Bitcoin Forum

Actual newbies will be put off by this while the ones who were actually looking to make alts will pay those few thousand satoshi (or just use fresh ip or smth), what's the point?

If a person actually is interested in having real constructive discussions concerning Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, he/she will pay the small fee. And if he/she can't afford the small fee, then there are other Bitcoin communities out there (e.g. Reddit/Twitter). It's not like they're totally shunned off out of Bitcoin if they can't get into Bitcointalk.

On the other hand, spammers are far less incentivized to continue their spamming spree if there's a fee. Yes, the fee is not that much, but it really adds up as they make more and more accounts.

As far as I know, "Units of Evil" refers to the degree of the violation of your IP address when you register for an account. It's a system that prevents users from using the same IP address to create multiple accounts.

I know several personal examples of people who I invited to join bitcointalk forum and they couldn't registered because they got evil fee notification and asked to pay with Bitcoin.
Keep in mind that they never before heard about bitcointalk forum, they never registered in this forum, and they don't own any Bitcoin for paying this evil fee :/
I even tested and confirmed this myself from different location, using different device, maybe because some networks are using shared IP addresses.
In the process of punishing spammers and banned users we are also punishing innocent newbies and that is a fact.

Those hearing about this forum for the first time and wanting to try it out may not know how knowledge packed this forum is and may easily yolk it together with other scam sites asking for payment too. Some of us have been programmed and wired to think so that any site asking for cash upfront is a scam waiting to happen. I do rationalize my thoughts that way too. On the whole, I stoically believe that the registration fee (that's what it boils down to, anyway) is highly unnecessary and should be removed.

I don't think that it's so simple like "if newbie is really interested, he will pay the fee". Let's say that someone started reading about bitcoin, likes forums in general, decided to register here and get welcomed by the message that says he done something wrong and has to pay fee, while he doesn't even own any bitcoin yet and visited bitcointalk for the first time. How many of those will bother buying their first btc just to register on some forum? I know that I wouldn't, I would just say fuck it and move elsewhere, and probably many others too.



Spammers will find a way to circumvent this evil fee thing as they financial incentive to do so, while genuine users that just wanted to ask a couple of questions get rekted. Given the current state of forum, I don't think that's a good approach.

In this case, what works is that spammers or farmers of their accounts will feel completely free.
The forum is allowed to enter from any VPN or proxy. I may repeat myself, but what's the problem with buying a VPN? For 2 or 3 accounts, since you really need alternative accounts, you can spend a little. But the picture will change if we allow blocked users to register accounts again as if nothing had happened.
Then what is the meaning of all the rules and prohibitions?

How many of those that are new to crypto and just wanna ask few questions will be willing to go through  hassle of buying VPN just to register on some forum? You know who won't have an issue getting some cheap VPN to register bunch of alt accounts? Those whose goal is to make money out of this forum, aka spammers and scammers.

Take as an example @dkbit98 experience, where he invited couple of people who got that evil fee msg and gave up on forum. God knows how many legit users gave up due that.

Two or three years ago I would have agreed with you but I don't feel like that anymore.
It makes no point to cast users aside when they are newbies and throw them to other social media websites that are full of shills and paid posters where usually newbies get the wrong idea about both bitcoin and crypto in general.
When I was browsing the forum created by yobit I was genuinely surprised by the number of people that were posting in  a "vs bitcointalk" topic and were sure that bitcointalk requires a membership fee to use.


I don't know...Maybe getting rid of the evil fee and instead of that putting a captcha on every action form made by a user who signed up via an evil IP? And maybe remove that once he gained 10 or x merits? Keeping spammers away while losing also a lot of users, maybe trying to deal with them would be better?


Common, the average user that is just now looking for information about bitcoin will run into that and will not bother to install a VPN (if he even knows how to install one) but will simply close the window and go to a different place thinking that you need to pay to access this as you do with some newspapers that are behind a paywall. Not everyone is born with all that knowledge and learning is one thing this forum should be a part of in my opinion.

Makes perfect sense to me, it prevents the more malicious users from registering while the genuine users using an IP address which has previously been associated with these malicious users will have to pay a small fee. Okay, its not a perfect solution, but it has been proven to work over the years.

