Twitter @bitcointalk is official, but I only use it for outage notices and such. If there are no problems, then there will be no @bitcointalk messages.

I don't use social media. If you think that some social media functionality would be useful (such as pointing to interesting posts), feel free to do it yourself. If it's an interesting project, I might be willing to create APIs to help you. But since I don't use these sites, I don't even know what people would want.

His account was compromised.


I'm not going to do reversals on mere abuse.

Since it was a large amount and a clear-cut case, I deleted those merit sends.

In the recent US House hearing on digital currency, most of the lawmakers were worried that a cryptocurrency would out-compete the US dollar, and so they were interested in creating an official USD cryptocurrency to preempt this. (Mainly they were worried about a cryptocurrency created by a different government, but some also contemplated Bitcoin achieving dominance.) This sort of "FedCoin" is a hilarious effort doomed to fail.

Most people are fine with using things like credit cards, bank autopayments, bank-linked payment apps, etc. They're easy enough, and since the payments are reversible, they're highly forgiving of the average person's absolutely abominable security practices. These people are not going to switch to either Bitcoin or FedCoin any time soon, and they can be ignored for now.

Of course, the above-mentioned traditional payment methods have a huge list of problems. Listing just a few:
 - Pull-based payments are inherently insecure.
 - Payments based on shared secrets like credit card numbers are inherently insecure.
 - The person you're paying has to know your personal information.
 - Your intermediary has to know your payment history. Most credit card companies actively sell this information to advertisers, all of them are probably vulnerable to Equifax-like breaches, and all of them are open books to government agencies.
 - USD is inflationary, and its future is highly unpredictable and (depending on your viewpoint) maybe dubious.
 - Accepting payments is costly due to fees and chargeback risk.
 - Accepting payments requires significant set-up time, and is impossible to do privately.
 - The entire thing is debt-based and filled with intermediaries. If $5 is moved, then multiple parties are simultaneously borrowing $5. It's fragile and inefficient.

If you're in the minority of people who runs into these problems, then you're probably going to use cash if possible, which solves most of those problems. If you're online, then you'd be interested in accepting BTC, which also solves most of those problems.

But any FedCoin likely to be created is going to solve few of those problems, if any:
 - Banking protocols have historically almost never been designed securely, and I doubt that any FedCoin would change this pattern.
 - Because the average person can't handle security, the system is either going to be forbidden to the average person or it's going to be reversible.
 - Governments hate privacy.
 - The very last thing that governments would give up is their power to print money.

So any FedCoin is just going to be another credit card system. But people who already like credit cards will just continue using their credit cards. There's no market for it.

---

Now, a smart statist might recognize all of the above, and abandon all of their other money-related goals just in order to maintain their power to print money. This could be done by implementing the 1996 NSA paper How To Make a Mint (which I often like to evangelize). The Federal Reserve would run some powerful timestamping servers which everyone would use, and then the rest of the system would be based on public-key crypto directly between payers and payees, probably aided by dedicated hardware. This would be better than Bitcoin in several ways:
 - It would be 100% anonymous. Not even the government could unmask you. (*)
 - Payments would be instantly irreversible and nearly free.
 - There would be no need for anyone but the Federal Reserve to run any heavy full nodes.
 - The value would be tied to USD, and therefore less volatile than BTC currently.
 - More complicated smart contracts could be implemented, since the Fed could act as a built-in smart-contract oracle.

The only thing that BTC would have going for it vs this type of e-cash would be its decentralization and finite supply. Valuable properties IMO, but I would never expect BTC to out-compete this e-cash as long as the USD was reasonable stable, whereas I do think that BTC can out-compete either today's USD or any likely hypothetical FedCoin over a long period of time.

But I would be shocked if any government tries this. Many will try the pointless FedCoin-type thing, but they are too arrogant, anti-privacy, and incompetent to create an actually-useful e-cash system like this.

(*Note that it would be possible to design the system such that certain backdoor keys could be used to unmask payments. Everyone would know about this in advance; it wouldn't be a secret backdoor. Maybe something like this could be made tolerable to the average person, though no matter what measures are in place at the start, if any backdoor is tolerated at all, then it's only a matter of time before the NSA is looking through every transaction's history.)

(There is absolutely no need to shoe-horn a block chain into such a system, BTW.)

The full hearing is here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?448611-1/house-panel-examines-digital-currency

It seemed pretty positive overall. The witnesses weren't all perfect, but they were good on the whole. Dr. Michel in particular was perfect as far as I saw. Sherman spouted his usual FUD, but he was mostly alone.

It seems that they're mostly thinking of competing with Bitcoin, which is a hilarious effort doomed to fail. 90% of Bitcoin's value proposition is inherently in opposition to government control: irreversibly, privacy, limited supply, decentralization, etc. Any "FedCoin" they'd create is going to be a total failure, at least on any level that normal people would notice. If they created an actually-private e-cash system without any redundant block chain nonsense a la How To Make a Mint, then that's something that could actually compete with Bitcoin on some level, but there's basically zero chance of them doing that.

Yes, it's the same as always. Currently there are 3 patrollers and 20 non-patroller local moderators. (I saw someone say elsewhere that all mods have jurisdiction over newbies, but this isn't true.) At some points in the past there have been more patrollers, but that's not necessarily indicative of a shortage.

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 invest-heavy.


That's just a disguised advertisement for your ICO.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.10 ChipMixer
1 0.08 8Bet
1 0.06 Godex_io
1 0.04 TheONLY-1
1 0.04 btcoon.com
1 0.02 Who_

LOL

It must be that other big-blockers like HostFat (moderator), franky1, jonald_fyookball, etc. have no problems here just because their arguments are ineffective. But faced with your incredible expertise, we had no choice but to ban you.

