I won't completely rule anything out, but I suspect that we'll never drop below $2k. While we're likely to touch $3k, I think that anything below $3k is upwardly-unstable.

In the absence of some underlying catastrophe, the absolute floor IMO is $700, which is where we were 1.5 years ago. But many of the gains since then were real & fundamental.

It's really pathetic, though honestly it's a little refreshing to see Trump talk so openly about it. I have little doubt that any of the past several administrations would've done the same thing, but they would've come up with some other excuse than "I know that Saudi Arabia is a murderous, anti-freedom, anti-West, genocidal regime, but we just make so much money selling them weapons, and we need their help to crush third-world-country Iran!"

Time flies!

I want to do something really special for 10 years. If you have ideas, PM me.


Definitely, but it's more to do with size than anything. That was the community's golden age because it was a pretty tight-knit community where people knew and cared about each other to some extent, and there was a shared vision. You lose that as communities grow. On a forum of this size, in order to return to the level of quality we had in 2011, you'd basically have to turn the forum into a police state. And even if you were OK with that in principle (which I'm not...), it'd push away many of the good contributors. Often it seems like a situation of "size, freedom, or quality: pick two".

There is room for improvement, though, and there are probably many ways of incrementally improving signal-to-noise without sacrificing much or any freedom.

LOLOLOLOL, ABC just added "deep reorg protection", probably in order to prevent potential SV attacks, but this instead makes it much easier to attack. This is the kind of naïve idea that you think of when you're first learning about Bitcoin; I've heard it suggested dozens of times since 2010. The geniuses behind BCH continue to astound.

The market activity sure is interesting... Lots of volume.


XRP is a centralized fiat currency sort of like USDT, so you'd expect it to behave differently from real cryptocurrencies.

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.

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.

I was on the fence, but I decided not to accept your bids for now because:
 - Magnum Wallet is fairly new, nobody has independently checked its security AFAICT, and any wallet has a high risk of large-scale losses.
 - There is a general lack of info about who you are and what you're doing. No terms of service. No info about any connection between you and the listed coins. Not much info about how your integrated exchange works. Etc.
 - Your site gives the impression of pushing "no-risk profit", which is concerning.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.16 FirstGlobalCredit
1 0.16 Gunthar
5 0.16 lightlord

The Merkle root is also little-endian...

As to why, it's because the fields are read/written directly between memory and the socket, and that's how the data is ordered in memory. Integers are little-endian in memory because that's how the supported architectures do things. It's a little weird that hashes are stored little-endian, but Satoshi put most hashes in a uint256 type which behaved how you'd expect a 256-bit integer to behave on eg. x86, including little-endianness.

It's debatable, but IMO:

Before any learning occurs, the human brain starts out like 95% complete. If a brain was born into a jar without any inputs, then it would not really function since it'd still be missing 5%; but still, the vast majority of all mental processes are built into your hardware, not learned. A clear example is language acquisition: only a tiny minority of the population has a good idea of what an adjective actually is, for example, yet almost every child is somehow "taught" how to use adjectives ~perfectly.  Grammar is built into your hardware, and you just need to fill in the details during your first few years of life. The same is true of things like compassion and generosity, though I think that "default" human compassion only applies to those who you perceive as belonging your in-group, and universal compassion is more learned. (Hunter-gatherers tended to believe that their tribe's members were the only true humans, and all others were mere animals.)

Children aren't really taught how to think or behave: they already know intuitively how to do that in almost all cases, and they just need relatively few nudges to slightly shape the behavior they were born with. In the best case, an AI would be a true blank slate, which nobody has ever had to teach before, or more likely it'd have a built-in nature as an accidental side effect of its programming which would make its thinking incompatible with human values from the start.

The first GAI might come from completely mapping a human brain and simulating it on a computer. In that case, it would behave like a human.

But if GAI comes about through any other method, then it's not likely to have any emotions, honor, compassion, etc. For that matter, it probably also wouldn't have thoughts such as fear, ambition, or greed, at least not in the human sense. These things evolved in human brains due to a need to effectively cooperate and/or compete with other members of our species. Intelligence does not imply any of those things. If a GAI was somehow accidentally created, you definitely couldn't trust it, and you'd have no way of predicting what it actually wanted, since its entire way of looking at the world would be totally alien.

Since it'd obviously be bad to create a super-intelligent psychopath, there are several organizations dedicated to figuring out how to give something of a conscience to future GAI, such as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Greg posted a detailed explanation of CSW's most recent fraud: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone-wanted-to-pretend-to-be-satoshi-by-posting-a-fake-signature-to-defrau/81116#81116


True, I've historically erred much more on the side of bearishness. But since I mostly hodl, only speculating with smallish amounts if at all, that means that I'm rarely disappointed, and sometimes happily surprised.

In general, I'm all for being lenient. There are users who have been temp banned many times but still haven't been permabanned because their contributions outweigh their misbehavior. I actively disbelieve in the idea of a "rule of law" where hard rules exist and are strictly applied across the board as if we're all robots. Every case should be considered individually in the context of the forum's mission.

