scope you have in mind :)

So the $350k might be a complete waste of money?  :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o

Why did you spend $350,000 if you're not even sure if they're able to handle the project?

And why did you take this decision while being as shady as possible?
I understand if you don't give a shit about my opinion (hence, I won't give it), but I'm pretty baffled that the staff & donators were not in the loop.

Since the answer above as to who owns the funds was answered as "theymos owns the funds" then the answer to "Why did you spend ..."  is likely "Because theymos wanted to".   8)

But now he has to answer about this very weird choice he made, on his own, in all secrecy.
Would he have endorsment from the staff and donators, this was a non-issue.
I just don't get why theymos puts himself in such situations.

I wouldn't regard that a complete waste of money. If it's a wise decision, well… It's a start…

If you think that spend 1 million dollar for a new forum software (without any planning ahead) is a wise decision then you must be delusional...

Wake up, d00d! Feel the smell of coffee and accept you had been duped by your "benevolent dictator".

I wonder how many people would have donated had they known that their donations would end up being spent on a million dollar forum developed by a previously unknown friend of the admin with no other contractors even considered.

I'm sorry - I really don't have a dog in this particular fight but purely as an innocent bystander I'm just a little shocked.

If anybody here would like a full featured HTML5 multi-platform virtual world for less than a million dollars please PM me.  I'll even throw in a free forum.

I would have went with a Tender asking what specifics Theymos had in mind
Seventh Continent went with 2x that though :)

That

I love how people are glossing over the thought that nearly $1,000,000 might be spent for a forum/website like thats a totally reasonable cost and not sketchy at all because OH NOEZ we can't use existing forum software! Maybe if you actually updated the forum software instead of crying about how "older versions r better cause less features less bugs", you wouldn't need to make decisions like this.

I don't think "staff" and "donators" received a terms of service when they received their positions or make their donations.

If someone did I would certainly like to read those terms.

I certainly didn't make my contribution with any stings attached.

Theymos is free to do what he wants with my contribution as far as I'm concerned.

Since I can't explain what the current problem with forum software is as well as Jeff Atwood's team at Discourse, I'll let them explain:
http://www.discourse.org/about/

For many reasons (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180726.msg1888938#msg1888938), Discourse isn't what we're looking for, so we too are funding a startup to fix this problem. Jeff Atwood won't tell us how much he raised for Discourse, but with 10 people on the Discourse team working full-time for a year, he's certainly raised more than a million dollars. People are expensive!

Based on Theymos specs this may well be the Psy Ops of the internet forum system
Basically Prism in a box but it will shock and awe people towards it
Nuke users with automatic smart IP bans
That said I like it!

What the next revolution in forum creating software will be is anyone's guess.
It is a fair point however that it hasn't really changed all that much since 2000.
This idea does seems to me a bit out of the box and it might be a better solution than trying to create building blocks on current tech.
But aiming for the big guns and becoming the beacon of forum software is quite the goal.
Worth a shot though thanks maged for the expansion on the details.
Guess I'll sit on the sidelines and see what gets created.

Luckily I'm a new member and wasn't here when people used to send 50 BTC donations. Not because I have something against donations, but because I'd hate to see my money being spent this way. Most communities use free forum software like PhpBB or SMF (or, of course, paid products like vBulletin) and, in case they need particular customizations, they pay a company to do the work for them. But of course it's nothing like 7 figures or even 6! Not sure why Bitcointalk is so different and needs to spend such amounts of money. At least why not try to update the forum to the latest SMF version or change forum software altogether FOR FREE before trying any other solutions?

I really doubt I'll get an answer as most of my questions about the forum to theymos go unanswered...

Please explain how unilaterally making a decision to spend $350,000 as a down payment on new forum software is appropriate management.  It seems especially inappropriate as the software company does not have a website.

Most communities don't have 6 million dollars sitting around that people have been badgering to have spent on forum software for a year and a half. Frankly, the forum's expenses are pretty minimal now, hosting is covered by PIA in return for an ad slot it seems, and only 25% of the income generated is used, the other 75% goes to storage where it would continue to sit for years. Some security bounties are paid out now and then, but a week's worth of advertising would cover those.

I dont know if Theymos made the right direction in spending a million dollars on a completely custom forum, however you never know, it could turn out really cool, and become a widely used replacement to SMF if it is as neat as it could be. Can you imagine the advertising associated if half of the world's new forums were based on a build created with Bitcoins?

I've said it a few times already, at this particular point in time, I don't especially agree with the decision, however I'm willing to give Theymos time to address certain issues, and willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will start complaining AFTER I see what has been produced. Whats done is done, its not my money, and we aren't going without on something else because Theymos decided to break 1/6th of the bank on new forum software.

The breakdown of the dissent group appears to be two donators/VIP that want their money back regardless of what theymos does or does not do and a staff member or two also not liking a decision without additional input. The rest of the donators are either mostly staying quiet, optimistically waiting, or pessimistically waiting. I'm in the latter category, because I think that without a project manager with a stake in the game, any project always ends up going several months without results. I see this daily in my day job, unfortunately.

Theymos *has* stated he's looking towards some sort of a governance system in the future as well, so we do have that to be optimistic about, I suppose. I'm willing to wait and see what happens, just like I figure most mods and donators are. It seems a bit early to be outright critical of a decision to get started, IMHO. I mean, it's been close to two years for a good number of us.


This might just be a nitpick, but Bitcoin is closer to $500/coin presently than $1k. And some of us are quite bearish and expect it to go to $200 before $1k, so I'm not sure it's a good idea to keep referring to coin held as if it's worth $1k/coin anymore.

Absolutely! While I have no comment about who theymos decided to fund at this point in time, I absolutely love the idea. Check out Wikipedia and look at how vBulletin was created...


Actually, they do own a hackerspace that they very well may have made the website for:
http://hicapacity.org/

I agree that it could turn out to be a great platform, I'm not questioning this. My doubts are about the way the job was assigned (or if alternative cheaper solutions were considered) and why no free upgrades are used in the meantime (for example the latest SMF version), given the complete project will be ready in at least one year.

Thats fine, you are correct Bitcoin holdings should not be denominated in fiat prices, however 1/3rd of the payment was already made, and that was at a higher rate than we are at now. I suppose my main point is, the forums has very few expenses, a good deal of ad revenue, so why not go all out on making a neat new platform. I'm willing to give Theymos the benefit of the doubt on this until he proves that he did not deserve that benefit.

I would have liked to be in the loop regarding his decision making process, but frankly, I don't think that many of the people here myself included would have actually been any help. I'm assuming he talked to people who's technical opinion's he valued, and he made his decision from there. If not, we can boo him in a year's time if the end product is a flop.

To be honest, with the idiotic decision to remove the newbie jail, I've found myself coming here less and less.

Then there's the two hacks in the past few months, and sticking to an ancient old forum software.  Guess what? phpBB is free, supported, and probably can import the DB from this wheezy old crap. 

I think the forum is pretty much dead. It just hasn't stopped twitching yet.

PHPBB isn't much better with regards functionality, does not handle big forums well at all and it is far less secure in general compared to SMF. The code is very messy and pretty sketchy in places and there a ton of file inclusions in PHPBB - that is not a good combination!

It doesn't have the best track-record when it comes to security either:
http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1529/Phpbb.html

Here is SMF's:
http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2069/product_id-3598/Simple-Machines-SMF.html

Don't get me wrong, SMF sucks, but most forum software does. It's a good thing BitcoinTalk is making their own and even better that its being released open source, I'm just not liking the lack of transparency and I hope the costs will be justified in the end.

People tend to complain a lot about why Bitcointalk isn't using a newer SMF version. Despite the reason being stated a bunch of times, updating to a newer version of SMF isn't as simple as people think it is. An upgrade would probably break a lot of the custom code on Bitcointalk. Some people still don't understand this and think it's something that can be done in a couple of minutes.

Our company employs very capable and highly skilled software engineers that have worked closely with other companies in the past, everything from server side ops and scalability up to mobile applications - iOS and Android. Our design repertoire includes a lot of NDA work and is on a need to know basis so I'd like to reveal only to certain individuals. Please contact me if you have any questions.

In regards to engaging the community with the new forum development, the idea is to start a sub-section or series of threads and take information from the community about feature requests, discussions, bugs, etc.

Design work has started on the forum, but the first delivery to this community is an auction system for the ad spaces app that will integrate with the current forum. We'll be revealing that in the upcoming weeks.

I'd like to add that one of the major concerns for the future forum implementation is security and we'll be getting it checked with a professional security agency and hopefully get some public input on security checks (since it will be completely open source software).

