Local rules are enforced entirely at the discretion of the relevant moderators. It's intended to be for stuff like "you must post a picture", "you must make a price prediction", "do not go on tangents about services other than <this one I'm interested in>", etc. Not really "these people are banned: ...". (Though I have been thinking about adding a function to ban specific users from your selfmod threads.)

Pages 36-37 and 41. They mined and bought bitcoins and then used them to buy domain names and hosting, it seems.

This is a also a nice quote:


Lesson: always use encryption.

I see nothing that would cause that on my end. The main possibility which comes to my mind is: Tor gets its DNS from a random semi-untrusted Tor exit node, and it gave you a Cloudflare IP for bitcointalk.org, but the wrong one, possibly as part of some attack (though this would seem to require a flaw on Cloudflare's end), or possibly due to some weird network conditions at the exit node. It could also just be a Cloudflare hiccup.

I've only read a little of it so far, though I'm planning on reading the whole thing. At least in the first couple dozen pages, it seems much better for Trump than I expected.

There's a brief mention of Bitcoin being used by the Russians for certain things, though it's pretty neutral.

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, 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], banks, funds, or anything else 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 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- 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.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.06 ChipMixer
1 0.06 SlavaVendo
2 0.06 SwC_Poker
2 0.06 lightlord

I'm not planning on doing that here. People have enough trouble figuring out the sort-of-similarly-designed Trust system. That was just an idea that I wanted to share in case anyone was making a decentralized forum and wanted to have a merit-like system.

No, several people looked into it, but nobody was able to make contact with anyone who knew anything about what he did with the BTC or who might've stolen it after his death. The 25% reward still stands on any returned amount.

That sounds pretty interesting and on the right track, though their website is incomplete, and it sounds like it might be fractional reserve:

I'd really love it if it's not fractional reserve and the "bank" is actually a multisig of several independent entities. But as long as it works well and actually uses blind signing, it'll be good to see.

This is our very own Elwar. I very much hope he makes it out of there safely...

It's depressing for the whole seasteading movement. The dream is/was to be able to have many tiny sovereign seasteads ("let a thousand nations bloom"), but this makes me think that we may in practice need larger, more defensible seasteads along with guaranteed-autonomy agreements with governments. Or maybe someone needs to create a large private military that is a credible threat against countries like Thailand, and sell "invasion insurance" to seasteads.


I remember that Blue Frontiers had some sort of an agreement with French Polynesia; I don't know about Thailand.

Trust ratings are not moderated, and their value/accuracy is dependent on the viewer's trust network being reasonable. So they definitely shouldn't be indexed by search engines, at least: exclude it from robots.txt or use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" />

I can't currently think of any other issues resulting from mirroring them if they're excluded from search engines.

If that's the case, then that's nice (for us; sad for him), but I haven't been reading him that way. Admittedly, I only started paying him much attention recently.


OMG that's terrible. Hopefully they're able to get out of there safely.

Ayre has reportedly been involved with CSW since at least Feb 2016. See this lengthy article, though note that it uses info from several highly unreliable sources, so you have to second-guess everything. Apparently, Wright worked in Antigua on gambling websites a long time ago, which is Ayre's residence and line of business, so they probably met directly or indirectly through this.

Wright first publicly made his appearance in the Bitcoin scene in Dec 2015, and apparently he was engaging in the "I'm Satoshi but down on my luck, plz give me a small loan of a million dollars" shtick from at least around mid 2015. The fact that Ayre was involved so early makes me a bit suspicious that he could be in on the con, but it's also possible that he's just fallen for it real deep.

I find Ayre's actions inexplicable. He appeared in this space suddenly, with a thin recent history. He's fixated on statist arguments, but his history makes me think that he should be biased against the state. (CSW has also been talking about this: which one is influencing the other?) He's stuck steadfastly by CSW for 3+ years with nothing obvious to show for it, and probably significant losses. (But is there something we don't know about? Does he somehow stand to profit from the current course of events, where SV & CSW fail in a loud and dragged-out way?)

If anyone has some connection to Ayre through a friend-of-a-friend or something, I'd really like to know what's actually going through his mind.

There was a period where both Sirius and I were active administrators. For convenience, I reckon Jan 1, 2012 as when I became head administrator, though it was actually a gradual transition starting before and ending after that.

The EU (and its member states) is an authoritarian regime which is steadily marching in the same direction as the USSR. Every year they reduce individual freedoms. If I was in the EU, I'd be trying to leave ASAP.

Lightning is not like a bank at all. Mostly it works like a 2-of-2 multisig, where nobody can just steal your BTC, and the Bitcoin network itself guarantees security. The opportunity for theft only comes into existence in some edge cases which the LN software is supposed to prevent.

I am a bit skeptical of LN, especially in the short-term: it's currently very clunky and complex, and it seems likely to always have some notable inherent limits. I'm concerned that in order to easily smooth over these issues, a lot of people might end up using hosted LN wallets/payment-handlers, which are banks. But if people use LN directly, then it's not like a bank whatsoever.

There are various ways that Bitcoin could be made into an effective payments system aside from LN. I'm a fan of blinded bearer certificates and federated sidechains, which would be semi-centralized, but you could also do something like having a high-volume miner-security-only sidechain that expires and is replaced every couple of years. Store-of-value is the most important thing, but it's definitely also possible for Bitcoin to support high-volume payments.

Not surprising, but sad. Assange is one of the original cypherpunks.

Probably, but it may still be the best option for minimizing harm/risk. If the child strongly, actively wants sex reassignment even after people try to reason them out of it, I don't think that it'd be right to outright prohibit them from pursuing it, and delaying puberty is a way to give them time to mentally mature and consider it before anything too irreversible happens. (This particular case is different because the child's desire is in dispute.)


This is a good point. If someone is experiencing depression due to physiological issues, then this should be treated before doing anything drastic. And non-physiological depression is ~always an internal problem, not an external problem. If someone is utterly depressed about not being the "correct" gender, then this indicates an outlook on life which will probably cause them to be utterly depressed about not having the correct job, or not having the correct amount of money, or being unattractive, etc. Happiness comes primarily from within, not from without.

I'm sure that some people are able to calmly examine reality and decide that they'd be better off after sex reassignment, without unrealistically thinking that this will solve all of their problems. And while I don't think that this is a great idea, it's not my decision to make, and in the end I'm happy that human technology can today sort of deliver on this desire. But some people who end up at this point may be desperately chasing happiness via external factors, which never works and in this case is likely to be particularly counterproductive.

In these cases they'll often give them a hormone mixture that merely delays puberty for some years, giving them extra time to come to a final decision. 6-8 is too young to really decide. (Maybe this is what they're actually doing, and it's just being spun as "chemical castration".)

IMO it's unwise with current technology and culture to substantially modify your body in this way, but I also believe in individual sovereignty, so if you want to do it, that should be up to you. There are obvious problems when dealing with children, though, since children tend to be highly ignorant, and pre-puberty children are biologically programmed to believe what authority figures tell them to believe. In this case, he probably agrees with his mother when he's with his mother, and with his father when he's with his father.

That's actually a pretty interesting-sounding use-case which makes me want to fix action=.xml, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it. Probably not in the next week or two, at least. (I can't just enable it, since it's too slow; I have to rewrite at least some of it.)