I'm thinking of making Games & Rounds not count toward posts or activity. What other boards would be good candidates for this? Maybe Off-topic, though some decent discussions occur there, so I'm not sure about that.

Pruned nodes are still full nodes. They have all of the same security, and they provide most of the same benefits to the Bitcoin network. Full nodes without pruning are called "archive nodes".

I will probably mostly not enable pruning because I find that I need to rescan pretty frequently, and you can't do that with pruning.

Fixed, thanks.

Actually it went quicker than expected, only 10 minutes.

I think that the previous problem should be much less common now.

I don't think that the security impact would be catastrophic. All we need is for the hashrate of legitimate miners to be greater than any likely attacker, and I think that this would become the case only a day or two after the PoW change, as soon as ordinary people start mining again in decent numbers.

But I don't think that there's any actual value in switching the PoW algorithm right now. It's likely that any new algorithm will get ASICs again in less than 6 months. (And if ASICs can be avoided - a very difficult task -, then the network will instead probably become dominated by botnets, and I don't know that it's good to rely on botnet operators for security. Though perhaps botnets would tend to be less centralized than ASICs, at least.) IMO it's better to stick with "the devil you know" unless the current miners actually abuse their position. But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

That's probably a fairly accurate description, but TBH I'm pretty disappointed that it worked out like that. The purpose of all the complexity in the trust system was to make it decentralized, yet to a very large extent it became centralized in the form of DefaultTrust. I'm tempted to try out my alternate idea for bootstrapping the trust lists of new users which I posted about a while ago just because I find the centralization very annoying, even if the new system might be objectively somewhat worse.

It is never safe to use untrusted copies of those directories. When someone gives you an already-made block database, it's possible for them to manipulate it so that they can fork you off of the real chain at any time or do various other nasty things. By default Bitcoin Core does no checking of info in the database except for some basic checks of the last few blocks. Checkpoints are not rechecked. And even Bitcoin Core's checkblocks feature won't find all possible traps.

The database files are cross-platform, but you should copy them only if you trust the source absolutely. Also, the files are all intimately related and different per node, so it won't work to copy just some files -- it needs to be an all-or-nothing copy.

P.S. ｗａｔａｓｈｉ－ｋｏｋｏｔｏのアブターはとてもかわいい。

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

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. 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.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 12, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

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.

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 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Probably the end time will be 7-12 days from the time of this post, though it could be anywhere between 4 and 22 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- 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.

Sorry, I can't accept your bid.

Auction ended. Final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.00 xzzx
1 1.80 playtodos
3 1.80 idsb2b
1 1.75 Alex.BG
3 1.70 victorhing

There's a good chance that he will be one of the worst presidents ever. I don't think that even he knows what his policies are or should be, and probably he would be in way over his head. I think that he will be strongly inclined to implement protectionist trade policy -- restricting trade with China, etc. -- and this would be extremely bad for the US and world economy in both the short-term and long-term.

But I have to say I'm interested to see what Trump would do as president. Maybe I'm naïve, but I've become convinced that Trump at least does not have the same motivations as the vast majority of politicians. Possibly he's even honest about actually wanting to "make America great again". Also, it's likely that everything he tries to do will put the government into deadlock, which is always good. (I'm still not going to vote for him.)

No. There isn't a fixed number of seats in the default trust list or anything.

I haven't even read the article, but since he never scammed here, I'm inclined to give escrow.ms the benefit of the doubt and assume (until I get more info) that he is the victim of some government nonsense. But I guess he will at least be inactive for a while, so I removed him.


It's a common misconception that one's trust list is a list of people who you extra-special-trust. Really it's a list of people who you believe have given accurate ratings and will continue to do so -- it's not necessary to actually trust them all that much otherwise. And likewise, if someone is very trustworthy but never leaves trust ratings, then it's somewhat pointless to add them to your trust list.

A lot of people are using the term "DT" in a confusing way... I wrote a vocabulary post about this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=891261.0

In the future Core will let you choose to "donate x GB to the network", and then you'll store a random range of historical blocks. Then nodes doing an initial sync will have to search out nodes that have the blocks they want from among these nodes storing chunks of the historical chain. It's a bit like how BitTorrent works.

I feel like the people who will be most interested in your question will be in Dev&Tech, so I moved it there. It is rather off-topic there, so if someone complains then maybe it should be moved to Off-topic.

Sorry for your loss, but while account trades are tolerated here, they are strongly discouraged, in part because we do not enforce/broker account sales. In most cases, the original owner of the account is the legitimate owner forever as far as forum administration is concerned. (Though if we happen to come across some pretty clear evidence that an account is sold by its owner, we're not going to intentionally help the original owner scam the account back. But neither are we going to put much effort into preventing this.)

I restored Jude Austin to its original owner. I don't see any evidence for or against the original owner scamming the buyer out of 0.6 BTC. It's possible, but on the other hand the password hashes are known to have been leaked, so if Jude Austin's password was weak, it is possible for it to have been cracked.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Trademark complaint.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1117926.0

I probably couldn't support or vote for Trump. He seems extremely inconsistent, and what he says is often not well-thought-out.

As for whether Trump is better than the others, I'm not sure. Looking at his stated platform, I guess he might be OK. His platform is 75% terrible, but that's better than most, and he looks decent on the most important issues. It'd be especially good if he is incapable of effectively working with congress, since that'd slow down government action. But it's difficult to predict what exactly would happen if he was elected.


Yeah, I voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. But it's pretty unlikely that he could win. Maybe if it's Hillary vs some highly unpopular Republican nominee and the Libertarian Party really steps up its game.

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=<kept chain data in MB>. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/rand-paul-dropping-out-of-white-house-race-218675

Pretty sad. Very near the beginning of the presidential race he seemed to be doing quite well, but he ended up just not being good enough at politics.

I haven't been following the other candidates. Are any of them decent? IMO, the most important issue (especially for a president) is maintaining peace, and it seems like almost all of the candidates are way worse than Obama, ready to go recklessly into a deadly and expensive war.

You also can't rescan, which I suspect is what people will end up missing the most with pruning.