Right. And in case of equal activity, member ID is the tiebreaker.

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 8 or 9 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.

---

[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).

The trust feedback against you is too negative overall, so I won't accept your bids at this time.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.15 nyancatio
5 0.14 sportsbet.io

Paying the fee only affects your account, not the IP. Evil on IPs only decays with time.

OK, I reduced the maximum to the same price as copper membership, since it doesn't really make sense for copper membership to be cheaper when it includes whitelisting.

In the last 30 days:
 - 16441 users registered.
 - 4040 required a fee, and the average required fee among them was 0.00127297 BTC.
 - 99 paid the fee, and the average fee paid was 0.00116449 BTC.

I'm not necessarily bothered by the number of accounts abandoned due to fees, since many of those will probably be spammers searching for a no-fee IP. The fees actually paid (by people who are presumably not spammers) may be a bit high, though: I feel like it should be about a tenth of that.

There is a maximum: it's that value currently. Without the maximum, that much evil would result in a fee of 0.06491724 BTC at current rates.

You can login via Tor. I just tried it and it worked on the first attempt, though it took a couple of minutes to solve the captcha. You login once, get the captcha code, and then never have to deal with a captcha again: all via Tor.

Enable limited retention in your settings.


The main issue with Tor Browser here is that it doesn't save cookies between restarts, so Cloudflare and Recaptcha treat you as a completely unknown person each time. I think that it's sufficient to use Tor Browser but in its settings disable "always use private browsing mode". This definitely does impact your privacy, though. You'd ideally want a different browser instance (or profile, if Tor Browser supports it) for each site where you want this disabled.

I've pre-approved nyancatio. I consider the specific thing they're going to advertise to be a game, not an ICO-type-thing.

I changed the name of the cookie. Does that fix it?

If Brave is blocking PHPSESSID cookies, then that's definitely broken behavior on their end. PHPSESSID is not some sort of tracking cookie; it's used for PHP's session management feature.

Cloudflare has a right to do what they want with their property, but it's concerning all the same.

The Internet is, unfortunately, not a magic cloud where things can live on their own. It's service providers all the way down:
 - Terrorists post on 8/pol/. These people are bad.
 - The 8/pol/ board owner may or may not want the terrorists posting there. If not, then he's an innocent third-party, but he's blamed. (In one of the previous shootings, I read that the 8/pol/ moderators removed the shooter's posts and reported it to the police within minutes.)
 - 8/pol/ lives on 8chan, a huge collection of boards, many of them completely unrelated to politics. 8chan's boards are similar to Reddit's subreddits, with independent board owners. But 8chan as a whole is blamed for the terrorists.
 - 8chan uses several service providers directly: hosting, domain registration, etc. These are blamed for the terrorists.
 - Because the Internet is fundamentally flawed, every site needs DDoS protection, and Cloudflare offers by far the best value in that area. (I think that they're probably subsidized by the NSA in order to act as a honeypot, but perhaps they're just really effective.) You could use a different service or roll your own, but this would cost several thousand $/month more to get equivalent service, and in any case you're introducing more service providers who will be blamed for the terrorists.
 - The hosting companies have their own ISPs, who have their own ISPs, etc., who could all be blamed for the terrorists. At the top, you have the backbone providers who mutually rely on each other and could blame each other for terrorists on their network.
 
For freedom to exist, at some point service providers have to have the courage to say, "Those people using my services through n degrees of separation are evil, but trying to stop them would harm freedom more than help it, so I'm not going to do so." By dropping a site with very few real issues, based on uninformed public outcry, Cloudflare failed here. The government should stay out of it, but it creates an argument for Cloudflare being unreliable & anti-freedom. (They also opened up a huge can of worms, since now they'll get complaints about basically every site they host.)

The whole situation also exposes the serious flaws of the Internet, which may someday destroy it: firstly, the fact that DDoS protection is needed at all; and secondly, the existence of this endless chain of services that you need to trust not to take you down.

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 8 or 9 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.

---

[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).

