You didn't see an image, though it might have looked like an image due to fancy CSS.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 5 Jake
1 3 Goat
6 1 mcorlett

You should read the rules before bidding...

I am considering this bid invalid until Jake sends me a deposit.

Thanks for the responses!

Probably Spanish would look best on a résumé, but I almost never meet Spanish-speaking people who don't also speak fluent English (here in Wisconsin), so I'm not sure how useful it would be to me. I also can't think of any Spanish literature or media which might interest me. I feel like I would never use Spanish once I complete the required courses.

Sounds like Chinese is very difficult and likely not very rewarding, so now I'm leaning toward French. There's a ton of French film and literature which might be interesting, and there seems to be quite a few French-speaking people involved in P2P projects like Bitcoin, Freenet, and I2P, so French might be one of the more useful languages for communication I'm likely to engage in.


Ah, I hadn't realized learning Chinese would be so slow-going. Being unable to read anything substantial would make learning the language much more difficult, I'd imagine.

Pretty accurate assessment.

At times, Atlas has been very reasonable. In the early days I trusted him a lot. But over the last several months, he's been annoying and unhinged. I wish he would pull it together. (Your constant provocation doesn't help...)

I need to take two semesters of a foreign language, but I'm not sure which language to learn. My choices are French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and German. I've been leaning slightly toward Chinese; I don't really like the "sound" of Romance languages, and Chinese culture seems interesting. I've heard that Chinese is pretty difficult, though, and it probably wouldn't be as useful as Spanish. Also, I intend to learn Japanese someday, and I'm worried that knowing the Chinese readings of characters would mess me up (or would it actually help?).

Any advice?

Bitcoin only downloads the chain from one of your peers at a time, so connecting to more will only increase your chances of connecting to a fast one. You could get the same effect by "-connect"ing to a node you know is fast.

(As others have mentioned, network speed isn't usually the limiting factor, anyway.)

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 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.

The ad lasts 7 days starting from when I put it up.

Stats: On the 20^th of November, 2011, there were about 120,000 views of topics. So one slot would have appeared around 12,000 times per day. The ad doesn't appear on topic pages with only one post, though, and it only appears for people using the default theme. Total views per day on more recent days (in March):
- 17^th: 138858
- 18^th: 136029
- 19^th: 146393
- 20^th: 150091
- 21^st: 134668
- 22^nd: 133153
- 23^rd: 119321
- 24^st: 111110

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 02:00:00 on April 3, 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 slot may be sold to someone else.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 5.5 bitsforcoins.com
2 5 cablepair
2 4.5 Goat
2 4 Goat
1 4 wm-center.com

Right. They're both banned now for posting garbage.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
2 5 cablepair
2 4.5 Goat
2 4 Goat
2 4 wm-center.com


Yes, though I'd prefer it if each of your posts just contained all of your current bids.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
2 5 cablepair
2 4 Goat
4 3.5 aurumxchange


You can make multiple bids per post like you've been doing. I'm just going to assume that you're replacing your old bids whenever you post again.

That'd make things a little more difficult for botnet operators, but it can be bypassed. The botnet software could listen for blocks and transactions on the Bitcoin network and include them without checking them or storing them. The resulting blocks will usually be valid, since legitimate nodes don't relay bad transactions. The botnet could even "check" each transaction by seeing if its other peers either already have the new transaction or will accept it.

I just realized that this attack also applies to other proposals requiring some amount of transactions from the memory pool to be in the next block.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 4 Goat
6 3.5 aurumxchange
1 3.5 NothinG

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 Goat
6 3.5 aurumxchange
1 3.5 NothinG

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 Goat
1 3 Goat
3 3 cablepair
1 2.5 Goat
1 2 NothinG
1 2 wm-center.com

In addition to your past bids?

You also need to discourage the block if it has only transactions you don't know about, since otherwise the miner could make up transactions.

I'm not bothered by this rule from an economic perspective, but I'm not confident in the effectiveness of discouragement (due to bad incentives), and I'm uneasy about relying on transaction propagation in any way, since propagation is imperfect and will get worse with time. I prefer gmaxwell's proposal because it only relies on the block chain.