Sorry, no ICOs (or similar).


Because your site is intended to accept deposits but hasn't been tested yet (possible quick exit scam), and because you seem to have your own token (ICO indications), it's too high-risk now. Maybe later.


No idea what you're going to advertise.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.16 alagoria
1 0.14 ni23457
1 0.12 ExoPlanets.io
1 0.12 Qabio
4 0.10 ChipMixer
1 0.04 irfan_pak10

New BCH roadmap:

You'll be given a payment address on any page where payment is expected, but please don't do that because:
 - Donations are not necessary now.
 - It'd skew my accounting.
 - I might not use the same "accumulated payments" method of awarding memberships if more paid memberships are added in the future, so you might not get anything for it.

A democracy and a monarchy are equally capable of increasing the size of the state or refraining from doing so. If the members of the US congress all agreed to do so, they could turn the US into a communistic system where everyone was employed by the state. A monarch could, on the other hand, keep his government very limited. Just because a government is democratic doesn't limit its ability to grow, and in fact democratic institutions have a natural propensity to expand over time.

Yes, it calculates the total amount that has been sent to any of your payment addresses, and if it's greater than or equal to the copper membership fee, then it gives you a copper membership. So at least in the current system, you can pay it across several transactions, or you could pay the copper membership fee amount instead of the lower evil fee amount in order to be unproxybanned and get copper membership at the same time.

Note, however:
 - Before you send each transaction, you should re-copy the appropriate address from the page. Do not save the address and use it far in the future, or blindly reuse it, even if it seems not to change.
 - Balances are never withdrawable, there are no refunds, and nothing is guaranteed.
 - The copper membership fee could increase in the future, even if you already have some partial amount deposited.

I didn't change anything, so it must be a problem on imgur's end specifically.

Here's an HTTP image:


Here's an HTTP image which redirects to HTTPS:

Democracy sucks. Very few people are knowledgeable about important issues because:
1. A ton of people are just overall stupid to begin with.
2. Even smart people don't have much incentive to become knowledgeable about issues because they know that their vote is almost meaningless.

This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that referenda on raising the minimum wage almost always pass overwhelmingly, despite the fact that virtually every economist says that minimum wage laws are counter-productive.

Usually what you get in the end is a big mess of special-interest-backed laws which don't make any sense, hurt liberty, and drag down the economy. Example: A sugar company will gain $1 million per year from a sugar tariff. Every citizen will lose $0.01 per year due to slightly increased prices from that same tariff, for a total country-wide loss of $3 million per year. Most people won't know that this issue even exists because they are not sufficiently knowledgeable and don't have any incentive to become knowledgeable. For people who do know, it's still usually not rational to spend time and money trying to defeat this measure when you're only going to lose $0.01 per year. Whereas it is rational for the sugar company to spend money trying to get the tariff enacted. (The same sort of thing applies to niche ideological positions, too, not just money.) So these special-interest-backed initiatives often pass (there is in fact a sugar tariff in the US), and they accumulate over time.

The US founding fathers tried to set up the government such that it was more-or-less ruled by an elite set of intellectuals with democracy as only a distant check on possible tyranny, but it clearly didn't work, and nowadays democracy mostly prevails. I suspect that any mixed system of this sort will eventually fail. (Also see my post here.)

I've gone back and forth, but at the moment I tend toward thinking that monarchy would be better than democracy, even though monarchy is clearly also very flawed. At least the monarch can have some sort of guiding vision rather than the total schizophrenia we often see in democracies, and they have more personal skin in the game, since the state's success is their success, for their entire lifetime and extending through the lifetimes of their heirs. But I've never lived in an absolute monarchy, and maybe I'd think differently if I did.

In any case, it'd be better to:
 - Limit government involvement in everything. A government with little power can't do as much harm, even if it constantly makes poor decisions.
 - Have many smaller states rather than a few big ones. If there were 10,000 states and a worldwide culture of allowing freedom of movement, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about your state falling to tyranny or mob rule, since at least one of the other ones should still be OK.
 - Not brainwash people into thinking that democracy or absolutism is by definition good. I've met a lot of people who think that if a majority agrees to something, then that's the end of discussion: the thing agreed to is absolutely moral and correct. This is very stupid.
 - Not treat the law as your god, using it a comfortable shortcut for moral and/or utilitarian thinking.

.onion is even worse for DDoS attacks because the clients are all anonymous, so you can't ban abusive IPs. That's why I haven't created a .onion, even though it would be very easy to do.

Tor needs to address this somehow. I've mentioned some ideas in the past.

They were trying various different things for several hours, but they stopped for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they try it again tomorrow, but I re-activated one of the systems which was part of my custom anti-DDoS setup before moving to Cloudflare, and that's been able to identify and block them so far.

DDoS attacks are back-and-forth affairs:
1. The attacker tries something.
2. Your automated systems handle it, or the site goes down until you manually figure out how to mitigate it.
3. The attacker tries something else.
4. Repeat until one side gets sick of it.


It's not my main area of interest, so I might never get around to it.

If I was interested in that, what I'd do is create an open source project which would basically replicate Cloudflare (plus improvements) by using your own AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. account. So you'd download the open source script, give it your cloud-provider credentials, and it'd set it all up for you, maybe even including a nice Web interface. It would create a small CDN of a few very-lightweight instances spread across the world, and automatically spin up more instances in the correct regions when the existing ones are overloaded. The instances would reverse-proxy your site, cache appropriately, keep track of IP reputation, sometimes insert challenges, etc. Costs would probably be higher than the cheaper Cloudflare plans, but much cheaper than Cloudflare Enterprise.