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.14 lightlord
7 0.13 sportsbet.io

For years, I have had well over 50% of my net worth in BTC, but objectively-speaking it is very risky to have so much invested in any one thing.  It'd be risky to have 50% of your net worth in MSFT, too. I definitely wouldn't recommend such a high BTC allocation to normal people at this point; something like 5% BTC and 5% gold may be a more reasonable recommendation. Maybe in a decade or two, somewhat higher allocations will look OK.

Risk-wise, there's no difference between putting 90% of your net worth in BTC now and "riding BTC up" to the point where you now have 90% of your net worth in BTC. If BTC crashes, you lose the same amount. If you're in a position like this and you wouldn't put that much of your net worth in BTC now, then you might be exposing yourself to more risk than you should.

I don't consider it very useful to "diversify" into altcoins, BTW, since altcoins are mostly trash. As I see things, BTC almost is the cryptocurrency asset class, and if I were to design a reasonable/fair "broad cryptocurrency index", BTC would make up at least 95% of it.

IMO the entire worldwide economy is dominated by the effects of money-printing. So much money was printed from 2008 onward (and given primarily to financial institutions) that we ended up with things like negative bond yields and ridiculously-inflated stock prices. The reason that the CPI doesn't increase very much is that when the money was printed, it ended up fairly concentrated, and a person or highly-regulated business can only spend so much money. The glut of money goes to various investable assets, not typical goods/services. With this in mind, the entire fiat economy begins to look a bit like a ponzi scheme, or like ultra-manipulated coins like XRP, and I'm not super enthusiastic about participating in it. That said, there are so many people playing this game that it could go on for a very long time; I wouldn't for example say that it's always a bad idea to buy bonds, and in fact I do own some traditional investments.

It's concerning. 8chan is a "free platform" site like bitcointalk.org, aiming to maximize what users can do. I'll be interested to see how they fare with their new DDoS protection. If they're still using it in a year, I'll look into switching to it for bitcointalk.org.

The ultimate solution here is decentralized forums, though. I wish there was more work in this direction, but most of it is minimal-effort hype without substance. If section 230 is eliminated as some have proposed, centralized "territories of freedom" won't really be able to exist.

Trading the accounts of these services is not allowed. Report anyone selling them. Newbies will be permanently banned; established members may be given warnings before being banned, but the relevant posts will be deleted.

• Autodesk
• AWS
• Canva
• FuboTV
• N26
• Upwork

Services are added to this list when we come to believe that essentially no trades of such accounts are following our rules, which prohibit for example selling hacked accounts, accounts requiring KYC info, accounts created using stolen identities, accounts which cannot be legally traded, etc. If you have a really strong argument for how you're selling these accounts without violating our rules, create a topic in Meta explaining in detail, and we may consider either removing the service from this list or giving you a one-time exemption.

I do recounts from time to time.

Did you think about this at all? With a billion dollars you could maybe make a few billion meals. It wouldn't come anywhere close to feeding the world, and after you blew all of your money on this short-term effort, nothing would fundamentally change. Hunger and homelessness are caused primarily by systemic issues such as lack of a functional free market, not because people are hoarding wealth. In today's world, any person anywhere should be able to produce many times what they need to survive; if they can't, then something is stopping them (eg. culture, government, crime, etc.). Just throwing resources in their direction will do little to nothing; you need to figure out the systemic issues and work to remove them.

For example, in many areas that have been poor forever despite continual aid efforts, there is a culture that if you make any money, you are expected to entirely distribute it among your town, not keep it yourself. Due to this, nobody has an incentive to do more than the absolute minimum. Infrastructure never gets built, and if outsiders build it for them, it's never improved upon. If you want to fix poverty in these areas, you have to work on changing this broken culture. (I don't claim that this is the primary cause of worldwide poverty.)

Damn it, I simulated it, and you seem right. I suppose that my model of the situation was wrong because it actually does matter that the first month has already happened, whereas I was trying to eliminate the specificity of this.

If you're looking at a particular person, their chance of being excluded in both a month with 104 eligible and the next month with 106 eligible is ~0.2%. But the chance that any one or more people already excluded in the first month are also excluded in the second month is, I believe, 1 - [(102 choose 100) / (106 choose 100)] = 99.9997%

This month 106 users were eligible.

Old:

New: