This bid does not exactly fill me with confidence in your abilities... What's your plan for creating a good product?

The forum has ~1100 BTC now (all available for this project) and will probably have a few hundred more by March. At the current market rate this would be over $8000, though I can't guarantee that the bitcoin price won't go down a lot by then.

Starting in March would be fine, but I want to make a decision about who the bidder will be by the end of January. (If there are no great bidders, I will probably abandon this bidding process, start an open source software project, write the forum core myself, and place bounties on all other required software aspects.)

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. (One of the remaining slots has random factoids, and one links to the current ad auction.)

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 January):
- 1^st: 99683
- 2^nd: 117879
- 3^rd: 106534
- 4^th: 121305
- 5^th: 146498
- 6^th: 142415
- 7^th: 109045
- 8^th: 115249
- 9^th: 118833
- 10^th: 118167
- 11^th: 116874

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 bid, all of your previous bids are automatically canceled.
- All bid prices must be divisible by 0.5.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- The auction end time is 04:00:00 on January 20, 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.

Auction starts in about one hour.

As jimrandomh mentioned, M-of-N would allow for some important features. The protocol already supports this kind of transaction (so you could theoretically do two-factor authentication now), but there are major drawbacks. In order to do two-factor authentication with the current system, you would need to do one of these things:
- Have everyone sending you BTC use a recent Bitcoin client version and potentially pay higher fees for sending you BTC. Also, your Bitcoin addresses may be double the normal size or larger.
- Every time you receive BTC, the client will automatically need to send the received BTC back to yourself in a new transaction. Received transactions will temporarily not be protected by your two-factor authentication scheme, and you'll pay tons of extra fees.

OP_EVAL, P2SH, and CHC are some proposals for changing the protocol in a backward-compatible way so that these drawbacks are eliminated for two-factor authentication and many other possible future features that require "fancy transactions" (escrow, password-based authentication, etc.). OP_EVAL is broken and will probably not be used. P2SH is probably OK, but the specific way it is implemented is hack-like and inelegant. I like CHC.

Did you read gmaxwell's long post above?

I agree. P2SH would probably work OK, but it's not consistent with the rest of Script, so I would prefer that it not be used.

(I voted for both P2SH and CODEHASHCHECK in the poll, since I think they're both acceptable solutions.)

The auction will be on Jan. 14 at 12:00 AM UTC (tomorrow). Countdown.

There will be four auction rounds. The first round will be for 3 slots. The second round will be for 2 slots. The remaining two rounds will each be for one slot. Minimum increment is 0.02 BTC. A bid wins if it is not outbid after one minute.

Style will be allowed next week.

I agree that an API would be useful and desirable. I'm just not willing to spend any of my personal time on it when the code I write will be obsolete in a few months.

Then he must be prepared to deal with the consequences of that decision. It's not the board's problem.

I was talking about posters with less than 5 posts.

It's hosted by MtGox, which is based in Japan. The actual server location doesn't really matter.

It's against the rules to make trades that are not legal in both the seller's and buyer's countries. I'm not interested in figuring out legality of trades or investigating locations of members, though, so I only delete really obvious stuff.


It's in Japan.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

I strive to allow as much freedom as possible. It should be possible to express any idea as long as the idea will not get the forum in trouble and you express the idea using proper categorization, etc.

Habitual trolls are not welcome because they disrupt real discussion. Here are the recommendations (not policy) that I wrote for mods regarding trolls:

There's ~1100 BTC available right now.

I'm aware of the Eligius controversy, but I haven't seen DiabloD3 do anything wrong in the matter. I don't read the mining section. If he did do something wrong, then someone needs to tell me exactly what he did so I can investigate it. I'm not going to do anything in response to vague complaints of "dirty dealing".

Even if we say that Luke scammed all Eligius pool members by attacking alt chains (which I would disagree with), then he would still not be banned because scammers are not banned from this forum.

Updated. Thanks.

What posts has DiabloD3 deleted that should not have been deleted? What posts of Luke-Jr's have not been deleted that should have been deleted?