As for the migration, users can volunteer to be migrated over to the new service, while still keeping their old account on the old system (SMF) with their user data intact. Back links and track backs should all work as expected to make sure links don't break from other sites.

As Theymos pointed out: The goal of this software project is to create new, open source forum software which will compete with SMF, phpBB, etc.


This is my crash introduction to the community and it's very exciting to be fully engaged on an open source system that will be used for this forum. You'll see more of my posts in the future regarding forum development.

@wangbus

Maybe you can help answer some questions from the OP


Thanks!

I already said the work for our company is NDA or on a need to know basis. We don't do marketing because we are already fully booked with customers and projects. If you would like more validity, throw me some developers that know what they're doing and they can tell you if I'm legit. :)

Its just some random guy, they dont represent slickage.

So you are doing an open source software but you cannot disclose the work?

Your bullshit "NDA" excuse is not going to work here.

Let's try again: did you designed a forum software before? Could you provide a reference?

No they havent, and they aren't affiliated with Slickage, its just someone messing with us.

 >:(

Thats incorrect. They really are. Note the age of the account: I whitelisted it a while back for them on request.  It's the real deal.

I'm still incredibly skeptical, there are more than a few inconsistencies here. There was never mention of any NDA, nor any mention that any work had actually begun yet. Theymos had said that they were planning on collecting information from the forum users to see what things they think should be implemented, yet work has already been done, and they have been given no feedback yet?

I dunno what to say but it's the right person.

I think you're misreading what was said there, I think he was referring to past work they've done, not the forum work.

Hey Guys,

I'm currently employed by Slickage Studios as a Senior Software Engineer. I wanted to post on here since it seems like we're making ourselves public and to let you guys know that's we're real software engineers with real experience in the field. I'm pretty sure you guys are going to Google the hell out of our handles so we've gone ahead and used the handles that we use in our day to day lives. So have at it.

I'll try to be online in this forum as must as possible to field questions, and give updates when appropriate.

Correct. The NDA was in reference to previous work we've done with other clients. We would love to  share more about our previous customers but this was a decision on their side and we have to respect their wishes. As for the forum code, it will be open source. No NDA here.

In all honesty, we just haven't had time. Since the start of the company, we've been pretty busy and we figured that we didn't really need the marketing. Our work spoke for itself.

Naturally, clients that are pleased with our work will suggest us to others and so on. Basically what I'm trying to say, was that we didn't have a need to build out the website.

Sorry, that's not me! But that is James. As for my Github profile, it's https://github.com/taesup. Now let's see if you can find my github.io page and/or my personal homepage... it's not hard. I apologize in advance though. I haven't updated either in quite a while.

Really professional!

All negativity aside...

We will do our best with this project and hope the community responds with support. All source will be open source once we're ready for contributions.

Theymos has done enough work to work with us to know our competency through our mutual networks. We are doing the community a favor by building this and also for the open source community because a forum of this sort isn't exactly high priority on the "hipster" Silicon Valley list of important things to do. However there is a lot to be done in terms of making the technology more up to date. I hope we can all agree on that note.

Heh, sorry I thought you were an imposter. I read a few of your posts perhaps in the wrong light, and thought someone was making a joke.

forum business is too hard thing really. The stress you have is not comparable to other kind sites. I understand theymos, i still respect him and no question at all. The only place one can questionable is in court.

We don't mind the questions. That's what we're here for right now, and why we've created accounts with our day to day handles. We're here to engage the community. So ask away.

As for the amounts being tossed around, I obviously can't speak for Theymos or for James. But I can do a quick back of the envelope calculation. gweedo, being that you're a programmer too, I'm sure you can relate to this.

A typical programmer costs around the price of about 80k a year (that's low for Silicon Valley too). Which comes out to about 37 an hour. All companies need to pay for benefits, overhead, rent, electricity, etc on TOP of paying out a employee. So normally you would charge a rate around 2 to 3 times the salary of a employee. That's already around 114 an hour, or 240k a year. And there's already more than one employee working on the bitcoin forums... so yea.

As a freelancer, I'm sure you charge around the same rate to compensate for the "self-employment tax," your own benefits, etc.

I am calling bullshit on the teasup and wangbus accounts. I won't change my mind unless Theymos states that they are the "real deal".

Thanks! I wrote that years ago as a personal site and just haven't had time to really update it. I actually don't really like to follow the corporate culture where everyone wears a tie and all that jazz. I'm more of a rebel in that way. Maybe I'll just leave it how it is...

Community involvement do not contribute at a pace and/or contribute without much accountability. I'd like to push this project past its initial workings then allow involvement. Forum software in general sucks as Theymos stated. For those who know me understand that I am in love with the idea of improving communication. I'd like to improve that and this is a good opportunity to do so.

Yeah it is pretty cool.  ;)

You are entitled to your own opinions and this is a valid concern. Maybe to quell any doubts, we'll ask theymos to formally introduce the members at some point in the near future. 

But we want to keep cost down so why not open source from the start? It would the greatest transparency. Also if this is a passionate project for you why didn't you raise capital from outside VCs? Does the bitcointalk forum own a piece of this forum if it ever it went the way of the other open source projects and started generating income?

Sorry dude, you'll have to ask the remaining questions to Theymos. I'm being as upfront as possible and I don't think the amount is out of hand. Startups in the valley get 1M for a year with a small team very easily for a project and scale wise, this is probably much harder than a lot of things out there.

EDIT: Sorry I misread. I will have it open sourced from the very start once we are past the design phase.

From my understanding, no... this will be completely open source.

So in response to your previous questions, as much as I'm allowed to at least, we do have other clients and we do try to keep our costs low. As such, we believe our rate is competitive. In all fairness, we hope that this project doesn't just end in a year, no software project ever just ends. At least, not open source ones. We do hope that the community can contribute as well. In our shared experience though, someone does need to champion the cause and often times money is the best motivator. We hope that we can set a good base for the forum, get the designs out the door, then allow the open source community to help fix bugs and build features.

The most successful open source project are usually backed by some commercial sponsor. Node.js itself is backed by Joyent. Also, we want to keep the funding within the hands of BitcoinTalk. This also ensure that any commercial sponsor outside the community can't hijack the project by threatening to pull funds.

As for other startups, many millions have been invested into startups that still have not turned profitable but continues to succeed in their own space. Twitter is a great example of this. We are comparatively cheap on that scale.

As for the software itself, it is not a custom piece of software. When open sourced, it'll be available for use by anyone just like vBulletin.

therymos doesn't get forum software designed, matthewmwright holds a press conference claiming fraud, everyone gets out the pitchforks. therymos gets forum software designed, everyone claims fraud, gets out the pitchforks.

are you guys able to design a quantum version of the forum software where they both design and don't design the forum software?  that should allow both groups to be happy.

I'm sorry you feel that way gweedo  :-[. I feel like you've twisted some of our words and have made some assumptions which reflect negatively on us. I could sit here all day and talk about price estimates, workload, staffing and whatnot but I would rather not waste other people's time. I do have some work to do.  ;D

In closing, Twitter may have made a lot of people money but itself as a company is still not out of the red. (Last time I checked, pre-IPO.)  vBulletin is not open sourced, but it is also not a custom piece of software which is what my aim was with that statement. As for language, I assume you are referring to JavaScript? JavaScript just happens to be one of the best supported languages out there in the open source world and has more than one use, even down to the command line level. Forum software is outdated, there is a demand. We are helping to fulfill that demand. I don't know how many people you assume are working on this project. The NDA is in regards to prior clients and not this one. I'm sure you can understand that we want to respect our previous client's wishes. But I will guarantee that the software being built is not a rush job that we release and expect the community to finish. We are open sourcing the code for transparency, for the community to help if they would like to (I hope you find some way to work on the code as well, given your skills.), and as a way for theymos to give back to the community. I hope I have addressed most of your concerns. If you would like to discuss this more in private. I'm open to that idea, and I'm also fine with you documenting and releasing anything we discuss privately. In the mean time, I would rather hold off on these questions to allow other people to satisfy their concerns as well.

Good day, sir.

inb4 You are wrong because you spelled "theymos" wrong
inb4 forum software not designed yet

We tried. It caused a rip in the fabric of space/time. Luckily the Doctor just happened to be around. (Sorry, bad Doctor who joke.)

smh I thought you had a NDA with your prior clients  ::)

d-wave hired you didn't they

Sorry about my unprofessional name. Everyone seems to get a kick out of it so I stuck with it. Transparency right?

¯\(°_o)/¯

So thermos has appointed wangbus to code the new forums  :-\

I have to say (and I'm sorry wangbus if you are really you on here) that I like others am not instilled with confidence by:

• your name
• your github page
• your 'company' page
• your "'NDA'-bound resume"

Basically, you have nothing to show for yourself, which is slightly, strange...