Here's what theymos said in the other thread if you haven't seen it:

This seems excessive, and probably wouldn't be beneficial at all. The malicious users would still get through, okay you would prevent some bots from registering, but there are other types of malicious users that the evil fee prevents. Then there's the issue with captcha's; they just aren't very effective at what they are suppose to do. There's services out there which will solve the captcha for pennies, and that is significantly lower cost than the evil fee. I don't know the going rate, but I'd assume they'd offer to do 100s for a few pennies. Its why Google tried to bring in a better system like the pictures, but inevitably they'll do them for too.

I don't think so and it doesn't seem right. If there was an entry fee for everyone who joined, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But if I invite my cousin here, and he is asked to pay an evil fee when I claimed that I never had to, he would think I was a scamming jerk. 

With no or less fresh blood, the Bitcointalk community will be slowly dying. The existing members will one day grow old and tired of Bitcointalk and proper replacements are needed. There have been plenty of discussions lately how the activity is dropping and the evil fees are one small part of the problem. 

I wouldn't have paid a fee to be a member here, but then again I didn't register multiple accounts or use Tor or whatever it is that triggers the evil fee.  And most members won't ever have to worry about that--just the people most likely to misuse the forum, so I think it's pretty generous on Theymos's part.

That would be a problem if everyone had to pay whatever cost it is for the evil fee, but not everyone does--and this forum isn't suffering from a lack of new members, or even a lack of active ones.  There's never been a problem with the fee before (and in fact it rarely gets mentioned), so I think this thread is just someone griping about it because they're one of the ones who have to pay it.

This is pretty much my point. Because as far as I know(not sure how tight Bitcointalk is concerning evil fees when registering so correct me if I'm wrong here), probably like ballpark 95% of people going to register isn't going to be required to pay the evil fee in the first place. The only people who are going to pay are the privacy-conscious(Tor/VPN/proxy users) people and the spammers themselves.

Ok, with the risk of looking completely stupid, what other types of malicious users do we have around, I count spammers as bots, and we have ban evaders which in most cases are smarter than the usual newbie and in 99% cases know how to use a VPN. What others are there that can pose such a threat?? Of course, you're a moderator and you get access to a lot more data than me, I've also just read the reply theymos gave on the other topic so probably I'm having the wrong impression about this one.

Some VPN are even free on the playstore and apple stores.

That was also a situation I found myself when I introduced two people to the forum. I had to pay the evil fees for them so as to encourage them. It was a situation I didn't want to get involved in because of the financial commitment. Sadly, I ended up being their only rescuer.

Not all newbies have to pay this fee. The fee has to be paid by those who try to open more than one account or create an account using shared ip. The problem is that the user who uses the shared ip, he/she has to pay evil fee at the time of registration without doing any bad deeds. And for this reason, some newbie may not be able to join this community. This amount will be less, from users who try to create multiple accounts.

Like I created this account of mine and was able to post without any kind of fee. So real newbies can create an account in this forum without paying any fees. So this Evil fee prevents multiple account holders who try to create more accounts using different methods. And these activities are done by those who use those accounts to spamming.

That's not true. Not every new account is a farmed account. There are very clean innocent users who want to come in for the first time who are faced with the IP challenge. I really don't know how the forum derived that, of an IP getting mapped as evil and then get innocent users punished.

I thought that was for those of us who got registered pre-2018 that got lucky escaping the sledgehammer. But your profile reads 2019. You must be lucky then. I have made payments for two different people on this just to encourage them to get on board around that period or so too.

This type of narrative is misleading, honestly. Those who already have accounts here and intend to farm more won't be deterred by the evil fees which are for them infinitesimal, compared to what they know they stand to gain in form of payments from bounties and signature campaigns. This isn't so for anyone new. I have a case like that now with a mentee who got skeptical paying that evil fee..

