Yeah, some strongly-anonymous person besides Satoshi should really have a copy of the alert key. (I am not very public, but I'm not terribly anonymous.) Control of the bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org domain names is shared between Sirius and an anonymous person, which is good.

Or maybe we need to establish a "Bitcoin Defense Force" to act as bodyguards for all of the devs.

He is no longer a moderator. I don't give out scammer tags anymore except in extraordinary cases. You can use the trust system.


As I typically do for language sections, I chose him after consulting the community in question.

Cara J. is affiliated with HashFast, so I will accept her bids.

Current state:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
7 11 Cara J.

How many connections do you have?

Your account is too new. I will not accept your bids unless you pay in advance. I'll PM you.

Ah, very interesting! I never bothered to check that (and I bet a lot of other people didn't, either). Wouldn't it be hilarious if Satoshi managed to choose one of the few standard curves that was not backdoored?

Primary results:

---

INDIVIDUAL SEAT

    Elizabeth T. Ploshay (30.0%)
    Trace Mayer (17.1%)
    Ben Davenport (16.8%)
    Joerg Platzer (16.8%)
    Luke Dashjr (7.1%)

INDUSTRY SEAT

    Meyer (Micky) Malka (68.6%)
    Tony Gallippi (8.6%)
    Jaron Lukasiewicz (8.6%)

---

I'm surprised at how poorly Joerg Platzer did. It seems that a lot of people like him. He may gain votes in the next round.

It's at the bottom of the topic page.

But they can unlock it. The edit will be visible, though.


Yes.

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
5 10 betcointm
2 9.25 friedcat

Interestingly, Bitcoin is one of the only users worldwide of the ECDSA curve called secp256k1, which is not a verifiably-random curve. Unlike SHA-256's constants, we don't know for sure where secp256k1's curve constants came from. This curve was specified by SECG, which is a group that includes NIST.

It's very unlikely that this curve is particularly weak in any way, but it may be prudent to offer users the option of using different crypto. (This can be done in a backward-compatible way.)


It doesn't matter which CA you use. The CA system is structured such that any CA can compromise sites using any other CA. All HTTPS is unsafe if any CA is compromised (if you trust the CA system blindly).

Not enough time has passed for me to conclude anything.


There is no edit history. I can sometimes use database backups to get the original post, but backups are done only daily, and this is a big hassle.

Thanks to the fast response of PIA's Andrew Lee and NFOrce, the attack was stopped (for now). The attacker was flooding the server with UDP packets.

It's a problem with your terminal, probably. Bitcoin just accepts whatever bytes you give it IIRC.


The HTML is sent in ISO-8859-1, but Unicode is fully supported via HTML entities.

That'd probably be too much load on the server.

I know it's not as good, but the search box in the upper-right will search only the current topic if you're on a topic page.

The Namecoin thread predates the creation of the altcoin section by several months, so that particular thread is considered "grandfathered".

That's exactly what they want you to think.

Yes. If there's an invalid chain longer than your current chain, Bitcoin will automatically give you a warning and go into safe mode. 0.8.5 (probably) will go into safe mode if a competing chain is even approaching a dangerous length.