Also, that this sort of need exists shows that the Internet is fundamentally broken. PoW should be part of TCP, not a janky hack which requires hiding behind huge networks and probably accepting a MITM.

Done, thanks.

No, but for now I'm successfully filtering it.


CF stops all sub-layer-7 attacks, which is somewhat useful. But I was doing pretty well at stopping those on my own. What caused me to switch to Cloudflare in the first place was tens of thousands of IPs doing things which seemed indistinguishable from real-world traffic. For those layer-7 attacks, Cloudflare has been a mixed bag.

First of all, I can enable the "checking your browser" thing, and that stops almost all attacker traffic. But that also breaks noscript browsers and bots, so I don't like to do it too much. Skilled attackers can also sometimes get through that, though I think that it does require a proof-of-work.

Cloudflare is honestly not very good at detecting attack traffic. You'd think that they'd be able to detect things like a huge influx of IPs that are not the regular visitors, or IPs that are not used for regular traffic on any of CF's sites, or a bunch of weird request patterns that have never been done before in the history of the site. I feel like I'd be able to write this kind of general detection code if I had a year to dedicate to it, and I'm not a giant corporation. So that's a disappointment. But nobody else is better AFAIK. I talked to Incapsula at length, and their tech is AFAICT basically the same as Cloudflare, but a lot more expensive.

It's a DDoS.

I restored the four deleted topics, but since they were all very similar, I locked all but one of them.

Except for a few special cases, it should not be policy for subjects to be confined to megathreads. It's OK for there to be overlap between multiple active threads. If a board seems to become monopolized by similar-looking topics, then some lockings or perhaps deletions might be warranted, but Hardware is low-volume.

I added meta tags to most sections which specify the language. Like:
In Firefox, you can see it by looking at "page info".

If you frequent a local section, please check it to make sure that I got it right. For example, the little bit of research I did made me think that "hi,en-IN" (Hindi & Indian-flavored English) is correct for the India section, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Done. I only did the ones that look really similar to Latin characters, and it only applies to English sections. It's done at display time, so it's retroactive.

It would take at least a couple hours every day to deal with them. Each case typically requires a lot of follow-up. And it's really annoying work. I used to do them sort-of regularly, but at some point I just couldn't stand it anymore, in addition to not really having time. Cyrus is still doing some, though not enough to keep up.

There's no need for any fee, and a fee probably wouldn't be appropriate unless absolutely necessary. Money is not a problem. If I could throw $100k at the problem and make it go away, I would do so. But in the real world, there is no magic wishing well where you can throw money and make things happen. You give people money and they don't do what you want, or the people you hire turn out not to be trustworthy, or you fill out the tax forms wrong and then later have to spend more time&money dealing with that than you would've by just doing the thing with current sub-optimal resources, etc.

I acknowledge that the current situation is very bad, and we have some plans for fixing it. I hope to have manual account reviews going smoothly again before the end of the year at the latest.


Yes, this would be very useful. I hate that I'm basically acting as a CEO here. I hate dealing with lawyers and accountants, or figuring out who to hire. This stuff is not my wheelhouse, and is in fact not even on my ship. I wish that someone would take all of that business-related stuff off my hands. But it looks like that's the one aspect which is most difficult to (safely) get rid of, so I've been trying (with only a bit of success) to delegate in other areas.

A former chair of the Federal Election Commission agrees that the campaign finance stuff has no merit: https://www.c-span.org/video/?450698-4/washington-journal-bradley-smith-discusses-michael-cohens-plea-deal-campaign-finance-laws

I meant that he won't throw people in his in-group under the bus.


Pence is a Cheney-style neocon. Very pro-war and authoritarian. So he'd probably get along well with the neoliberal Democratic establishment, even if they'd pretend to hate him due to his social views (which he's not in a position to do much about as president anyway).

Trump is friends with Manafort, he believes (maybe rightly) that Manafort would not be in any trouble if not for his association with Trump, and Manafort is remaining loyal. Trump has proven throughout his presidency that the #1 thing he cares about is personal loyalty, so he will feel obligated to protect Manafort here. Trump isn't the kind of person who can easily throw someone under the bus, and he will perceive not pardoning Manafort as doing so.

From what I've heard, Cohen's guilty plea was unusual in that he seemed to plea guilty without actually cooperating with law enforcement or even seeking a typical plea deal. I wonder what that's about.

Although Cohen and Manafort both seem like highly unethical characters AFAICT (Cohen was secretly recording his clients in order to collect dirt on them, and Manafort apparently worked for an evil Ukrainian regime), the specifics of these cases make them look more like a move against Trump. For example, it's extremely unusual for anyone to be pursued for bank fraud in which the bank didn't actually lose any money, or criminally for this sort of campaign finance stuff. And the campaign finance thing seems like a real stretch, since Trump has buried personally-damaging stories like this on several occasions before he was running for president. It'd be like saying that spending personal money to renovate your house was a campaign contribution because it'd look bad campaign-wise if you had a run-down-looking house; it's very tangential.

I think that Trump will pardon Manafort, which is a horrible move politically. Impeachment is unlikely, but if it does happen, we might end up looking back on that pardon as being the thing which ultimately resulted in Trump getting impeached. But a strong desire to pardon is understandable from Trump's perspective.

From a libertarian perspective, this whole mess is probably pretty good because it keeps the government chaotic, divided, and busy, and maybe it'll even expose the stupidity of some of these "paperwork crimes".