Trump is friends with Manafort, he believes (maybe rightly) that Manafort would not be in any trouble if not for his association with Trump, and Manafort is remaining loyal. Trump has proven throughout his presidency that the #1 thing he cares about is personal loyalty, so he will feel obligated to protect Manafort here. Trump isn't the kind of person who can easily throw someone under the bus, and he will perceive not pardoning Manafort as doing so.

From what I've heard, Cohen's guilty plea was unusual in that he seemed to plea guilty without actually cooperating with law enforcement or even seeking a typical plea deal. I wonder what that's about.

Although Cohen and Manafort both seem like highly unethical characters AFAICT (Cohen was secretly recording his clients in order to collect dirt on them, and Manafort apparently worked for an evil Ukrainian regime), the specifics of these cases make them look more like a move against Trump. For example, it's extremely unusual for anyone to be pursued for bank fraud in which the bank didn't actually lose any money, or criminally for this sort of campaign finance stuff. And the campaign finance thing seems like a real stretch, since Trump has buried personally-damaging stories like this on several occasions before he was running for president. It'd be like saying that spending personal money to renovate your house was a campaign contribution because it'd look bad campaign-wise if you had a run-down-looking house; it's very tangential.

I think that Trump will pardon Manafort, which is a horrible move politically. Impeachment is unlikely, but if it does happen, we might end up looking back on that pardon as being the thing which ultimately resulted in Trump getting impeached. But a strong desire to pardon is understandable from Trump's perspective.

From a libertarian perspective, this whole mess is probably pretty good because it keeps the government chaotic, divided, and busy, and maybe it'll even expose the stupidity of some of these "paperwork crimes".

[btc] is the only custom tag. Some other behavior of the bbcode parser was changed, but it's more stylistic than semantic, like disabling certain tags in some contexts.

If someone wrote a bbcode parser that was 99.9% compatible with the SMF bbcode parser but was based on traditional parsing (ie. lex+yacc-style), that'd be useful. The current regex monstrosity really sucks.

None of these ideas are new to me. Even if I don't respond to suggestions, I do read them, and they float around in my mind going forward. If it's not already done, then there's some reason why. A big possible reason is that I'm the only person who does development on the current code, and my time is limited. Another big reason is that this is a huge forum with complex dynamics, and even small policy changes can have big effects which need to be thought through very carefully.

An example: a bump button sounds good as a fix for certain very visible problems, but it also codifies a broken system. People would use bots to bump all of their threads constantly, giving "industrial" posters a huge advantage over casual posters. A captcha could maybe help a little, but there are services where you can pay a tiny fee to have captchas solved for you. (Which opens another question: maybe a comparatively tiny fee should be allowed as an alternative to having you solve a captcha.) A better solution would be to replace the concept of traditional bumping with something quite different, with different bumping models for different types of sections. But that requires further thought. If implementing a bump button was free, perhaps it'd be worthwhile to at least do it for now and fix a few minor problems with bumping today. But since it's a clearly-imperfect solution, this isn't even on my miles-long to-do list.

I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:


OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance.


Maybe.


No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified.

Partially it's because we're talking about two different situations. I'm thinking mainly of someone actively trying to attack ECDSA, and the lockers symbolize private keys, not addresses or public keys. You seem to be thinking mainly about two people accidentally generating the same address.

In symmetric crypto, if there are no other weaknesses, then a key length of N bits means that you have to search through O(2^N) keys in order to break the cipher. There is no faster way on classical computers. This sort of perfect cipher is used as the security standard for all crypto; when someone says that something has 128 bits of security, they mean that it has the same security as a perfect symmetric cipher with 128-bit keys. My analogy is meant to illustrate that breaking Bitcoin's ECDSA is roughly O(2¹²⁸).

All asymmetric crypto has worse security efficiency than the perfect symmetric cipher. In the case of elliptic-curve crypto, a key length of N bits implies an equivalent security (vis-à-vis the perfect symmetric cipher) of no more than N/2 bits because there are known algorithms for solving the underlying elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem in O(sqrt(n)) on classical computers. (Also, it's completely broken on quantum computers.)

If you're interested in an attacker who only has an address to work with, without any ECC stuff (ie. unused addresses), then 2¹⁶⁰ is a reasonable number. If you're considering collisions, which cannot usually be useful to an attacker, then 2¹⁶⁰ is OK, but then you need to consider the birthday problem. If someone really wanted to find a collision, then it probably can be done in a human lifetime, but almost certainly they would collide two of their own addresses, not one of theirs with someone else's.

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.

Still too investment/ICO-looking.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.10 ChipMixer
2 0.10 faucet.ly
1 0.10 TrueFlip.io
2 0.02 Foofighter

Any analogy is going to be imperfect and incomplete.


If someone is trying to attack the system, then the security is as if there are 2¹²⁸ distinct private keys, even though private keys are actually 256 bits long and pubkey-hashes are 160 bits long. Sometimes I say that there appear to be 2²⁵⁶ lockers, but that many of them actually share their internal spaces with many others (via wormholes/magic).