Anyway, that being said good luck with it all. Will the project be developed on github openly from the start?

Extremely sorry for the lack of exposure but you guys can add me on LinkedIn or talk to me directly if you would like to see my resume. The project will be developed in open source but will not be accepting contributions until we're ready.

Your concern is understandable and I'd like to be as transparent as possible with development.

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

@Wangbus, teasup

Was theymos able to see any of your NDA'd code/portfolio?

 ::)

This shows that Michael could care less for the community. His priority is not to protect or to improve the forum. He wants to increase the profit generated by advertisements before anything else. A better auction system would allow him to have more free time to do his best for the community, which is do almost nothing.

+1

Please link us to anything you can, I don't think there's been any sort of portfolio work posted.

No, you are not doing any favour for this community. You are being alleged paid with funds collected from donators/VIP forum members. We are not in need of favour around here, we are in need of security, quality control and internal organization. We are the ones doing you a favour.

Thats not what happened at all. We want forum software, we all do, but we're not happy with the way things are being handled.

A while ago Theymos offered 5500BTC to make the forum software and had people from the community contact him:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0

Hundreds of people contacted him, some people with extensive portfolio's and some people that were well-known and trusted by the community. After reviewing hundreds of people Theymos decided that he wasn't happy with having anyone other than himself make the forum software.

I can understand that because if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself and unlike Bitcoin where you can just send money to an exchange and get BTC, there isn't an exchange that you can send money to and get good forum software.

Theymos is still in college etc so he didn't have any time to make the software himself. So after a year or so of stalling he decided to hand over $350k as part of a million dollar contract to a software development company that is unknown to the community without telling anyone - not even other bitcointalk.org staff.

Unlike the previous offers this particular software development company does not have any public portfolio or even a company website. They also refuse to show us any previous work at all claiming ALL of it is NDA - we have yet to see a single line of code that was written by them. I am not sure if you realize this, Slickage Studios, but that money was donated by the community over the past number of years so all these people who are asking questions are the ones who are paying the bills, not Theymos - in fact I don't think he paid a penny of his own money.

Theymos hired this company without even telling us and this was the wrong thing to do, he should have posted here beforehand letting us know his intention to hire them and had us grill the company seeing as we were the ones paying for it.

In addition to this it is many people's opinion that the cost is excessive. You can argue that x cost x to make or x got so much in IPO money but lets not forget that the Satoshi Bitcoin client cost $0 to make and has spawned an industry worth a Billion dollars.

In the end of the day Slickage Studios were not the only bidders for this project and many more established dev companies were willing to make it for less (5500BTC was $150,000 at the original time of offer). In addition to this Slickage Studio's are not Twitter, Facebook or VBulletin and they cannot justify their costs by quoting their expenses. Also most of the people here would not like a startup working on this project but rather an established company with verifiable history and a track-record.

This is what has happened. This is why people are mad. Anybody would agree we have a right to be mad and highly suspicious of this entire thing.

I've done some background checking. I don't have much on Wangbus yet but I do have some stuff for Ed (taesup).

Resume:
https://sites.google.com/site/taesup63/EdwardKimResume.pdf

Blogs:
https://sites.google.com/site/taesup63 - has some previous projects
http://taesup.com/blog
http://taesup.blogspot.ru/

Social:
https://twitter.com/taesup

github:
http://github.com/taesup

Yes and we talked about the technical pieces regarding this implementation for a while now. We were approached and connected via other parties so I wasn't aware of the other thread on this forum. Like I said, we'll do our best and everything will be open source for public eyes to see. I am a community leader and there is a lot of information about me on the Internet if you want to dig. I actually don't update my public resume anymore, but please add me on LinkedIn if you guys would like more information. I've been focusing solely on my company.

When they hear things like "doing you a favor" and "Twitter isn't profitable and it cost millions", are people supposed to be encouraged?

If anyone thinks a million dollars is in any way appropriate - or frankly even $350k - for a custom forum build then I've got a bridge or two I'd like to sell them.

Thank you shil, but you are really the only person here that can't talk because you didn't track the right people, so yeah your opinions don't count. Let business people, that are living in the real world.

$1 million dollars for a forum, is insane! Any custom software, that is not enterprise level that cost more than $150K is insane! I am a freelancer I know the price. Also they already admitted that this is not going to be a full time project, they have other projects. That for sure doesn't warrant the $1 million price tag.

For $350K I rather not see the prototype. $350K for a little bit of work which they will turn over to the open source community give me a break, to do thru bug hunting and adding to it. Come on this is $150K max for the whole thing. Theymos get your head out of the sand this donation money now listen to the community we don't want this!!!!!

I'm pretty dissapointed that some of the money will go for an automated ad auction system, that will only work on a dying forum software, and will need to be ported to the new custom one after that. Is that really necessary?

Auction system is a detail. The forum is the main project.

On top of that, the ads generate revenue for the site so that's very important.

Well I agree with others, 1 million dollar for a opensource forum software is pretty a big amount, It's like paying 1 million dollar for a pizza now (that lazlo ate in 2010 :D)

If theymos have paid 5500 BTC for a new forum software in 2011, no one would have asked a question because bitcoins price was low that time, but now even 1000 BTC is too much.

@Wangbus, How much time it will take to migrate/convert this forum into a new one, after new forum software will be ready?

That's a good question. I hope for that price everyone will get to keep their watchlist, and all the negative trust (and none of the positive one, because it's BAD).

But what I'd like, here, really, is to gain access to the specifications you're working with.
And for each feature, I'd like to have a workload estimate, and a progress bar.

How many people will work on this, btw?

Within the first 3 months, I'd like to have an initial version up of the new forum software. Migration will happen afterwards. I'm not sure about how long this will take yet.

im pretty sure goat expects current rate + 80% interest for his time + another 80% for loss of income + a dinner with theymos in vegas

With all due respect, that sounds disturbingly like naive and commercially inexperienced programmer accounting and not real world business accounting.

I currently employ twelve developers, run two software development companies and have been doing that kind of things for many years.  From my perspective the figures you're quoting here are nonsense. :)

Maybe it makes some sense if you can only employ people from California, one of the most expensive places on Earth for this kind of thing by the way.  But even then it's a pretty generous arrangement.

I don't care how you cut it:

The auction system is written in Node. It will be able to be used with the new software without much modification.

You answer one question? Come on we need answers. Please don't just ignore questions.

+1
I'm curious if the price was fiat or XBT.  The way the exchange rate is going nowadays who knows it might end up costing more then 5000XBT.

Thank you Kouye! This is the type of feedback we're looking for. Although we can copy as much of the functionality as possible from SMF to ease the transition from this forum to the next. It's up to you guys to help point out the features that are essentially broken or could be better in other ways.

As for the specification, once we make the Github account public, you can track our progress and issues there. You can even submit your own issues as you guys use the new software.

As for the number of people working on the forum, Wangbus and I have volunteered to go public (and thrown to the trolls) but we do not feel it's fair to others (if there are any.  ???) for us to release that information. Is this a cheap cop out? In essence, yes. But that's the best I can do given the circumstances. You can assume there's at least two of us.



For everyone else, we understand your concerns and agree that they are valid concerns. I would be just as skeptical about "some company" coming in and trying to sell some million dollar software. The best we can offer is that we are professional Software Engineers. You have our day to day / professional handles. The information about us is out there. You will probably come to your own conclusions as many have. We cannot sway those conclusions with just words. We hope that as we start releasing software, we can start to change your perceptions. We hope that we can work with the community to build better software.

While I can't answer for theymos, I thought that I would at least provide my thoughts to the discussion.
Because there is not much money if forum software anymore. Jeff Atwood got his seed funding for Discourse off of name recognition alone. If you disagree with this statement, please give me a list of startups that started in the last five years that are working on new forum software, along with how much funding they've received (if available). I am genuinely curious to see how much attention forums have received from VCs and angel investors recently.

I would argue that it is. First and foremost, this new forum software is being made for us and us alone. Sure, we're giving it away to the public, but that's besides the point. Since it's hard to make a case that there is still much money to be made in forums (as I brought up above and might be wrong about), software companies entered negotiations with us believing that we could very well be the only paying customer. We wanted this done now, no matter what, and we could afford it, so we stuck with that belief and compensated them accordingly. In return, we required them to make the project be open-source. They can act as the official distributor, maintain the official repo, and provide consulting services (much like wordpress), but they can NEVER require anybody to buy any of the code that they produce for us.

Again, I would love to be proven wrong in my assumption that people aren't investing in new forum software anymore, because at least then there will be some innovation outside of our platform to look forward to and integrate in the future. But as it is, we've already paid our initial deposit, so there's no point in arguing that we should have paid less. Instead, look for reasons why we should get more for our money. Convince them that outside investors can and will fund the rest of the project.