Look, you're banned because you've been fundamentally unwilling to follow any forum rules. This is a centralized forum, and if you want to post here, then you have to be willing to swallow your pride a bit, conform to forum rules, and take mods seriously when they give you warnings. If you're going to ignore mods, ignore rules, generally make a nuisance of yourself, and constantly escalate when called out, then you're simply not welcome on this centralized forum: go away and stop trying to sneak back.

As I mentioned before, I am willing to reconsider your ban if you promise to follow the same rules as everyone else and try to avoid getting banned, rather than having the attitude of "you can't ban me".

I was disappointed that Trump picked Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. He's the kind of person who Romney or Bush would've picked: similar to John Roberts. So his basic philosophy will be to allow burning the constitution just so long as it's a slow burn. Gorsuch on the other hand is a very strict constitutionalist, and was a truly excellent pick -- his selection proved that Trump can on occasion be better than the typical centrist Republicans and Democrats who we've been afflicted with for decades.

I expect Kavanaugh to make it through the Senate unless some major scandal is revealed. On the Republican side, probably even Rand Paul will find it politically impossible to vote against him unless he's already destined to lose, and a few democrats will likely also be pressured to vote for him (though their votes will be unnecessary).

What do you think?

Phishing is bannable. Probably everyone who wore it would be banned.

Coming from 4chan, I've been disappointed that there's very little fanart for bitcointalk.org. (Though it's not surprising, since 4chan is an imageboard and this is a text-focused BBS-type forum.)

No, edits in the grace period are not logged.


Probably.

Enough time has passed; you can edit your posts now. Note however that unlike how it was years ago, edits are now logged and available to admins. Also, since you were previously prevented from deleting replies to selfmod topics, and I see value in continuing to prevent this, I removed selfmod status on all of your past topics (topics 166416, 166498, 180287, 206948, 206949, 248803, 270101).

Short-style bech32 addresses have the same maximum possible addresses of 2¹⁶⁰. There is also a long-style bech32 address format (used for multisig and other more complex scripts) which has 2²⁵⁶ possible addresses.

Has anyone ever analyzed the actual interest rates of the BTC economy? Because BTC is long-term-deflationary, you'd expect interest rates to be very high, but I don't know of any actual analysis. For example, it'd be interesting for someone to analyze the threads in the Lending section to produce some interest-rate charts.

A particularly simple way to do it might be to use Twine. Twine creates completely-client-side HTML+JavaScript pages. It's intended for interactive fiction, but I don't think that it'd be much of a stretch to use it for courses. Then the course construction could be done on github, and the github work could be automatically compiled into HTML+JS and dumped on courses.bitcointalk.org with some server-side integration added in.

It seems that there is an open-source EDX platform which could be used, but it seems really complex, and especially difficult for many people to create/modify a course collaboratively.


Yeah, I'd like to write some of the technical material, but I won't have time to oversee it properly. I also don't know much about the science of pedagogy. I'd be nice if someone with some teaching experience would volunteer to oversee the whole thing.

I don't have any concrete plans for this at all, but I've been thinking recently that the Bitcoin community desperately needs some high-quality, unbiased online courses, and perhaps bitcointalk.org would be a good place to host such a thing. This is just a brainstorming thread.

Example courses that come to mind:

---

Introductory cryptocurrency investing
 - The main focus would be not getting scammed and not losing all of your money.
 - It would be very careful not to endorse any particular sites, investments, or trading methods.
 - Overall extremely conservative, to balance out all of the pump around here.
 - It might be similar to the sort of material on investor.gov, but less authoritarian (eg. no "only trust SEC-approved things") and with more cryptocurrency focus.
 Using English naturally online
 - Tips targeted at non-native English speakers for acting naturally online.
Being a constructive bitcointalk.org member
Making money online
 - SANE tips for making money, especially for people in less-developed countries. No unwise things like gambling or high-risk investing, and no non-constructive things like spamming the forum with garbage.
Basic cryptocurrency concepts
Accepting Bitcoin payments
Implementing Bitcoin
 - A long & advanced course on implementing a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency largely from scratch in Python or another easy language. (Some of my best courses in university had this model, where you're provided a bunch of library code and then you glue it together by writing a few hundred lines for each assignment, at the end of the course getting some sort of complete thing.)
 

---

Some different/modified software would be needed. The existing threads structure is not at all suitable. Neither are wiki pages, since they're too easily messed-with. Maybe some suitable online-course software already exists. It'd be cool if the courses were internally gamified a bit, maybe with "achievements" and stuff. And it could be integrated with the main forum, eg. giving you badges on your profile if you completed a course.

A real challenge, which I'm not exactly sure how to solve, would be to keep them up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased. 99.9% of introductory cryptocurrency info on the Internet is basically an advertisement for something, and therefore not very useful. If anyone could create a course and publish it on equal standing with the other courses, then we'd end up with a huge pile of altcoin-pump courses, "how to make money using totally-safe HYIPs", and stuff like that. But if courses are only written by trusted & competent people after significant mod review, then only a limited number of courses could be created, and they'd probably quickly become outdated. Perhaps it'd work to do a github-style pull-request format led by some trustworthy editors. (Github could even be used, though that's pretty difficult to use for people not already familiar with git.)

Thoughts?

The algorithm is somewhat complicated, since one of my goals was to make it as stateless as possible. There are no explicit periodic allocations of source merit in the database, for example. So even though I had several concrete examples of the bugs in my algorithm, I was finding it difficult to fix. The current corrected algorithm was actually designed by Slickage (who are working on the next-generation forum software). I'm not sure if it's public yet, but the JavaScript version of the algorithm will eventually be on the public repo.


Right.