Ask the local moderators.

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.

Still no.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Person
2 0.16 FirstGlobalCredit
1 0.16 SwC_Poker
1 0.14 blenderio
5 0.14 cryptasm

(No flattening was required.)

OK, now it should be impossible no matter how much you try.

You can sue anyone for anything. I suppose it's not obvious enough for outright dismissal in this case.

I feel bad for the Kleimans. It sounds like CSW tried to use them as a pawn in some larger con, and now they think that they're owed millions of dollars which never existed.

Alright, you now can't merit the same post with the same amount within 60 seconds.

No. I changed it to "Your ban message may have an email address which you can email. If not, then appeals are unlikely to be accepted."

I don't want to so blatantly encourage people to "appeal by making a topic in Meta" because that's just a ridiculous process, especially since it so rarely works.

There are daily offsite backups, so only up to a day of content could be lost in that case.

Agreed. The UK is an authoritarian nanny state with a very broken political process, and France seems addicted to unsustainable welfare programs. Leaving the EU won't solve their problems, and may exacerbate some of them. But I still support it, since there's a better chance of a few independent countries out of many figuring things out than the EU as a whole, especially when the EU is run by totally-disconnected power-hungry bureaucrats who want to engineer everyone's lives.

Maybe the UK or France could pull it off. I don't advocate it, but I think that a welfare-heavy state can be stable and not too terrible if the people in charge look at economic realities rather than dreams, and maybe the UK people will learn from the brexit mess and put less power/faith in government. Not likely, but you never know.

This is just the domain name; the server would be unaffected. I could have an alternative up in less than an hour, probably. It would be extremely annoying in several ways, though.

I hate that the DNS is so trust-heavy. It's like storing money in banks: you just have to hope that your bank/registrar isn't being manned by easily-manipulated idiots today. (I don't like the designs of any decentralized DNS solutions that I've seen so far, though: often they're "DNS + blockchain!" nonsense solutions with no real thought.)

I agree, but leftists fundamentally won't: that's what makes them leftists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_rights

I've been extremely interested in Mimblewimble since it was first presented a couple of years ago, though I only recently heard that grin is finally launching its mainnet soon. This is the first altcoin that has ever significantly interested me.

I will definitely be buying grin fairly early on. Probably won't bother figuring out mining, though. Note that due to the way grin emits its coins, prices are likely to start out high and steadily drop for the first few weeks/months.

If you're mining grin and want to sell for BTC: let me know and I'll buy from you.

I was going to try to evaluate more, but I never got around to it.

Current thinking:

 - Extremely interested: grin
 - Good: XMR
 - Some merit: ETH
 - Possibly some merit, not sure: XLM, TRX, QRL, IOTA

I see two ways:

First, although I still consider it bad, I think that it'd be better policy-wise and ethically for governments to eliminate regulations while still collecting and distributing taxes. For example, instead of having a 25% income tax and a $15/hour minimum wage, I'd consider it better to have a 30% income tax, no minimum wage, and some sort of welfare system to cover up whatever holes you see created by the lack of a minimum wage. (The 25%->30% income tax increase is just an example, and is maybe not worth eliminating just the minimum wage regulation.)

Second, we can have many small countries with different policies. There's no need for world domination. I'm a big supporter of seasteading, anti-EU movements, and secessionist movements around the world.

Perhaps. I do feel strongly that people are too tied to the necessity of 9-to-5, 5-days-per-week jobs, even though people have been working similar amounts (or less!) for 100+ years.

But it's important to put the cart before the horse! If government mandates low amounts of work, for example, then the economy might not be ready, possibly causing economic breakdown and poverty. It also puts a barrier in front of the minority of people whose primary desire may be to work as much as physically possible so that they can significantly move their family up the economic ladder. The government should just stay out of it and let people work as much as they want/need.

I agree, but I thought it'd be interesting as a change of pace to pretend that we'd all be willing to form one political platform.


