The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, custom fonts, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine 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.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 11 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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/Legendary 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 stats 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.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 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 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- 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 reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

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[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

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I expect this auction to end between Monday and Wednesday next week.

AFAIK, that medium post is nothing new.

Base mimblewimble isn't really designed to be a "black box of reliable anonymity" in the way that Monero or Wasabi-CoinJoins are, where connections are hard-broken. It's more of a framework on which you could build solid anonymity using techniques that have largely not yet been perfected, plus major scaling benefits. Monero = CT + stealth addresses + ring signatures. Grin = CT + "stealth addresses" + mimblewimble. Because grin replaces ring signatures with mimblewimble, its privacy is less reliable than Monero's. Probably the grin developers have tried to make their mimblewimble transaction aggregation methods good, but I currently wouldn't put much faith in it, and IMO it'll take many years of research to get something really solid. That said, CT + stealth addresses offer a certain base level of privacy, and grin's method of handling stealth addresses (using an interactive protocol, exchanging "slates") is both more scalable than Monero and probably more private.

If your goal is to mix coins, grin is definitely not for you right now, and it may never be. Monero's goal is maximal privacy, regardless of the cost. Grin's goal is excellent privacy, consistent with scaling.

I'll finish this some other day.

Past page 61, I might not merit the really-low-effort photoshops/template-fills anymore.

I guess the merit economy needed some emergency repo operations.

My head is going to explode, but I have to get through these... I thought an art contest would be nice and simple...

Merit sources are free to reveal their source amounts, though I think it may be a bit unwise. While it will eventually become obvious roughly what the source amounts are from the stats, there's a huge difference between showing up in a "list of probable merit sources" and having a quote out there of you basically saying "I'm a merit source, come beg me for merit, complain about every merit I send, and accuse me of being part of the anti-X/pro-Y conspiracy."

Agreed. Trump clearly got out of the deal almost entirely for political reasons, and he'd probably accept even a slightly better deal. But if Iran went along with this -- allowing a counterparty to break a deal on a whim -- it'd make them look really weak. Meanwhile, there's nothing really pressing the US to back down.

I suppose that Iran's strategy is to pick at the US and its allies with small strikes, but make it small-scale/ambiguous enough, and set things up politically (eg. pointing to the broken nuclear deal) that the US couldn't rely on many allies if it wanted to invade Iran fully. The US doesn't have the political will to sustain a real war against Iran for long. The US could do a lot of airstrikes etc., though, and I'm not convinced that small strikes by Iran will ever get them anywhere.

No, what I mean by "socialism" is "a lot of central economic planning and redistribution": pretty far left on the 2-axis political compass. I'm aware of Marx's definition, but that's not really what people tend to mean nowadays. Words change, especially in politics; for example, leftists stole "liberal" from libertarians, and we stole "libertarian" from them (at least in the US).

It won't be.

I'm far from an expert, but AFAIK, Iran is a very socialist and authoritarian country, similar to China but with an Islamic flavor and much less competent leaders. Combined with this economic mismanagement, you have US sanctions designed to destroy the Iranian economy, and probably constant CIA activity fomenting unrest. Also, many powerful players in the US and elsewhere would love any excuse to escalate militarily with Iran. This seems like a pretty much impossible situation. I'm surprised that a little bank-burning is all Iran's experiencing. What is Iran's path forward? Can it actually continue on as-is?

The major forks for the BTC previously held by OgNasty will be liquidated sometime before the end of the year. When this is done, you'll see a bunch of BTC sent to 17RTT[...]. The forkcoins for the other BTC will not be liquidated soon.

Right, I should've mentioned that in the PM. After you received my PM but before you sent any merit, the source amount displayed was your total allocation.

Fixed, thanks.

A couple of people requested that I provide some stats on the poll voters here. I am generally willing to provide poll stats that are general enough not to identify individual voters. If you want actual voter lists published, then you have to warn people about this in advance.

One person specifically requested that I provide counts of voters who had at least 10 merit. 10 voters for DarkStar_ had at least 10 merit, while 8 voters for legendster had at least 10 merit. An additional stat which I came up with: Consider the amount of merit that each voter earned over the last year. The median of that stat was 82 for DarkStar_ voters, and 3 for legendster voters.

I am only providing stats; do not interpret this as me supporting anyone. I barely even know what you're voting on here.