I hate to say it, but at the end of the day, dictators get things done. If new forum software were just a nice thing to have sometime in the next ten or so years, then theymos absolutely made the wrong call. However, we needed new 21st century forum technology here two (three?) years ago, so I can't fault theymos too badly for just going ahead with this on his own. I just hope that he realizes that if this goes bad, he is solely responsible for the outcome. Since I don't wish ill fortune against theymos, I'm hopeful that this will turn out just fine and we'll all be able to laugh about this later.

Good idea.

I want one mother fucker here to step forward if you even contributed more then $500 in bit coin at the time that you gave it.

sure it's worth millions now but at the time that 5500 coins was worth less then 100k.

I feel like its super hypocritical that some of you are assigning 2 different values to the same money.

this million dollar software is getting bought with $20k worth of donations. your getting a great deal.

"We"? There is no "we". You did not participated in the decision and it is not your money. So stop with this "we" bullshit, OK?


LoL

The only thing that Michael got done until now is a flawed trust system and an activity counter...

2011-08-29, BTC was around $9, so that's $450

From August 2012, BTC was usually above $10, so here's a list of mother fuckers:

How much of that 350k is being sent back to your bank account so you're not accused if stealing funds? We're not 9 years old and stupid enough to believe you found a company that doesn't even have a website to build forum software for 350,000. Sounds like one of those ill give my friend the job type deals. I'll await the oh he scammed me messages.

I would like to ask some questions and also express some of my views on the matter in hand.

Obviously, a big issue is the automated ad auctions, why do we need this? Haven't you expressed enough times already that the forum doesn't need any more money, yet you are 'investing' in a module which is going to increase the income of the forum. Another question, is what do you plan on doing with this money that you have gained from this new auction module? Do you plan on keeping the new forum software up to date and fixing vulnerabilities with it or do you plan on paying staff members with it or anything else? Isn't the new automated auction going to run into problems too?

 
Here's a quote from a staff member stating that the forum no longer needs money, and let's be honest even though you are spending a awful lot on this forum software you will still have a lot left over. Now, why would you want to focus on this and implement this into the new forum if you don't require any donations, because ad revenue is basically a donation to the forum but you pay staff members a percentage of it.

Another question: Why did you pick James Wang to develop the software for that amount of money? It seems that a lot of others at the forum would be willing to do what you are asking him to do for much less, and maybe these people are more qualified. I want to know why you didn't communicate to the forum about this, why couldn't users at this forum get involved and create a open source forum software between each other. Gweedo is more than qualified for this along with several other programmers at the forum.

If this project really is open source then why are you not answering all our questions? You have to convince us that this is a good idea because lets face it there hasn't been much communication between the administrator team and the community. Even staff members are ill informed and are not sure what is being done.

According to CrunchBase Slickage Studios have 4 employees and founded in 2012. Surely, in 2 years there isn't enough past work present to show they are the company for the job. Established companies or well known people which have done big projects are normally the people to hire because the big projects are normally known by a lot of people. But, such a newly created company which has I personally have never heard of and I'm sure others haven't either are now working on a one million dollar project, which will probably turn out to be more because of vulnerabilities found and other issues. How long are Slickage studious going to continue support after the software has been handed over.

What I don't like about this whole thing is we don't even know if they are capable of doing this, it seems either not a lot of research was done or you like to gamble. If you have reasons why Slickage Studios is the right company for the job then please send us some references so we can have a look personally too. In many peoples eyes I can understand why they think you might want get the money out of the forum and into your pocket by hiring someone who you personally know or have a mutual friend. I have seen the IOS apps that they have posted and I'm less than impressed, their design and functionality are not impressive one bit. All I do know about him is that he learned was learning Python in March 2009.


James, I have a question. You have tweeted previously on twitter this: If that's your philosophy then why are you requiring 1 million to start this? Or do you lie much? 

Also another tweet:
You tweeted this on march 2013, I hope you have done your home work in less than a year my friend.

I'm also glad we are hiring Wang because he is always productive.


I have nothing against Wang or Theymos, but you have stated that you have been transparent and are doing the best for the community yet we have not had many answers or have we been involved in any of the decisions (Although I strongly disagree with this), maybe normal users like me shouldn't be included in the decisions but donators and people who have helped you ie. the staff should at least have a say in this.

So what you're saying is, you started up a company, with no website, but somehow found million/billion dollar businesses to buy code from you, without previous work, (because everyone knows everyone gets a NDA so they just have to trust you...) and you don't need to build your website and or portfolio because you're so busy with work, you can take the time out of the day to earn some chump change to build forum software? And the only way these million/billion dollar businesses know about you is word of mouth? So theymos knows the admin of a major site such as walmart, bank of america, how about chase bank who referred you to him? I'm highly sliptical pun intended!

 :-\

That looks a long time ago... At that time I donated to the forum because I was under the impression the forum development plan was being followed since 2nd November 2011:


I assumed the new forum software development was about to start and Michael was able to manage the project. This is a post made on 7th September 2012 which made me confident the money about to be donated would be used to improve the forum:


After my donation I expected a candidate to be chosen. That, of course, did not happen in a reasonable period of time. It was never mean to happen. I was straightly duped into a money grab scheme perpetrated by Michael under the disguise of "donations".

This is the last post by Michael in that thread:

Well, he wrote "probably" ::)
But I hear you, claiming not to pay anywhere near 5500 BTC in advance, which where something like 600K USD at that time, and throwing 350K USD at someone now just doesn't compute.

Not just merely "throwing 350K USD" at some random start-up company, but also ignoring all offers made by various forum participants since 2011.

They donated it for forum software which they never got till now.
Also
True,but point is, theymos didn't used those 5500 BTC or 100k on time.


They are assigning 2 different values because theymos is giving 1 Million Dollars not XYZ Amount of BTC
 and please check bold text, you are one of those "Some".


How do you know that software really worth 1 Million dollars? it's not even created yet, It's will be a forum software not some NSA's new surveillance software.

Ps: It won't be first forum software built on node.js , check
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nodebb-the-discussion-platform-of-the-future
https://github.com/designcreateplay/NodeBB

First about ad auctions, yes the forums no longer needs donations because it is now self sufficent because of the Ad Auctions. Staff are paid based on advertising revenue, but as you said a bit later in your post, we were not in the loop either, so no staff members had any say on that feature, nor do I understand why it would be one of the first things to be implemented. Sure, for a million dollars revamp everything, but I would have thought more important features would have come first.

Theymos did discuss who to pick for creating the new forum software, but with people he trusted and thought were qualified, privately. He said that Wangbus was recommended to him by Warren, who's opinon he valued. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=81508

I don't know the details as to why Wangbus in particular was picked over others, but we the public also don't know their qualifications, which I'd hope Theymos got before hiring them. Maybe their NDA that they are talking about is something incredibly major. Theymos was aware that they were a new company and that the $350k downpayment would be used to hire more people. There weren't any kickbacks for Theymos. If he wanted to embezzle money, I'm sure he could have thought of a far easier way than to introduce this kind of controvercy.

I respect that the staff are getting paid because of all the hard work they put in for this website to function correctly, but spending money on a automated auction system sounds silly to me, this isn't going to get more adverts to be displayed it's just a fancy system which is only going to benefit Theymos so he doesn't have to post now and then the auction.

Of course there are some promising features being discussed for example two factor authentication but, that is still pretty standard in most forum these days, this feature has been requested for a long time now and we should of had it implemented sooner he has the money to pay someone to implement this into a simple machines forum, yet he hasn't. That's something which I would support spending money on, but even that doesn't cost a lot for someone to implement. It's just ridiculous that one of the only mentioned features has no benefit to the community.

I hoping theymos has made a wise decision, but even then he hasn't got by it the right way. The staff should of been involved in such discussions and decisions even asking the communities feedback as we as Bitcoin users rely on trust, I don't understand why this has been kept a secret from A) the public b) the staff. Also, I don't quite understand why we can't see what James Wang sent to Theymos, considering he's a business owner I would of thought he would want to advertise as much as possible but, he has not given out anything.

I see the staff are making more effort than Theymos himself in trying to resolve the issues that the forum is having, you can slowly see the community getting tired of all this secrecy and there has already been people leaving the forum. Even Tysat a moderator (which I respect highly because of his high workload and friendliness) doesn't quite understand what is going on and looks like he doesn't support the decisions being made.

We have a wonderful community yet if these decisions keep on happening I fear that there will be drastic changes but, all it takes is a little communication and community involvement. Thank you SaltySpintoon for trying to answer everyone's questions even though you don't fully understand yourself because of the lack of communication, although it does seem Maged and maybe Badbear knows a little more than you do.