It's not surprising. There are two main branches of political belief: liberalism and authoritarianism, and "liberal" derives from "liberty" (=freedom). In the past, there was significant true political belief in authoritarianism, where people would actually say that they believed in eg. following an absolute ruler, but now almost all politics is at least couched in terms of liberalism. For someone to disagree with my vague individual freedom statement would require them to be far outside of the overton window, probably an extreme communist type or an extreme conservative.

The main difference between libertarians and left-liberals is that those on the left recognize some positive rights as integral to freedom, such as the "right to healthcare", while libertarians only recognize negative rights such as the "right to not be assaulted".


Maybe someday material scarcity could be eliminated for most practical purposes, but scarcity can't be eliminated on the whole. For example, you may desire to have something custom-designed by one particular famous artisan, and that person's time is limited. Or you may like Picard in Star Trek desire an authentic kurlan naiskos artifact.

In this area, some leftists make two major mistakes:
 1. They tend to just dismiss a desire for anything that technology cannot conceivably produce ~infinite amounts of as something that people shouldn't desire. This brings them out of touch with what humanity actually is.
 2. They tend to assume that we're 99% of the way to post-scarcity, so we can just immediately eliminate all modern-day ways of managing scarcity. Even the USSR thought in this way to some extent, dreaming of a future where automation would solve everything, even though from today's standpoint they were laughably far from post-scarcity.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin

It's not clear whether quantum computers large enough to attack Bitcoin will come into existence in 10 years or 100+ years. If the former, then making Bitcoin quantum-safe in a hurry will be messy, though it can and will be done.

It's certainly not the "end of blockchain technology". Anyone who says that doesn't know what they're talking about. Designing a quantum-safe cryptocurrency is trivial, though it adds significant overhead, which is why nobody's really doing it yet. QRL claims to be a functioning and remarkably efficient quantum-safe cryptocurrency (though still much less efficient than quantum-unsafe cryptocurrencies), but I haven't looked into any aspect of it very much.

It's part of Electrum's design. Anyone can run an Electrum Server and put it forward for the public to use. When you run the client, you connect to a random Electrum server (run by some random person), send them a list of your addresses, and they send you back the transactions associated with those addresses. (More-or-less.) This is less secure than running your own full node for various reasons, and it's also terrible for privacy, since some random person gets a list of every Bitcoin address you've ever used along with your IP address. But if you want to avoid these sorts of tradeoffs, then you have to run your own full node, which takes a bit of time and resources.

You might suggest that clients should only connect to a fixed set of trusted and well-vetted Electrum servers, but that introduces fundamental centralization into Electrum's operation, which the Electrum developers wished to avoid. This attack, where an attacker creates hundreds/thousands of legitimate-looking network nodes all controlled by him, is called a Sybil attack, and is a common issue in decentralized systems.

 - Electrum is a low-security wallet in general. It focuses on bleeding-edge features and usability, not absolute security. Store only pocket change there (and on the same computer as Electrum). For storing large amounts, use a hardware wallet.
 - The fact that this phishing message was prefixed by "error: error sending transaction" should make one immediately suspicious. If you feel any suspicion about anything, stop and discuss it on the forum or elsewhere.
 - When a new update comes out, wait a week or two before installing it. If it's listed as critical, look at various sites such as bitcointalk.org to figure out why it's critical. If in doubt about whether a "critical" update is real, you can just stop using Electrum for a few days and wait for further news.
 - Navigate to the site using a bookmark if possible, and use HTTPS.
 - Verify the PGP signature when you download it.
 - When you run the executable on platforms that support digital signing, make sure that it's signed by "Electrum Technologies GmbH"

If you're using Electrum or a derivative, you may receive a message like this:


This message is false, sent to you by a hacker. If you click the link in the message and install the software, then your BTC will be stolen. If you ignore the message, then you should be OK. Version 3.3.2, released a week ago, makes the messages less readable/convincing, though you could still receive such messages.

Note that altcoin derivatives of Electrum are very common, with over 1600 forks on github, and they will also be affected.

More info:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4968

Discussion:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089963.0