This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Disallowed paid-to-post incentivization.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4180744.0

I think that a lot of Americans think that an invasion of Iran would be similar to Iraq because their names are just one letter apart. But in reality, Iran has a vastly larger economy. Conquering large amounts of territory could only be successful (maybe) if the US entered near-total-war mode, which isn't going to happen. Iran can't do much about airstrikes, though.


I guess that's what the US is hoping for, but I've heard that despite economic conditions, Iran does not suffer from severe social unrest yet.

I just got a ton of money from really liked the HoweyCoins initiative, and so I posted their advertisement took it upon myself to carefully write an honest ANN to fairly represent the HoweyCoins project. Certainly, my controllers I was happy with the results, and I'm glad to see so many suckers wise, intelligent, handsome investors taking an interest in this great project.

Thanks for all of the great suggestions! Makes me want to make several more badges for different things, though I don't know what they'd be for.

For the original purpose, my favorites are:

I suspect that it will always be difficult to know what any mushroom cloud icon is if you don't already know, though.

I'll probably add it next week sometime. The icon can be changed easily either before or after it becomes public, though, so additional suggestions are welcome.

BTW, currently 195 users would have some icon, and only 9 users would have the highest-tier one.

I can't imagine that Satoshi didn't know about this, since it was one of the main ideas in achieving electronic cash before Bitcoin, but I can't find any references to it from him. Bitcoin is only very loosely similar to this system (called blinded bearer certificates or chaumian e-cash), though.

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.

No idea what you're going to advertise.


No ICOs.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.16 bjnetbee
4 0.14 ChipMixer
2 0.14 FortuneJack
1 0.12 ColorlessK

I think that I'm going to add some badges for people who report a bunch of posts. Maybe one for 300 good reports, one of 1000, and one for 5000. Does anyone want to make or find these images? They have to be exactly 16x16 px (like ), and if you find them online, then they must be copyright-free.

Wow, I haven't been watching it, and I was surprised when I saw you say such a large number. In fact, there are currently 2470 copper members. I'm shocked that so many people have bought it. I thought that it was kind of boring -- I was expecting maybe one or two per week or something.

I wonder if the fluctuating BTC/USD price actually acts as a sort of marketing technique. Whenever the price falls, it's like the membership is on sale, and when it's rising people have a fear of missing out. (BTW, I get tons of comments from people expressing total wonder at how easy and magical-feeling the copper-member and unproxyban payments are, which I love.)

It was always an obvious witch-hunt. The only "manipulation" that's ever even been seriously suggested has been intelligence & propaganda by the Russians, which they're obviously doing all the time and you're never going to completely stop.

As someone who is far from a Trump fan, I've been finding it shocking how notable people are politically getting away with saying stuff like "Trump is a treasonous Russian agent who stole the election!" This sort of mainstream rejection of US legitimacy strikes me as unsustainable. If for example the anti-Trump faction in the DoJ drops some nasty-looking stuff just before the midterms and then it turns out to be largely fabricated (a very likely scenario IMO), then Republicans are going to consider this action to be manipulation far worse than anything that the Russians are accused of doing, probably leading to yet more escalation in both rhetoric and tactics.

That seems to strongly support Trump's position that Clinton, Obama, and many corrupt DoJ officials conspired to illegally spy on his campaign. It also lends some credence to the idea that the Trump-Russia investigation is largely driven by the same corrupt group of people.

I feel that Trump is not handling this at all effectively, though. He should really be able to use this stuff to totally clean house in the DoJ (his DoJ), but it seems that he's done very little, and in fact he's made several shocking political blunders in this area. Due to his failure to properly address it, I wouldn't be surprised if the probably-still-functional anti-Trump conspiracy within the DoJ acts against him just before the midterm elections

Doing a quick count, it looks like a total of about 11.4 XAU has been paid in security bounties since inception.

Twitter @bitcointalk is official, but I only use it for outage notices and such. If there are no problems, then there will be no @bitcointalk messages.

I don't use social media. If you think that some social media functionality would be useful (such as pointing to interesting posts), feel free to do it yourself. If it's an interesting project, I might be willing to create APIs to help you. But since I don't use these sites, I don't even know what people would want.

His account was compromised.


I'm not going to do reversals on mere abuse.

Since it was a large amount and a clear-cut case, I deleted those merit sends.

In the recent US House hearing on digital currency, most of the lawmakers were worried that a cryptocurrency would out-compete the US dollar, and so they were interested in creating an official USD cryptocurrency to preempt this. (Mainly they were worried about a cryptocurrency created by a different government, but some also contemplated Bitcoin achieving dominance.) This sort of "FedCoin" is a hilarious effort doomed to fail.