For a million dollars, I'd expect the forum software to have all of the features we could ever want and more. I don't disagree with having an automated Ad system, however I would have thought far more things would take precident. I also hope Theymos made a wise decision, frankly, the community has no idea what is going on, Theymos could have spent $1M to get $10M worth of features, I dont think there is room to critize content yet, because we haven't seen the content to be produced. We can somewhat criticize his decision making process, but we also don't know how many people he spoke to about it, and who they are and their levels of expertise on the matter. For all we know Theymos may have contacted the world's authority on forum software, and they may have pointed him to Slickage. What we can undoubtedly criticize is the lack of transparency that is going on. While the community isn't entitled to know everything that is going on behind the scenes, it probably would have been a good idea to hold an official Q&A and fill us in on what he could prior to now.

Moderator's aren't employed by Theymos, we are welcome to question his every decision and flat out disagree with him at any point we want. Of what I know of him, I like the guy and expect that he would have done a better job handling this than he has, however I will be giving him the benefit of the doubt until he gives me reason not to. If the work produced is subpar, then I'll complain then. Theres no point in complaining now, the money has been spent, we can either support slickage and try and help get things done in the form of suggestions, or we can continuously badger them and slow whatever work is being done. I move that we withold badgering until after they have proven themselves incompetent. If they prove themselves competent, then we will have no reason to complain.

I personally think a good start would be to look at the thread Viceroy created a while back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244678.0

There's some solid feature suggestions and discussion among the community there and I think there are some respectable members who contributed some good ideas. I see where you are coming from and understand a lot of us were to quick to judge. (Guilty) although, even if this decision was a good decision on the behalf of Theymos I still believe there could of been better communication between Theymos and the staff, it seems that you and Tysat had no involvement in this decision, I don't know what you specialist in and if you would have had any good feedback to provide to Theymos on the decision but, I'm sure on of the staff members would of suggested asking the community because that's where the money came from in the first place. The lack of transparency was a bad decision but I'm hoping the forum software will not be and I will be eagerly waiting for the release.

Theymos, could of contacted people privately but, no one has expressed this as of yet.

We will do our best. I've completely surrendered my public presence and dedicate immense efforts toward this project. For clarification, I use Twitter for thoughts that encompass our maker/hacker community here. The comment about security was about messing with Yubikeys. Assuming I'm a newbie at anything is a valid concern which is why I need everyone to survey our work in the future. This is definitely a test that most software companies probably don't need or want to do. But I'm very excited to be closely work with this community in the future to develop this product. Like SaltySpitoon mentions, let's stay positive about things everyone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against you or your company personally, but I wouldn't say I'm positive about much of this. Logistics were handled poorly so my expectations aren't quite that if had everything been handled ideally. That said, I don't know about you, your company, nor what you and Theymos have already worked on, so I have no say on your work quality. This should be a good opportunity for you guys to build something fantastic to put on a resume and your website. That way your next clients wont be just looking at a NDA. I'll applaud when its done and fantastic, or yell if its crap. Whats done is done, so might as well let you get to work so you can prove everyone wrong (or hopefully not right).

Easy for you, you just got the pay day of a lifetime to build open source software, which most of will probably help out with. So yeah lets stay positive.


The correct way to handle this theymos for the future is to do the lowest costing yet highest yield.

I'm sorry but anyone, anyone, trying to justify spending ONE MILLION DOLLARS on forum software should have their internet access revoked... among other things. Absolutely ludicrous.

Positives: I imagine the forum will be quite decent after the work is done.
Negatives: The fact the sum of money involved reminds me of a scene from Austin Powers.
Negatives: Seriously, one million dollars? (more?)
Positives: Wangbus can hire an awful lot of hookers, and buy an awful lot of cocaine now.

Any information about tax?

This is a great question!  We're dealing with large amounts of money now and the government doesn't like not getting its cut.

As a freelancer I know that, Wangbus will have to give Theymos his corporation's w-9 form, if they haven't done that already. That really should have been done before the transfer of the $350K.

Could you elaborate about that? For what exactly purpose the w-9 form is necessary?

By submitting a W-9, you are certifying that the tax id number you are providing is correct and accurate. Wangbus is going to need this to file for income tax.


That's a good question which I forgot to ask, I should imagine the tax on such a fee will be rather large which would require additional funds to be used. I'm sure the government will not miss this large transaction, they will want their cut.

Are you sure non-profits pay income taxes?

This transaction doesn't significantly affect taxes AFAIK. By "selling" bitcoins in this way, a lot of USD income was made via capital gains, but it immediately became an expense. The net income is zero for this transaction. Appropriate taxes (determined by a professional) will be paid, of course.

Why don't we have the automated ad auction system, yet? It's so trivial for a 350k$ team that there is no excuse.

+1 Would like to see a "Forum Development" subforum now.
Ps: I hope they separate "Marketplace" from discussion forums and add functions like encrypted messages, 2factor,mobile theme and all the functions users wanted to get.

That all should be coming soon. Very soon.

Anything that involves money and security is not so trivial, IMHO. There's a lot of extra bits you have to take into consideration especially since we're designing this to work both with the current server software and the new one we're building. We need to make sure that any user information isn't leaked through the ad auction system yet can tie in directly with what theymos already has.

Edit: not user information because some of it will be public (usernames, whatever else the user has already deemed public in their SMF profile, etc) but at the same time the user does not have to sign up for a new account. They'll be using the account they have in SMF to validate identity. Sounds fun right?

Internet access is a right, not a privilege.

I wasn't speaking literally. Didn't think I'd have to state that.

nothing's gonna get done on the forums.  people donated when the value of BTC was low because they wanted a rank to show off.  the donations are likely redistributed to the top team or theymos is enjoying the money.  who doesn't like all that money.

For $350k, it's going to want to be a pretty fricking amazing forum.  

Happy to be proven wrong, but to me it just looks like Theymos hit the jackpot with all these donations and the rising price and is just enjoying the cash.   There's no logical reason why things have taken so ridiculously long to get done, and this whole "give shitloads of cash to a random group with no history" doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.

Honestly I'm not particularly happy to have this place attached to Bitcoin in a big way (as it is) as it just comes across as amateur hour.

EDIT:  Wait, he's spending a million dollars?   I don't even know what to say to that.

EDIT 2:  And what of the other 5 million dollars that's sitting around "doing nothing".  What are the plans for that.   If the forums costs are paid for by ads, then that money should be distributed back to donators at the very least (just to be clear, I haven't donated).

I'm not sure if this was answered already or within the scope of the project, I think it is important for Theymos to allocate funds towards design rather than only the back-end of the new forum. Would be nice if we had a really well designed forum to use. I could point you towards a few good firms if interested.

I also don't understand why use some no-name development studio when the pay is that high.

Good god someone is getting ripped off here!!!! I would have made a completely scalable system from the ground up for 350k and it would be tighter than mother gooses ass!!!!

that 50k vip investment could of made you one hell of a forum for your own site.

I am sure most of the donators/VIP could do more than a forum if they were properly reimbursed to remedy the situation. That amount of funds would much more productive in the donators/VIP hands rather in the hands of the current administrator.

Speak for yourself! Personally, I actually like the current forum and I hope the new one will be as "clean" in its design.

I hope that the new forum will not be to complicated otherwise it would just be a waste it be usee friendly otherwise no matter how much fancy features it will be hard to navigate and extremely annoying.

Where is it apparent that the BTC I donated are explicitely for the purpose of creating a new forum? Theymos is free to make use of the funds as he best sees fit, in my view.

Source?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38071.0
https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html

contain nothing of what you say.

\o/

I can't wait for the new software are we expecting to see this a year from now or some time next year?

Around a year they said.

I think we can expect some delays with such a big project but I think it will be worth it when it comes out even if the money was a little high its welll worth it if we have the best forum around.

Whatever happens people will still complain, unless it is completely revolutionary in forum technology, but whatever it looks like people will probably be disappointed. How can a million dollar years in the making forum live up to the hype?

A plug and play open source forum in Node.js might actually be worth $1 million dollars. Most of the widely used forums today are built in PHP so this could be just as big for Node.js as it is for the forum. Additionally, if this code is open source and integrates with BTC, it has wider applications.

*Puts on his tinfoil hat*

Since Augusto and Goat aren't directly saying it, I'll just be blunt so folks know why there is some flak about spending the money...

Federal (specifically DoD, but others as well) projects often come with an NDA for the developers to not share government work in their portfolios. Whenever I hear someone talk about NDAs, I assume government work. Given that this is going to be an open source forum that has some form of BTC and Trust integration, it would likely be highly valuable to various entities within Darknets as well. If designed intentionally with exploits in the open source version that are patched in the live version, an aspiring three-letter agency could use the success of a Node.js forum to promote adoption in some of these remoter areas of the web. Then, at a specified integration-point, they could exploit said software causing turmoil for hapless Darknet administrators.

