Seems pretty plausible, though you're right that it can't be proven. Still, people should stay away from 999dice.com until they change the way they deal with seeds to rule out this sort of tampering.

The problem with that is that many of the current anti-DoS measures distinguish between users by looking at their IP address. For example, if you're not logged in then your IP is limited to one search every 100 seconds (or something like that -- I don't remember the exact number) to prevent you from overloading the server. IMO Tor needs to add some configurable proof-of-work mechanism to hidden services for them to be widely usable. For example, one thing that comes to mind is that the client could prove that he's holding x GB of data unique to a certain hidden service, and after verifying this, Tor could pass a unique private IP for that client (eg. 10.1.2.3) to the hidden service's web server. (The IP would be different per hidden service, so it would only be a minor reduction in privacy -- the hidden service would only be able to track you across its own pages.) Then the standard idea of "block IPs that abuse the server" could be used by the hidden service.

There is no caching on the bitcointalk.org side. The image is always passed directly from the source server to the user. Any Expires or Cache-Control headers sent by the origin server are passed through as well, so caching might be done by the client.

The code is computed from the URL, not the image data.

That's annoying. I suppose there's not much I can do about it, though.

A proper image proxy link looks like:
https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.images.express.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fdynamic%2F1%2F590x%2FDog-handler-431049.jpg&t=549&c=fnsjPOVuf7KyWA

Notice that it has "t" and "c" parameters. These are used to check that the link was generated by the forum. Link generation is done whenever posts are loaded (at the bbcode parsing stage). So the links change over time. (Image proxy links expire after a month or two, so you can't just generate a valid link and then use it forever.)

What I support most strongly is that we do substantially-delayed hard forks with conservative values. Then doing hard forks regularly isn't such a big issue.

For example, Bitcoin Core can be immediately modified to increase the max block size to 2 MB on a specific date 2 years from now. I think that pretty much everyone would be basically OK with this max block size (and even higher values might be widely acceptable). By the time the change actually takes effect in 2 years, everyone will already have upgraded because very few people use 2-year-old software. Businesses and users won't have to go out of their way to choose one fork over another, and so there will be less room for messiness.

Then if a really nice academic study convincingly arguing that 5 MB blocks are safe is published 1 week after the 2-year-delayed change is added, another 2-year-delayed change can be added right away with very little extra cost. After ~2 years, the max block size will increase to 2 MB, and then a week later change to 5 MB.

Yes, 2 years is a long time. But I'm confident that Bitcoin will survive that long with 1 MB blocks.

There was an expected 502 error for ~2 minutes just now.

We were fixing things about 20 hours ago. Hopefully that's what you saw.

If anyone sees any nginx or "connection problems" errors in the next day, please post here.

Did anyone get errors in the last 6 hours (or the next ~12 hours)? I'm hoping that it's stable now.

Bitcoin can be changed in a backward-incompatible way and still remain Bitcoin. It was done by Satoshi with the version checksum change, for example.

Hopefully there won't be any huge hard fork controversy in the future. It'd be a big mess if people had to actively decide between one fork or another. If this does happen, then I will endorse the most correct version of Bitcoin, and this version is what I'll mean when I say "Bitcoin". In particular, these are some principles that any potential hard fork must not violate:
- The network must remain substantially decentralized.
- The inflation schedule must be the same or lower/slower. (Though I'm not 100% sure whether lowering inflation would be OK.)
- No one should be allowed by design to steal your money.
- As much as reasonably possible, no one should be able to prevent you from spending your money.
- Anonymity should be at least possible.

I will oppose any unsafe hard fork, even if it's proposed by Gavin. I and the sites I have some hand in are independent of the dev group, the Bitcoin Foundation, and other companies/organizations. I don't know whether Gavin's current proposal is safe, so the only thing I'm doing now is recommending caution.


I wasn't a fan of the whole idea of giving miners any special say on the issue. (Though it wasn't actually much of a vote, since miners could only confirm/reject P2SH.) Miners are basically employees of the network, and it should be the actions of users and businesses that influence what miners do, not the other way around. It would have been possible and better for users and businesses to (at a reasonable pace) force miners to accept the P2SH change.

