I'm not sure that a block chain is required at all, but if it is, it's probably best to use the Bitcoin block chain. General timestamping with Bitcoin is incredibly useful, and it can't be done in other chains because the incentives aren't right. So it should be allowed (with appropriate fees), and in practice it's probably difficult to prevent it.

I hope that someone uses this opportunity to create a decentralized DNS network that's actually good. Namecoin always had a lot of flaws which probably would have prevented any real success. In particular, DNS does not require its own currency.

Geotrust doesn't have access to the private key. They're a CA. They sign public keys. Any widely-trusted CA can replace a certificate signed by any other CA, so using a more expensive CA is pointless. But unlike Cloudflare, a CA can't retroactively decrypt encrypted traffic, and it's possible for users to notice a certificate change if they pay close attention.

This is probably the highest security bounty of any forum. It's only a little less than Google's security bounties. After this attack, the forum spent over 100 BTC on security-related stuff. Prior to the attack, the forum spent 40 BTC on password hashing improvements which significantly mitigated the damage of this attack.

Contrary to common belief, there is no magic wishing well into which you can throw money and instantly get good results. Often, it's better not to spend money, especially when growth is not the forum's main goal. You always seem to want me to spend thousands of bitcoins as quickly as possible. This would be a great way for the forum to lose a lot of its money without gaining much value in return.

If you don't like how I spend the forum's money, you can:
- Use reasonable arguments (not just trollish demands/complaints) to try and convince me; or
- Create your own organization, generate 6000+ BTC (mostly not from donations), and try some alternative strategy.


No exploit stopped by Cloudflare should ever get anywhere near affecting the forum, and any exploit that is stopped can almost certainly be done in some other way that won't be stopped. Same for any automatic exploit detection based on patterns. Unless DoS attacks get really bad, I won't be willing to give up control of the forum's HTTPS keys.

I prefer not to denominate values in any single country's currency here, but BTC is too unstable. XAU is pretty stable.

It doesn't support HTTPS for hosted sites, though.

bitcoin.org is hosted on GitHub, which doesn't support HTTPS.


The Chinese government also controls several certificate authorities, so they can bypass HTTPS anyway.

Bitcointalk.org offers large security bounties. See: https://bitcointalk.org/sbounties.php

Exactly one person did make a fuss right away, which is why I'm inclined to believe him even though he doesn't have any real proof.

He claims to have used bips.me, an EWallet. And when he asked bips.me to sign something like I recommended, they apparently didn't know what he was talking about...

It's rare for someone to pay such large amounts to 17RTT... (except for my huge internal transfers), and he contacted me quickly, so it's probably likely that he actually sent it. The possibility that he didn't is why I'm posting this.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software and for other useful purposes, the forum is selling ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page.

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. Ads will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". 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.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Seven 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 frequently get 1-2 extra days, 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 seven slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 7 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 7 slots. If the two highest bids are 7 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 6 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 0.25.
- 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. I also post periodic status updates which should help make things clear.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 3.25 Inaba
3 3.25 CEX

Someone donated 10 BTC directly to the forum's main donation address 17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9. (This is not what you're supposed to do if you want Donator status.) Someone is trying to claim this donation for Donator status, but they can't prove that they sent it. If you actually sent this 10 BTC, sign a message with 1ECTrZNum3ojyfDnZbkDBALtfwWL54wtZL. Otherwise, I'll give the status to the guy who already contacted me about claiming it.

Sometimes (though very rarely), there is a large chain fork. In a fork, the miners mining on what ends up being the wrong side of the fork lose their mining rewards when the chain merges again. Anyone who received those newly-mined coins (perhaps over many "generations" of transactions) will have those transactions permanently invalidated. This is very bad. To prevent this from happening, the Bitcoin network prohibits coinbase transactions (mining rewards) from being spent for 100 blocks. As a result, a fork must be longer than 100 blocks for any non-coinbase transactions to be invalidated unless there's double-spending involved. Any change to Bitcoin which would allow a valid transaction to later become invalid would break Bitcoin's robustness in this area unless such transactions had similar 100-block spending restrictions.

That would reduce Bitcoin's security/robustness model. Currently, it isn't possible for a transaction to become invalid after a chain fork of less than 100 blocks unless double-spending is involved. With threshold transactions, a long fork (due to a netsplit, bug, etc.) can cause widespread havoc by invalidating tons of transactions dependent on a threshold transaction. Maybe it'd be OK if threshold transactions had the same 100-block spending limit as coinbase transactions, but this extra complexity isn't worthwhile IMO unless there's some amazing application for these transactions.

Registration is disabled until I have time to fix some things.

This auction will be done again: see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=308632.0 .

Due to the hack, the last auction will be redone. This auction will end sometime in the next 48 hours.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software and for other useful purposes, the forum is selling ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page.

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. Ads will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". 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.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Seven 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 frequently get 1-2 extra days, 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 seven slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 7 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 7 slots. If the two highest bids are 7 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 6 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 0.25.
- 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. I also post periodic status updates which should help make things clear.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else.

If you uploaded your avatar recently, it may have been lost in the move.