*Takes tinfoil hat off*

Regardless of whoever is designing this software, security should be the primary focus or else you're going to get some really bad (and IMHO, quite-deserved) flak. I'd highly recommend keeping the existing security bounties and possibly even integrating or accounting for them during development of the project.

Seeing that nobody else has asked it, I guess I will.

wangbus, are you John K. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=31288)?

Also, since you are Staff, thus allowed to peruse the entire forum's back-end database due to you needing to know what this one encompasses so to better build the next one, do you have access to our private PMs? If you don't, get it, for there's a wealth of information that could be gleaned there to augment a $1M USD payday.

~TMIBTCITW

PS: I devised a formula to determine the "intrinsic value" of this forum: IV = IV/F x F in which IV stands for intrinsic value and F represents BitcoinTalk. Somebody check my maths please, for I'm prone to errors after eating an entire 16" pizza from Rosati's (or sometimes on an empty stomach).

I feel the same about Node as well and I spent a long time a little over 2 years ago getting into Node and had great success with the technology in many situations. I'd like to add that I've never done NDA government work and security is very high priority in what we're doing.

Oh yeah... I'm not John K and I haven't been given access to the database yet but will need it very soon. We will follow standard ethics for private data and not transmit information to the public. This will indeed be the highest of priorities.

I don't see the need for giving you access to database content at all.
Schema and content of specific internal tables should be sufficient.
If this is your highest priority, you should at first determine what kind of data exactly you need to see.

Not sure if you're guessing that all staff is able to look at the database or not... but we can't, AFAIK only an admin has access to that.

This is the forum administrator perpetrating the biggest charity fraud in Bitcoin history. There is not going to be any new forum software. The only thing which will improve in the next months is the auction system. The only and solely interest of the administrator is to gather more and more money. Everything else is cheap talk and the new forum will certainly never be produced. Do you all think a forum software worth 1,000,000 USD? Do not be a fool! I come from a country where politicians overpay contractors to misappropriate public funds. This is exactly what is being done here, overpayment to let the administration misappropriate the donated funds without being held accountable. Do you think this is unlikely? Please, ask the administrator the proof of payment. Ask him why he cannot provide such proof. Ask him to open the books and you will find amazing how that request is ignored.

AC brings up a really good point... we still haven't seen any proof of the payment.

theymos or wangbus,

Please show us the transaction(s) where the $350,000 payment was sent.

AH HA! Caught you! You forgot the period after the K, thus you could still be John K..  ;D

Seriously, thanks for taking the time in addressing my concern. BTW, get yourself a bigger pad, for I've seen bedrooms larger than where you live.

Later, bud.

~Bruno Kucinskas

All depends on if you donated to theymos personally or to a community forum.
My guess is that most donators thought they were providing funds for a rising community, not giving it away to its current administrator.


You mean a full, direct access to the whole database?
If so, I hope you are currently posting here through a vpn...



If that was a scam (which I don't beleive it is at that point, to be honest, and I do have an easy trigger), I'm 99.99% sure that theymos would have sent a fake TX to cover up, that's really basic stuff. He can post a txID, I'll still be as dubious as before. Pretty useless, in my opinion.

Not sure if he did exchange or what but theymos said this in his previous post.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I agree with gweedo and this is the first time, I saw a developer asking database of a live website to develop something, SMF 1.1.19 is available for download all over the internet.

@Wangbus are you not able to make that auction mod with help of demo forum and database?

Is that why the site went down the other day? it said it couldn't connect to database.

It does that from time to time with workload, but I think Theymos took it down briefly for an update or something the other day.

Is there any discussion on this then? I didn't hear of anything which was announced.

Yesterday it happened due to a SMF bug triggered when too many people access the site at one time under certain conditions. I fixed that bug. A few days ago it happened when I added a feature that required me to keep the messages table locked for longer than I expected. (The change is that all edits are now logged, whereas previously they were only sometimes recorded in DB backups.)

Interesting! Isn't this akin to somebody paying a developer to redo his very large website based on it currently using Wordpress as its CMS? Simply download the latest version that the site is using and build from there. Once built, all the content is migrated to the new site, and probably only then would the developer need assess if/when troubleshooting is warranted.

I'm not that versed in such matters, so somebody please call me if I erred in my assessment, expanding upon the quoted text.

I've been known to give theymos shit every now and then, but overall I still kinda trust him, notwithstanding the TF episode.

Update: This just leaked: theymos' first choice was Smartronix: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site/  ;D ;D ;D

~Bruno Kucinskas

Wow it looks like theymos got a great deal!  :o He saved $17 million  :D

This would be best and should only take minutes to do... I guess transparency is overrated

The $350k was paid in cash, wouldn't that mean Bitpay or similar handled the BTC?

It should be pretty easy for both of them to show the transaction.

It's even more hilarious because "Bitcointalk" as an entity doesn't even really exist.  It's not a registered non-profit.  There appears to have been no attempt to establish it as even an LLC despite theymos holding more than enough funds to got through that step.  At the end of the day it's unlikely that the government would view "Bitcointalk" income (whether donations or ad revenue) as anything other than theymos' income and theymos alone as responsible for operating the "business" of Bitcointalk.

When the IRS comes knocking, the onus is going to be on theymos to prove that anyone other than him has any legal liability whatsoever in relation to Bitcointalk.  "I don't believe in regulations" isn't going to cut it as a defence to failing to comply with those regulations.

It's also rather amusing that when Bitcoin was worth fuck all nobody really cared all that much that their donations were in the hands of a young kid with no business or project management experience - now those donations are worth several million dollars, people suddenly care but there's no real way to wrest that control away from him and put it in more experienced hands or to ensure that he acts in good faith.

I think all the money should be donated to different charities around the world. This forum is more then fine and will be more then fine for the foreseeable future.

"Pretty sure" means you may be mistaken. In this case you are.

I didn't donate to charities, but to the forum. I would regard such an act a misappropriation of my funds.

There are people doing business here. The forum isn't fine for that.

Hell yeah, this.

It looks like what's happening is similar to finding a couple random new computer science graduates, giving them $1,000,000, and expecting them to write the best forum software in the world.

Prediction: If these Slickage people try to write a new forum from the ground up, it will be almost universally regarded as worse than the existing forum.

Money well spent then...

why do we need a new website ?
the current one is fine ?

sweet mother of god.... so theymos is having some guy build forum from ground up ? Seems legit they registered their domain a week or 2 ago.
why not just give the hacker the password ? ( all tho I suspect he already has it )
and fark a year ??? I can do basic php, python etc etc.. and I could build the site in less than a year and for ALOT less than $350k.

Atleast Goat has the good sense to question this tard-ation.

For a split second I felt bad calling ppl tards in the other thread..but wow......

i repeat: clap clap clap

The current forum is not "fine".  It's suffered intrusions on more than one occasion and it goes offline a lot.

Certainly you don't need a million dollar forum if it's primary purpose is to give people somewhere to sit around dribbling bullshit about Bitcoin, but theymos' vision for Bitcointalk seems to incorporate more than that. 

I'm not hugely in favour of the forum being a place to conduct business - I think it tends to make people careless - but that seems to be part of the vision.  Certainly if this million dollar forum was designed from the ground up with security baked in, then the software might be attractive to other enterprises with similar requirements (and I'm sure that's crossed theymos' mind). 

You don't spend $1 million on developing forum software in order to offer a prettier look or bells and whistles.  It would make sense both financially and ideologically (if you're theymos - remember that theymos is very ideologically driven) to do it if you thought the end product might assist grey or black market forums to be less penetrable though.

You are making big bucks to design a forum, yet you think vBull is Open Source?
That is odd that you don't know the most basic thing about the industry.

hold on.. slow down!!!
according to the thread I made... with the multiple intrusions... the hackers didnt get access to the db.. they just held hands and danced around.

but ya.. i was being sarcartic after i locked other thread.

His ideology is certainly "different", kind of like Amir's is "different".

well your dealing with a person who tried to sell GLBSE shares 2-3 days before it collapsed..... after he got inside information.

our fearless leader !!
fearless until its his btc that might be lost.........

Well, the lack of transparency is problematic. The lack of community involvement in the decision making that lead to this is problematic. And, the lack of a clear definition of the relationship between theymos and the community and the resulting anarchy/theymos as benevolent dictator is too problematic.

THAT SAID, I will attempt to go against all of my instincts and natural predispositions and attempt some optimism in this matter.