I can also confirm that the same thing happened to two of my friends, who were interested in crypto and I wanted to help them register on this forum and get involved in the crypto community.
My friends had no knowledge of crypto, they didn’t even have crypto funds to pay the evil fee, and they didn’t even know how to open a crypto wallet and send crypto funds.
Shouldn't this forum be a friendly place for new and inexperienced members, where they will gain the first information about the crypto world and get the necessary support and help?
I don't know, maybe I'm naive and I don't understand some things, but somehow I feel that something is wrong here and that it needs to be corrected.

Not sure if this has been answered around here as of late, but which IPs of the banned user are actually taken into consideration to be marked and scored through the Evil algorithm?

I mean, an account could go over a variety of IPs in the last x days, so I’m trying to understand whether the algorithm applies to the IP used to create the account, the last IP used before actually getting banned, or any IP used by the account in a certain timeframe (+ what timeframe we’re talking about).

Found the answer:

If this happens again (or if you still know their usernames), please post in Remove Proxyban (evil fees) - get whitelisted for free (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5350260.0) so I (or someone else) can whitelist them:

Off the top of my head; Spammers, advertising bots, malware spreaders, ban evasion, and I'm sure there's plenty more. For example, even with the evil score, we have outbreaks of these types of users, where they bombard the forum with various different things. A few months back there was a lot of nuked users if anyone was paying attention to the modlog, and that was a result of these outbreaks. It isn't entirely about the different attack vectors though, its the volume that is prevents.

The idea is, we make it as difficult as possible for these types of users to register accounts, at least without using a clean IP. If they are using a VPN, they are likely using the most popular ones, i.e the cheapest. Eventually, those VPN's will accumulate a lot of evil score, and it makes it more expensive. Now, this does absolutely hinder the process of registering for genuine users, but unfortunately its probably contributed significantly to the amount of malicious users that get through. I'm sure theymos has the numbers, and if it wasn't working, he would likely remove it.

I don't think anyone every looks stupid when asking for clarification for the record.

Send me a personal message if they do want to register on the forum, and you can recommend them.

The point is to inconvenience scammers and spammers who try to hide their identity using things like TOR.  At the same time, less educated newbies will likely then pay the fee leaving a trail to their true identity, or having to mask this payment as well, which you guessed it, further inconveniences them or possibly even doxes them via the blockchain.  It's one of the few processes that has been put in place to empower honest users by inconveniencing others and isn't an issue for anyone who isn't hiding anything.

Oh got it, in my mind I just lumped together all of them as spammers, be it for advertising or phishing links or PMs, everyone that posts something that is unwanted, that's why I was curious if there are other things people do around that is dangerous which is not involving actual posting.

Well, maybe because the barrier is having a real effect on cutting down we don't ​see them and we underestimate the dangers but seeing how there are lots of people even in this topic who have one or two friends having problems one must think there might be a lot more that don't know anyone on this forum and just leave. ​And since you mentioned statistics, it would be really interesting to see how many users are created each month via evil IPs and don't log in again.

It also doesn't prevent them from using free proxies or VPN(s) to create other account(s) so they might actually evade Evil fee, in doing so they'll create useless abandoned accounts.


I don't think this would be a good decision to force Evil IP Fee on new users that are new to Bitcoin as a whole, let alone using the forum.
Even if they agree to pay the fee they'll end up paying more to miners.

Thank you very much for this kind offer LoyceV.
Unfortunately, the friends I barely persuaded to register on this forum and learn something about crypto, after this unpleasant experience with the evil fee completely gave up crypto and never came back.
I can no longer convince them to try again and learn more about crypto, for them the evil fee has remained a sufficient argument that crypto is a scam and nothing serious.
It happened a few years ago so I don't even remember their username anymore.
For the future I will have this offer of yours in mind but for these two friends it is too late.

Wait I think I'm missing something, how does that make abandoned accounts?

If the newly created account is Proxy banned, they'll move to the next VPN and try again. But I don't think the abandoned accounts are much of a problem.

Pretty much this. There were times I searched for some stuffs on Google, came across a high-ranking + relevant site, accessed it only to be blacklisted (country reason).

Even with the email provided, I couldn't be bothered and just moved elsewhere when I could get my answer in just a few seconds rather than spending much more time + money just to register and start posting. After all, Bitcointalk isn't the only place for such discussions when you have sites like Reddit.