I like this analogy:

Imagine a massive wall of lockers. Each locker is 1mm by 1mm, and the entire wall of lockers is a square 2 light years on each side. When you choose a private key, you pick one of these lockers at random. When someone sends you bitcoins, there's some magical inbox which puts the bitcoins into your locker without telling the sender anything about the location of your locker.

The lockers don't have locks. If someone knew the location of your locker (ie. your private key), then they could just go take what's in it. Similarly, it's possible to choose a locker at random and find that someone has used it already at some point in the past. But there are just so many lockers that in reality it's never going to happen, even if humanity devotes all of its efforts to searching through all of the lockers.

This altcoin massacre made me ponder what the coin market cap listing should look like, if this stuff was based on real fundamental value and not pure pump-and-dump speculation. I'd put XMR and ETH at a very distant second and third to BTC, since they each provide some very real features over BTC which people are using right now to good effect (though each has problems). I haven't looked into the more recent ones much, though. Are there any others that are backed by more than empty promises?

There was a query in the merit stats which became too slow and ended up jamming up the whole database. Possibly it was pushed over the edge by new bot activity, but no intentional DoS attack AFAICT. Or maybe my fix from yesterday's unrelated database issue degraded performance. I'll look into it more later. In any case, I think I fixed it for now.

It also wasn't fodocooper. I'm very confident that it was just a mistake from a moderator who deletes mountains of trash every day. (I'd also think that it was just a mistake if it had been deleted by frodocooper or -ck, but since it wasn't, you can put your mind doubly at ease...)

It wasn't deleted by -ck.

Nobody is out to get you. The posts looked in isolation like no-content "good project"-type garbage. Many moderators scan all posts as they come in, not looking closely at which threads they belong to. I agree that those posts were sufficiently on-topic when taken in context, especially when posted by non-newbies, and should not have been deleted. Their authors reposted them immediately, so get over it.

I strongly suspect that dominance is inversely related to the BTC price, at least when looking at these large price movements in the short-term. So when BTC returns to $7k, I'd expect dominance to drop again. But it would be good/interesting if people are losing faith completely in the particularly worthless alts like XRP.

Right, that's why while I think that it's a good idea in principle, it'll probably never be done, and almost certainly never be done in a way which is a net positive. The point is to reduce the size of government (in number of regulations, government employees, etc.) and encourage some amount of personal responsibility (at least the responsibility to ask private charities for money if necessary), but instead you're going to end up with a huge mess of limitations and exceptions which would rival the US tax code in size.

---

I'd be theoretically OK IMO to progressively phase out UBI at very high income levels, but I wouldn't particularly support that because it requires the government to know your income, and I strongly favor eliminating the income tax. Taxation is theft and should be totally eliminated, but income tax is the worst type; it'd be better to replace income tax with sales tax and/or property tax. (If there is an income tax, then you can do negative income tax, a similar system to UBI supported by Milton Friedman.)

The amount should not depend on marital status. If two or more people are able to have a better standard of living by living together, then that's fine. Charles Murray suggests that his proposed $13k/year is not usually enough to live alone, and would require either marriage or rooming.

The amount should not depend on location. If costs are too high where you live, then you should move. If costs are low where you live, then that's fine. People without much money should go to low-cost areas; it's like supply & demand.

Minimum wage is basically universally agreed amongst economists to be counter-productive to everyone. The only thing that it can possibly do is prevent two people from making a deal which they otherwise would've considered worthwhile. It decreases employment and has very little effect on wages. With UBI, even the (totally false) justification for minimum wage that it's necessary for people to get enough money to live would be removed.


This is something that also bothers me. People always frame prosperity/welfare as needing to find a well-paying 9-to-5 job, but is it really necessary for people to work so much? 100 years ago it was common for a single person to support two adults and several children on his own, but now it's common for two parents to work full-time and still feel squeezed. Standards of living have increased, of course, and materialism also plays a big factor, but the whole culture seems wrong. It's probably also due in large part to the government uselessly consuming so much of the economy.

Especially with increasing automation, people are going to have to spend more time on free-form, entrepreneurial sorts of things, and that's good. There's no need to force people into soul-sucking 9-to-5 jobs. Already, I suspect that if you're earning less than $30k/year in the US, then you could probably make more money by becoming an independent contractor of some sort, even if you're completely unskilled.

I fear that governments will create near-pointless 9-to-5 jobs as a form of welfare (like eg. the New Deal CCC) in order to guarantee a "living wage", which would be just unbelievably stupid. Just send people a check and the vast majority of them will on their own do much more useful and fulfilling work.

Something had broke, but I fixed it.

Done. If people are having issues with eg. getting BTC out of an old MultiBit wallet, it'd be appropriate to post this in Bitcoin Technical Support.

Altcoins have always on the whole followed the BTC price but with higher variance. So if you bought a basket of altcoins, I'd expect it to behave similarly to a leveraged BTC position; when BTC rises, altcoins rise more and the BTC dominance decreases, and when BTC falls, altcoins fall more and the BTC dominance increases.

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.

Sorry for ending this much later than usual.


Looks more like an ICO than a game at this point. Rejected for now.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.10 ChipMixer
1 0.10 bjnetbee
2 0.10 irfan_pak10
2 0.08 Stunna