Most people are fine with using things like credit cards, bank autopayments, bank-linked payment apps, etc. They're easy enough, and since the payments are reversible, they're highly forgiving of the average person's absolutely abominable security practices. These people are not going to switch to either Bitcoin or FedCoin any time soon, and they can be ignored for now.

Of course, the above-mentioned traditional payment methods have a huge list of problems. Listing just a few:
 - Pull-based payments are inherently insecure.
 - Payments based on shared secrets like credit card numbers are inherently insecure.
 - The person you're paying has to know your personal information.
 - Your intermediary has to know your payment history. Most credit card companies actively sell this information to advertisers, all of them are probably vulnerable to Equifax-like breaches, and all of them are open books to government agencies.
 - USD is inflationary, and its future is highly unpredictable and (depending on your viewpoint) maybe dubious.
 - Accepting payments is costly due to fees and chargeback risk.
 - Accepting payments requires significant set-up time, and is impossible to do privately.
 - The entire thing is debt-based and filled with intermediaries. If $5 is moved, then multiple parties are simultaneously borrowing $5. It's fragile and inefficient.

If you're in the minority of people who runs into these problems, then you're probably going to use cash if possible, which solves most of those problems. If you're online, then you'd be interested in accepting BTC, which also solves most of those problems.

But any FedCoin likely to be created is going to solve few of those problems, if any:
 - Banking protocols have historically almost never been designed securely, and I doubt that any FedCoin would change this pattern.
 - Because the average person can't handle security, the system is either going to be forbidden to the average person or it's going to be reversible.
 - Governments hate privacy.
 - The very last thing that governments would give up is their power to print money.

So any FedCoin is just going to be another credit card system. But people who already like credit cards will just continue using their credit cards. There's no market for it.

---

Now, a smart statist might recognize all of the above, and abandon all of their other money-related goals just in order to maintain their power to print money. This could be done by implementing the 1996 NSA paper How To Make a Mint (which I often like to evangelize). The Federal Reserve would run some powerful timestamping servers which everyone would use, and then the rest of the system would be based on public-key crypto directly between payers and payees, probably aided by dedicated hardware. This would be better than Bitcoin in several ways:
 - It would be 100% anonymous. Not even the government could unmask you. (*)
 - Payments would be instantly irreversible and nearly free.
 - There would be no need for anyone but the Federal Reserve to run any heavy full nodes.
 - The value would be tied to USD, and therefore less volatile than BTC currently.
 - More complicated smart contracts could be implemented, since the Fed could act as a built-in smart-contract oracle.

The only thing that BTC would have going for it vs this type of e-cash would be its decentralization and finite supply. Valuable properties IMO, but I would never expect BTC to out-compete this e-cash as long as the USD was reasonable stable, whereas I do think that BTC can out-compete either today's USD or any likely hypothetical FedCoin over a long period of time.

But I would be shocked if any government tries this. Many will try the pointless FedCoin-type thing, but they are too arrogant, anti-privacy, and incompetent to create an actually-useful e-cash system like this.

(*Note that it would be possible to design the system such that certain backdoor keys could be used to unmask payments. Everyone would know about this in advance; it wouldn't be a secret backdoor. Maybe something like this could be made tolerable to the average person, though no matter what measures are in place at the start, if any backdoor is tolerated at all, then it's only a matter of time before the NSA is looking through every transaction's history.)

(There is absolutely no need to shoe-horn a block chain into such a system, BTW.)

The full hearing is here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?448611-1/house-panel-examines-digital-currency

It seemed pretty positive overall. The witnesses weren't all perfect, but they were good on the whole. Dr. Michel in particular was perfect as far as I saw. Sherman spouted his usual FUD, but he was mostly alone.

It seems that they're mostly thinking of competing with Bitcoin, which is a hilarious effort doomed to fail. 90% of Bitcoin's value proposition is inherently in opposition to government control: irreversibly, privacy, limited supply, decentralization, etc. Any "FedCoin" they'd create is going to be a total failure, at least on any level that normal people would notice. If they created an actually-private e-cash system without any redundant block chain nonsense a la How To Make a Mint, then that's something that could actually compete with Bitcoin on some level, but there's basically zero chance of them doing that.

Yes, it's the same as always. Currently there are 3 patrollers and 20 non-patroller local moderators. (I saw someone say elsewhere that all mods have jurisdiction over newbies, but this isn't true.) At some points in the past there have been more patrollers, but that's not necessarily indicative of a shortage.

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.