This auction is over. I forgot to lock it.

I added it to the bottom of topic pages.

This is too subjective. Some would say that even BS&T has revealed its business model sufficiently.

I have been considering a HYIP subforum under Gambling based on interest rate. I haven't decided yet whether this would be fair, consistent, and helpful.

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 this week will be 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

Efficacy stats:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54182.0

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.

- 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 0.5.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- The auction end time is 11:00:00 on August 17, UTC. Countdown. (The end time may be extended -- see below.)
- 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 any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the auction end time, then the auction will be extended by 30 minutes. If any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the new end time, then the auction will be extended again, etc. The time will not extend beyond 6 hours total.

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

I never liked the stickies. Using stickies for categorization seems like a misuse of the feature. How about "long-term offers" under "Lending" for this kind of stuff, and no restrictions on post content?

Yeah, that's a known problem that rarely affects users. I haven't been able to figure out which escape/unescape function is being included twice or left out, and I don't want to mess with it too much for fear of breaking passwords. Please use the password reset function to change your password to something without special characters, or PM me if this isn't possible.

Auction ends in ~20 minutes.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
4 5 cablepair
4 3.5 wm-center.com

It's not impossible for him to pay more BTC than exists over a long period of time. He could, for example, pay out 1 million BTC, buy that BTC back using USD, and repeat until he's paid the ~13 million BTC. Something like that could happen legitimately with a gigantic, extremely productive company (the company would buy the BTC back with its products instead of USD). MtGox has probably sent more BTC than exists.

This has always been a problem, and the developers continuously improve it. I first heard about Bitcoin over 2 years ago from a post on a forum complaining about how long it was taking for Bitcoin to download all of the blocks. It took 2-3 days at that time to download all of the blocks.

If you weren't already logged in, it wasn't possible to log in since the downtime yesterday. This is fixed now.

It seems that the server locked up while compressing the forum backup. I don't know why. This normally works fine -- I just tried it now without any issues.

I'm not sure what caused it.

Yes. It's to make it more difficult for banned users to come back. You should hire someone to create an account for you.

I am serious. Obviously I don't think there's a huge risk or I wouldn't be buying any BDT shares. But this freeze is reason to be concerned, and some investors might just need their principal back ASAP.

Satoshi wrote about the Byzantine Generals problem:

I'll buy BDT shares now from trustworthy people (via PGP-signed futures contracts) @ 0.6 BTC per share.

When someone is banned, in some cases all of their IPs will also be banned. If they were using Tor, some Tor exit nodes will be banned. If you use Tor, you'll occasionally run into these bans. You can tell Tor to switch to a new exit node ("new identity") when this happens. Tor switches exit nodes every 10 minutes by default; you'll run into bans less frequently if you increase this time using the MaxCircuitDirtiness configuration option.

Right. Script has opcodes for some hashing and signing algorithms built in, but it's not powerful enough to implement other crypto algorithms (bignum math isn't possible, for example). It's possible to make Script Turing-complete, but I don't see this happening any time soon since it would be backward-incompatible, it introduces potential security problems, and there's not that much benefit to it.


There are hardware devices that securely contain private keys and perform signing, but I don't know whether any existing devices would be able to sign Bitcoin transactions. Especially since Bitcoin uses an ECDSA curve used almost nowhere else.

I think the price would go down quite a bit. Bitcoin would be much less useful if a large portion of its users needed to deal with it under the radar. Gavin and some other developers would probably stop working on the code, as well.

This is unlike drug prices. People want cocaine, but no one really wants bitcoins. People want to use bitcoins. If it's less easy to use BTC, BTC is less valuable.

An outright ban on Bitcoin seems unlikely, though.

I find accounts pretty intuitive for the most common use cases. If you're running a website selling something, you can just create one bitcoind account per user on your site. Use getaccountaddress to get the address for deposits to that account, sendfrom to make withdrawals from that account, getbalance to get the account's balance, and move to move funds from one person on your site to another person on your site. No need to worry about tracking or updating addresses.