Manafort's guilty plea surprised me a lot. I hope at some point we get all of the details behind this.


Agreed.

Buying merit or normal ranks is like buying yourself a bunch of trophies to put on your shelf. It's stupid, and it's an insult to everyone who achieved it legitimately. I can't see ever doing that. I don't particularly mind letting people pay for some of the privileges of these things, such as with copper membership, but it should be a parallel system.

Copper membership is good. Now, if you want to participate in signature campaigns, you can either pay the $10-$20 for copper membership or accomplish the herculean task of making one good post. I don't think that it's unreasonable in either case.

If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end. Demanding money in order to bypass a broken system would be really bad. But AFAICT the merit system actually is reasonably effective at identifying good posters.

P.S. I copied all of the signatures and personal texts before wiping them from the demoted users. If bounty managers need info about this, send me a PM like "Please send me a list of all demoted users who had '_______' in their signature".

Due to excessive garbage-posting, you now need 1 merit to be a Jr Member. All existing Jr Members who didn't meet the requirement were demoted. Also, newbies can no longer set any signature or personal text.

Note that this does not affect:
 - PM rate-limiting, which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
 - "You must wait ___ seconds...", which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
 
But it does affect:
 - Voting in polls
 - Patroller jurisdiction
 - The "ignore newbie PMs" option.
 - "The body is omitted from this email because the sender is a newbie."
 - BBCode limits
 - Reduced-accuracy link filtering
 - Board restrictions

Many of these limitations can be eliminated with a copper membership. In particular, you can set a signature at Member level if you wear a copper membership.

One reason that I was hesitant to do this before is that there are an awful lot of newbie restrictions, and I don't want the forum to be unwelcoming to good newbies. I'll think about tying some of those to activity instead of rank in the future.
 
With help from DdmrDdmr, I just added 36 new merit sources, which should help newbies achieve the requirement. But if you're incapable of posting anything worthwhile, then you will never rank up, and you shouldn't: this isn't the forum for you.

It's low on my to-do list. I have to rewrite most of the queries on that page.

I accidentally broke something temporarily, sorry about that. It should be fixed now, and your post should be in your drafts.

You're considered to have woken up if your last login time is 180+ days ago, and the message remains for 30 days.

Recently the idea occurred to me that it might be cool to have a bitcointalk.org YouTube channel. It could contain things such as:
 - Bitcoin information
 - Summaries of recent high-quality posts
 - Summarized crypto news, but from a neutral perspective, without any pump-and-dump

If there was regular (eg. weekly) content, this might be a good way of attracting good new users and making existing users feel more engaged in the community.

Does this sound like a good idea? Is anyone interested in producing this content? I suppose we'd need at least someone with good camera presence, someone skilled at video editing, and one or more script writers. I might be willing to dedicate some forum funds to this.

As a somewhat popular incumbent, Trump will have a big advantage. He'll especially have an advantage if the Democrats win the House this year and then spend two years doing nothing but investigating Trump scandals; it'd be similar to the Bill Clinton impeachment pushback.

The Democrats don't have a great lineup of possible candidates. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris seem to be the two main front-runners, but IMO they're far too establishment to win against Trump. Bernie is probably too far left, and the Democratic party won't let him win the primary anyway. Biden is very popular, but he's also very old; he'd be a shoe-in if he were 10 years younger, though he might still be the best option. As ridiculous as it sounds (and is), Oprah Winfrey might be able to pull it off due to her large fanbase, even though she's even less ideological/intellectual than Trump.

At this point I'd give Trump 2-to-1 odds. The biggest question is really how successful the deep state will be at undermining him rather than any real political factors.

Troy ounces of gold.

Donators/VIPs/long-time-staff get one free permanent factoid. That's what benjamindees malevolent wanted, so that's what he got. :shrug:

Edit: Actually I looked it up, and that one comes from malevolent, quoting benjamindees.

BTW, it's funny how the values of these things change over time. Donator OgNasty has had one of these mini-ads running since 2012. In 2012 the value of a tiny ad like this was nearly nothing. But since it's been running for so many years, and since the value of forum ads has gone up, I'd estimate the total accumulated value of that ad as at least $30k, maybe more. Whereas OgNasty's 10 BTC donation was worth $47.80 when he donated it, and would be worth $63,934.70 now.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], banks, funds, or anything else that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.

Right. When people bid a value that is not evenly divisible by 0.02, I always round down to the next acceptable value. So a bid at 0.03 would be interpreted as a bid at 0.02.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.08 lightlord
1 0.08 ni23457
1 0.08 einax
2 0.08 FortuneJack
2 0.08 modernbuddha
1 0.08 ExoPlanets.io

I wouldn't be surprised if people irrationally freak out about it. I could see the price dropping further once more people hear this news. Though realistically, CXBTF was just made available on US markets about a month ago, and its all-time US trading volume looks to be only something like $5 million, so it's not as if a major player in the market was just removed.

According to some apparent SEC quotes on CoinDesk, it looks like the SEC is annoyed by some language in CXBTF's marketing material, though I can't actually find the source of those quotes.

IMO about $1-2k of the price is built on top of people hoping for an ETF (which would probably quickly put the price well above $10k), so any news that hints for or against quicker ETF approval is likely to have major effects.

I'm seeing a lot of fake-looking panic everywhere. Bullish IMO.

Nothing changed on the forum's end. Tor Browser 8 is based on Firefox Quantum, which is very different from previous Firefox versions. Big changes are to be expected.


No.

I'm about halfway done with it. Other things came up. Probably I won't finish it this month, maybe in October.

He's bad on the 4th amendment:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/396251-amash-slams-kavanaugh-over-views-on-government-surveillance

Dominance is still high even though BTC has rebounded, which is not what I'd expected. I guess people really did lose some faith in altcoins. Looking at the chart, it seems that ETH's loss in marketcap was one of the major factors, which I find especially surprising, since although ETH has major technical flaws, it is one of the few that I consider to not be total garbage. XRP also lost marketcap, which makes sense.

It's already wordfiltered, just in a different way than sites that are 100% clear phishing.


That'd be subsidizing bad behavior.