Presume for a moment that theymos was visionary in retaining Mr. Schlongtrain/Wangbus/whatever and Co. and that they indeed are capable and follow through in delivering $1mil in added value to the forum.

If you suspend disbelief momentarily, there could be some interesting possibilities. If the new forum fully integrates things like cryptographic authentication and signing of 'posts' and transactions between users, as well as the ability to create complex conditional transactions between multiple users including things like an escrow function capable of different terms such as if X/Y of escrow keyholders affirm or deny a transaction it is released - things like that, perhaps a reformed trust system as well, heck the capability of complex transactions backed up by cryptography could even create the possibility of a rudimentary legal system with judges and juries, etc - built right into the p2p transaction functionality of the forum software itself rather than as a separate service running on top of the forum and validated by the community to be legit as it will all be open sourced - then it could be very interesting indeed.

If you can envision a forum software capable of seamlessly, natively supporting these types of complex interactions between users in a way that is cryptographically sound and secure, perhaps a visionary and anarchic way to look at this is that with this forum software, forum membership becomes the new citizenship. The infrastructure of the forum replaces the infrastructure of the sovereign nation in governing and administering the transactions between users/citizens. And, of course the weakness of bitcointalk.org in this regard is that it's "owners"/admins/whatever are known and so should it become a serious threat to physical nations, it could be physically threatened or taken down - but since this software is intended to be open source, it could and should then be installed elsewhere, hopefully a lot of elsewheres.

Viva la revolucion. Now, maybe that will cost more than $1mil - if it does, and if it does turn out to be so revolutionary, then theymos will have redeemed himself and Mr. Schlongtrain will be a hero.

Hoping for a happy ending,

me

Did you read the bio on these guys? They have combined a few years of post-Bachelors computer science experience under their belts. $1m for this project is absurd, especially given that the firm doesn't even have its own website. What kind of software development firm can get away with charging $1 million for a project when they themselves don't even have a website? This just looks awful, all around. Gweedo et al. raise very valid points across the board.

anyone who believes theymos paid 1mil or 350k is well...very gullible.
pretty sure we'll get updates then it all mysteriously vanishes.


I havnt read all 13 pages.. but does anyone know how theymos met the dev ? considering they don't have a site and all.. i'm kind of curious ?
perhaps he met him at a bar.. and they got talking..  or perhaps he sent PM

'Hey d00d I can make you a site for 1 million'
well you dont have any previous websites, that actually work and was not registered 2 minutes ago.. so i suppose based on those reg flags it seems reasonable what is your btc address ?
'wow i didnt think it would work errr umm here it is'

I don't believe he has mentioned this yet (at least publicly).

Theymos met wangbus through a member warren.
I don't know his username but you can see pics here http://hicapacity.org/page3/

Ah. Looks like possibly this guy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=81508

Post where Salty mentioned Warren: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455867.msg5144795;topicseen#msg5144795

*edit* I guess its all above board and legit then.
well done to the successful company in winning the contract !!

And come on guys, its very likely that payment will be made in stages with delivery - not 100% up front. No one really does that IRL.

Mr. Schlongtrain

Priceless.

As I said elsewhere, I have not and will not donate, specifically because I don't see lube nearby, and even if I did, I'm not into that. Donating to this forum under the current structure is far worse than speculation. It's outright absurdity, and a shame that this 'cornerstone' of the Bitcoin community has committed to the MtGox of forum design.

At least launch a pilot, or 'something' that can let people see more than Mr. Schlongtrain's new WangBus plushies.

Hell, I'm a writer - I'm ready to start writing a bestseller for $1,000,000 - just send it on over. Really - I'm that good, and I've got just as much evidence to demonstrate my ability as Mr. Schlongtrain (more, actually, as I'm older and been driving my own schlongtrain since probably before he was born).

Anyway, vapid comments. Feel free to disregard them, as I don't follow these threads (bad decisions in the making rarely fascinate me). Plus, as others have pointed out - I have not donated anything - therefore I have no right to a voice (never mind the time I donate writing about Bitcoins, educating people about them, or encouraging their adoption - so they can see the million dollar heist on the forums here - woo for the community).

Later :/

say it out loud.. and properly

"million dollar payment will be made in stages with delivery... for the website.. which costs 1 million dollars... even though fortune 500 companies dont spend that much (well some obviously spend heaps more)"

sounds funny when you say it out loud, right :) ?

also I didnt donate... so like the writer dude above me.. i better shutup and let the heist begin..
popcorn is on me :)

I am Warren Togami.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=81508;sa=showPosts;start=0
I am a developer of both Bitcoin and Litecoin, management consultant and engineer.  My previous career was as a Linux Software Engineer followed by MBA and a bit of law school.  You can see from my post history that I have been involved in major bug fixes in Bitcoin during 0.8.x and 0.9 and have contributed to related projects like p2pool in both code and fund raising.  I also consult for <various Bitcoin companies> on business and engineering issues.

I met theymos late 2013 the day of the major security breach.  I initially served as an emergency security consultant, mainly in locking down the replacement server to get the forum back up and running as quickly as possible.  The site remains a bit crippled today (i.e. no uploading of avatars) because of paranoid server security configurations and shared agreement that the current SMF is not worthwhile to improve.  Upgrading to the SMF-2.x would be too much work to port and validate weird custom features (starting with Satoshi years ago and other administrators through the years) while the user experience wouldn't be much of an improvement.  Theymos studied the other forum software alternatives and was dissatisfied with all of them.

James Wang is one of the most experienced and versatile engineers that I know.  He has done iOS and Android apps, desktop applications, and highly scalable web and database apps.  Other engineers at his company are similarly talented.  He long had a desire to implement a better communications framework, and he was very excited when he learned that someone wanted a new forum where the end product would be open source as all of his past work was forced to be hidden within proprietary software companies.  His vision for the new forum is to not only do forum-like communications better, but to also reuse the same framework to do what Freenode does in a better way.  This could be a compelling new product that is useful for projects, open and closed teams and communities far beyond Bitcoin.

Theymos was late in getting help to achieve the stated goals for the forum, and it is too easy for people to criticize due to that tardiness.  Now I can say with confidence that there are professionals working on not only engineering but also protecting the forum as a defensible legal entity.  Shortly pieces of working code will be revealed to the community and be placed in production in auxiliary functions of the current forum.  A bit after initial portions go live the engineering firm will be directly engaging with the community for feedback on the new forum design.

I believe the community will be surprised and pleased with what comes next.  The purpose of all this work is more ambitious and goes beyond a mere medium of communication.

You are all entitled to complain. I donated to Michael improve the forum for everyone, not just the donators/VIP members.

Boy, I wish I would have discovered your posts prior to IW going down.


Otherwise I may have moved out my 1,000+ BTC prior to the hack, for a week earlier I, too, was expressing concerns, but set to rest that all was well. Well, 10 months later after I submitting three claims, the lesser one, 0.835 BTC was returned to me just recently. Still awaiting an outcome for the other two wallets totaling 1,132 BTC.

It's looking like we'll never see proof of payment

I am dreaming totally but I would like to share my Junior Member idea : what would be nice and would maybe ease everyone's mind would be a huge give away for all members, just a few hundreds BTC but it would be in the spirit of the early days of Bitcoin

Theymos would gain some more support from everyone and a lot of good people will receive some bitcoins, it would be-legendary

The idea is totally off-topic but it isn't a crazy one. BTC has been getting a lot of bad press over the last few months. You could make the argument that all pr is good but that's only valid to degree, if your competition is getting only positive news then the bad pr is no longer good. The amount of negative articles on Bitcoin could potentially be the failure of it. Redistributing the wealth of the forum or spending it on positive Bitcoin ads could be what we need to push BTC forward even further.

I understand your point but in that case how did doge grow so quickly? They grew so quickly because they getting extremely positive news articles when bitcoin was being destroyed by the press. I think that what we need right now is a combination of both.

Distribution of forum funds for the mere purpose to cause a hype will lead to the press scrutinize where the money is coming from. Then the press will know how Michael provided support to fraudsters like BFL and Tradefortress. The good news will become bad news. I will be more than glad to explain to journalists how I was duped in a charity fraud perpetrated by the forum administration.

There is 6200BTC here : https://blockchain.info/address/17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9

The truth is Theymos is taking decisions as well as he can, it is a bit authoritative and many old members don't agree with his decisions but it is how it works now so we have to rely on his; it will change and everything will be different in a few years because it isn't stable enough atm
I like the idea that he is a good guy, he can definitely be influenced and that is why I threw my idea of a big giveaway; the most recent members don't always feel welcome and they would after a huge giveaway

I think that if he's truly acting in the best interest on the community, then he shouldn't have any issues explaining his reasoning or actions.  Since he won't/can't do that, it looks pretty sketchy.  I don't think it's too much to ask since he's dropped $350,000 out of ~$1,000,000 total on a new forum.