Prison is a huge waste of both the government's money and the inmates' time, and it probably increases the chance of inmates committing more crimes.

First of all, victimless crimes are not real crimes and should not exist.

For most crimes, the sentence should be based entirely on the premise of getting the person not to commit the crimes anymore, based on a case-by-case analysis of the person. Often, prison shouldn't be necessary at all. For example, serial shoplifters could be sentenced to a period of having to wear a bodycam whenever in public so that they could be surveiled and prevented from stealing anything. This would be a huge invasion of privacy for them, of course, but it's better than prison. Psychological treatment may be appropriate in a lot of cases. Maybe in some cases it'd be appropriate to apply some corporal punishment (eg. "100 lashes"). Having someone languish in prison for years is pretty much the worst thing for everyone, including the prisoner; I'd definitely prefer 100 excruciatingly-painful lashes than a year in prison.

The above works in a state, but it's also in-line with my anarcho-capitalist ideal. In an ancap society, prison would be a service of your protection agency, operating a bit like insurance. Typically, such prisons would have the goal of protecting you from retaliation from the people you harmed, convincing society that you are no longer a risk after you get out, and preventing you and the protection agency from bearing costs of further crimes. So typical ancap prisons would be rehabilitation-oriented, not "lock up for x years"-oriented.

I don't actually think that this would be good in any way, and I'm not advocating for it, but I've thought that it'd be rational from the US's perspective to offer inmates convicted of certain non-violent crimes the option of reducing their sentence by serving it in the military. The military is already set up as something of a brainwashing machine, and having some less-precious troops would give the military more flexibility. The US faces a problem now in that they're only ever willing to dedicate handfuls of troops to most places because they're terrified that there'll be a massacre of hundreds of troops, which would be a PR disaster. "US penal brigade wiped out" sounds bad, but it's quite a bit better than "thousands of brave US servicemen massacred."

I'm reading a lot of mixed predictions regarding Bloomberg. Some predict that he's just going to throw so much money at it that he'll replace & beat Biden, therefore winning the primary. The media certainly loves him. But I don't see it. He's apparently going to try running as a "better Biden", but he actually has a weird mixed record containing right-wing, ultra-left-wing, and ultra-authoritarian elements. He can be attacked a lot from both the right and left. I tend to think he'll go nowhere, like Steyer, but my uncertainty on this is high at this point.

You need at least 100 activity or 10 merit.

This isn't a Meta issue... DoH is unrelated to Cloudflare's DDoS protection service.

I can understand why Firefox etc. are doing it. ISPs have a history of screwing up / tampering with DNS; networks & operating systems often have DNS misconfigured; and Microsoft isn't going to fix anything at the OS level. So for the average user it's going to improve the experience.

But it's giving Cloudflare (ie. a probable NSA honeypot) an unprecedented level of data on users and websites, and also an unprecedented level of control. Cloudflare will be able to take down or redirect sites unilaterally now, only having to fear getting removed by Firefox as a result. Everyone uses ICANN's root servers because everyone else uses ICANN's root servers. If everyone starts to use Cloudflare, then Cloudflare becomes the new ICANN in practice.

Hopefully Tor isn't stupid enough to enable this in Tor Browser, since that'd allow for pretty trivial traffic analysis by Cloudflare, and you wouldn't be able to disable it without highlighting yourself as one of a few people behaving oddly.

It's really a demonstration of the failure of the Internet on a technical level. The Internet is decades of dirty hack on top of dirty hack, and now we're ending up with a world where the only easy way to get things working decently is "just put literally everything on Cloudflare". Very dangerous. The whole structure of the Internet needs to be rethought.

I agree with the idea of moving away from ISP resolvers and traditional port-53 DNS. It sucks. Though ideally it'd be done at the OS level, and in any case you can do a lot better than DoH, yet another dirty hack. For example, it probably wouldn't slow things down much for Firefox to just act as a recursive DNS resolver. That'd be maximally decentralized. Or you could at least use a private information retrieval protocol in order to rely on a single resolver like Cloudflare without actually giving them any information, and have the resolver also provide the full chain of DNSSEC authentication for every query answer.

Right. Paid ads will come back late in the month, around the 28^th, I think.

Yes, though they do eventually expire (after many months), so you shouldn't write it down and use it in a year or something crazy like that.