There's also a forum policy against trolling. This is necessary to keep the forum usable.


Trading hacked account info is not illegal as far as I know, though IANAL. If it is illegal, explain why. Illegal trades are not allowed.


This seems more likely to be illegal. If it's not illegal, it's a similar issue to the current one and I would be inclined to allow it.

Yeah, I just told him to use local rules.

It's my policy to usually enforce local rules. See:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31782.0

I think that being able to ban someone from a thread is generally a good thing. Someone might be damaging a thread in ways that moderators don't normally react to. If you don't like the local rule, you can start a new thread. Also, banning someone from posting in a topic should be a red flag to potential traders. This makes it easier to identify potentially dangerous traders.

There are good reasons to think that torac is selling hacked accounts.

Selling hacked accounts is not banned by any current forum policy. Selling the accounts is not illegal as far as I know (maybe the act of hacking the accounts is illegal). I'm always reluctant to go against the forum's policy of free speech, and in this case I'm not even sure that the trades are immoral. On one hand:

- The victims probably never notice.
- If the victims do notice, they can probably get their accounts back without too much hassle.
- There is no violence or deception involved.
- torac is only selling information. Some part of me thinks that selling information can never be wrong.

On the other hand, there are victims...

Also, I can never know with absolute certainty whether someone is selling hacked accounts or just reselling accounts that have been given to them willingly. (Reselling willingly-given accounts is OK. The forum clearly has no obligation to enforce the terms of service for other sites. Otherwise common trades such as Steam trades or PayPal transfers would be disallowed.) This makes a ban on trading hacked accounts potentially messy to enforce. Should I ban trades that are only probably trades of hacked accounts?


The forum is non-profit. I don't get anything whether he donates or not.


I wouldn't like it, but I'm not sure that selling the credentials would be immoral.

Bitcoin has a lot of momentum. To compete, a cryptocurrency would need to do a lot more than just make a few tweaks to Bitcoin. Maybe a cryptocurrency would have a chance against Bitcoin if it implemented most of the stuff on the hardfork wishlist and had a client that's better than all Bitcoin clients. Or if someone figured out how to prevent double-spending in a decentralized way that's better than Bitcoin's method using mining.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, 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. 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 7 days starting from when I put it up.

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

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.

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 0.25.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- 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.

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 10 cablepair
2 7 RoyalBitcoin
2 6.25 Inaba

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 10 cablepair
4 6.25 Inaba

New VIP donator: XMLGold. Thanks!

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 10 cablepair
2 6 RoyalBitcoin
2 5.5 Inaba

I feel like a handful of people could basically ruin the entire site by constantly creating new accounts and offering to buy/sell Bitcoins but then not showing up to trades. This attack doesn't cost anything other than a bit of time. LocalBitcoins would then be very difficult to start using because no one would ever trust users without previous trades. Is there anything in place now or planned to prevent this?

The balance of an account isn't related to how many bitcoins are currently "stored in" the account. The balance of an account increases when the account receives bitcoins at one of its addresses, but decreases only when you explicitly move bitcoins from the account using something like sendfrom. getbalance without an account is the correct number of bitcoins in your wallet.

The way accounts work often confuses people, but these counter-intuitive behaviors are often useful for simple Bitcoin-accepting websites, which is what the accounts feature was designed for.

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 10 cablepair
4 4 Inaba

It wasn't the default, but I just changed that.

I did my first successful trade on LocalBitcoins. It went pretty well.

Suggestions:
- I have a very cheap cell phone that doesn't support SMS very well. I'd like to have the option of calling some number and entering a numeric code to release the funds.
- For pricing, I would like to be able to have a fixed extra fee per transaction. So my fee would be "5% above the MtGox price per BTC plus $3" or something like that.

There won't ever be a mandatory fee. That would significantly reduce the forum population.


The forum is far from low on money. Donations are appreciated, but no one should feel obligated to donate.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, 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. 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 7 days starting from when I put it up.

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

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.

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 0.25.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- 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.

I'm surprised that more people aren't doing crazy things because they think the world is going to end. This has been the biggest end of the world prediction since 2000, but now it seems like most people have forgotten about it. Kind of disappointing.

I got an email from my 13-year-old self via futureme.org warning that the world is really totally going to end soon. I was such an idiot...