Andrew Bitcoiner of BitJack21.com won this auction. Here's the auction for next week:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47385.0

Scripts must be stateless and time-independent unless these transactions are required to mature in the same way as generation transactions. Otherwise the transactions will cause a lot of trouble after reorgs. This has been discussed many times.

It's not been three days since the OP quite yet. There are a couple more hours to go.

After I put up the winner's ad, I'll lock this thread and start another one. The next auction will last 7 days.

The price was under $0.01 for much longer.

I don't know where everyone keeps reading this outdated info. The restriction was 50 posts for only like 2 days.

If someone doesn't like the direction that their topic has taken, they should be able to disassociate themselves from the discussion by locking the thread and letting someone else restart the discussion elsewhere. Locking is also very useful in cases where threads become obsolete.


Some people said that, but I certainly didn't unlock it, and as far as I can tell none of the other mods did either.

There's no way to remove a topic from "show new replies to your post". The watchlist functionality in the new software will take care of this.

The first version of the code will be the best-written code because the programmer will be thinking about all of the required features. Everything after the first version will be messier and less stable. So I want to get as much done as possible in the first version.

The forum will be paying 500 BTC or more for the completion of the project, which I think is reasonable for the number of features.


They'll just post direct links to images and people will click on them. Maybe later there will be an option for readers that will expand all direct image links.

Nothing stops you from continuing to discuss locked topics in a new topic.

Some more things that I'll add to the final specification:
- The bidder needs to provide code or detailed instructions on how to move current database data to the new database.
- The software needs to be at least as fast and resource-light as SMF.
- I like how the SMF post composition page allows you to highlight text and then click a button to apply certain BBCode. This needs to be replicated.
- I mentioned this a bit in the OP, but to be more clear: There needs to be "weighted time online" and "weighted post count" in addition to the raw values. It should not be possible for a user to increase one of the weighted values by too much without increasing the other value. If you post 200 posts in 1 hour, your weighted post count should be 1. If you post 1 post in 200 hours, your weighted time online should 6 hours. These numbers should be configurable and should apply retroactively when changed (where possible).
- Time online should not increase if you're simply refreshing a page.
- Post counts should not be shown on topic pages, but should be shown on profile pages.


As I mentioned in the OP, the new software must support all of the popular user-facing SMF features.

I don't care much whether the software will be written from scratch or based on some already-existing software, though the base must be written very cleanly so I can easily modify it.

Most messages have separate version numbers, but for version messages the version is indeed the client version. 0.3.19.3 is 31903. 0.4 (the latest stable version) is 40000.

Services can be 0.

subVer was intended to be used for releases like 0.3.19.3.1, but this is unlikely nowadays. The purpose of this field might change to something else later -- maybe it will identify user agents.


You didn't update the message header length/checksum.

What would this do?

Teppy wins this week. Auction for next week:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46492.0

Miners (or anyone) can also destroy coins irredeemably by sending generated coins to "OP_FALSE" or to any other script that can never return true.

You can't stop people from destroying coins. People can just lose their private keys if they want to destroy BTC.

The fees on queued transactions will pile up and eventually be taken by someone. It might take some time for fees to fund competition, but it will happen eventually.

There's no point in adding new code the prevent duplicates. Only generation transactions can be duplicates, and they don't harm the network.

I've seen this behavior from bots before, and it is always noticed after the bot has posted a few hundred posts at the most. If there's any suspicion of a poster being a bot, you only need to Google some phrases posted. Non-bots who post garbage should also be banned, so identification isn't a huge issue, anyway.

If a bot manages to not post garbage, then it's being a constructive member of the community and we should not discriminate.

Halving the subsidy impacts mining profitability in exactly the same way as doubling the difficulty. Many miners will drop out, the difficulty will be reduced, and then things will stabilize again at a lower network hash rate. This is not a huge deal, since the network already has way more computational power than it really needs.

With the next forum software, forum rankings (like "hero member") will be based on both posts and time online, and post counts will probably not appear on topic pages.