I am very interested by what you guys who were here early enough think about all this and my opinion is a bit irrelevant in the matter because I don't have enough informations yet and I was not here early enough

But to be honest Theymos does answer a lot of questions asked exemple : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455867.msg5069851#msg5069851

He is pretty busy and he has been given a lot of power that he is using the best he can; as far as I understand he probably made a huge mistake with the 350,000$ (was it really 350,000$ when he paid or is it 350,000$ at today's price??) and he doesn't recognise it, maybe he will when it is crystal clear that it was a mistake; the rest of the money is here so it can still be used well

Theymos is an interesting character since he can be quite helpful in some areas and virtually silent in others.

Concerning this thread if he wanted to alleviate some of the concerns of the community it would be a significant step forward to reveal a public bitcoin address, as it implies that even donator's  to charities should be able to view where the money is going even if not how it was used.

We walk a very fine line on the forums between facts and conspiracies and our trust has been broken quite a few times by scammers of all sorts who were once trusted members, causing a bunch of the oldies to be cautious to these type of things.

Either way we will need to wait and see if the changes are worth it and to an extent we have no choice but to trust Theymos decisions on these type of purchases even if we personally disagree with them.

Ye who controls the Bitcoin address controls what is done with the bitcoins.

Meh, not much point. Either you think he's stealing or you don't. Seeing a transaction isn't going to change that, neither is anything he says for that matter. I mean if you really think he's stealing, then you wouldn't believe him anyway.

Yeah, d00d, he is pretty busy scratching his balls while the whole forum becomes a den of fraudsters and opportunists. His last amazing achievement was to allow newbies post freely whatever and wherever they want. This was a slap in the face of the moderators and staff which were already overloaded by the influx of meaningless information (a.k.a. spam, trolling, advertising, etc.). I am sure he is more busy looking at fluffy boobs in the university campus where he attend rather than take care of the forum he should administrate.

Yeah can't imagine why theymos isn't rushing in here to participate in stimulating discussion of this caliber.

Not quite true Badbear even if you don't believe charities are spending money in a third world country to help people.
You would like to know your money was moved somewhere and check their accounting statements.
Bitcoin makes this simple by posting an address then at least you know that the money was moved and can prove it moved.

Accountability is important even if we can't see what the money is being used for ourselves.

A good recent example of this is if Mtgox still has our bitcoins and what address they store their balances on
If people could see the bitcoins were still there they may believe that they are actually having problems and did not run away with the coins
A public address is vital and well unhackable you can see the money but you can't steal it

Another good example recently is Havelock having an address we can all view for Asicminer shares that way we can see that no fractional reserve is being managed.

PSA: Havelock has now taken over management of the passthrough on their site:
Address: 1J5fvfUrDcZj8rrpVHMgn8u7sXee84QkPd
Currently has 19733 shares tied to it (subject to change) and the new email is now AMFund@havelockinvestments.com.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5455011#msg5455011

When the hell are we getting the new software so i can update my damn profile picture.  ::)
Not to mention that it looks like the coins are being mixed right now so I wouldn't be surprised if some embezzlement came to light.

Final Balance    33.0199 BTC
Funds are not there, funds are there https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155000.0

I'm sorry, BabBear, but I'm also pretty surprised theymos didn't take 5 or 10 minutes to completely shut this thread down, and instead chose to let it live on.
Apart from the obvious trolls, there are quite a few legit questions, still unanswered.
Maybe we can make a compilation of those valuable questions?

I'll just start with one.

- Can we have a precise, specified, delivery timeline?

(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497523.0 is automated, now! Or is it?)

Agreed, I sort of expected Theymos to make some sort of official statement, after that he wouldn't have to answer anything else. I still trust Theymos' decisions, but I'm curious as to why he hasn't responded at all. Of course there are going to be the idiots that wont listen to reason, but he can ignore them. Would be nice if he wouldn't ignore the people that are asking reasonable questions in a calm and inquisitive way. Do I think Theymos is stealing the forum's funds, no, probably not. He could stand to make far more by operating the site legitimately and going other avenues. If he really wanted money, he could make a killing off of merchandising, but he seems to have little interest in that, leading me to believe he isn't all that interested in the financial aspect.

I have already come to terms with the fact that the reasons he picked wangbus are his own, and I'm sure he has some. Great, I'll judge if it was a good call after they create the forum software. I have come to terms with the ESTIMATED $1M that will be spent, and have decided to complain once again after seeing the quality of the work. I have even come to terms with the fact that Theymos is a busy guy and doesn't have time to respond to every single question that is asked, but it would really be nice if he could find time to answer some rather weighted questions.

1) What sort of transaction details can you give to show that you aren't embezzling the money. It is a valid concern and should be pretty easily disproven.

2) What sort of progress has been made already, why is the forum auction system being developed so early (Unless other things are already falling into place?)

3) When will Wangbus be asking the community for feature requests

4)  "Insert the questions Goat raised in the OP, they are pretty well thought out and should be easy to answer"

5) Can you get a little bit more in touch with the community on this? You don't have to answer to everyone, its your project, but you have 250,000 accounts that would like some sort of reports from time to time. The basic questions should be addressed, and the stupid questions ignored.

Let me explain:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_XkvLwlzojmk/TKPGO4_iE4I/AAAAAAAAAzI/LY9lFi2QCBA/s1600/YouSuck.jpg

The only idiots here are you and others providing all sorts of excuses and justifications to cover up the administration incompetence.

Really, you are one of the only people who aren't providing any sort of critical feedback, you are just complaining. Goat is complaining too, but he at least isn't complaining for no reason, he wants basic answers. I tend to trust people that have proven themselves in the past, so I am indeed giving Theymos the benefit of the doubt on this one. I dont think hes incompetent, I just think that it would be better if he addressed the serious questions, and ignored you. I dont think hes stealing the forum money, because he could have just taken it all and since he is technically the forum "owner" and the forum is not a registered nonprofit, he could probably legally take it all. Like I said in my previous post, I dont think Theymos is in this for the money anymore, because either he has plenty, or he thinks he can make more by operating the site legitimately. No one ever goes against self interest.

Do not really matter what criticism is made, Michael will ignore anyway.


So do I. What is the problem with the questions I made? Do you have a problem with that?


Michael's past background is not the best example of trust and integrity.


You are still looking for excuses to cover up charity fraud...


Not "anymore"? So he was before?

There are still plenty of unanswered questions...

I'd say the biggest (and easiest to answer) is where's the proof of the $350,000 initial payment?  It was said that it was done in BTC, so it should be super easy to find and link the transaction.

Also, there was mention of taking input from the community for the new software... will this happen?  It's been over a month since this thread was first started, I find it odd that I haven't seen or heard about Slickage talking with the community.

EDIT:
One more thing I forgot to add up top.  Was it ever stated why Slickage needs full access to the forum database?  Because I can't think of a reason they would need it, they should only need to know how it's laid out.

Just sitting here waiting for a reply  :-\

my personal guess: they bought the forum from theymos incl. donations and paid him. now they can use the donations to pay their employees and theymos has some cash.

but we'll see. i am very interested in the outcome.

Maybe not if you're thinking of using PHP?

Theymos stated that PHP now sucks??


I think PHP5 is pretty nice and very clean for scaleable and future-proof systems provided proper OOP structure is used?

I actually know nodejs, I just don't like it. I only work with languages that I enjoy. I could write it in C++ if wanted me to for $350K.

Theymos PM lets get this thing rolling.

Ha ha 350k for forum software, I'll do it for 100k in any language.

edit: also why does forum software need to be uber-secure?  if anyone wants a secure channel, then they should arrange a secure channel, not use some brand-new untested in the battlefield forum software.

besides that the easy holes tend not to be at application level anyway.

Sounds to me like shopping around a bit would have been an excellent idea.  There are thousands of forums all over the internet so they can't be that difficult to program relatively speaking.  I'm not a programmer so I wouldn't know, however I do know that offering a job like this to the community and accepting bids from various parties would get this forum the best deal. 
Too late for that now I guess.
Has there been an official project thread started yet or is this it?

Is it really the $1,000,000 forum software project.
Is the $350,000 initial payment only ~1/3 down?
...or isn't $350,000 the whole price.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=523070.0

Because there's a whole board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=167.0) created to discuss this, so encouraging new topics to reply to his sticky is a good thing.

its one million Dollar. Tiny forums costs something about $100 a year, on the other side reddit is worth five Billion Dollar.

Quote
"When will the software be finished?

About one year from now."


and?

I guess It's still "one year from now".