I think the decision to introduce an evil fee on this forum is wrong in many ways and I really hope theymos change that.
First of all, the basis for asking someone to pay an evil fee is the coincidence that some spammer used the same IP in the past.
Second, I don't think admins can punish someone in advance for something a new member didn't do and ask them to pay a fine.
Third, among the new members there are a lot of people who are new to crypto and don't know how to open a btc wallet, how to send someone a btc, they do not have bitcoin at all.
Last and most importantly, some new members will see the evil fee as the ultimate proof that crypto is a scam and will never return to the crypto.
This just happened to my two friends and I'm sincerely sorry that I even suggested them to register on this forum.
I will not repeat this mistake again and I don't intend to invite new friends to this forum until the rule on evil fee changes.
I'm sincerely sorry that theymos see no problem with the evil fee and the fact that many new and potential members have dropped out of this forum due to the rules of the evil fee, as most of them would not be spammers but responsible members of this forum. 

You have a point. It does bring a bad impression experience-wise if I were to signup only to see that I have to "atone for someone else's sins"; it's akin to some paywall gone bad.

After all, IPs are dynamic and someone might be unfortunate enough to get assigned a bad one.


Don't feel bad, it's no ones fault here that they couldn't sign up.

I never really tried free VPN (I don't trust them) but I wouldn't be surprised if using free VPN get you this evil fee thing as well, as since it's free, it might be massively used by account farmers.



Good job man, they were lucky to have someone like you, willing to help. I'm curious now, are they still members of this forum?

As I've mentioned before, the proxyban fee has practical reasons, but it's a system that cannot be efficient in controlling ban evaders which is the actual purpose. New members would normally not know their way around the forum or Bitcoin itself and may have stumbled on the site from somewhere else and rather than getting a welcome message which explains a bit about this forum, they get a ban message which they need to pay to overturn.
Ban evading is an offense on the forum and those caught will still be banned even though they have paid the fee, new members on the other hand are the ones who would either pay for something they know nothing about or not register at all.

Theymos recently increased the number of whitelisters on the forum and that's a very good step, making it easier for new member to access should be the next, with a newbie welcome message. So rather than getting a ban message, a new member would get a welcome message directing them on how to evade any issues they encounter on the forum.

That is the trade-off of the current system. There isn't any other feasible way to deter spammers, and removing it completely only serves to worsen the current spams we're seeing. Those affected by this are unfortunately just collateral damage.

The actual purpose is mainly to control spammers, instead of those seeking to evade bans, IMO. There was a huge influx of spam SEOs at the start of the year, with them scraping other posts to try to blend it. Removing the barrier of entry for those IP ranges only serves to increase the spam on the forum and other than monetary disincentives, I don't think there would be a better way to reduce those spams. If you remove the fees completely, you'll most likely start to either see hoards of account farmers or bots every now and then and degrading the experience for everyone.

Most users probably won't care about using the forum, once they see that they have to pay a fee to use it. No matter how much you explain to them, they would probably just be put off by having to pay a fee just to post.

Units of evil attached to an IP increases as more members using that IP gets banned, so it's technically a fee to prevent these banned users from creating new accounts on the forum, by extension this would discourage spamming as users get banned for spamming and it would prevent them from opening new accounts to continue spreading spam.
Actually, the way I see it; the system was created to prevent any activity which would lead to a ban, such as spam (message or pm), malware etct as those banned accounts are deterred from registering again.

These friends of mine weren't people who had vast knowledge of the internet and didn't know what a VPN was. In fact, VPN became popular in Nigeria because of the Twitter ban that happened in the country by the federal government not Nigeria a few months ago. Before then not so many people knew what a VPN meant.


Sadly, both left after a while. They said they couldn't understand much of the discussions that went on here because of the terminologies used in most posts. My pleas for them to continue and persevere didn't yield any results so I let them be. I don't think they even made it to Jnr rank. I count their temporary departure as loss to them because they don't recognize what they missed.

That's the silver lining of the Streisand effect. Whenever the government plans to ban this and that, more people would find alternate ways to bypass them.


In the end, it's the individuals choice on whether he/ she would want to try or not. You did your best. There would always be future opportunities waiting for you once you meet new people.

