Sorry, no ICOs (or similar).

Current auction status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.16 ChipMixer
3 0.16 bookiepro
1 0.16 BitRentX
2 0.02 robresno

The auction continues.

Now that the alert key has been disclosed, I thought that a few people might be interested in this small bit of code, perhaps the last piece of Satoshi's code that will be released. It's intended for 0.3.x.

I tried it on different IPs and accounts which I know to not be explicitly whitelisted, and it always works. I guess CF is tracking IP/cookie reputation or something. Annoying.

Based on the responses of people here, I think that I found the trigger-happy rule and fixed it, though.

I looked into it a bit, but I couldn't figure out what was triggering it here. Next time it happens, click the back button, copy exactly what you were trying to post, put it on pastebin, and send me the link.

That "blocked" page is almost always a Cloudflare WAF false positive related to some data you submitted. If you're banned, you'll get a different message, and IP addresses are almost never blocked like this.

I can quote his post just fine:

Are you still unable to? If so, then I suppose it's some sort of interaction between the post and some of your headers. Not sure.

Whenever this happens, feel free to obfuscate the post in order to bypass Cloudflare's blocking until I'm able to fix it permanently. Cloudflare isn't smart enough to notice this, and you certainly won't be banned for it.

You have to delete or post something from/to a topic for the topic to be marked as modified in the sitemap. Google probably still updates their cache even without this, but I suppose it'd take a while.

I wrote the sitemap handling years ago. It's probably due for a rewrite, TBH, but who knows when I'll have time for that.

Right


Once new net trust has entered the system, it can't be traced. But the issuer can place limits on how it is created. For example, they could allow their designated-trusted users to create only so much net trust per month. And the issuer knows everything about each trade, even if they don't know the trade histories of the users, so they could disallow net-trust-creation for trades which look suspicious to them, using whatever criteria seems appropriate.

Right. And due to how blinded bearer certificates work, even the issuer can't know that the burned certs and the re-issued certs are connected.

BTW, this would be a per-site thing, not a widespread "trust cryptocurrency".


It's not actually necessary to burn all of your certs, I was just imagining that as the most common scenario.

I was actually imagining that the certs would be completely divisible, so if you had 100 then you could do 100 trades with 1 trust score each. But if this is undesirable, one solution would be to have certain fixed denominations into which you could up-convert but not down-convert. So perhaps there would be denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, and 100. If you did a trade in which you used 5 1-value certs to achieve a trust score of 5, then at the conclusion of the trade you would end up with 1 5-value cert back, and it would not be possible to ever divide this again (except perhaps on an unofficial, off-site basis, at a premium). Using fixed denominations would prevent much correlation on value.

One of the more anonymous ways of buying bitcoins currently is to buy a gift card with cash and then sell it for BTC on Paxful. However, it is difficult to do this with a brand new Paxful account because BTC-sellers are wary of various types of fraud in this process (eg. buying the gift card with a stolen credit card); however, if you build reputation on a Paxful account, you will then be tying all of your acquired BTC together, which is terrible for privacy. This could be solved with blinded bearer certificates (eg. lucre):

1. Paxful designates certain users as trusted. These users might, for example, have their identity known to Paxful.
2. Without having to create an account, a user can post an advertisement like "Selling a $100 Amazon gift card for BTC". When they do this, they will spend all of the Paxful trust certs that they have acquired at any time in the past. Their advertisement will then be listed with a trust score equal to the number of submitted certs.
3.
    a. If the advertisement is cancelled, then Paxful will reissue new certs equal to the previously-spent certs and give them back to the advertiser, so the advertiser’s trust score will not change.
    b. If the advertisement is completed successfully, and the counterparty is a Paxful-trusted user, then Paxful will reissue new certs equal to the previously-spent certs plus 1. So the advertiser’s trust score will either increase, if they are dealing with a Paxful-trusted-user, or stay the same if they’re dealing with any other user.
    c. If the advertisement results in fraud by the advertiser, then no new certs will be reissued, and the advertiser will lose all of the trust points that he associated with the advertisement.

The result is that you can do Paxful trades without any possibility of your transactions being linked together (blinded bearer certificates are perfectly anonymous, even to the "bank"), but with tracking of your reputation so that once you’ve done a few trades, you will be able to easily trade with people.

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.

Looks too risky for forum users. twn.io is largely non-functional, with mostly-broken links & no terms of service or anything, but it seems that it will ask for deposits. PM me with a lot more info if you want to advertise in the future.



No ICOs. The alt.estate one seems mainly focused on getting people to invest, even if you frame it in other terms.


No idea what you're going to advertise; rejected.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.14 KryptoKash
1 0.12 walleting.services
1 0.12 TD Games
4 0.10 ChipMixer
2 0.10 bookiepro

Right, I don't care about making money from the forum personally. (I've actually thought about getting rid of the forum ads, since it's often a big headache and the forum has enough reserves for a long time, but operating at a significant loss while there's money basically just sitting on the table feels wrong, even if the level of loss is sustainable for quite a while.)

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.

Some people might be interested in screenshots of the full Report History. (I can't actually see it myself without generating dummy data, since I don't report posts...)


Absolutely not.

Create it in your imagination.

OK, I fixed the transparency issue. Though now the throbber won't show up if you have scripts disabled. AFAICT there's no way to do it accurately with just CSS.

Alt text has a real semantic meaning, so I didn't want to do that, but I added a throbber background image to images without any alt text. I just added it now, so it may take a few hours before you'll be able to see it due to caching.

Does anyone notice any problems with this? In order to achieve the desired effect, I had to give all images with no alt text display:inline-block, which I think shouldn't affect layout at all, but I could be wrong.

Rejected. I've decided that masternode coins can sometimes be acceptable, but Biblepay seems highly deceptive. For example, you say "10% of the emission goes to sponsoring Orphans, with provable contributions," but:
 - 10% of the monthly emission should be somewhere around 6 million coins, but the monthly trade volume tends to be only slightly higher than this, which is unbelievable if you're actually selling the coins in order to make donations.
 - This 10% goes to a hardcoded non-multisig address with no explanation.
 - "THE COIN HAS RPC COMMANDS THAT PROVE 100% OF CONTRIBUTIONS ARE SPENT THE WAY INTENDED" is completely false. The RPC command just totals up all of the payments to the hardcoded address. What happens after the coins go to that address is unexplained.
 - There is no non-profit registration, receipts for donations, any info about the people who are supposedly facilitating donations, etc.
 
Biblepay looks like a generic coin with hardcoded dev subsidy plus some probably-totally-fabricated marketing about orphans.

No, if you have someone's email address then there are several known ways of finding their username. I don't consider this a bug.

I have to solve reCAPTCHA challenges via Tor all the time, and while it definitely takes longer than normal, I can still do it within a couple of minutes 95% of the time. Sometimes reCAPTCHA will totally block an IP address, or put an IP address onto a near-impossible level of difficulty, but it's rare, and the solution to that is to just get a different Tor exit.

Thanks for the well-wishes, everyone! ❤️ It's funny to think that I've been in Bitcoin since before I was 20, 30% of my whole life. Makes me feel both old and young, in different ways.