If by "protect" you mean "allow attackers to use a limitless amount of money"... AWS doesn't have much built-in DDoS protection AFAIK.

While you can definitely use AWS as part of a very scalable and stable architecture, it's easy for costs to go out of control. For example, a site I used called inkblazers.com is apparently going to shut down very soon because they're spending over $60,000 per month on their AWS hosting. The forum's hosting costs a few thousand dollars per month. Their Alexa rank is 118,092, whereas bitcointalk.org's Alexa rank is 4,568. (They probably have to deliver a lot more data, but that cost is still absolutely ridiculous.)

And AWS doesn't guarantee uptime. Reddit, for example, is apparently based on AWS, and temporary overload errors are very common there. On an average day, bitcointalk.org is usually more stable than Reddit, I think.

It's far easier to do things mostly-right if you just use a traditional single server. This also allows more control and better security. (Amazon doesn't have the best reputation for protecting customers.)

Responding to things that other people keep saying elsewhere: Yes, the forum has a lot of money. But this is mostly due to BTC value increases, and it would quickly be depleted if costs increased much higher. Spending at the level of most VC-backed startups would be absolutely reckless. I don't think that the forum can afford more than maybe one additional full-time employee, for example. (Currently the only full-time employees are Slickage. I and the moderators are paid so little that we're basically volunteers. There are also a few part-time contractors.)

Believe me, no one finds it more annoying than I do when the forum is down -- I'm usually the one who has to fix it and try to prevent it from happening again... In this case, things are breaking without any obvious cause, so it might take some time to figure this out and get things rock-solid again.

It has basically no features. It's barely better than the commenting system on a blog.

Most of the recent downtime is caused by MariaDB very rarely hanging on a random query and preventing all other queries from completing. If this sort of thing happens when everyone is sleeping/away (especially on weekends), then there's downtime. Someone on the MariaDB IRC says that it might be a bug in the version of MariaDB that I upgraded to as part of the server change.

Searching is enabled again now. I also made several improvements to search. It should be substantially faster now, and maybe also more accurate. (SMF was extremely buggy in this area -- it's surprising that search was even usable before.)

I undeleted 15 PMs from evrynet to you. This might not be all of the PMs -- PMs are removed from the database if the sender and all recipients delete them.

Having 6 open topics about the same thing isn't OK. It's not fair to people who read/post other topics, since they'll tend to have a disadvantage when it comes to position in the topics list.

Post the polls in Archival, and lock all of them. Then link to the polls from one topic in Hardware.

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 (no marquee or blinking). Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 700px 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. Eight 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 10, 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 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 counts 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.

Auction rules

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

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made. In particular, bids from people with less than 15 activity points are likely to be rejected. I recommend not getting into a bidding war with someone who has less than 15 activity points, as their bids might not be accepted, but your latest bids will still stand. If you need to know right away whether someone's bids will be accepted, PM me.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 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 no more than 12 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.

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). You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

Sorry for the delay.


Normally I would accept your bid because you tried to contact me first (even if I didn't respond), but the only review of your service is negative, so I won't accept your bid. Please try to grow without forum ads for a month or two, and then try again.

Final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 4.00 FortuneJack
1 3.95 casinobitcoin
3 3.90 BitmainWarranty

Is confidence in the Yen going down at all? I heard that the central bank recently started increasing inflation a lot.

The Bitcoin price is very volatile right now, so most people shouldn't invest much money in it.


That's too bad. Monacoin is basically exactly the same as Bitcoin, but without Bitcoin's extremely competent developers and established ecosystem.


Your English is mostly understandable, so you could probably post to the main English sections. I think that there also are a few native Japanese people around here. 私も日本語が少し話せます。

I agree with the soft fork, though an annoying thing about this is that increasing the block version to 3 will cause everyone to get an "upgrade required" warning even though upgrading is not really required. It might cause systems to automatically shut down (due to alertnotify) or cause people to panic, and it increases the value of bitcoin.org as an attack target because everyone will be upgrading at the same time. I guess it can't be helped in this case, though maybe this warning should be removed or at least softened in future versions.