There are hundreds of new accounts created every day. Most of them are abandoned, meaning they never log in to the forum again. I'm not sure exactly why this is the case, but I can assume the evil fee has some bearing on it.

Why did the complaint escalate recently, even though the percentage of those who use the site is not increasing? The problem will increase by the end of the year if the price of Bitcoin increases.
The problem lies in using VPN, which often gets a ban, but using a clean real ISPs IP will not lead to bans in most cases. Most beginners do not use Tor.

On the other hand, solving problems with fees isn't perfect.

Which is also a problem. Certain users prefer to have some sort of anonymity when browsing the internet, moreso for Bitcoin related sites. The problem is prevalent in both the IP ranges allocated to regions which is infested with spammers or just Tor exit nodes. From the top of my head, I've seen a few threads where certain users has had difficulties registering without triggering it even with IPs allocated by their ISPs. Neither of which is good and I also don't believe that there would be a better idea than enforcing some sort of payment to stop spams like these.

I'm pretty sure the price of "evil" is adjusted when Bitcoin goes up or down in price, just like the Copper Membership.

A fresh proxy could probably help in situations like that. They are free and available from many countries around the world. If one location doesn't work, one can always try with a different one, but newbies probably don't know about that. However, that still creates a big number of abandoned accounts. But hopefully that will decrease now as word goes around that there are users who can whitelist legit individuals who got affected by the evil-fee virus.

Theymos said more than two years ago that the most expensive evil fee someone has to pay wouldn't cost more than the price of the copper membership.

Units of evil applies to the IP range. That would probably result in most IPs being tainted, as long as a few of the IP within that range are blacklisted. I highly doubt you would be able to find any free proxies from a scraper that would allow you to register without any units of evil. They are abused to death and needless to say, I suspect a huge bunch of them are honeypots, intended to log and track those who don't know any better. If we've reached the stage where even IP ranges belonging to residential ISPs are being tagged, then it would be far more difficult to find clean proxies.

Is there a way to check the evil IP database before registering? That might reduce the number of abandoned accounts.
Is there a list of banned IP addresses and ranges somewhere?

Such information wouldn't be available for the general public, but theymos could probably export it if he wanted to or needed to do it. The admins can see which IPs the users used when registering, what they use when posting, logging in, etc.

Even if there was such list, chances are slim that people who have never been on Bitcointalk will check it. Those who have seen the evil fee notifications would be surprised because it's not something you see on other boards.

This would make the evil ip feature pointless because people who want to bypass it including the spammers would just cycle through their ip address until they have one that does not match in the database and they could do this automatically

Nope. But there's old data: Evil score visualization (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1215937.0)

+1, only accounts which have already been on the forum would be savvy enough to access such information and use it, a newbie who sees a ban message when they have literally done nothing would just close tab and move on, except they were referred to the forum by a veteran member.

Perhaps, it is time for the mewie welcome message.

It's not that they are any potential problem but accounts do take some storage memory doesn't matter how big or small.
With crypto being more popular I'm certain there are going to be a lot more new users in the forum in the next 5-10 years and 1 User creating multiple accounts to evade the evil IP fee will only make the problem worse.
It doesn't matter if store is no issue.


I don't think even if he releases the list of IP address ranges then it would reduce the number of abandoned accounts.
Reason: Those who are new and while creating an account here wouldn't know that whether their IP is a part of it or not.
Fix: The link to that post can be shown somewhere on the registration page.

Well that's sucks, that they didn't have a little bit more patience since you really did all you could, and even spent some money. This forum can be a very confusing place for someone that is completely new to bitcoin, and to the forums in general.

Like in any other forum, retention rate here is probably very low so I think that majority of users give up before they even reach Jr Member rank, like your friends did.

theymos has already created a link from the page that instructs users to pay the evil fee to the Bitcointalk thread where users can be whitelisted for free in case they were caught up in the mess and have evil on their IP without having done anything wrong. I think that's a good improvement. Let's just hope they understand what they read and know what is being asked of them. 