Plagiarism is what gets people permabanned, not just copying. Plagiarism is copying with the intent of passing the work off as your own. In essentially all cases, plagiarism deserves a permaban because it usually proves definitively that the person is here for the wrong reasons: to fill up space in order to get paid, not to actually discuss or contribute. If someone was able to convince us that they were plagiarizing just to eg. impress people rather than to fill up space, then a lesser ban of a few months might instead be warranted. But this has never happened AFAICR. (Arguments based on plausible deniability aren't going to work; we don't need to prove that you had the motive we see in your actions.)

If you treat posting as a job, a chore, then you must live in fear, since the forum is not made for you. In this case, you need to blend in as someone who actually cares, but plagiarism will immediately out you, and producing a mountain of useless posts will also eventually be noticed, if more slowly. If you do actually care, then this will be obvious in your posts (and probably your merit score), and you will have nothing to fear from moderators; even allegations of plagiarism will be doubted when seen in the context of your other posts.


Plagiarism is almost always a copyright violation which could conceivably get the poster in a lot of trouble, but it's not a bigger legal issue for the forum than anything else. (Using the forum to violate copyright is never allowed, though.)


That's not a particular concern of mine.


Only in the EUSSR.

If you don't think that an ETF or similar big boosting event is likely in the next ~year, then that might end up paying off, but personally I wouldn't sell large amounts now. First of all, it'll probably at least touch $6k in the near future. Second, you don't know when an ETF will be approved or the next 2008-style financial crisis will happen, both of which could truly put BTC through the roof. (Insider trading will probably put BTC to $10k+ some time before an ETF is actually approved.) Third, while cryptocurrency will probably not take over the world anytime soon, it's a very real and growing niche which isn't ever going away, and I see no serious competitors to BTC for king of the cryptocurrency space.

It all depends on your risk tolerance and time horizon, though. If there's any BTC price that would ruin you, then it might be a good idea to sell some.

If there had been significant upward pressure, then we wouldn't have been stuck at ~$6.5k for so long. I predict that ~$5.5k will be "the new $6.5k" for a while, maintaining relative stability with periodic bouncing.

I suspect that we're on a long-term slow downward trend until either the next halving or until something major happens (eg. ETFs, maybe certain global events, etc.).


It doesn't really matter either way. ABC wouldn't have accepted SV blocks even without the checkpoint, so the narrative that it's somehow "cheating" makes no sense, and the checkpoint also doesn't prevent any likely attacks, so it's pointless centralization. These guys still haven't figured out how consensus systems work...

ABC has far more economic support, and I suspect that enough hashrate will be moved to BCH-ABC at the critical time. It's most likely IMO that this will be resolved in ABC's favor within 48 hours.

I will be a bit surprised if SV wins, though it's not impossible. If SV wins, I suppose it'll be only after at least some weeks of war. This'd be the most funny and damaging for BCH, though I find CSW too distasteful to exactly hope for a SV win. It'd be especially funny if one side wins due to economic support despite losing on hashrate, which is possible.

I don't see much impact to BTC of losing 5-10% hashrate in this scuffle, especially since the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is conveniently going to happen in ~1.5 days. I also don't see much fundamental reason for the BCH outcome to affect BTC's price, though who knows short-term: IMO the recent BTC crash was set off by Jihan trying to make some point (made possible due to low exchange depths/volumes).

CSW's whole thing is to exploit how people tend to believe that things aren't total lies. So when he says he's Satoshi, people think "Well, I don't believe he's Satoshi, but maybe he knew Satoshi". Or "He failed to destroy BTC with mining power like he said he would last year, but maybe he still actually has a bunch of mining capacity hidden away somewhere." Or "There's no technical way for him to irrecoverably screw with SegWit transactions, but maybe he found some bug somewhere."

But really he's completely full of shit; the vast majority of claims he makes are complete lies from front to back. (And often just a tiny bit of research will make this obvious.)

That was my thinking as well when I first read it, but it was posted ~3 hours ago, before this crash. It strikes me as too much of a coincidence.

Jihan is reported to have said a few hours ago regarding the BCH fork, "I have no intention to start a hash war with CSW, because if I do (by relocating hash power from btc mining to bch mining), btc price will dump below yearly support; it may even breach $5000. But since CSW is relentless, I am all in to fight till death!" I think he or someone aligned with him dumped on low volume in order to send some kind of message, though I'm not sure what that message is supposed to be: there really shouldn't be much fundamental relationship between hash power and prices except insofar as it causes technical issues (eg. slow blocks -> higher fees), but no BTC issues seem likely here.

The server doesn't know the codes (ie. "coins") until after they're spent. They're not like eg. Amazon gift codes. In order for bb-certs to be securely sent/received, they need to be consumed and then reissued by the "bank", so the bank usually needs to be continuously online and dealing with clients, though any underlying assets (eg. BTC) could be stored offline and allowed to desync from the bank to some extent.


You don't need to swap bb-codes with other people for anonymity, since bb-code transactions are perfectly anonymous to begin with.

I've thought about that, but it's too big of a project right now.

I actually think that it might be a good idea for a stand-alone business. I mentioned it in a document about blinded bearer certificates I wrote a while ago.