Bitcoin Forum

I am not sure if I am asking an embarrassing question. I tried to find the hosting service provider for BitcoinTalk online but failed. I hope someone here will help me to find it.

I understand cloudflare (http://www.cloudflare.com) is taking care of security and stuffs however who is providing us the hosting service? I believe theymos is anonymous meaning his identity is hidden (I am guessing) to the hosting service providers too. In that case who was/is his choice?

Sorry, if I sound stupid but I needed to know. Thanks in advance.

Regards,

iPwB

At a time the forum was hosted by NForce and still is I suppose, then there is PrivateInternetAccess that had something to do with the hosting if I am not wrong (hosting the server or sponsoring ut, something about)

You've ruined it for me. I always had the idea that the server(s) are located in theymos' living room.
Every morning he comes down and pats his authentication server, the webserver has a coffee machine on it that pours him his morning caffine dose and he gets to work on his workstation (a series of computers that monitor each of ther servers and one big 52" monitor with a desktop computer that he uses to post on the forum with) ;D.

AFAIK it's AWS. It used to be hosted by someone else (paid for by PIA in exchange for a permanent ad space) but theymos semi-recently switched (due to concerns related to security and legal ownership, he mentioned it in a post somewhere I think). In terms of hidden identity, I don't think it's really possible to stay anonymous when dealing with a company as large and invasive as Amazon.

If that were the case, the coffee would've probably turned into molten lava with the number of DDoS attacks the forum has been hit over the past few years.

IIRC, theymos said something about using AWS instances as a reverse proxy to help combat DDOS attacks, and possibly for scaling issues.

I am not sure if this is still the case, but you used to be able to spin up a free AWS instance with just a credit card, that was free for a year, and I am pretty sure they would let you pay for AWS via your gift card/account balance.

theymos' identity is public, and anyone should be able to find it via a simple google search.

Interesting. Theymos is not as anonymous as I assumed. I always thought he operates from an undisclosed dungeon. I wonder how many times he has been mugged so far!!

I am fairly confident that theymos does not live in a dungeon. He at least used to live in Wisconsin, but given how cold it is there, I am not sure why anyone would want to live in Wisconsin, so I presume he has moved to someplace warmer, especially considering his probable wealth resulting from the massive rise in the value of his bitcoin.

Yeah, I also think that theymos (or Michael Marquardt?) isn't anonymous person. He said that he have to make accounting, pay taxes and do other invisible job, I hardly can imagine how he would be able to do it as anonymous person. And these boring things like accounting is one of the reasons why theymos don't have enough time for forum developpment.

I assume that the hosting provider of the forum is the company DigitalOcean, LLC in New York.
I could be wrong.

Can he not register the forum as a charity to avoid tax? It kinda is like that anyway.

Thanks guys for the answers so far... So, I got...





But which one is correct? I always wonder if it is possible to have hosting and domain by being anonymous? We talk about anonymity but the truth is the entire social/professional system has designed such a way that you have to provide your identity somewhere to some group like it or not.

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I see a BIG question mark there  ;D

I don't know. It's possible to get one, whether it can be related back to you in other ways is a different question. There are some domain levels where you need less information, you can pay with bitcoin but usually, as it's not automated, you don't often get a reminder and could be charged a fee to keep it up if you fail to meet the deadline of your invoice (or obviously have your instance disconnected also)...


Why do you think he's so active here recently, he rested his coffee on the server during the recent ddos and he's still waiting for it to cool ;D.

see..
https://securitytrails.com/domain/bitcointalk.org/history/a

This can only tell theymos :)

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I don't know if it's possible to publish it, but it's open information.

IP address history for bitcointalk.org (https://suip.biz/?act=domainiphistory)

https://i.imgur.com/BF8DgTW.png

The last IP address that does not belong to Cloudflare (104 ...) is 107.170.166.118. This IP address belongs to ISP DigitalOcean, LLC.

Here are some more interesting information.

https://i.imgur.com/0wn148d.png

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This is old data.

Or Sirius, I'm guessing he'll know as he's still in control of the domain (afaik).

I suspect that this was a reverse proxy from when theymos was trying to mitigate the DDoS attacks himself.

I don't think theymos will disclose the hosing provider, especially if it is a smaller provider because that could subject the hosing provider to DDoS attacks in an attempt to bring the forum offline, as the forum is a fairly large target for DDoS attacks.