OK it’s a really good change and I’m sorry it didn’t happen sooner.
When this situation with the evil fee happened to two of my friends, they actually immediately gave up this forum because they were shocked by such a request to pay the evil fee.
They didn’t even know at the time how to open a bitcoin wallet or how to send someone a btc.
Personally, I think that this problem could have been solved in another, simpler way and then a lot less potential new members would have given up on this forum.
All newbie members with suspicious IP addresses could be denied the right to write in the market section for 6 months or a year.
This would discourage spammers from registering and other new members would not give up on the forum.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. To be honest, I don't know how I would have reacted myself if I had seen it. I don't think I would have paid the fee.

Being asked to pay with bitcoin before even learning how to use it reminded me of a sketch I saw at the beginning of the pandemic. I guy walked into a pharmacy to buy a mask, but the pharmacist asked him to leave because he wasn't wearing a mask. He told her that he was there in order to buy a mask, but she wasn't having any of it and said rules are rules and he needed to leave. A vicious circle.

This won't work: I've seen many spammers that activate hundreds of accounts for the first time after years. Spammers can patiently plan for this, while normal users would be annoyed by the limitations.

Many sites can't even be accessed through Tor, or only after solving a (painstaking) Captcha. Unfortunately, anonymity often causes bad behaviour. How cool would it be if there's a more universal way to proof you're not a spammer, that's accepted by a lot of sites? I wouldn't pay for a single site, but a "universal" anonymous payment to pay for many sites at once doesn't sound so bad.

On several occasion, I found people who really wanted to learn about bitcoin because they knew that I was one of the users of the bitcointalk forum (perhap because I wasn't very private before). They need to register an account to learn, but unfortunately they have to pay some satoshi to be able to use the account because a malicious IP was detected. I don't know if it's just for one or two regions or if it also applies generally to anyone who wants to sign up for an account.

The widespread account registration service on local Indonesian Jual & Beli board might help them even if they have to pay a small fee ranging from $0.5-$1 to register an account, I think. But I never know whether such a service is allowed on the forum or not, but on the one hand it will be very helpful for beginner who want to learn bitcoin and register an account. Maybe using a VPN will also help based on some people's experience, but I can't guarantee that.

I think that part of the problem lies in the way that evil fee message is constructed. When a person who never visited bitcointalk before in his life (and  often knows very little about bitcoin) sees that "welcoming" message "Your IP address has previously been used for evil on this forum..." of course that strong reaction is expected, and in huge majority of cases they will go elsewhere. It's not 2011 anymore, people have plenty of other choices and in question is can this forum allow to loose potential good members over this. In the end, I know who won't have any issues paying the fee; those that are registering in order to profit.

---

I know its still early, but I have a question for those that have power to whitelist new users: any cases yet in which system flagged someone by mistake?

Probably, but I can't know for sure. Just keep an eye on my list (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5350260.msg57505682#msg57505682), as long as they don't get banned, they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

The problem you mentioned does exist, and the evil tip will not be too much, but this is a very bad experience for newcomers. Whether it is an IP problem or not, the final complaint will be placed on the Bitcoin forum, facing unprincipled The bounty hunter team, I still agree with this point. There is a saying that it is better: I would rather kill 1,000 people by mistake than let a bastard. Each has its own reason, and at the same time, we should quickly find a way to reorganize the bounty plan section.

Humanity is known for paying for the sins of our ancestors so this is no biggie, besides lets look on the bright side of this. People tend to value what they paid for more than what they got for free. So they they'll value their account more and not out if ignorance break the forum rules with the hopes of opening a new one freely without any obstruction. Before the introduction of the evil fees, the registration of the forum was free for the now blacklisted IP address and giving them privilege the create multiple alts and disturbing the forum but things ar different now.

Let consider this for instance, why are they registering (picking up interest) to join the forum, if the answer to is to seek for knowledge from the forum then a little fees won't be much to ask since you're basically coming to learn which people normally pay for. Now if you're coming for business then a little fees shoudn't be an issue too considering what the forum can offer your business.

All I'm trying to say is, the fees has its positive side and to extent, it has served it's purpose of creation. If the forum was to remove the evil fees of a thing, I'll still be cool with that decision. Theymos knows what's best for the forum.